Firefox's automatic update is good for the individual. But for IT departments, they'd want to test the patches before releasing them and they'd want to centralize the patching process. I think it's well known what happens if we let the non-computer savvy users choose whether to update or not themselves, or forcing them to take on untested patches;^)
Yeah, that's a really great plan, and never has problems if you stick to sysadmin-friendly Microsoft kit.;-)
Did you ever get the feeling that the linked story there is going to get cited every time everyone ever claims Microsoft's stuff is more secure because of automatic updates, and every time the UK government ever says a centralised ID database for everything is a really good idea?
This must be the oldest conflict in IT. The paranoid sysadmin wants to keep everything everywhere the same and under their complete control. On the face of it, that's not unreasonable. They are, after all, the ones who have to clear up the mess when something goes wrong.
On the other hand, an informed user may know full-well that certain non-standard tools would help them to do their job better than the officially-recognised alternatives, and may be perfectly competent to install and maintain the non-standard software. Given that they're the ones doing the real work and IT are only a support function, this argument also has a lot of merit.
I'm stuck in a similar situation at work. Small company (lots of flexibility) let us install whatever we wanted as long as we didn't screw up and it was all legal, fit for purpose, etc. Large company (rigid procedures, absurd overheads, centralised IT) buys small company, and decides to upgrade loads of machines so everyone can run Outlook 2003. This results in the absurdity that support staff now have nice new 22" monitors and 3GHz, 1GB machines they don't need, while developers who've been asking for those specs for a year or more still get 19", 2GHz, 512MB machines (and all of those numbers actually matter to more than our egos in the work we do). More to the point, it means I expect to be told to give up Thunderbird in favour of Outlook 2003 imminently.
I'd have more sympathy for the sysadmin approach if I hadn't switched to Thunderbird after the official solution failed to do its job at all usefully: after a standard MS update took out my standard-configuration Dell PC, we were unable to restore the backed up mail due to the Outlook-inventing-a-non-existent-password bug. Moreover, Outlook's address book features stopped working, and the mail filters never worked properly in the first place, due to another well-known bug.
I recovered my mail flawlessly by importing into Thunderbird, which also has simple-but-effective address book and mail filtering features. It also doesn't second-guess the intentions of those sending me.exe files (handy if you work in a software house!), doesn't pose the same security risks, yada yada. Basically, Thunderbird does what I need a mail client to do in my job, simply and without fuss. Outlook didn't, and caused me more than a day of downtime when the official update failed.
When you've got this sort of thing going on, I don't see why any competent user should be denied the right to use appropriate software in their job just because paranoid sysadmins either aren't competent to provide a better alternative, or choose an alternative that isn't up to spec, whether or not it says Microsoft on the box.
As a final note, I'm also well aware that Outlook 2003 is a lot more than an e-mail client. Its ability to schedule meetings, publicise a person's diary, etc. has already resulted in at least one of my colleagues missing an important meeting because he didn't know it was happening (since the e-mail notification was added straight into the electronic diary he'd never used without further notice). It has also resulted in a string of nearly a dozen confused e-mails between people who sit three desks apart about another meeting, where previously either asking the people directly or, if they weren't in the office, a single e-mail would have sufficed. And this is Microsoft/the IT department's idea of improving efficiency? Stuff 'em.
I think the problem is usually implicit type conversions rather than operator overloading. In particular, allowing almost-random conversions between a concrete type such as a number and a string form is just asking for trouble: it's great for quick 'n' dirty scripts, but a child's toy in a grown-up world for serious projects.
I think I understand your argument, and to an extent I agree that the world would probably be a better place if we (society collectively) tended more in that direction. I guess my problem is simply that I don't think it's realistic, at least not yet. Arguments like giving things away being good advertising are only of value in a basically capitalist society if you then have a means of generating a return on that investment when potential customers see the advertising and come to you to give you money for something else. If your whole business, or most of it, is based on giving things away, there's limited scope for that...
That was an interesting read, and don't worry, I don't do flamewars.
However, I don't see how the article really refutes my point. If anything, it's excellent evidence for it. Someone is trying to convince us that altruism is a superior way for society to develop, and in theory and isolation perhaps they're right. However, when you look at the examples throughout the article, they're animals committing suicide to save their peers, or businesses giving up profits to become altruistic.
This is very noble of them, and perhaps it is indeed in the best long-term interests of society as a whole. Alas, it's also never going to pay the rent for the employees or fund the pensions of the shareholders. As long as we live in such a capitalist economy, the approach of giving things away simply isn't viable as a primary source of income.
While I admire your belief in your principles, there is simply no serious evidence to support the approach you describe as a general policy -- that is, to show that it can support creative industries in anything other than exceptional and isolated cases.
You obviously have never grasped the concept of opensource. You can give something away for free and still make money off of it.
No, you really can't. You might be able to make money off something related to it, but once you give it away, you gain absolutely nothing for the original work. And making money of service industries based on a project is far from easy.
Give your work away and make your money off donations and people that come to you for custom jobs.
Before open source came along, that might even have worked for some people: in most places, honest souls did cough up the requested amount for shareware, and getting your name on a good, popular project might have been good for some future employment prospects.
Unfortunatey, today's Internet-enabled users seem to expect everything on a silver platter for free, whether legally or otherwise. Collectively, we have pretty much killed the previous, much better idea almost completely.
Can you name even one open source project that isn't at least one of:
an established "big name"
a mass-market application
supported by corporate backing
that generates a living wage for its creators based on donations? Do you know anyone who actually does make that decent living you mentioned using this approach in a smaller, less significant context?
Here's a personal example, to show how implausible your approach seems to me, and why.
I write software for a living. I'm employed by a fairly small company (around 50 of us) which sells specialist libraries for various mathematical tasks. We are the market leaders by some way in our field. We have a small, strong management team, and over 80% of our staff are directly involved with software development rather than overheads.
We make some money from the initial sales, and some money from on-going support contracts we offer to cover new developments, bug fixes, etc. Fortunately for us, the nature of our market means on-going development deals tend to benefit both us and our customers pretty strongly, so a lot of them choose to sign up. In case it still isn't obvious, we're a textbook example of a company with good prospects for making money off on-going support deals.
Even with all this going for us, without our original income from sales, we probably couldn't afford to be in the business we're in: we generate enough money overall to pay reasonable wages but don't make bazillions in annual profits, and would lose a lot of that income the first time we gave a customer the source code if it weren't protected by copyright.
It is coincidental that I happen to work for this company. My point is simply that it's a perfect example of a company that has good prospects as a service provider rather than a software retailer, and yet still it relies significantly on up-front sales income as well. If we couldn't do it based on service income alone, it's a good bet that most small companies or one-man outfits without the market penetration, most larger organisations with more overheads, or those who aren't lucky enough to work in a business that almost necessitates constant support won't be able to do it either.
No one is arguing that Sun was innovative. They were... however, their not being (in my rather myopic view of things) innovative now.
I'm not enough of a Solaris expert to know, but some of the guys at the office (where we use many platforms, including Solaris) have commented favourably on new features in the latest version. I'm not saying they're the only way of doing things, and rubbishing Linux for not having anything to serve the same purpose just because Red Hat hasn't included it yet is clearly missing the point, but it does seem that Solaris has taken some significant steps forward recently.
Similarly, look at Java New Edition With Extra Bits or whatever they're calling it today: they've incorporated much-demanded features like generics (ironically, given the stubborn insistence of much of the Java community for years that they were a Bad Feature(TM), but I digress) in the latest version. This isn't innovative in the programming world as a whole (though perhaps their particular implementation has novel aspects) but it's certainly a big step forward for Java.
It's easy to overlook things like this when you're comparing to a fast-moving environment like Linux development, but the changes are there nonetheless.
It's rude to nick the images and not give credit to the originatic site. It's not rude to nick them and provide a link back to the original site.
I respectfully disagree. AFAICS, taking any images without permission, even with attribution, is just as morally and legally wrong on the Internet as it would be anywhere else.
Consider, for example, the many web graphics companies, who make lots of graphics available for free in return for a link, but rely on commercial businesses paying for sets of images to fund their work. If anyone could just come along and nick them in exchange for nothing but a credit, those companies couldn't operate any more, helping neither them nor the many people who benefit from the other graphics they kindly give away for free.
There is definitely an argument to be made there, but contrary to what several people have posted in this thread, the article you cite does say quite clearly that the ruling by the US appeal court has a limited significance. In particular, the article says:
"The Arriba case only decided the slender issue that thumbnails of another's aesthetic photos are a fair use when done for information-gathering or indexing purposes. It's entirely possible that thumbnails in other contexts could be held to be copyright infringement if, for example, they are of nude or pornographic images, cartoon characters or celebrity photos."
The article continues with some justification for this statement. So while you're correct that the image size/res may be relevant, it's still not clear whether in this specific case they actually are.
Google is an innocent bystander that happens to be easily identifiable and has deep pockets. If the site which mirrored the images doesn't tell Google "don't index me" then Google has every right to index it. If the content isn't properly owned, the issue is between the content owner and the person who is violating their copyright.
That is an assumption, of course. Perhaps that is indeed how it should be, but Google has no special significance in law, nor any special rights to do things other can't just because they're currently the biggest player in the search engine game.
Consider the somewhat similar case of buying stolen goods. You may believe you bought them them legitimately, and you may not have been the one who broke the law to steal them in the first place, but you still have to give them back to their rightful owner and you still don't necessarily get back the money you paid for them. The fact that you were only involved as an innocent third party is irrelevant here.
The porn industry (like so many others) has benefited greatly from Google.
That's true. On the other hand, they benefitted from numerous other search engines before Google, and if Google fell, they'd benefit from plenty of others who'd follow afterwards, too.
And oobviously it's a two-way street. Whether or not you agree with the nature of their content, it is beyond question that the porn industry has contributed more innovation to the web than many of its other residents. I imagine, though I have no facts to back this up, that a rather significant fraction of Google's visitor base comes because of that porn industry (no pun intended).
Additionally, it's one of the communities which tends to try and "trick" the engines into higher rankings more often, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
Perhaps you're right, but this is a very odd argument to make if your general principles are anything like mine. Google is effectively an unregulated near-monopoly that has far more power over the web than others. People object when, for example, Microsoft leverage a similar status to get bad HTML all over the web that only works with IE. They cheer when others find ways to work around IE's problems. Why does Google merit such support where others in similar positions have not? (Or do you disagree with that particular principle of mine?)
My parent post seems to have been modded both Flamebait and Troll, possibly several times, though also (+1, Insightful). Would one of the down-modders please make an anonymous reply and tell me why? It's a perfectly serious post, making the IMHO reasonable observation that a lot of Google's features tread a fine line between helping their visitors and outright breaking of the law. Their Usenet archives have similar problems, as does the Google Cache, and both of these have been talked about here plenty of times before.
Was it the bit about ROBOTS.TXT that people objected to? If so, sorry, but that's just down-modding through being ignorant of the law. The Internet has no special significance, and the fact that someone didn't follow a particular somewhat standard protocol (the robots file) does not exempt everyone reading their site from obeying the law, any more than sending a technically incorrect e-mail (using HTML, for example) exempts the reader from any legal obligations they might have not to divulge confidential information in it.
I honestly don't understand the down-mods here. Do people just want to will Google to be right on this, because they're Google?
If they got the pictures, then Mr. pr0n company needs to somehow protect them better.
It's funny how people's morals change to suit them. Nicking images off someone else's site without permission used to be regarded as rude at best, and very rude indeed if you were actually linking using their bandwidth from your site. That was nothing to do with copyright (though I suspect that issue is pretty clear-cut here anyway) and simply a matter of polite netiquette. When did nicking someone else's graphics become socially acceptable?
This is a bit scary, because I think what Google is doing might actually be considered illegal, because the pictures are copyrighted.
It's not scary at all. Google have been treading on very thin ice with features like this (and their Usenet archives, BTW) since forever. As many of us have been saying for almost as long, it was only a matter of time until someone felt damaged enough to call them on it -- and why shouldn't they?
(Incidentally, anyone who thinks the site not providing a ROBOTS.TXT file somehow gives anyone, Google included, the authority to infringe copyright is indulging in fantasy.)
FWIW, I help to run a pretty large club in my spare time, taking around 30 hours a week on top of doing a full-time job, and I get the mail for that club. I do appreciate how annoying constant newbie questions from people who haven't RTFAQ'd can get.:-)
Perhaps you're right and I've simply been unlucky in meeting members of that vocal minority, but I have run into more than the odd one or two of them by now and I'm afraid the overall image I've been left with is less than positive. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places, or I'm reading too much into experiences when I first dabbled with FOSS some time ago. (Most of it was related to major projects, BTW: I was put off installing Linux completely by the attitude I saw amongst the people who were the only support I was going to get if things went wrong, for a start, and to this day I still run on Windows even though I'm a big fan of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Maybe the time has come to give it another look...)
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not suggesting a MegaCorp usurp code covered by a clear statement such as the "later version" example you gave. I'm suggesting the MegaCorps might try usurping code with a more waffly statement, such as those that seem to appear on a lot of Joe Public projects: something like "This software may be used according to GPL 2 or later."
In this case, it isn't clear that the GPL in question refers to "the GNU General Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation", and the lawyers could argue that what the FSF puts in its own document that it calls the GPL is irrelevant. (I'm not saying they'd get away with it, given the relatively high profile of that particular GPL in techie circles, just that I'm surprised no corporate lawyers have yet tried to find out.)
I think you are missing the fact that the GPL itself is covered by copyright. You cannot distribute a work (i.e. license) derived from the GPL without the permission of the copyright holder (the FSF).
That's strange. In most enlightened cultures, the legal right to control which contracts parties may enter into by mutual agreement is reserved to legally recognised government, not to the whims of a random organisation with no more legal significance than Joe down the street.
As far as I am aware some software-- including the Linux kernel if I'm not incorrect-- don't license to the GPL itself or "GPL 2 or later", they license to one specific version.
That seems very sensible. In fact, it amazes me that (AFAIK) none of the megacorps has yet tried to assimilate AnyGPL'd code on the basis that the licence under which it was distributed was GPL version 19,754, as defined by MegaCorp, Inc., and they therefore have full rights (and no-one else has any). The idea of licensing software under some future, unspecified EULA is just plain daft, IMHO; it's like signing an unfinished contract, or writing a blank cheque.
Sun is watching it's market share of Unix spiral downwards. Sun's solution to this problem isn't to innovate but to go after the competition.
That's rather unfair. Of course they're going after the competition, as any smart marketing organisation always will. But accusing the people who have contributed so significantly to the state of IT today, through Java, Star/OpenOffice and of course Solaris, of not being innovative is just asinine.
I have been an active member of the Linux community since its inception and we have been exorbitantly friendly to new users and developers.
Sorry, but that simply isn't true (in general). You personally may have been welcoming and helpful, and that is commendable. Sadly, a lot of your peers are anything but, as the number of "luser" rants in a typical FOSS IRC channel or discussion forum will testify. The attitude of a significant number of self-important 3l337 Hax0rz in this respect has been one of the biggest and stupidest things holding back the FOSS community since forever.
Mod me (-1, Flamebait) if you must, but know that in doing so, you'll only prove my point.
Please note that my point was that the record company execs probably believe, quite genuinely and for whatever reason, that the song-swapping is costing their business money.
It was the grandparent that brought cassette recording into this, and that was the straw man. I simply pointed out that there's no reason to believe surviving that implies they would survive any threat that may exist at present.
After all, they barely survived home recording with cassette tapes.
Sure. And while we're being so incredibly insightful, I'll suggest that perhaps TFANE if your pay packet depends on people respecting copyright:
a copying mechanism that requires physically transferring the copied material from original to copy, usually only at normal or double speed, on media that cost a significant amount of money to buy
a copying mechanism where a worldwide snowball effect could see the material on every Internet2-connected desktop in the world within a couple of hours of it leaking, without the need to purchase any new hardware or for any physical transfer to take place.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's a really great plan, and never has problems if you stick to sysadmin-friendly Microsoft kit. ;-)
Did you ever get the feeling that the linked story there is going to get cited every time everyone ever claims Microsoft's stuff is more secure because of automatic updates, and every time the UK government ever says a centralised ID database for everything is a really good idea?
This must be the oldest conflict in IT. The paranoid sysadmin wants to keep everything everywhere the same and under their complete control. On the face of it, that's not unreasonable. They are, after all, the ones who have to clear up the mess when something goes wrong.
On the other hand, an informed user may know full-well that certain non-standard tools would help them to do their job better than the officially-recognised alternatives, and may be perfectly competent to install and maintain the non-standard software. Given that they're the ones doing the real work and IT are only a support function, this argument also has a lot of merit.
I'm stuck in a similar situation at work. Small company (lots of flexibility) let us install whatever we wanted as long as we didn't screw up and it was all legal, fit for purpose, etc. Large company (rigid procedures, absurd overheads, centralised IT) buys small company, and decides to upgrade loads of machines so everyone can run Outlook 2003. This results in the absurdity that support staff now have nice new 22" monitors and 3GHz, 1GB machines they don't need, while developers who've been asking for those specs for a year or more still get 19", 2GHz, 512MB machines (and all of those numbers actually matter to more than our egos in the work we do). More to the point, it means I expect to be told to give up Thunderbird in favour of Outlook 2003 imminently.
I'd have more sympathy for the sysadmin approach if I hadn't switched to Thunderbird after the official solution failed to do its job at all usefully: after a standard MS update took out my standard-configuration Dell PC, we were unable to restore the backed up mail due to the Outlook-inventing-a-non-existent-password bug. Moreover, Outlook's address book features stopped working, and the mail filters never worked properly in the first place, due to another well-known bug.
I recovered my mail flawlessly by importing into Thunderbird, which also has simple-but-effective address book and mail filtering features. It also doesn't second-guess the intentions of those sending me .exe files (handy if you work in a software house!), doesn't pose the same security risks, yada yada. Basically, Thunderbird does what I need a mail client to do in my job, simply and without fuss. Outlook didn't, and caused me more than a day of downtime when the official update failed.
When you've got this sort of thing going on, I don't see why any competent user should be denied the right to use appropriate software in their job just because paranoid sysadmins either aren't competent to provide a better alternative, or choose an alternative that isn't up to spec, whether or not it says Microsoft on the box.
As a final note, I'm also well aware that Outlook 2003 is a lot more than an e-mail client. Its ability to schedule meetings, publicise a person's diary, etc. has already resulted in at least one of my colleagues missing an important meeting because he didn't know it was happening (since the e-mail notification was added straight into the electronic diary he'd never used without further notice). It has also resulted in a string of nearly a dozen confused e-mails between people who sit three desks apart about another meeting, where previously either asking the people directly or, if they weren't in the office, a single e-mail would have sufficed. And this is Microsoft/the IT department's idea of improving efficiency? Stuff 'em.
I think the problem is usually implicit type conversions rather than operator overloading. In particular, allowing almost-random conversions between a concrete type such as a number and a string form is just asking for trouble: it's great for quick 'n' dirty scripts, but a child's toy in a grown-up world for serious projects.
Shouldn't you have just, y'know, shot him for his insolence? That's what all the real false gods do...
I think I understand your argument, and to an extent I agree that the world would probably be a better place if we (society collectively) tended more in that direction. I guess my problem is simply that I don't think it's realistic, at least not yet. Arguments like giving things away being good advertising are only of value in a basically capitalist society if you then have a means of generating a return on that investment when potential customers see the advertising and come to you to give you money for something else. If your whole business, or most of it, is based on giving things away, there's limited scope for that...
That was an interesting read, and don't worry, I don't do flamewars.
However, I don't see how the article really refutes my point. If anything, it's excellent evidence for it. Someone is trying to convince us that altruism is a superior way for society to develop, and in theory and isolation perhaps they're right. However, when you look at the examples throughout the article, they're animals committing suicide to save their peers, or businesses giving up profits to become altruistic.
This is very noble of them, and perhaps it is indeed in the best long-term interests of society as a whole. Alas, it's also never going to pay the rent for the employees or fund the pensions of the shareholders. As long as we live in such a capitalist economy, the approach of giving things away simply isn't viable as a primary source of income.
While I admire your belief in your principles, there is simply no serious evidence to support the approach you describe as a general policy -- that is, to show that it can support creative industries in anything other than exceptional and isolated cases.
No, you really can't. You might be able to make money off something related to it, but once you give it away, you gain absolutely nothing for the original work. And making money of service industries based on a project is far from easy.
Before open source came along, that might even have worked for some people: in most places, honest souls did cough up the requested amount for shareware, and getting your name on a good, popular project might have been good for some future employment prospects.
Unfortunatey, today's Internet-enabled users seem to expect everything on a silver platter for free, whether legally or otherwise. Collectively, we have pretty much killed the previous, much better idea almost completely.
Can you name even one open source project that isn't at least one of:
- an established "big name"
- a mass-market application
- supported by corporate backing
that generates a living wage for its creators based on donations? Do you know anyone who actually does make that decent living you mentioned using this approach in a smaller, less significant context?Here's a personal example, to show how implausible your approach seems to me, and why.
I write software for a living. I'm employed by a fairly small company (around 50 of us) which sells specialist libraries for various mathematical tasks. We are the market leaders by some way in our field. We have a small, strong management team, and over 80% of our staff are directly involved with software development rather than overheads.
We make some money from the initial sales, and some money from on-going support contracts we offer to cover new developments, bug fixes, etc. Fortunately for us, the nature of our market means on-going development deals tend to benefit both us and our customers pretty strongly, so a lot of them choose to sign up. In case it still isn't obvious, we're a textbook example of a company with good prospects for making money off on-going support deals.
Even with all this going for us, without our original income from sales, we probably couldn't afford to be in the business we're in: we generate enough money overall to pay reasonable wages but don't make bazillions in annual profits, and would lose a lot of that income the first time we gave a customer the source code if it weren't protected by copyright.
It is coincidental that I happen to work for this company. My point is simply that it's a perfect example of a company that has good prospects as a service provider rather than a software retailer, and yet still it relies significantly on up-front sales income as well. If we couldn't do it based on service income alone, it's a good bet that most small companies or one-man outfits without the market penetration, most larger organisations with more overheads, or those who aren't lucky enough to work in a business that almost necessitates constant support won't be able to do it either.
I'm not enough of a Solaris expert to know, but some of the guys at the office (where we use many platforms, including Solaris) have commented favourably on new features in the latest version. I'm not saying they're the only way of doing things, and rubbishing Linux for not having anything to serve the same purpose just because Red Hat hasn't included it yet is clearly missing the point, but it does seem that Solaris has taken some significant steps forward recently.
Similarly, look at Java New Edition With Extra Bits or whatever they're calling it today: they've incorporated much-demanded features like generics (ironically, given the stubborn insistence of much of the Java community for years that they were a Bad Feature(TM), but I digress) in the latest version. This isn't innovative in the programming world as a whole (though perhaps their particular implementation has novel aspects) but it's certainly a big step forward for Java.
It's easy to overlook things like this when you're comparing to a fast-moving environment like Linux development, but the changes are there nonetheless.
I respectfully disagree. AFAICS, taking any images without permission, even with attribution, is just as morally and legally wrong on the Internet as it would be anywhere else.
Consider, for example, the many web graphics companies, who make lots of graphics available for free in return for a link, but rely on commercial businesses paying for sets of images to fund their work. If anyone could just come along and nick them in exchange for nothing but a credit, those companies couldn't operate any more, helping neither them nor the many people who benefit from the other graphics they kindly give away for free.
There is definitely an argument to be made there, but contrary to what several people have posted in this thread, the article you cite does say quite clearly that the ruling by the US appeal court has a limited significance. In particular, the article says:
The article continues with some justification for this statement. So while you're correct that the image size/res may be relevant, it's still not clear whether in this specific case they actually are.
That is an assumption, of course. Perhaps that is indeed how it should be, but Google has no special significance in law, nor any special rights to do things other can't just because they're currently the biggest player in the search engine game.
Consider the somewhat similar case of buying stolen goods. You may believe you bought them them legitimately, and you may not have been the one who broke the law to steal them in the first place, but you still have to give them back to their rightful owner and you still don't necessarily get back the money you paid for them. The fact that you were only involved as an innocent third party is irrelevant here.
That's true. On the other hand, they benefitted from numerous other search engines before Google, and if Google fell, they'd benefit from plenty of others who'd follow afterwards, too.
And oobviously it's a two-way street. Whether or not you agree with the nature of their content, it is beyond question that the porn industry has contributed more innovation to the web than many of its other residents. I imagine, though I have no facts to back this up, that a rather significant fraction of Google's visitor base comes because of that porn industry (no pun intended).
Perhaps you're right, but this is a very odd argument to make if your general principles are anything like mine. Google is effectively an unregulated near-monopoly that has far more power over the web than others. People object when, for example, Microsoft leverage a similar status to get bad HTML all over the web that only works with IE. They cheer when others find ways to work around IE's problems. Why does Google merit such support where others in similar positions have not? (Or do you disagree with that particular principle of mine?)
My parent post seems to have been modded both Flamebait and Troll, possibly several times, though also (+1, Insightful). Would one of the down-modders please make an anonymous reply and tell me why? It's a perfectly serious post, making the IMHO reasonable observation that a lot of Google's features tread a fine line between helping their visitors and outright breaking of the law. Their Usenet archives have similar problems, as does the Google Cache, and both of these have been talked about here plenty of times before.
Was it the bit about ROBOTS.TXT that people objected to? If so, sorry, but that's just down-modding through being ignorant of the law. The Internet has no special significance, and the fact that someone didn't follow a particular somewhat standard protocol (the robots file) does not exempt everyone reading their site from obeying the law, any more than sending a technically incorrect e-mail (using HTML, for example) exempts the reader from any legal obligations they might have not to divulge confidential information in it.
I honestly don't understand the down-mods here. Do people just want to will Google to be right on this, because they're Google?
It's funny how people's morals change to suit them. Nicking images off someone else's site without permission used to be regarded as rude at best, and very rude indeed if you were actually linking using their bandwidth from your site. That was nothing to do with copyright (though I suspect that issue is pretty clear-cut here anyway) and simply a matter of polite netiquette. When did nicking someone else's graphics become socially acceptable?
It's not scary at all. Google have been treading on very thin ice with features like this (and their Usenet archives, BTW) since forever. As many of us have been saying for almost as long, it was only a matter of time until someone felt damaged enough to call them on it -- and why shouldn't they?
(Incidentally, anyone who thinks the site not providing a ROBOTS.TXT file somehow gives anyone, Google included, the authority to infringe copyright is indulging in fantasy.)
FWIW, I help to run a pretty large club in my spare time, taking around 30 hours a week on top of doing a full-time job, and I get the mail for that club. I do appreciate how annoying constant newbie questions from people who haven't RTFAQ'd can get. :-)
Perhaps you're right and I've simply been unlucky in meeting members of that vocal minority, but I have run into more than the odd one or two of them by now and I'm afraid the overall image I've been left with is less than positive. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places, or I'm reading too much into experiences when I first dabbled with FOSS some time ago. (Most of it was related to major projects, BTW: I was put off installing Linux completely by the attitude I saw amongst the people who were the only support I was going to get if things went wrong, for a start, and to this day I still run on Windows even though I'm a big fan of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Maybe the time has come to give it another look...)
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not suggesting a MegaCorp usurp code covered by a clear statement such as the "later version" example you gave. I'm suggesting the MegaCorps might try usurping code with a more waffly statement, such as those that seem to appear on a lot of Joe Public projects: something like "This software may be used according to GPL 2 or later."
In this case, it isn't clear that the GPL in question refers to "the GNU General Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation", and the lawyers could argue that what the FSF puts in its own document that it calls the GPL is irrelevant. (I'm not saying they'd get away with it, given the relatively high profile of that particular GPL in techie circles, just that I'm surprised no corporate lawyers have yet tried to find out.)
See also my other reply in this subthread.
That's strange. In most enlightened cultures, the legal right to control which contracts parties may enter into by mutual agreement is reserved to legally recognised government, not to the whims of a random organisation with no more legal significance than Joe down the street.
Well, their lawyers may do, but since you haven't even attempted to provide a counter-argument, let's assume you don't, shall we?
That seems very sensible. In fact, it amazes me that (AFAIK) none of the megacorps has yet tried to assimilate AnyGPL'd code on the basis that the licence under which it was distributed was GPL version 19,754, as defined by MegaCorp, Inc., and they therefore have full rights (and no-one else has any). The idea of licensing software under some future, unspecified EULA is just plain daft, IMHO; it's like signing an unfinished contract, or writing a blank cheque.
That's rather unfair. Of course they're going after the competition, as any smart marketing organisation always will. But accusing the people who have contributed so significantly to the state of IT today, through Java, Star/OpenOffice and of course Solaris, of not being innovative is just asinine.
Sorry, but that simply isn't true (in general). You personally may have been welcoming and helpful, and that is commendable. Sadly, a lot of your peers are anything but, as the number of "luser" rants in a typical FOSS IRC channel or discussion forum will testify. The attitude of a significant number of self-important 3l337 Hax0rz in this respect has been one of the biggest and stupidest things holding back the FOSS community since forever.
Mod me (-1, Flamebait) if you must, but know that in doing so, you'll only prove my point.
Yes! Please bring us your democratic values by forcibly removing our governments and installing ones that support your wishes instead!
Love,
China and Japan
Um... Amperage?! Doesn't anyone use the word "current" any more? :-)
Please note that my point was that the record company execs probably believe, quite genuinely and for whatever reason, that the song-swapping is costing their business money.
It was the grandparent that brought cassette recording into this, and that was the straw man. I simply pointed out that there's no reason to believe surviving that implies they would survive any threat that may exist at present.
Sure. And while we're being so incredibly insightful, I'll suggest that perhaps TFANE if your pay packet depends on people respecting copyright: