Well, basically you are saying that software patents suck, and that in the context of software patents, free software is in deep trouble. Of course I agree.
Now, let's get to the matter of whether a license is OSD-compliant or not. In Open Source licensing, a copyright holder conveys rights to others. The OSD specifies what rights that copyright holder must convey for their license to be considered Open Source. The copyright holder doesn't have any control regarding the patent rights of third parties. Thus, I don't see any point in requiring the copyright holder to first obtain a non-scope-limited license, applying to everyone in the world, to every patent that the software might infringe upon. I dare you to even find out what patents those would be for any non-trivial program. Patent searches are never provably exhaustive. Thus, I could contend, following your rationale, that no software is Open Source, because all non-trivial software submitted as Open Source is potentially infringing of an issued patent. So, my contention is that the OSD would indeed not achieve anything if your rationale was followed.
Now, there is a potential pernicious case in which the copyright holder has a license that the community doesn't, and thus can make use of community-submitted code that others can not. If the copyright holder uses that license to their advantage, by working in collusion with the patent holder to deny commercial use of the code to others, I would contend that the copyright holder does have at least partial control and that the software in question might well not be considered Open Source. I don't yet know what to do about this.
There's a work-around. You put the patented principle in a MIT-licensed file, and link that to the rest.
Regarding W3C, if you think they are insensitive, try IETF's attitude on intellectual property. It mostly comes from these working groups consisting of employees of too many big companies. They are all cross-licensed with another, and don't give a hoot if their standards can't be implemented by any merely medium-sized enterprise.
But we fixed that at W3C. We got a compromise. The community isn't used to compromise.
There are a number of points I would make with any government that will listen. They aren't necessarily standard-specific. They are:
Many issued US software patents have significant prior art that should invalidate them
Patents are supposed to describe the invention. Many of them are poorly written or are deliberately written to be obtuse or over-general, and thus fail to describe the invention. Try reading some of them.
The 20-year term is too long for the software industry, in that there is no quid-pro-quo for the public - a patent is no longer useful by the time it enters the public domain.
Is mathematics discovered or invented? Isn't software mathematics? Is mathematics really not an invention, and rather a discovery of the way the world works? In other words, should the patent belong to the Deity who created the mathematics of the universe (tabling argument regarding whether or there's a deity or the universe just happened).
Isn't software just an application of the general-purpose computer, which is old enough to be unpatentable?
I'm writing that now. I've got to say, I logged on to slashdot and saw this and practically shit a brick:-) It takes time to lay out the arguments, give me a few hours.
The OSD would apply to patents that the licensor owns. I reject the notion that some third party can make your software non-OSD-compliant by filing for a patent. If we let that happen, there'd be no Open Source software at all.
No, they may not stop any GPL software this way. If you are worried about a patent in a piece of GPL software, put that subroutine under the MIT license, which does not have the patent language of the GPL. Eben Moglen, the attorney for FSF, was the one to suggest this.
If we don't let the patent holders charge for things unrelated to the standard, they will just walk off of W3C and we will have lost, because they will be making their standards in an organization that lets them do whatever they want as far as royalties are concerned.
The right place to make a stink is with governments. We've gotten the best policy that we can get from W3C without having the members walk off to another organization that lets them do what they want with their patents. I worked on this policy for two years (somewhere between 1/4 and 1/8 time), along with Larry Rosen of OSI and Eben Moglen of FSF, and got the best deal I could for the community. Let's please not blow it.
All you need to do is embed the patented practice in a file that is covered by the MIT license, and link it to the GPL stuff. Eben Moglen, the attorney who works on the GPL, suggested this.
First sentence should say "Jay is not in the working group." Also excuse the typos, I was typing this pretty quickly, attempting to do damage control as fast as I could.
Also considering that the people who serve in the W3C patent policy working group are slashdot regulars, and Jay is not. Folks, Jay Sulzberger does not understand the issues and has no authority whatsoever to speak on this topic. The community representatives who worked on this policy for two darned years, cetainly Larry and myself and possibly even Eben, think we got the best deal we could possibly get. Sure, we had to make compromises, sometimes we have to. If we don't take this deal and force them to give up all rights to their patents, the patent holders will walk off of W3C and make standards in an organization that allows them to charge whatever they royalty they ask for use within the standard. We will have lost. Please write W3C and say you approve of the current policy draft.
Folks It is essential for the Free Software community to support the W3C as it stands today. The policy does what it's supposed to do - it protects web standards for Free Software. Unfortunately, if we ask for more than that, we will lose everything we've fought for. The reason is simple. Members join the W3C voluntarily. If a consequence of joining is that any and all of their patents that are used in a standard will become free for any use whatsoever, they will not join, and they will instead make their standards in an organization that lets them charge royalties for use within the standard. We will have lost.
Nor does it make it impossible for GPL software to make use of the patents. If you want to use a patent in GPL software, put that routine under the MIT license, which does not have the GPL's language regarding patents, and can link with GPL work. This work-around was suggested by Eben Moglen.
This doesn't mean I support software patents. I think they should be eliminated. But we can't eliminate software patents through W3C - only through legislatures.
I'll end this with a plea to Jay Sulzberger. Jay, you are working to destroy two years of work by myself, Eben Moglen, and Larry Rosen. You didn't participate in the patent policy working group. I didn't see you volunteer. You don't sufficiently understand the issues yet. Please help us get the current W3C policy accepted, so that things will get better instead of worse.
On a clear day, I could probably see Port Chicago from the top of some nearby hills. I can also see the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from said hills. The wind blows toward Port Chicago in the daytime, from it at night. Lots of radiation monitoring goes on around here. Nobody is finding residual fallout. Instead, they went nuts about a local tritium lab that might have leaked enough material to make a few watches glow. No, sorry, I don't buy it.
hey, if everyone dislikes it who is using it, it won't be hard to start a new support forum or develop something else to replace it
I would state that more assertively. It's exactly what should be done, and the folks operating the alternate support site should be the ones to get the $50.
And they run the chance of having some outside party who will be closer to the community spirit provide better service and run away with the product. If you want to encourage that, make sure to send your money to the alternate support community, not to the one whose practices you object to.
There are two books in my book series with Prentice Hall that are in the Barnes and Noble near you. You are welcome to copy them, they are under an Open Publication License. They are Embedded Systems Programming with eCos and The Linux Development Platform. We will have the editable texts online within a few months.
Yes! This is an excellent way to handle the situation. The way to address this sort of problem is to leverage the power of the community to make trade-secrets economicaly infeasable. If you feel strongly enough, open a self-support mailing list, too.
I agree that the Nazi connection is going over the top. However, I disagree that Valenti respects your right to be an independent film-maker, or that RIAA respects the right of garage bands that are now finding it difficult to sell their own CDs. Independent musicians who dare to sell their music directly are inevitably suspected of bootlegging, due to RIAA and MPAA pressure. We've even having trouble selling Debian CD-Rs on eBay, because their copyright policy is "you must own the copyright to the material, or it must be in the public domain".
In the future, I suspect that MPAA and RIAA will try to make it impossible to distribute independently-created media without an expensive "anti-piracy" audit, just as license audits are used to shake down schools and businesses today.
Bruce
Re:Morse has more than two symbols
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 2
Yes, I trained with Farnsworth, with characters at around 28 WPM and with word spacing appropriate to my copying speed at the time. I got my Extra from the ARRL VECs operating at Travis California, around 1993, and then put away the key:-)
Farnsworth is a deliberate distortion of the code timing that indeed helps one avoid the dreaded 10 WPM plateau. It sounds funny if you haven't been there, but dreaded is the right word. The problem is that below 10 WPM, you can think of code as dots and dashes. Above 10 WPM, you can't separate them in your head quickly enough to copy continuous code. You have to learn the sound, which is really forcing the recognition of the code into a different part of your brain. This forcing takes a good deal of discipline. I think it took me 60 days of copying the daily news for half an hour each morning and evening to get to be able to pass the 20 WPM test... barely. I could copy solid at 13 WPM, and at 20 I just wrote down all of the words after "is" and those were the test answers. I think ARRL actually made the test harder after I published how I passed it:-)
Be sure to visit nocode.org, code's fine on the air - let's just get it off that test!
I found a reference that claims a dot is a Baud. I don't agree. Using the recommended time constant for the key-click filter, I think a dot fits in two Baud. But note that the key-click filter is generally set too fast - the manufacturer doesn't know what top speed the operator might have, and thus most operators send a dot of more than two Bauds in length.
Bruce
I think you're one level too low
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Let's be careful to separate Morse code from the data link below it. You are talking about the data link of the radio telegraph, one layer down in the stack. Your answer is correct for figuring out modulation and bandwidth.
Morse is a code that is overlaid on that data link, and has its own symbols that can be expressed as strings of data link on or off bits, only approximately, because Morse is not a clocked code. How many data link one bits there are to a dot has to do with the ratio of a dot length that the operator is sending at that moment (remember he's hand-keying) to the time constant of the key-ckick filter.
Bruce
Re:Does Morse not have three codes?
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 2
See my comment above. I think Morse actually has 5 symbols. And it's not really a clocked code.
Slashdot Mirror
You're welcome to start one, or join freestandards.org . But being part of the world might be more effective than turning away from it.
Now, let's get to the matter of whether a license is OSD-compliant or not. In Open Source licensing, a copyright holder conveys rights to others. The OSD specifies what rights that copyright holder must convey for their license to be considered Open Source. The copyright holder doesn't have any control regarding the patent rights of third parties. Thus, I don't see any point in requiring the copyright holder to first obtain a non-scope-limited license, applying to everyone in the world, to every patent that the software might infringe upon. I dare you to even find out what patents those would be for any non-trivial program. Patent searches are never provably exhaustive. Thus, I could contend, following your rationale, that no software is Open Source, because all non-trivial software submitted as Open Source is potentially infringing of an issued patent. So, my contention is that the OSD would indeed not achieve anything if your rationale was followed.
Now, there is a potential pernicious case in which the copyright holder has a license that the community doesn't, and thus can make use of community-submitted code that others can not. If the copyright holder uses that license to their advantage, by working in collusion with the patent holder to deny commercial use of the code to others, I would contend that the copyright holder does have at least partial control and that the software in question might well not be considered Open Source. I don't yet know what to do about this.
Thanks
Bruce
Regarding W3C, if you think they are insensitive, try IETF's attitude on intellectual property. It mostly comes from these working groups consisting of employees of too many big companies. They are all cross-licensed with another, and don't give a hoot if their standards can't be implemented by any merely medium-sized enterprise.
But we fixed that at W3C. We got a compromise. The community isn't used to compromise.
Bruce
I could write more, but you get the picture.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
If we don't let the patent holders charge for things unrelated to the standard, they will just walk off of W3C and we will have lost, because they will be making their standards in an organization that lets them do whatever they want as far as royalties are concerned.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Nor does it make it impossible for GPL software to make use of the patents. If you want to use a patent in GPL software, put that routine under the MIT license, which does not have the GPL's language regarding patents, and can link with GPL work. This work-around was suggested by Eben Moglen.
This doesn't mean I support software patents. I think they should be eliminated. But we can't eliminate software patents through W3C - only through legislatures.
I'll end this with a plea to Jay Sulzberger. Jay, you are working to destroy two years of work by myself, Eben Moglen, and Larry Rosen. You didn't participate in the patent policy working group. I didn't see you volunteer. You don't sufficiently understand the issues yet. Please help us get the current W3C policy accepted, so that things will get better instead of worse.
Bruce
Bruce
I would state that more assertively. It's exactly what should be done, and the folks operating the alternate support site should be the ones to get the $50.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Unless you count these guys, and microsatellites are old hat to them.
Bruce
In the future, I suspect that MPAA and RIAA will try to make it impossible to distribute independently-created media without an expensive "anti-piracy" audit, just as license audits are used to shake down schools and businesses today.
Bruce
Farnsworth is a deliberate distortion of the code timing that indeed helps one avoid the dreaded 10 WPM plateau. It sounds funny if you haven't been there, but dreaded is the right word. The problem is that below 10 WPM, you can think of code as dots and dashes. Above 10 WPM, you can't separate them in your head quickly enough to copy continuous code. You have to learn the sound, which is really forcing the recognition of the code into a different part of your brain. This forcing takes a good deal of discipline. I think it took me 60 days of copying the daily news for half an hour each morning and evening to get to be able to pass the 20 WPM test... barely. I could copy solid at 13 WPM, and at 20 I just wrote down all of the words after "is" and those were the test answers. I think ARRL actually made the test harder after I published how I passed it :-)
Be sure to visit nocode.org, code's fine on the air - let's just get it off that test!
K6BP
I found a reference that claims a dot is a Baud. I don't agree. Using the recommended time constant for the key-click filter, I think a dot fits in two Baud. But note that the key-click filter is generally set too fast - the manufacturer doesn't know what top speed the operator might have, and thus most operators send a dot of more than two Bauds in length.
Bruce
Morse is a code that is overlaid on that data link, and has its own symbols that can be expressed as strings of data link on or off bits, only approximately, because Morse is not a clocked code. How many data link one bits there are to a dot has to do with the ratio of a dot length that the operator is sending at that moment (remember he's hand-keying) to the time constant of the key-ckick filter.
Bruce
Bruce