IANAL, but although I agree that the validity of GPL was never seriously in question, the real problems lie in the details.
The GPL is actually written in mostly "plain English" instead of the legalese that lawyers are used to. It makes easier reading for us mortals, but the terms are not exactly precise. When developers try debugging a piece of code, they don't want to see pseudocode, and in the same vein, when lawyers analyze a legal issue, they don't want to see plain English. And then various assertions that the FSF make regarding the GPL (outside of the actual text) are of questionable authoritativeness -- the issue of so called "linking", to me at least, has always been muddy as hell.
In a case like distributing busybox without source, of course it is clear cut hands down violation. The problems arise when you run across issues like mysql jdbc drivers, binary blobs in Linux, compatibility of various licenses with GPL, problems with ascertaining authorship/ownership of code, etc.
Granted, they mostly involve some grey areas in the underlying copyright law, but the GPL just complicates things even further (particularly compared to more concise and open licenses such as the MIT license).
We are free to program whatever we want into the calculator, but honestly, it really doesn't help much. In fact, for most of the time the calculator is left alone when I take my exams. The "general" mathematics course is easy enough to be done with the assistance of a few very simple calculators (notably, the trigonometry functions), and the "advanced mathematics" is (to me) so hard that even if I had a full fledged computer in front of me it wouldn't help much.
This "Chinese culture" is not about the pseudo-communism crap popularized by the Western media in the 20th century. "Communism" didn't displace Chinese culture even back then when China was at least attempting to implement Communism, and these days it's nothing more than the name of the ruling party.
From my understanding, part of the "Chinese culture" is the rampant piracy and disrespect of the most basic IP rights. Release software in GPL? You'd have dozens of rip off companies taking your code and releasing their own proprietary systems. Even the state sponsored "Green Dam" filter software was allegedly pirated, so you can see how bad that is.
The other part of it is the traditional way knowledge is passed down -- secret recipes, secret formulas, secret techniques, secret processes, supposedly passed down from generation to generation within a family, or between master and students, but never to outsiders. Or at least, that's how it's said to be like.
Combine these two and you can see why open source is a "foreign" concept.
More precisely my point is that specifying the country in which proceedings must take place does not necessarily imply the laws of that country being applied.
As far as I understand, generally it is possible for a court to apply foreign laws, particular in these quasi-contractual licenses. In more technical terms, the choice of law and where jurisdiction lies are different issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_laws
I've never meet a Japanese person who has issue fitting their name in English language forms. They just write it in roman characters.
Getting a bit OT, but my original point is, if you're complaining about having to write your name in Katakana, then it wouldn't be fair to say that Japanese could work around the English site by filling in English forms using Roman characters. I know most of them are used to doing this, but still.
I find English websites are generally fairly good at handling names
I'm no Japanese, but I guess the vast majority of English websites would simply fail if you tried using a Japanese name (with Japanese characters). Worse, they might pretend to succeed and then get the encoding completely botched up.
Pinyin is taught in Chinese primary schools. Chinese people use it, except maybe not in the same way that westerners use it.
If I remember correctly, Pinyin was sort of the first phase of a proposed transition from Chinese characters to a more alphabet based language. The leaders and intellectuals during the revolution periods of China in early 1900s believed that using Latin alphabets to replace Chinese characters would boost literacy rates because Chinese characters were too hard to learn.
That proposal was obviously shelved, but Pinyin has remained, and remains useful for a number of reasons. Textbooks could be annotated in Pinyin to help students learn pronunciations of new Chinese characters, Pinyin could be used as an input method for computer systems, etc.
The fact that it would help westerners is just an added bonus.
I only speak for people in Hong Kong (where Cantonese usage is most common).
First you need to understand that there are ways to input Chinese characters that are not based on pronunciation. There are a variety of input methods that use strokes and common (visual) components of the characters. Most of them are developed in Taiwan, the most common one is "Changjie". As long as the input method doesn't rely on pronunciation, Cantonese speakers can use it.
There are a few "Cantonese" input methods, but none are standard. Quite a few are proprietary, which means it's a pain to switch computers if you get too comfortable with them. There are a few romanization systems, see eg. http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/
Just for your interest, since there are no official romanization systems for Cantonese, we have a wide range of ad hoc substitutes that vary from person to person, and sometimes even self-inconsistent.
For example, the classic Mandarin "Ni hao" (i.e. Hello) could have the following romanizations in Cantonese: - nei ho - lei ho (very common mispronunciation) - nei hoe (and maybe other creative ones I can't come up with right now)
I'm Chinese, and deal with CJK characters on a daily basis. My pet peeve is when developers make crazy assumptions about locales -- For example, I live in Hong Kong, and every so often I get a Chinese version of a website even when my preferred language is English. Sometimes getting the site to give me English becomes a huge struggle (Google, among others, did this on me).
Even so, correctly handling Unicode is such a PITA that I normally try avoiding it unless I really, really, really need to deal with it. And I often get the implementation wrong too. Of course, I blame the quirkiness of Unicode. UTF-8 has variable character size, and due to its backwards compatibility with ASCII you often mix up the two. UTF-16 uses 16 bits characters except that it doesn't. UTF-32 is a huge waste of space. And worst of all, most languages interpret Unicode differently, and make various wrong/bad assumptions.
I wonder how people who have never used anything other than Latin characters are going to get the Unicode stuff right. I was there when GNOME transitioned from 1.x to 2.x. GNOME 2.x was supposed to have "full unicode" support, but it took them literally YEARS before input and display of Chinese characters actually worked.
You're saying we shouldn't use Unicode because there are 0.01% of the population in the world who still can't type their correct name in your system, and therefore need to keep using ASCII or ISO-8859-1 that excludes like 50% of the world's population?
USA = United States of America Mexico = Latin America
So it's all "America", right!
And it doesn't even consider the eventual reunification that both sides desire! USA wants to control Mexico to stop the drug trade! Mexicans fleeing into USA illegally! They must love each other!
Seriously, get a clue before you attempt to shoot yourself in the foot.
Clause 2b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Why is it that you people always find it convenient to make snide comments that some other country on the other side of the planet have a moral imperative to shed blood (remember, revolutions are bloody) just to achieve the so called "ideal formula" of "democracy, freedom, liberty" etc?
Do you have any respect for the lives to be lost, families and homes to be destroyed, once the world's most populous nation gets into some sort of civil war?
The main problem with using PHP is that you'll need to have a server that supports it, or set up your own. And then there's the idiocy of MySQL (which usually comes with php), the lack of an interactive interpreter, and so on.
PHP is marginally useful for web development, but really, rather crap for anything else.
The problem *was* that casualties were somewhat unavoidable in the last few decades when China transformed itself from a hellhole into a semi-developed country. You're delusional if you think it's easy or that you can avoid really harsh conditions.
Now that at least parts of China is growing in prosperity, people are demanding better living standards and "dignity". 40 years ago when everyone in China was basically living in poverty, nobody complaints were heard because there's nothing you can do about it. Now, you have these billionaires running around in town, some of which got to where they are through sheer luck, and there's much more pressure on the government and society to deal with the dissent.
If you bother to disagree with me, let me tell you: China is changing rather rapidly these days. If the information you have is like 5 years ago, it's probably out of date, and it's not the China you're talking about today.
One of the reasons why Ubuntu had this 6 month release is because Debian had this habit of making releases once every 3 years, and by the time it was released, many of the packages became out of date.
It was definitely a problem back then since many features on the Linux desktop were still in active development around 5-6 years ago (and back then a difference between 6 months is quite significant), but most of the features have matured now and personally I haven't felt the need to run on the bleeding edge as much today. Today I run aptitude upgrade (on my debian system) once in a blue moon, and honestly I rather not bother, because usually something breaks or changes behavior and I would have to find out how to workaround the problem instead of getting work done.
"All physical goods have a first sale-like doctrine"
"like"? Yeah, just like how all people have human-*like*-rights. But seriously, if you've read the other posts, it's obvious that in many jurisdictions there simply isn't such a thing for physical goods. Retailers can be limited by their suppliers in various ways.
More specifically, the first sale doctrine is an exception to copyrights, or at least a defense against copyright infringement lawsuits. Like you said, it allows the use copyright protected material to pass on to the buyer just like normal property. But this does not necessarily mean that normal property can be freely retailed.
There is this thing called contracts. Suppliers make retailers sign contracts restricting how they can deal with the products. How else do you think the publishers for Harry Potter make book stores behave and not leak out the books before the official release date?
Honestly, don't think that because you know a few legal terms you're somehow a legal expert -- too many people think that they can "twist" the law to their favor by putting up some half-assed arguments.
(This is also a single post on a forum from one user...;-p)
I'm in Hong Kong and I use that ISP mentioned in the article at home.
Never noticed the change because I've set my DNS servers to google's, but now that I test it out, my ISP's servers do seem to be returning 203.198.80.* in place of NXDOMAIN.
The First Sale doctrine only applies to Copyrights. It has nothing to do with the issue here, which basically is Apple trying to muscle retailers into selling their products in a certain way.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but although I agree that the validity of GPL was never seriously in question, the real problems lie in the details.
The GPL is actually written in mostly "plain English" instead of the legalese that lawyers are used to. It makes easier reading for us mortals, but the terms are not exactly precise. When developers try debugging a piece of code, they don't want to see pseudocode, and in the same vein, when lawyers analyze a legal issue, they don't want to see plain English. And then various assertions that the FSF make regarding the GPL (outside of the actual text) are of questionable authoritativeness -- the issue of so called "linking", to me at least, has always been muddy as hell.
In a case like distributing busybox without source, of course it is clear cut hands down violation. The problems arise when you run across issues like mysql jdbc drivers, binary blobs in Linux, compatibility of various licenses with GPL, problems with ascertaining authorship/ownership of code, etc.
Granted, they mostly involve some grey areas in the underlying copyright law, but the GPL just complicates things even further (particularly compared to more concise and open licenses such as the MIT license).
Here in Hong Kong we don't allow graphing calculators. We have things like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_fx-3650P
We are free to program whatever we want into the calculator, but honestly, it really doesn't help much. In fact, for most of the time the calculator is left alone when I take my exams. The "general" mathematics course is easy enough to be done with the assistance of a few very simple calculators (notably, the trigonometry functions), and the "advanced mathematics" is (to me) so hard that even if I had a full fledged computer in front of me it wouldn't help much.
Our curriculum is rather algebra heavy though.
This "Chinese culture" is not about the pseudo-communism crap popularized by the Western media in the 20th century. "Communism" didn't displace Chinese culture even back then when China was at least attempting to implement Communism, and these days it's nothing more than the name of the ruling party.
From my understanding, part of the "Chinese culture" is the rampant piracy and disrespect of the most basic IP rights. Release software in GPL? You'd have dozens of rip off companies taking your code and releasing their own proprietary systems. Even the state sponsored "Green Dam" filter software was allegedly pirated, so you can see how bad that is.
The other part of it is the traditional way knowledge is passed down -- secret recipes, secret formulas, secret techniques, secret processes, supposedly passed down from generation to generation within a family, or between master and students, but never to outsiders. Or at least, that's how it's said to be like.
Combine these two and you can see why open source is a "foreign" concept.
You may say so.
More precisely my point is that specifying the country in which proceedings must take place does not necessarily imply the laws of that country being applied.
As far as I understand, generally it is possible for a court to apply foreign laws, particular in these quasi-contractual licenses. In more technical terms, the choice of law and where jurisdiction lies are different issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_laws
IANAL.
Thanks AC for the corroboration. :)
Took me a while to decode. Looks like I'm barely primary school level. :) My first language is Cantonese so my Putonghua isn't quite there...
For those who are interested, this is the real translation:
Slash-Dot is Otaku's news. But the website's technological aspect stinks and the content is dog fart. I fucked Commander Mexico-Roll's mother's pussy.
Nice one.
I've never meet a Japanese person who has issue fitting their name in English language forms. They just write it in roman characters.
Getting a bit OT, but my original point is, if you're complaining about having to write your name in Katakana, then it wouldn't be fair to say that Japanese could work around the English site by filling in English forms using Roman characters. I know most of them are used to doing this, but still.
I find English websites are generally fairly good at handling names
I'm no Japanese, but I guess the vast majority of English websites would simply fail if you tried using a Japanese name (with Japanese characters). Worse, they might pretend to succeed and then get the encoding completely botched up.
Pinyin is taught in Chinese primary schools. Chinese people use it, except maybe not in the same way that westerners use it.
If I remember correctly, Pinyin was sort of the first phase of a proposed transition from Chinese characters to a more alphabet based language. The leaders and intellectuals during the revolution periods of China in early 1900s believed that using Latin alphabets to replace Chinese characters would boost literacy rates because Chinese characters were too hard to learn.
That proposal was obviously shelved, but Pinyin has remained, and remains useful for a number of reasons. Textbooks could be annotated in Pinyin to help students learn pronunciations of new Chinese characters, Pinyin could be used as an input method for computer systems, etc.
The fact that it would help westerners is just an added bonus.
I only speak for people in Hong Kong (where Cantonese usage is most common).
First you need to understand that there are ways to input Chinese characters that are not based on pronunciation. There are a variety of input methods that use strokes and common (visual) components of the characters. Most of them are developed in Taiwan, the most common one is "Changjie". As long as the input method doesn't rely on pronunciation, Cantonese speakers can use it.
There are a few "Cantonese" input methods, but none are standard. Quite a few are proprietary, which means it's a pain to switch computers if you get too comfortable with them. There are a few romanization systems, see eg. http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/
Just for your interest, since there are no official romanization systems for Cantonese, we have a wide range of ad hoc substitutes that vary from person to person, and sometimes even self-inconsistent.
For example, the classic Mandarin "Ni hao" (i.e. Hello) could have the following romanizations in Cantonese:
- nei ho
- lei ho (very common mispronunciation)
- nei hoe
(and maybe other creative ones I can't come up with right now)
The message usually gets across though ;-p
I'm Chinese, and deal with CJK characters on a daily basis. My pet peeve is when developers make crazy assumptions about locales -- For example, I live in Hong Kong, and every so often I get a Chinese version of a website even when my preferred language is English. Sometimes getting the site to give me English becomes a huge struggle (Google, among others, did this on me).
Even so, correctly handling Unicode is such a PITA that I normally try avoiding it unless I really, really, really need to deal with it. And I often get the implementation wrong too. Of course, I blame the quirkiness of Unicode. UTF-8 has variable character size, and due to its backwards compatibility with ASCII you often mix up the two. UTF-16 uses 16 bits characters except that it doesn't. UTF-32 is a huge waste of space. And worst of all, most languages interpret Unicode differently, and make various wrong/bad assumptions.
I wonder how people who have never used anything other than Latin characters are going to get the Unicode stuff right. I was there when GNOME transitioned from 1.x to 2.x. GNOME 2.x was supposed to have "full unicode" support, but it took them literally YEARS before input and display of Chinese characters actually worked.
!@#%@%
</rant>
You still need limits. Otherwise good luck when you get that hacker who has a 10-Gigabyte last name.
That is no excuse. Who the fuck modded you up?
You're saying we shouldn't use Unicode because there are 0.01% of the population in the world who still can't type their correct name in your system, and therefore need to keep using ASCII or ISO-8859-1 that excludes like 50% of the world's population?
Ridiculous.
I was going for this snide comment myself, but you got there first :) Hey btw, regarding the GP's question, 2.5 works too.
But in all seriousness, the question of whether every EVEN number can be expressed as the sum of two primes, is still an open problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach's_conjecture
Duh. That's like saying:
USA = United States of America
Mexico = Latin America
So it's all "America", right!
And it doesn't even consider the eventual reunification that both sides desire! USA wants to control Mexico to stop the drug trade! Mexicans fleeing into USA illegally! They must love each other!
Seriously, get a clue before you attempt to shoot yourself in the foot.
Actually, no, at least not for GPL v2
Clause 2b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Emphasis mine.
I haven't read GPLv3 in detail though.
Why is it that you people always find it convenient to make snide comments that some other country on the other side of the planet have a moral imperative to shed blood (remember, revolutions are bloody) just to achieve the so called "ideal formula" of "democracy, freedom, liberty" etc?
Do you have any respect for the lives to be lost, families and homes to be destroyed, once the world's most populous nation gets into some sort of civil war?
Python and Sqlite work pretty well.
The main problem with using PHP is that you'll need to have a server that supports it, or set up your own. And then there's the idiocy of MySQL (which usually comes with php), the lack of an interactive interpreter, and so on.
PHP is marginally useful for web development, but really, rather crap for anything else.
Duh. This thing is happening in mainland China, PRC.
Shenzhen is here
Taiwan is here
The problem *was* that casualties were somewhat unavoidable in the last few decades when China transformed itself from a hellhole into a semi-developed country. You're delusional if you think it's easy or that you can avoid really harsh conditions.
Now that at least parts of China is growing in prosperity, people are demanding better living standards and "dignity". 40 years ago when everyone in China was basically living in poverty, nobody complaints were heard because there's nothing you can do about it. Now, you have these billionaires running around in town, some of which got to where they are through sheer luck, and there's much more pressure on the government and society to deal with the dissent.
If you bother to disagree with me, let me tell you: China is changing rather rapidly these days. If the information you have is like 5 years ago, it's probably out of date, and it's not the China you're talking about today.
One of the reasons why Ubuntu had this 6 month release is because Debian had this habit of making releases once every 3 years, and by the time it was released, many of the packages became out of date.
It was definitely a problem back then since many features on the Linux desktop were still in active development around 5-6 years ago (and back then a difference between 6 months is quite significant), but most of the features have matured now and personally I haven't felt the need to run on the bleeding edge as much today. Today I run aptitude upgrade (on my debian system) once in a blue moon, and honestly I rather not bother, because usually something breaks or changes behavior and I would have to find out how to workaround the problem instead of getting work done.
"All physical goods have a first sale-like doctrine"
"like"? Yeah, just like how all people have human-*like*-rights. But seriously, if you've read the other posts, it's obvious that in many jurisdictions there simply isn't such a thing for physical goods. Retailers can be limited by their suppliers in various ways.
More specifically, the first sale doctrine is an exception to copyrights, or at least a defense against copyright infringement lawsuits. Like you said, it allows the use copyright protected material to pass on to the buyer just like normal property. But this does not necessarily mean that normal property can be freely retailed.
There is this thing called contracts. Suppliers make retailers sign contracts restricting how they can deal with the products. How else do you think the publishers for Harry Potter make book stores behave and not leak out the books before the official release date?
Honestly, don't think that because you know a few legal terms you're somehow a legal expert -- too many people think that they can "twist" the law to their favor by putting up some half-assed arguments.
(This is also a single post on a forum from one user... ;-p)
I'm in Hong Kong and I use that ISP mentioned in the article at home.
Never noticed the change because I've set my DNS servers to google's, but now that I test it out, my ISP's servers do seem to be returning 203.198.80.* in place of NXDOMAIN.
Fuck.
The First Sale doctrine only applies to Copyrights. It has nothing to do with the issue here, which basically is Apple trying to muscle retailers into selling their products in a certain way.