If a court ruled that the company accepted the terms of the GPL and must release its source code, this outcome would be an unparalleled disaster for the GPL. The Microsoft FUD machine would kick into overdrive and cite the case as proof that to have any involvement with "Open Source" software of any kind is to surrender all of your intellectual-property rights, and the PHBs would be scared senseless.
The best outcome would be an enforceable "cease and desist" with the copyright owner being kind enough not to ask for damages.
I can only suggest they save their time in court, GPL their application and get on with writing applications that people want to use
I'm not sure of the exact type of this company, but for a software company, it's not generally realistic to expect them to give away their crown jewels for free. A more realistic demand would be that they stop using the GPLed code and produce, find, buy, or rent non-GPLed code with the equivalent functionality.
Ransom Love? Now that sounds like an interesting business model. So how does it work?
Re:Astroturfers now define slashdot content
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It's been so long since I've seen a good Natalie Portman naked and petrified post.
I predict the great return of Natalie Portman posts on May 22, 2002.
Re:M$ is built upon IP being undermined
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Damn... need to start reading the articles all the way through...
Re:M$ is built upon IP being undermined
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You forgot to mention that The Empire would not have risen to power in the first place if it weren't for the Clone Wars. (Oops, did I give too much plot away?) The PC clones were ripoffs of IBM's intellectual property, and MS-DOS was the operating system that was able to capitalize on cheap PCs.
The solution is pretty simple. In order to be enacted as law, the originators must surrender any copyright claims to the material in question. You'd think that legislatures would have enough brain power to figure something like this out, but who knows; we can't be sure where their paychecks are coming from. Industry standards organizations must work something like this also.
I too see the ideals of patent theory as being valid. However, patents must not be issued for trivial inventions, as has been done far too much lately, and companies that abuse their patents should lose their rights to them. For example, RAMBUSt w.r.t. JEDEC and Unisys w.r.t. LZW compression.
While somewhat important, I think that people give data validation far too high of a priority. People seem to think that "self-describing data" is going to save the world in the same way that XML was supposed to eliminate the need for parsing and interpretation of information by a computer program. I've been involved in using XML to exchange information and make remote invocations of services in a Web environment, and you still have to write programs to interpret the contents of the XML information in pretty much the same way as with data exchanged in any format.
So you can automatically validate it. So frikking what! The rabid theoriticians in the consortium of people that I work with get all hung up on this without realizing that most functioning protocols out there are able to exchange information without the need for a formal validation model. Not that you would really want to use one on either the generation or consumption side of a real system, since it just slows things down. All you need is a clear spec for the protocol.
Another thing that bugs me is the fiercely defended text-only approach used in XML. For some reason, XML fans seem to think that computers cannot exchange and understand binary data, or that editing tools would be unable to allow people to see it.
The text-only approach has two major limitations. First, there's no way to directly include binary data. There's lots of binary-encoded objects out there, like image or sound file formats, but you have to encode it in BASE64 or something. This is pretty strangely limited given that XML data is generally exchanged over an 8-bit clean pipe (i.e., the Web). Something like:
<xml:binary size=10>kjiu õéçäá</xml:binary>
would be quite reasonable, with "size" octets placed directly between the closing '>' of the opening tag and the opening '' of the close tag. They should have included a mechanism in XML Schema to declare this.
The second problem with text is the high cost of parsing it. Probably the majority of time spent in a system that processes a large bulk of XML data is spent in the lexical analysis stage of consuming the XML stream. They had their big chance with binary-WAP-XML, or whatever they called it, but that seems to be kind of screwed up and includes patented technology. What is needed is a simple, widely acceptable binary encoding of exactly the information included in XML text, which uses lookup tables to optimize handling tag names.
The third problem with exchanging raw text XML encoded data is that it explodes the information you want to ship over the Web by a factor of about 20 times. It needs to become commonly accepted practice to, at least, exchange this information in a compressed format, such as GZIP. The MIME tags really need to be updated too, to allow a nesting of formats, to say "this is a gzip-compressed stream of Bob's fabulous graphics markup format encoded in XML".
The biggest and most depressing limiting factor is the lifetime of a technologically advanced civilization. One might postulate that this could be as short as 20 years, given the number of times the human race has almost blown itself up.
So, it's not a matter of an extraterrestrial signal reaching Earth at all, it's a matter of it reaching Earth while we are listening. If clear radio signals had reached the Earth 1000 years ago, we would never had known. If that civilization is now extinct, we will never know.
Given the age of the universe, the time that we have been listening for radio signals is very small.
A non-internet example would be pyramid schemes. The average US/European/developed country person is wary of these things and rarely taken in, though the occassional sucker exists. On the other hand, it has brought down an entire country's financial system. (East European, forgot name.)
In what way was the dot-com sucker play not a pyramid scheme?
Well, I don't have any realistic expectations of finding extraterrestrial life. My interest is more to help demonstrate to policy makers more public interest in space and space exploration. I'd rather see the relevant resources being spent on developing space ships instead of bombs. It would also be nice if the human species doesn't end up being exterminated before getting off of this rock.
So what happens if I run SETI@home? My current CPU is going 100% all of the time. (Or, at least the FPU is.) If (heaven forbid) I were to get a P4, would I be getting 50% performance all of the time? Why not just buy a 750-MHz CPU!
It's not clear what you mean. OpenGIS is an standards organization, not a product. Perhaps you are referring to their Web Map Server specification, probably the first meaningful standard they've ever produced. It makes it fairly easy to make maps available to the web in a vendor-neutral way so that they can be overlaid with maps from other independent servers on the fly.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you did get your hands on the keys, it would mean the collapse of the entire Passport security scheme.
The fireworks should be really cool when this inevitibly happens.
If a court ruled that the company accepted the terms of the GPL and must release its source code, this outcome would be an unparalleled disaster for the GPL. The Microsoft FUD machine would kick into overdrive and cite the case as proof that to have any involvement with "Open Source" software of any kind is to surrender all of your intellectual-property rights, and the PHBs would be scared senseless.
The best outcome would be an enforceable "cease and desist" with the copyright owner being kind enough not to ask for damages.
I can only suggest they save their time in court, GPL their application and get on with writing applications that people want to use
I'm not sure of the exact type of this company, but for a software company, it's not generally realistic to expect them to give away their crown jewels for free. A more realistic demand would be that they stop using the GPLed code and produce, find, buy, or rent non-GPLed code with the equivalent functionality.
Ransom Love? Now that sounds like an interesting business model. So how does it work?
It's been so long since I've seen a good Natalie Portman naked and petrified post.
I predict the great return of Natalie Portman posts on May 22, 2002.
Damn... need to start reading the articles all the way through...
You forgot to mention that The Empire would not have risen to power in the first place if it weren't for the Clone Wars. (Oops, did I give too much plot away?) The PC clones were ripoffs of IBM's intellectual property, and MS-DOS was the operating system that was able to capitalize on cheap PCs.
Maybe IBM could use some of their $1B Linux money to back Eazel development.
Whoever invented double clicking should be shot in the head! Twice!!
The solution is pretty simple. In order to be enacted as law, the originators must surrender any copyright claims to the material in question. You'd think that legislatures would have enough brain power to figure something like this out, but who knows; we can't be sure where their paychecks are coming from. Industry standards organizations must work something like this also.
As American as lawsuit lottery
I too see the ideals of patent theory as being valid. However, patents must not be issued for trivial inventions, as has been done far too much lately, and companies that abuse their patents should lose their rights to them. For example, RAMBUSt w.r.t. JEDEC and Unisys w.r.t. LZW compression.
Maybe he should consider sending his dog instead.
they just want to find the easiest cheapest way to do what they want to do on the Internet
Then AOL should fill those CDs they are always sending to everybody with pr0n instead of software. Cut out the middle man!
While somewhat important, I think that people give data validation far too high of a priority. People seem to think that "self-describing data" is going to save the world in the same way that XML was supposed to eliminate the need for parsing and interpretation of information by a computer program. I've been involved in using XML to exchange information and make remote invocations of services in a Web environment, and you still have to write programs to interpret the contents of the XML information in pretty much the same way as with data exchanged in any format.
So you can automatically validate it. So frikking what! The rabid theoriticians in the consortium of people that I work with get all hung up on this without realizing that most functioning protocols out there are able to exchange information without the need for a formal validation model. Not that you would really want to use one on either the generation or consumption side of a real system, since it just slows things down. All you need is a clear spec for the protocol.
Another thing that bugs me is the fiercely defended text-only approach used in XML. For some reason, XML fans seem to think that computers cannot exchange and understand binary data, or that editing tools would be unable to allow people to see it.
The text-only approach has two major limitations. First, there's no way to directly include binary data. There's lots of binary-encoded objects out there, like image or sound file formats, but you have to encode it in BASE64 or something. This is pretty strangely limited given that XML data is generally exchanged over an 8-bit clean pipe (i.e., the Web). Something like:
<xml:binary size=10>kjiu õéçäá</xml:binary>
would be quite reasonable, with "size" octets placed directly between the closing '>' of the opening tag and the opening '' of the close tag. They should have included a mechanism in XML Schema to declare this.
The second problem with text is the high cost of parsing it. Probably the majority of time spent in a system that processes a large bulk of XML data is spent in the lexical analysis stage of consuming the XML stream. They had their big chance with binary-WAP-XML, or whatever they called it, but that seems to be kind of screwed up and includes patented technology. What is needed is a simple, widely acceptable binary encoding of exactly the information included in XML text, which uses lookup tables to optimize handling tag names.
The third problem with exchanging raw text XML encoded data is that it explodes the information you want to ship over the Web by a factor of about 20 times. It needs to become commonly accepted practice to, at least, exchange this information in a compressed format, such as GZIP. The MIME tags really need to be updated too, to allow a nesting of formats, to say "this is a gzip-compressed stream of Bob's fabulous graphics markup format encoded in XML".
Hmm... what was MS saying about the folly of giving away IP freely? ;)
I.P. Freely? I.P. Freely? Paging Mr. I.P. Freely.
The biggest and most depressing limiting factor is the lifetime of a technologically advanced civilization. One might postulate that this could be as short as 20 years, given the number of times the human race has almost blown itself up.
So, it's not a matter of an extraterrestrial signal reaching Earth at all, it's a matter of it reaching Earth while we are listening. If clear radio signals had reached the Earth 1000 years ago, we would never had known. If that civilization is now extinct, we will never know.
Given the age of the universe, the time that we have been listening for radio signals is very small.
The dinner picture would have been better if it had shown them eating small birds. Equipment recycling.
A non-internet example would be pyramid schemes. The average US/European/developed country person is wary of these things and rarely taken in, though the occassional sucker exists. On the other hand, it has brought down an entire country's financial system. (East European, forgot name.)
In what way was the dot-com sucker play not a pyramid scheme?
The solution is simple. First get rid of private ownership and then torch all of the Cafes. Problem solved.
XEphem is a pretty neat program for this sort of thing too. It is also included on the Red Hat 7.1 Power-Tools disc.
Well, I don't have any realistic expectations of finding extraterrestrial life. My interest is more to help demonstrate to policy makers more public interest in space and space exploration. I'd rather see the relevant resources being spent on developing space ships instead of bombs. It would also be nice if the human species doesn't end up being exterminated before getting off of this rock.
So with XF86 4.0 and Linux 2.4, do I get all that wonderful 3D stuff built-in that will make my Quake-3 scream?
So what happens if I run SETI@home? My current CPU is going 100% all of the time. (Or, at least the FPU is.) If (heaven forbid) I were to get a P4, would I be getting 50% performance all of the time? Why not just buy a 750-MHz CPU!
"A stuffed penguin on every desktop."
It's not clear what you mean. OpenGIS is an standards organization, not a product. Perhaps you are referring to their Web Map Server specification, probably the first meaningful standard they've ever produced. It makes it fairly easy to make maps available to the web in a vendor-neutral way so that they can be overlaid with maps from other independent servers on the fly.