I've always thought, as a non-lawyer somewhat familiar with the law, that this is rather a grey area for free-as-in-beer software.
If we assume for the purposes of this argument that someone may only copy a work with the copyright holder's permission, then a licence agreement is a way of giving that permission. If the software is paid for and the licence agreement comes with it, then there's a reasonable argument that the agreement acts as a contract with consideration on both sides. But if the software was obtained for free, then there is no obvious consideration involved in that direction. There can't then be a contract requiring the copyright holder to uphold their end of the bargain, because there is no bargain.
In that case, the copyright holder could withdraw their permission at any time, which rather breaks the entire concept of the GPL. Similar issues have arisen elsewhere in law, which is why you sometimes see businesses that are in trouble being sold for $10 rather than "given away" for free.
Incidentally, a related question that someone raised with me in another discussion was whether you can, legally robustly, donate a work to the public domain. At that point, copyright would no longer apply, so a licence of any kind would be unnecessary to make a legal copy. However, try tracking down a law in any major jurisdiction that actually has an explicit provision allowing someone to voluntarily and permanently give up a copyright they hold and leave a work in the public domain, in the same absolute sense that it would be after any applicable copyright expired or for, say, government works that are legally public domain from the start. I've never found one, which raises the interesting (and somewhat scary) prospect that no-one can actually give away their work for free in a manner that any recipients can rely on, even if all parties wish this to be the case...
That might be what the FSF say it's for, but neither you nor we have any way to know whether that is really how they would act at any future time.
Didn't we have a related discussion on Slashdot the other day, where an open project had got all its contributors to sign over the copyright to a central organisation and those contributors then saw the central organisation bought out and the licence changed to a less open one for future releases?
In most jurisdictions I know (certainly in civil law countries, the US, and the UK), you cannot acquire ownership of stolen property. If you buy something stolen, bad for you.
Indeed. At least as the buyer, you have a chance to make any checks you might feel are necessary, for example into the registered owner of a vehicle or property, or the reputation of a seller. For particularly valuable property, one might even consider making such checks to be due diligence. The original owner who was deprived of their property through theft had no such opportunity.
The motivation behind this is to make theft less profitable. If you could acquire actual ownership of stolen property, you would be willing to pay up to market price for it, and your interest would be to ''not'' inquire wether the item has been legitimately acquired by the fence.
And that, as our American friends might say, is the ball game.
I don't know a single PS3 owner who does not also own a BD movie. Not 1.
Neither do I, but that's because I don't know a single PS3 owner. The Wii is the gaming platform of choice among people I know, with just a few 360s making up the total for keen console gamers.
Frankly, the overall reaction among my friends and colleagues to hi-def video has been a resounding "". I'm not sure I've even seen a hi-def movie in either format on anyone's shelves.
That's cute: a straw man rant, dressed up as intellectual argument, resting on the frankly rather arrogant belief that you know more about economics than me or others reading your post, all the while overlooking a basic bad assumption that undermines your entire argument. Don't feel bad, I've posted patronising crap like that here before, and I got rightly smacked down for it too.
Here's the basic idea you forgot: demand for luxury items varies with asking price, and not necessarily linearly. It is entirely possible that a group of decent musicians could make more money by almost (but not quite) giving away their stuff to a huge number of people over the Internet than they could by charging the current going rate for concert tickets and playing to small capacity venues on tour. Thus it is entirely possible that while the market would not support them full-time playing live, it could support them with Internet distribution to many people at a low price, taking advantage of the almost zero marginal cost of reproduction and distribution. This is my counter-argument to the GGP post's proposal that musicians will go back to making their livings playing live, and nothing you wrote contradicts it at all AFAICS.
I confess to being slightly confused. I could rattle off a list of quite a few personal friends, work colleagues and immediate family who are involved in professional music from various perspectives, but there wouldn't be much point, because then I would only have said what you appear to know already: most of the small groups who basically play clubs and pubs get enough to cover expenses and beer money, and that's about it. Many of them also have day jobs to bring in the real money. It's only the guys who reach the very top who make it big from live performances.
As far as I can see, this only supports my position, which was that most musicians could not go back to making their living just from live performance as the GGP post suggested, but there will be a place in the new era of on-line music sales for major promoters to get real talent more widely shared. Guys who are good, but too small to be full-time pros today, could still bring in a worthwhile income in what becomes almost a micropayment economy, where instead of trying to sell £10 CDs, you try to sell 10p downloads to 100x as many people.
Sorry, but I think that whole argument is fundamentally flawed.
For one thing, few musicians could make enough money to get by today from live performances alone, even the good ones.
For another thing, the idea of mass distribution won't disappear, it'll just shift to a different channel. A smart label will establish an on-line brand with a good reputation and lots of visitors coming to its web site, and use that to promote the bands it's acting for. I imagine we'll see the market shift to cheaper products that sell more copies as well. A smart label could still make a worthwhile percentage doing that, it'll just replace their old physical media distribution model and sales/pricing assumptions over time.
The only organisations that will die are stupid labels who think the physical media are the way of the future and don't understand basic economics. And frankly, they deserve to. A middleman who provides no useful service is worthless, and will lose out to more helpful competition.
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy
They also aren't the same thing, as anyone even remotely familiar with the subject is well aware.
What isn't rational in a market economy is deliberately making the black market version of your product better than the above board original, by artificially crippling the latter. Such a policy is pretty much directly targeted at the very people who actively support your business, while doing little to impair those who do not.
Pointing out problems with liquidity in a bank is hardly akin to inciting a riot.
The problem is, that is almost exactly what it was akin to a few weeks ago. People were literally fighting in the streets in some cases, trying to get to the front of the queue at a Northern Rock branch after waiting outside for hours to get their money out.
I don't see how you can make such a sweeping generalization.
I honestly don't see what either of your two examples does to counter it. Very young children have almost no freedoms in the ethical sense we're talking about, and as they grow, most societies continue to restrict their freedoms but lessen those restrictions as they become older and more responsible. Unless you live somewhere very different to where I live, a fully able 21-year-old is personally responsible for their actions both legally and ethically, just like any other adult.
Muckrakers are a small price to pay for a bit of transparency.
It won't seem a small price if lots of people banking at Northern Rock literally lose their life savings because the deal fell through and the government washed their hands of it.
When you go around talking about using free speech responsibly (or else?) it sounds a lot like 'shut up and keep your head down'
No, I just don't believe in absolute free speech with no consequences for what you choose to say. Anyone who does is an idealist.
Free speech is an important principle, and it certainly shouldn't be given up lightly, but it inherently conflicts with several other important ideals: among them are privacy, protection from defamation, secrets kept for legitimate national security purposes, and even physical safety in the classic "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" example. If you really believe that freedom of speech is an absolute right, then I'm afraid you'll have to give up all those other things. Personally, I think that is too high a price to pay for letting any old fool run off at the mouth without bothering to think about the consequences.
If it wanted to protect everyday people with savings with the bank they could still have let it fail and simply paid out the account insurance. What it is protecting is bond investors, whose money would explicitly not be covered in a bank crash
I'm sorry, but I believe you're mistaken.
The assets of Northern Rock, once the sound mortgages they are currently out are repaid, aren't so far off the amount of the initial Bank of England loans (short of a huge housing market crash, but I don't know anyone who thinks the 50% drop some in this discussion are talking about is credible). It's true there seems to have been some figure fiddling in the second round of BoE loans. Even so, there isn't much risk there relative to the overall sums of taxpayers' money being talked about; in particular, this doesn't support the £1k per person statistic being thrown around. If it were that dicey, why would not one but two private sectors buyers be seriously interested in a bail-out scheme at this point?
The other half-or-so of the staggering sums of public money being talked about is the theoretical maximum the government would have to pay out if the Rock went under and everyone with savings there lost their own money as a consequence, i.e., it's underwriting the public, not the investors in NR.
Personally, as I think I indicated earlier, I'm with those who don't like the first loans mentioned above but support the public guarantee. That is, if the Rock goes under and investors lose everything, that's their problem for making a bad investment, but the innocent public whose only involvement was letting Northern Rock run their savings account should be protected.
And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.
That depends on whether there's a good chance of getting it back, doesn't it?
Certainly the government takes a lot of my money and does things I don't approve of with it. But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan and it avoids a financial melt-down, it's probably a loan I'd rather make.
The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.
Perhaps. But then a lot of innocent people who kept their savings with NR would lose money. Confidence in the UK's banking industry would collapse. A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow, and if not rapidly corrected by much more dramatic government action than what we've seen with Rock, that in turn would be followed by the biggest national financial meltdown in history.
At that point, it wouldn't matter whether you were a higher-rate taxpayer with lots of savings or a minimum wage slave living month to month. It wouldn't matter whether you prudently checked out your bank's policies on sub-prime lending before keeping your savings there, or just went with what looked like the best deal when you compared the numbers. If the banks collapse, in a modern economy that depends on them and the trust system underwriting them, everyone is seriously f**ked — I'm not talking a tax hike next year, I'm talking likely total failure of law and order.
This is what a lot of the "shoulda just let 'em crash" brigade don't seem to appreciate. Even if we do all lose £1k each because of the government intervention, it's still a lot less in real terms than we would have lost if they hadn't intervened and things had gone south fast. Of course, no remotely competent government would ever let things get anywhere near that far, but the point is that if you don't act decisively early on, you may be forced to take even more dramatic actions later that are even more dubious if you look at the long-term economic picture alone.
Now, letting the investors in an organisation that fails off the hook is an entirely different question. The government shouldn't underwrite bad investments, because it just encourages more bad investments and rewards those who should pay for their poor choices using taxpayers' money. But remember, a lot of the government money involved in the Rock case isn't underwriting the investors, it's underwriting the everyday people who have savings with Rock. If Rock gets bought out at well below its previous value, that's just market forces in action, but it's only the investors who lose out, not the customers or the taxpayer. There's a world of difference.
This is basically caused by a wunch of bankers who loaned money they did not have to people who cannot afford to repay it.
That's what the sub-prime crisis is all about, yes. But Northern Rock's problem was not primarily that they did not have the money, but rather that they did not have the liquidity and were caught off guard. Also, while NR did lend in some dubious ways (another reply to my previous post noted some particularly daft examples), so did almost everyone else in recent years, and Rock are reportedly much less exposed in this way than much of the competition.
Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.
That may be true, but if you have a site that renders fine in highly W3C-compliant browsers and degrades gracefully in IE6 because of some extra work you did, then you're not going to consider IE7 an improvement if it circumvents your degrading code but still doesn't make it to standards compliant and render the page properly. More to the point, neither is anyone visiting your site.
This is the case for a number of hobby sites I support. I made the effort to get them working OK in IE6, because my logs tell me that the majority of my visitors use that browser. I'm not going to make the effort to make them work perfectly in IE7, because they work well enough to be useful and not enough of my visitors use IE7 to justify spending my time making the sites pretty in that browser as well. And besides, who knows how long IE7 will have its current quirks anyway? A special case might be justified for a platform used by 90% of visitors for several years, but writing a new special case every time for MS's benefit is silly unless they're all going to last that long and carry that kind of market share.
I very much doubt I will be alone in this view. I guess come 12 February, we'll find out.:-)
While I am as wary of any kind of censorship as the next guy, we would also do well to remember that the entire Northern Rock episode was basically caused by media over-hyping a short term liquidity problem, which is a relatively benign, if somewhat unusual, banking situation.
The way the credit crunch/government loan issue has been portrayed in the mainstream media, even relatively decent sources like the BBC, has made it sound disastrous, thus prompting a full scale run on a bank. Given that the entire consumer banking industry basically runs on a trust system, everything would probably have worked out fine, but the resulting panic has exacerbated the problem and now we have had the big government bail out.
So, while I'm all for free speech, I'm also all for people using it responsibly. The responsible thing to do before would have been for the media to explain that Northern Rock had a relatively sound loans book in the long term (they actually have far less exposure to sub-prime losses than many of the big banks), and that the central bank (well, "the government" in this case, argue it how you like) stepping in to smooth over a temporary liquidity problem is the correct response to this, economically speaking. Indeed, it seems unlikely that these circumstances are specific to Northern Rock: much the same could have happened (and perhaps more deservedly) to many other banks in the current economic climate. NR were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, metaphorically speaking. So it would be better if the average person had some understanding of the basic economic idea, so we don't see a repeat performance when the next big bad announcement is made by another bank.
The responsible thing to do now would be to allow Northern Rock, the government, Virgin, and whoever else is playing behind the scenes to get on with making a deal. All leaking confidential documents mid-process does is make it harder to find a mutually beneficial way out of the current predicament, which ultimately just shafts everyone, including the taxpayer and potentially those who have money held by NR.
Censorship has a chilling effect, but so does irresponsible spreading of half-truths and misinformation by the tinfoil hat brigade on the pretence of defending free speech. With freedom comes responsibility, always.
And those "rules" will make absolutely no difference to someone who decides not to join the union. Surprisingly, a new organisation created for the sole purpose of pretending to be important does not yet trump either the law of the land or economic market forces!
Well, apart from the whole "commercial entity duping people who were sharing their code under GPL into allowing arbitrary commercial, closed-source uses" part, anyway.
I don't understand why anyone who has chosen to use the GPL after considering what it implies (rather than just because of hype or fashion) would ever sign away their copyright to some commercial entity like this. If you're OK with anyone using your code however they like, just release it to the public domain or pick some BSD-style licence. If you want those distributing work built on it to have to allow others to do likewise, giving your copyright to another group whose primary interest might become the opposite is silly. (I'm not sure how likely it would be to stand up in court, either; a contract generally requires consideration on both sides, so what did you get in return for the other guys getting your copyright?)
I'm afraid you've set yourself an almost impossible task. IME, there are no shortcuts here, and it it's going to take anywhere from a few months to a couple of years for a new developer to really get their head around a large, unfamiliar code base.
That said, I recommend against just diving in to some random bit of code. You'll probably never need most of it. Heck, I've never read the majority of the code of the project I work on, and that's after several years, with approx 1M lines to consider.
You need to get the big picture instead. Identify the entry point(s), and look for the major functions they call, and so on down until you start to get a feel for how the work is broken down. Look for the major data structures and code operating on them as well, because if you can establish the important data flows in the program you'll be well on your way. Hopefully the design is fairly modular, and if you're in OO world or you're working in a language with packages, looking at how the modules fit together can help a lot too. Any good IDE will have some basic tools to plot things like call graphs and inheritance/containment diagrams, if not there are tools like Doxygen that can do some of it independently.
If you're working on a large code base without a decent overall design that you can grok within a few days, then I'm afraid you're doomed and no amount of tools or documentation or reading files full of code will help you. Projects in that state invariably die, usually slowly and painfully, IME.
That leads to the interesting questions of whether a 24-year-old Norwegian hacker who likes allowing people to share information freely would make a better leader than any politician likely to achieve high office this year, and whether even 17-year-old Russian script kiddies could do a better job of promoting good international relations than the likes of Brown and Putin.
Oh, sorry, did you mean a coup d'état via cyberspace would be a bad thing?:-)
Sorry, I didn't write my second point clearly. I meant redistributing copies of the work. I have no problem with either loaning or selling an original copy, as long as the previous holder's personal use rights stop when they give up that original copy. In fact, I don't think prohibiting such loan or sale should be within the copyright holder's rights at all, because there is no "multiplication" involved and the original copy has already been legitimately obtained.
Such a simple framework would probably cause some considerable debate around the use of licensing agreements, I suspect, but at least having some clarity there would allow an exploration of what is fair and what the law should therefore evolve to support, instead of the "when does it/doesn't it apply?" mess we have in many jurisdictions today.
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I've always thought, as a non-lawyer somewhat familiar with the law, that this is rather a grey area for free-as-in-beer software.
If we assume for the purposes of this argument that someone may only copy a work with the copyright holder's permission, then a licence agreement is a way of giving that permission. If the software is paid for and the licence agreement comes with it, then there's a reasonable argument that the agreement acts as a contract with consideration on both sides. But if the software was obtained for free, then there is no obvious consideration involved in that direction. There can't then be a contract requiring the copyright holder to uphold their end of the bargain, because there is no bargain.
In that case, the copyright holder could withdraw their permission at any time, which rather breaks the entire concept of the GPL. Similar issues have arisen elsewhere in law, which is why you sometimes see businesses that are in trouble being sold for $10 rather than "given away" for free.
Incidentally, a related question that someone raised with me in another discussion was whether you can, legally robustly, donate a work to the public domain. At that point, copyright would no longer apply, so a licence of any kind would be unnecessary to make a legal copy. However, try tracking down a law in any major jurisdiction that actually has an explicit provision allowing someone to voluntarily and permanently give up a copyright they hold and leave a work in the public domain, in the same absolute sense that it would be after any applicable copyright expired or for, say, government works that are legally public domain from the start. I've never found one, which raises the interesting (and somewhat scary) prospect that no-one can actually give away their work for free in a manner that any recipients can rely on, even if all parties wish this to be the case...
That might be what the FSF say it's for, but neither you nor we have any way to know whether that is really how they would act at any future time.
Didn't we have a related discussion on Slashdot the other day, where an open project had got all its contributors to sign over the copyright to a central organisation and those contributors then saw the central organisation bought out and the licence changed to a less open one for future releases?
In most jurisdictions I know (certainly in civil law countries, the US, and the UK), you cannot acquire ownership of stolen property. If you buy something stolen, bad for you.
Indeed. At least as the buyer, you have a chance to make any checks you might feel are necessary, for example into the registered owner of a vehicle or property, or the reputation of a seller. For particularly valuable property, one might even consider making such checks to be due diligence. The original owner who was deprived of their property through theft had no such opportunity.
The motivation behind this is to make theft less profitable. If you could acquire actual ownership of stolen property, you would be willing to pay up to market price for it, and your interest would be to ''not'' inquire wether the item has been legitimately acquired by the fence.
And that, as our American friends might say, is the ball game.
I don't know a single PS3 owner who does not also own a BD movie. Not 1.
Neither do I, but that's because I don't know a single PS3 owner. The Wii is the gaming platform of choice among people I know, with just a few 360s making up the total for keen console gamers.
Frankly, the overall reaction among my friends and colleagues to hi-def video has been a resounding "". I'm not sure I've even seen a hi-def movie in either format on anyone's shelves.
That's cute: a straw man rant, dressed up as intellectual argument, resting on the frankly rather arrogant belief that you know more about economics than me or others reading your post, all the while overlooking a basic bad assumption that undermines your entire argument. Don't feel bad, I've posted patronising crap like that here before, and I got rightly smacked down for it too.
Here's the basic idea you forgot: demand for luxury items varies with asking price, and not necessarily linearly. It is entirely possible that a group of decent musicians could make more money by almost (but not quite) giving away their stuff to a huge number of people over the Internet than they could by charging the current going rate for concert tickets and playing to small capacity venues on tour. Thus it is entirely possible that while the market would not support them full-time playing live, it could support them with Internet distribution to many people at a low price, taking advantage of the almost zero marginal cost of reproduction and distribution. This is my counter-argument to the GGP post's proposal that musicians will go back to making their livings playing live, and nothing you wrote contradicts it at all AFAICS.
I confess to being slightly confused. I could rattle off a list of quite a few personal friends, work colleagues and immediate family who are involved in professional music from various perspectives, but there wouldn't be much point, because then I would only have said what you appear to know already: most of the small groups who basically play clubs and pubs get enough to cover expenses and beer money, and that's about it. Many of them also have day jobs to bring in the real money. It's only the guys who reach the very top who make it big from live performances.
As far as I can see, this only supports my position, which was that most musicians could not go back to making their living just from live performance as the GGP post suggested, but there will be a place in the new era of on-line music sales for major promoters to get real talent more widely shared. Guys who are good, but too small to be full-time pros today, could still bring in a worthwhile income in what becomes almost a micropayment economy, where instead of trying to sell £10 CDs, you try to sell 10p downloads to 100x as many people.
Sorry, but I think that whole argument is fundamentally flawed.
For one thing, few musicians could make enough money to get by today from live performances alone, even the good ones.
For another thing, the idea of mass distribution won't disappear, it'll just shift to a different channel. A smart label will establish an on-line brand with a good reputation and lots of visitors coming to its web site, and use that to promote the bands it's acting for. I imagine we'll see the market shift to cheaper products that sell more copies as well. A smart label could still make a worthwhile percentage doing that, it'll just replace their old physical media distribution model and sales/pricing assumptions over time.
The only organisations that will die are stupid labels who think the physical media are the way of the future and don't understand basic economics. And frankly, they deserve to. A middleman who provides no useful service is worthless, and will lose out to more helpful competition.
Exactly.
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy
They also aren't the same thing, as anyone even remotely familiar with the subject is well aware.
What isn't rational in a market economy is deliberately making the black market version of your product better than the above board original, by artificially crippling the latter. Such a policy is pretty much directly targeted at the very people who actively support your business, while doing little to impair those who do not.
Don't use Quicktime on Windows!
Oh, wait...
Pointing out problems with liquidity in a bank is hardly akin to inciting a riot.
The problem is, that is almost exactly what it was akin to a few weeks ago. People were literally fighting in the streets in some cases, trying to get to the front of the queue at a Northern Rock branch after waiting outside for hours to get their money out.
I don't see how you can make such a sweeping generalization.
I honestly don't see what either of your two examples does to counter it. Very young children have almost no freedoms in the ethical sense we're talking about, and as they grow, most societies continue to restrict their freedoms but lessen those restrictions as they become older and more responsible. Unless you live somewhere very different to where I live, a fully able 21-year-old is personally responsible for their actions both legally and ethically, just like any other adult.
Muckrakers are a small price to pay for a bit of transparency.
It won't seem a small price if lots of people banking at Northern Rock literally lose their life savings because the deal fell through and the government washed their hands of it.
When you go around talking about using free speech responsibly (or else?) it sounds a lot like 'shut up and keep your head down'
No, I just don't believe in absolute free speech with no consequences for what you choose to say. Anyone who does is an idealist.
Free speech is an important principle, and it certainly shouldn't be given up lightly, but it inherently conflicts with several other important ideals: among them are privacy, protection from defamation, secrets kept for legitimate national security purposes, and even physical safety in the classic "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" example. If you really believe that freedom of speech is an absolute right, then I'm afraid you'll have to give up all those other things. Personally, I think that is too high a price to pay for letting any old fool run off at the mouth without bothering to think about the consequences.
If it wanted to protect everyday people with savings with the bank they could still have let it fail and simply paid out the account insurance. What it is protecting is bond investors, whose money would explicitly not be covered in a bank crash
I'm sorry, but I believe you're mistaken.
The assets of Northern Rock, once the sound mortgages they are currently out are repaid, aren't so far off the amount of the initial Bank of England loans (short of a huge housing market crash, but I don't know anyone who thinks the 50% drop some in this discussion are talking about is credible). It's true there seems to have been some figure fiddling in the second round of BoE loans. Even so, there isn't much risk there relative to the overall sums of taxpayers' money being talked about; in particular, this doesn't support the £1k per person statistic being thrown around. If it were that dicey, why would not one but two private sectors buyers be seriously interested in a bail-out scheme at this point?
The other half-or-so of the staggering sums of public money being talked about is the theoretical maximum the government would have to pay out if the Rock went under and everyone with savings there lost their own money as a consequence, i.e., it's underwriting the public, not the investors in NR.
Personally, as I think I indicated earlier, I'm with those who don't like the first loans mentioned above but support the public guarantee. That is, if the Rock goes under and investors lose everything, that's their problem for making a bad investment, but the innocent public whose only involvement was letting Northern Rock run their savings account should be protected.
And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.
That depends on whether there's a good chance of getting it back, doesn't it?
Certainly the government takes a lot of my money and does things I don't approve of with it. But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan and it avoids a financial melt-down, it's probably a loan I'd rather make.
The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.
Perhaps. But then a lot of innocent people who kept their savings with NR would lose money. Confidence in the UK's banking industry would collapse. A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow, and if not rapidly corrected by much more dramatic government action than what we've seen with Rock, that in turn would be followed by the biggest national financial meltdown in history.
At that point, it wouldn't matter whether you were a higher-rate taxpayer with lots of savings or a minimum wage slave living month to month. It wouldn't matter whether you prudently checked out your bank's policies on sub-prime lending before keeping your savings there, or just went with what looked like the best deal when you compared the numbers. If the banks collapse, in a modern economy that depends on them and the trust system underwriting them, everyone is seriously f**ked — I'm not talking a tax hike next year, I'm talking likely total failure of law and order.
This is what a lot of the "shoulda just let 'em crash" brigade don't seem to appreciate. Even if we do all lose £1k each because of the government intervention, it's still a lot less in real terms than we would have lost if they hadn't intervened and things had gone south fast. Of course, no remotely competent government would ever let things get anywhere near that far, but the point is that if you don't act decisively early on, you may be forced to take even more dramatic actions later that are even more dubious if you look at the long-term economic picture alone.
Now, letting the investors in an organisation that fails off the hook is an entirely different question. The government shouldn't underwrite bad investments, because it just encourages more bad investments and rewards those who should pay for their poor choices using taxpayers' money. But remember, a lot of the government money involved in the Rock case isn't underwriting the investors, it's underwriting the everyday people who have savings with Rock. If Rock gets bought out at well below its previous value, that's just market forces in action, but it's only the investors who lose out, not the customers or the taxpayer. There's a world of difference.
This is basically caused by a wunch of bankers who loaned money they did not have to people who cannot afford to repay it.
That's what the sub-prime crisis is all about, yes. But Northern Rock's problem was not primarily that they did not have the money, but rather that they did not have the liquidity and were caught off guard. Also, while NR did lend in some dubious ways (another reply to my previous post noted some particularly daft examples), so did almost everyone else in recent years, and Rock are reportedly much less exposed in this way than much of the competition.
Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.
That may be true, but if you have a site that renders fine in highly W3C-compliant browsers and degrades gracefully in IE6 because of some extra work you did, then you're not going to consider IE7 an improvement if it circumvents your degrading code but still doesn't make it to standards compliant and render the page properly. More to the point, neither is anyone visiting your site.
This is the case for a number of hobby sites I support. I made the effort to get them working OK in IE6, because my logs tell me that the majority of my visitors use that browser. I'm not going to make the effort to make them work perfectly in IE7, because they work well enough to be useful and not enough of my visitors use IE7 to justify spending my time making the sites pretty in that browser as well. And besides, who knows how long IE7 will have its current quirks anyway? A special case might be justified for a platform used by 90% of visitors for several years, but writing a new special case every time for MS's benefit is silly unless they're all going to last that long and carry that kind of market share.
I very much doubt I will be alone in this view. I guess come 12 February, we'll find out. :-)
While I am as wary of any kind of censorship as the next guy, we would also do well to remember that the entire Northern Rock episode was basically caused by media over-hyping a short term liquidity problem, which is a relatively benign, if somewhat unusual, banking situation.
The way the credit crunch/government loan issue has been portrayed in the mainstream media, even relatively decent sources like the BBC, has made it sound disastrous, thus prompting a full scale run on a bank. Given that the entire consumer banking industry basically runs on a trust system, everything would probably have worked out fine, but the resulting panic has exacerbated the problem and now we have had the big government bail out.
So, while I'm all for free speech, I'm also all for people using it responsibly. The responsible thing to do before would have been for the media to explain that Northern Rock had a relatively sound loans book in the long term (they actually have far less exposure to sub-prime losses than many of the big banks), and that the central bank (well, "the government" in this case, argue it how you like) stepping in to smooth over a temporary liquidity problem is the correct response to this, economically speaking. Indeed, it seems unlikely that these circumstances are specific to Northern Rock: much the same could have happened (and perhaps more deservedly) to many other banks in the current economic climate. NR were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, metaphorically speaking. So it would be better if the average person had some understanding of the basic economic idea, so we don't see a repeat performance when the next big bad announcement is made by another bank.
The responsible thing to do now would be to allow Northern Rock, the government, Virgin, and whoever else is playing behind the scenes to get on with making a deal. All leaking confidential documents mid-process does is make it harder to find a mutually beneficial way out of the current predicament, which ultimately just shafts everyone, including the taxpayer and potentially those who have money held by NR.
Censorship has a chilling effect, but so does irresponsible spreading of half-truths and misinformation by the tinfoil hat brigade on the pretence of defending free speech. With freedom comes responsibility, always.
Why would all the ISPs in the country decide to "honour" such a union?
And those "rules" will make absolutely no difference to someone who decides not to join the union. Surprisingly, a new organisation created for the sole purpose of pretending to be important does not yet trump either the law of the land or economic market forces!
It is working as intended.
Well, apart from the whole "commercial entity duping people who were sharing their code under GPL into allowing arbitrary commercial, closed-source uses" part, anyway.
I don't understand why anyone who has chosen to use the GPL after considering what it implies (rather than just because of hype or fashion) would ever sign away their copyright to some commercial entity like this. If you're OK with anyone using your code however they like, just release it to the public domain or pick some BSD-style licence. If you want those distributing work built on it to have to allow others to do likewise, giving your copyright to another group whose primary interest might become the opposite is silly. (I'm not sure how likely it would be to stand up in court, either; a contract generally requires consideration on both sides, so what did you get in return for the other guys getting your copyright?)
I'm afraid you've set yourself an almost impossible task. IME, there are no shortcuts here, and it it's going to take anywhere from a few months to a couple of years for a new developer to really get their head around a large, unfamiliar code base.
That said, I recommend against just diving in to some random bit of code. You'll probably never need most of it. Heck, I've never read the majority of the code of the project I work on, and that's after several years, with approx 1M lines to consider.
You need to get the big picture instead. Identify the entry point(s), and look for the major functions they call, and so on down until you start to get a feel for how the work is broken down. Look for the major data structures and code operating on them as well, because if you can establish the important data flows in the program you'll be well on your way. Hopefully the design is fairly modular, and if you're in OO world or you're working in a language with packages, looking at how the modules fit together can help a lot too. Any good IDE will have some basic tools to plot things like call graphs and inheritance/containment diagrams, if not there are tools like Doxygen that can do some of it independently.
If you're working on a large code base without a decent overall design that you can grok within a few days, then I'm afraid you're doomed and no amount of tools or documentation or reading files full of code will help you. Projects in that state invariably die, usually slowly and painfully, IME.
It's where baby Leia is growing up. Even I know that, and I've only seen the first three films!
Why, is something bad going to happen in episode IV?
That leads to the interesting questions of whether a 24-year-old Norwegian hacker who likes allowing people to share information freely would make a better leader than any politician likely to achieve high office this year, and whether even 17-year-old Russian script kiddies could do a better job of promoting good international relations than the likes of Brown and Putin.
Oh, sorry, did you mean a coup d'état via cyberspace would be a bad thing? :-)
Sorry, I didn't write my second point clearly. I meant redistributing copies of the work. I have no problem with either loaning or selling an original copy, as long as the previous holder's personal use rights stop when they give up that original copy. In fact, I don't think prohibiting such loan or sale should be within the copyright holder's rights at all, because there is no "multiplication" involved and the original copy has already been legitimately obtained.
Such a simple framework would probably cause some considerable debate around the use of licensing agreements, I suspect, but at least having some clarity there would allow an exploration of what is fair and what the law should therefore evolve to support, instead of the "when does it/doesn't it apply?" mess we have in many jurisdictions today.
All the law says is that fair uses are lawful
Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're aware, that isn't quite true in many places today.
The law in many places now says that a fair use does not infringe copyright, which isn't the same thing if other laws are also relevant.