Since this story is about my project and it's a complete non-event, I'm going to make an off-topic announcement before I get to the meat.
We now have 4 paid editors at Technocrat.net and we're running Slashdot for Grown-ups. Please try it out.
Now, about UserLinux: Debian will resolve its problems. We're trying to help. And the project will go on. There will be a commercially-supported UserLinux release about a day after the Debian release. There is nothing else but the Debian release on the critical path.
I have been acquainted with Mark Shuttleworth since the early days of Debian and fully support Ubuntu. UL will borrow from Ubuntu where appropriate. But UL seeks to do all development directly within the Debian organization, in order to achieve maximum transparency and public participation (a better explanation is in the UserLinux white paper). So, where UL borrows from Ubuntu, the result will be checked into Debian.
I would have liked everything to go a year faster, but I'm convinced that the UL rationale is still valid and is important to the future of GNU/Linux.
The real victim of the Itanic was HP. HP traded their Precicison Architecture (which became Itanium) and all of their CPU engineers and their foundry to Intel in a non-cash deal. Intel is now using HP technology in i386-family CPUs and HP gets nothing for that.
It's sort of like throwing a few billion dollars in the fireplace.
In this case, Best Wok had been recipient of a previous enforcement action regarding the same phone. They replaced the phone but the replacement didn't work out for them (meaning it probably didn't work for 5 miles or whatever), and they plugged in the baddie again. The ARRL Observers had been tracking them for a long time. So, Best Wok had passed the slap-on-hand phase and was in for a big forefiture. But I hear they are out of business anyway, so probably won't pay.
The language about their lack of a license sounds as if "you're damned if you don't", but what it actually says is that they have a history of non- compliance because there was no license for the device found in their posession.
A restaurant was recently cited by the FCC for having one of these that worked in the ham frequencies:
*Pages 1--4 from Microsoft Word - 45968.doc*
Federal Communications Commission DA 05- 336
Before the Federal Communications Commission
Washington, D. C. 20554
In the Matter of
Pang Cheng, d/ b as Best Wok 1
Westville, New Jersey
File No. EB- 03- PA- 029
NAL/ Acct. No. 200432400001
FRN: 0009- 3455- 62
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
Adopted: February 7, 2005 Released: February 9, 2005
By the Chief, Enforcement Bureau:
I. INTRODUCTION
1. In this Memorandum Opinion and Order (" Order"), we deny a petition for reconsideration filed by Pang Cheng, d/ b as Best Wok (" Best Wok"), and we affirm the Forfeiture Order
issued May 21, 2004, in the amount of ten thousand dollars ($ 10,000) for willful violation of Section 301 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (" Act"). 2 At the time of the noted violation Best Wok
owned a restaurant located at 1070 Delsea Drive, Westville, New Jersey. The noted violation involves Best Wok's operation of radio transmitting equipment on the frequency 145.8376 MHz without a license
issued by the Commission.
II. BACKGROUND
2. The Enforcement Bureau (" Bureau') received a complaint alleging that Best Wok was operating radio transmitting equipment on the two meter amateur frequency 145.835 MHz without a
license. On October 16, 2001, and January 22, 2003, the Bureau sent Best Wok letters warning that operation of radio transmitting equipment without a license is in violation of Section 301 of the Act and
could subject it to penalties. The certified mail return receipts indicate that Best Wok received the warning letters on October 25, 2001, and January 27, 2003, respectively.
3. On February 28, 2003, an agent from the Commission's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, field office (" Philadelphia Office") drove to the Westville, New Jersey, area to determine whether Best Wok
was operating radio transmitting equipment without a license. At approximately 10: 45 a. m., the agent began monitoring a constant radio signal on or near 145.835 MHz. At 11: 10 a. m., the agent used
direction finding techniques to determine that the source of the transmissions was the Best Wok restaurant
1 The Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture(" NAL"), NAL/ Acct No. 200432400001 (Enf. Bur., Philadelphia
Office, released February 26, 2004) and the Forfeiture Order, 19 FCC Rcd 8939 (Enf. Bur. 2004), were captioned "Best Wok." Information submitted with the petition for reconsideration indicates that Best Wok is a sole
proprietorship business owned by Pang Cheng. According, we have recaptioned this matter as "Pang Cheng, d/ b as Best Wok."
2 47 U. S. C. 301.
1
Federal Communications Commission DA 05- 336
2
at 1070 Delsea Drive, Westville, New Jersey.
4. At 11: 30 a. m. on February 28, 2003, the agent entered the Best Wok restaurant and inspected the radio transmitting equipment in the presence of the restaurant manager, Mr. Sae C. Hauwo,
who admitted that Best Wok was operating a long range cordless telephone system. The system included a base unit at the restaurant and a mobile unit in Mr. Hauwo's vehicle. The agent used frequency-measuring
equipment to determine that the base unit was transmitting on 145.8376 MHz. Mr. Hauwo stated that neither Best Wok nor any of its employees had a license to operate the radio transmitting
equipment. Additionally, Mr. Hauwo asserted that, when Best Wok received the October 16, 2001, warning letter, it ceased operation of the lon
Obviously we don't agree about politics. The MoveOn ad in question is old, and is there at this late date because I don't want to deal with the slashcode and remove it. It happens I am working on a Ruby on Rails replacement for Slash.
But I would expect to run more MoveOn ads. If I can change a few people's minds in exchange for losing a few other people who just can't bear to look at a MoveOn ad, I'd consider that a good deal.
The essential reason to choose UserLinux is that it avoids the conflict between Open Source and producing income that all commercial distributions develop while supporting the enterprise. Fully Open-Source distributions won't make a profit over the long term. You have to hold something back like certification or bug reports. And when you do that, the result is something less than Open Source. Rather than give up on fully Open Source distributions, I concluded that we don't have to make money from them. There are enough interested parties to support them as non-profits.
The policy of the UserLinux project is for all development to be carried out within Debian, not within our own repository. Customers can take a much greater role because the Debian organization admits them fairly.
Of course, the long release delay has made something of a fool of me - because so far we've only proven that this non-profit can't get it together to make a release.
There is a lot more in the white paper on the project site.
It's not as if I don't work for Debian. Today I am a volunteer on their corporate board and represent them to various standards organizations. More of my time is devoted to working for the entire Free Software community, and I flew 50K miles last year to represent Free Software, doing things like speaking against software patenting at the EU parliament in Brussels, keynoting a GNOME conference in Norway, lobbying in Washington D.C., teaching law students in Hawaii, and briefing reporters at every LinuxWorld show.
Historicaly, I am the author of Debian's fundamental policy document and did a lot of the early work on their system.
Geez. All I can say is Duh. Yes, you need to release more often. Indeed, you need to release once. Release period. Boy, did I goof by deciding to base the UserLinux release management on Debian. Good idea in theory. And I couldn't get all of the time I wanted to work on the project. But I finally got my act together, but Debian didn't release, and didn't release, and didn't release, and still didn't release. And I will start working on UL again when there is a distro to base it upon.
You're still confusing APIs and headers. While APIs may not be copyrightable, there's no reason that the headers that implement them could not be copyrighted. I can assure you that U.S. law doesn't mention headers and the applicable U.S. case law mentions APIs rather than headers.
When Linus copied errno.h from Unuix he made a terrible mistake, and only through luck were we saved from it being much more serious. Had he typed that header in from the POSIX standard text, he would only have been copying the API and all would have been cool. But the dummy copied the entire header, such that many lines are byte-per-byte equivalent with a UNIX version. This would really have been infringement had it not been for the fact that USL lost the copyright on those files and that there had been copyright releases for several standards.
Regarding derivative works, the law does not give any special privileges to source code. Indeed, the copyright title doesn't mention source code. The binary which must include copies of other people's work, and the source code, are each independently considered to be derivative works.
Don't be sure it's simpler for literary works. Your D&D example could in some cases be an infringement of the public performance right.<p><i>I was more asking if Nvidia merely linked to objects they didn't distribute or if they used header includes and compiled them in, then distributed that.</i><p>You can download their "source" distribution. It contains a no-source.o file 3 megabytes in size with an obfuscated symbol table, and a bunch of.c files to link that file to the kernel and require kernel headers to compile. All of this is linked together into one module.<p><i>Bruce</i>
It's designed for efficient, high-density, highly multi-threaded blade applications..
Um. The whole point of blades is that they don't have the expensive interconnect. So, here's an architecture with the interconnect in the chip, which would make it cheaper. But it's still not clear to me that a big system built around one die that uses transistors really efficiently is going to be less expensive than eight smaller systems that don't use their transistors as efficiently.
some folks made the claim that "define" lists of names and values was not copyrightable (similar to how name/phone-number pairs are not copyrightable).
That is the principle that a mere compilation of facts is not copyrightable. However, the creative organization of those same facts can be copyrighted.
That wasn't litigated, and I'm not really confident that it isn't a creative work to construct a list of kinds of errors or even to define a single kind of error. But it's irrelevant in this case because that errno.h file was in the public domain for other reasons.
No, touching the GPL doesn't make your work automaticaly GPL, but it does potentially make it infringing, which can be worse.
Most employees click yes on click-through licenses even though they aren't authorized to enter into contracts on behalf of their company. Similarly, most programmers can't make good decisions about copyright issues without access to counsel. Some of the stuff that happened with SCO has made that no clearer, especially if we have a crowd of folks who believe that headers are automaticaly in the public domain. The reality is much more complicated.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to patronize. You may have noticed that I explained what "cat" was to someone else. The reason for that is that we are having a public discussion. Although you understand the context, several hundred other people will not. Have pity on them, OK?
If I understand your question correctly, you would like to know if the distribution of instructions that are intended to create a copy on the users's system would be an act of infringement, given the fact that the user's copy is never distributed, but a copy that was distributed would probably be held to be infringing.
If I were the expert witness in such a case, my finding would be that distribution of instructions that are intended to commit an act remotely is tantamount to commission of the act non-remotely. I think my side would win.
We have only one court case that comes anywhere near there, which was Nintendo v. Goloob, and it's not definitive because the details weren't the same and it didn't go to a high enough court of appeals.
i thought intels HT processors still only had one execution unit. They just have two fetch and decode processes and fast context switching between them.
I wasn't even assuming they have that much. The minimum you need to make this trick work is two independent contexts. That means two copies of all kernel-visible control and data registers. You would probably not need to save internal microstate unless you need it to restart a long-running instruction.
Are you saying, by this, that nVidia had a whole bunch of kernel includes in their driver, which made the binary include copyrighted code?
A reducto ad absurdum example helps here. Suppose there is a GPL kernel C file init.c which you wish to distribute without that pesky GPL. So, you create a file stealcode.c that simply says "#include <init.c>", and then you run "cc -c stealcode.c". The resulting file stealcode.o would be an infringing binary copy of init.c . Now, how is it different when you include any header? It must be something else about the header that makes it OK to copy. Usually, that something else is the license.
My Pentium 4 processor has 2 threads. Linux treats them as 2 processors, and makes full use of them. Yes, it's cool to have 8 cores and 4 threads per core. But this is all about price/performanace. An 8-core chip that shares the cache, VM infrastructure, and memory interface between all cores is going to work best for CPU-intensive tasks that are not also I/O or memory-intensive and can be partitioned into multiple threads easily. Not photorealistic rendering, for example, that requires too much data. And it won't handle separate-process loads as well as 8 blades would. So, watch all of those parameters: price, power, memory bandwidth, how cache and VM are done, PC board real-estate, etc. How they are combined will tell you whether that chip is a win or lose for your application.
If such a category of software exists, the GPL needs to be completely rewritten. If you own the full copyright to a piece of software, as in you wrote every single line of code, you should be able to distribute it anyway you want.
But it's not the case that the driver author wrote every line. The compiled driver includes code written and copyrighted by other people. It doesn't run without that code.
Slashdot Mirror
We now have 4 paid editors at Technocrat.net and we're running Slashdot for Grown-ups. Please try it out.
Now, about UserLinux: Debian will resolve its problems. We're trying to help. And the project will go on. There will be a commercially-supported UserLinux release about a day after the Debian release. There is nothing else but the Debian release on the critical path.
I have been acquainted with Mark Shuttleworth since the early days of Debian and fully support Ubuntu. UL will borrow from Ubuntu where appropriate. But UL seeks to do all development directly within the Debian organization, in order to achieve maximum transparency and public participation (a better explanation is in the UserLinux white paper). So, where UL borrows from Ubuntu, the result will be checked into Debian.
I would have liked everything to go a year faster, but I'm convinced that the UL rationale is still valid and is important to the future of GNU/Linux.
Thanks
Bruce
It's sort of like throwing a few billion dollars in the fireplace.
Bruce
Does anyone remember what a VAX-780 cost? That was a 1 MIPS CPU.
The language about their lack of a license sounds as if "you're damned if you don't", but what it actually says is that they have a history of non- compliance because there was no license for the device found in their posession.
Bruce
Darn slashdot stripped out the pre tag. I resubmitted a link to the PDF.
Bruce
*Pages 1--4 from Microsoft Word - 45968.doc* Federal Communications Commission DA 05- 336 Before the Federal Communications Commission Washington, D. C. 20554 In the Matter of Pang Cheng, d/ b as Best Wok 1 Westville, New Jersey File No. EB- 03- PA- 029 NAL/ Acct. No. 200432400001 FRN: 0009- 3455- 62 MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER Adopted: February 7, 2005 Released: February 9, 2005 By the Chief, Enforcement Bureau: I. INTRODUCTION 1. In this Memorandum Opinion and Order (" Order"), we deny a petition for reconsideration filed by Pang Cheng, d/ b as Best Wok (" Best Wok"), and we affirm the Forfeiture Order issued May 21, 2004, in the amount of ten thousand dollars ($ 10,000) for willful violation of Section 301 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (" Act"). 2 At the time of the noted violation Best Wok owned a restaurant located at 1070 Delsea Drive, Westville, New Jersey. The noted violation involves Best Wok's operation of radio transmitting equipment on the frequency 145.8376 MHz without a license issued by the Commission. II. BACKGROUND 2. The Enforcement Bureau (" Bureau') received a complaint alleging that Best Wok was operating radio transmitting equipment on the two meter amateur frequency 145.835 MHz without a license. On October 16, 2001, and January 22, 2003, the Bureau sent Best Wok letters warning that operation of radio transmitting equipment without a license is in violation of Section 301 of the Act and could subject it to penalties. The certified mail return receipts indicate that Best Wok received the warning letters on October 25, 2001, and January 27, 2003, respectively. 3. On February 28, 2003, an agent from the Commission's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, field office (" Philadelphia Office") drove to the Westville, New Jersey, area to determine whether Best Wok was operating radio transmitting equipment without a license. At approximately 10: 45 a. m., the agent began monitoring a constant radio signal on or near 145.835 MHz. At 11: 10 a. m., the agent used direction finding techniques to determine that the source of the transmissions was the Best Wok restaurant 1 The Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture(" NAL"), NAL/ Acct No. 200432400001 (Enf. Bur., Philadelphia Office, released February 26, 2004) and the Forfeiture Order, 19 FCC Rcd 8939 (Enf. Bur. 2004), were captioned "Best Wok." Information submitted with the petition for reconsideration indicates that Best Wok is a sole proprietorship business owned by Pang Cheng. According, we have recaptioned this matter as "Pang Cheng, d/ b as Best Wok." 2 47 U. S. C. 301. 1 Federal Communications Commission DA 05- 336 2 at 1070 Delsea Drive, Westville, New Jersey. 4. At 11: 30 a. m. on February 28, 2003, the agent entered the Best Wok restaurant and inspected the radio transmitting equipment in the presence of the restaurant manager, Mr. Sae C. Hauwo, who admitted that Best Wok was operating a long range cordless telephone system. The system included a base unit at the restaurant and a mobile unit in Mr. Hauwo's vehicle. The agent used frequency-measuring equipment to determine that the base unit was transmitting on 145.8376 MHz. Mr. Hauwo stated that neither Best Wok nor any of its employees had a license to operate the radio transmitting equipment. Additionally, Mr. Hauwo asserted that, when Best Wok received the October 16, 2001, warning letter, it ceased operation of the lon
Obviously we don't agree about politics. The MoveOn ad in question is old, and is there at this late date because I don't want to deal with the slashcode and remove it. It happens I am working on a Ruby on Rails replacement for Slash.
But I would expect to run more MoveOn ads. If I can change a few people's minds in exchange for losing a few other people who just can't bear to look at a MoveOn ad, I'd consider that a good deal.
Bruce
OK. What's your name and address?
Phooey on you. My post was submitted before that other.
The policy of the UserLinux project is for all development to be carried out within Debian, not within our own repository. Customers can take a much greater role because the Debian organization admits them fairly.
Of course, the long release delay has made something of a fool of me - because so far we've only proven that this non-profit can't get it together to make a release.
There is a lot more in the white paper on the project site.
Bruce
Historicaly, I am the author of Debian's fundamental policy document and did a lot of the early work on their system.
I've paid my dues a few times over.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Apple Lisa had a two-button mouse.
When Linus copied errno.h from Unuix he made a terrible mistake, and only through luck were we saved from it being much more serious. Had he typed that header in from the POSIX standard text, he would only have been copying the API and all would have been cool. But the dummy copied the entire header, such that many lines are byte-per-byte equivalent with a UNIX version. This would really have been infringement had it not been for the fact that USL lost the copyright on those files and that there had been copyright releases for several standards.
Regarding derivative works, the law does not give any special privileges to source code. Indeed, the copyright title doesn't mention source code. The binary which must include copies of other people's work, and the source code, are each independently considered to be derivative works.
Bruce
Don't be sure it's simpler for literary works. Your D&D example could in some cases be an infringement of the public performance right.<p><i>I was more asking if Nvidia merely linked to objects they didn't distribute or if they used header includes and compiled them in, then distributed that.</i><p>You can download their "source" distribution. It contains a no-source .o file 3 megabytes in size with an obfuscated symbol table, and a bunch of .c files to link that file to the kernel and require kernel headers to compile. All of this is linked together into one module.<p><i>Bruce</i>
Um. The whole point of blades is that they don't have the expensive interconnect. So, here's an architecture with the interconnect in the chip, which would make it cheaper. But it's still not clear to me that a big system built around one die that uses transistors really efficiently is going to be less expensive than eight smaller systems that don't use their transistors as efficiently.
Bruce
That is the principle that a mere compilation of facts is not copyrightable. However, the creative organization of those same facts can be copyrighted.
That wasn't litigated, and I'm not really confident that it isn't a creative work to construct a list of kinds of errors or even to define a single kind of error. But it's irrelevant in this case because that errno.h file was in the public domain for other reasons.
No, touching the GPL doesn't make your work automaticaly GPL, but it does potentially make it infringing, which can be worse.
Most employees click yes on click-through licenses even though they aren't authorized to enter into contracts on behalf of their company. Similarly, most programmers can't make good decisions about copyright issues without access to counsel. Some of the stuff that happened with SCO has made that no clearer, especially if we have a crowd of folks who believe that headers are automaticaly in the public domain. The reality is much more complicated.
Thanks
Bruce
If I understand your question correctly, you would like to know if the distribution of instructions that are intended to create a copy on the users's system would be an act of infringement, given the fact that the user's copy is never distributed, but a copy that was distributed would probably be held to be infringing.
If I were the expert witness in such a case, my finding would be that distribution of instructions that are intended to commit an act remotely is tantamount to commission of the act non-remotely. I think my side would win.
We have only one court case that comes anywhere near there, which was Nintendo v. Goloob, and it's not definitive because the details weren't the same and it didn't go to a high enough court of appeals.
Thanks
Bruce
I wasn't even assuming they have that much. The minimum you need to make this trick work is two independent contexts. That means two copies of all kernel-visible control and data registers. You would probably not need to save internal microstate unless you need it to restart a long-running instruction.
Anything else on top of that is optimization.
Bruce
A reducto ad absurdum example helps here. Suppose there is a GPL kernel C file init.c which you wish to distribute without that pesky GPL. So, you create a file stealcode.c that simply says "#include <init.c>", and then you run "cc -c stealcode.c". The resulting file stealcode.o would be an infringing binary copy of init.c . Now, how is it different when you include any header? It must be something else about the header that makes it OK to copy. Usually, that something else is the license.
Bruce
Bruce
But it's not the case that the driver author wrote every line. The compiled driver includes code written and copyrighted by other people. It doesn't run without that code.
Bruce