I wonder what their relationship is to the Kenwood that makes ham radios. Ham radio has a lot of parallels to free software. Individuals working on technology and sharing the results, networking to have more effect than any one person could, etc.
Actually, the GPL does not prevent anyone from selling their products. You are allowed to offer any number of licenses, commercial or GPL, if you are the copyright holder of the work. If you want to avoid forking, insist on sign-over of copyright for patches into your main source thread, commit to offer them under the GPL, and remain an active maintainer. If you don't want to be an active maintainer, then expect a GPL fork by someone outside who will do a better job.
I signed on this morning after about 100 comments had been posted. Novell folks mentioned this case of someone departing their employment with copyrighted technology to me, over dinner one evening, entirely unofficially, and that's all that I know about it so far. What they said sounded like the news reports linked to by other commenters here. But I'm not stating any opinion on this case because I don't need to do collateral damage in helping Novell make an Open Source license.
As far as I know, it's entirely possible to make a Netware client through reverse engineering, it's still legal to do that, and some people have done that and it's available in Open Source. In addition, there's Netware stuff that Alan Cox worked on long ago. But I am far from cognizant of the status of all of these products.
The Novell folks came to me and asked for help with a license. I gave it to them, for free, spending two days there in Utah and other time on the phone and email, for the good of the community. If you think something is happening that is not for the good of the community, of course you should tell me about it, and I will bend people's ears at Novell if necessary.
There are some nice dye-submimation printers out there that will get to the one-hour photo houses. They are just as expensive as print film, should keep the vendors happy.
My camera has something called Digital Print Order Form. You tell the camera what you want printed, and then when you get to the store pop the memory card into the store's socket and it prints right away with no additional interaction but to take your credit card.
The print order form is a text file. The flash filesystem in this camera is in the DOS filesystem format. The image files are straight TIFF or JPEG. No FlashPix format to convert from. Linux reads all of this now, just plug the flash card into an adapter and treat it as an ATA drive.
It is in the retail market. Just a matter of time. I went out and shot a bunch of pictures at 1700x1200 uncompressed, using my nice digital SLR camera. I came back, downloaded them, and put my Nikon F2 up for sale on Amazon.
Granted, but the Memory Stick is the only way of putting memory in the device. Like there's anything revolutionary about memory. I'm buying devices that support commodity RAM and nothing else.
The Sony Memory Stick seems to be a Sony-proprietary implementation. In contrast, we have SmartMedia and CompactFlash, which are much closer to being open standards. They are consortia, I think, but they let everybody in who has the price of admission and thus the devices are priced like commodities.
I considered a Sony digital camera recently and bought an Olympus C-2500L because it comes with both SmartMedia and CompactFlash slots, and I wasn't locked into Olympus as a memory vendor. I put 160MB in there between them, at a price I could never have approached using Sony Memory Sticks.
It seems to me that if we buy hardware that uses Sony memory sticks, we're locked in to one vendor and will pay higher prices. Are they even licensing memory stick production to anyone else?
Thanks
Bruce Perens
P.S. The Olympus C-2500L is wonderful. Still film is dead.
About half a year ago, you might still have been able to take "Mozilla is Dead" seriously. Since then, there have been tremendous improvements in the software, and more contributors have joined the product because now that it actually works they have confidence that their efforts to improve it will be useful.
Very few Bazaar projects start as Bazaars - usually a rudimentary but working product is gotten out the door in "Cathedral" style, after which outside contributors join up because there's something useful that they can contribute to. In contrast, at the start Mozilla was not anything that even developers could use, and thus the project didn't have much outside participation at that point. It's well beyond that now, and reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
I think you're trying to nudge C-T for more Slashdot code. Yes, I know it's off topic and thus so is my reply, so I didn't push the +1 score button.
Without denegrating C-T's great work on the Slashdot software, I'd like to point out there's an Open Source weblog at squishdot.org. It's in quite an early state - looks rudimentary next to Slashdot, but it has a real Open Source Definition compliant license and releases are done reasonably often. Future versions will probably incorporate ZDiscussions, a component of Confera which is distributed on the zope web site, and of course the whole thing is built on Zope.
Someone moderated that message (#11) as Off Topic? It's a direct cricisism of the leading article, containing a direct quote and a comment on the quote. I wouldn't have considered it off-topic. I wouldn't call that moderator abuse, but it's probably careless moderation.
In this message Eric Raymond writes that a story about China adopting Linux as its official OS is a fraud. It is a fraud, and Eric is functioning appropriately as a spokesperson within the free software community when he says so. Eric's been doing a pretty good job lately, and I appreciate that. Unfortunately, Eric writes:
It may be too much to hope that this statement will head off a flurry of snide opinion pieces divagating about "open-source communism"; the clumsy rhetoric of some of our past ambassadors may have made that outcome inevitable.
Experienced observers in the free software community will note that Eric can't help engaging in one of his favorite pastimes, taking a jab at Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation. The problem with this is that Stallman is emphaticaly not a communist. In Stallman's own words: Karl Marx didn't invent helping your neighbor. It's true, however, that references to communism are often used to discredit many of the best things about community spirit. We don't want to see that strategy used against Linux, but Eric engages in that himself by deprecating Stallman in his China message, a message in which he deliberately takes on the mantle of speaking for the entire community. That's unfortunate.
In order to deflect talk of Linux being a "communist enterprise", we need to be clear about the relationship of Free Software (Open Source) to communism. Free software does create a "commons": a sort of publicly-owned property, collectively maintained for the good of all. Karl Marx didn't invent that either, it's a critical aspect of every community, and most capitalistic enterprises would wither without a publicly-owned infrastructure to support them. Consider, for example, that money is part of that infrastructure. That's the message I'd like to carry to the press: having a commons, helping our neighbors, and protecting our freedoms should not be equated to communism.
I asked to recuse myself regarding any decision about Debian, as the award would be presented to the project leaders and I'm a past project leader as well as one of the award judges.
Tim B-L should get some sort of honor. I'd want to look a little harder at how much of what he's done for Open Systems rather than free software. A lot of people confuse the two.
I'm working on putting up the TIGER/Line 1998 U.S. map database today. It's the complete electronic U.S. street map, available for your use in free software. I've previously had the 1997 version online. I'm also doing some other nice things for free software lately, so what are you doing, huh, huh, come on, spit it out:-)
I don't think we should assume that copy-protection is critical for anyone's sales. CDs have existed up until now without it, a copy-protection system was recently added to CDs, but I don't see that the industry was hurt during 20 years of its absence. Software copy-protection met with incredibly strong customer rejection.
The record and video industry has been crying about this for years, but I think it's still a red-herring. Their real purpose is to make it difficult for you to be in the business unless you go through one of the established studios. They don't want artists to be able to do their own distribution, electronicaly, and keep all of the profits.
Given that reverse-engineering for reasons of compatibility is still legal even in the U.S., I don't see that these guys have done anything wrong. And take a look around at all of the Linux DVD web sites. I'm told that multiple ones are down, mirrors removed, etc. IMO first ammendment rights are being stomped upon rather heavily this morning
We need make our displeasure known using peaceful and legal means. I can't over-emphasize that. Beyond that we need to work out a strategy, and get the Linux businesses involved in supporting legal defense. Sit down now, think about what you can do, and do it today. Tell reporters. Call your congressman. Picket a video store if you can't think of anything else!
Where's the source code? Where's the message telling us how to get the source code, required by the GPL if they don't distribute the source code with the product?
And what is this system of theirs? It seems to be a Red Hat system that they installed on a hard disk using UMSDOS and LOADLIN, and then they copied the hard disk into a folder.
Folks, we need to get the message out that these are not responsible business people.
Actually, Unisys acquired the patent with the rest of the assets of a company it was taking over.
I think it makes sense for us all to switch to PNG now, because if we don't switch, good PNG support will never become de rigeur for web browsers.
We have to force the issue.
Since PNG is also technically superior (it compresses better), good support in browsers will mean that nobody uses GIFs any longer. And people will notice when a format goes out of use due to software patent problems.
The $200 does not include Pacific Bell loop costs. As far as I can tell, this is a significant expense, at least hundreds of additional dollars per month. What the pool is providing is aggregation of your personal T1 on to a wider net connection. Can someone chime in with the actual figures for the Pacific Bell portion?
DSL is a better deal than a T1 because of the way the tariffs are written here in California, I hope they switch to DSL soon. However, I am currently paying $215/month for 768K symmetric DSL, I doubt that with the wire plus the aggregation they can beat that price by much. Still, I'd be glad to use a co-op if it became economicaly viable.
At the time development of the Linux port of LIBC was going on, the main thread maintainers were reluctant to merge in the Linux changes. One of the reasons might have been the lack of maturity of the Linux code but I do not know the entire story. But the GPL worked in this example. The main thread maintainers were circumvented when they would not help with an issue someone else felt was important. When that fork got the lion's share of distribution, much more than the original fork, the main thread maintainers saw the need to incorporate the Linux changes and did so. This was not done as smoothly as you might like, but I bet it was done more quickly than it would have been if there was some sort of dictatorial control on the C library with license restrictions to back it up. In that case, the Linux C library might simply never have been done, because the main thread maintainers didn't care about Linux when it started.
I maintain that this was a demonstration of the GPL working the way it should. Nobody was allowed to stand in the way of the Linux development because of the terms of the GPL, and the final result did get merged back in.
Yes. Signing the copyright over to FSF means that FSF can be the complaintant in a lawsuit regarding the code, and that they are the complaintant for a portion of the code so large (the whole thing) that it can not be "written out" of the product. In the case of the Linux kernel, any one of the hundreds of copyright holders could be a complaintant, and working together several of them would make an _effective_ complaintant. If I complained based on the line or two I've added to the kernel, that wouldn't be too effective.
Uh, maybe you didn't understand. Yes, it's there to protect from lawsuits. The way it protects from lawsuits is to dispel any impression that it's a real deed to real property.
I liked the joke postings better. Can I turn it in for a pound of green cheese?
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce
Bruce
As far as I know, it's entirely possible to make a Netware client through reverse engineering, it's still legal to do that, and some people have done that and it's available in Open Source. In addition, there's Netware stuff that Alan Cox worked on long ago. But I am far from cognizant of the status of all of these products.
The Novell folks came to me and asked for help with a license. I gave it to them, for free, spending two days there in Utah and other time on the phone and email, for the good of the community. If you think something is happening that is not for the good of the community, of course you should tell me about it, and I will bend people's ears at Novell if necessary.
Thanks
Bruce
My camera has something called Digital Print Order Form. You tell the camera what you want printed, and then when you get to the store pop the memory card into the store's socket and it prints right away with no additional interaction but to take your credit card.
The print order form is a text file. The flash filesystem in this camera is in the DOS filesystem format. The image files are straight TIFF or JPEG. No FlashPix format to convert from. Linux reads all of this now, just plug the flash card into an adapter and treat it as an ATA drive.
Bruce
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I considered a Sony digital camera recently and bought an Olympus C-2500L because it comes with both SmartMedia and CompactFlash slots, and I wasn't locked into Olympus as a memory vendor. I put 160MB in there between them, at a price I could never have approached using Sony Memory Sticks.
It seems to me that if we buy hardware that uses Sony memory sticks, we're locked in to one vendor and will pay higher prices. Are they even licensing memory stick production to anyone else?
Thanks
Bruce Perens
P.S. The Olympus C-2500L is wonderful. Still film is dead.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Very few Bazaar projects start as Bazaars - usually a rudimentary but working product is gotten out the door in "Cathedral" style, after which outside contributors join up because there's something useful that they can contribute to. In contrast, at the start Mozilla was not anything that even developers could use, and thus the project didn't have much outside participation at that point. It's well beyond that now, and reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
Thanks
Bruce
Without denegrating C-T's great work on the Slashdot software, I'd like to point out there's an Open Source weblog at squishdot.org. It's in quite an early state - looks rudimentary next to Slashdot, but it has a real Open Source Definition compliant license and releases are done reasonably often. Future versions will probably incorporate ZDiscussions, a component of Confera which is distributed on the zope web site, and of course the whole thing is built on Zope.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
In order to deflect talk of Linux being a "communist enterprise", we need to be clear about the relationship of Free Software (Open Source) to communism. Free software does create a "commons": a sort of publicly-owned property, collectively maintained for the good of all. Karl Marx didn't invent that either, it's a critical aspect of every community, and most capitalistic enterprises would wither without a publicly-owned infrastructure to support them. Consider, for example, that money is part of that infrastructure. That's the message I'd like to carry to the press: having a commons, helping our neighbors, and protecting our freedoms should not be equated to communism.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce
Tim B-L should get some sort of honor. I'd want to look a little harder at how much of what he's done for Open Systems rather than free software. A lot of people confuse the two.
Thanks
Bruce
I actually managed to have a civil email exchange with ESR this week, so I doubt that serving on the nomination committee will be a problem.
Thanks
Bruce
I'm working on putting up the TIGER/Line 1998 U.S. map database today. It's the complete electronic U.S. street map, available for your use in free software. I've previously had the 1997 version online. I'm also doing some other nice things for free software lately, so what are you doing, huh, huh, come on, spit it out :-)
The record and video industry has been crying about this for years, but I think it's still a red-herring. Their real purpose is to make it difficult for you to be in the business unless you go through one of the established studios. They don't want artists to be able to do their own distribution, electronicaly, and keep all of the profits.
Thanks
Bruce
We need make our displeasure known using peaceful and legal means. I can't over-emphasize that. Beyond that we need to work out a strategy, and get the Linux businesses involved in supporting legal defense. Sit down now, think about what you can do, and do it today. Tell reporters. Call your congressman. Picket a video store if you can't think of anything else!
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
And what is this system of theirs? It seems to be a Red Hat system that they installed on a hard disk using UMSDOS and LOADLIN, and then they copied the hard disk into a folder.
Folks, we need to get the message out that these are not responsible business people.
Bruce
I think it makes sense for us all to switch to PNG now, because if we don't switch, good PNG support will never become de rigeur for web browsers.
We have to force the issue.
Since PNG is also technically superior (it compresses better), good support in browsers will mean that nobody uses GIFs any longer. And people will notice when a format goes out of use due to software patent problems.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
DSL is a better deal than a T1 because of the way the tariffs are written here in California, I hope they switch to DSL soon. However, I am currently paying $215/month for 768K symmetric DSL, I doubt that with the wire plus the aggregation they can beat that price by much. Still, I'd be glad to use a co-op if it became economicaly viable.
Thanks
Bruce
I maintain that this was a demonstration of the GPL working the way it should. Nobody was allowed to stand in the way of the Linux development because of the terms of the GPL, and the final result did get merged back in.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I liked the joke postings better. Can I turn it in for a pound of green cheese?
Bruce