Rephrased slightly, to indicate that what people pay attention to and whats important aren't always the same thing:
"Now I see. Is that the same 99% of the citizens who could give a rats ass about having, or even knowing knowing about habeas corpus? How many citizens want habeas corpus? I'd guess it is that 1%".
Likewise, most people only pay attention to their heart beat when something seems wrong.
Making the screws hard to open isn't a problem. I can always just cut through. ROM isn't a problem, as I noted in reply to your post that you are quoting. Terminating warranty if I do manage to get the case open seems an artificial impediment to my using my rights under the GPL and I'd like to see that sort of abuse eliminated.
Using ROM shouldn't be a problem so long as I have access to the source code and can burn my own ROM to replace the original and good new code can run.
Actually, in a fair world where basic rights were truly taken into account, I would assume that anyone who bought a book would have the right to make a PDF (or HTML) copy of the book to carry on their laptop. This "of course not" attitude seems to me to indicate that IP is a property right rather than a social experiment.
The right to prevent hacking a device you've purchased, versus the right to hack a device you've purchased, needs to be addressed in terms of the license in use and the rights tivo had to distribute the device to the person who bought it. In terms of morality, in general it seems to me that DRM is flawed. The social experiment to increase the common good by pretending that psuedo-rights exist is failing due to a power grab that unfairly tilts the scales against the common good. In terms of the GPL, while tivo may have found a legal loophole for their immoral acts, it is unsurprising that a revamped GPL closes said loophole.
"In fact, the GPL is really what takes away your freedom. It essentially says that if you want to create a derivative work, you must abide by certain restrictions. What this effectively does is grant certain rights to the recipients of derivative works in exchange for certain restrictions on freedom to create those derivative works. Not as sexy sounding as "preserving freedom", I suppose."
It doesn't sound as sexy to expand the terms into phrases. Yet, "a rose, by any other name." This quote of yours is actually a wonderful argument for the GPL "preserving freedom". Thank you.
Perhaps it has less to do with the definition of "free", but rather has to do with the time frame invoked. What is immediately "free", say spending your paycheck on a whim, while maximizing choice and freedom at time t0, won't necessarily lead to maximized freedom over an interval of time (say from t0 to when your rent and car payment comes due). RMS takes a long time-lime sort of view.
It was first, the dialog box which reported an error and suggested you call microsoft, and second the discussion that then ensued, which made the act illegal. Merely checking to see if MS-DOS or DR-DOS is running isn't illegal. Using that fact to filter users and to spread FUD specificly crafted for that user, that is not legal.
Actually, no, this was a deliberate test set up to tag people running a competitors product and error screen. What made it look really really bad, I think, was that the AARD Detection Code was intensionally hidden: "Microsoft's encrypted code to disguise what it had done was unravelled by Geof Chappell in England, who commented at the time that "the only error' is that the user is running Windows with someone else's version of DOS."
Dr Dobbs has pretty pictures of setup.exe being detected. They describe the workings of the code on page 4:
The first step in discovering why the error message appeared under DR DOS but not MS-DOS was to examine the relevant WIN.COM code. However, the WIN.COM code that produced this message turned out to be XOR encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated--all in an apparent attempt to thwart disassembly. The code also tries to defeat attempts for a debugger to step through it. For example, Figure 2 shows a code fragment in which the INT 1 single-step interrupt is pointed at invalid code (the two bytes FFh FFh), which disables DEBUG. The same is done with INT 2 (nonmaskable interrupt) and INT 3 (debug breakpoint). However, since modern debuggers (I used Nu-Mega's Soft-ICE) run the debugger and debuggee in separate address spaces, the AARD code's revectoring of INTs 1-3 has no affect on the Soft-ICE debugger. In any case, these attempts to throw examination off-track are in themselves revealing.
But what does "country information" like the DOS default upper case-map have to do with a network redirector? Why does a piece of Windows care whether this mapper is located in the DOS data segment? And why should it care whether the first FCB-SFT is located on a paragraph boundary? What kind of "errors" are these, anyway?
These are all reasonable questions. In fact, the address of the default upper case-map has nothing to do with the network redirector, and no other part of Windows cares about what particular form is taken by DOS's default case-map or first FCB-SFT pointers. The AARD code has no relation to the actual purpose of the five otherwise-unrelated programs into which it has been dropped. It appears to be a wholly arbitrary test, a gratuitous gatekeeper seemingly with no purpose other than to smoke out non-Microsoft versions of DOS, tagging them with an appropriately vague "error" message.
My understanding was that they checked a memory reference. While segment + offset gives an address that should work in combination regardless of the values summed, there were different combinations of segment and offset for a OS level call that was tested to flag DR-DOS vs MS-DOS. It was a marketing scam, because the customer rep you eventually talked to would lead you towards not trusting the underlaying OS you were using, as a targeted FUD attack. In fact the test was not related to functionality at all. I think its true MS had to pay dearly for the incident, but I'm not that up on MS legal history.
"sue Microsoft over some alleged infringements in MS-DOS"
It was lots worse than that:
In 1991, Microsoft employees launched an exceptionally dastardly plan to kill another competitor, DR DOS. DR DOS sales threatened MS-DOS, the early predecessor to Windows 95 that established Microsoft's operating system monopoly. DR DOS sales were on the rise--they doubled from $15 million in 1990 to $30 million in 1991. They soared again to $15 million in the first quarter of 1992 alone. Then disaster struck.
Microsoft was writing Windows 3.1, an important upgrade to the hugely popular Windows 3.0. In September 1991, a plan was hatched to use this upgrade to kill DR DOS. In an email discovered by the Dept. of Justice, the head of Windows development and Microsoft VP David Cole wrote, "aaronr had some pretty wild ideas after three or so beers--earleh has some too." The plan was to plant code into Windows which would "put competitors on a treadmill" and cause the system to "surely crash at some point shortly later." In order words, Windows would intentionally bomb if it detected DR DOS.
At this time, many computer vendors were considering switching from MS-DOS to the superior, cheaper DR DOS. Microsoft was especially concerned about IBM. Wooing these PC vendors was crucial to the future success of DR DOS, as was the good will of "early-adopters" (i.e., technically savvy users who drive new trends in the computer industry).
These vendors and early-adopters were also the same people who received a Christmas "beta" pre-release of Windows 3.1. They discovered--to their horror--that using DR DOS would cause vague system errors to pop up in Windows 3.1; they dumped DR DOS in droves. By the fourth quarter of 1992, sales of DR DOS had dropped from $15 million to only $1.4 million. The once mighty competitor became a has-been and was sold to Novell and later Caldera.
"...Vista's NOT doing well for them and costing them dearly."
"Really?"
Yes, really. Reports of MS currently beating market expectations is highly suspect:
Microsoft's shares did rise to just under $30 in late 2004, as the initial buyback plan was going into effect, and to more than $31 in January, as the company continued to repurchase its own stock.
But all told, the company's share price has been largely stagnant over the past five years. Microsoft shares have fallen since January, and they closed Friday at $27.87.
That's down from more than $28 in July 2004, when the company announced the initial plan to reduce its cash holdings through steps including a $30 billion stock buyback and a $3-a-share special dividend.
yahoo finance
SeekingAlpha
Microsoft's Record Quarter: Shareholders Paid for Most of the Upside Surprise
Thursday May 3, 4:43 am ET
Microsoft's own numbers tell us the way it is making more and more each quarter is partly funded by making each share worth less and less in assets. At the very least, this fact that Microsoft is dipping into its assets to pay for its record earnings makes me question just how successful those Vista and Office launches really were. Judging from the reaction of Microsoft's stock price after those record earnings -- and the fact that it remains lower than it was three months ago before the Vista launch -- that fact hasn't been lost on Wall Street either.
$30 billion sounds like a lot of money until you consider their burn rate: "$29 billion on hand at last count was less than half the cash and short-term investments held by Microsoft about two years ago." It takes money to pump earnings reports, "Microsoft achieved record breaking earnings during the Vista launch quarter by taking money out of its assets, not through amazing sales of Vista and Office."
So I would suggest that you are right with one small edit: MS's cash "has absolutely"*everything*"to do with Microsoft's share price, or with future business."
I speculate that there could be serious inflation of numbers in terms of units sold. At least on this campus, the number of "free" Vista downloads probably outnumbers the number of purchased Vista licenses by a factor that is probably two rather than one order of magnitude. That means that in this local area Vista is selling like Hotcakes, which you might expect at an average price somewhere around $3 to $30. If the numbers "sold" are taken, and then applied to retail price, this would sure look like a lot more money being generated than actually is flowing. Probably totally legal accounting slight-of-hand. Still, I question adoption rates. I've yet to see a single (free) Vista install that lasted for more than a month before WinXP was reinstalled. Easy come easy go...
"Look I can see you're in favor of the GPL, but don't you think in my example, the company would have been better off banning any use of GPL code in it's product?"
I would even go so far as to say, if you can't use it without violating the law, you just shouldn't use it. I totally agree that all companies should at least try to ban the criminal behavior of employees, don't you?
Agreed: the embedded space is different, for sure. Running on top of a GPL layer is different than compiling everything in together. If you specify that you need to distribute binaries that are statically linked against binary only code, then of course I'm willing to stipulate that GPLed code is not an option. LGPL might work. I certainly don't see this as a problem with the GPL.
Actually Win1.0 was a joke. Win2.0 was no better. Win3.0 didn't make much difference. It was Win3.1 that finally was usable in a way that didn't make MS look like a retarded child next to a Mac. Now I have to say that Win95 looked good, but it was so unstable. Win98SE finally cleaned up a lot of that crud, but that was right before Win2k was released. Win2k was the first stable modern version of windows I ever saw ran. For most of Win9x's life, it sucked. Hard to grade it just on the last patch on the last version before it EOL-ed...
WinXP SP2 is likewise a *big* improvement on Win9x in terms of stability. Now I agree that WinME was...different in a less than pleasing way. I never ran it, but I know people who did. I don't know anyone who stayed with it, though.
So maybe I look back over a longer chain of events than you do, but it seems to me that mostly Microsoft has sold crap. They sold it, though. Not always though legal methods (I remember seeing dialogs popup, asking me to call MS Hotline, suggesting their was an error taking place...back when Win3.1 would detect you were running it on DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. They lost that lawsuit, by the way, many many many years after putting DR-DOS out of business...
I know my school suddenly became a member of the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance because they were almost giving the memberships away. Which meant all the CS majors downloaded free copies of MS Vista Business. Which meant that we went through an eCommerce site where we filled our carts and ran through "checkouts" that stated we owed $0.00, which seemed funny at the time. Now I know several hundred copies of Vista showed up as "sold" when they weren't really.
Imagine if all over the world tonight, young people decided to take colored chalk in hand and write "MS: Put Up or Shut Up!" on sidewalks from Munich through Paris and London, to Tokyo and on around to SF, LA, Austin, NY, etc...
Under your scenario you stipulated you couldn't open the source code. So that route is out. That means you have no legal right to distribute. What it comes down to is you don't own what you thought you paid for. In terms of Mathematica, the situations are identical in that you stipulated a UI on top of GPLed kernel and stack.
Agreed that a controlled market is easier. Agreed that a small number of prepackaged superstars would be more lucrative (for the labels) than a free and open market. The point at which we disagree is the effect that dissolving the strangle hold the major labels have on the distribution pipeline would then have on the state of music production.
Although writing a UI on top of a kernel tcp/ip stack won't cause the UI to be GPLed, I assume you want to present a case where there is mingling and the GPL would be invoked. So lets assume you don't merely right a UI on top.
Obviously you can't distribute all the source code, which means that you can't distribute the whole package. It really means you never could legally distribute the whole package. Right? The request for source code is a way of pointing out to you that you are in violation, not a real request, because you don't have the rights to GPL the code which would need to be GPLed to distribute. Sounds like you'd have to stop distributing, and you could maybe open all the code you do own rights to...
Historically, the position often taken (especially when it seems a company didn't knowingly have intent to infringe) is to make things right from this point going forward. At least, that is what the FSF seems to want to shoot for.
Back to the way you initially asserted your problem, though: I have a license for Mathematica for Linux. It runs on a GPLed kernel and a GPLed stack and in fact in a GPLed windowing system on a GPLed window manager using GPLed GUI kits. Yet Wolfram would surely laugh (as they should) if I asked for the code to their UI. It doesn't work that way.
It has been an interesting experiment to reward distributors with power over use for their investment. Creative artists show up in that equation somewhere, too. Not so much though, their reward is dominated by the reward received by those who actually control the distribution. Stated as you stated it, though, it is obviously a reward and not a right. That at least allows for discourse.
On your second point, the ramifications of a major change would be controversial. All the noise from vested interests would drown out the fact that nobody really knows if music would collapse or experience a renaissance. If copyright went away, the major labels would have to evolve, for sure. I doubt we'd have the small number of souless, mindless crap artists who are marketed so heavily dominating music. Rather, we'd see phenomena like tour bands (Grateful Dead). People like music. People will pay to see live music. But rather than marketing being paid, and a small number of artists paid, you might just find the dam bursting loose waters an enormous acreage of talent.
Slashdot Mirror
Rephrased slightly, to indicate that what people pay attention to and whats important aren't always the same thing:
"Now I see. Is that the same 99% of the citizens who could give a rats ass about having, or even knowing knowing about habeas corpus? How many citizens want habeas corpus? I'd guess it is that 1%".
Likewise, most people only pay attention to their heart beat when something seems wrong.
Making the screws hard to open isn't a problem. I can always just cut through. ROM isn't a problem, as I noted in reply to your post that you are quoting. Terminating warranty if I do manage to get the case open seems an artificial impediment to my using my rights under the GPL and I'd like to see that sort of abuse eliminated.
Using ROM shouldn't be a problem so long as I have access to the source code and can burn my own ROM to replace the original and good new code can run.
Actually, in a fair world where basic rights were truly taken into account, I would assume that anyone who bought a book would have the right to make a PDF (or HTML) copy of the book to carry on their laptop. This "of course not" attitude seems to me to indicate that IP is a property right rather than a social experiment.
The right to prevent hacking a device you've purchased, versus the right to hack a device you've purchased, needs to be addressed in terms of the license in use and the rights tivo had to distribute the device to the person who bought it. In terms of morality, in general it seems to me that DRM is flawed. The social experiment to increase the common good by pretending that psuedo-rights exist is failing due to a power grab that unfairly tilts the scales against the common good. In terms of the GPL, while tivo may have found a legal loophole for their immoral acts, it is unsurprising that a revamped GPL closes said loophole.
"In fact, the GPL is really what takes away your freedom. It essentially says that if you want to create a derivative work, you must abide by certain restrictions. What this effectively does is grant certain rights to the recipients of derivative works in exchange for certain restrictions on freedom to create those derivative works. Not as sexy sounding as "preserving freedom", I suppose."
It doesn't sound as sexy to expand the terms into phrases. Yet, "a rose, by any other name." This quote of yours is actually a wonderful argument for the GPL "preserving freedom". Thank you.
Perhaps it has less to do with the definition of "free", but rather has to do with the time frame invoked. What is immediately "free", say spending your paycheck on a whim, while maximizing choice and freedom at time t0, won't necessarily lead to maximized freedom over an interval of time (say from t0 to when your rent and car payment comes due). RMS takes a long time-lime sort of view.
It was first, the dialog box which reported an error and suggested you call microsoft, and second the discussion that then ensued, which made the act illegal. Merely checking to see if MS-DOS or DR-DOS is running isn't illegal. Using that fact to filter users and to spread FUD specificly crafted for that user, that is not legal.
Dr Dobbs has pretty pictures of setup.exe being detected. They describe the workings of the code on page 4:
My understanding was that they checked a memory reference. While segment + offset gives an address that should work in combination regardless of the values summed, there were different combinations of segment and offset for a OS level call that was tested to flag DR-DOS vs MS-DOS. It was a marketing scam, because the customer rep you eventually talked to would lead you towards not trusting the underlaying OS you were using, as a targeted FUD attack. In fact the test was not related to functionality at all. I think its true MS had to pay dearly for the incident, but I'm not that up on MS legal history.
It was lots worse than that:
"Really?"
Yes, really. Reports of MS currently beating market expectations is highly suspect
Microsoft's Record Quarter: Shareholders Paid for Most of the Upside Surprise
Thursday May 3, 4:43 am ET
$30 billion sounds like a lot of money until you consider their burn rate: "$29 billion on hand at last count was less than half the cash and short-term investments held by Microsoft about two years ago." It takes money to pump earnings reports, "Microsoft achieved record breaking earnings during the Vista launch quarter by taking money out of its assets, not through amazing sales of Vista and Office."
So I would suggest that you are right with one small edit: MS's cash "has absolutely" *everything* "to do with Microsoft's share price, or with future business."
I speculate that there could be serious inflation of numbers in terms of units sold. At least on this campus, the number of "free" Vista downloads probably outnumbers the number of purchased Vista licenses by a factor that is probably two rather than one order of magnitude. That means that in this local area Vista is selling like Hotcakes, which you might expect at an average price somewhere around $3 to $30. If the numbers "sold" are taken, and then applied to retail price, this would sure look like a lot more money being generated than actually is flowing. Probably totally legal accounting slight-of-hand. Still, I question adoption rates. I've yet to see a single (free) Vista install that lasted for more than a month before WinXP was reinstalled. Easy come easy go...
"Look I can see you're in favor of the GPL, but don't you think in my example, the company would have been better off banning any use of GPL code in it's product?"
I would even go so far as to say, if you can't use it without violating the law, you just shouldn't use it. I totally agree that all companies should at least try to ban the criminal behavior of employees, don't you?
Agreed: the embedded space is different, for sure. Running on top of a GPL layer is different than compiling everything in together. If you specify that you need to distribute binaries that are statically linked against binary only code, then of course I'm willing to stipulate that GPLed code is not an option. LGPL might work. I certainly don't see this as a problem with the GPL.
Whats wrong with hanging them?
Actually Win1.0 was a joke. Win2.0 was no better. Win3.0 didn't make much difference. It was Win3.1 that finally was usable in a way that didn't make MS look like a retarded child next to a Mac. Now I have to say that Win95 looked good, but it was so unstable. Win98SE finally cleaned up a lot of that crud, but that was right before Win2k was released. Win2k was the first stable modern version of windows I ever saw ran. For most of Win9x's life, it sucked. Hard to grade it just on the last patch on the last version before it EOL-ed...
WinXP SP2 is likewise a *big* improvement on Win9x in terms of stability. Now I agree that WinME was...different in a less than pleasing way. I never ran it, but I know people who did. I don't know anyone who stayed with it, though.
So maybe I look back over a longer chain of events than you do, but it seems to me that mostly Microsoft has sold crap. They sold it, though. Not always though legal methods (I remember seeing dialogs popup, asking me to call MS Hotline, suggesting their was an error taking place...back when Win3.1 would detect you were running it on DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. They lost that lawsuit, by the way, many many many years after putting DR-DOS out of business...
But isn't MS a VMS shop? Didn't they hire all DEC's SW engineers and programmers? Not really a Unixy culture there...
I know my school suddenly became a member of the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance because they were almost giving the memberships away. Which meant all the CS majors downloaded free copies of MS Vista Business. Which meant that we went through an eCommerce site where we filled our carts and ran through "checkouts" that stated we owed $0.00, which seemed funny at the time. Now I know several hundred copies of Vista showed up as "sold" when they weren't really.
Imagine if all over the world tonight, young people decided to take colored chalk in hand and write "MS: Put Up or Shut Up!" on sidewalks from Munich through Paris and London, to Tokyo and on around to SF, LA, Austin, NY, etc...
:-)
What a PR piece that would make
Under your scenario you stipulated you couldn't open the source code. So that route is out. That means you have no legal right to distribute. What it comes down to is you don't own what you thought you paid for. In terms of Mathematica, the situations are identical in that you stipulated a UI on top of GPLed kernel and stack.
Agreed that a controlled market is easier. Agreed that a small number of prepackaged superstars would be more lucrative (for the labels) than a free and open market. The point at which we disagree is the effect that dissolving the strangle hold the major labels have on the distribution pipeline would then have on the state of music production.
Although writing a UI on top of a kernel tcp/ip stack won't cause the UI to be GPLed, I assume you want to present a case where there is mingling and the GPL would be invoked. So lets assume you don't merely right a UI on top.
Obviously you can't distribute all the source code, which means that you can't distribute the whole package. It really means you never could legally distribute the whole package. Right? The request for source code is a way of pointing out to you that you are in violation, not a real request, because you don't have the rights to GPL the code which would need to be GPLed to distribute. Sounds like you'd have to stop distributing, and you could maybe open all the code you do own rights to...
Historically, the position often taken (especially when it seems a company didn't knowingly have intent to infringe) is to make things right from this point going forward. At least, that is what the FSF seems to want to shoot for.
Back to the way you initially asserted your problem, though: I have a license for Mathematica for Linux. It runs on a GPLed kernel and a GPLed stack and in fact in a GPLed windowing system on a GPLed window manager using GPLed GUI kits. Yet Wolfram would surely laugh (as they should) if I asked for the code to their UI. It doesn't work that way.
It has been an interesting experiment to reward distributors with power over use for their investment. Creative artists show up in that equation somewhere, too. Not so much though, their reward is dominated by the reward received by those who actually control the distribution. Stated as you stated it, though, it is obviously a reward and not a right. That at least allows for discourse.
On your second point, the ramifications of a major change would be controversial. All the noise from vested interests would drown out the fact that nobody really knows if music would collapse or experience a renaissance. If copyright went away, the major labels would have to evolve, for sure. I doubt we'd have the small number of souless, mindless crap artists who are marketed so heavily dominating music. Rather, we'd see phenomena like tour bands (Grateful Dead). People like music. People will pay to see live music. But rather than marketing being paid, and a small number of artists paid, you might just find the dam bursting loose waters an enormous acreage of talent.