Now you've found the grey area. And it's a *legal* grey area, because the legal precedents are not clear, not a technical one.
I believe the usual interpretation is that, if you write your code specifically for Linux, with Linux in mind, and it runs on no other OS, then, yes, pigs may fly and Linus could find a judge to force you to GPL your software, if he wanted to.
This is because the legal requirements have nothing to do with arbitrary technical boundaries like linking and API calls. The legal standard is whether your program is a "derivative work" of Linux or not. And the courts have come up with all sorts of cute little tests (like they do, because they're too stupid and lazy to actually determine anything on a case-by-case basis) to determine whether a work is "derived" or not.
As you can see, technically, this is an awful set of guidelines. But, remember, it has nothing to do with Linux or GPL specifically. This same set of awful guidelines applies to all licensed software.
In the real world, nobody worries about any of this because, unless you're writing binary kernel modules that cause hassle, nobody cares what calls your userland programs use. And, even if you're writing binary kernel modules, Linus has said he doesn't care and other kernel developers would have a hard time suing anybody without Linus.
And finally, it's clearly obvious that the "derived work" tests are archaic and have little relevance to Open Source software. Even a poor attorney could make a decent argument that APIs are there to facilitate use, that use is allowed by the GPL, and that such use does not constitute derivation.
Any idiot can see that "eudaimonia" means "good spirits".
Of course, I also have no doubt that your philosophy prof. spent an entire classperiod trying to convince you of his own pet interpretation. Probably a Republican too, I bet, huh? They tend to equate wealth with happiness...
Seriously, though, you're right the Catholic church sold golden tickets into heaven for a long time. But it's not like that had anything to do with Jesus or anything.
They had that meeting. Half of them decided to try for consistency and the other half decided to go for completeness. The completeness half is doing great, but makes absolutely no sense. And the consistency half gave up and became atheists.
Autozone switched to Linux a while ago. They were the first ones sued by SCO, in fact.
This is just my observation, but I've always thought of Autozone as the "low end" auto parts retailer in the US. Their prices are always lowest. Their clerks tend to speak less English. Mechanics used to tell me to shop "anywhere but Autozone". I stopped going there a few years ago because they would constantly give me the wrong parts.
Recently, though, I've noticed a change. People are recommending Autozone to me. The last part I got there fit perfectly. The clerk actually knew what he was talking about. And they still have the lowest prices in town.
It just goes to show that, with Linux, cutting costs doesn't mean cutting functionality.
That's easy. Hopefully, if these animals can reproduce, they will immediately be granted "protected" status and allowed to roam freely in North America. Any land that our prehistoric friends need will be cheerfully appropriated under the "eminent domain for extinct species" power that the Supreme Court will surely find in the Constitution.
Displaced humans will be herded into cities, to await terrorist attack, or catastrophic flood, peak oil, or bird flu. Politicians will constantly reassure us that these crises can be averted simply by working harder at our menial jobs.
Years later, when the giant prehistoric spiders become an entrenched threat, a new administration will decleare "War on Spiders" and work to cover up and downplay any government responsibility in creating the spiders to begin with. This new administration will entreat us to "make sacrifices" while cutting taxes and increasing handouts to former spider-creators. Battles fought in the "War on Spiders" will include attacks on Lithuania and East Timor, and strong verbal threats towards Nicaragua (all members of the "Axis of Spiders"), yet no actual spiders will be harmed. After years of stalemate, victory will be declared and troops quietly returned home to "work harder" and "make sacrifices".
Nice post. Something I've thought for a long time. But, at the same time, I think you may be seeing malice where there is none.
There are certainly those who belittle the "younger generation" for their own self-aggrandizement. But there are also those who are genuinely concerned for the future. I see them every day. Unfortunately, from a distance, the two tend to look alike.
The real old farts to be worried about, though, aren't the ones blogging about the demise of universal technical knowledge. Those who are really "out to get you" are the ones that sit quietly in the corner, bemoaning the rise of the "Clinton generation" and cheap, open communcations, and, of course everybody's favorite running jokes, "hackers" and "terrorists". They quietly work to bring back the days when "old men send young men to die in war". They push for the end of universal computing and widespread access to knowledge. They will happily ruin the economy via outsourcing, immigration, and dependence on foreign energy rather than give an inch to their own children.
Those are the ones that will have to be dragged into the streets and shot when the time comes, not old geeks that want kids to understand how microprocessors work.
I *know* this guy is not an admin. He is MIS, at best. *Huge* difference. This guy gets paid to write reports and macros for applications for whatever software this businesses uses, clearly SAP, not to install or administer servers.
I mean, just listen to him. He outsources everything. He seriously believes all operating systems are the same. He complains about having to spend two days a month updating and testing. Then he goes on to include this work in an increased "total cost of ownership" for Linux, completely ignoring the fact that it's his job and he's being paid whether he does it or not. He doesn't know the difference between an application failure (core dump) and an OS failure (panic/oops). And, to top it all off, he thinks autopatching is a great feature.
Lots of "small" (multi-million dollar) businesses make the mistake this one has: they think they can get away with having just one "admin" who is really MIS, who spends all of his time dealing with the business side of things rather than the computing side. To maintain the illusion that this is a workable combination, they switch everything to Windows and spend almost as much on licensing and consultants as they would on a competent admin. Then they wonder why their customers' credit card numbers mysteriously show up on the 'net.
News flash to all the "small" businesses out there: well-maintained computer infrastructure can replace 50% of your employees. Skimping on IT personnel is a stupid, stupid mistake. You can afford to have *both* a proper IT guy and a report-writing business grad. Despite their misleading marketing, Microsoft software is not a substitute for a qualified admin.
what purpose would it serve to send a man to Mars?
It would cut the umbilical cord, or at least extend it significantly. NASA has gotten too good at cost cutting and economic analysis. They don't even generate oxygen aboard ISS half of the time, just haul it up there on their interstellar semi-truck. So, what happens when transportation becomes uneconomical? Everything goes to shit. NASA is relying on the same flawed economics of transport and energy that causes crises like peak oil.
Anyone with even the most basic understanding of gravity knows that resources can't just be generated on earth and trucked into space, with the waste being trucked back down. That's not a sustainable strategy. Yet that's just what NASA has been doing for the past 25 years.
They act as though simply *being* in space were the goal. Good job, NASA, you've barely duplicated the efforts of your grandfathers, with less reliability.
The goal should be to put a person in space, and make him *stay* there.
The sad part is, the Russians were halfway to this goal before we got involved in their space station project.
And all the bitching about budgets is completely annoying. NASA doesn't exist to make money. They exist to do basic research. Yet their budget is barely enough to maintain the decades-old projects they currently have. They exist to design fuel cells that cost $1 million today, yet will be invaluable in the future. They exist to create things like photovoltaic cells and aquaculture, technologies that we may literally rely upon for our lives in the future.
Maybe NASA should be militarized. At least then they would have taskmasters with some sense of investment in the future. If not, de-orbiting a couple of satellites on the White House lawn should get them the funding they need to do the job they should be doing.
The context is that students pay to take classes and fail to understand even half of them, and for this they are praised and promoted and offered high-paying jobs, along with their professors.
The real mystery is more of an economic-political one. Why did such a large number of people essentially devote their lives to building monuments? How was it paid for? Did the pyramids possibly have some redeeming purpose other than as religious symbols? Why are pyramids on my money? How could leaders who have nothing better to spend money on than worthless make-work projects stay in power for so long?
If you read between the lines, they aren't talking about generators. They're talking about renewable energy.
We are getting closer and closer to the point at which commercial power cannot compete with renewable energy. In fact, we may already be at that point. Power companies are already investing in RE to hedge against rising fuel costs, and to provide peak loads.
The problem is: sunlight exists everywhere, wind exists everywhere. RE power technologies are reliable and low-maintenance. There is very little value that power companies can add. In fact, centralized generation may only add losses and unreliability.
If fossil fuels prices stay high, carbon controls will deal a crushing blow to commercial power companies. For US producers, coal mining is quickly becoming political nightmare. CHP, or co-generation, is also a rising threat. Centralization simply can't compete.
The only market commercial power operators will find in the new renewable power economy is managing and consulting for power that other people produce. Basically, systems like these will be competing with lead-acid batteries. Maybe they can do it. Personally, I think we'd be better-off scrapping the power lines for their aluminum and putting a windmill on every pole, but that's just me.
Yeah I'm talking about UserLinux. Admittedly, it's been a year since I'd looked at them. But, you have to admit, there was something to it at one time. Lots of Debian people were pissed that anyone would dare to build a distro on top of Debian without hiring them outright. UserLinux was ridiculed from the very beginning, because Bruce talked about "marketing" and "support" rather than "developing" and "collecting fees". The project was designed to extend Debian, rather than replace it. Ironically, it seems many Debian devs would have been less critical of a replacement. And the Ubuntu zealotry that followed was largely a response to this. Of course, that's just my perspective.
If anyone got involved in Debian in the hope of making money, then they're sadly deluded
Come on, now. Surely most Debian devs make money on Linux one way or another?
The concept of easement covers this. An easement is the right to encroach on property, typically for access, movement of goods (such as minerals, timber, and, somehow, electricity), picking fruit, as a source of water, all sorts of things. This right has a definite value, though less than the value of the land itself.
"I'd like compensation for DELETED, which consists of DELETED, and is worth DELETED on the market, because it's comparable to DELETED which costs DELETED yet is better because of DELETED improvements."
No power gives the government the ability to take property from you and give it to someone else without compensation. Yet, in this case, that is the result. Why? It's a loophole, and Lucent has exploited it marvelously.
Consider: The executive priviledge in question (and the court case cited) gives the government the ability to restrict the release of information deemed important to national security. That's all.
How did Lucent exploit this to their advantage? They promised to pay for the technology, signed contracts and everything. Then they simply didn't pay. Now, it's up to the screwed party in this case, the plaintiff, to sue for recompense. The plaintiff brings suit. And, in the course of the trial, the plaintiff requests discovery from Lucent to verify it's claims and help make it's case.
Uh-oh. Here's where Big Brother steps in. The government says "you can't talk about that" to the courts, and to both parties. Now what is the plaintiff supposed to do? What evidence can he use? There's probably a contract that details specific technology that they now can't disclose. If they blot out the parts that are sensitive, Lucent can use that to claim reasonable doubt. They can't investigate Lucent to find out that they actually took and used said technology, because Lucent can't reveal that information to the court. The plaintiff is completely screwed, against all logic and reason.
I especially love the quote from the Lucent representative: "You can't try this case in your publication". They understand the issues well enough to know how to screw people; and they did it intentionally.
This is becoming more and more common. I have high voltage power lines, 100 ft tall, in my back yard. Yet, I never gave permission to the power company to put them there. I rejected their low offer when they called to try to purchase an easement, and they said "fine". They never filed condemnation proceedings to take the land. They simply built the power lines illegally, over my objections. They can do this because, in Oklahoma, the constitution provides that the maximum damages for them doing so are the same as the cost of the easement. The most it will cost them is what a judge decides the easement is worth. But, now, it's up to me to file suit to get those damages, which means I'll probably just end up with their low offer minus attorney fees.
And they do this as a matter of course, to everyone. It's fascism by definition.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this and other military robots will most likely be used on civilians who resist military occupation.
Now you've found the grey area. And it's a *legal* grey area, because the legal precedents are not clear, not a technical one.
I believe the usual interpretation is that, if you write your code specifically for Linux, with Linux in mind, and it runs on no other OS, then, yes, pigs may fly and Linus could find a judge to force you to GPL your software, if he wanted to.
This is because the legal requirements have nothing to do with arbitrary technical boundaries like linking and API calls. The legal standard is whether your program is a "derivative work" of Linux or not. And the courts have come up with all sorts of cute little tests (like they do, because they're too stupid and lazy to actually determine anything on a case-by-case basis) to determine whether a work is "derived" or not.
As you can see, technically, this is an awful set of guidelines. But, remember, it has nothing to do with Linux or GPL specifically. This same set of awful guidelines applies to all licensed software.
In the real world, nobody worries about any of this because, unless you're writing binary kernel modules that cause hassle, nobody cares what calls your userland programs use. And, even if you're writing binary kernel modules, Linus has said he doesn't care and other kernel developers would have a hard time suing anybody without Linus.
And finally, it's clearly obvious that the "derived work" tests are archaic and have little relevance to Open Source software. Even a poor attorney could make a decent argument that APIs are there to facilitate use, that use is allowed by the GPL, and that such use does not constitute derivation.
Any idiot can see that "eudaimonia" means "good spirits".
Of course, I also have no doubt that your philosophy prof. spent an entire classperiod trying to convince you of his own pet interpretation. Probably a Republican too, I bet, huh? They tend to equate wealth with happiness...
Everybody knows that Catholics aren't Christian!
Seriously, though, you're right the Catholic church sold golden tickets into heaven for a long time. But it's not like that had anything to do with Jesus or anything.
They had that meeting. Half of them decided to try for consistency and the other half decided to go for completeness. The completeness half is doing great, but makes absolutely no sense. And the consistency half gave up and became atheists.
Autozone switched to Linux a while ago. They were the first ones sued by SCO, in fact.
This is just my observation, but I've always thought of Autozone as the "low end" auto parts retailer in the US. Their prices are always lowest. Their clerks tend to speak less English. Mechanics used to tell me to shop "anywhere but Autozone". I stopped going there a few years ago because they would constantly give me the wrong parts.
Recently, though, I've noticed a change. People are recommending Autozone to me. The last part I got there fit perfectly. The clerk actually knew what he was talking about. And they still have the lowest prices in town.
It just goes to show that, with Linux, cutting costs doesn't mean cutting functionality.
what effect will it have on the ecosystem?
That's easy. Hopefully, if these animals can reproduce, they will immediately be granted "protected" status and allowed to roam freely in North America. Any land that our prehistoric friends need will be cheerfully appropriated under the "eminent domain for extinct species" power that the Supreme Court will surely find in the Constitution.
Displaced humans will be herded into cities, to await terrorist attack, or catastrophic flood, peak oil, or bird flu. Politicians will constantly reassure us that these crises can be averted simply by working harder at our menial jobs.
Years later, when the giant prehistoric spiders become an entrenched threat, a new administration will decleare "War on Spiders" and work to cover up and downplay any government responsibility in creating the spiders to begin with. This new administration will entreat us to "make sacrifices" while cutting taxes and increasing handouts to former spider-creators. Battles fought in the "War on Spiders" will include attacks on Lithuania and East Timor, and strong verbal threats towards Nicaragua (all members of the "Axis of Spiders"), yet no actual spiders will be harmed. After years of stalemate, victory will be declared and troops quietly returned home to "work harder" and "make sacrifices".
I wonder the same thing about Christians sometimes.
He sites examples
cites. Sites are places. Cites are citations, things that you write or otherwise communicate.
Sorry, but I'm a grammar troll today.
Nice post. Something I've thought for a long time. But, at the same time, I think you may be seeing malice where there is none.
There are certainly those who belittle the "younger generation" for their own self-aggrandizement. But there are also those who are genuinely concerned for the future. I see them every day. Unfortunately, from a distance, the two tend to look alike.
The real old farts to be worried about, though, aren't the ones blogging about the demise of universal technical knowledge. Those who are really "out to get you" are the ones that sit quietly in the corner, bemoaning the rise of the "Clinton generation" and cheap, open communcations, and, of course everybody's favorite running jokes, "hackers" and "terrorists". They quietly work to bring back the days when "old men send young men to die in war". They push for the end of universal computing and widespread access to knowledge. They will happily ruin the economy via outsourcing, immigration, and dependence on foreign energy rather than give an inch to their own children.
Those are the ones that will have to be dragged into the streets and shot when the time comes, not old geeks that want kids to understand how microprocessors work.
Us geeks are the exception
Ugh. We geeks, not 'us'. Think "We are the exception".
That's what repair shops and 1-800 numbers are for.
Don't you mean Wal-Mart and the Chinese?
I made a similar realization when I noticed a banner ad for "News Blog", that pointed to a major print newspaper... on a blog site.
I *know* this guy is not an admin. He is MIS, at best. *Huge* difference. This guy gets paid to write reports and macros for applications for whatever software this businesses uses, clearly SAP, not to install or administer servers.
I mean, just listen to him. He outsources everything. He seriously believes all operating systems are the same. He complains about having to spend two days a month updating and testing. Then he goes on to include this work in an increased "total cost of ownership" for Linux, completely ignoring the fact that it's his job and he's being paid whether he does it or not. He doesn't know the difference between an application failure (core dump) and an OS failure (panic/oops). And, to top it all off, he thinks autopatching is a great feature.
Lots of "small" (multi-million dollar) businesses make the mistake this one has: they think they can get away with having just one "admin" who is really MIS, who spends all of his time dealing with the business side of things rather than the computing side. To maintain the illusion that this is a workable combination, they switch everything to Windows and spend almost as much on licensing and consultants as they would on a competent admin. Then they wonder why their customers' credit card numbers mysteriously show up on the 'net.
News flash to all the "small" businesses out there: well-maintained computer infrastructure can replace 50% of your employees. Skimping on IT personnel is a stupid, stupid mistake. You can afford to have *both* a proper IT guy and a report-writing business grad. Despite their misleading marketing, Microsoft software is not a substitute for a qualified admin.
what purpose would it serve to send a man to Mars?
It would cut the umbilical cord, or at least extend it significantly. NASA has gotten too good at cost cutting and economic analysis. They don't even generate oxygen aboard ISS half of the time, just haul it up there on their interstellar semi-truck. So, what happens when transportation becomes uneconomical? Everything goes to shit. NASA is relying on the same flawed economics of transport and energy that causes crises like peak oil.
Anyone with even the most basic understanding of gravity knows that resources can't just be generated on earth and trucked into space, with the waste being trucked back down. That's not a sustainable strategy. Yet that's just what NASA has been doing for the past 25 years.
They act as though simply *being* in space were the goal. Good job, NASA, you've barely duplicated the efforts of your grandfathers, with less reliability.
The goal should be to put a person in space, and make him *stay* there.
The sad part is, the Russians were halfway to this goal before we got involved in their space station project.
And all the bitching about budgets is completely annoying. NASA doesn't exist to make money. They exist to do basic research. Yet their budget is barely enough to maintain the decades-old projects they currently have. They exist to design fuel cells that cost $1 million today, yet will be invaluable in the future. They exist to create things like photovoltaic cells and aquaculture, technologies that we may literally rely upon for our lives in the future.
Maybe NASA should be militarized. At least then they would have taskmasters with some sense of investment in the future. If not, de-orbiting a couple of satellites on the White House lawn should get them the funding they need to do the job they should be doing.
numbers don't mean anything without context
The context is that students pay to take classes and fail to understand even half of them, and for this they are praised and promoted and offered high-paying jobs, along with their professors.
The real mystery is more of an economic-political one. Why did such a large number of people essentially devote their lives to building monuments? How was it paid for? Did the pyramids possibly have some redeeming purpose other than as religious symbols? Why are pyramids on my money? How could leaders who have nothing better to spend money on than worthless make-work projects stay in power for so long?
If you read between the lines, they aren't talking about generators. They're talking about renewable energy.
We are getting closer and closer to the point at which commercial power cannot compete with renewable energy. In fact, we may already be at that point. Power companies are already investing in RE to hedge against rising fuel costs, and to provide peak loads.
The problem is: sunlight exists everywhere, wind exists everywhere. RE power technologies are reliable and low-maintenance. There is very little value that power companies can add. In fact, centralized generation may only add losses and unreliability.
If fossil fuels prices stay high, carbon controls will deal a crushing blow to commercial power companies. For US producers, coal mining is quickly becoming political nightmare. CHP, or co-generation, is also a rising threat. Centralization simply can't compete.
The only market commercial power operators will find in the new renewable power economy is managing and consulting for power that other people produce. Basically, systems like these will be competing with lead-acid batteries. Maybe they can do it. Personally, I think we'd be better-off scrapping the power lines for their aluminum and putting a windmill on every pole, but that's just me.
What little group?
Yeah I'm talking about UserLinux. Admittedly, it's been a year since I'd looked at them. But, you have to admit, there was something to it at one time. Lots of Debian people were pissed that anyone would dare to build a distro on top of Debian without hiring them outright. UserLinux was ridiculed from the very beginning, because Bruce talked about "marketing" and "support" rather than "developing" and "collecting fees". The project was designed to extend Debian, rather than replace it. Ironically, it seems many Debian devs would have been less critical of a replacement. And the Ubuntu zealotry that followed was largely a response to this. Of course, that's just my perspective.
If anyone got involved in Debian in the hope of making money, then they're sadly deluded
Come on, now. Surely most Debian devs make money on Linux one way or another?
Where did you get that idea from? The article doesn't say that.
:)
It seems to be all the rage nowadays. And, yeah, the article was quite vague. Admittedly, I'm a little touchy about it. It was a rant, what can I say?
why the random attack?
Warning shot
The concept of easement covers this. An easement is the right to encroach on property, typically for access, movement of goods (such as minerals, timber, and, somehow, electricity), picking fruit, as a source of water, all sorts of things. This right has a definite value, though less than the value of the land itself.
Oh yes they are.
More specifically, though, a patent is a contract, between you and government. It has value. It is certainly property.
More importantly, they don't have to say anything at all. They can say "ahh.. Fifth Amendment" and that's the end of it.
And what are they supposed to say?
"I'd like compensation for DELETED, which consists of DELETED, and is worth DELETED on the market, because it's comparable to DELETED which costs DELETED yet is better because of DELETED improvements."
No power gives the government the ability to take property from you and give it to someone else without compensation. Yet, in this case, that is the result. Why? It's a loophole, and Lucent has exploited it marvelously.
Consider: The executive priviledge in question (and the court case cited) gives the government the ability to restrict the release of information deemed important to national security. That's all.
How did Lucent exploit this to their advantage? They promised to pay for the technology, signed contracts and everything. Then they simply didn't pay. Now, it's up to the screwed party in this case, the plaintiff, to sue for recompense. The plaintiff brings suit. And, in the course of the trial, the plaintiff requests discovery from Lucent to verify it's claims and help make it's case.
Uh-oh. Here's where Big Brother steps in. The government says "you can't talk about that" to the courts, and to both parties. Now what is the plaintiff supposed to do? What evidence can he use? There's probably a contract that details specific technology that they now can't disclose. If they blot out the parts that are sensitive, Lucent can use that to claim reasonable doubt. They can't investigate Lucent to find out that they actually took and used said technology, because Lucent can't reveal that information to the court. The plaintiff is completely screwed, against all logic and reason.
I especially love the quote from the Lucent representative: "You can't try this case in your publication". They understand the issues well enough to know how to screw people; and they did it intentionally.
This is becoming more and more common. I have high voltage power lines, 100 ft tall, in my back yard. Yet, I never gave permission to the power company to put them there. I rejected their low offer when they called to try to purchase an easement, and they said "fine". They never filed condemnation proceedings to take the land. They simply built the power lines illegally, over my objections. They can do this because, in Oklahoma, the constitution provides that the maximum damages for them doing so are the same as the cost of the easement. The most it will cost them is what a judge decides the easement is worth. But, now, it's up to me to file suit to get those damages, which means I'll probably just end up with their low offer minus attorney fees.
And they do this as a matter of course, to everyone. It's fascism by definition.