About the only thing bogus is the "implied license" to copy, in order to make use of the work.
I don't necessarily like the implication that any terms may be applied. In this case, I think that the courts basically were looking for a pretext to agree with Blizzard.
In point of fact, this is basically the same principle the GPL is founded on -- violate the terms of the license and you're committing copyright infringement. Not exact, but similar.
Look, if AT&T wants to curry favor with the MPAA, which is to my mind what they're trying to do, they are very likely trying to offer some service which needs the approval of the MPAA. What if AT&T wants to offer full-def streaming movies on demand with a release schedule better than the movie channels? And the MPAA says "no, not unless you guarantee there is no piracy." A marketing bozo would fall all over themselves trying to prove that they could filter intellectual property without having a clue how it was actually done or even really caring if they could do it or not.
I don't really buy the bandwidth argument -- it certainly is contributory but an ISP can mess with your packets without claiming to be a IP cop.
The GPL is a *license*. A licence granted to the *distributor* of software by the author of the software.
The GPL provides an affirmative defense against being sued for copyright infringment. The GPL does *NOT* compel any behavior; the defense contributed is invalid if the terms of the license are not met.
When a distributor distributes to you the source to any binary they distribute to you, they meet the license terms. They have NO obligation to you as a receiver of their distribution at any point in the future.
Sveasoft is using a CONTRACT to allow people access to un-distributed versions of the software for beta testing. Each new micro-distribution made under this contract contains GPL licensed software. If you redistribute the sofware under the terms of the license, Sveasoft is free to terminate their contract with you -- as your right to redistribution has not been infringed.
This does not preclude you from obtaining new updates to the software by other means. But Sveasoft (or any other distributor) is free to say "you have to pay to receive distributions *from me.*"
If you don't like it, your rights are about zilch. As long as the distributor gave you source, and didn't impose new license restrictions on your software, you can redistribute to your hearts content. You cannot however, impose terms on your *distributor!* If you believe the GPL has been violated by an act of the distributor, thats too bad -- because all it does is provide a point to contest the defense of copyright violation if and when the distributor is sued by someone with standing to sue for copyright infringment.
It is likely that a course of action made by an author against a distributor would prevail *IF* they attempted to bind you with a contract that revoked redistribution rights granted by the GPL. However, nothing in the GPL provides a distributor a continuing obligation to provide you with FUTURE updates to code. What Sveasoft is doing is completely legitimate (and makes sense too, because it keeps all the b0z0 d00dz out of the paid support channels).
So many people want to make the GPL into a contract, which it isn't. A contract can impose an obligation to perform; a license cannot (although a license may be revoked if an action is NOT performed -- this is the heart of the GPL).
barratry
n. creating legal business by stirring up disputes and quarrels, generally for the benefit of the lawyer who sees fees in the matter. Barratry is illegal in all states and subject to criminal punishment and/or discipline by the state bar, but there must be a showing that the resulting lawsuit was totally groundless. There is a lot of border-line barratry in which attorneys, in the name of being tough or protecting the client, fail to seek avenues for settlement of disputes or will not tell the client he/she has no legitimate claim.
Well if the agency you work for is in the DC area, there is a Zope/Python user's group... ZPUG. I dont know if they are still meeting around DuPont Circle or not, but they used to.
Admittedly, I like Zope, but it is naive to think that one solution fits all problems (although this would be rank blasphemy to a policy wonk). Still, the price is right, and there's a reasonably active community around to help you get through learning curve issues.
Of course, if spending money on the project is your requirement, there are a number of talented companies in the DC area which have Zope expertise, including Zope Corporation.
In Zope, objects that inherit from the Persistent class are automatically persisted; you dont have to do anything magic yourself (unless you want to have objects that can sort of 'auto-upgrade' themselves when new software installed -- there are hooks for that. Just about every Zope object inherits from the Persistent class.
In addition, Zope is transactional; so if two threads both attempt to update the same persistent object, one thread will be aborted and automatically retried if the object doesn't support a conflict-resolution protocol. Smart objects like web counters can implement that protocol, because the important information is "plus one" rather than any specific value. The ability to do an automatic rollback and retry takes a lot of the headaches out of trying to do transactional programming yourself. The transaction awareness extends to RDBMS adapters, so any participating RDBMS is also rolled back or commited as appropriate.
Zope has a fairly extensive caching mechanism to help cache both objects, and rendered content. In a large volume site, you still want squid out front though, because squid is a much more efficient page caching engine.
I can't speak for the various other offerings out there; other than I advise strongly against drinking the kool-aid.
One should also consider the fact that obsesity in the United States is climbing along with the rate of consumption of diet cola. Conclusion: Diet cola causes obesity.
Sadly, correlating any two lines may be amusing for agitprop, but hardly forms the basis of any predictive ability. A second example is the stock market boom of 1996-2000 -- people just followed the trend blindly because it looked like a trend. Whoops!
I also take issue with "betting the world." Firstly, it isn't yours to bet with. Its mine too, so please don't make my choices for me. Secondly, even if the global climate changed, it is hard to believe life on earth would be wiped out. Good grief, we can't even get rid of cockroaches, and the doomsayers get all in a tizzy about their favorite collections of spores, molds, and fungus (thanks, Egon).
Z/VM is VM/ESA, the operating system, after a renaming and extensions for the new CPU archtecture.
VM PRF is the performance reporting facility I think... I dont remember if this was the old SMART or not; I dont think it is -- it reports on all of the performance and accounting data collected by VM.
REXX is the interpreter on IBM mainframes. The REXX compiler will let you compile REXX (duh) which speeds up things slightly and obfuscates the code tremendously.
TCPIP is the service product on VM that talks to the networking hardware. Gee, go figure.
DIRMAINT is a rather hideous way of updating the VM user directory. VMSECURE (last owned by Sterling Software afaik) is much nicer but not an IBM product. This is how you change user passwords, setup disk space, etc. on VM.
Tivioli Storage Manager will be their backup software. Could be DFHSM or some such renamed.
NFS should be fairly self-evident. I'm GUESSing this represents NFS drives as VM Shared File System files, the old version exported VM minidisks over NFS -- so that may be it instead.
EREP is the error reporting program to take hardware records collected by VM and figure out why the machine went casters up.
Slashdot Mirror
About the only thing bogus is the "implied license" to copy, in order to make use of the work. I don't necessarily like the implication that any terms may be applied. In this case, I think that the courts basically were looking for a pretext to agree with Blizzard.
In point of fact, this is basically the same principle the GPL is founded on -- violate the terms of the license and you're committing copyright infringement. Not exact, but similar.
Look, if AT&T wants to curry favor with the MPAA, which is to my mind what they're trying to do, they are very likely trying to offer some service which needs the approval of the MPAA. What if AT&T wants to offer full-def streaming movies on demand with a release schedule better than the movie channels? And the MPAA says "no, not unless you guarantee there is no piracy." A marketing bozo would fall all over themselves trying to prove that they could filter intellectual property without having a clue how it was actually done or even really caring if they could do it or not.
I don't really buy the bandwidth argument -- it certainly is contributory but an ISP can mess with your packets without claiming to be a IP cop.
The GPL is a *license*. A licence granted to the *distributor* of software by the author of the software.
The GPL provides an affirmative defense against being sued for copyright infringment. The GPL does *NOT* compel any behavior; the defense contributed is invalid if the terms of the license are not met.
When a distributor distributes to you the source to any binary they distribute to you, they meet the license terms. They have NO obligation to you as a receiver of their distribution at any point in the future.
Sveasoft is using a CONTRACT to allow people access to un-distributed versions of the software for beta testing. Each new micro-distribution made under this contract contains GPL licensed software. If you redistribute the sofware under the terms of the license, Sveasoft is free to terminate their contract with you -- as your right to redistribution has not been infringed.
This does not preclude you from obtaining new updates to the software by other means. But Sveasoft (or any other distributor) is free to say "you have to pay to receive distributions *from me.*"
If you don't like it, your rights are about zilch. As long as the distributor gave you source, and didn't impose new license restrictions on your software, you can redistribute to your hearts content. You cannot however, impose terms on your *distributor!* If you believe the GPL has been violated by an act of the distributor, thats too bad -- because all it does is provide a point to contest the defense of copyright violation if and when the distributor is sued by someone with standing to sue for copyright infringment.
It is likely that a course of action made by an author against a distributor would prevail *IF* they attempted to bind you with a contract that revoked redistribution rights granted by the GPL. However, nothing in the GPL provides a distributor a continuing obligation to provide you with FUTURE updates to code. What Sveasoft is doing is completely legitimate (and makes sense too, because it keeps all the b0z0 d00dz out of the paid support channels).
So many people want to make the GPL into a contract, which it isn't. A contract can impose an obligation to perform; a license cannot (although a license may be revoked if an action is NOT performed -- this is the heart of the GPL).
From Law.com
barratry
n. creating legal business by stirring up disputes and quarrels, generally for the benefit of the lawyer who sees fees in the matter. Barratry is illegal in all states and subject to criminal punishment and/or discipline by the state bar, but there must be a showing that the resulting lawsuit was totally groundless. There is a lot of border-line barratry in which attorneys, in the name of being tough or protecting the client, fail to seek avenues for settlement of disputes or will not tell the client he/she has no legitimate claim.
Well if the agency you work for is in the DC area, there is a Zope/Python user's group... ZPUG. I dont know if they are still meeting around DuPont Circle or not, but they used to.
Admittedly, I like Zope, but it is naive to think that one solution fits all problems (although this would be rank blasphemy to a policy wonk). Still, the price is right, and there's a reasonably active community around to help you get through learning curve issues.
Of course, if spending money on the project is your requirement, there are a number of talented companies in the DC area which have Zope expertise, including Zope Corporation.
In Zope, objects that inherit from the Persistent class are automatically persisted; you dont have to do anything magic yourself (unless you want to have objects that can sort of 'auto-upgrade' themselves when new software installed -- there are hooks for that. Just about every Zope object inherits from the Persistent class.
In addition, Zope is transactional; so if two threads both attempt to update the same persistent object, one thread will be aborted and automatically retried if the object doesn't support a conflict-resolution protocol. Smart objects like web counters can implement that protocol, because the important information is "plus one" rather than any specific value. The ability to do an automatic rollback and retry takes a lot of the headaches out of trying to do transactional programming yourself. The transaction awareness extends to RDBMS adapters, so any participating RDBMS is also rolled back or commited as appropriate.
Zope has a fairly extensive caching mechanism to help cache both objects, and rendered content. In a large volume site, you still want squid out front though, because squid is a much more efficient page caching engine.
I can't speak for the various other offerings out there; other than I advise strongly against drinking the kool-aid.
Sadly, correlating any two lines may be amusing for agitprop, but hardly forms the basis of any predictive ability. A second example is the stock market boom of 1996-2000 -- people just followed the trend blindly because it looked like a trend. Whoops!
I also take issue with "betting the world." Firstly, it isn't yours to bet with. Its mine too, so please don't make my choices for me. Secondly, even if the global climate changed, it is hard to believe life on earth would be wiped out. Good grief, we can't even get rid of cockroaches, and the doomsayers get all in a tizzy about their favorite collections of spores, molds, and fungus (thanks, Egon).
Z/VM is VM/ESA, the operating system, after a renaming and extensions for the new CPU archtecture.
VM PRF is the performance reporting facility I think... I dont remember if this was the old SMART or not; I dont think it is -- it reports on all of the performance and accounting data collected by VM.
REXX is the interpreter on IBM mainframes. The REXX compiler will let you compile REXX (duh) which speeds up things slightly and obfuscates the code tremendously.
TCPIP is the service product on VM that talks to the networking hardware. Gee, go figure.
DIRMAINT is a rather hideous way of updating the VM user directory. VMSECURE (last owned by Sterling Software afaik) is much nicer but not an IBM product. This is how you change user passwords, setup disk space, etc. on VM.
Tivioli Storage Manager will be their backup software. Could be DFHSM or some such renamed.
NFS should be fairly self-evident. I'm GUESSing this represents NFS drives as VM Shared File System files, the old version exported VM minidisks over NFS -- so that may be it instead.
EREP is the error reporting program to take hardware records collected by VM and figure out why the machine went casters up.
Matt Kromer (matt digicool com)