I agree that they can claim the GPL release was a "mistake". However they must now actively act like it was a "mistake" and try to fix it. This means they must immediately release complete information about where the infringement is so all users of the GPL'd code can "fix" it. The longer they don't do this, the stronger the GPL release case gets.
As for the FUD about the GPL, the results are identical no matter *what* license they released their Linux under. It would be the same if they used BSD or they put it in the public domian, or even if they signed a NDA with somebody for it and later realized that person should not have access to the code.
The paper seems to skip around the huge unanswered question: Is there a private key that third parties know that it is impossible for the owner of the computer to know?
The paper makes it sound like all key pairs are either randomly generated or that the chip can be fed a public key. However it is a bit vague, and I suspect the answer is that there are also non-random pairs in there, where third parties know the private key but you don't. They skirt around this by saying "Bios startup is quite complex" but I think the real answer is that there unless hashes have matched up to a point these secret public keys are inaccessible.
This system is absolutely useless for security as all exploits actually cause supposedly correct programs to follow the wrong instructions. This is like claiming current systems are secure because you cannot change the microcode and invent new machine instructions. It's purpose is so that it is impossible to get any kind of modified or different operating system in there, and still be able to run DRM programs, which could decode information using the secret key.
The fact that IBM and everybody else has refused to answer this question (I think the answer here was skirted around with some bullshit about the "BIOS startup being quite complex") makes me think they are lying.
The fact that having a high-speed encryption chip is quite useful is being used to hide the real purpose. Do you really think the same people who think Winmodems are a good idea are that interested in adding hardware just to speed up a function that can be done in software?
They also make a point about the random key generation, which is interesting, because it keeps the private key completely in the hardware where no program can see it and thus be fooled to reveal it. However I am curious if this is actually a defense against any real exploits. I have not heard of exploits that involve revealing the private key of a previously-negotiated pair, most involve fooling the system into doing something unwanted through an already opened and legitimate channel, or fooling it into using another public key that the attacker already knows the private one for. Can any experts find any real exploits where a temporary and untransmitted private key was revealed? If not then I would also suspect this is a smoke-screen, attempting to turn the fact that the chip has secret keys into a benefit. I would also think that 99% of the benifit, if any, could be achieved by loading the chip with a random pair and then making sure the program has eradicated all knowledge of the pair. There have been expoits in weak random number generators, and in this case the random number generator is in hardware and no longer easily fixed.
Wrong. The GPL does not prevent the author from dual-licensing. Microsoft could have purchased the rights to use the SCO code in their closed-source software, even if SCO purposely released a GPL version.
It is possible that SCO copied GPL code into their product by accident. Then Microsoft could have put it into their code. This would certainly be interesting and would be a huge problem for SCO. Microsoft in order to save face would have to sue them for the price of the useless license.
But in the end Microsoft could probably remove the GPL code pretty easily. Same thing for Linux removing any SCO code, actually. It would be easy if it was known where it was.
Anybody with any knowledge of the systems would know that if Linux infringes, then Windows certainly does as well. Microsoft also hired "programmers familiar with the SCO code". Also the systems are not all that different, Windows has lots of Unix-like behavior, starting with MSDOS 2.0.
Microsoft/SCO is admitting the fact that Windows has to infringe as much as Linux, and is paying the license fee, knowing full well that Linux cannot pay the same.
It also allows them to go after BSD and every other non-Windows system in the world. They all use integer file descriptors and unix-style read/write, and thus all can potentially infringe.
That is why I think SCO must actively work on fixing their "mistake". If they do nothing they are admitting it was not an error. Therefore for them to have a case they must release immediately detailed information about what parts of Linux must be changed, at least for the version they sent out, so that the "mistake" can be corrected.
The fact that SCO released the code under the GPL can easily be dismissed, they can just say it is much too large and complex to check it. They could also claim there was poor internal communication so somebody thought it was ok. I think such mistakes don't cause you to lose copyright. If a printout blew out of Microsoft on the wind and is found, it does not mean Microsoft loses their copyright.
They do have to release immediately information about where the code is, so that their mistake can be rectified. If they don't do actively try to fix their mistake then they are implicitly saying that it is not a mistake, and then the release of the code goes against them.
You only need to make your own contributions available if you actually distribute the modified programs. You can use it in-house all you want, for any purpose whatsoever. I would suspect most cross-licensing agreements are somewhat more strict than that.
Your exact same scenario would apply if the employee stole the code and put it into a closed-source program. If this was a problem then buyers would have to worry about *all* software they buy, not just open source.
Delivery trucks would still be allowed. They would probably get there a lot faster without the traffic blocking them.
Your car would be stored in a big garage on the edge of town, like you suggested.
Anybody who thinks this can't work should explain why people in America flock to huge malls, some of them approaching the same area as city downtowns. Last time I checked they did not allow driving inside them.
Information can exist without people. If the entire human race died out, I think the earth would still have a lot of information left on the surface, perhaps for the intelligent descendents of the cockroaches to eventually read.
I perfectly understand that a person who possesses some information and does not want others to have it can prevent it by not telling the information to anybody. But information itself is naturally free. Imagine if you did not exist, but the information did, ie it was written down. Now perhaps nobody can see it written down, but in that case it's exactly the same as if the information did not exist. So let's assumme some person can see it. What exactly in nature prevents that person from copying it? The answer is NOTHING!!!!. Information "wants" to be free.
The electron idea is exactly the same. Electrons "want" to be in the lowest energy state. This does not mean that generators and electricity and the entire power grid and Edison are evil or physically impossible. It is EXACTLY the same with information. Just because information "wants" to be free does not mean you are forced to make it free, as you have pointed out it is trivial to make it "non-free" by not telling anybody the information.
Most people when they talk about information are referring to information that somebody has access to, however.
which "takes more work": distributing a binary only with super-annoying copy protection licensed from some 3-man development shop (un-free) or distributing a binary with the exact snapshot of the source that binary was created with?
I don't understand this argument at all. Obviously distributing the source is trivial compared to making a working copy-protection scheme, so this sounds like an excellent arguemnt for making information "free". I figure what you meant to say is that it takes even less work to not distribute the source at all and not do a copy protection scheme, which is certainly true. Unfortunately you have distributed information (the compiled program) and that information can be copied easily. The real way to do as little work as possible and to keep your information "non-free" is to distribute nothing. But that makes the world outside your brain no different than if the information did not exist at all.
However if somebody found that source in the dumpster, it takes active work to prevent them from copying it and distributing it. Ie prosecution or laws or even intimidation or peer pressure or even instilling a sense of guilt into that person. Unfortunately there is no way to change the laws of physics and the natural state is that that information will be copied, at least into that person's brain.
Perhaps the statement should be "visible information wants to be free" or something like that.
Information "wants to be free" in the same way that an electron "wants to be in the lowest energy orbit". Get it?
Of course the electron is not thinking and weighing the options and deciding. And you (not the electron) could very well want that electron in a different orbit, and you could make it do that by applying enough force and energy, but this still has no effect on the fact that the electron "wants" to be in the lowest orbit.
Same thing with information. It should be obvious that without government regulation or some other enforcement, copyright would be meaningless. This indicates the natural state of the universe, and informant "wants" to be free. If information did not "want" to be free, then the natural state of the universe would be that you would be unable to copy information that you saw.
I can't believe people are still stupid enough not to understand this simple and rather clever statement. Saying information "wants" to be free does not mean all people want it to be free, and does not mean that we must allow it to be free. It means that it takes more work to make it non-free than to make it free. You can then argue whether this work is worth it or not, but that still does not change the fact that information "wants" to be free!
Pixmaps are already stored on the server side, so what is sent are commands to draw lines and text and draw pixmaps at various places.
Although it sounds good at first, putting widgets on the server may result in more communication. This is because the interface to a widget is extremely complicated, and the requirements of compatability and that the widget be used by many different applications could bloat up it's interface to a quite enormous mess. And appliations will likely end up updating this interface on every event to get the behavior they want, resulting in more communication than before. Also some widgets require more data sent than will ever be drawn, imagine a scrolling browser with 100,000 items, the server would need drawing instructions for 100,000 items rather than the 20 or so that are currently visible.
It is also extremely complex and results in bloated code. In fltk I would say 50% of the X-specific code is for talking to the window manager, ie more code is spent on that than in providing all the drawing primitives. I am pretty certain this is about 10 times as much code than I would need to draw the window borders myself.
With tiny test C programs the Intel compiler produced stunning results, like sometimes 3 times faster than GCC (this was slightly older gcc, perhaps 2.9.0 or so). Unfortunately as soon as we applied it to our real C++ programs we found the results to run at exactly the same speed. My guess is the stuff was too complicated for it to use any of it's optimizations.
The Intel compiler on Windows is about 30% faster than VC++ (version 6, we have not tried the.net version yet) with these same C++ programs, and the result is perhaps 4% faster than the GCC 2.9.6 Linux version (the program is entirely compute-bound, so this is not an OS difference). So far we have not seen even this 4% improvement in the Linux Intel compiler, which leads me to believe they have not put as much work into it as they did for the Windows one.
The GPL means that people could redistribute code based on SCO's GPL release, but I'm not sure that applies to other relases of the code that was supposedly stolen from SCO. If RedHat legally got a GPL copy from SCO then they could modify it into "RedHat Linux" and sell it and this would have been explicitly agreed to by SCO releasing the GPL version.
Conversely imagine if SCO had actually written Linux and never released a GPL copy. Then RedHat rummages through their dumpster, finds a printout, and steals it and makes RedHat Linux. This would obvioulsly be illegal and a copyright violation. Then SCO decides to relase this Linux under the GPL, after the theft. I would think this subsequent action in no way would make RedHat less guilty of theft.
It would get more gray if in fact SCO had already released the code under the GPL and at the same time RedHat rummaged through their dumpster and did not in fact notice or look at the freely-available GPL code. Despite the fact that RedHat could have legally aquired it, it still seems to me they would be equally guilty. The only real difference is that unless they were actually caught looking in the dumpster they can claim they copied the GPL code and thus not get prosecuted.
Although I am pretty certain they have no case, the claim that because they released a GPL copy means they have no case is IMHO not true. Claiming that makes people think the GPL is more powerful than it really is, which falls right into MicroSoft's attempts to make it sound evil.
Unfortunatley that problem is not unique to open-source code. Commercial code could be (and almost certainly is) full of copyright violations. The fact that the copyright violations are better hidden I think means it is even more likely.
The problemo that they have though is that 'SCO' is really Caldera inc which in turn used to sell Linux. There is a big problem with distributing linux if you intend to get heavy on the IP trip. As Bill Gates observed, Linux was released under a viral license which in effect strips away most of SCO's intellectual property rights.
No, you have that wrong, you are believing Bill Gates' FUD about GPL.
Distributing your *own* software under the GPL does not affect your copyright ownership rights to it. SCO is claiming the code is copyrighted by them. This in fact would mean they are the only entity that can distribute it, under the GPL or any other license.
The fact that they distributed it under the GPL has no effect on their claim. This would be like claiming that a burglar is not guilty of robbing a home because the people who live there also removed stuff from it.
Forget all this nonsense about "locales". It is obvious there are exactly 2 "locales" of interest, UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. Now suprisingly enough these can co-exist almost perfectly, so there can be *one* "locale" and we can be rid of all this brain-dead attempts at i18n.
What systems should do is treat all streams of bytes as UTF-8, with the additional rule that all sequences of bytes that are not legal UTF-8 (including a unicode value encoded with more bytes than necessary) should be treated as individual bytes in ISO-8859-1. It turns out that you need three accented characters in a row, or a capitalized accent character followed by a foreign punctuation mark, for an ISO-8859-1 to be confused with UTF-8.
I very much believe this works, although I think a search should be done through lots of ISO-8859-1 text to find out if there are any common sequences that are confused with UTF-8.
Even if this is not a perfect solution, it certainly is better than the current scheme. Most filenames will be readable. More importantly it gets rid of the idea of an "error" in a character string, significantly simplifying the interfaces.
Print a public-key encryption of the serial number as a barcode (or magnetic stripe) on the bill. This will force counterfeiters to copy the numbers off existing bills. Then do something to locate duplicates... Of course as another response her says, this probably would mean a database that would also track everybody's cash, which may be bad.
At some level it would be nice if everybody agreed that the filenames are UTF-8 strings. With some agreed-on meaning for illegal UTF-8 sequences: my recommendation is that those be treated as raw ISO-8859-1 bytes, with the characters from 0x80-0x9f treated at the Microsoft "word" characters. Other arrangements are possible, the only rule I would impose is that there are no "errors", all possible arrangements of bytes are legal and can (perhaps with difficulty) be produced by most programs.
However what is really needed at many levels is for people to stop thinking of these things as "text" and start thinking of them as arrays of bytes. The more levels that treat them as raw bytes, the better. So even in applications I would move any interpretation up as close as possible to the user.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the FUD about the GPL, the results are identical no matter *what* license they released their Linux under. It would be the same if they used BSD or they put it in the public domian, or even if they signed a NDA with somebody for it and later realized that person should not have access to the code.
Is there a private key that third parties know that it is impossible for the owner of the computer to know?
The paper makes it sound like all key pairs are either randomly generated or that the chip can be fed a public key. However it is a bit vague, and I suspect the answer is that there are also non-random pairs in there, where third parties know the private key but you don't. They skirt around this by saying "Bios startup is quite complex" but I think the real answer is that there unless hashes have matched up to a point these secret public keys are inaccessible.
This system is absolutely useless for security as all exploits actually cause supposedly correct programs to follow the wrong instructions. This is like claiming current systems are secure because you cannot change the microcode and invent new machine instructions. It's purpose is so that it is impossible to get any kind of modified or different operating system in there, and still be able to run DRM programs, which could decode information using the secret key.
The fact that IBM and everybody else has refused to answer this question (I think the answer here was skirted around with some bullshit about the "BIOS startup being quite complex") makes me think they are lying.
The fact that having a high-speed encryption chip is quite useful is being used to hide the real purpose. Do you really think the same people who think Winmodems are a good idea are that interested in adding hardware just to speed up a function that can be done in software?
They also make a point about the random key generation, which is interesting, because it keeps the private key completely in the hardware where no program can see it and thus be fooled to reveal it. However I am curious if this is actually a defense against any real exploits. I have not heard of exploits that involve revealing the private key of a previously-negotiated pair, most involve fooling the system into doing something unwanted through an already opened and legitimate channel, or fooling it into using another public key that the attacker already knows the private one for. Can any experts find any real exploits where a temporary and untransmitted private key was revealed? If not then I would also suspect this is a smoke-screen, attempting to turn the fact that the chip has secret keys into a benefit. I would also think that 99% of the benifit, if any, could be achieved by loading the chip with a random pair and then making sure the program has eradicated all knowledge of the pair. There have been expoits in weak random number generators, and in this case the random number generator is in hardware and no longer easily fixed.
and even the fact that you can generate key pairs
It is possible that SCO copied GPL code into their product by accident. Then Microsoft could have put it into their code. This would certainly be interesting and would be a huge problem for SCO. Microsoft in order to save face would have to sue them for the price of the useless license.
But in the end Microsoft could probably remove the GPL code pretty easily. Same thing for Linux removing any SCO code, actually. It would be easy if it was known where it was.
IBM probably cannot revoke the older licenses, unless Microsoft signed a very strange contract.
Microsoft/SCO is admitting the fact that Windows has to infringe as much as Linux, and is paying the license fee, knowing full well that Linux cannot pay the same.
It also allows them to go after BSD and every other non-Windows system in the world. They all use integer file descriptors and unix-style read/write, and thus all can potentially infringe.
That is why I think SCO must actively work on fixing their "mistake". If they do nothing they are admitting it was not an error. Therefore for them to have a case they must release immediately detailed information about what parts of Linux must be changed, at least for the version they sent out, so that the "mistake" can be corrected.
The fact that SCO released the code under the GPL can easily be dismissed, they can just say it is much too large and complex to check it. They could also claim there was poor internal communication so somebody thought it was ok. I think such mistakes don't cause you to lose copyright. If a printout blew out of Microsoft on the wind and is found, it does not mean Microsoft loses their copyright.
They do have to release immediately information about where the code is, so that their mistake can be rectified. If they don't do actively try to fix their mistake then they are implicitly saying that it is not a mistake, and then the release of the code goes against them.
If the GPL is illegal than copyright is illegal. I don't think that is going to happen.
You only need to make your own contributions available if you actually distribute the modified programs. You can use it in-house all you want, for any purpose whatsoever. I would suspect most cross-licensing agreements are somewhat more strict than that.
Your exact same scenario would apply if the employee stole the code and put it into a closed-source program. If this was a problem then buyers would have to worry about *all* software they buy, not just open source.
Your car would be stored in a big garage on the edge of town, like you suggested.
Anybody who thinks this can't work should explain why people in America flock to huge malls, some of them approaching the same area as city downtowns. Last time I checked they did not allow driving inside them.
Information can exist without people. If the entire human race died out, I think the earth would still have a lot of information left on the surface, perhaps for the intelligent descendents of the cockroaches to eventually read.
The electron idea is exactly the same. Electrons "want" to be in the lowest energy state. This does not mean that generators and electricity and the entire power grid and Edison are evil or physically impossible. It is EXACTLY the same with information. Just because information "wants" to be free does not mean you are forced to make it free, as you have pointed out it is trivial to make it "non-free" by not telling anybody the information.
Most people when they talk about information are referring to information that somebody has access to, however.
which "takes more work": distributing a binary only with super-annoying copy protection licensed from some 3-man development shop (un-free) or distributing a binary with the exact snapshot of the source that binary was created with?
I don't understand this argument at all. Obviously distributing the source is trivial compared to making a working copy-protection scheme, so this sounds like an excellent arguemnt for making information "free". I figure what you meant to say is that it takes even less work to not distribute the source at all and not do a copy protection scheme, which is certainly true. Unfortunately you have distributed information (the compiled program) and that information can be copied easily. The real way to do as little work as possible and to keep your information "non-free" is to distribute nothing. But that makes the world outside your brain no different than if the information did not exist at all.
However if somebody found that source in the dumpster, it takes active work to prevent them from copying it and distributing it. Ie prosecution or laws or even intimidation or peer pressure or even instilling a sense of guilt into that person. Unfortunately there is no way to change the laws of physics and the natural state is that that information will be copied, at least into that person's brain.
Perhaps the statement should be "visible information wants to be free" or something like that.
Of course the electron is not thinking and weighing the options and deciding. And you (not the electron) could very well want that electron in a different orbit, and you could make it do that by applying enough force and energy, but this still has no effect on the fact that the electron "wants" to be in the lowest orbit.
Same thing with information. It should be obvious that without government regulation or some other enforcement, copyright would be meaningless. This indicates the natural state of the universe, and informant "wants" to be free. If information did not "want" to be free, then the natural state of the universe would be that you would be unable to copy information that you saw.
I can't believe people are still stupid enough not to understand this simple and rather clever statement. Saying information "wants" to be free does not mean all people want it to be free, and does not mean that we must allow it to be free. It means that it takes more work to make it non-free than to make it free. You can then argue whether this work is worth it or not, but that still does not change the fact that information "wants" to be free!
Although it sounds good at first, putting widgets on the server may result in more communication. This is because the interface to a widget is extremely complicated, and the requirements of compatability and that the widget be used by many different applications could bloat up it's interface to a quite enormous mess. And appliations will likely end up updating this interface on every event to get the behavior they want, resulting in more communication than before. Also some widgets require more data sent than will ever be drawn, imagine a scrolling browser with 100,000 items, the server would need drawing instructions for 100,000 items rather than the 20 or so that are currently visible.
It is also extremely complex and results in bloated code. In fltk I would say 50% of the X-specific code is for talking to the window manager, ie more code is spent on that than in providing all the drawing primitives. I am pretty certain this is about 10 times as much code than I would need to draw the window borders myself.
The Intel compiler on Windows is about 30% faster than VC++ (version 6, we have not tried the .net version yet) with these same C++ programs, and the result is perhaps 4% faster than the GCC 2.9.6 Linux version (the program is entirely compute-bound, so this is not an OS difference). So far we have not seen even this 4% improvement in the Linux Intel compiler, which leads me to believe they have not put as much work into it as they did for the Windows one.
It does sound equivalent, so I think the main advantage is that it can be used in languages that don't have references.
Conversely imagine if SCO had actually written Linux and never released a GPL copy. Then RedHat rummages through their dumpster, finds a printout, and steals it and makes RedHat Linux. This would obvioulsly be illegal and a copyright violation. Then SCO decides to relase this Linux under the GPL, after the theft. I would think this subsequent action in no way would make RedHat less guilty of theft.
It would get more gray if in fact SCO had already released the code under the GPL and at the same time RedHat rummaged through their dumpster and did not in fact notice or look at the freely-available GPL code. Despite the fact that RedHat could have legally aquired it, it still seems to me they would be equally guilty. The only real difference is that unless they were actually caught looking in the dumpster they can claim they copied the GPL code and thus not get prosecuted.
Although I am pretty certain they have no case, the claim that because they released a GPL copy means they have no case is IMHO not true. Claiming that makes people think the GPL is more powerful than it really is, which falls right into MicroSoft's attempts to make it sound evil.
Wrong! Nobody said the robber would get amnesty for returning the stolen goods.
I don't remember Caldera sending every user of Windows a letter telling them they might be breaking the law.
Unfortunatley that problem is not unique to open-source code. Commercial code could be (and almost certainly is) full of copyright violations. The fact that the copyright violations are better hidden I think means it is even more likely.
No, you have that wrong, you are believing Bill Gates' FUD about GPL.
Distributing your *own* software under the GPL does not affect your copyright ownership rights to it. SCO is claiming the code is copyrighted by them. This in fact would mean they are the only entity that can distribute it, under the GPL or any other license.
The fact that they distributed it under the GPL has no effect on their claim. This would be like claiming that a burglar is not guilty of robbing a home because the people who live there also removed stuff from it.
What systems should do is treat all streams of bytes as UTF-8, with the additional rule that all sequences of bytes that are not legal UTF-8 (including a unicode value encoded with more bytes than necessary) should be treated as individual bytes in ISO-8859-1. It turns out that you need three accented characters in a row, or a capitalized accent character followed by a foreign punctuation mark, for an ISO-8859-1 to be confused with UTF-8.
I very much believe this works, although I think a search should be done through lots of ISO-8859-1 text to find out if there are any common sequences that are confused with UTF-8.
Even if this is not a perfect solution, it certainly is better than the current scheme. Most filenames will be readable. More importantly it gets rid of the idea of an "error" in a character string, significantly simplifying the interfaces.
Print a public-key encryption of the serial number as a barcode (or magnetic stripe) on the bill. This will force counterfeiters to copy the numbers off existing bills. Then do something to locate duplicates... Of course as another response her says, this probably would mean a database that would also track everybody's cash, which may be bad.
At some level it would be nice if everybody agreed that the filenames are UTF-8 strings. With some agreed-on meaning for illegal UTF-8 sequences: my recommendation is that those be treated as raw ISO-8859-1 bytes, with the characters from 0x80-0x9f treated at the Microsoft "word" characters. Other arrangements are possible, the only rule I would impose is that there are no "errors", all possible arrangements of bytes are legal and can (perhaps with difficulty) be produced by most programs.
However what is really needed at many levels is for people to stop thinking of these things as "text" and start thinking of them as arrays of bytes. The more levels that treat them as raw bytes, the better. So even in applications I would move any interpretation up as close as possible to the user.