Except that what Turbo Hercules were selling was Hercules, plus support and hardware to run it on - i.e. the normal Open Source business model.
No - what Turbo Hercules wants is for IBM to change their license of z/OS. Without that, Turbo Hercules has no product. Turbo Hercules wants to sell support for z/OS running atop the Hercules emulator. Without that change in licensing, they have no product, since they're not selling support "just" for Hercules. They want IBM to give permission to IBM customers to violate the terms of their z/OS license, and they're offering nothing to IBM in return. That's not the "open source business model" - that's a leech.
Second and subsequent offenses? 10 years jail.
Maynard screwed up, just as Bowler and Muller did, in trying to cast this as something other than what it is.
He made the obvious point that threatening companies offering commercial support for an open source project by claiming said project is illegal is effectively an attack on that project. Does that count as "making an ass of yourself" now? Or maybe it's the fact he dared to contradict PJ by doing so that makes him an ass?
It's the same thing as if some open-source project needs Windows DLLs - there's NOTHING requiring Microsoft to license them, and saying no is not an attack on open source.
Open-source projects that need to violate proprietary licenses don't deserve support - they're not truly open source to begin with.
z/OS is proprietary. Turbo Hercules wants to support z/OS in scenarios that violate IBMs license. Not going to happen, and it has nothing to do with patents or "selling commercial support."
I don't know why anyone would remove the letters - the second on http://www.turbohercules.com/uploads/files/AnzaniLetterTurboHercules-2009-11-04.pdf (the original reply from IBM) lays out the case quite clearly - that IBM doesn't want to change the licensing of z/OS to accommodate the business plans of Turbo Hercules - and that is their right.
Forget the patents, forget the fud - that alone is enough to kill Turbo Hercules as a business, without ANY sort of attack on F/LOSS, including Hercules.
Are you saying that we'll be using current schemes when the patents expire and better hardware, or new schemes (which they'll patent if they can)?
There's no need for compression at high enough data rates, and we'll be there within the decade. The local cable co has spent the last decade running fibre everywhere.
This is why I'm against "fair compulsory licensing" - by removing the pain, it takes away the incentive to develop alternatives, it takes away the incentive to adopt alternatives, and it encourages monopolies.
That's a fair point, yes, but I hate to ask everyone to bear that pain.
No pain, no gain. It's not only fair - it's the right thing to do. People have to realize that if they're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem.
Besides, there's LESS pain using, for example, linux or bsd, than there is using Windows or OSX, but people need a bit of a prod sometimes to act, even when the action is in their own self-interest. It's the way people are.
The copyright violation I'm talking about isn't Hercules - it's the running of 2 copies of z/OS during recovery - one on the mainframe, one on the emulator.
This alone is fatal to the Turbo Hercules program. That's why I said that patents aren't the real issue.
my beef is that they're more than willing to attack people for using open source software
What if you're using open source to pirate books, or movies, or music, or to scam people through spam? As I pointed out above, the real problem for the Turbo Hercules business model is the 2nd copy that needs to be run simultaneously during recover scenarios. That's plain old copyright violation, has nothing to do with open source or patents whatsoever.
As for the DPL, it's not a case of making lemonade, it's a case of, by adopting it, validating the whole patent troll methodology. It's akin to saying "stealing is wrong, but instead of preventing crime, we'll reduce the amount they can steal by stealing some first."
people like Microsoft who hate Linux or other free software for encroaching on their profits won't hesitate to sue
They're VERY hesitant to sue. Why do you think they have people going around claiming patent violations but never suing? They know they have nothing. Nobody believes them any more.
so how is a FOSS programmer supposed to get a job if no business can use free software to make money?
Plenty of businesses use free software to make money. The problem is Turbo Hercules wants to use NON-FREE software - z/OS - to make money, contrary to the z/OS license. Again, this has nothing to do with patents or open source. It's a quick-and-dirty copyright violation.
IBM is under no obligation to give Turbo Hercules the right to use z/OS for purposes other than what it is licensed for, same as GPL software is under no obligation to give a proprietary/closed license to anyone.
BTW - the quantum computing I'm talking about has nothing to do with qbits - they don't have nearly enough possible states. Anything running on a fixed substrate (etched silicon, for example), is "weak" quantum computing, and will never be capable of, for example, consciousness - not enough possible states. To give you an idea, if we were to convert all the sand in the world to computer chips, we'd probably still not be anywhere near the possible number of states of the human brain (because the states aren't just "encoded" in the number of neurons or connections, but the actual physical distances, masses, and atoms as well - so the "real" state includes the location of every atom in the brain, not just every neuron and dendrite. And we'll never be able to give an adequate description of that unless we can get below the fundamental graininess of the universe.
This doesn't mean we won't figure out how to do it - just that the result won't be patentable, any more than you can patent your consciousness.
Business method patents and software patents are on the way out. It took more than a decade to get to the mess we're in - it won't be cleaned up in one judgment. The court has screwed over the patent trolls royally - how are they going to get financing for more trolls when there's so much uncertainty now about how to even decide if something is patentable? This is the worst possible outcome for them - they would have liked a judgment that drew bright lines, so they could tell investors "we have an 80% chance of winning." Now it's "we don't even know the rules of the game any more."
Check the consumer protection legislation in your area. It probably has something along the lines of products needing to be fit for the purpose for which they were purchased for a reasonable length of time, taking into account the price paid.
There are two types of warranties: Legal and Conventional.
Conventional Warranty (limit your rights): We warrant foo for 1 year (no warranty on batteries, screens, keyboards, accessories, etc).
Legal Warranty: Fitness for purpose for which it was purchased, taking into account price paid, etc. In other words, you paid $3k for that big-screen tv and it croaked 1 day after your conventional 1-year warranty expired? You can still use the legal warranty via small claims court. They can't hide behind the limitations of the conventional warranty - the conventional warranty is in addition to the legal warranty (which makes extended warranties stupid purchases).
I would have told him as much - that it was directed solely at Turbo Hercules and their attempt to get IBMs customers to violate their license with IBM, so relax, don't worry about it, it has nothing to do with Jay Maynard whatsoever.
The only way they could go after TH would be to attack Hercules. Maybe you can blame them for putting him in the crossfire, but that doesn't mean that IBM wouldn't be willing to crush him to crush TH. And I think that's what Florian is trying to point out. He's not out to get IBM. He's out to trumpet the fact that software patents are Bad News. And they are. The damned things are poison. We can't pretend that we're immune, because we're not.
Just a few points.
1. Again, IBM did not attach the open source project - and the REAL issue is copyright violation, not patents. Turbo Hercules can FUD it all they want, but basically, they need to get IBM to agree to allow IBM clients to violate the terms of their z/OS license by:
running the licensed copy of z/OS on unlicensed hardware
once the failed hardware is working again, running two copies (one of which obviously is uniicensed) during the restore phase to transfer data back to the main machine
Turbo Hercules can't get around the fact that any restore operation would require z/OS to be running on both the mainframe and the emulator/hardware combo. That's 2 separate machines, with only one licensed copy of z/OS. Even in the consumer OS world, this is a copyright violation.
2. You don't "trumpet the fact that software patents are bad news" by pushing the "Defensive Patent License" - that just creates a second set of patent trolls.
3.
To a certain extent we ARE immune - or at least, we have antibodies. Patents that don't generate enough money to cover their enforcement costs and still make a profit are a financial drain. Every time someone patents something, if they raise the cost too high, someone else will find a way around it, and that "lucrative patent" is suddenly worth a lot less. When that happens too often, investing in patents for trolling becomes a losing proposition. This is what will happen over the next 20 years.
Here's something to think about: How are you going to obtain a patent on the algorithms running on a quantum computer when even observing them, never mind describing them, will cause them to change? And it wont be copyrightable either because you won't be able to produce a source code listing... like the two-slit experiment, observation changes the output, so you're no longer describing the program that was working when it was not observed. I give it 2 decades.
The software patent issue is a temporary problem. As the nature of software changes, the most advanced software will eventually become unpatentable for reasons that have nothing to do with laws - but that's 20 years down the road.
Lets look at a more immediate case -.h264 codec patents. They might have a "patent pool life" of 20 years, but they only have a "shelf life" of 10 - because 10 years from now, we'll be able to stream uncompressed 1920x1080x32bitx120hz streams in real time, using only non-lossy, non-patented compression schemes.
At that point who is going to want a codec that has artifacts and is encumbered, unless it's dirt cheap? And if it's dirt cheap, then the cost of administering it becomes greater than the revenue gained, so... (because your patent is only as good as the profit - not gross revenue - you can extract with it).
It's a repetition of what happened with Stacker. On-the-fly disk compression was obvious, somebody did it, and it looked like the world was their oyster.
Then came the first problem - increased cpu speads obsoleted their hardware-based solution less than a year after it went on the market - the software-only version worked quicker because their controller card was now a bottleneck.
Then Microsoft "borrowed" it for DoubleSpace and DriveSpace.
But a funny thing happened - disk drives got bigger and bigger and bigger - and suddenly, the technology's worth became negative. The increase in disk space became less valuable than the increase in hassles with respect to such things as drive fragmentation, backing up, etc. It was worth it when 40 meg was $500. When you can buy 8 terabytes for the same price, who needs it? Nobody. It's literally more hassle than it's worth, even if it's free.
Same thing happened to many raid controllers. They became a performance bottleneck, so it became better to just use software raid. It was also a bonus that you didn't have to keep extra cards in stock just in case the manufacturer went belly up.
Remember math co-processors? They had what, a 15-year run?
As more and more people switch to laptops and other portable computing devices, the home UPS market will just disappear - another victim of changes in tech. For those desktops still around in 10 years, most will probably be running a journaling file system, and software will mostly auto-save not just changes in files, but such things as what apps are open, screen layout, etc (KDE already does a great job of this if you yank the plug, and I expect it to only improve)...
That's one good thing about software patents - we can guarantee that when the burden of any one particular patent gets too onerous, someone will figure a way to code around it. So patents encourage software diversity. This is why I'm against "fair compulsory licensing" - by removing the pain, it takes away the incentive to develop alternatives, it takes away the incentive to adopt alternatives, and it encourages monopolies.
Think of where we'd be today if Microsoft could prevent all pirating of Windows, and jacked the licensing for home use to $1k a copy a year. How many people would say "screw this - I'll try something different"?
A lot of motorcycle drivers will never "get" counter-steering - to them it's counter-intuitive. That it's actually safer in a curve (because you can lay the bike down really low, and if it slips, you can recover better because it straightens out the line between your center of gravity and where the rubber meets the road - I know, not a great explanation - just do it!) than the conventional method is lost on them.
You raise some valid points. I think part of the problem is that people think that, because groklaw has comments enabled, that "building a community" should be the focus. So I went and walked my dogs again, and here's what I think... not saying it's 100% right, but...
Groklaw is not about building an online community, not in the conventional sense that we think of online communities. It's about collecting legal info and putting it out there, and c'est tout! It would probably have been better to conduct discussions via email, and a private message board, and not have public comments. That would have been truer to the actual mission statement, and would have avoided a lot of problems, but it's too late to change that now.
Now for the changing users to "anonymous" - that's what several content management systems do when a user is removed from the system. It's SOP. You even get a warning that all their comments will be assigned to the anonymous account.
Deleting comments is also not that hard - you just browse the comments, and if you have the right privileges, you'll see the "delete" link. Comments underneath no longer have a parent, so they become top-level, which makes them look silly, so you usually delete "from the bottom up".
Of course, the better way is simply not to delete comments; for a site like slashdot, that's ok - slashdot doesn't make any claim to fame except as a "news for nerds" site. Groklaw is more like a private project with a public interface. This is a case where the feature set of the software was a bad fit with the temperament and goals of the project. It happens.
But I *have* heard people say that they're afraid to disagree with her. Afraid!
I see two problems with that - like you, I obviously think that people shouldn't be afraid; I hope people never get afraid of disagreeing with me (except when they're wrong, of course - then "fear the curse":-). The second is that both sides are taking this way too seriously. It's just a web site. There are plenty of others out there, if you can't get along with the people running it.
Really, people do tend to take it too seriously. Case in point - pudge and I go at it once in a while. And yet, we don't take it personally - to the contrary, if he's ever in town, he's more than welcome to stop by, because I think what he's done here is pretty neat. Same thing with most of my hundred-plus freaks (I'm trying to collect the whole set).
There's at least one user who everyone is sure hates my guts (and vice versa) because over the years we've had lots of very public disagreements - in private, it's the exact opposite. Why? Because we both understand that the other person is sincere in their beliefs and isn't trying to milk it for some personal advantage - unlike lobbyists, who will milk it for all it's worth.
they wanted to scare them off without having to do anything legally. I know, that's how lawyers operate. I don't have to like it, though.
.. and it was directed at Turbo Hercules, not Hercules. IBM was saying "look, you don't have a right to commercialize this in the way you're trying, and if you try, here are some of the other issues you're going to face." So who went to Maynard and said "They're threatening your software?" Not IBM. IBM never threatened it, and if Maynard had asked for my opinion, I would have told him as much - that it was directed solely at Turbo Hercules and their attempt to get IBMs customers to violate their license with IBM, so relax, don't worry about it, it has nothing to do with Jay Maynard whatsoever.
So who gave Maynard and the rest of the world the obviously bogus interpretation that this was an attack on Hercules? The answer is obvious - look at whose agendas benefit from such confusion. Turbo Hercules, Roger Bowler, and Florian Mueller.
It's this sort of abuse of other people and open source projects that should be denounced.
Personal attacks based on who he talks to on Twitter or Linked-In?
I've never done it, despite what Mueller may claim.
The court said that, at the very least, most "business methods" shouldn't be patentable. That's a big win.
So we'll make a narrow ruling
That's what courts do. They don't have a mandate to rule beyond the scope of the case before them. The people arguing their case (for either side) don't have the obligation of addressing anything outside the scope of their case either - that would be an unconstitutional burden. So it is what it is, and we got what we needed.
In short, nobody got what they wanted,
How so? Until the judgment came down, everyone was whining that the Supremes were going to say that business patents were ok. Now, because we didn't get 100% at the first kick at the can, this is a loss? That's just revisionist history.
When you get 80% of what you want, plus a wedge to get the other 20% at the next case - and you also get the chilling effect on software patents as a side effect - that's a big win.
Also, Muller's not against software patents. All the DPL does is create even more problems. It's stupid. Let me rephrase that - the Defensive Patent License is REALLY stupid. It's like trying to fix a site with too much flash by adding even more flash, or trying to clean up spaghetti code by adding even more spaghetti code.
It's the sort of "solution" that people who want to insert themselves into the process (read: lobbyists) love, but that doesn't solve the problem - it just perpetuates the patents race.
Why would you compare a Kin phone's hardware software to an Android phone? The least expensive Android phone still costs 3 times more than the Kin phone.
You kin always go to their 'kin web site - kin.com. If you follow the links to Verizon, you can still buy one. There's an Early Termination Fee of $350. I'm wondering if Verizon customers couldn't go back to Verizon and say "I want my $350 Early Termination Fee".
At the very least, anyone who bought one in the last 6 weeks is going to be royally p*ssed.
Maybe you shouldn't trust PJ so much. She censors Groklaw so that people can't hold an honest debate there. How, you ask? By vanishing and silently editing people's posts.
By "vanishing" I mean that your post will *appear* to exist when you visit Groklaw. But nobody else will see it. I have verified this via proxies. Oh, and you might say "she only does that to trolls!" Not true. She does it to people she disagrees with. Marbux, AllParadox and one former Groklaw moderator have all parted ways due to this issue. Incidentally, I have logs and screenshots documenting this. I sent them to Florian, incidentally, because I find PJ's actions dishonest.
If she's only had a falling out with 3 people in 7 years, that's not that bad.
The "I've verified this via proxies" is really a non-issue - other people have since pointed out that other content management systems have similar capabilities. I'll be writing a HOW-TO so that anyone can implement it, because it's a good "circuit breaker" or "fire break" for some use cases. Let everyone take a breather and reflect a bit...
That being said, I'm willing to look at the evidence - but it has to be in context.
Silently editing posts should be more obvious, but it's still quite insidious. One of her supporters wrote something potentially libelous. She deleted the libelous part and *vanished* the reply pointing that out... Quite a bit of whitewash for a supposedly open site, no? Oh, and if your account is deleted, your name is stripped from all your comments. So you don't get attribution any more (ever wonder why some people sign their posts? yeah...)
You said it yourself - "potentially libelous". It's the same here on slashdot - for example: if you make a death threat to the president, it WILL be removed (it's been done in the past) and any post pointing that out will also be removed. slashdot has no choice - there's a specific law just for dealing with death threats to the president.
Normal practice on any of the many forums I have administered (as well as many others I have used), is for the mods to write [EDITED] or [SCRUBBED] or something of the sort to indicate the removal of such things. Not to whitewash the lot of it.
Maybe you should get better forum software:-) Okay, that was a bit of a joke... but seriously, sometimes it's better for EVERYONE if the post is totally removed. For example, what do you think would happen if, instead of removing 10 of your posts, someone were to write "This post has been deleted because it conflicts with the site's policies"? People seeing that would think "troll" or "spammer". At that point, you'd probably wish they had just silently deleted them.
All I'm saying is that there's no ideal solution.
True, it's her site and her rules. She even reserves the right to do that (even while claiming that posters own their own posts). And claims to have found a lawyer telling her it's legally okay. I can accept all of that as true. But it's pretty damned insidious.
No need for a lawyer to tell her it's okay - it is. You might own your post, but you don't have a contractual or other right to require that someone else provide a platform for you to disseminate it. To the contrary. the only right you have is to use your own resources to get your message out.
Now, if you had signed a contract that said "posts written by $X will be hosted on site $Y for a period of $Z time in return for the following consid
It was a total of over 9,000 jobs. Only 3,000 were attributed to the delay - and in the final analysis, the EU agreed, the claims by Mueller etc., were bullshit.
Why are you citing a site (techrights) whose material largely consists of cites to their own prior articles, and when there is actually an external reference, the majority of times it does not back up what techrights is claiming?
Another voice uneasy about the Oracle-Sun venture is Florian Mueller, an EU policy expert who is a former MySQL shareholder and adviser. Mueller had helped Widenius' new company, Monty Program, urge the EU to investigate the anticompetitive effects of a MySQL owned by Oracle.
That delay cost 3,000 people their jobs.
Major database players, including HP and IBM, have already reportedly taken advantage of the delay to win over customers from Sun.
In the meantime, Sun continues its downward spiral. Late Tuesday, the company confirmed that it would lay off another 3,000 employees, about 10 percent of its total workforce, over the next year. This latest round is in addition to 6,000 jobs cuts announced almost a year ago as part of the company's restructuring plan.
Muller/Mueller is another Darl McBride.
Also, Muller/Mueller continually cites his blog as "evidence". And remember - he IS a lobbyist.
Speaking of trolls 4 hire, why won't techrights disclose who is providing financial backing for the site? Yes, they claim there is no backing and its all done as a hobby. But they also claim to spend over an hour on average researching and writing each post. That works out to nearly 60 hours a week on average over the last 3 years. (That's average, The volume of posting there has gone up over the last few months, indicating its more like 80 hours a week now. Unpaid hobby my ass).
Don't underestimate what a group of volunteers can do. Next you'll be claiming that Pamela Jones is really a bunch of IBM lawyers.
We're talking about a Groklaw crowd that uses its moderator rights etc. here on slashdot to suppress the truth that Groklaw claims to be digging for. Groklaw sent its crowd over by way of a link in its news pick column. And some of the postings look a lot like written by people who if they're not IBM employees are at least very close to IBM and very much informed.
Shades of Darl McBride - blame it on groklaw and IBM.
What did he expect? People on slashdot are going to be "very much informed" - we're not politicians who can be bought with some bafflegab and a few drinks over dinner.
And his "solution" is brain-dead. I'll be dealing with that in a future story.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the time, filing in small claims is sufficient.
If not, you include your day's wages as part of the damages - and since it's damages, it's tax-free, so stop yer complainin' :-)
Or you could be a two-time loser and buy a Kin ... it's been almost a week they've been cancelled, and Verizon is still selling them.
No - what Turbo Hercules wants is for IBM to change their license of z/OS. Without that, Turbo Hercules has no product. Turbo Hercules wants to sell support for z/OS running atop the Hercules emulator. Without that change in licensing, they have no product, since they're not selling support "just" for Hercules. They want IBM to give permission to IBM customers to violate the terms of their z/OS license, and they're offering nothing to IBM in return. That's not the "open source business model" - that's a leech. Second and subsequent offenses? 10 years jail.
Maynard screwed up, just as Bowler and Muller did, in trying to cast this as something other than what it is.
Except that if you read IBM's original letter http://www.turbohercules.com/uploads/files/AnzaniLetterTurboHercules-2009-11-04.pdf it makes it clear that the beef IBM has isn't with Turbo Hercules supporting any open source project, but with changing the licensing of z/OS.
It's the same thing as if some open-source project needs Windows DLLs - there's NOTHING requiring Microsoft to license them, and saying no is not an attack on open source.
Open-source projects that need to violate proprietary licenses don't deserve support - they're not truly open source to begin with.
z/OS is proprietary. Turbo Hercules wants to support z/OS in scenarios that violate IBMs license. Not going to happen, and it has nothing to do with patents or "selling commercial support."
I don't know why anyone would remove the letters - the second on http://www.turbohercules.com/uploads/files/AnzaniLetterTurboHercules-2009-11-04.pdf (the original reply from IBM) lays out the case quite clearly - that IBM doesn't want to change the licensing of z/OS to accommodate the business plans of Turbo Hercules - and that is their right.
Forget the patents, forget the fud - that alone is enough to kill Turbo Hercules as a business, without ANY sort of attack on F/LOSS, including Hercules.
It's Psystar all over again.
There's no need for compression at high enough data rates, and we'll be there within the decade. The local cable co has spent the last decade running fibre everywhere.
No pain, no gain. It's not only fair - it's the right thing to do. People have to realize that if they're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem.
Besides, there's LESS pain using, for example, linux or bsd, than there is using Windows or OSX, but people need a bit of a prod sometimes to act, even when the action is in their own self-interest. It's the way people are.
This alone is fatal to the Turbo Hercules program. That's why I said that patents aren't the real issue.
What if you're using open source to pirate books, or movies, or music, or to scam people through spam? As I pointed out above, the real problem for the Turbo Hercules business model is the 2nd copy that needs to be run simultaneously during recover scenarios. That's plain old copyright violation, has nothing to do with open source or patents whatsoever.
As for the DPL, it's not a case of making lemonade, it's a case of, by adopting it, validating the whole patent troll methodology. It's akin to saying "stealing is wrong, but instead of preventing crime, we'll reduce the amount they can steal by stealing some first."
They're VERY hesitant to sue. Why do you think they have people going around claiming patent violations but never suing? They know they have nothing. Nobody believes them any more.
Plenty of businesses use free software to make money. The problem is Turbo Hercules wants to use NON-FREE software - z/OS - to make money, contrary to the z/OS license. Again, this has nothing to do with patents or open source. It's a quick-and-dirty copyright violation.
IBM is under no obligation to give Turbo Hercules the right to use z/OS for purposes other than what it is licensed for, same as GPL software is under no obligation to give a proprietary/closed license to anyone.
BTW - the quantum computing I'm talking about has nothing to do with qbits - they don't have nearly enough possible states. Anything running on a fixed substrate (etched silicon, for example), is "weak" quantum computing, and will never be capable of, for example, consciousness - not enough possible states. To give you an idea, if we were to convert all the sand in the world to computer chips, we'd probably still not be anywhere near the possible number of states of the human brain (because the states aren't just "encoded" in the number of neurons or connections, but the actual physical distances, masses, and atoms as well - so the "real" state includes the location of every atom in the brain, not just every neuron and dendrite. And we'll never be able to give an adequate description of that unless we can get below the fundamental graininess of the universe.
This doesn't mean we won't figure out how to do it - just that the result won't be patentable, any more than you can patent your consciousness.
Business method patents and software patents are on the way out. It took more than a decade to get to the mess we're in - it won't be cleaned up in one judgment. The court has screwed over the patent trolls royally - how are they going to get financing for more trolls when there's so much uncertainty now about how to even decide if something is patentable? This is the worst possible outcome for them - they would have liked a judgment that drew bright lines, so they could tell investors "we have an 80% chance of winning." Now it's "we don't even know the rules of the game any more."
It's Defective by Design (TM)
For once, Apple copied Microsoft.
Check the consumer protection legislation in your area. It probably has something along the lines of products needing to be fit for the purpose for which they were purchased for a reasonable length of time, taking into account the price paid.
There are two types of warranties: Legal and Conventional.
Conventional Warranty (limit your rights): We warrant foo for 1 year (no warranty on batteries, screens, keyboards, accessories, etc).
Legal Warranty: Fitness for purpose for which it was purchased, taking into account price paid, etc. In other words, you paid $3k for that big-screen tv and it croaked 1 day after your conventional 1-year warranty expired? You can still use the legal warranty via small claims court. They can't hide behind the limitations of the conventional warranty - the conventional warranty is in addition to the legal warranty (which makes extended warranties stupid purchases).
Just a few points.
1. Again, IBM did not attach the open source project - and the REAL issue is copyright violation, not patents. Turbo Hercules can FUD it all they want, but basically, they need to get IBM to agree to allow IBM clients to violate the terms of their z/OS license by:
Turbo Hercules can't get around the fact that any restore operation would require z/OS to be running on both the mainframe and the emulator/hardware combo. That's 2 separate machines, with only one licensed copy of z/OS. Even in the consumer OS world, this is a copyright violation.
2. You don't "trumpet the fact that software patents are bad news" by pushing the "Defensive Patent License" - that just creates a second set of patent trolls.
3. To a certain extent we ARE immune - or at least, we have antibodies. Patents that don't generate enough money to cover their enforcement costs and still make a profit are a financial drain. Every time someone patents something, if they raise the cost too high, someone else will find a way around it, and that "lucrative patent" is suddenly worth a lot less. When that happens too often, investing in patents for trolling becomes a losing proposition. This is what will happen over the next 20 years.
Here's something to think about: How are you going to obtain a patent on the algorithms running on a quantum computer when even observing them, never mind describing them, will cause them to change? And it wont be copyrightable either because you won't be able to produce a source code listing ... like the two-slit experiment, observation changes the output, so you're no longer describing the program that was working when it was not observed. I give it 2 decades.
The software patent issue is a temporary problem. As the nature of software changes, the most advanced software will eventually become unpatentable for reasons that have nothing to do with laws - but that's 20 years down the road.
Lets look at a more immediate case - .h264 codec patents. They might have a "patent pool life" of 20 years, but they only have a "shelf life" of 10 - because 10 years from now, we'll be able to stream uncompressed 1920x1080x32bitx120hz streams in real time, using only non-lossy, non-patented compression schemes.
At that point who is going to want a codec that has artifacts and is encumbered, unless it's dirt cheap? And if it's dirt cheap, then the cost of administering it becomes greater than the revenue gained, so ... (because your patent is only as good as the profit - not gross revenue - you can extract with it).
It's a repetition of what happened with Stacker. On-the-fly disk compression was obvious, somebody did it, and it looked like the world was their oyster.
Then came the first problem - increased cpu speads obsoleted their hardware-based solution less than a year after it went on the market - the software-only version worked quicker because their controller card was now a bottleneck.
Then Microsoft "borrowed" it for DoubleSpace and DriveSpace.
But a funny thing happened - disk drives got bigger and bigger and bigger - and suddenly, the technology's worth became negative. The increase in disk space became less valuable than the increase in hassles with respect to such things as drive fragmentation, backing up, etc. It was worth it when 40 meg was $500. When you can buy 8 terabytes for the same price, who needs it? Nobody. It's literally more hassle than it's worth, even if it's free.
Same thing happened to many raid controllers. They became a performance bottleneck, so it became better to just use software raid. It was also a bonus that you didn't have to keep extra cards in stock just in case the manufacturer went belly up.
Remember math co-processors? They had what, a 15-year run?
As more and more people switch to laptops and other portable computing devices, the home UPS market will just disappear - another victim of changes in tech. For those desktops still around in 10 years, most will probably be running a journaling file system, and software will mostly auto-save not just changes in files, but such things as what apps are open, screen layout, etc (KDE already does a great job of this if you yank the plug, and I expect it to only improve) ...
That's one good thing about software patents - we can guarantee that when the burden of any one particular patent gets too onerous, someone will figure a way to code around it. So patents encourage software diversity. This is why I'm against "fair compulsory licensing" - by removing the pain, it takes away the incentive to develop alternatives, it takes away the incentive to adopt alternatives, and it encourages monopolies.
Think of where we'd be today if Microsoft could prevent all pirating of Windows, and jacked the licensing for home use to $1k a copy a year. How many people would say "screw this - I'll try something different"?
Patent trolls have the seeds of their own death.
Just my 2 cents :-)
That sound you hear is parents throughout the land going "I should charge my kids more! All I ever get is half a pizza!"
Probably not, but he can make incredibly stupid videos for you .
http://www.youtube.com/user/jordan4604
Which is worse - that he made the videos, or that he posted them?
Maybe it could be considered both ghost-written and plagiarized.
Like all those "... as told to" auto-biographies, which don't deserve the title "autobiography", but rather "authorized biography".
And for those wondering where the site is: http://payforessay.com/
90% and up = A
80% and up = B
70% and up = C
60% and up = D
Everything else = F
Now? 50% is an F.
And if you give too many Fs, you'll be sued.
A lot of motorcycle drivers will never "get" counter-steering - to them it's counter-intuitive. That it's actually safer in a curve (because you can lay the bike down really low, and if it slips, you can recover better because it straightens out the line between your center of gravity and where the rubber meets the road - I know, not a great explanation - just do it!) than the conventional method is lost on them.
The original series was so bad that ANYTHING would have been an improvement.
The remake was ... if you haven't seen it, just go watch it. You won't be disappointed.
Good point. RMS also has to bear some of the blame.
You raise some valid points. I think part of the problem is that people think that, because groklaw has comments enabled, that "building a community" should be the focus. So I went and walked my dogs again, and here's what I think ... not saying it's 100% right, but ...
Groklaw is not about building an online community, not in the conventional sense that we think of online communities. It's about collecting legal info and putting it out there, and c'est tout! It would probably have been better to conduct discussions via email, and a private message board, and not have public comments. That would have been truer to the actual mission statement, and would have avoided a lot of problems, but it's too late to change that now.
Now for the changing users to "anonymous" - that's what several content management systems do when a user is removed from the system. It's SOP. You even get a warning that all their comments will be assigned to the anonymous account.
Deleting comments is also not that hard - you just browse the comments, and if you have the right privileges, you'll see the "delete" link. Comments underneath no longer have a parent, so they become top-level, which makes them look silly, so you usually delete "from the bottom up".
Of course, the better way is simply not to delete comments; for a site like slashdot, that's ok - slashdot doesn't make any claim to fame except as a "news for nerds" site. Groklaw is more like a private project with a public interface. This is a case where the feature set of the software was a bad fit with the temperament and goals of the project. It happens.
I see two problems with that - like you, I obviously think that people shouldn't be afraid; I hope people never get afraid of disagreeing with me (except when they're wrong, of course - then "fear the curse" :-). The second is that both sides are taking this way too seriously. It's just a web site. There are plenty of others out there, if you can't get along with the people running it.
Really, people do tend to take it too seriously. Case in point - pudge and I go at it once in a while. And yet, we don't take it personally - to the contrary, if he's ever in town, he's more than welcome to stop by, because I think what he's done here is pretty neat. Same thing with most of my hundred-plus freaks (I'm trying to collect the whole set).
There's at least one user who everyone is sure hates my guts (and vice versa) because over the years we've had lots of very public disagreements - in private, it's the exact opposite. Why? Because we both understand that the other person is sincere in their beliefs and isn't trying to milk it for some personal advantage - unlike lobbyists, who will milk it for all it's worth.
So who gave Maynard and the rest of the world the obviously bogus interpretation that this was an attack on Hercules? The answer is obvious - look at whose agendas benefit from such confusion. Turbo Hercules, Roger Bowler, and Florian Mueller.
It's this sort of abuse of other people and open source projects that should be denounced.
I've never done it, despite what Mueller may claim.
Well, gotta go.
The court said that, at the very least, most "business methods" shouldn't be patentable. That's a big win.
That's what courts do. They don't have a mandate to rule beyond the scope of the case before them. The people arguing their case (for either side) don't have the obligation of addressing anything outside the scope of their case either - that would be an unconstitutional burden. So it is what it is, and we got what we needed.
How so? Until the judgment came down, everyone was whining that the Supremes were going to say that business patents were ok. Now, because we didn't get 100% at the first kick at the can, this is a loss? That's just revisionist history.
When you get 80% of what you want, plus a wedge to get the other 20% at the next case - and you also get the chilling effect on software patents as a side effect - that's a big win.
Also, Muller's not against software patents. All the DPL does is create even more problems. It's stupid. Let me rephrase that - the Defensive Patent License is REALLY stupid. It's like trying to fix a site with too much flash by adding even more flash, or trying to clean up spaghetti code by adding even more spaghetti code.
It's the sort of "solution" that people who want to insert themselves into the process (read: lobbyists) love, but that doesn't solve the problem - it just perpetuates the patents race.
Are you on drugs?
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=5290 Kin 1: $329.99
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=5291 Kin 2: $429.99
Sure, you can get them for less on a 2-year plan, but the same thing applies for Android phones. And there's a $350.00 Early Termination Fee.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=5331LG Android: $369.99 - so it's cheaper than the Kin 2.
The kin phones are DOA.
At the very least, anyone who bought one in the last 6 weeks is going to be royally p*ssed.
Both times I saw the Kin ad, I said to myself "you've GOT to be kidding."
A guy shooting pics of his ex-girlfriend?
That's just creepy. So you lose the women.
The message it sends is "guys who have a Kin are losers!" So you also lose the men.
So who was the target market? Stalkers?
At least that foolishness never made it to Canada.
If she's only had a falling out with 3 people in 7 years, that's not that bad.
This is an old story, from since 2004:
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/Stocks_S/threadview?m=te&bn=2942&tid=181845&mid=-1&tof=-1&rt=2&frt=2&off=1
The "I've verified this via proxies" is really a non-issue - other people have since pointed out that other content management systems have similar capabilities. I'll be writing a HOW-TO so that anyone can implement it, because it's a good "circuit breaker" or "fire break" for some use cases. Let everyone take a breather and reflect a bit ...
That being said, I'm willing to look at the evidence - but it has to be in context.
You said it yourself - "potentially libelous". It's the same here on slashdot - for example: if you make a death threat to the president, it WILL be removed (it's been done in the past) and any post pointing that out will also be removed. slashdot has no choice - there's a specific law just for dealing with death threats to the president.
Maybe you should get better forum software :-) Okay, that was a bit of a joke ... but seriously, sometimes it's better for EVERYONE if the post is totally removed. For example, what do you think would happen if, instead of removing 10 of your posts, someone were to write "This post has been deleted because it conflicts with the site's policies"? People seeing that would think "troll" or "spammer". At that point, you'd probably wish they had just silently deleted them.
All I'm saying is that there's no ideal solution.
No need for a lawyer to tell her it's okay - it is. You might own your post, but you don't have a contractual or other right to require that someone else provide a platform for you to disseminate it. To the contrary. the only right you have is to use your own resources to get your message out.
Now, if you had signed a contract that said "posts written by $X will be hosted on site $Y for a period of $Z time in return for the following consid
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10379870-38.html
It was a total of over 9,000 jobs. Only 3,000 were attributed to the delay - and in the final analysis, the EU agreed, the claims by Mueller etc., were bullshit.
Here's one for you: Florian Mueller/Muller is just a lobbyist
That delay cost 3,000 people their jobs.
Muller/Mueller is another Darl McBride.
Also, Muller/Mueller continually cites his blog as "evidence". And remember - he IS a lobbyist.
Don't underestimate what a group of volunteers can do. Next you'll be claiming that Pamela Jones is really a bunch of IBM lawyers.
Oh, speaking of that ... has already accused the people who called him out on his trolling and lies this last weekend of being IBM shills:
Shades of Darl McBride - blame it on groklaw and IBM.
What did he expect? People on slashdot are going to be "very much informed" - we're not politicians who can be bought with some bafflegab and a few drinks over dinner.
And his "solution" is brain-dead. I'll be dealing with that in a future story.