I'm complaining that you often CANNOT send ASCII content without including a DOCTYPE or encoding specification. Like it or not, when you have to deal with integrating different systems with multiple encoding, data-storage and serving methods, the ability to kick back to a format/encoding agnostic method of data transfer is useful.
Giving someone the source code on purchase without giving them a license to distribute would accomplish the same thing. You could still hire developers to work on it if the main project died.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to Intel. If the goal is providing broader access to technology, it should not matter who manufacturers the devices as long as the choice is reasonable and non-corrupt. If Negroponte cannot provide a more attractive computer than Intel... what value is the organization really providing?
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Exactly. In my experience most employers are trying to protect themselves: I've known of copyright disputes over works for hire that involved ridiculous demands by programmers simply because they were sole developers. They were still paid to develop the software! This sort of behavior hurts the rest of us who are honest, but is a huge reason companies have contracts like this.
IMO, the key thing is to actually HAVE a legacy of independent development work that consists your previous inventions/IPR. Ideally this is part of the reason they want to hire you. Then this sort of contract minutiae becomes practical question instead of an abstract one. Even if you can't change boilerplate legal text, it's almost always possible to add an addendum to the agreement which specifies that "these restrictions do not apply for the work X is doing on projects Y and Z".
Left out one thing that struck me... maybe Red Hat will find a way to monetize the CentOS distribution channel in the future. There's no reason to crush something that you might be able to leverage in the future, or cause problems for it at all.
Get the traffic/usage and then figure out how to monetize it. Especially if someone else pays for the bandwidth.
I'd mod you up if I had the points, and hadn't posted here myself.
> What will be hard to justify, is converting the CC-BY-NC license to GFDL, without obtaining the consent of the copyright holder.
I'd be curious how binding the CC "guidelines" are on the question of commercial use given that the language in the license itself is fairly explicit. But you're absolutely correct that they can't justify changing the license.
You're actually wrong. The license specifies extremely clearly that the materials cannot be copied for purposes "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation." This would prohibit the initial installation of the data on a commercial server. Get a volunteer to install it and you're prevented from touching it again. Backups? Nope. Extra installations? Nope. Even if you outsourced the copying to an outside institution you could end up screwed if your server copies materials in the process of serving them, such as through database caches.
So sorry that you don't like it, but the CC-NC license is hostile to commercial use. I don't have any problem with this.
The reasonable defense for Wikia here is to claim that their use of the materials is not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage. This is not an unreasonable claim considering that the company is not asserting ownership over the materials and is providing access to them free-of-charge. The CC license is ambiguous about what constitutes "primarily" commercial use however. The word "intended" is even more tricky.
Don't let the critics hold you back, Dube. A lot of us are cheering you on -- I love seeing people working on interesting projects like this. We need more sorts of urban transportation vehicles like this. And if it can make you rich all the better.
That being said, you probably should change the name of the bike.
Psychonauts got in at 99? I would have pushed it into the top ten, but it's good to see that the game hasn't been completely ignored. I wonder how many people have actually played it.
Let's not sully the English language by referring to what was being tossed out of the White House as intelligence. There was overwhelming evidence at the time that the case for war was non-existant - pointing this out cost many civil servants their careers and lives. Trying to pass the buck to Britain is especially rich. Do you remember David Kelly, or did you just shut off your brain for the six months prior to the invasion?
I really don't see a problem here. Presumably the project maintainer is running the mailing list and (reasonably) moderates it. It sounds like he doesn't want people creating problems for him on his own mailing list. Fair enough. The code is open and if people feel censored they can easily start their own mailing list.
If there are enough active contributors besides this guy who are willing to work on the project and for whom this license is a sticking point, a fork will succeed. If not it will fail. But attacking Dieter is just sticking a knife in the back of someone who released code in the first place. Power to Dieter and I hope things work out for him.
You complain about Gore being an alarmist while simultaneously griping about air pollution (emissions)? Talk about cognitive dissonance. Did you believe Democratic environmental policy was myopic in 2000 but that alternative energy is great nowadays?
It's really poor taste to disparage someone while agreeing with him seven years after the fact. The worst that anyone remotely credible will say about Gore is that he is right to be tremendously concerned with global warming, but that "it may not be entirely man-made." Funny how they won't expunge words like "may" from their own statements on the matter.
Come on... if any browser goes into panic mode when it doesn't find a DOC tag, I won't be using it. You don't always need to compile "-Wall", especially if you want working code.
This is simply wrong. No-one goes "off grid" simply because they use private power generation and so there would never be any requirement to renegotiate access to the public grid. I don't know why you think this. People are just installing a power generator. If you consume more power than your generator produces you still have to pay the traditional utility. If you consume less then the utility usually has to pay you, at rates which vary state-to-state.
No-one is setting themselves up to be screwed simply because they have a private generator running on their property. If the installation is free of charge then all the better. About the worst anyone would be setting themselves up for is a botched installation and hassle dealing with the people who install the panels.
This could very well be a pyramid scheme targetting resellers and salesmen. Anyone required to pay "up front" for goods which will be delivered later is of course at risk of losing that money. But that doesn't make the structure of the deal objectively bad for consumers. What is the problem?
I don't understand the skepticism. The company is willing to install a power generator on your roof free of charge. Even if the company goes under, it wouldn't make sense for the new owners to remove the panels as long as they have a revenue stream coming from them as is.
As far as I can tell, the only way you could possibly get screwed is if the market price of electricity on the public grid falls below the rate to which you agree for private provision. But if the market price rises, you get an even better deal. People are rational and will evaluate signing one of these contracts based on what they are paying for electricity now and expect to be paying in the future.
Who cares about the company's marketing method? What matters is whether they can make the business model work. This is a fantastic idea environmentally and it seems to be good for the consumer too. The details are all going to be in the contracts between homeowners and the company, not the company and its sales force.
Lots of benefits, one of the most obvious from the driving perspective is much better acceleration -- manual cars can shift up faster and easier than automatics do (you don't need to wait for the engine to go into overdrive before it decides to shift). Another is less damage to your transmission through normal driving and less expensive transmission repairs should you need.
It is also cool/useful to shift down and use the shift as a breaking/speed-control device when driving in places like indoor parking lots/ramps/etc.
Whenever universities make photocopies for textbooks, they are supposed to pay a federal copyright association. This is an example of compulsory licensing in America and is the reason why photocopied textbooks are so expensive. The original authors very rarely see any of this money.
Is the solution to eliminate compulsory licensing? Is it to reform the institutions? There are legitimate problems here, but the answers are probably not black and white. I'm not sure what should be done with AllofMp3.com, and would be much more sympathetic to the organization if its homepage were in Russian rather than English.
As far as I'm aware the Russian company is operating legally and making the payments required according to Russian law. The RIAA is displeased because the compulsory rates are set by the state at much lower levels than they are getting through alternate channels like iTunes.
Compulsory licensing is not necessarily a bad thing (radio would not exist without it). The real irony is that if the RIAA is not getting paid, it is getting gamed by an organization which is supposed to be "representing" the organization in managing its IPR.
This is a really interesting post. What are your thoughts on a program that could hot-swap between backend database systems, optionally choosing to interact with MySQL or Postgresql or SQLite or whatever backend database storage system was required. If the choice was left to the user in terms of implementing the database backend, would this still be considered a derivative work for sales purposes?
Not looking for legal advice, just curious because you have some interesting thoughts on things.
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I'm complaining that you often CANNOT send ASCII content without including a DOCTYPE or encoding specification. Like it or not, when you have to deal with integrating different systems with multiple encoding, data-storage and serving methods, the ability to kick back to a format/encoding agnostic method of data transfer is useful.
AMEN.
I'm still pissed off about needing to slap a DOCTYPE on a textfile. ASCII is a standard too.
Giving someone the source code on purchase without giving them a license to distribute would accomplish the same thing. You could still hire developers to work on it if the main project died.
I wouldn't agree that Bush and Cheney want to do us harm. More just self-interest coupled with indifference to complex problems.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to Intel. If the goal is providing broader access to technology, it should not matter who manufacturers the devices as long as the choice is reasonable and non-corrupt. If Negroponte cannot provide a more attractive computer than Intel... what value is the organization really providing?
The Republicans are to blame for this one.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-- Auden
Exactly. In my experience most employers are trying to protect themselves: I've known of copyright disputes over works for hire that involved ridiculous demands by programmers simply because they were sole developers. They were still paid to develop the software! This sort of behavior hurts the rest of us who are honest, but is a huge reason companies have contracts like this.
IMO, the key thing is to actually HAVE a legacy of independent development work that consists your previous inventions/IPR. Ideally this is part of the reason they want to hire you. Then this sort of contract minutiae becomes practical question instead of an abstract one. Even if you can't change boilerplate legal text, it's almost always possible to add an addendum to the agreement which specifies that "these restrictions do not apply for the work X is doing on projects Y and Z".
Left out one thing that struck me... maybe Red Hat will find a way to monetize the CentOS distribution channel in the future. There's no reason to crush something that you might be able to leverage in the future, or cause problems for it at all.
Get the traffic/usage and then figure out how to monetize it. Especially if someone else pays for the bandwidth.
I'd mod you up if I had the points, and hadn't posted here myself.
> What will be hard to justify, is converting the CC-BY-NC license to GFDL, without obtaining the consent of the copyright holder.
I'd be curious how binding the CC "guidelines" are on the question of commercial use given that the language in the license itself is fairly explicit. But you're absolutely correct that they can't justify changing the license.
You're actually wrong. The license specifies extremely clearly that the materials cannot be copied for purposes "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation." This would prohibit the initial installation of the data on a commercial server. Get a volunteer to install it and you're prevented from touching it again. Backups? Nope. Extra installations? Nope. Even if you outsourced the copying to an outside institution you could end up screwed if your server copies materials in the process of serving them, such as through database caches.
So sorry that you don't like it, but the CC-NC license is hostile to commercial use. I don't have any problem with this.
The reasonable defense for Wikia here is to claim that their use of the materials is not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage. This is not an unreasonable claim considering that the company is not asserting ownership over the materials and is providing access to them free-of-charge. The CC license is ambiguous about what constitutes "primarily" commercial use however. The word "intended" is even more tricky.
Don't let the critics hold you back, Dube. A lot of us are cheering you on -- I love seeing people working on interesting projects like this. We need more sorts of urban transportation vehicles like this. And if it can make you rich all the better.
That being said, you probably should change the name of the bike.
Psychonauts got in at 99? I would have pushed it into the top ten, but it's good to see that the game hasn't been completely ignored. I wonder how many people have actually played it.
Don't overlook Article III. This also looks like a proactive way for Congress to take command over US foreign policy towards Iran.
Let's not sully the English language by referring to what was being tossed out of the White House as intelligence. There was overwhelming evidence at the time that the case for war was non-existant - pointing this out cost many civil servants their careers and lives. Trying to pass the buck to Britain is especially rich. Do you remember David Kelly, or did you just shut off your brain for the six months prior to the invasion?
I really don't see a problem here. Presumably the project maintainer is running the mailing list and (reasonably) moderates it. It sounds like he doesn't want people creating problems for him on his own mailing list. Fair enough. The code is open and if people feel censored they can easily start their own mailing list.
If there are enough active contributors besides this guy who are willing to work on the project and for whom this license is a sticking point, a fork will succeed. If not it will fail. But attacking Dieter is just sticking a knife in the back of someone who released code in the first place. Power to Dieter and I hope things work out for him.
You complain about Gore being an alarmist while simultaneously griping about air pollution (emissions)? Talk about cognitive dissonance. Did you believe Democratic environmental policy was myopic in 2000 but that alternative energy is great nowadays?
It's really poor taste to disparage someone while agreeing with him seven years after the fact. The worst that anyone remotely credible will say about Gore is that he is right to be tremendously concerned with global warming, but that "it may not be entirely man-made." Funny how they won't expunge words like "may" from their own statements on the matter.
Come on... if any browser goes into panic mode when it doesn't find a DOC tag, I won't be using it. You don't always need to compile "-Wall", especially if you want working code.
This is simply wrong. No-one goes "off grid" simply because they use private power generation and so there would never be any requirement to renegotiate access to the public grid. I don't know why you think this. People are just installing a power generator. If you consume more power than your generator produces you still have to pay the traditional utility. If you consume less then the utility usually has to pay you, at rates which vary state-to-state.
No-one is setting themselves up to be screwed simply because they have a private generator running on their property. If the installation is free of charge then all the better. About the worst anyone would be setting themselves up for is a botched installation and hassle dealing with the people who install the panels.
This could very well be a pyramid scheme targetting resellers and salesmen. Anyone required to pay "up front" for goods which will be delivered later is of course at risk of losing that money. But that doesn't make the structure of the deal objectively bad for consumers. What is the problem?
I don't understand the skepticism. The company is willing to install a power generator on your roof free of charge. Even if the company goes under, it wouldn't make sense for the new owners to remove the panels as long as they have a revenue stream coming from them as is.
As far as I can tell, the only way you could possibly get screwed is if the market price of electricity on the public grid falls below the rate to which you agree for private provision. But if the market price rises, you get an even better deal. People are rational and will evaluate signing one of these contracts based on what they are paying for electricity now and expect to be paying in the future.
Who cares about the company's marketing method? What matters is whether they can make the business model work. This is a fantastic idea environmentally and it seems to be good for the consumer too. The details are all going to be in the contracts between homeowners and the company, not the company and its sales force.
Lots of benefits, one of the most obvious from the driving perspective is much better acceleration -- manual cars can shift up faster and easier than automatics do (you don't need to wait for the engine to go into overdrive before it decides to shift). Another is less damage to your transmission through normal driving and less expensive transmission repairs should you need.
It is also cool/useful to shift down and use the shift as a breaking/speed-control device when driving in places like indoor parking lots/ramps/etc.
Whenever universities make photocopies for textbooks, they are supposed to pay a federal copyright association. This is an example of compulsory licensing in America and is the reason why photocopied textbooks are so expensive. The original authors very rarely see any of this money.
Is the solution to eliminate compulsory licensing? Is it to reform the institutions? There are legitimate problems here, but the answers are probably not black and white. I'm not sure what should be done with AllofMp3.com, and would be much more sympathetic to the organization if its homepage were in Russian rather than English.
As far as I'm aware the Russian company is operating legally and making the payments required according to Russian law. The RIAA is displeased because the compulsory rates are set by the state at much lower levels than they are getting through alternate channels like iTunes.
Compulsory licensing is not necessarily a bad thing (radio would not exist without it). The real irony is that if the RIAA is not getting paid, it is getting gamed by an organization which is supposed to be "representing" the organization in managing its IPR.
He should never have pardoned Nixon.
This is a really interesting post. What are your thoughts on a program that could hot-swap between backend database systems, optionally choosing to interact with MySQL or Postgresql or SQLite or whatever backend database storage system was required. If the choice was left to the user in terms of implementing the database backend, would this still be considered a derivative work for sales purposes?
Not looking for legal advice, just curious because you have some interesting thoughts on things.