It would seem that with fixed cost billing you'd need to specify rigid acceptance criteria up front to avoid the customer lobbying for "just one more feature" under the cost umbrella of the current contact.
How do you reconcile this with the nature of XP projects to deliver something that is noticeably different from the customers original conception of their need (but that in fact fits very well the customers need as learned over the course of the project?)
I'm seriously interested to hear about folxs who have figured out how to marry an agile development process to fixed cost contracts.
I'll add my voice to the chorus. A few weeks ago I finally kicked MacOS X 10.0.4 off my harddrive for being slow and buggy, and got MOL working under Debian Linux on my PB G4. It's truely wonderful. I use Linux for my java development work, and its great to be able to hotkey right to my Mac desktop for productivity apps. Beats dual booting all to heck. And it's way faster than Classic under OS X (at least with 10.0.4).
I figure I'll take a look at OS X again when 10.2 comes out, but until then I'm happy as a clam.
I remember gestural interfaces having a brief heyday of popularity on the Mac back around 1988-89 when Hypercard came out. They made alot of sense at the time, and I'm not sure why they never caught on with the desktop computing crowd.
Other posters are astute in noting that any decent pen based interface such as PalmOS or NewtonOS has relied on gestures for along time now. I definately think NewtonOS had made excellent use of gestures, such as scrubs to erase text.
we were told we couldn't get the "A" rate because our credit wasn't good enough. Those "scores" that pop up on bankers' screens really, really baffle me.
Here's something that made my jaw drop when I learned it. Apparently the "scores" that at least some of the credit reporting agencies report are marked down if somebody else has recently pulled your credit report. That is the mere act of looking at your credit score by one potential lender reduces what the next one will see.
And alot of places are not even interested at looking at the actual contents of the report, they just check your score and they are done.
I really admire all your hard work, drive, and what you went through to get an education that enabled you to get a well paying job. I have only one question:
Why shouldn't we, as a society, make it easier for people whose situations were like your own to accomplish what you did?
You propose charities as a solution, but all the statistics I've heard say that poor people donate a higher percentage of their time and income to charity than do the wealthy. I don't know that we can count on all people who have made it up the ladder to reach a hand back down... Especially those that didn' t have far to climb.
Let's make it easier as a society for more people to do what you did. It doesn't make your accomplishment any less worthwhile. And it benefits all of us!
Lets take a closer look at David Brin's "Healthy" diamond. Draw a crossbar to represent our hypothetical middle class. Let's say they are pulling down around $40-60K a year.
Now lets look at the poor. Somebody making $5K a year is really struggling (poverty level income is what, around $13K a year?) So lets be generous, and draw a line 10 units DOWN from the middle of the crossbar to represent the gap between the poor and the middle class.
How about the rich? Well, $10 million a year doesn't even really get your started on the road toward the super rich, but hey, lets not be greedy, so draw a line 250 units long UP from the crossbar to represent the difference between the middle class and the rich.
Now connect the tips to make your diamond. Dang! looks more like a pyramid to me...
And if our diamond is so healthy, why is our much vaunted middle class making less today in adjusted dollars than they were in 1970? Sounds like a topological transformation is underway to me, and somebody didn't want you to notice...
I think it's the "Nose Holders for Gore" who need to do a little more research on their guy. Sure, Gore talks a good line on issues that are important to progressive voters, but strangely when it comes time to cast his vote, or make policy, Mr. Gore keeps on looking like a moderate Republican.
It sounds to me like David Brin would be happier voting for Harry Browne, and I encourage him to do so. The really unfortunate thing in this election would be to keep handing power to a Democratic party that continues its slide to the right, just because we have a nincompoop boogyman like W. waved in front of every 4 years...
Oh yeah, and as an aside, having volunteered at the Nader 2000 office in Seattle, and worked the Nader super-rally held here, I'd like to say that there are at LEAST as many women as men working on the campaign, if not more. A good number of women are refusing to be scared into line by Supreme Court boogieman...
Let's hear it for the politics of joy and justice!
You are right. I much prefer Xemacs:-)... And I like all those helpful indentation and expression balancing features in the various language modes.
As for finding the end of a block, well python-mode has handy commands to mark and move by class, method definition or block, so those clever elisp hackers obviously have some way to do it.
I still think Python's WYSIWYG style of formatting makes sense. If nothing else, it finally ends all those arguments about where to put your opening brace, so we can have more time to fight about variable naming conventions!
It would be okay for the compiler to generate a warning for incorrectly-indented code, but to generate incorrect code instead is simply inexcusable.
Depends on your definition of correctness.;) If you wrote:
if( myCondition) {
doThingOne();
doThingTwo();
}
On a quick visual inspection of the code, I'd assume that doThingTwo() was outside of the if clause, and if you wrote:
if( myCondition)
doThingOne();
doThingTwo();
I'd definately assume doThingTwo() was inside the if until I looked closer to notice the braces were missing. In this case, the "correct" code would be very suprising.
In python, you don't have these sorts of suprises, your block structure is immediately obvious from indentation, and if it looks wrong, it is wrong. I'd call that correct code generation...
I'll admit I was a little put off by this feature of python at first, but as soon as I started working with it for awhile, it just seemed natural. Now in my Java programming I always get annoyed when I have to spend time balancing my braces!
Also, I used to do alot of work in perl with a guy who never bothered to indent his code consistently (after all, its the braces that define the block structure) and at least once a week, he would call me over to look at some bug that became obvious as soon as I reformatted the code. And applying the pragmatic programming principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), what is the point of having the same semantic information encoded in the formatting (where it is visible to the programmer) and brace structure (where it is visible to the compiler). If you've got the same information in two places, eventually they'll get out of sync, and you'll lose...
Lifestreams is an intriguing interface concept, and deserves to be explored, but now that the concept is locked up in a patent we'll have to wait 17 years to see if it has any potential...
An interesting perspective on this question which I picked up from some well known pundit whose name I've now completely forgotten (was it Sterling? Negroponte? darn...):
We are in the process of changing over from an infrastructure where short haul data went over wires and long haul data went through the air, to one where long haul data goes over wires and short haul data goes through the air.
That is, I want my PDA, computer, and cell phone to chat with each other while they are on my desk, and my cell phone talks to a tower a few miles away at the most. Meanwhile my desktop PC and that cell phone tower are connected to land lines that take the data on to the phone networks/internet (slowly becoming one) and thence around the world.
So unless I'm crossing Antarctica by dog sled, the idea of long haul radio communication becomes much less interesting. Which means the same frequency bands can be used over and over again as I move from area to area.
The challenge then becomes one of making the little short range devices smart enough to work out how to share the locally available spectrum equitabily, and not stomp all over each other.
As far as I know, the good authors get those ideas by talking to working scientists.
Perhaps the ESA just needs to start paying more attention to the scientists already in their employ!
Of particular interest to /. readers...
on
The Star Fraction
·
· Score: 1
...the father of the aforementioned libertarian socialist mercenary created a piece of framework software, which was distributed freely on the net, which was so massively useful it became a fundemental part of pretty much every piece of running code in existance.
The kicker comes later in the book where it is revealed than in addition to being massively useful, this code also provides a side door into the information systems of the world, that enables the distributed AI's to survive, and that this was done on purpose. All issues of practicality aside, I enjoyed some fictionalized Free Software being used to bring down the man....
It's also just nice to see SF characters proudly identifying themselves as socialists (and Trotsky socialists no less). The characters in the Star Fraction were ones I would have loved to hang out at the pub with!
The latest Smithosonian had an especially good article about him. Apparently his original demo 'bot was a robust walker that could clear most obstacles, run by all of 12 transistors.
I think somebody needs to look at combining the approaches of AI based robots that make decisions based on modeling their world, and robots such as Tilden's that seem to simply have "body feel" for their environment. Perhaps a Tilden type robot body could carry a reasoning "head" that sets goals for the body to carry out. I think this would be much like ourselves. Imagine if you had to walk or jump with only your eyes to guide you. No sense of balance, or kinesthetic sense. I doubt you could do it. We shouldn't expect robots to do the same.
The BSD license is best because it's short, simple, clear, unambiguous, and fair.
If you want to create a reference implementation or framework, and your mission is to promote the standard protocol or language embodied in that framework, then the BSD license is a great choice. After all, in this situation you don't mind a commercial vendor picking up your code base and not contributing changes back to the community. You are just happy that they are advancing the standard. This is the mission and the achievement of the internet plumbing pieces that Brett cites in his post.
If however, your mission is to create an implementation that will remain open to the community (presumably based on standards that are well established and don't need further help), then the GPL is an excellent choice, since it will encourage improvements and changes to keep flowing back into the original code base, and protect the code base from being hijacked into binary only products, (unless of course some arrangement has been made with the copyright holders of the GPLed code).
On the gripping hand, if your mission is to make big wodges of cash, then you'll probably want to keep your development closed, and sell binary copies under an obnoxious UCITA-friendly shrink wrapped license.
It does not seem to me that a programmer who wants to encourage his colleagues to contribute to a project should adopt a license whose explicit purpose is "ban" them from making a better living than a grad student!
I think you misread the motivation. I can make big wodges of cash by picking up a sawed off shotgun and visiting a few of my local banks. Yet for some reason, society "bans" me from engaging in this wholesome and profitable activity. RMS seems to feel that, being as the vast majority of software technique is a common pool developed by the contributions of thousands, arbitrarily walling off portions of the noosphere on the grounds of patent and copyright might be a little like robbing the intellectual bank. You can argue the specifics of how society might best encourage innovation, while at the same time not choking the golden goose of a free enchange of ideas, but please, lets not invoke base motives here. It seems to me that RMS himself has done considerably better in his financial life than the average grad student.
Remember, 80% of software development is of custom code that is valuable only to one specific customer anyway, so none of that work is going to be imperiled by the red menace of the GPL. On the contrary, the wide availability of quality, community maintained tools and infrastructure should only make our lives as programmer more productive and pleasent, since we no longer have to labor with black box APIs that are changed at the whim of incrutable marketing departments...
It is the responsibility of the copyright holder to defend the copyright from infringement. If you fail to do so for long enough, then other parties can start claiming rights. This is why so many Big Media Corporationstm err on the side of rabid lawyers attacks when their copyrighted properties are being used. Even when the actual use falls under fair use provisions. After all, their lawyers are on retainer, so its only you that has to spend money to defend yourself. But I digress...
The GPL is based on the notion of using existing copyright to provide legal teeth to the basic "play nice" notion of copyleft. So in order to mount a legal defense of a particular work, it would have to be undertaken by the copyright holder(s) of that work.
i think i read somewhere in the GPL that in the process of GPL'ing the code, you give the copyright to the FSF.
Is that your final answer? Would you like to use your lifeline?;)
No sorry, that is incorrect. You have confused the policy of the FSF, which is to get copyright on all contributions to projects they maintain assigned to themselves, and the language of the GPL itself.
You can most certainly GPL code, and keep the copyright to yourself. This is the situation with, for example, the Linux kernel. The result of this situation is that after awhile, it becomes quite impractical to determine who holds the copyright to what part of the codebase. This is not a problem if it is not desired to distributed the code under a different license as well (and this is the case with the Linux kernel)
However for those, such as the poster, or Cygnus, or Aladdin, who want to be able to release a GPL version of their project, and also make money by licensing their codebase to binary-only folk, it is essential that they retain sole copyright on their codebase. This is accomplished by asking patch contributors to formally assign their copyright to the project maintainer.
The FSF also requires copyright assignment. In their case, the justification is that in the event of a legal dispute, they would be in a position to prosecute any violations of the GPL on their projects without needing to involve anybody else.
Summary: you continue to hold copyright on any code you place under the GPL, unless you specifically assign that copyright to someone else (for whatever reason)
I remember seeing this, and thinking it was funny. I'd love to some day see this again. Thankfully, we have the bootleg community to keep such wonderful things alive for us!
The first was last night, when a large number of local church groups held a protest service, and then planned to march to the nearbye exhibition center where at WTO reception was being held, to create a human chain around it. The cause being promoted was the cancellation of Third World debt. This had been planned way in advance, the schedule was even in most of the papers. Yet for some reason, the Seattle Times reported on this the next day as an "impromptu demonstration." huh?
Anyway, it turned out the police had put up big barricades (concrete blocks and chain link fences) and the planned march wound up getting bottled up in a (newly) dead end street. After some confusion people worked there way around to where you could actually see the exhibition center, and we were treated to the bizarre site of Seattle cops wearing heavy riot gear, and phalanxes of police motorcycles and armored vehicles. It looked like something out of Judge Dredd. I began to wonder if I was still in the USA.
Then this afternoon, I marched in the AFL-CIO sponsored protest parade. This was the "legal" protest parade, and several tens of thousands of people turned out. I must say it was inspiring to see ranks and ranks of people of all shapes sizes and colors, ahead and behind as far as I could see. People were very well behaved, and I didn't see any violence. Nor did the cops feel the need to show up in such overwhelming force.
Turned out this was because they were off bashing the heads of the "illegal" protestors. I heard some experiences from a woman I rode home on the bus with afterwards, as well as from a protestor who is staying in our house while he is in Seattle. Apparently the cops were not just firing tear gas into groups of protesters, but grabbing peoples heads and spraying pepper spray right into their faces. What the hell is that supposed to accomplish?
After we got home, we watched the coverage on local stations (which were reporting the use of CS gas). The police were denying the use of rubber bullets, but NPR reported that the streets were littered with them. The protestors who are staying with us just game home, and said that somebody in their affinity group got shot in the face with one.
I think things would have stayed mostly peaceful if the mayor hadn't decided to impose a downtown curfew at 7 p.m. and order the police to clear the streets. Once the police started rushing the groups of protestors, things got ugly fast. I saw footing on one of the local news stations of a policeman firing tear gas cannisters directly at a protestor who was standing with his back to them.
A friend pointed me to indymedia.org which has lots of eyewitness reports and even some footage which isn't being shown in the major media. Check it out if you want to know what is going on...
...I believe this may be instrumental to helping the people of China eventually turn away from a totalitarian society. After all, right now the Chinese government is scared spitless of the Internet. Every PC connected to the Internet must be licensed, because the Chinese leaders know there is no greater force for freedom than the free exchange of ideas. Look what fax machines and samizdat accomplished in Russia...
Now, the Chinese government is making an operating system available to the people, and operating system, which any trained programmer can learn to modify for their own purposes. How long can the government keep control of what information flows across the networks once the Chinese people are riddled with kernel hackers? I expect in four or five years you'll hear about Chinese binary only distributions of Linux, and they'll start requiring a license to have the source. RMS has predicted that any entity that wants to control the distribution of information has to make programming and programmers tools tightly regulated, if not illegal. And thats just what things like the DVD-cabal and (I predict) the Chinese government will try to do.
How ironic that a truely communistic social movement (open source) may some day be the undoing of the totalitarian goverments who pretend they are communist.
After all how much difference is there between the statement, "We are doing this for the good of consumers..." (US Banking industry on the repeal of Glass-Stegal(sp?)) and "We are doing this for the good of our citizens..." (any rampant authoritarian government you choose to name)
As I suspected when I saw the reference to the Sunday Times, the original article that was cited in USA today was authored by Jon Ungoes-Thomas. Readers of ntk.net will be familiar with Ungoed-Thomas as a journalist who is long on unsubstantiated sensation, and very short on fact checking, and who is building a career out of predicting the collapse of civilization as a result of the Internet.
I'd take this particular article with a few large and tasty grains of salt.
Slashdot Mirror
MacOS aliases have another neat property that symlinks don't. If you move the file or directory that an alias points to, the alias still works.
It would seem that with fixed cost billing you'd need to specify rigid acceptance criteria up front to avoid the customer lobbying for "just one more feature" under the cost umbrella of the current contact.
How do you reconcile this with the nature of XP projects to deliver something that is noticeably different from the customers original conception of their need (but that in fact fits very well the customers need as learned over the course of the project?)
I'm seriously interested to hear about folxs who have figured out how to marry an agile development process to fixed cost contracts.
I'll add my voice to the chorus. A few weeks ago I finally kicked MacOS X 10.0.4 off my harddrive for being slow and buggy, and got MOL working under Debian Linux on my PB G4. It's truely wonderful. I use Linux for my java development work, and its great to be able to hotkey right to my Mac desktop for productivity apps. Beats dual booting all to heck. And it's way faster than Classic under OS X (at least with 10.0.4).
I figure I'll take a look at OS X again when 10.2 comes out, but until then I'm happy as a clam.
I remember gestural interfaces having a brief heyday of popularity on the Mac back around 1988-89 when Hypercard came out. They made alot of sense at the time, and I'm not sure why they never caught on with the desktop computing crowd. Other posters are astute in noting that any decent pen based interface such as PalmOS or NewtonOS has relied on gestures for along time now. I definately think NewtonOS had made excellent use of gestures, such as scrubs to erase text.
Here's something that made my jaw drop when I learned it. Apparently the "scores" that at least some of the credit reporting agencies report are marked down if somebody else has recently pulled your credit report. That is the mere act of looking at your credit score by one potential lender reduces what the next one will see.
And alot of places are not even interested at looking at the actual contents of the report, they just check your score and they are done.
Why shouldn't we, as a society, make it easier for people whose situations were like your own to accomplish what you did?
You propose charities as a solution, but all the statistics I've heard say that poor people donate a higher percentage of their time and income to charity than do the wealthy. I don't know that we can count on all people who have made it up the ladder to reach a hand back down... Especially those that didn' t have far to climb.
Let's make it easier as a society for more people to do what you did. It doesn't make your accomplishment any less worthwhile. And it benefits all of us!
Now lets look at the poor. Somebody making $5K a year is really struggling (poverty level income is what, around $13K a year?) So lets be generous, and draw a line 10 units DOWN from the middle of the crossbar to represent the gap between the poor and the middle class.
How about the rich? Well, $10 million a year doesn't even really get your started on the road toward the super rich, but hey, lets not be greedy, so draw a line 250 units long UP from the crossbar to represent the difference between the middle class and the rich.
Now connect the tips to make your diamond. Dang! looks more like a pyramid to me...
And if our diamond is so healthy, why is our much vaunted middle class making less today in adjusted dollars than they were in 1970? Sounds like a topological transformation is underway to me, and somebody didn't want you to notice...
It sounds to me like David Brin would be happier voting for Harry Browne, and I encourage him to do so. The really unfortunate thing in this election would be to keep handing power to a Democratic party that continues its slide to the right, just because we have a nincompoop boogyman like W. waved in front of every 4 years...
Oh yeah, and as an aside, having volunteered at the Nader 2000 office in Seattle, and worked the Nader super-rally held here, I'd like to say that there are at LEAST as many women as men working on the campaign, if not more. A good number of women are refusing to be scared into line by Supreme Court boogieman...
Let's hear it for the politics of joy and justice!
You obviously don't use Emacs as your editor.
You are right. I much prefer Xemacs :-) ... And I like all those helpful indentation and expression balancing features in the various language modes.
As for finding the end of a block, well python-mode has handy commands to mark and move by class, method definition or block, so those clever elisp hackers obviously have some way to do it.
I still think Python's WYSIWYG style of formatting makes sense. If nothing else, it finally ends all those arguments about where to put your opening brace, so we can have more time to fight about variable naming conventions!
It would be okay for the compiler to generate a warning for incorrectly-indented code, but to generate incorrect code instead is simply inexcusable.
Depends on your definition of correctness. ;) If you wrote:
On a quick visual inspection of the code, I'd assume that doThingTwo() was outside of the if clause, and if you wrote:
I'd definately assume doThingTwo() was inside the if until I looked closer to notice the braces were missing. In this case, the "correct" code would be very suprising.
In python, you don't have these sorts of suprises, your block structure is immediately obvious from indentation, and if it looks wrong, it is wrong. I'd call that correct code generation...
I'll admit I was a little put off by this feature of python at first, but as soon as I started working with it for awhile, it just seemed natural. Now in my Java programming I always get annoyed when I have to spend time balancing my braces!
Also, I used to do alot of work in perl with a guy who never bothered to indent his code consistently (after all, its the braces that define the block structure) and at least once a week, he would call me over to look at some bug that became obvious as soon as I reformatted the code. And applying the pragmatic programming principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), what is the point of having the same semantic information encoded in the formatting (where it is visible to the programmer) and brace structure (where it is visible to the compiler). If you've got the same information in two places, eventually they'll get out of sync, and you'll lose...
Lifestreams is an intriguing interface concept, and deserves to be explored, but now that the concept is locked up in a patent we'll have to wait 17 years to see if it has any potential...
We are in the process of changing over from an infrastructure where short haul data went over wires and long haul data went through the air, to one where long haul data goes over wires and short haul data goes through the air.
That is, I want my PDA, computer, and cell phone to chat with each other while they are on my desk, and my cell phone talks to a tower a few miles away at the most. Meanwhile my desktop PC and that cell phone tower are connected to land lines that take the data on to the phone networks/internet (slowly becoming one) and thence around the world.
So unless I'm crossing Antarctica by dog sled, the idea of long haul radio communication becomes much less interesting. Which means the same frequency bands can be used over and over again as I move from area to area.
The challenge then becomes one of making the little short range devices smart enough to work out how to share the locally available spectrum equitabily, and not stomp all over each other.
...for future technologies?
As far as I know, the good authors get those ideas by talking to working scientists.
Perhaps the ESA just needs to start paying more attention to the scientists already in their employ!
...the father of the aforementioned libertarian socialist mercenary created a piece of framework software, which was distributed freely on the net, which was so massively useful it became a fundemental part of pretty much every piece of running code in existance.
The kicker comes later in the book where it is revealed than in addition to being massively useful, this code also provides a side door into the information systems of the world, that enables the distributed AI's to survive, and that this was done on purpose. All issues of practicality aside, I enjoyed some fictionalized Free Software being used to bring down the man....
It's also just nice to see SF characters proudly identifying themselves as socialists (and Trotsky socialists no less). The characters in the Star Fraction were ones I would have loved to hang out at the pub with!
...this approach, with the one taken by Mark Tilden:
The latest Smithosonian had an especially good article about him. Apparently his original demo 'bot was a robust walker that could clear most obstacles, run by all of 12 transistors.
I think somebody needs to look at combining the approaches of AI based robots that make decisions based on modeling their world, and robots such as Tilden's that seem to simply have "body feel" for their environment. Perhaps a Tilden type robot body could carry a reasoning "head" that sets goals for the body to carry out. I think this would be much like ourselves. Imagine if you had to walk or jump with only your eyes to guide you. No sense of balance, or kinesthetic sense. I doubt you could do it. We shouldn't expect robots to do the same.
Because I just don't see it. Except for the default font sizes, those look damned near identical to me.
Huh... I guess that means these two examples are also pretty similar except for the font size:
Don't you wish you'd thought of that before you cranked out all those images? ;)
The BSD license is best because it's short, simple, clear, unambiguous, and fair.
If you want to create a reference implementation or framework, and your mission is to promote the standard protocol or language embodied in that framework, then the BSD license is a great choice. After all, in this situation you don't mind a commercial vendor picking up your code base and not contributing changes back to the community. You are just happy that they are advancing the standard. This is the mission and the achievement of the internet plumbing pieces that Brett cites in his post.
If however, your mission is to create an implementation that will remain open to the community (presumably based on standards that are well established and don't need further help), then the GPL is an excellent choice, since it will encourage improvements and changes to keep flowing back into the original code base, and protect the code base from being hijacked into binary only products, (unless of course some arrangement has been made with the copyright holders of the GPLed code).
On the gripping hand, if your mission is to make big wodges of cash, then you'll probably want to keep your development closed, and sell binary copies under an obnoxious UCITA-friendly shrink wrapped license.
It does not seem to me that a programmer who wants to encourage his colleagues to contribute to a project should adopt a license whose explicit purpose is "ban" them from making a better living than a grad student!
I think you misread the motivation. I can make big wodges of cash by picking up a sawed off shotgun and visiting a few of my local banks. Yet for some reason, society "bans" me from engaging in this wholesome and profitable activity. RMS seems to feel that, being as the vast majority of software technique is a common pool developed by the contributions of thousands, arbitrarily walling off portions of the noosphere on the grounds of patent and copyright might be a little like robbing the intellectual bank. You can argue the specifics of how society might best encourage innovation, while at the same time not choking the golden goose of a free enchange of ideas, but please, lets not invoke base motives here. It seems to me that RMS himself has done considerably better in his financial life than the average grad student.
Remember, 80% of software development is of custom code that is valuable only to one specific customer anyway, so none of that work is going to be imperiled by the red menace of the GPL. On the contrary, the wide availability of quality, community maintained tools and infrastructure should only make our lives as programmer more productive and pleasent, since we no longer have to labor with black box APIs that are changed at the whim of incrutable marketing departments...
It's all true! We commie bastiches will not rest until every red blooded American "programmer" is out on the street begging for used DIMMs.
But not just yet... First I have to go re-line my football helmet with tinfoil!
Meanwhile, I'm eagerly awaiting TomC to weigh in on the immorality inherent in the system!
Essentially true...
It is the responsibility of the copyright holder to defend the copyright from infringement. If you fail to do so for long enough, then other parties can start claiming rights. This is why so many Big Media Corporationstm err on the side of rabid lawyers attacks when their copyrighted properties are being used. Even when the actual use falls under fair use provisions. After all, their lawyers are on retainer, so its only you that has to spend money to defend yourself. But I digress...
The GPL is based on the notion of using existing copyright to provide legal teeth to the basic "play nice" notion of copyleft. So in order to mount a legal defense of a particular work, it would have to be undertaken by the copyright holder(s) of that work.
i think i read somewhere in the GPL that in the process of GPL'ing the code, you give the copyright to the FSF.
Is that your final answer? Would you like to use your lifeline? ;)
No sorry, that is incorrect. You have confused the policy of the FSF, which is to get copyright on all contributions to projects they maintain assigned to themselves, and the language of the GPL itself.
You can most certainly GPL code, and keep the copyright to yourself. This is the situation with, for example, the Linux kernel. The result of this situation is that after awhile, it becomes quite impractical to determine who holds the copyright to what part of the codebase. This is not a problem if it is not desired to distributed the code under a different license as well (and this is the case with the Linux kernel)
However for those, such as the poster, or Cygnus, or Aladdin, who want to be able to release a GPL version of their project, and also make money by licensing their codebase to binary-only folk, it is essential that they retain sole copyright on their codebase. This is accomplished by asking patch contributors to formally assign their copyright to the project maintainer.
The FSF also requires copyright assignment. In their case, the justification is that in the event of a legal dispute, they would be in a position to prosecute any violations of the GPL on their projects without needing to involve anybody else.
Summary: you continue to hold copyright on any code you place under the GPL, unless you specifically assign that copyright to someone else (for whatever reason)
I remember seeing this, and thinking it was funny. I'd love to some day see this again. Thankfully, we have the bootleg community to keep such wonderful things alive for us!
I've taken part in two of the protests.
The first was last night, when a large number of local church groups held a protest service, and then planned to march to the nearbye exhibition center where at WTO reception was being held, to create a human chain around it. The cause being promoted was the cancellation of Third World debt. This had been planned way in advance, the schedule was even in most of the papers. Yet for some reason, the Seattle Times reported on this the next day as an "impromptu demonstration." huh?
Anyway, it turned out the police had put up big barricades (concrete blocks and chain link fences) and the planned march wound up getting bottled up in a (newly) dead end street. After some confusion people worked there way around to where you could actually see the exhibition center, and we were treated to the bizarre site of Seattle cops wearing heavy riot gear, and phalanxes of police motorcycles and armored vehicles. It looked like something out of Judge Dredd. I began to wonder if I was still in the USA.
Then this afternoon, I marched in the AFL-CIO sponsored protest parade. This was the "legal" protest parade, and several tens of thousands of people turned out. I must say it was inspiring to see ranks and ranks of people of all shapes sizes and colors, ahead and behind as far as I could see. People were very well behaved, and I didn't see any violence. Nor did the cops feel the need to show up in such overwhelming force.
Turned out this was because they were off bashing the heads of the "illegal" protestors. I heard some experiences from a woman I rode home on the bus with afterwards, as well as from a protestor who is staying in our house while he is in Seattle. Apparently the cops were not just firing tear gas into groups of protesters, but grabbing peoples heads and spraying pepper spray right into their faces. What the hell is that supposed to accomplish?
After we got home, we watched the coverage on local stations (which were reporting the use of CS gas). The police were denying the use of rubber bullets, but NPR reported that the streets were littered with them. The protestors who are staying with us just game home, and said that somebody in their affinity group got shot in the face with one.
I think things would have stayed mostly peaceful if the mayor hadn't decided to impose a downtown curfew at 7 p.m. and order the police to clear the streets. Once the police started rushing the groups of protestors, things got ugly fast. I saw footing on one of the local news stations of a policeman firing tear gas cannisters directly at a protestor who was standing with his back to them.
A friend pointed me to indymedia.org which has lots of eyewitness reports and even some footage which isn't being shown in the major media. Check it out if you want to know what is going on...
...I believe this may be instrumental to helping the people of China eventually turn away from a totalitarian society. After all, right now the Chinese government is scared spitless of the Internet. Every PC connected to the Internet must be licensed, because the Chinese leaders know there is no greater force for freedom than the free exchange of ideas. Look what fax machines and samizdat accomplished in Russia...
Now, the Chinese government is making an operating system available to the people, and operating system, which any trained programmer can learn to modify for their own purposes. How long can the government keep control of what information flows across the networks once the Chinese people are riddled with kernel hackers? I expect in four or five years you'll hear about Chinese binary only distributions of Linux, and they'll start requiring a license to have the source. RMS has predicted that any entity that wants to control the distribution of information has to make programming and programmers tools tightly regulated, if not illegal. And thats just what things like the DVD-cabal and (I predict) the Chinese government will try to do.
How ironic that a truely communistic social movement (open source) may some day be the undoing of the totalitarian goverments who pretend they are communist.
After all how much difference is there between the statement, "We are doing this for the good of consumers..." (US Banking industry on the repeal of Glass-Stegal(sp?)) and "We are doing this for the good of our citizens..." (any rampant authoritarian government you choose to name)
As I suspected when I saw the reference to the Sunday Times, the original article that was cited in USA today was authored by Jon Ungoes-Thomas. Readers of ntk.net will be familiar with Ungoed-Thomas as a journalist who is long on unsubstantiated sensation, and very short on fact checking, and who is building a career out of predicting the collapse of civilization as a result of the Internet.
I'd take this particular article with a few large and tasty grains of salt.
As I suspected when I saw the reference to the Sunday Times, the original article that was cited in USA today was authored by Jon Ungoes-Thomas. Readers of ntk.net will be familiar with Ungoed-Thomas as a journalist who is long on unsubstantiated sensation, and very short on fact checking, and who is building a career out of predicting the collapse of civilization as a result of the Internet. I'd take this particular article with a few large and tasty grains of salt.