I think this could be a little misleading. There is no link between patents and copyright. A work of art is copyrighted: a computer program, being a work (source code) is copyrighted like a novel or song is copyrighted. The fact that the software may be a clever invention is not why it is copyrighted. It is copyrighted because someone wrote it (although an author can elect to forgo copyright). What I think is a little misleading is the term "specific implementation", because it may imply a link between the patent and the copyright.
And besides, if computing moves away from code executing on local CPUs and onto central servers to be accessed by web clients (the "cloud"), than even GPL code modified by,for example, Google is not distributed, so the patches are not mandatorily available under GPL either.
Tonight I helped a friend set up openoffice. The laptop was quite a new Acer. The download speed was really slow then I realised that power saving was turned on even though I had plugged in the power (and throttling the wifi). Finally I got it working. Clicking on the task bar thing at the bottom caused pop-up menus to be drawn that didn't properly erase. Using the internet browser seemed really sluggish. So what OS doesn't handle changes in power states, leaves rubbish on the screen, has a slow web browser... it was Windows XP. Debian is really so much better. The only good thing that happened is the openoffice database from my wife's Mac worked immediately on the Windows machine. So it was a very convincing evening of open source superiority. Seeing Windows running on the OLPC hardware is going to be something to see; I'd almost pay for the entertainment value.
Firstly to Slashdot editors, thanks for posting this article.
I went to a poor rural high school a long time ago. When I was 12, a teacher somehow got an Apple II. It stayed in the staff room. Magically, the same teacher who bought the computer put the manuals in the school library. I discovered the Apple manuals one day, and I started reading about programming. A few weeks later, I was given access to the machine and off I went; that started me on a path that took me to my country's best university and then all over the world. That was just because I found a book on programming. Imagine how much more wonderful it will be when someone like me, in Nigeria or Uruguay, can use a real computer right away. They may be only one in a hundred kids like this, but it's one in every hundred kids, not just one in a hundred western kids, and now more of them will get connected to computers they can actually start programming on. This is amazingly great project.
I think the Microsoft licences are really impressive. Short, easy to read, and it seems obvious to me why they were approved. These Microsoft licences would be a good first read for someone trying to understand more sophisticated licences, like GPL v2 or v3. In fact memo to myself to carry out that exercise, to see what the value-add of the GPL v2 is. Perhaps the challenge should be to find an even short and simpler OSI compliant licence.
The licence is there, anyone can use it. I wonder how much barrier there will be to using a licence with Microsoft in the name, just because of that.
"It's worth remembering that truly free markets are truly unstable and lead to monopoly"
Can you give us an example of a monopoly that has existed without government support? The Roman Catholic Church, Western Europe, for a few centuries:-)
Instead of all the communist central planning nonsense trying to come up with ever cleverer politburo schemes, we should have a Market-Based Scheduler: CPU resources should be auctioned every 100ms. Let the market decide.
Which also requires the uTorrent tree to contain no code from the open tree written by someone who doesn't want uTorrent to go closed source, I suppose. So even though bittorrent was open source, perhaps it had little community involvement. Or perhaps uTorrent is completely written from scratch, but this seems unlikely.
But contributions from other authors are the copyright of those other authors. So to take a GPL project to closed-source, all contributors with code in the now-closed source would need to agree, right?
The law on this is a bit complex in Australia, because the rules are determined by precedent (case law or common law). An auction with a reserve price is treated differently in English & Australian common law than an auction without a reserve price. A reserve price indicates a definite intention to sell. If there is a definite intention to sell and a definite intention to buy, you basically have a contract.
please see my other reply: it is not stupid (in general, people are not stupid; otherwise the sabre-tooth tigers would be running the planet). It could be wrong (but not for stupid reasons), or it could be that you don't understand the arguments. But to summarise, what you perhaps forget is that if we force a move to open standards, what about existing documents? Converting them all to a new format will also be "huge dollars", and if you don't want to pay, the huge amount of documents existing before the new format is introduced still have the same problem, still needing a solution. To use your colorful language, the "bullshit problem" must be faced anyway; you can't solve it for free just by mandating open document formats. Conversion of all existing documents to open formats is a possible solution, but I really doubt it is the best way to spend money.
To answer your question, I don't think a mass migration to open document formats is going to happen. This is because
firstly, the benefits occur only in the distant future (no one seriously sees a near-term problem with reading MS Word formats)
secondly, moving the massive amount of existing documents into a new format will certainly be way too expensive, so we anyway need a more cost-effective way to access to potentially obsolete documents. I don't agree that formats become obsolete; a format is a specification. Implementations of formats may become obsolete.
It is fine to plan for the future, but to solve problems, decisions and investments need to be made, and these are based on the relative merits of alternatives. You quote from my earlier post "of course they charge for it" as if this is a damning indictment of my position, but deciding that from Jan 1 2008 open formats must be used is no solution to the problem before Jan 1 2008. A solution is needed and it will cost money. The solution I propose is cheap. Not free, but cheap. Once such a solution is chosen, it unfortunately undermines the benefits of changing to open document formats, because the cheap solution for the problem before Jan 1 2008 is now virtually a free solution for the future (virtually free because you already have it).
Plenty of other people will point out the risk of obsolete data is not just in the format, but in the storage mechanism. Open formats only address part of the problem. They don't solve the obsolete implementation problem.
All in all, imposing open document formats is not a very compelling argument as a way to spend tax-payers' money. Ideologically, I agree 100% with it, by the way (I am a Debian user), but the decisions about imposing ideologies on the whole community should be left to the democratic process.
Some people invest thousands of dollars in beautiful dinner sets. Over time, things break, and sometimes manufacturers stop making certain patterns, so when you want to buy a replacement sugar bowl, too bad. The market has a solution: there are companies that specialise in old, out of production pieces (they stockpile when manufacturers give end of life notice). Of course, they charge for it. It is easy to imagine virtual machine specialists who run virtual versions of old operating systems and architectures. Personally, I hope that public libraries (or museums) will also provide something like this, but I don't fear a lack of reasonable affordable private enterprise solutions.
Since I can run various Sinclair Spectrum emulators in Java, including archives of many games, I am sure that you can easily find a C64 emulator.
I thought copyright expired 50 years after the death of the copyright owner, not 50 years after publication of the work. How is Cliff Richard going to lose royalties when he is still alive?
Half way through the interview I slammed on the mental brakes. Linux is so famous for getting more from old hardware. My Debian distribution boots much more quickly than Windows. And waiting for me in apt-get an upgrade to a new kernel with a new "fair" scheduler. After slamming the brakes, I didn't get off the bus though. Con is a great guy, looking for 120% activity in his life. His insights are more to do with kernel development than Linux on the desktop. Con: Success with your further endeavors, and for sure you will find something related to computers quite soon. An Amiga user never gets that out of their system.
Ho ho: the funny thing is that all the countries pointed out as doing better than the US have a significant difference: until recently, they had government-owned monopoly telecoms. Even after privitisation, the former government telecom operator nearly always maintains a highly dominant position because they kept a very good hold on the copper wire. The battle between new players and the one heaveyweight is one of market share, and it plays out in broadband deployment. Typically the former monopoly races to get ADSL penetration (which uses the copper wire) and the newcomers race to deploy a parallel infrastructure (cable). Various government regulations spur on this investment, because the genuine intent of privitisation was to build competition, and in every case I can think of, it was decided that they way to meet this objective was for new players to build cable networks. I think the massive increase in broadband access seen in European countries is a side effect of this one-off investment in duplicate infrastructure.
Markets do not hate to be free. Markets have buyers and sellers, and often a monopoly on one side is most definitely not in the interest of the other side. Perhaps you mean sellers hate to be free (although there are cases of monopsony: a buyer monopoly). I would say that the market mechanism (competition) breaks monopolies much more often than government action; Slashdot readers should be able to think of many disruptive technologies that the market mechanism used to break monopolies. An economic liberal believes that the best government regulation is that which allows the market mechanism to work better. (Normally I would just say "liberal" but "liberal" in the US has come to mean anti-market, despite the origin of the word with its roots in "freedom"). Regarding libertarians and economic liberals: yes, they are strongly against market intervention in most cases. But only extremists fail to acknowledge that there are obvious cases of market failure, and these obvious cases can be well defined. They basically occur when the cost of someone's choice is borne by other people, such as the decision to buy a huge SUV in which the cost of pollution may not be paid by the owner (which is the argument for carbon taxes).
After trialling Ubuntu for some time on a second machine, two weeks ago I migrated from XP to Ubuntu. I've been using unix systems for a while but I like a few things about Ubuntu. The package management is certainly one of them. The distribution also seems really committed to open source. The migration is going great; the only thing for which I still use XP is Photoshop Elements, and that is in a vmware server session. On my second machine I now run Debian. A lot of people go on about the slow release cycle of Debian. I am starting to wonder about this. There are actually multiple release tracks of Debian, and "testing" could be renamed "Desktop continuous update release" quite honestly, I think. Feisty Fawn was released with an Open Office package in which Base did not really work, and a version of Gnome in which "file roller" uses a drag and drop interface not supported by Nautilus. This has not impressed me. As far as I know, neither problem has been fixed yet. Debian is the natural home of "apt" and maybe Debian understands it better, with the three release streams fully taking advantage of it. One would not have to wait six months for such problems to be fixed, I think.
So I really like Ubuntu, but I am starting to wonder if Debian may have the last laugh, at least on my machines.
Oh, and the kick for me to finally get XP off our main computer: I bought my wife a macbook. After 30 minutes with it, I was embarrassed to be still running XP.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this could be a little misleading. There is no link between patents and copyright. A work of art is copyrighted: a computer program, being a work (source code) is copyrighted like a novel or song is copyrighted. The fact that the software may be a clever invention is not why it is copyrighted. It is copyrighted because someone wrote it (although an author can elect to forgo copyright). What I think is a little misleading is the term "specific implementation", because it may imply a link between the patent and the copyright.
And besides, if computing moves away from code executing on local CPUs and onto central servers to be accessed by web clients (the "cloud"), than even GPL code modified by,for example, Google is not distributed, so the patches are not mandatorily available under GPL either.
Tonight I helped a friend set up openoffice. The laptop was quite a new Acer. The download speed was really slow then I realised that power saving was turned on even though I had plugged in the power (and throttling the wifi). Finally I got it working. Clicking on the task bar thing at the bottom caused pop-up menus to be drawn that didn't properly erase. Using the internet browser seemed really sluggish. So what OS doesn't handle changes in power states, leaves rubbish on the screen, has a slow web browser ... it was Windows XP. Debian is really so much better. The only good thing that happened is the openoffice database from my wife's Mac worked immediately on the Windows machine. So it was a very convincing evening of open source superiority. Seeing Windows running on the OLPC hardware is going to be something to see; I'd almost pay for the entertainment value.
Firstly to Slashdot editors, thanks for posting this article.
I went to a poor rural high school a long time ago. When I was 12, a teacher somehow got an Apple II. It stayed in the staff room. Magically, the same teacher who bought the computer put the manuals in the school library. I discovered the Apple manuals one day, and I started reading about programming. A few weeks later, I was given access to the machine and off I went; that started me on a path that took me to my country's best university and then all over the world. That was just because I found a book on programming. Imagine how much more wonderful it will be when someone like me, in Nigeria or Uruguay, can use a real computer right away. They may be only one in a hundred kids like this, but it's one in every hundred kids, not just one in a hundred western kids, and now more of them will get connected to computers they can actually start programming on. This is amazingly great project.
I think the Microsoft licences are really impressive. Short, easy to read, and it seems obvious to me why they were approved. These Microsoft licences would be a good first read for someone trying to understand more sophisticated licences, like GPL v2 or v3. In fact memo to myself to carry out that exercise, to see what the value-add of the GPL v2 is.
Perhaps the challenge should be to find an even short and simpler OSI compliant licence.
The licence is there, anyone can use it. I wonder how much barrier there will be to using a licence with Microsoft in the name, just because of that.
Can you give us an example of a monopoly that has existed without government support? The Roman Catholic Church, Western Europe, for a few centuries
Instead of all the communist central planning nonsense trying to come up with ever cleverer politburo schemes, we should have a Market-Based Scheduler: CPU resources should be auctioned every 100ms. Let the market decide.
Good trick.
Which also requires the uTorrent tree to contain no code from the open tree written by someone who doesn't want uTorrent to go closed source, I suppose. So even though bittorrent was open source, perhaps it had little community involvement. Or perhaps uTorrent is completely written from scratch, but this seems unlikely.
But contributions from other authors are the copyright of those other authors.
So to take a GPL project to closed-source, all contributors with code in the now-closed source would need to agree, right?
The law on this is a bit complex in Australia, because the rules are determined by precedent (case law or common law).
An auction with a reserve price is treated differently in English & Australian common law than an auction without a reserve price.
A reserve price indicates a definite intention to sell. If there is a definite intention to sell and a definite intention to buy, you basically have a contract.
I thought Bill was retiring.
please see my other reply: it is not stupid (in general, people are not stupid; otherwise the sabre-tooth tigers would be running the planet). It could be wrong (but not for stupid reasons), or it could be that you don't understand the arguments. But to summarise, what you perhaps forget is that if we force a move to open standards, what about existing documents? Converting them all to a new format will also be "huge dollars", and if you don't want to pay, the huge amount of documents existing before the new format is introduced still have the same problem, still needing a solution. To use your colorful language, the "bullshit problem" must be faced anyway; you can't solve it for free just by mandating open document formats. Conversion of all existing documents to open formats is a possible solution, but I really doubt it is the best way to spend money.
To answer your question, I don't think a mass migration to open document formats is going to happen. This is because
firstly, the benefits occur only in the distant future (no one seriously sees a near-term problem with reading MS Word formats)
secondly, moving the massive amount of existing documents into a new format will certainly be way too expensive, so we anyway need a more cost-effective way to access to potentially obsolete documents. I don't agree that formats become obsolete; a format is a specification. Implementations of formats may become obsolete.
It is fine to plan for the future, but to solve problems, decisions and investments need to be made, and these are based on the relative merits of alternatives. You quote from my earlier post "of course they charge for it" as if this is a damning indictment of my position, but deciding that from Jan 1 2008 open formats must be used is no solution to the problem before Jan 1 2008. A solution is needed and it will cost money. The solution I propose is cheap. Not free, but cheap. Once such a solution is chosen, it unfortunately undermines the benefits of changing to open document formats, because the cheap solution for the problem before Jan 1 2008 is now virtually a free solution for the future (virtually free because you already have it).
Plenty of other people will point out the risk of obsolete data is not just in the format, but in the storage mechanism. Open formats only address part of the problem. They don't solve the obsolete implementation problem.
All in all, imposing open document formats is not a very compelling argument as a way to spend tax-payers' money.
Ideologically, I agree 100% with it, by the way (I am a Debian user), but the decisions about imposing ideologies on the whole community should be left to the democratic process.
Some people invest thousands of dollars in beautiful dinner sets. Over time, things break, and sometimes manufacturers stop making certain patterns, so when you want to buy a replacement sugar bowl, too bad. The market has a solution: there are companies that specialise in old, out of production pieces (they stockpile when manufacturers give end of life notice). Of course, they charge for it.
It is easy to imagine virtual machine specialists who run virtual versions of old operating systems and architectures. Personally, I hope that public libraries (or museums) will also provide something like this, but I don't fear a lack of reasonable affordable private enterprise solutions.
Since I can run various Sinclair Spectrum emulators in Java, including archives of many games, I am sure that you can easily find a C64 emulator.
I was referring to the argument in the parent post that you can not connect a PC, known to be at a certain IP address, with a computer owner.
Very few poeple are idiots; you should try to understand the post. Consider this part of growing up.
You should try that argument next time you get a parking ticket on your unattended car.
This is a very late post, but changing this setting will help:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signon.prefillForms
IN firefox, enter
about:config
type prefill to seach on this term, and double click the entry above to go to false.
You will then have to double click on a field before password manager provides any input to the page.
Ok, he would lose the copyright on the sound recording 50 years after publication, but the copyright to the lyrics and music are life + 70 years.
I thought copyright expired 50 years after the death of the copyright owner, not 50 years after publication of the work. How is Cliff Richard going to lose royalties when he is still alive?
Half way through the interview I slammed on the mental brakes. Linux is so famous for getting more from old hardware. My Debian distribution boots much more quickly than Windows. And waiting for me in apt-get an upgrade to a new kernel with a new "fair" scheduler. After slamming the brakes, I didn't get off the bus though. Con is a great guy, looking for 120% activity in his life. His insights are more to do with kernel development than Linux on the desktop. Con: Success with your further endeavors, and for sure you will find something related to computers quite soon. An Amiga user never gets that out of their system.
Ho ho: the funny thing is that all the countries pointed out as doing better than the US have a significant difference: until recently, they had government-owned monopoly telecoms. Even after privitisation, the former government telecom operator nearly always maintains a highly dominant position because they kept a very good hold on the copper wire. The battle between new players and the one heaveyweight is one of market share, and it plays out in broadband deployment. Typically the former monopoly races to get ADSL penetration (which uses the copper wire) and the newcomers race to deploy a parallel infrastructure (cable). Various government regulations spur on this investment, because the genuine intent of privitisation was to build competition, and in every case I can think of, it was decided that they way to meet this objective was for new players to build cable networks. I think the massive increase in broadband access seen in European countries is a side effect of this one-off investment in duplicate infrastructure.
Markets do not hate to be free. Markets have buyers and sellers, and often a monopoly on one side is most definitely not in the interest of the other side. Perhaps you mean sellers hate to be free (although there are cases of monopsony: a buyer monopoly). I would say that the market mechanism (competition) breaks monopolies much more often than government action; Slashdot readers should be able to think of many disruptive technologies that the market mechanism used to break monopolies. An economic liberal believes that the best government regulation is that which allows the market mechanism to work better. (Normally I would just say "liberal" but "liberal" in the US has come to mean anti-market, despite the origin of the word with its roots in "freedom").
Regarding libertarians and economic liberals: yes, they are strongly against market intervention in most cases. But only extremists fail to acknowledge that there are obvious cases of market failure, and these obvious cases can be well defined. They basically occur when the cost of someone's choice is borne by other people, such as the decision to buy a huge SUV in which the cost of pollution may not be paid by the owner (which is the argument for carbon taxes).
So I use the KDE program "ark". It works.
After trialling Ubuntu for some time on a second machine, two weeks ago I migrated from XP to Ubuntu. I've been using unix systems for a while but I like a few things about Ubuntu. The package management is certainly one of them. The distribution also seems really committed to open source. The migration is going great; the only thing for which I still use XP is Photoshop Elements, and that is in a vmware server session.
On my second machine I now run Debian.
A lot of people go on about the slow release cycle of Debian. I am starting to wonder about this. There are actually multiple release tracks of Debian, and "testing" could be renamed "Desktop continuous update release" quite honestly, I think. Feisty Fawn was released with an Open Office package in which Base did not really work, and a version of Gnome in which "file roller" uses a drag and drop interface not supported by Nautilus. This has not impressed me. As far as I know, neither problem has been fixed yet. Debian is the natural home of "apt" and maybe Debian understands it better, with the three release streams fully taking advantage of it. One would not have to wait six months for such problems to be fixed, I think.
So I really like Ubuntu, but I am starting to wonder if Debian may have the last laugh, at least on my machines.
Oh, and the kick for me to finally get XP off our main computer: I bought my wife a macbook. After 30 minutes with it, I was embarrassed to be still running XP.