My reference to "tivo-ization" was not that the code was no longer compilable - but that it would no longer be accessible for commercial use or use in many projects with different licenses even by the original author, who gets absolutely nothing in return for giving up his or her rights. The code has certain aspects that are now "fenced off" from the world.
THEY can issue a commercial license, while the original author no longer can. The reason they want to do this is because they see value in it. If you think this is such a great idea, assign all your copyrights to me, so that I can use them any way I choose, and I'll grant you a license back under the AGPL 3.0.
You really should take me up on this generous offer - after all, it's what you're advocating others do wrt Lucky-Nutty-Silly-Putty. So let me take the opportunity^Wburden of worrying about the commercialization of everything off you. And I promise I'll even have a script to automatically generate a new for-pay release every 2-3 years so that it will never revert to a BSDish license.
We can call it the "Hotel California License" - because you can check it out (under the AGPL) any time you like, but you can never leave...
So, write up those copyright assignments and stick them in the mail TODAY, and I will include, at no extra cost, not one, not two, but THREE emails acknowledging that you have a reciprocal limited license under the AGPL.
Maybe you should discuss how MySQL operated with Monty. They, purportedly, worked pretty much in the way you propose. It made him very unhappy.
A billion dollars unhappy I can take ANY day.
Seriously, the people who wrote code in exchange for money for MySQL got more than Lexy-Flexy-Nexy is offering, so they really had no grounds to complain. As for Monty, he ultimately came across as a cry-baby. Nobody forced him to sell to Sun.
No wonder that businesses look at us like we're a bunch of crazies. On the other hand, no wonder businesses think they can pull a "code capture" like this - after all, we're just a bunch of crazies, right?
The more I think about it, the more I believe the F/LOSS movement needs to grow up.
1. Lose the dirty smelly booger-eating neckbeard loons image - for some, that means literally "drop the bong and pick up a bar of soap";
2. Stop being misogynists - or at least have the courtesy to degrade yourself in private; Same with homophobes, racists, gun-nuts, conspiracy theorists, crunchies, fundies, tea-party "nuke-the-AYE-rabs", all-closed-source-is-evil, etc.;
3. Everything is negotiable;
4. Demand quid pro quos from businesses - TANSTAAFL applies to them as well; See Rule # 3.
5. Consider that "one size does not fit all" applies to licenses as much as it does to editors - sometimes the only way to get something funded is to keep it closed for a while, "how long" is always negotiable (see Rule # 3);
6. Either do it for free because YOU want to, or charge full price - make them put their money where their mouth is;
7. Keep in mind that they might respect you if you apply #1 - #6. They certainly won't if you don't.
If someone other than LN forks the work they are restricted to AGPL 3.0 terms. LN, as the copyright holder, is the party with a right to issue a commercial license. We don't need a covenant with folks who can only use AGPL 3.0.
In other words, they've done the equivalent of Tivo-ising the code wrt commercial use. Sweet!
Hey everyone - assign ME your copyrights and I'll give you a grant-back to use all the copyrights in the pool under the AGPLv3. I'll go one further than Loopy-Noopy - I'll even give you a grant-back to use them under a separate GPLv2 or later license, so you can contribute to projects like Linux, which is GPLv2 only. What could possibly go wrong?
Someone else explained that. But I'll give it a try as well. There are no doubt a number of strategies that would be even better for the Open Source developer. The problem with those strategies is: what motivates a company to participate in those strategies? Especially a company that has invested a significant fraction of a Billion on the product, and we have so far invested nothing?
How much they have invested in their product is irrelevant to the question at hand, because the outside code writers have no financial or other interest in Lexus-Nexus. Are they getting shares in the completed product? Some of the revenue stream? No. So who cares about how much or how little L-N has spent so far (and to go further down that line - they've made their money back several times over, so I would put that argument in the "cry me a river of crocodile tears" bucket).
Really, I'm disappointed that you would even think that means anything in this context.
If the code has a perceived value, then they should either:
1. Offer to buy it outright;
2. Offer to take a license to it from the author sufficient to meet their needs, again perhaps with financial compensation to the author, depending on the code and the license terms;
Saying "either assign copyright to us, or we're not interested in your code" is what losers and bullies say. They end up crying to their mommies that nobody wants to play with them.
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They're a business - maybe they should act like one?
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Seriously, who cares? It's not like they're offering to open-source their DATA.
There is a limited set of licenses that need to be acquired from a small set of companies - not the potential hundreds that would arise from an OSS project - a license would be needed even for a minor bug fix.
A grant of right to dual-license the code from each contributor means they don't have to get a further license to do a bug fix (and they wouldn't need the permission from each contributor for each mod anyway - only the contributor whose file is being modified).
It's MUCH easier to convey such a license legally than it is to convey copyright - all copyright assignments MUST be in writing, whereas the license grants can be done by email. So, if you have 100 contributors, you only need 100 emails, not 100 written assignments.
Now if you look at things like the redistributables from Microsoft or Apple, there are WAY more than 100 licenses in there, and yet you don't see the problems you allude to. (The h.264 decoders are a good example - over 1,000 licensees, and yet this doesn't cause a problem for either company when they do a bug fix - they don't have to go to each licensor and say "please, pretty please, let me mod this file that you didn't write").
The licensed code is often distinct from the original code although it may be distributed with it, whereas L-N would have one main codebase containing almost all of the licensed code.
Irrelevant. I'm sure it's not going to all be stuffed in one big source file. (and if they're that stupid, then why are we even discussing this, because in such a case you would know they're already doomed).
I don't think it is a workable solution - the added burden on L-N to try to manage all the licenses would probably make it easier to forgo open sourcing their codebase. Given two reasonable solutions, one which I think is achievable while the other is not makes me prefer the achievable one.
As I pointed out above, it's easier to get a license grant than to do a copyright assignment.
The licensed code is often distinct from the original code although it may be distributed with it, whereas L-N would have one main codebase containing almost all of the licensed code.
The licensed code is often compiled into the binary, rather than loaded in a dynamic library. This doesn't cause any problems for license grants - why would you think it would?
don't think it's being needy - rather it is an opportunity to create a win-win situation *and* demonstrate that open source can be a viable commercial business model that benefits the community and the company.
We don't need demonstrations that require us to accede to the law firm of Ben Dover and Phil McCavity. We have plenty of examples of win-win between business and open source. Apple continues to contribute to BSD. Google, Facebook, etc., continue to contribute to Linux. Redhat contributes to a LOT of projects. They're the face of the win-win model, not some obscure company that says "if you don't assign your copyrights to us, then it's not worth it to us."
Finally, anyone who doesn't like the convent is free to either not participate, or fork the code under the GPL; although in this case I think a fork would be rather useless since the L-N version is likely to be the preferred version.
Like OpenOffice is preferred over LibreOffice? Nah... Let's not forget how EGCS was so successful a fork of a stagnant GCC codebase that eventually it became GCC, or how Firefox was a fork of the Mozilla suite... vi vs vim, emacs vs xemacs, the many MANY linux distro forks, rogue vs hack vs nethack, XFree86 vs Xorg, SSH vs OpenSSH, AT&T Unix to... well, you get the point:-)
I'm not buying it, and judging from other people's comments, there are plenty of others who feel the same way
First, it depends on the license-back. If the developer who wrote the code get the right to relicense it to everyone under any terms they wish, including the right to license it for closed-source projects, then what is the difference between that and the developer granting a similar license to the business instead, and not doing a copyright assignment?
If it doesn't contain the full set of rights, then it isn't really a full license back to the developer.
Second, the AGPL prevents the author, if all they got was an AGLP license back, from doing this. It also prevents them from licensing the code to GPLv2-only projects.
So no, it's not mooted by a license-back, unless it's, mutatis mutandis, the exact equivalent to the developer keeping copyright and only assigning the right to dual-license the code to the business.
You still haven't explained why having the developer grant a non-exclusive license to dual-license the code to the business for use in their pooducts is better than assigning copyright.
I can think of several obvious ones why my way is better -
1. it allows the original author to grant similar licenses to other businesses so that they have an incentive to actually use and improve the code;
2. it allows the original author to grant use of the code to GPLv2-only projects;
3. it allows the original author to grant use of the code to non-competing closed-source businesses, rather than giving that right to the business by assigning them the copyright;
4. it eliminates any uncertainty about "if the company doesn't do X by such-and-such a date", goes belly-up, or splits into multiple businesses (only the unit that keeps the product gets the license).
Look at #3 carefully - why should a company that didn't write the code deprive the author of a potential source of revenue? Code can live for a long time (I have code that was written ~20 years ago for DOS that still runs fine on the latest Windows systems with no modifications).
There's no legal impediment to the company just accepting a limited dual-use license grant for their products from the original author. They still have the right to enforce their own copyrights to protect their products.
Sun was bleeding money hand over fist and wasn't long for this world - we all know that. They were picked up at bankruptcy prices, not some insane dot-com-multiple of their value.
Well, I'll discuss with their attorney whether there is a need for a change in terms specific to bankruptcy. But if the company goes bankrupt, they didn't benefit from the Open Source cooperation sufficiently anyway. So, I'm not sure how much we need to flog that horse. It seems unlikely that Oracle is going to pick up such a product in an asset sale and suddenly make a smash hit out of it.
A company can have a smash hit and still go bankrupt and be picked up by Oracle. Or is Java not a "smash hit" any more?
If the author is the one granting the dual license, instead of assigning copyright, they don't lose their rights if the company goes bankrupt - and they can write in the assignment that it is terminated on a filing of bankruptcy, so that solves the problem nice and simple. If the trustee wants to sell the product, they can always ask for a new license and throw some money at the author as an incentive:-)
Since Lexus - Nexus would not own all of the software it would make a sale of the company or rights to the product very complicated.
Look around outside the open-source world. Most software that you buy is written by businesses that don't own all the rights to the code - they license various code libraries, data, etc.
People distribute commercial Java products - they certainly don't own all the copyrights to Java. People distribute commercial programs that run under Windows - they certainly don't own all the copyrights to the redistributables that came with their compiler, or the class libraries they licensed from 3rd parties.
Here's a thought - try switching your argument around - "would it be unreasonable for Lexus-Nexus to get a grant from the developer for an unlimited, non-exclusive license to use and resell his or her code?"
Really, what is so "wrong" or "complicated" about that? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Why, in the Open Source world, do people suggest we just bend over when someone asks for a copyright assignment? Are we *that* needy of validation that we'll just give it up for the asking?
(facepalm) The whole purpose is for the company to have control of all copyrights, that's the only viable way for it to work. From my reading this attempts to balance the needs of the developer. How much incentive will be tested in the marketplace.
That's VERY suspicious, because the vast majority of commercial products out there do NOT have control of all the copyrights used in their products.
The whole "oh we need copyright assignment because otherwise we can't create a viable commercial product" argument is baloney.
Maybe, in their particular case, they can't, because of the aforementioned inability to capture the code so that only they can exploit it commercially (they want a "monopoly" on dual-use licensing). Or maybe they're just over-reaching, just like all the others who demand copyright assignment when the author granting permission to use the code commercially is more than sufficient.
In general, companies want to be able to enforce the copyright of the entire product. It is possible that a company could be convinced to join the scheme as you propose it, but the risk and legal load for the company are appreciably higher than what I have proposed, so the company would have to be expecting to get a lot from the community in order to justify that. I'm not sure the balance would work for the company.
??? The Novell vs SCO trial should have ended that. You don't need ownership of ALL the copyrights to enforce your own rights. Of course they would still be able to enforce the copyright on the parts of their product to which they have copyright under such a scheme.
And of course, if they don't like it. let them write their own version. If they see dual-licensing something as valid, they should respect that authors have the same right to dual-license their code, instead of outright assignment.
The real motive is code capture. Once they get copyright assignment, they can dual-license it, but nobody else can approach the original author for the same right - their competition is limited to open-source licensing only. Your license proposal, like many code copyright assignments, goes directly against the interests of both the author and the general public, since other businesses won't be as willing to invest in improving code they can't themselves dual-license.
After the last round of FUD from the FSF: FSF Uses Android FUD To Push GPLv3, (debunked here) anyone who asks for copyright assignment and says "trust me" is on my "do not trust further than I can throw/smell/sic my dogs on them" list.
Wouldn't it protect the authors' rights more if the author:
1. kept his or her copyright;
2. granted a dual license right to the company that terminates if the conditions are not respected.
The company still gets to use the code, provided they respect the conditions, and the author has the right to make the same deal with competing projects, rather than see the code "captured" for commercial use by only one project.
The author would also retain the right, at any point, to relicense his or her code under a less restrictive license at some future date (eg: bsd, public domain) if they wish.
Oh, but most IT-guys don't get it either. Computing has become mainstream, and it's hard to give up old thinking constructs (like more features being better unconditionally).
I hope you're not saying that IT people think "more features being better unconditionally", because sane programmers absolutely do NOT believe that (the insane ones went nuts by trying to add feature after feature).
The laptops already do what you ask wrt underclocking when running on batteries, etc., and have been doing it for years. Last week a local big-box was clearing out a batch of quad-core laptops with 6 gigs of ram and 640 gigs of disk, 1 gig discrete graphics for well under $500 in a back-to-school special. At that price, who wants desktop?
Most of the people I know don't use desktops any more - a laptop is their main computer - good enough to do the job, quieter, takes up less space, uses less power, and it doesn't lose your data when the power goes off. Tale your desktop, add in the cost of a UPS that will run it for an hour or two, webcam, speakers, keyboard, mouse, wireless adapter, and you're at price parity with the laptop, but without the portability.
They're going to turn the 8 on it's side and it becomes "Windows Infinity". They'll get Buzz Lightyear to hype it, as it's the newest cartoon interface.
Then in 3 years, they'll release Windows 9, and Buzz Lightyear can say "... and BEYONDDDDDDdddddd!"
And maybe, just maybe, the BoD will have fired Ballmer and Microsoft will actually be able to come up with something for Windows 10 that is more than just "look - 20% more shiny!"
Thanks for re-writing history. Vista was supposed to be released in 2003 and XP was supposed to be EOLed in 2007. We all know what happened - Vista became the black hole.
The desktop IS dying, and has been for years. Laptops have been selling desktops for years - and one of the advantages of laptops is mobility. When you can buy dual-core laptops with 6 gigs of ram and a 640 gig hd for under $400, why bother with a desktop? Just plug your existing screen, keyboard and mouse in and enjoy dual-screen goodness at a low, low price AND get the benefits of both mobility and a couple of hours of "UPS" from the battery when used as a destop replacement.
But if you do it sensibly, like is done in Europe, Asia and even American-like countries like Canada and Australia, you end up with excellent areas that are very livable.
Please don't cite Canada as an example. Downtown Montreal is a poverty-ridden pigsty and everything is (literally) falling apart.
Considering that being surrounded by green space is a health benefit, I'd rather be there than their artsy-fartsy-but-doesn't-really-mean-anything "notion of a shared responsibility in the collective metropolitan realm"
Downtown cores suck. It's called a concrete jungle for a reason.
Absolutely. Or cut off their physical access (wired access only, tied to mac address and port number, with the switch in a locked area, authentication required to connect so if he unplugs your cable into his machine and spoofs your address, he still can't use it.
And while you're at it, make sure you don't download anything questionable either. The time you're wasting watching that "must-watch" show/move could be used doing something more interesting.
To answer your last question "Why isn't encryption more prevalent these days", it's because it's not integrated into the individual services - people have to *THINK*, and thinking is hard. Plus, they don't realize that there is a problem in the first place.
Barring that, it isn't too tough to copy and paste text to a PGP decoder.
For the majority of the population, yes, it IS too tough. We're talking about users who are, in some many cases, barely over the "the coffee cup holder in my computer is broken" level. When you ask them to type a web site address in the url bar, they type it into the search box instead - and keep complaining that they can't find the newly-registered domain, because even though it's been propagated for 3 days, Google hasn't found it yet (this last was from a programmer who has since stopped programming, thank $DIETY_OR_DARWIN_PICK_YOUR_POISON).
Look at how many businesses are using Google Docs to store their company data, internal communications, etc., outside their control. And using gmail for stuff that should be private. When you think of it. that's insane... totally gonzo.
I for one am sick of the whole "if you have nothing to hide" lame excuse for turning me into a product to be sold to advertisers. I am *not* a product. I am *not* a number. I am *not* a statistic to be sliced and diced and analyzed and fed the thin gruel that passes for "what's hot today." A few of us started discussing solutions to this in one of my journal entries yesterday here. Please feel free to throw bricks as needed:-)
TFA says that individual pieces will be up to 300 pounds each. Not to worry though - if that lands on you, it's probably only going to hurt for a fraction of a second.
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My reference to "tivo-ization" was not that the code was no longer compilable - but that it would no longer be accessible for commercial use or use in many projects with different licenses even by the original author, who gets absolutely nothing in return for giving up his or her rights. The code has certain aspects that are now "fenced off" from the world.
THEY can issue a commercial license, while the original author no longer can. The reason they want to do this is because they see value in it. If you think this is such a great idea, assign all your copyrights to me, so that I can use them any way I choose, and I'll grant you a license back under the AGPL 3.0.
You really should take me up on this generous offer - after all, it's what you're advocating others do wrt Lucky-Nutty-Silly-Putty. So let me take the opportunity^Wburden of worrying about the commercialization of everything off you. And I promise I'll even have a script to automatically generate a new for-pay release every 2-3 years so that it will never revert to a BSDish license.
We can call it the "Hotel California License" - because you can check it out (under the AGPL) any time you like, but you can never leave ...
So, write up those copyright assignments and stick them in the mail TODAY, and I will include, at no extra cost, not one, not two, but THREE emails acknowledging that you have a reciprocal limited license under the AGPL.
A billion dollars unhappy I can take ANY day.
Seriously, the people who wrote code in exchange for money for MySQL got more than Lexy-Flexy-Nexy is offering, so they really had no grounds to complain. As for Monty, he ultimately came across as a cry-baby. Nobody forced him to sell to Sun.
No wonder that businesses look at us like we're a bunch of crazies. On the other hand, no wonder businesses think they can pull a "code capture" like this - after all, we're just a bunch of crazies, right?
The more I think about it, the more I believe the F/LOSS movement needs to grow up.
1. Lose the dirty smelly booger-eating neckbeard loons image - for some, that means literally "drop the bong and pick up a bar of soap";
2. Stop being misogynists - or at least have the courtesy to degrade yourself in private; Same with homophobes, racists, gun-nuts, conspiracy theorists, crunchies, fundies, tea-party "nuke-the-AYE-rabs", all-closed-source-is-evil, etc.;
3. Everything is negotiable;
4. Demand quid pro quos from businesses - TANSTAAFL applies to them as well; See Rule # 3.
5. Consider that "one size does not fit all" applies to licenses as much as it does to editors - sometimes the only way to get something funded is to keep it closed for a while, "how long" is always negotiable (see Rule # 3);
6. Either do it for free because YOU want to, or charge full price - make them put their money where their mouth is;
7. Keep in mind that they might respect you if you apply #1 - #6. They certainly won't if you don't.
I'm sure others will come up with more ideas ...
In other words, they've done the equivalent of Tivo-ising the code wrt commercial use. Sweet!
Hey everyone - assign ME your copyrights and I'll give you a grant-back to use all the copyrights in the pool under the AGPLv3. I'll go one further than Loopy-Noopy - I'll even give you a grant-back to use them under a separate GPLv2 or later license, so you can contribute to projects like Linux, which is GPLv2 only. What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, right ... I didn't think so ...
Seriously, it's not even [tt] Tuesday yet ...
How much they have invested in their product is irrelevant to the question at hand, because the outside code writers have no financial or other interest in Lexus-Nexus. Are they getting shares in the completed product? Some of the revenue stream? No. So who cares about how much or how little L-N has spent so far (and to go further down that line - they've made their money back several times over, so I would put that argument in the "cry me a river of crocodile tears" bucket).
Really, I'm disappointed that you would even think that means anything in this context.
If the code has a perceived value, then they should either:
1. Offer to buy it outright;
2. Offer to take a license to it from the author sufficient to meet their needs, again perhaps with financial compensation to the author, depending on the code and the license terms;
Saying "either assign copyright to us, or we're not interested in your code" is what losers and bullies say. They end up crying to their mommies that nobody wants to play with them.
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Seriously, who cares? It's not like they're offering to open-source their DATA.
A grant of right to dual-license the code from each contributor means they don't have to get a further license to do a bug fix (and they wouldn't need the permission from each contributor for each mod anyway - only the contributor whose file is being modified).
It's MUCH easier to convey such a license legally than it is to convey copyright - all copyright assignments MUST be in writing, whereas the license grants can be done by email. So, if you have 100 contributors, you only need 100 emails, not 100 written assignments.
Now if you look at things like the redistributables from Microsoft or Apple, there are WAY more than 100 licenses in there, and yet you don't see the problems you allude to. (The h.264 decoders are a good example - over 1,000 licensees, and yet this doesn't cause a problem for either company when they do a bug fix - they don't have to go to each licensor and say "please, pretty please, let me mod this file that you didn't write").
Irrelevant. I'm sure it's not going to all be stuffed in one big source file. (and if they're that stupid, then why are we even discussing this, because in such a case you would know they're already doomed).
As I pointed out above, it's easier to get a license grant than to do a copyright assignment.
The licensed code is often compiled into the binary, rather than loaded in a dynamic library. This doesn't cause any problems for license grants - why would you think it would?
We don't need demonstrations that require us to accede to the law firm of Ben Dover and Phil McCavity. We have plenty of examples of win-win between business and open source. Apple continues to contribute to BSD. Google, Facebook, etc., continue to contribute to Linux. Redhat contributes to a LOT of projects. They're the face of the win-win model, not some obscure company that says "if you don't assign your copyrights to us, then it's not worth it to us."
Like OpenOffice is preferred over LibreOffice? Nah... Let's not forget how EGCS was so successful a fork of a stagnant GCC codebase that eventually it became GCC, or how Firefox was a fork of the Mozilla suite ... vi vs vim, emacs vs xemacs, the many MANY linux distro forks, rogue vs hack vs nethack, XFree86 vs Xorg, SSH vs OpenSSH, AT&T Unix to ... well, you get the point :-)
I'm not buying it, and judging from other people's comments, there are plenty of others who feel the same way
First, it depends on the license-back. If the developer who wrote the code get the right to relicense it to everyone under any terms they wish, including the right to license it for closed-source projects, then what is the difference between that and the developer granting a similar license to the business instead, and not doing a copyright assignment?
If it doesn't contain the full set of rights, then it isn't really a full license back to the developer.
Second, the AGPL prevents the author, if all they got was an AGLP license back, from doing this. It also prevents them from licensing the code to GPLv2-only projects.
So no, it's not mooted by a license-back, unless it's, mutatis mutandis, the exact equivalent to the developer keeping copyright and only assigning the right to dual-license the code to the business.
You still haven't explained why having the developer grant a non-exclusive license to dual-license the code to the business for use in their pooducts is better than assigning copyright.
I can think of several obvious ones why my way is better -
1. it allows the original author to grant similar licenses to other businesses so that they have an incentive to actually use and improve the code;
2. it allows the original author to grant use of the code to GPLv2-only projects;
3. it allows the original author to grant use of the code to non-competing closed-source businesses, rather than giving that right to the business by assigning them the copyright;
4. it eliminates any uncertainty about "if the company doesn't do X by such-and-such a date", goes belly-up, or splits into multiple businesses (only the unit that keeps the product gets the license).
Look at #3 carefully - why should a company that didn't write the code deprive the author of a potential source of revenue? Code can live for a long time (I have code that was written ~20 years ago for DOS that still runs fine on the latest Windows systems with no modifications).
There's no legal impediment to the company just accepting a limited dual-use license grant for their products from the original author. They still have the right to enforce their own copyrights to protect their products.
Sun was bleeding money hand over fist and wasn't long for this world - we all know that. They were picked up at bankruptcy prices, not some insane dot-com-multiple of their value.
A company can have a smash hit and still go bankrupt and be picked up by Oracle. Or is Java not a "smash hit" any more?
If the author is the one granting the dual license, instead of assigning copyright, they don't lose their rights if the company goes bankrupt - and they can write in the assignment that it is terminated on a filing of bankruptcy, so that solves the problem nice and simple. If the trustee wants to sell the product, they can always ask for a new license and throw some money at the author as an incentive :-)
Look around outside the open-source world. Most software that you buy is written by businesses that don't own all the rights to the code - they license various code libraries, data, etc.
People distribute commercial Java products - they certainly don't own all the copyrights to Java. People distribute commercial programs that run under Windows - they certainly don't own all the copyrights to the redistributables that came with their compiler, or the class libraries they licensed from 3rd parties.
Here's a thought - try switching your argument around - "would it be unreasonable for Lexus-Nexus to get a grant from the developer for an unlimited, non-exclusive license to use and resell his or her code?"
Really, what is so "wrong" or "complicated" about that? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Why, in the Open Source world, do people suggest we just bend over when someone asks for a copyright assignment? Are we *that* needy of validation that we'll just give it up for the asking?
That's VERY suspicious, because the vast majority of commercial products out there do NOT have control of all the copyrights used in their products.
The whole "oh we need copyright assignment because otherwise we can't create a viable commercial product" argument is baloney.
Maybe, in their particular case, they can't, because of the aforementioned inability to capture the code so that only they can exploit it commercially (they want a "monopoly" on dual-use licensing). Or maybe they're just over-reaching, just like all the others who demand copyright assignment when the author granting permission to use the code commercially is more than sufficient.
??? The Novell vs SCO trial should have ended that. You don't need ownership of ALL the copyrights to enforce your own rights. Of course they would still be able to enforce the copyright on the parts of their product to which they have copyright under such a scheme.
And of course, if they don't like it. let them write their own version. If they see dual-licensing something as valid, they should respect that authors have the same right to dual-license their code, instead of outright assignment.
The real motive is code capture. Once they get copyright assignment, they can dual-license it, but nobody else can approach the original author for the same right - their competition is limited to open-source licensing only. Your license proposal, like many code copyright assignments, goes directly against the interests of both the author and the general public, since other businesses won't be as willing to invest in improving code they can't themselves dual-license.
After the last round of FUD from the FSF: FSF Uses Android FUD To Push GPLv3, (debunked here) anyone who asks for copyright assignment and says "trust me" is on my "do not trust further than I can throw/smell/sic my dogs on them" list.
1. kept his or her copyright;
2. granted a dual license right to the company that terminates if the conditions are not respected.
The company still gets to use the code, provided they respect the conditions, and the author has the right to make the same deal with competing projects, rather than see the code "captured" for commercial use by only one project.
The author would also retain the right, at any point, to relicense his or her code under a less restrictive license at some future date (eg: bsd, public domain) if they wish.
I hope you're not saying that IT people think "more features being better unconditionally", because sane programmers absolutely do NOT believe that (the insane ones went nuts by trying to add feature after feature).
Only one problem with that - he would have to know your MAC address first ...
Most of the people I know don't use desktops any more - a laptop is their main computer - good enough to do the job, quieter, takes up less space, uses less power, and it doesn't lose your data when the power goes off. Tale your desktop, add in the cost of a UPS that will run it for an hour or two, webcam, speakers, keyboard, mouse, wireless adapter, and you're at price parity with the laptop, but without the portability.
Today's laptops make great portable servers.
Then in 3 years, they'll release Windows 9, and Buzz Lightyear can say "... and BEYONDDDDDDdddddd!"
And maybe, just maybe, the BoD will have fired Ballmer and Microsoft will actually be able to come up with something for Windows 10 that is more than just "look - 20% more shiny!"
Thanks for re-writing history. Vista was supposed to be released in 2003 and XP was supposed to be EOLed in 2007. We all know what happened - Vista became the black hole.
Desktops are DEAD.
Constructive Cannibalism +1.
Just don't do it too often - they tend to be high in fat.
Please don't cite Canada as an example. Downtown Montreal is a poverty-ridden pigsty and everything is (literally) falling apart.
Considering that being surrounded by green space is a health benefit, I'd rather be there than their artsy-fartsy-but-doesn't-really-mean-anything "notion of a shared responsibility in the collective metropolitan realm"
Downtown cores suck. It's called a concrete jungle for a reason.
Absolutely. Or cut off their physical access (wired access only, tied to mac address and port number, with the switch in a locked area, authentication required to connect so if he unplugs your cable into his machine and spoofs your address, he still can't use it.
And while you're at it, make sure you don't download anything questionable either. The time you're wasting watching that "must-watch" show/move could be used doing something more interesting.
To answer your last question "Why isn't encryption more prevalent these days", it's because it's not integrated into the individual services - people have to *THINK*, and thinking is hard. Plus, they don't realize that there is a problem in the first place.
For the majority of the population, yes, it IS too tough. We're talking about users who are, in some many cases, barely over the "the coffee cup holder in my computer is broken" level. When you ask them to type a web site address in the url bar, they type it into the search box instead - and keep complaining that they can't find the newly-registered domain, because even though it's been propagated for 3 days, Google hasn't found it yet (this last was from a programmer who has since stopped programming, thank $DIETY_OR_DARWIN_PICK_YOUR_POISON).
Look at how many businesses are using Google Docs to store their company data, internal communications, etc., outside their control. And using gmail for stuff that should be private. When you think of it. that's insane ... totally gonzo.
I for one am sick of the whole "if you have nothing to hide" lame excuse for turning me into a product to be sold to advertisers. I am *not* a product. I am *not* a number. I am *not* a statistic to be sliced and diced and analyzed and fed the thin gruel that passes for "what's hot today." A few of us started discussing solutions to this in one of my journal entries yesterday here. Please feel free to throw bricks as needed :-)
He wrote some blog posts about other domain scammers, and they're retaliating. Awwww .... nothing to see here, folks ....
TFA says that individual pieces will be up to 300 pounds each. Not to worry though - if that lands on you, it's probably only going to hurt for a fraction of a second.