Of course, there's no reason you can't do printf("Hello World."); in Visual Studio. I too started in BASIC, because that's what was available. Frankly, "drag some buttons onto a gui and get an app that looks cool and does nothing" is EXACTLY where I would start a child today. They'll do that maybe twice, then want the buttons to do something and go from there.
Or I could edit a text file, run a couple command line apps and wind up with a command line app that prints "Hello World!" to the screen. Woo-Hoo!!! What kid wouldn't love that? I mean, sure, I did. But I can kind of fogive kids today if text appearing on a screen does not strike them as quite so miraculous.
"While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code."
As deep as VS "allowed" him? WTF are you talking about? I've used VS every workday for 7 years. I gather it has some sort of functions for making cute screens with buttons on them? I wouldn't know, I've never written a gui app.
He's a kid. He wanted to make something he thought was cool; and he did, good for him. It makes sense he went for the drag-together an EZ-GUI stuff; He made something that looked cool and didn't do much. I'm guessing "looks cool" was his design target.
Heck, I first got into programing (time to date myself) writing BASIC programs to draw maps of D&D dungeons. 99% of what I learned in my first months of coding was the details of the particular extended ascii set my computer suported. I learned useless trivia and wrote lousy code in pusuit of eye-candy. But eventually, I wanted to move a marker around the dungeon, then I wanted to keep track of what was in different rooms. Today I make a fairly nice living writing complex C++ without a bit of eye-candy anywhere near it.
In short, leave the kid alone. Soon enough he'll want those cute buttons to do real stuff. If adults can be kept from eliminating his fun by insisting that "real" programs can't look good, he'll be a crackerjack coder in no time.
What exactly is "generic data"? If a GPU chip could do a CPU chips job 12 times as fast, it would be used as a CPU chip.
GPU chips are designed to do a certain type of calculation (matrix multiplication) as quickly as possible, and, unsurprisingly, they can do it a lot faster than chips designed for a much wider array of calculations. 3D graphics is a sufficiently popular application that it has caused chips to be designed for rapid matrix multiplication, but various other applications require this caclulation as well, so for some of those, you might get a speed-per-dollar boost by getting a GPU to do the calcs for you.
Way back in days of yore I knew an astonomy prof who wanted to do a bunch of calculations about galactic gas densities, or some such, and this required a whole ton of interpolation. He got an expansion card for his PC from some two-guys-in-a-garage hardware company that would do this many orders of magnitude faster than the CPU could hope to. They built it using chips designed for CD players.
In either case, it's not that the chip in question was magically better. Rather, specific applications needed a specific calculation to be very fast, and were important enough that someone designed a special purpose chip to do it, and optomized the hell out of it. Then there were other apps that needed that calculation; and while they weren't themselves worth designing a special chip for, they were worth figuring out how to hack the existing tech into something usable.
You make some good points, but I think you are operating on an erroneous assumption.
You are quite right that standard mass-production techniques could reduce the per-rover cost considerably through economies of scale. But it wouldn't reduce the total cost of these missions much, so we couldn't do very many more of them, which would defeat the whole point. Because the rover is not the expensive part. The rocket launch is the expensive part. We already do a lot of those (compared to just rover missions) and get some economies of scale, and it's still pretty expensive. Making the rover itself cheaper won't save a lot of money, because on the scale of the total mission, it doesn't cost a lot anyway.
If you spent a bunch more on the lander/rover, and made it significantly lighter, that would cut costs. But it's already pretty incredibly light for what it does. So until the cost of thrust comes down significantly (which doesn't look likely), extreterestrial rover missions are going to be infrequent affairs; and the metric rover designers should strive to optomize is not "bang for buck" but "bang per pound". Given these parameters, largely redesigning the rovers per mission makes sense. Going to the moon means less gravity, means every sructural part can be lighter. Going to a different latitude on Mars means less solar energy, means a bigger solar panel, means something else has to go. Standardized rovers would be great for sending a whole lot to the martian equator, but you can only afford so many launches a year, who wants to send all of them to the martian equator?
"No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
The fact that you and the 4th circuit share a willingness to pretend this isn't blindingly simple doesn't make either of you right.
Persons engaged in terrorist activity should be locked up, I'll certainly agree. How shall society decide if someone is engaged in activities that mean they ought to be locked up? In some countries, such decisions are made in a court of law. In other countries, the supreme leader just says who should be locked up. I'd prefer to live in the first sort of country, and I thought I did.
My point is, putting this code out there, in hopes that someone who might write something competitive will see it, and that they will wind up writing something similar because there is "only one obvious way to express a given algorithm" (which I'm not sure I can imagine for anything complex enough to care about), so that MS can then sue them to kill of that competing thing... Well, it sounds like a crackpot scheme without much chance of possibly being worth the trouble. I'm not saying MS wouldn't do something that dirty; I'm saying they wouldn't do something that ineffective.
Now, besides dirty tricks, one thing MS has done to get where they are, and definitely has a long track record of, is making things very nice for developers who write Windows software. If you want write code that helps cement their position, they do an excellent job of making it easy for you. The MSRL is a straight to the point, effective way of furthering that effort, so I see little need to imagine more convoluted reasons for it. Heck, the "look but don't touch" essence of the license is basically the same deal as for the source they've been offering through MSDN for years, and I don't recall any lawsuits stemming from there. But having that source has been immensely helpful to many a coder indirectly helping the evil empire by writing Windows based software.
I predict they will not harass anyone who makes extensive use of MSRL works. They will thank them. Because the only point of making extensive use of MSRL works will be to write Windows software.
Exactlty. "access" is but one of the conditions. Given the number of different ways to write any given peice of non-trivial software, the chances are mighty slim of "substantial similarity" if you didn't actually copy it.
The Harrison case is is famous, but not particularly on point. The court concluded (most believe wrongly) the song was a copy of one that it in fact sounds a lot like. We're presumably talking about MS trying to prove source code is a copy of code it doesn't look much like.
All of which sounds like an awfully elaborate and unlikely to work trap for MS to be attempting, especially next to the stated reason for the Reference License, which actually makes perfect sense.
Satelite communications work fine through stormclouds. Ditto all manner of ground-based communications passing horizontally trough many times as much storm as these signals will need to pass trough vertically. Water is mediocre (but sufficient) at disrupting a narrow band of frequencies. Engineers who can figure out how to keep a stratospheric communications balloon on station can figure out how to pick a frequency outside this band.
"How much would it cost to keep these balloons floating continuously?"
Not much compared to running fibre to everybodies house. Why do you think people keep coming up with different broadband ideas? It's not that they haven't thought of running fibre.
"how much do they think people will pay for broadband?"
Well, people who can't get broadband otherwise currently pay quite a bit to get it via satelite. This will slash the latency dramatically, so those people ought to be willing to pay for it instead, and they might pay more or there might be more of them.
Given the amount of money they must have already spent to float one balloon to the stratosphere and try it, I'm guessing they've done the back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine it isn't dead in the water.
"As far as my knowledege of copyright goes, it seems that the alleged need only have a similar product and access to the original, whether they copied it or not, to prove infringement"
Your knowledge of copyright does not go far enough. While the typical slashdot understanding seems to be that if you ever saw someone elses code, anything you ever write belongs to them, this is not actually the case.
You are right that infringement does not have to be line for line copying; but it does have to be copying. If I read some code that does something, then tommorow I go write something from scratch that does the same thing, it is not copyright infringement, even if I remember the general outlines of how to do it from their code. If I sit there typing in their code from a printed listing in my lap, changing variable names as I go, that's infringement. The "cleanroom" techniques used to re-implement things (like, famously, BIOS chip code) are useful for proving you could not possibly have infringed. Proving you did infringe takes a lot more than showing you saw the original code, and is actually quite difficult (in the absense of source that matches).
The reference license is used for stuff like libraries that are part of Windows. You can't modify them, but you wouldn't want to anyway, because your users are going to have the standard version; and there would be no point in writing you own. But it's awfully nice to be able to step into them in the debugger and see what's going on.
I can understand your concern, but actually the Reference license makes a lot of sense for things like development libraries. If I'm getting some unexpected behavior from some MS lib, it's nice to be able to debug into it and see what's going on. I can't modify it, but I wasn't going to anyway; I've got to make my code work with the unmodified lib that will be on my users machines.
Besides, having seen code that does something, then writing code to do that thing does not put you on the losing end of a copyright suit. The "gotcha" you fear would not really work. At the least, it hasn't; The RL license is not new, there's a ton of code out there under it, and has been for a while. If the lawsuits you fear were happening, they'd certainly be making news on slashdot.
No, that's the BSD license. With BSD licensed code, you can do whatever you want with it. One of the things you can do with it is include it in a project you then release under the GPL (or any licence you like); therefore the BSD license is GPL compatible, and so will the MS one be if it is really BSD like. The GPL quite clearly does not let you do whatever you want with the code: you cannot release it under a different license.
Worthless? Compared to what, and for what purpose? For serious, important research I wouldn't stop at wikipedia, but I wouldn't stop at a standard encylopedia for that either. Funny you mention Caesar: the last time I consulted Wikipedia I wanted to know what year he crossed the Rubicon. Trivia? I guess, but so is most of the stuff I ever look up. Without wikipedia, I would have just done a google search, picked the first hit that looked like an encyclopedia-level bio, and gone with that. Wikipedia is at least as trustworthy as a random web page (generally more so), and makes it easy to find that "encyclopedia level" treatment of a subject.
There are currently extensive references in the Julius Caersar entry, and quite a bit of discussion on the talk page. Without more details, I'm somewhat curious what this "demonstrably false" information was?
Those are very interesting questions. If only there were an article somewhere that answered them.
Of course, what would be really great would be if some people would not just assume certain tasks were "simple" and move on, but actually watch some real live users try to acomplish them. They could even videotape it to see exactly what the stumbling blocks were. Then someone could write an article about it so others would understand what they assumed was simple actually causes problems for people. Of course, to understand that, those people would have to do something with that article. Starts with 'r'? Rhymes with 'mead'? Anyone? Anyone? Sigh.
"Corporations can loan things to employees, or they can give things." Yes, or they can direct their employees to use things in their role as part of the corporation, without either loaning or giving those things to their employees in their role as distinct legal entities. It is not the employee-employer relationship that is significant here. It is the "acting as an agent of". There are very specific requirements for this to happen; it is not extensible to the public at large.
Your fanclub example is more nuanced, but still flawed. Is the fanclub Microsoft? For the sake of argument lets assume it's BGFanClub Linux, modified by the club itself. Fanclub members doing what they themselves decide to do using the software are not acting as agents of the fanclub, and giving them the software for such purposes is indeed distribution. Persons using the software while acting as agents of the fanclub would legally be the fanclub using its own software. This would only happen if they were using the software in the course of official fanclub business under the direction of the fanclubs officers, in keeping with the fanclub bylaws, etc. etc.
I realize you have not been to law school. But had you been, you would have taken a course in corporate law at some point, and all this would have been covered on the first day. Probably in the first five minutes, preceded by the words "As I'm sure you're all aware...". The whole point of forming a corporation is that that corp then becomes a legal "person", and the employees do not personally take on the responsibilities and liabilities incurred by the corporation when they do things on the corporations behalf, nor do the owners when the corp does things on their behalf. 90% of corporate law is about the exceptions to this: When can you sue the officers of the corp for what they had the corp do? (sometimes) When can you sue the shareholders for what the corp does, or the employees for what they do at the direction of the officers? (almost never) The GPL does not need an exception about this, because nothing it does can possibly cause the rights it grants the corp or the restrictions it places on the corp to adhere to the agents of that corp. When I do something as an agent of my employer, it is legally my employer who is doing that thing.
The GPL allows corps (or any legal entity) to use modified versions without giving the source to anyone, not even the employees who, as agents of the corp, actually cause that use to occur. Yet it still prevents them from giving the modified version to someone else witout giving them the source. I'm not sure why you don't believe this, but you are incorrect. In fact, I'm pretty sure you don't care what the truth is; you just like arguing about it. The amount of research it would take to find out I am right ought to take you considerably less time than you have already spent dreaming up flawed thought experiments to show I am wrong, yet you have not done it.
Owning a Hybrid certainly made financial sense for me. I bought a Prius early on, and sold it recently. Between what I got for selling it and the tax breaks I got when I bought it, I paid $1000 to own it for four years, including all maintenance.
Legal entity A has some software. If Legal Entity A allows Legal entity B to copy, use, fold, spindle or mutilate, the software, Legal entity A has distributed it. If only Legal Entity A is ever allowed to do anything with the software, they have not distributed it. If BigCorp installs BigCorp software on BigCorp computers and uses it to do BigCorp business, they have not distributed it.
If I have it, and thanks to me, you now have it, it has been distributed. This is not rocket science. The part you seem to be having trouble with is if I, acting as an agent of my employer, happen to have a physical copy of my employers software in my hand, this does not make it mine. I do not legally have it. My employer has it, and is using their property by way of their agent.
Microsoft can modify KDE and do whatever they like with it, so long as only Microsoft does anything with it. If they give it to any legal entity that is not Microsoft, they must give that entity the source.
But giving it to their employees and directing their employees to use it as agents of the company are legally very different things.
They are not bound by section 6 because they are not distributing it, because they are not handing it out. If my employer directs me to use a piece of software they own to do my job, it does not become mine any more than the desk they put in their office that they direct me to use becomes mine. I do not own the software, I do not have licence to use the software, I have not been given the software. I use the software only as an agent of the company. Legally speaking, it is the company who is using the software.
Again, this "agent of the company" business is not some amorphous thing I just made up; it is a well defined and established legal concept. It is largely the whole point of incorporating in the first place. It is also critical to understanding the issues you are spending a lot of time holding forth (incorrectly) on, so I'd suggest you may want to look into it. I will not bother pointing out what's wrong with the rest of the things you say; they all stem from the same flawed premise: that acting as an agent of the company is not legally different than acting for ones self. It is different.
If BigCorp installs the software on BigCorps computer for use by BigCorp, and does not permit the use of this software by their employees or anyone else except when acting as agents of BigCorp, they have not given the software to anyone but BigCorp, and don't have to give the source to anyone.
If your boss hands you a CD with some software for you to install and use to do your job, and tells you it is not to be used for non work related purposes (or has a blanket policy saying this about all company property), no one has given you personally the software, and you do not personally have any of the rights the end user of the software has under whatever license it has, GPL or otherwise.
The difference between acting as an agent of the company and acting as yourself is not obscure, fringe legal theory. Anyone with any basic legal knowledge will explain it to you the same way. I submit that you do not have this basic level of knowledge, and are, in this thread, willfully avoiding aquisition of it.
Have you considered the posibility that your Mom is running her own experiment to answer the question: What do I have to do to get him to quit screwing with my computer and bugging me about which of two indistingusable programs I use? Aha! Pretend there is a difference I care about and assure him I like it.
"The truth is, most users (who usually don't know what they're doing), will click in the first thing that looks like a browser and be happy."
If what they do gets them the results they want, what basis is there for saying they don't know what they are doing?
There are thousands of telemarketers out there. Getting most of them to not call me the first time is great, and that's what the DNC list should do, and largely has. Once they've called me, getting that one to (maybe) not call me again is pointless. Telling them they are a jerk (yes, you personally, in addidition to your employer) is more satisfying, and possibly more effective. If fewer people were willing to be jerks for pay, perhaps it would be less cost effective.
Re:Palm's Mistakes or Microsoft's Tactics?
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Palm's Mistakes
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"The simplest explanation would be that RIM licensed the technology they needed from Microsoft"
Actually, the simplest, (and correct) explanantion is that the original poster is talking out his ass. RIM used the same open, documented formats everyone else does, including Palm. Palm talks to Exchange just fine when it's in a cradle on your desk. Blackberry talks to Exchange just fine when you're stuck in traffic on the freeway. The difference is huge, but it has nothing to do with Exchange.
You'd prefer to have code written by people who's agenda and competence level is unknown to you? I mean, if the NSA wanted to get some code out there that had something sneaky going on, it seems highly unlikely it would appear to come from them. I'd be willing to bet your computer has plenty of code on it written by people you have no knowledge of whatsoever. Trusting that but not code written by the government may not be paranoid, but it's pretty random.
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Of course, there's no reason you can't do printf("Hello World."); in Visual Studio. I too started in BASIC, because that's what was available. Frankly, "drag some buttons onto a gui and get an app that looks cool and does nothing" is EXACTLY where I would start a child today. They'll do that maybe twice, then want the buttons to do something and go from there.
Or I could edit a text file, run a couple command line apps and wind up with a command line app that prints "Hello World!" to the screen. Woo-Hoo!!! What kid wouldn't love that? I mean, sure, I did. But I can kind of fogive kids today if text appearing on a screen does not strike them as quite so miraculous.
"While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code."
As deep as VS "allowed" him? WTF are you talking about? I've used VS every workday for 7 years. I gather it has some sort of functions for making cute screens with buttons on them? I wouldn't know, I've never written a gui app.
He's a kid. He wanted to make something he thought was cool; and he did, good for him. It makes sense he went for the drag-together an EZ-GUI stuff; He made something that looked cool and didn't do much. I'm guessing "looks cool" was his design target.
Heck, I first got into programing (time to date myself) writing BASIC programs to draw maps of D&D dungeons. 99% of what I learned in my first months of coding was the details of the particular extended ascii set my computer suported. I learned useless trivia and wrote lousy code in pusuit of eye-candy. But eventually, I wanted to move a marker around the dungeon, then I wanted to keep track of what was in different rooms. Today I make a fairly nice living writing complex C++ without a bit of eye-candy anywhere near it.
In short, leave the kid alone. Soon enough he'll want those cute buttons to do real stuff. If adults can be kept from eliminating his fun by insisting that "real" programs can't look good, he'll be a crackerjack coder in no time.
If it matters in the least whether a non-OS programming class uses Windows or Linux, it's a lousy class.
What exactly is "generic data"? If a GPU chip could do a CPU chips job 12 times as fast, it would be used as a CPU chip.
GPU chips are designed to do a certain type of calculation (matrix multiplication) as quickly as possible, and, unsurprisingly, they can do it a lot faster than chips designed for a much wider array of calculations. 3D graphics is a sufficiently popular application that it has caused chips to be designed for rapid matrix multiplication, but various other applications require this caclulation as well, so for some of those, you might get a speed-per-dollar boost by getting a GPU to do the calcs for you.
Way back in days of yore I knew an astonomy prof who wanted to do a bunch of calculations about galactic gas densities, or some such, and this required a whole ton of interpolation. He got an expansion card for his PC from some two-guys-in-a-garage hardware company that would do this many orders of magnitude faster than the CPU could hope to. They built it using chips designed for CD players.
In either case, it's not that the chip in question was magically better. Rather, specific applications needed a specific calculation to be very fast, and were important enough that someone designed a special purpose chip to do it, and optomized the hell out of it. Then there were other apps that needed that calculation; and while they weren't themselves worth designing a special chip for, they were worth figuring out how to hack the existing tech into something usable.
You make some good points, but I think you are operating on an erroneous assumption.
You are quite right that standard mass-production techniques could reduce the per-rover cost considerably through economies of scale. But it wouldn't reduce the total cost of these missions much, so we couldn't do very many more of them, which would defeat the whole point. Because the rover is not the expensive part. The rocket launch is the expensive part. We already do a lot of those (compared to just rover missions) and get some economies of scale, and it's still pretty expensive. Making the rover itself cheaper won't save a lot of money, because on the scale of the total mission, it doesn't cost a lot anyway.
If you spent a bunch more on the lander/rover, and made it significantly lighter, that would cut costs. But it's already pretty incredibly light for what it does. So until the cost of thrust comes down significantly (which doesn't look likely), extreterestrial rover missions are going to be infrequent affairs; and the metric rover designers should strive to optomize is not "bang for buck" but "bang per pound". Given these parameters, largely redesigning the rovers per mission makes sense. Going to the moon means less gravity, means every sructural part can be lighter. Going to a different latitude on Mars means less solar energy, means a bigger solar panel, means something else has to go. Standardized rovers would be great for sending a whole lot to the martian equator, but you can only afford so many launches a year, who wants to send all of them to the martian equator?
"No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
The fact that you and the 4th circuit share a willingness to pretend this isn't blindingly simple doesn't make either of you right.
Persons engaged in terrorist activity should be locked up, I'll certainly agree. How shall society decide if someone is engaged in activities that mean they ought to be locked up? In some countries, such decisions are made in a court of law. In other countries, the supreme leader just says who should be locked up. I'd prefer to live in the first sort of country, and I thought I did.
My point is, putting this code out there, in hopes that someone who might write something competitive will see it, and that they will wind up writing something similar because there is "only one obvious way to express a given algorithm" (which I'm not sure I can imagine for anything complex enough to care about), so that MS can then sue them to kill of that competing thing... Well, it sounds like a crackpot scheme without much chance of possibly being worth the trouble. I'm not saying MS wouldn't do something that dirty; I'm saying they wouldn't do something that ineffective.
Now, besides dirty tricks, one thing MS has done to get where they are, and definitely has a long track record of, is making things very nice for developers who write Windows software. If you want write code that helps cement their position, they do an excellent job of making it easy for you. The MSRL is a straight to the point, effective way of furthering that effort, so I see little need to imagine more convoluted reasons for it. Heck, the "look but don't touch" essence of the license is basically the same deal as for the source they've been offering through MSDN for years, and I don't recall any lawsuits stemming from there. But having that source has been immensely helpful to many a coder indirectly helping the evil empire by writing Windows based software.
I predict they will not harass anyone who makes extensive use of MSRL works. They will thank them. Because the only point of making extensive use of MSRL works will be to write Windows software.
Exactlty. "access" is but one of the conditions. Given the number of different ways to write any given peice of non-trivial software, the chances are mighty slim of "substantial similarity" if you didn't actually copy it.
The Harrison case is is famous, but not particularly on point. The court concluded (most believe wrongly) the song was a copy of one that it in fact sounds a lot like. We're presumably talking about MS trying to prove source code is a copy of code it doesn't look much like.
All of which sounds like an awfully elaborate and unlikely to work trap for MS to be attempting, especially next to the stated reason for the Reference License, which actually makes perfect sense.
Satelite communications work fine through stormclouds. Ditto all manner of ground-based communications passing horizontally trough many times as much storm as these signals will need to pass trough vertically. Water is mediocre (but sufficient) at disrupting a narrow band of frequencies. Engineers who can figure out how to keep a stratospheric communications balloon on station can figure out how to pick a frequency outside this band.
"How much would it cost to keep these balloons floating continuously?"
Not much compared to running fibre to everybodies house. Why do you think people keep coming up with different broadband ideas? It's not that they haven't thought of running fibre.
"how much do they think people will pay for broadband?"
Well, people who can't get broadband otherwise currently pay quite a bit to get it via satelite. This will slash the latency dramatically, so those people ought to be willing to pay for it instead, and they might pay more or there might be more of them.
Given the amount of money they must have already spent to float one balloon to the stratosphere and try it, I'm guessing they've done the back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine it isn't dead in the water.
"As far as my knowledege of copyright goes, it seems that the alleged need only have a similar product and access to the original, whether they copied it or not, to prove infringement"
Your knowledge of copyright does not go far enough. While the typical slashdot understanding seems to be that if you ever saw someone elses code, anything you ever write belongs to them, this is not actually the case.
You are right that infringement does not have to be line for line copying; but it does have to be copying. If I read some code that does something, then tommorow I go write something from scratch that does the same thing, it is not copyright infringement, even if I remember the general outlines of how to do it from their code. If I sit there typing in their code from a printed listing in my lap, changing variable names as I go, that's infringement. The "cleanroom" techniques used to re-implement things (like, famously, BIOS chip code) are useful for proving you could not possibly have infringed. Proving you did infringe takes a lot more than showing you saw the original code, and is actually quite difficult (in the absense of source that matches).
The reference license is used for stuff like libraries that are part of Windows. You can't modify them, but you wouldn't want to anyway, because your users are going to have the standard version; and there would be no point in writing you own. But it's awfully nice to be able to step into them in the debugger and see what's going on.
I can understand your concern, but actually the Reference license makes a lot of sense for things like development libraries. If I'm getting some unexpected behavior from some MS lib, it's nice to be able to debug into it and see what's going on. I can't modify it, but I wasn't going to anyway; I've got to make my code work with the unmodified lib that will be on my users machines.
Besides, having seen code that does something, then writing code to do that thing does not put you on the losing end of a copyright suit. The "gotcha" you fear would not really work. At the least, it hasn't; The RL license is not new, there's a ton of code out there under it, and has been for a while. If the lawsuits you fear were happening, they'd certainly be making news on slashdot.
No, that's the BSD license. With BSD licensed code, you can do whatever you want with it. One of the things you can do with it is include it in a project you then release under the GPL (or any licence you like); therefore the BSD license is GPL compatible, and so will the MS one be if it is really BSD like. The GPL quite clearly does not let you do whatever you want with the code: you cannot release it under a different license.
Worthless? Compared to what, and for what purpose? For serious, important research I wouldn't stop at wikipedia, but I wouldn't stop at a standard encylopedia for that either. Funny you mention Caesar: the last time I consulted Wikipedia I wanted to know what year he crossed the Rubicon. Trivia? I guess, but so is most of the stuff I ever look up. Without wikipedia, I would have just done a google search, picked the first hit that looked like an encyclopedia-level bio, and gone with that. Wikipedia is at least as trustworthy as a random web page (generally more so), and makes it easy to find that "encyclopedia level" treatment of a subject.
There are currently extensive references in the Julius Caersar entry, and quite a bit of discussion on the talk page. Without more details, I'm somewhat curious what this "demonstrably false" information was?
Those are very interesting questions. If only there were an article somewhere that answered them.
Of course, what would be really great would be if some people would not just assume certain tasks were "simple" and move on, but actually watch some real live users try to acomplish them. They could even videotape it to see exactly what the stumbling blocks were. Then someone could write an article about it so others would understand what they assumed was simple actually causes problems for people. Of course, to understand that, those people would have to do something with that article. Starts with 'r'? Rhymes with 'mead'? Anyone? Anyone? Sigh.
It's called an analogy
HTH
"Corporations can loan things to employees, or they can give things."
Yes, or they can direct their employees to use things in their role as part of the corporation, without either loaning or giving those things to their employees in their role as distinct legal entities. It is not the employee-employer relationship that is significant here. It is the "acting as an agent of". There are very specific requirements for this to happen; it is not extensible to the public at large.
Your fanclub example is more nuanced, but still flawed. Is the fanclub Microsoft? For the sake of argument lets assume it's BGFanClub Linux, modified by the club itself. Fanclub members doing what they themselves decide to do using the software are not acting as agents of the fanclub, and giving them the software for such purposes is indeed distribution. Persons using the software while acting as agents of the fanclub would legally be the fanclub using its own software. This would only happen if they were using the software in the course of official fanclub business under the direction of the fanclubs officers, in keeping with the fanclub bylaws, etc. etc.
I realize you have not been to law school. But had you been, you would have taken a course in corporate law at some point, and all this would have been covered on the first day. Probably in the first five minutes, preceded by the words "As I'm sure you're all aware...". The whole point of forming a corporation is that that corp then becomes a legal "person", and the employees do not personally take on the responsibilities and liabilities incurred by the corporation when they do things on the corporations behalf, nor do the owners when the corp does things on their behalf. 90% of corporate law is about the exceptions to this: When can you sue the officers of the corp for what they had the corp do? (sometimes) When can you sue the shareholders for what the corp does, or the employees for what they do at the direction of the officers? (almost never) The GPL does not need an exception about this, because nothing it does can possibly cause the rights it grants the corp or the restrictions it places on the corp to adhere to the agents of that corp. When I do something as an agent of my employer, it is legally my employer who is doing that thing.
The GPL allows corps (or any legal entity) to use modified versions without giving the source to anyone, not even the employees who, as agents of the corp, actually cause that use to occur. Yet it still prevents them from giving the modified version to someone else witout giving them the source. I'm not sure why you don't believe this, but you are incorrect. In fact, I'm pretty sure you don't care what the truth is; you just like arguing about it. The amount of research it would take to find out I am right ought to take you considerably less time than you have already spent dreaming up flawed thought experiments to show I am wrong, yet you have not done it.
Owning a Hybrid certainly made financial sense for me. I bought a Prius early on, and sold it recently. Between what I got for selling it and the tax breaks I got when I bought it, I paid $1000 to own it for four years, including all maintenance.
Of course, figuratively and litteraly, YMMV.
Legal entity A has some software. If Legal Entity A allows Legal entity B to copy, use, fold, spindle or mutilate, the software, Legal entity A has distributed it. If only Legal Entity A is ever allowed to do anything with the software, they have not distributed it. If BigCorp installs BigCorp software on BigCorp computers and uses it to do BigCorp business, they have not distributed it.
If I have it, and thanks to me, you now have it, it has been distributed. This is not rocket science. The part you seem to be having trouble with is if I, acting as an agent of my employer, happen to have a physical copy of my employers software in my hand, this does not make it mine. I do not legally have it. My employer has it, and is using their property by way of their agent.
Microsoft can modify KDE and do whatever they like with it, so long as only Microsoft does anything with it. If they give it to any legal entity that is not Microsoft, they must give that entity the source.
But giving it to their employees and directing their employees to use it as agents of the company are legally very different things.
They are not bound by section 6 because they are not distributing it, because they are not handing it out. If my employer directs me to use a piece of software they own to do my job, it does not become mine any more than the desk they put in their office that they direct me to use becomes mine. I do not own the software, I do not have licence to use the software, I have not been given the software. I use the software only as an agent of the company. Legally speaking, it is the company who is using the software.
Again, this "agent of the company" business is not some amorphous thing I just made up; it is a well defined and established legal concept. It is largely the whole point of incorporating in the first place. It is also critical to understanding the issues you are spending a lot of time holding forth (incorrectly) on, so I'd suggest you may want to look into it. I will not bother pointing out what's wrong with the rest of the things you say; they all stem from the same flawed premise: that acting as an agent of the company is not legally different than acting for ones self. It is different.
If BigCorp installs the software on BigCorps computer for use by BigCorp, and does not permit the use of this software by their employees or anyone else except when acting as agents of BigCorp, they have not given the software to anyone but BigCorp, and don't have to give the source to anyone.
If your boss hands you a CD with some software for you to install and use to do your job, and tells you it is not to be used for non work related purposes (or has a blanket policy saying this about all company property), no one has given you personally the software, and you do not personally have any of the rights the end user of the software has under whatever license it has, GPL or otherwise.
The difference between acting as an agent of the company and acting as yourself is not obscure, fringe legal theory. Anyone with any basic legal knowledge will explain it to you the same way. I submit that you do not have this basic level of knowledge, and are, in this thread, willfully avoiding aquisition of it.
Have you considered the posibility that your Mom is running her own experiment to answer the question: What do I have to do to get him to quit screwing with my computer and bugging me about which of two indistingusable programs I use? Aha! Pretend there is a difference I care about and assure him I like it.
"The truth is, most users (who usually don't know what they're doing), will click in the first thing that looks like a browser and be happy."
If what they do gets them the results they want, what basis is there for saying they don't know what they are doing?
There are thousands of telemarketers out there. Getting most of them to not call me the first time is great, and that's what the DNC list should do, and largely has. Once they've called me, getting that one to (maybe) not call me again is pointless. Telling them they are a jerk (yes, you personally, in addidition to your employer) is more satisfying, and possibly more effective. If fewer people were willing to be jerks for pay, perhaps it would be less cost effective.
"The simplest explanation would be that RIM licensed the technology they needed from Microsoft"
Actually, the simplest, (and correct) explanantion is that the original poster is talking out his ass. RIM used the same open, documented formats everyone else does, including Palm. Palm talks to Exchange just fine when it's in a cradle on your desk. Blackberry talks to Exchange just fine when you're stuck in traffic on the freeway. The difference is huge, but it has nothing to do with Exchange.
You'd prefer to have code written by people who's agenda and competence level is unknown to you? I mean, if the NSA wanted to get some code out there that had something sneaky going on, it seems highly unlikely it would appear to come from them. I'd be willing to bet your computer has plenty of code on it written by people you have no knowledge of whatsoever. Trusting that but not code written by the government may not be paranoid, but it's pretty random.