I've been trying to find a logical and well-reasoned response to your post. I'm afraid the best I could come up with is, nobody cares about you and your fucking plane!
Seriously, what you describe seems to me to be a bit of a contrived situation. If most tech support was conducted under that sort of time pressure, I'd agree with you. Or even, if most tech support involved installing scanner, that might also be true. But the situation you describe is not the norm. So it doesn't matter how long it would have taken for you to help your friend out with this particular problem.
I could easily contrive a situation where you went round just before your flight and she said, "my PC is infested with viruses and spyware, and I think something is deleting files from my hard-drive". You might very well miss your flight trying to sort the mess out. By your definition, that makes Windows unsuitable for the masses. And of course virus problems are more common that installing scanners, I guess. But then again, by your argument, Windows would be suitable for the desktop if you had turned up an hour earlier, because then you'd have had time to go to the store and buy Norton anti-virus etc and install it and run it. But then again, Windows would have been unsuitable for the desktop if your friend lived too far from the nearest Staples. Et cetera.
But a few years ago, checkers was solved as a mathematical problem. There is a computer program that can play a perfect game of checkers, all the time. That project was headed by Jonathan Schaeffer, one of the people involved in this Poker AI project.
Checkers has not been "solved" and will not be for a very long time. What Schaeffer did was to beat the World Champion with his program, Chinook. You can read about this in his excellent book, "One Jump Ahead". I highly recommend this book.
I'll ask the question again: Is this how the Open Source movement is going to seek legitimacy? By attempting to blackmail people?
This is a meaningless question. This is one group of people. Why do you think that what they are doing is indicative of what the Open Source movement is going to do?
I honestly believe that, even in US, GPL is not exactly enforceable
I'm not sure I can agree with this, unless you mean that it is practically very difficult to get money out of organizations that are thousands of times richer than you are.
As a licence, I believe that the GPL is as strong as any other licence. Essentially, it says that it gives you more rights over the software than you would have if the licence wasn't present. Of course, you're not obliged to accept the licence, which grants you these extra rights. However, if you decide not to accept the GPL, the position on your rights to the software "falls back" to the default position, which is that you can't do anything with the software without breaching the copyright.
The GPL has been around for more than fifteen years, and not one organization has dared to challenge it in court. That tells its own story, I believe.
Does the article say how the GPL differs from an EULA in this regard? In other words, what is it about the GPL which means that the authors might be liable when they are not if their work is released under an EULA?
SCO does not lay claim to the Sequent code. IBM owns that free and clear. SCO's opinion is that because it was first integrated to AIX, it is a derivative work of UNIX, and can not be released to anyone without a UNIX liscense. But SCO does not lay claim to it, since they did not write it.
Thanks for clearing that up. I should have been more precise about that.
But I'd love to hear the Professor's views on the evidence that has emerged thus far. As far as I can see, SCO's case revolves around developments at IBM and Sequent (now owned by IBM). They have talked about RCU and NUMA and JFS and something else I have forgotten. It seems that what SCO have shown so far is equivalent to this: IBM devise a new scheme for (eg) scheduling in the kernel. They implement this new scheme in AIX, sell it to some customers and everyone (including SCO) is happy. Later on, IBM conceives its Linux strategy. They then port their new XYZ scheduling scheme to Linux, offer it to Linus and eventually it gets merged into the Kernel. Now SCO comes along and says that IBM has no right to incorporate it into Linux because it belongs to SCO. The fact that the original technology licensed to IBM has got nothing like XYZ scheduling in it doesn't matter to SCO; as far as they're concerned, since IBM incorporated it into AIX first, the technology belongs to SCO.
All of this begs the question as to what SCO have been showing to their independent experts. Suppose they grab the code for XYZ scheduling, as seen in AIX. Then they grab the code for XYZ scheduling, as seen in Linux. Obviously, these two pieces of code, are going to be a pretty good match, even down to the comments. They tell the independent consultants that the former is System V code (because SCO claims that everything that was ever added to AIX belongs to them). And they tell the consultants that the latter is from kernel 2.4.XX. So the independent consultants, in all good faith, report that there is a match between "SCO code" and Linux code. My bet is that this is what SCO have been doing. I believe that this is the reason for SCO wanting people to sign NDAs. They can't risk anyone who knows anything about the kernel saying exactly what the code represents. It is in their interests to fudge the issue of where the code has come from. If some random hacker has grabbed the original SVR4 code and slipped some of it into a patch that has found its way into the Kernel, that could occasion some sympathy for SCO (not $3bn or even $1bn worth of sympathy). If that is the case, it looks like code that SCO originally paid for is being used without SCO being compensated. On the other hand, if it's IBM's implementation of XYZ for AIX, which they have ported to XYZ for Linux, then SCO's case is dead in the water, and SCO knows it.
It is oversimplifying the issues to talk about "Intellectual Property". There is no body of law which deals with "Intellectual Property". There is patent law, there is copyright law, there is trademark law, and there are other laws. All of these bodies of law are different. SCO is trying to obfuscate the issue by using the term "Intellectual Property". They started the dispute claiming that IBM had breached their contract with SCO by revealing trade secrets to the Linux community. Recently, Linus Torvalds was criticized for saying that he didn't care about patents. Now SCO are claiming that they own the copyright for certain parts of the kernel. Needless to say, they have made no attempt whatsoever to prove any of these assertions. The use of the term "Intellectual Property" in this context constitutes fraud. It's well worth reading this article on the use of the term "intellectual property".
I have no mod points to give, friend, but if I did, I'd mod you +1 Insightful. I hope that many critics of RMS here will read your message and be ashamed of their attitude.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I have three sisters and a Mother. My Mother and youngest sister have never installed software on their PCs. They still use the SW that came with their respective boxes. Of my other two sisters, one is very confident and messes aroung a lot (she was an OS/2 user). The other meddles a bit, but isn't really confident and doesn't know what she's doing. I think that Linux or Lindows would be GREAT for my Mum and youngest sister, because it just works. They are what I call "newbies". The other two, who are far more advanced in their use of computers would probably not be suited by Linux or Lindows, because they are not newbies; from time to time they will want to install new software and may struggle because of that.
Why? If you bought your Mum a PC and bought MS Office, would you just hand her the CDs, or would you install it for her? My Mum has never installed any software on her machine. If she wants new software, my sister installs it for her.
crafty is not a bad program. It's one of the best amateurs out there. Certainly it's not as strong as Fritz, but so what? You could say that about >95% of all chess programs. Only someone who doesn't know what they're talking about would call it a bad program.
I take your point, but this is just one area of activity. Fighting the abuse of monopolies has to happen, of course. But I believe that it's important that governments shouldn't help to create monopolies. The GPL gives a convenient mechanism for this.
There are many people here posting that the GPL is inappropriate for government-funded projects because it makes it harder for commercial organizations to make money from government-funded software. This position is, I believe, untenable in a market where an abusive monopoly exists. Here is an example which I have posted to Slashdot before:
Suppose I am a government funded researcher. To be precise, people and businesses in my country pay their taxes and the government awards me some of this money to fund a new software system. Suppose my system is useful for SMEs to quickly help them to communicate opportunities to do business. It doesn't matter what it does exactly; the key is that there is communication between different organizations and that this is facilitated by my government-funded project. If I GPL this software, everyone in the country gets to use the software. If you're so inclined, you could go into business to try to make money from the software; you could improve the interface, or make it easier to search for partnerships, or whatever. Of course, you must GPL your changes, but you might be the clear leaders in the installation and configuration of this SW, so you could make some money. In any case, whether you can make money or not, the taxpayers do not lose out.
Suppose now that the software is released into the public domain, or even under a BSD licence. Suppose further that half-a-dozen firms spot a market opportunity to improve this project and make a commercial product out of the system. This is fine in principle, but if one of those six firms is Microsoft, we have an immediate problem. MS could decide to integrate the system into MS Outlook; perhaps the system uses email to communicate opportunities. We still have no problem of course, because there are five other competitors, any of whom could come up with a better approach to improving the product. Perhaps some of them will flourish in organizations which do not use Outlook for whatever reason.
However, if MS wishes to, they can simply make a subtle change to the protocol used by their version of the software. Because MS Windows is universal, this new protocol becomes the de facto standard. Of course, even this wouldn't be a problem, so long as MS published their changes to the protocol.
Suppose however that MS declines to publish their changes to the protocol. Our five other competitors are pushed out, and whatever money there is to be made from the software will accrue to Microsoft. For all I know, MS are paying a huge amount of tax, and perhaps they should have the opportunity to make a killing like this. The problem is that all the other taxpayers get to pay twice; they funded the original software with their taxes. And now if they want to get the benefit from the money they "invested" before, they have to pay again, this time to Microsoft. Of course you could argue that MS might have made significant improvements, but I don't think that argument holds, because they wouldn't have to make any useful changes to effectively require taxpayers to pay again for what they have already funded. All Microsoft needs to do is to make some subtle and unimportant and secret change to the communication protocol and they've made an instant market for themselves (or, more accurately, they've damaged another market).
I think that this is the key problem with BSD and public domain licensing for taxpayer-funded software.
I think I'm beginning to get a handle on what has happened here. Suppose I license Unix from SCO and create my own version called AndyIX. Subsequently, I get my hands on some cool NUMA hardware and decide I'm going to port AndyIX to this new system. A little while later, I end up with something like this:
My customers are really happy with this, and I make a bit of cash out of it. A few years later, I decide to port Linux to run on this nice NUMA hardware; of course I'll GPL my changes (blah blah blah) but my plan is to sell services to customers who want to run Linux rather than AndyIX on this HW. So, I adapt blah blah blah to Linux's way of doing things (leaving most of the comments unchanged of course). Eventually, I submit the new version of blah blah blah to the appropriate member of the Kernel team and the code is incorporated into the Linus's official kernel tree.
So now SCO come along and say that they own blah blah blah, because I implemented it into AndyIX first. As far as I can see, this seems to be the basis of SCO's "case". If the GPL is "viral", then SCO's Unix licence must surely qualify as a WMD?!
So it's patents now? SCO don't have any patents that are relevant. If they did, they would have included reference to them in their lawsuit. This is premium-quality BS. The "issue" that SCO has is that IBM and other UNIX licensees have been GPL-ing and submitting stuff that SCO claims is their intellectual property. If this is what has been happening, that cannot be Torvalds' fault. The fault (if any) lies with the submitters. It's not unreasonable for Torvalds to assume that if a patch comes from IBM that IBM has the right to submit it.
Essentially, what SCO is now saying is that if you license UNIX, any ideas that you (perfectly legally) incorporate into your version of Unix belong to SCO, because... well because of course, you couldn't have created it without SCO's huge contribution. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call "shenanigans" at this point.
Incidentally, I would point to this link, where the FSF argue that the term "intellectual property" is not useful - because it can be used by disreputable organizations (like SCO for example) to confuse matters relating to copyright, patents, trade secrets etc.
He's prepared to take legal action if the guys who walked out fork the code and call the new product JBoss. I understand the Fleury's organization has trademarked "JBoss".
You're right that you didn't say they deserved sympathy. I inferred that from the phrase, "saddled with the hobbyist-oriented GPL license that forces companies to part with their intellectual property". I was reacting (over-reacting, if you like) to the word "forces".
This is what you said originally:
If Linksys had built their routers around BSD, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess that might force them to give away their source code.
What I am trying to say is that this was a choice that they made. Either they chose to create the product using GPLed code, or they chose a supplier which used GPLed code. If they have to give away the source code, that is because of a choice they made. It is not the licence that forces them to distribute the source code (assuming that a breach of the GPL has indeed taken place); it is their decision to use material that is released under a licence which requires this.
Are you serious? They want to sell routers, but you think that it's not their fault if their technology-supplier breached a licence? What are you talking about? What do you think would happen to them if their suppliers had appropriated Microsoft's copyrighted material and put it into their routers? Are you suggesting that an organization that buys technology without checking its provenance is deserving of sympathy or support?
All of this is supposition of course. As I stated, they are only obliged to distribute their source under the terms of the GPL, if they chose to use GPLed software. Arguments about where they obtained the software are completely irrelevant.
Re:No wonder you post anonymously.
on
FreeBSD 5.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
If Linksys had built their routers around BSD, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess that might force them to give away their source code.
I think you meant to say, "if Linksys had taken the trouble to read the licence of the code they wanted to use, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess...".
The GPL doesn't force them to give away their code. They chose to use software which has a licence which requires them to make their code available if it is linked to the GPLed material. The key thing is the choice that they made. One of the provisions of the GPL is that the Licence itself should be provided with the software, so that someone who wishes to use the SW will not be in any doubt about their obligations. They had the Licence; if they ignored it, that was their choice and any problems they have now are their fault.
None of this is to doubt the quality of FreeBSD, and nor would I want to criticize people who want to distribute their software under a BSD-ish licence. It's up to the copyright-holder - anyone who wants to use the copyright-holder's material has to abide by the licence they chose. It's very simple really.
It seems every other week some poor embedded device company is being tarred and feathered for allegedly breaking the terms of the GPL.
But there's no risk really. Any professional organization will read the licences of any copyrighted material they want to use in their products. If there's a problem with what a professional organization wishes to do with GPLed material, they will decide not to use it and look elsewhere. That is their choice.
A company that gets into trouble for using GPLed software without releasing the source is not "poor" in the sense of deserving sympathy.
I hope there are still some people reading, but not enough to slashdot this site. I was mooching around the Beagle 2 mission site and found a link to Starsem, the Russian company that provided the launcher. They have the user manual for the Soyuz-Fregat launcher online!! How cool is that? Caution, it's an 8MB download.
It's not the same story. The one before was about discovering how geckos stick to things. This one is about synthesizing a kind of sticky tape which uses the same "approach".
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to find a logical and well-reasoned response to your post. I'm afraid the best I could come up with is, nobody cares about you and your fucking plane!
Seriously, what you describe seems to me to be a bit of a contrived situation. If most tech support was conducted under that sort of time pressure, I'd agree with you. Or even, if most tech support involved installing scanner, that might also be true. But the situation you describe is not the norm. So it doesn't matter how long it would have taken for you to help your friend out with this particular problem.
I could easily contrive a situation where you went round just before your flight and she said, "my PC is infested with viruses and spyware, and I think something is deleting files from my hard-drive". You might very well miss your flight trying to sort the mess out. By your definition, that makes Windows unsuitable for the masses. And of course virus problems are more common that installing scanners, I guess. But then again, by your argument, Windows would be suitable for the desktop if you had turned up an hour earlier, because then you'd have had time to go to the store and buy Norton anti-virus etc and install it and run it. But then again, Windows would have been unsuitable for the desktop if your friend lived too far from the nearest Staples. Et cetera.
Could you be more specific as to what you see as the big differences between the best Linux desktop you've tried and Windows?
Checkers has not been "solved" and will not be for a very long time. What Schaeffer did was to beat the World Champion with his program, Chinook. You can read about this in his excellent book, "One Jump Ahead". I highly recommend this book.
This is a meaningless question. This is one group of people. Why do you think that what they are doing is indicative of what the Open Source movement is going to do?
I'm not sure I can agree with this, unless you mean that it is practically very difficult to get money out of organizations that are thousands of times richer than you are.
As a licence, I believe that the GPL is as strong as any other licence. Essentially, it says that it gives you more rights over the software than you would have if the licence wasn't present. Of course, you're not obliged to accept the licence, which grants you these extra rights. However, if you decide not to accept the GPL, the position on your rights to the software "falls back" to the default position, which is that you can't do anything with the software without breaching the copyright.
The GPL has been around for more than fifteen years, and not one organization has dared to challenge it in court. That tells its own story, I believe.
Does the article say how the GPL differs from an EULA in this regard? In other words, what is it about the GPL which means that the authors might be liable when they are not if their work is released under an EULA?
Thanks for clearing that up. I should have been more precise about that.
But I'd love to hear the Professor's views on the evidence that has emerged thus far. As far as I can see, SCO's case revolves around developments at IBM and Sequent (now owned by IBM). They have talked about RCU and NUMA and JFS and something else I have forgotten. It seems that what SCO have shown so far is equivalent to this: IBM devise a new scheme for (eg) scheduling in the kernel. They implement this new scheme in AIX, sell it to some customers and everyone (including SCO) is happy. Later on, IBM conceives its Linux strategy. They then port their new XYZ scheduling scheme to Linux, offer it to Linus and eventually it gets merged into the Kernel. Now SCO comes along and says that IBM has no right to incorporate it into Linux because it belongs to SCO. The fact that the original technology licensed to IBM has got nothing like XYZ scheduling in it doesn't matter to SCO; as far as they're concerned, since IBM incorporated it into AIX first, the technology belongs to SCO.
All of this begs the question as to what SCO have been showing to their independent experts. Suppose they grab the code for XYZ scheduling, as seen in AIX. Then they grab the code for XYZ scheduling, as seen in Linux. Obviously, these two pieces of code, are going to be a pretty good match, even down to the comments. They tell the independent consultants that the former is System V code (because SCO claims that everything that was ever added to AIX belongs to them). And they tell the consultants that the latter is from kernel 2.4.XX. So the independent consultants, in all good faith, report that there is a match between "SCO code" and Linux code. My bet is that this is what SCO have been doing. I believe that this is the reason for SCO wanting people to sign NDAs. They can't risk anyone who knows anything about the kernel saying exactly what the code represents. It is in their interests to fudge the issue of where the code has come from. If some random hacker has grabbed the original SVR4 code and slipped some of it into a patch that has found its way into the Kernel, that could occasion some sympathy for SCO (not $3bn or even $1bn worth of sympathy). If that is the case, it looks like code that SCO originally paid for is being used without SCO being compensated. On the other hand, if it's IBM's implementation of XYZ for AIX, which they have ported to XYZ for Linux, then SCO's case is dead in the water, and SCO knows it.
It is oversimplifying the issues to talk about "Intellectual Property". There is no body of law which deals with "Intellectual Property". There is patent law, there is copyright law, there is trademark law, and there are other laws. All of these bodies of law are different. SCO is trying to obfuscate the issue by using the term "Intellectual Property". They started the dispute claiming that IBM had breached their contract with SCO by revealing trade secrets to the Linux community. Recently, Linus Torvalds was criticized for saying that he didn't care about patents. Now SCO are claiming that they own the copyright for certain parts of the kernel. Needless to say, they have made no attempt whatsoever to prove any of these assertions. The use of the term "Intellectual Property" in this context constitutes fraud. It's well worth reading this article on the use of the term "intellectual property".
I have no mod points to give, friend, but if I did, I'd mod you +1 Insightful. I hope that many critics of RMS here will read your message and be ashamed of their attitude.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I have three sisters and a Mother. My Mother and youngest sister have never installed software on their PCs. They still use the SW that came with their respective boxes. Of my other two sisters, one is very confident and messes aroung a lot (she was an OS/2 user). The other meddles a bit, but isn't really confident and doesn't know what she's doing. I think that Linux or Lindows would be GREAT for my Mum and youngest sister, because it just works. They are what I call "newbies". The other two, who are far more advanced in their use of computers would probably not be suited by Linux or Lindows, because they are not newbies; from time to time they will want to install new software and may struggle because of that.
Why? If you bought your Mum a PC and bought MS Office, would you just hand her the CDs, or would you install it for her? My Mum has never installed any software on her machine. If she wants new software, my sister installs it for her.
crafty is not a bad program. It's one of the best amateurs out there. Certainly it's not as strong as Fritz, but so what? You could say that about >95% of all chess programs. Only someone who doesn't know what they're talking about would call it a bad program.
Deep Blue had 480 special-purpose chess CPUs.
I take your point, but this is just one area of activity. Fighting the abuse of monopolies has to happen, of course. But I believe that it's important that governments shouldn't help to create monopolies. The GPL gives a convenient mechanism for this.
Suppose I am a government funded researcher. To be precise, people and businesses in my country pay their taxes and the government awards me some of this money to fund a new software system. Suppose my system is useful for SMEs to quickly help them to communicate opportunities to do business. It doesn't matter what it does exactly; the key is that there is communication between different organizations and that this is facilitated by my government-funded project. If I GPL this software, everyone in the country gets to use the software. If you're so inclined, you could go into business to try to make money from the software; you could improve the interface, or make it easier to search for partnerships, or whatever. Of course, you must GPL your changes, but you might be the clear leaders in the installation and configuration of this SW, so you could make some money. In any case, whether you can make money or not, the taxpayers do not lose out.
Suppose now that the software is released into the public domain, or even under a BSD licence. Suppose further that half-a-dozen firms spot a market opportunity to improve this project and make a commercial product out of the system. This is fine in principle, but if one of those six firms is Microsoft, we have an immediate problem. MS could decide to integrate the system into MS Outlook; perhaps the system uses email to communicate opportunities. We still have no problem of course, because there are five other competitors, any of whom could come up with a better approach to improving the product. Perhaps some of them will flourish in organizations which do not use Outlook for whatever reason.
However, if MS wishes to, they can simply make a subtle change to the protocol used by their version of the software. Because MS Windows is universal, this new protocol becomes the de facto standard. Of course, even this wouldn't be a problem, so long as MS published their changes to the protocol.
Suppose however that MS declines to publish their changes to the protocol. Our five other competitors are pushed out, and whatever money there is to be made from the software will accrue to Microsoft. For all I know, MS are paying a huge amount of tax, and perhaps they should have the opportunity to make a killing like this. The problem is that all the other taxpayers get to pay twice; they funded the original software with their taxes. And now if they want to get the benefit from the money they "invested" before, they have to pay again, this time to Microsoft. Of course you could argue that MS might have made significant improvements, but I don't think that argument holds, because they wouldn't have to make any useful changes to effectively require taxpayers to pay again for what they have already funded. All Microsoft needs to do is to make some subtle and unimportant and secret change to the communication protocol and they've made an instant market for themselves (or, more accurately, they've damaged another market).
I think that this is the key problem with BSD and public domain licensing for taxpayer-funded software.
So now SCO come along and say that they own blah blah blah, because I implemented it into AndyIX first. As far as I can see, this seems to be the basis of SCO's "case". If the GPL is "viral", then SCO's Unix licence must surely qualify as a WMD?!
So it's patents now? SCO don't have any patents that are relevant. If they did, they would have included reference to them in their lawsuit. This is premium-quality BS. The "issue" that SCO has is that IBM and other UNIX licensees have been GPL-ing and submitting stuff that SCO claims is their intellectual property. If this is what has been happening, that cannot be Torvalds' fault. The fault (if any) lies with the submitters. It's not unreasonable for Torvalds to assume that if a patch comes from IBM that IBM has the right to submit it.
Essentially, what SCO is now saying is that if you license UNIX, any ideas that you (perfectly legally) incorporate into your version of Unix belong to SCO, because... well because of course, you couldn't have created it without SCO's huge contribution. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call "shenanigans" at this point.
Incidentally, I would point to this link, where the FSF argue that the term "intellectual property" is not useful - because it can be used by disreputable organizations (like SCO for example) to confuse matters relating to copyright, patents, trade secrets etc.
He's prepared to take legal action if the guys who walked out fork the code and call the new product JBoss. I understand the Fleury's organization has trademarked "JBoss".
This is what you said originally:
What I am trying to say is that this was a choice that they made. Either they chose to create the product using GPLed code, or they chose a supplier which used GPLed code. If they have to give away the source code, that is because of a choice they made. It is not the licence that forces them to distribute the source code (assuming that a breach of the GPL has indeed taken place); it is their decision to use material that is released under a licence which requires this.
Are you serious? They want to sell routers, but you think that it's not their fault if their technology-supplier breached a licence? What are you talking about? What do you think would happen to them if their suppliers had appropriated Microsoft's copyrighted material and put it into their routers? Are you suggesting that an organization that buys technology without checking its provenance is deserving of sympathy or support?
All of this is supposition of course. As I stated, they are only obliged to distribute their source under the terms of the GPL, if they chose to use GPLed software. Arguments about where they obtained the software are completely irrelevant.
I think you meant to say, "if Linksys had taken the trouble to read the licence of the code they wanted to use, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess...".
The GPL doesn't force them to give away their code. They chose to use software which has a licence which requires them to make their code available if it is linked to the GPLed material. The key thing is the choice that they made. One of the provisions of the GPL is that the Licence itself should be provided with the software, so that someone who wishes to use the SW will not be in any doubt about their obligations. They had the Licence; if they ignored it, that was their choice and any problems they have now are their fault.
None of this is to doubt the quality of FreeBSD, and nor would I want to criticize people who want to distribute their software under a BSD-ish licence. It's up to the copyright-holder - anyone who wants to use the copyright-holder's material has to abide by the licence they chose. It's very simple really.
But there's no risk really. Any professional organization will read the licences of any copyrighted material they want to use in their products. If there's a problem with what a professional organization wishes to do with GPLed material, they will decide not to use it and look elsewhere. That is their choice.
A company that gets into trouble for using GPLed software without releasing the source is not "poor" in the sense of deserving sympathy.
I hope there are still some people reading, but not enough to slashdot this site. I was mooching around the Beagle 2 mission site and found a link to Starsem, the Russian company that provided the launcher. They have the user manual for the Soyuz-Fregat launcher online!! How cool is that? Caution, it's an 8MB download.
It's not the same story. The one before was about discovering how geckos stick to things. This one is about synthesizing a kind of sticky tape which uses the same "approach".