The flip side to this is that your new employer might not take kindly to pushing back the start date too much. I'm only marginally willing to let a new hire wait 4 weeks before starting; if they want that long, there is a good chance they might be fishing.
That's true, of course, but they could also be doing right by their soon-to-be-ex employer, as in this situation. Wouldn't you want to employ the kind of person who makes an effort to leave things tidy if and when they decide to leave?
I don't really agree re weak typing, though. It's not really weak typing that's at issue, it's that memory management is still done "by hand". Most of the nasty overflows stem from the fact that C lets you copy a 200 char long buffer into (and over the end of) a char[20].
At the risk of being picky, that basically is a type system error. Manual memory management can be responsible for resource leaks when you forget to free dynamically allocated memory, for example. However, most of the killers are when you can get data into places it shouldn't be, particularly by messing with the values of pointers or by over-running buffers, and this sort of vulnerability is introduced by using an insufficiently powerful (or overly flexible, depending on your point of view) type system.
Maybe the brits just know that symantec has been a joke for years.
/me glances at system tray where Symantec icon lived until last month, at which time I got so tired of its inability to schedule jobs properly that I asked our sysadmin to replace it with an alternative. Trend lives there now instead, and is becoming our corporate standard.
Until the artists wise up and use the Internet to distribute their music on their own terms, this cat and mouse game will continue.
Does it never occur to anyone that most bands probably don't have the necessary expertise to do this, and would require some outside help from promotion and marketing experts?
Most people who sign with a record label probably aren't going to make much money from it, but don't kid yourself about the Internet revolutionising self-publishing for music artists. It might not be today's record labels who get the goodies, but middle-men who know about Internet marketing will appear and take their share before $JOE'S_BAND gets big through the 'net, and most bands will need to make use of those services.
It's wrong to assert that "assholes among us" are the source of the problem. The labels are the ones imposing restrictive DRM.
And they're doing it because of flagrant, widespread, arrogant abuse of the law by a significant minority of the population.
If the assholes hadn't been taking the piss for years, DRM wouldn't have needed to exist. Sooner or later the record labels would have realised there was money to be made from honest customers in on-line music downloads and done it anyway, and it would have been a lot more convenient for those of us who do just want to back up the material, or burn a CD with our favourite mix to listen to in the car. We could have avoided provoking a whole wave of unnecessarily wide-ranging and frequently abused laws along the way, too.
DRM sucks, but the population has brought it upon itself. The assholes broke the law long before the law started becoming silly, and now rather than accepting that they scream "No compromise is acceptable!" as if their right to have the music at all is enshrined in some higher law. Newsflash: this is not the attitude to adopt if you want to start reversing the damage.
The record labels will have to change their business model to work with human behavior. What you propose is us changing our behavior to work with their business model. I couldn't disagree more.
Disagreeing is your prerogative, but you have failed to consider another alternative: as on-line distribution with thin margins becomes the dominant form of music sale, the record labels actually are going to start losing money. At that point the business guys at the top will just move into a different market, the guys who actually do good work will be out of a job, and while we'll lose a lot of the manufactured popular crap (but obviously a lot of people do like it; that's why it's popular) we'll also lose a lot of good music.
Most of the record industry isn't U2 or Britney Spears or $BIG_NAME_BAND, and without the publicity and promotional engine provided by the record labels, a lot of the smaller guys -- many of whom got that far by being pretty good at making music -- will lose out.
The primary advantage that MS Word and Excel had over the competition (WordPerfect and Lotus 123) was that MS owned the underlying platform and deliberately broke the published API used by the competition,
I imagine the fact that they had much better user interfaces probably helped, too. And there were all those genuinely useful new features. The fact that Wordperfect for Windows suffered forced instabilities wasn't what killed it. The UI that sucked and feature set that was less complete than Word's are what killed it.
Stop right there. The U.S. is *not* a free market, it's a regulated market that is somewhat free.
I'll concede that my use of the term "free market" was over-stating things, but none of your objections to the terminology actually addresses the point I was making: a company in this market is (by default) under no obligation to produce products that interoperate with anyone else's if they don't want to.
Also please note that we're talking about Europe, not the US, here. Establishing whether our markets or more or less free than those across the Atlantic is left as an exercise for the reader.
This is a Monopolistic company, deemed guilty, who won't give up the specifications on how to build a compatible product.
If I understand correctly, it's actually a company who won't give up those specifications without charging an excessive amount for them, and the legal system appears to be challenging them, quite rightly, on the latter point.
However, nothing I've seen so far seems to require them to give anything away completely for free. Perhaps I missed something in the original judgement that made this requirement?
Of course, Microsoft's operating system monopoly can be argued to have a cascade effect on the markets involved (If it wasn't for Microsoft Windows, do you seriously think we'd be running Microsoft Office?)
Personally, I'd say it's the other way around: if it weren't for Microsoft Office, I don't think Windows would ever have taken off. The early Windows versions of Word and Excel were good products, with genuine advantages over their rivals. MS had plenty of competition back then, and it didn't die off by magic. Without those major office applications as drivers, I can't imagine Windows developing the kind of momentum it did in the mid-90s.
That said, IMHO, the problems with Microsoft didn't start with either Windows or Office, both of which competed on their own merits with real competition until they'd established themselves as the dominant players in their respective markets. The problems began when Microsoft started throwing in other toys (IE, Media Player, etc.) on the back of Windows and/or Office, at the expense of competitors those toys couldn't beat in their own right. IME, the court cases have been aiming at the right target on this one.
I understand that you're a Microsoft basher, but I'll explain things in simple terms for you.;-)
Microsoft did break the law, but the law they broke was not developing their own protocols and APIs rather than using standards. In a free market, nothing says you have to be interoperable with everyone else, or to follow someone else's standards. With Microsoft's market share in some markets, it's doubtful whether anyone other than Microsoft has any right to claim to be "standard" anyway; try submitting all your CVs in.sxw format some time and see how far you get. If someone else has a better products then Microsoft's failure to promote interoperability and open standards will hurt them; that's the risk they choose to take in running their business that way, but it's their choice whether to take it.
The law Microsoft broke was in using their dominance of one market (operating systems for desktop computers) to promote their products in other fields. That, combined with the aforementioned reluctance to support interoperability with competing products, is unfair competition, and that's what they've been called on, both in the US and in Europe.
One possible remedy for this, now that the situation exists and Microsoft has effectively locked in custom in the secondary market through illegal means, is to force Microsoft to allow interoperability in that market. This is the important part of the penalty the courts handed down in Europe.
However, that doesn't make it open season on Microsoft. If you want to compete, you still have to do your own work. Microsoft aren't allowed to unreasonably prevent you from interoperating with their products (hence the disclosure requirements) but neither are they required to let you benefit for free from their work (for example, by providing sample interoperability code for your benefit at their own expense).
FWIW, I'm hardly a Microsoft apologist as my past posts here will demonstrate, but neither do I believe open source developers have some God-given right to privileges not enjoyed by the rest of the software development industry, just because they use words like "open" or "free" in their marketing. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to grow up and play by the big boys' rules.
If you're a convincted monopolist, many things than otherwise would be legal are considered a breach of the rules.
That may be true (aside from some wording issues), but I wasn't aware that trying to run a business and make money without providing valuable gifts to your direct competitors was one of them.
The Washington Post runs an entertaining "new words by adding/removing/changing one letter" competition from time to time as part of its "Style Invitation" series. Some recent favourites included:
bozone, n. The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
foreploy, n. Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
and of course this particular speciality of Slashdot moderators:
sarchasm, n. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
2. The legal entity named "Daimaou" wrote code that links to or otherwise reuses the GPLd code (" I brought in some source code that I had worked on prior to working here"), putting the collective work under the terms of the GPL
But what, exactly, do you mean by "putting the collective work under the terms of the GPL"?
The GPL is a licence under which the original code may be distributed. It grants distribution rights for the original, GPL'd code that you wouldn't otherwise have since you're not the copyright holder.
However, it can not impose any transfer of rights relating to the new code. There is simply no legal agreement there that would require this. In particular, if your new code is later used without the original GPL'd code, the fact that you once used GPL'd code cannot require you to distribute your new software under those terms if you're no longer using any GPL'd code in it.
The only case I can immediately see that the original copyright holder might have against you then would need your new software (sans GPL'd original code) to be held to be a derivative work of the original GPL'd code even though it no longer incorporated that code directly. For example, if the replacement you used for the original GPL'd code was a thinly-veiled clone of the same work, it would probably be held to be a derivative work, and as such the copyright would belong to the copyright holder of the original work. It's questionable (at best) whether you're even allowed to distribute that derived work under the GPL, unless the copyright holder specifically allows it.
I make it a point to discuss IP agreements up front.
Good move. I, too, asked specifically to see this aspect of the contract before I started with my current employer (then a small local business, privately owned). They had a clause which specifically distinguished between company and non-company works, basically saying it was theirs if I did it on company time or with company resources, which is pretty much fair enough IMHO.
More interestingly, when a US megacorp recently acquired that formerly small, privately-owned company, they tried to change our contract and insert various "all your soul are belong to us" clauses in the IP section. I publicly challenged the guy from the new company who was basically taking over at the top of the management chain about the IP, and his attitude was something pretty pathetic about how they train and develop us so of course they deserve to own everything we ever make. After that meeting, something like half the guys I work with sent me messages saying they agreed with my point and they hoped I'd fight for it. I did, and the new company wound up taking out the entire page of IP crap in the new contract and replacing it en masse with the old wording from our previous contract.
It gets better. Having demonstrated the kind of legal bull they were prepared to try, the entire employee base of the old company then scrutinised every word of the new contract, took legal advice, etc. with a depth and precision we probably never would have thought necessary otherwise. I think two people in the whole company were actually prepared to sign the contract as first presented. By the time we'd finished telling them what they were going to change (or many of us were going to walk, effectively wiping out the millions of dollars of investment they'd just made to buy the company) the contract looked rather different, and didn't contain anything that extended beyond company work into our private lives whatsoever.
It can be done. You just have to be smart about how you do it, and polite but firm when you're dealing with the lawyers/HR people. Ultimately any smart company is going to prefer a reasonable change to the contract over losing good staff, and let's face it, you didn't really want to work for a stupid company anyway, did you?
The company doesn't have a legal leg to stand on anywhere that I can think of. They can't claim rights to the code that the employee didn't have the right to give them, and are still constrained by the GPL, so if they release something based on the GPL'd code then they must also release the source code in the usual way. They also shouldn't be granted a patent based on the earlier work because it's prior art, but with the USPTO and its ilk running the show, who knows?;-)
The employee himself is potentially in rather a lot of trouble, and the only way I can see to extricate himself is to remove all of his code that he's written since working for this employer from the GPL'd project. He can't give his employer's code away under the GPL any more than his employer has a claim to the earlier already-GPL'd code.
Even then, I wouldn't be surprised if his employer has a strong case against him for whatever professional negligence counts as in their jurisdiction. He shouldn't have used the GPL'd code in the first place if he could reasonably have known that the company wouldn't want to handle the end product in a GPL-compatible way. If that's the case, then his work for them is effectively wasted, and he'll be lucky if he only gets fired.
IANAL in any jurisdiction, and if you get your legal advice on Slashdot you deserve everything else you get too!
Asking for help and showing this code in most communities results in a series of curt, bitter responses from many members of the community.
That's a very important point, and I think the effect of the community around a programming language (or indeed a whole paradigm -- functional, OOP, etc.) is often underestimated.
Just look at PERL: it has its merits, but in fairness clarity to newcomers is rarely listed as one of them. And yet, because asking a question on a PERL group tends to result in joyous cries of "TMTOWTDI" followed by an enthusiastic discussion of the relative merits of 17 different ways to solve your problem, even the most unaware newbie is likely to find help and education simply by asking politely.
In contrast, some languages (C and C++, for example) tend to invite technical perfectionists, who are happy to help but only if you're Doing Things Properly(TM). Others (functional languages, LISP dialects, etc.) tend to have quite academic communities, whose response to newbies, sadly, can be less than welcoming.
Now, take a look at those languages I listed, and ask yourself which ones have been the bigger success stories...
The insert example isn't great. Despite using the same name and similar end results, these are unlikely to have the same performance characteristics, which is likely to be a significant difference in practice.
However, consider a simple function such as map, which fundamentally takes some structured data, and produces a new set of data with the same structure, built from the original elements acted on by some function. This concept is applicable to a wide range of data structures, and writing it polymorphically (not generically) just makes for code that's easier to read and less memory work for the developer.
A more advanced example might be the use of a fold style function directly on lists. A similar concept could be applied to a tree, but you'd have to have some intermediate functionality that defined the ordering you were using to traverse your tree. Still, it can be useful to separate the concepts of the ordered algorithm (fold, or whatever more complex function is using it) from the ordering algorithm (traversing breadth-first, depth-first, etc.), from the connecting and terminal functions used by the fold algorithm specifically but potentially useful elsewhere as well.
I'm not disputing your point about file formats and the like. I was challenging your claim that (as I read it) cloning was necessary to develop non-trivial softare.
With my devil's advocate hat on, I ask you to consider the following argument.
If we accept that providing very similar keyboard shortcuts, menu layout etc. to the established commercial product -- effectively cloning most of its UI -- is necessary for an OSS product to succeed, then this strongly suggests that the OSS product is in fact matching the overall design and feature set of the established player as well. Indeed, this is the rationale behind numerous requests that have gone into big names like OpenOffice.
Now, that combination of features and UI did not come into existence by magic. It was the result of many years of R&D investment by the makers of the established commercial product. That research cost them a lot of time and money. It was, effectively, an investment aimed at producing a better product that would ultimately gain them more income. Obviously this doesn't apply to the trivial, but much of what is trivial today was a new idea once: someone invented the idea of using wizards to step through common tasks, for example.
If you do allow clones to basically rip all this work and duplicate it, without any compensation to the commercial product maker, you are saying that their research has added no value and they deserve no return on their investment. This is clearly untrue: if their UIs and product designs weren't valuable, then everyone else wouldn't be copying them.
Given the pace of software development today, it would be unhelpful and unrealistic to secure monopoly rights on presentational aspects of a program for a long period. However, duplicating a UI is relatively easy; it's finding out what will work well for users in practice that takes the effort. Hence a short-term protection for genuinely original UI ideas, perhaps a couple of years, would seem a reasonable compensation for the research done by the commercial investors. After all, ultimately that research does benefit the industry as a whole, as we see in numerous common UI idioms and indeed entire copycat OSS products today, and clearly those copycat products do have the potential to reduce sales for the commercial products they emulate.
Please read this document published by the League for Programming Freedom.
Fair enough, I've read that. It appears date from nearly two decades ago, a time when feature checklists dominated product advertising and UI research was a minor academic pastime. I could fly a 747 through the gaps in some of their arguments as they apply today, in a world where usability is a key differentiator, and a lot of popular application areas are running out of major new features. Which parts of it did you think would convince me they were right?
What about cases where a politician is elected (even by more than 50% of the voters) but his constituency disagrees with him on a particular issue (say, 75% against him) -- should he go with his declared platform (which was bought as a whole) or the will of the people?
I can hear the references to a certain scene in The West Wing already...;-)
Having been president of a more modest organisation (but still with a few thousand members) for some time, I am pretty strongly of the view that someone should be elected for their values and principles, not their specific policies. In the real world, circumstances will force policy to change from time to time. You can't ask everyone about all the details every time, and even if you did, you can't expect them to have the same amount of time to spend researching the issues and the same depth of understanding on which to base a decision. They elected their representative(s) to do that for them.
As for your specific question, I don't think there can ever be a single right answer to it. For example, would the 75% of the population who disagree with their representative's actions agree with them if they knew and understood as much as their rep, and saw that in fact those actions were consistent with the platform on which they elected the rep in the first place? Clearly the rep has no mandate to say one thing to get elected and then do something completely different in both principle and practice, but beyond that there comes a point when you have to trust the person you elected to do the right thing for the population who elected them. It doesn't always work (and if they consistently fail to do it, you elect someone else next time) but it's about the best way to run a government we've come up with so far.
Surely if we want this in the standard library, it should be included as part of the next version of the ISO C++ standard?
Which at least significant amounts of it is likely to be. Check out the standards committee Library Working Group's web pages for more details. You can find a list of proposals that have already been accepted into the library TR here.
People think OSS means "someone will magically fork it and create a whole new project at will when something goes wrong," which is rarely how it happens. Not everyone is a programmer, and few are great ones.
And the few great ones are rarely telepaths, so it will still take them a long time to get up to speed with a large, unfamiliar project. Even then, they will rarely, if ever, develop the same insight as the original dev team into all the little details, and they often won't even grok the overall architecture if the docs aren't good.
I mean sure, I could also build an office suite, photo-management software, an MP3 player, a DVD player, scanner software, a Pac-man game, and everything other app I could possibly want into the same executable, and if I ran all of them at once, it might be a more efficient use of memory resources
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, someone invented the concept of shared libraries. Just about every popular operating system supports this concept readily today. Are you really telling me that Firefox and Thunderbird don't share the same core code in memory and each load their own copy? No wonder they're worried about the development processes! (And start-up times, and bloat, and...)
Doxygen and other auto documentation tools help developers deal with a single, specific documentation problem - how to keep developer documentation in sync with the code.
Just as an aside, Doxygen is actually quite a good tool for writing general documentation as well; constructing project documentation intranets is pretty straightforward. The fact that it integrates well with existing code, picks up clever comment markers, etc. makes it easier to write design documentation that links directly to the implementation survey stuff, but it's good for a lot more than just that.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, of course, but they could also be doing right by their soon-to-be-ex employer, as in this situation. Wouldn't you want to employ the kind of person who makes an effort to leave things tidy if and when they decide to leave?
At the risk of being picky, that basically is a type system error. Manual memory management can be responsible for resource leaks when you forget to free dynamically allocated memory, for example. However, most of the killers are when you can get data into places it shouldn't be, particularly by messing with the values of pointers or by over-running buffers, and this sort of vulnerability is introduced by using an insufficiently powerful (or overly flexible, depending on your point of view) type system.
/me glances at system tray where Symantec icon lived until last month, at which time I got so tired of its inability to schedule jobs properly that I asked our sysadmin to replace it with an alternative. Trend lives there now instead, and is becoming our corporate standard.
Does it never occur to anyone that most bands probably don't have the necessary expertise to do this, and would require some outside help from promotion and marketing experts?
Most people who sign with a record label probably aren't going to make much money from it, but don't kid yourself about the Internet revolutionising self-publishing for music artists. It might not be today's record labels who get the goodies, but middle-men who know about Internet marketing will appear and take their share before $JOE'S_BAND gets big through the 'net, and most bands will need to make use of those services.
And they're doing it because of flagrant, widespread, arrogant abuse of the law by a significant minority of the population.
If the assholes hadn't been taking the piss for years, DRM wouldn't have needed to exist. Sooner or later the record labels would have realised there was money to be made from honest customers in on-line music downloads and done it anyway, and it would have been a lot more convenient for those of us who do just want to back up the material, or burn a CD with our favourite mix to listen to in the car. We could have avoided provoking a whole wave of unnecessarily wide-ranging and frequently abused laws along the way, too.
DRM sucks, but the population has brought it upon itself. The assholes broke the law long before the law started becoming silly, and now rather than accepting that they scream "No compromise is acceptable!" as if their right to have the music at all is enshrined in some higher law. Newsflash: this is not the attitude to adopt if you want to start reversing the damage.
Disagreeing is your prerogative, but you have failed to consider another alternative: as on-line distribution with thin margins becomes the dominant form of music sale, the record labels actually are going to start losing money. At that point the business guys at the top will just move into a different market, the guys who actually do good work will be out of a job, and while we'll lose a lot of the manufactured popular crap (but obviously a lot of people do like it; that's why it's popular) we'll also lose a lot of good music.
Most of the record industry isn't U2 or Britney Spears or $BIG_NAME_BAND, and without the publicity and promotional engine provided by the record labels, a lot of the smaller guys -- many of whom got that far by being pretty good at making music -- will lose out.
I imagine the fact that they had much better user interfaces probably helped, too. And there were all those genuinely useful new features. The fact that Wordperfect for Windows suffered forced instabilities wasn't what killed it. The UI that sucked and feature set that was less complete than Word's are what killed it.
I'll concede that my use of the term "free market" was over-stating things, but none of your objections to the terminology actually addresses the point I was making: a company in this market is (by default) under no obligation to produce products that interoperate with anyone else's if they don't want to.
Also please note that we're talking about Europe, not the US, here. Establishing whether our markets or more or less free than those across the Atlantic is left as an exercise for the reader.
If I understand correctly, it's actually a company who won't give up those specifications without charging an excessive amount for them, and the legal system appears to be challenging them, quite rightly, on the latter point.
However, nothing I've seen so far seems to require them to give anything away completely for free. Perhaps I missed something in the original judgement that made this requirement?
Personally, I'd say it's the other way around: if it weren't for Microsoft Office, I don't think Windows would ever have taken off. The early Windows versions of Word and Excel were good products, with genuine advantages over their rivals. MS had plenty of competition back then, and it didn't die off by magic. Without those major office applications as drivers, I can't imagine Windows developing the kind of momentum it did in the mid-90s.
That said, IMHO, the problems with Microsoft didn't start with either Windows or Office, both of which competed on their own merits with real competition until they'd established themselves as the dominant players in their respective markets. The problems began when Microsoft started throwing in other toys (IE, Media Player, etc.) on the back of Windows and/or Office, at the expense of competitors those toys couldn't beat in their own right. IME, the court cases have been aiming at the right target on this one.
I understand that you're a Microsoft basher, but I'll explain things in simple terms for you. ;-)
Microsoft did break the law, but the law they broke was not developing their own protocols and APIs rather than using standards. In a free market, nothing says you have to be interoperable with everyone else, or to follow someone else's standards. With Microsoft's market share in some markets, it's doubtful whether anyone other than Microsoft has any right to claim to be "standard" anyway; try submitting all your CVs in .sxw format some time and see how far you get. If someone else has a better products then Microsoft's failure to promote interoperability and open standards will hurt them; that's the risk they choose to take in running their business that way, but it's their choice whether to take it.
The law Microsoft broke was in using their dominance of one market (operating systems for desktop computers) to promote their products in other fields. That, combined with the aforementioned reluctance to support interoperability with competing products, is unfair competition, and that's what they've been called on, both in the US and in Europe.
One possible remedy for this, now that the situation exists and Microsoft has effectively locked in custom in the secondary market through illegal means, is to force Microsoft to allow interoperability in that market. This is the important part of the penalty the courts handed down in Europe.
However, that doesn't make it open season on Microsoft. If you want to compete, you still have to do your own work. Microsoft aren't allowed to unreasonably prevent you from interoperating with their products (hence the disclosure requirements) but neither are they required to let you benefit for free from their work (for example, by providing sample interoperability code for your benefit at their own expense).
FWIW, I'm hardly a Microsoft apologist as my past posts here will demonstrate, but neither do I believe open source developers have some God-given right to privileges not enjoyed by the rest of the software development industry, just because they use words like "open" or "free" in their marketing. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to grow up and play by the big boys' rules.
That may be true (aside from some wording issues), but I wasn't aware that trying to run a business and make money without providing valuable gifts to your direct competitors was one of them.
The Washington Post runs an entertaining "new words by adding/removing/changing one letter" competition from time to time as part of its "Style Invitation" series. Some recent favourites included:
and of course this particular speciality of Slashdot moderators:
But what, exactly, do you mean by "putting the collective work under the terms of the GPL"?
The GPL is a licence under which the original code may be distributed. It grants distribution rights for the original, GPL'd code that you wouldn't otherwise have since you're not the copyright holder.
However, it can not impose any transfer of rights relating to the new code. There is simply no legal agreement there that would require this. In particular, if your new code is later used without the original GPL'd code, the fact that you once used GPL'd code cannot require you to distribute your new software under those terms if you're no longer using any GPL'd code in it.
The only case I can immediately see that the original copyright holder might have against you then would need your new software (sans GPL'd original code) to be held to be a derivative work of the original GPL'd code even though it no longer incorporated that code directly. For example, if the replacement you used for the original GPL'd code was a thinly-veiled clone of the same work, it would probably be held to be a derivative work, and as such the copyright would belong to the copyright holder of the original work. It's questionable (at best) whether you're even allowed to distribute that derived work under the GPL, unless the copyright holder specifically allows it.
Good move. I, too, asked specifically to see this aspect of the contract before I started with my current employer (then a small local business, privately owned). They had a clause which specifically distinguished between company and non-company works, basically saying it was theirs if I did it on company time or with company resources, which is pretty much fair enough IMHO.
More interestingly, when a US megacorp recently acquired that formerly small, privately-owned company, they tried to change our contract and insert various "all your soul are belong to us" clauses in the IP section. I publicly challenged the guy from the new company who was basically taking over at the top of the management chain about the IP, and his attitude was something pretty pathetic about how they train and develop us so of course they deserve to own everything we ever make. After that meeting, something like half the guys I work with sent me messages saying they agreed with my point and they hoped I'd fight for it. I did, and the new company wound up taking out the entire page of IP crap in the new contract and replacing it en masse with the old wording from our previous contract.
It gets better. Having demonstrated the kind of legal bull they were prepared to try, the entire employee base of the old company then scrutinised every word of the new contract, took legal advice, etc. with a depth and precision we probably never would have thought necessary otherwise. I think two people in the whole company were actually prepared to sign the contract as first presented. By the time we'd finished telling them what they were going to change (or many of us were going to walk, effectively wiping out the millions of dollars of investment they'd just made to buy the company) the contract looked rather different, and didn't contain anything that extended beyond company work into our private lives whatsoever.
It can be done. You just have to be smart about how you do it, and polite but firm when you're dealing with the lawyers/HR people. Ultimately any smart company is going to prefer a reasonable change to the contract over losing good staff, and let's face it, you didn't really want to work for a stupid company anyway, did you?
The company doesn't have a legal leg to stand on anywhere that I can think of. They can't claim rights to the code that the employee didn't have the right to give them, and are still constrained by the GPL, so if they release something based on the GPL'd code then they must also release the source code in the usual way. They also shouldn't be granted a patent based on the earlier work because it's prior art, but with the USPTO and its ilk running the show, who knows? ;-)
The employee himself is potentially in rather a lot of trouble, and the only way I can see to extricate himself is to remove all of his code that he's written since working for this employer from the GPL'd project. He can't give his employer's code away under the GPL any more than his employer has a claim to the earlier already-GPL'd code.
Even then, I wouldn't be surprised if his employer has a strong case against him for whatever professional negligence counts as in their jurisdiction. He shouldn't have used the GPL'd code in the first place if he could reasonably have known that the company wouldn't want to handle the end product in a GPL-compatible way. If that's the case, then his work for them is effectively wasted, and he'll be lucky if he only gets fired.
IANAL in any jurisdiction, and if you get your legal advice on Slashdot you deserve everything else you get too!
That's a very important point, and I think the effect of the community around a programming language (or indeed a whole paradigm -- functional, OOP, etc.) is often underestimated.
Just look at PERL: it has its merits, but in fairness clarity to newcomers is rarely listed as one of them. And yet, because asking a question on a PERL group tends to result in joyous cries of "TMTOWTDI" followed by an enthusiastic discussion of the relative merits of 17 different ways to solve your problem, even the most unaware newbie is likely to find help and education simply by asking politely.
In contrast, some languages (C and C++, for example) tend to invite technical perfectionists, who are happy to help but only if you're Doing Things Properly(TM). Others (functional languages, LISP dialects, etc.) tend to have quite academic communities, whose response to newbies, sadly, can be less than welcoming.
Now, take a look at those languages I listed, and ask yourself which ones have been the bigger success stories...
The insert example isn't great. Despite using the same name and similar end results, these are unlikely to have the same performance characteristics, which is likely to be a significant difference in practice.
However, consider a simple function such as map, which fundamentally takes some structured data, and produces a new set of data with the same structure, built from the original elements acted on by some function. This concept is applicable to a wide range of data structures, and writing it polymorphically (not generically) just makes for code that's easier to read and less memory work for the developer.
A more advanced example might be the use of a fold style function directly on lists. A similar concept could be applied to a tree, but you'd have to have some intermediate functionality that defined the ordering you were using to traverse your tree. Still, it can be useful to separate the concepts of the ordered algorithm (fold, or whatever more complex function is using it) from the ordering algorithm (traversing breadth-first, depth-first, etc.), from the connecting and terminal functions used by the fold algorithm specifically but potentially useful elsewhere as well.
I'm not disputing your point about file formats and the like. I was challenging your claim that (as I read it) cloning was necessary to develop non-trivial softare.
With my devil's advocate hat on, I ask you to consider the following argument.
If we accept that providing very similar keyboard shortcuts, menu layout etc. to the established commercial product -- effectively cloning most of its UI -- is necessary for an OSS product to succeed, then this strongly suggests that the OSS product is in fact matching the overall design and feature set of the established player as well. Indeed, this is the rationale behind numerous requests that have gone into big names like OpenOffice.
Now, that combination of features and UI did not come into existence by magic. It was the result of many years of R&D investment by the makers of the established commercial product. That research cost them a lot of time and money. It was, effectively, an investment aimed at producing a better product that would ultimately gain them more income. Obviously this doesn't apply to the trivial, but much of what is trivial today was a new idea once: someone invented the idea of using wizards to step through common tasks, for example.
If you do allow clones to basically rip all this work and duplicate it, without any compensation to the commercial product maker, you are saying that their research has added no value and they deserve no return on their investment. This is clearly untrue: if their UIs and product designs weren't valuable, then everyone else wouldn't be copying them.
Given the pace of software development today, it would be unhelpful and unrealistic to secure monopoly rights on presentational aspects of a program for a long period. However, duplicating a UI is relatively easy; it's finding out what will work well for users in practice that takes the effort. Hence a short-term protection for genuinely original UI ideas, perhaps a couple of years, would seem a reasonable compensation for the research done by the commercial investors. After all, ultimately that research does benefit the industry as a whole, as we see in numerous common UI idioms and indeed entire copycat OSS products today, and clearly those copycat products do have the potential to reduce sales for the commercial products they emulate.
Fair enough, I've read that. It appears date from nearly two decades ago, a time when feature checklists dominated product advertising and UI research was a minor academic pastime. I could fly a 747 through the gaps in some of their arguments as they apply today, in a world where usability is a key differentiator, and a lot of popular application areas are running out of major new features. Which parts of it did you think would convince me they were right?
You think the only way to make a non-trivial word processor is to copy the UI style and feature set of Word very closely?
That's truly very sad.
I can hear the references to a certain scene in The West Wing already... ;-)
Having been president of a more modest organisation (but still with a few thousand members) for some time, I am pretty strongly of the view that someone should be elected for their values and principles, not their specific policies. In the real world, circumstances will force policy to change from time to time. You can't ask everyone about all the details every time, and even if you did, you can't expect them to have the same amount of time to spend researching the issues and the same depth of understanding on which to base a decision. They elected their representative(s) to do that for them.
As for your specific question, I don't think there can ever be a single right answer to it. For example, would the 75% of the population who disagree with their representative's actions agree with them if they knew and understood as much as their rep, and saw that in fact those actions were consistent with the platform on which they elected the rep in the first place? Clearly the rep has no mandate to say one thing to get elected and then do something completely different in both principle and practice, but beyond that there comes a point when you have to trust the person you elected to do the right thing for the population who elected them. It doesn't always work (and if they consistently fail to do it, you elect someone else next time) but it's about the best way to run a government we've come up with so far.
Which at least significant amounts of it is likely to be. Check out the standards committee Library Working Group's web pages for more details. You can find a list of proposals that have already been accepted into the library TR here.
And the few great ones are rarely telepaths, so it will still take them a long time to get up to speed with a large, unfamiliar project. Even then, they will rarely, if ever, develop the same insight as the original dev team into all the little details, and they often won't even grok the overall architecture if the docs aren't good.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, someone invented the concept of shared libraries. Just about every popular operating system supports this concept readily today. Are you really telling me that Firefox and Thunderbird don't share the same core code in memory and each load their own copy? No wonder they're worried about the development processes! (And start-up times, and bloat, and...)
Just as an aside, Doxygen is actually quite a good tool for writing general documentation as well; constructing project documentation intranets is pretty straightforward. The fact that it integrates well with existing code, picks up clever comment markers, etc. makes it easier to write design documentation that links directly to the implementation survey stuff, but it's good for a lot more than just that.