This question might be slightly offtopic: If I buy the VHS video of (say) The Matrix, then I have paid for a license to watch the film within my own home. I can't give my friend a copy, because he hasn't bought a license. So by this logic, if I know someone who has the DVD of The Matrix, I ought to be able to legally take a DVD copy and watch that, since I have the license. Right?
The same should apply to music: if I buy a battered old record of Queen's Greatest Hits at a second hand shop for next to nothing, I should then have the right to download the CD-quality MP3s of the songs for my own personal use.
Does anyone know if this argument will hold up in court?
Another point is that IBM is so large and complex (incoherent?) that its different divisions often have competing products. E.g. AIX, OS/2, Linux and Windows NT are all sold by IBM.
> To say that his [Linus'] presence makes an unconventional result a near certainty is crazy. How do we know this guy? Because he wrote a Unix clone.
The kernel may have been a clone, but the open development method was totally new, for something as complex as a kernel. (386BSD may have been open-source, but it was not openly-developed). Now there are many projects run similarly (gnome, kde, mozilla,...) but in 1991 it was a novelty.
Re:American notes don't go out of circulation
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IDs in Color Copies
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Yes, probably - how old are circulating dollar bills, on average?
Am I correct that American notes never cease to be legal tender?
American notes don't go out of circulation
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IDs in Color Copies
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· Score: 1
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that a 1776 dollar bill is still legal tender in the US. It's probably not difficult to match 1776 technology with today's consumer electronics.
I think everyone's just anticipating the way MS might use this result for anti-linux FUD. They've got the dollars to shout loud enough to seriously mislead people about what the rating means. If the playing field was level I'd agree with you.
> If I had to support netscape right now it'd double my work.
Even if this is true, might that not mean less work in the long run? If MS chooses to change the APIs in IE6+, you're going to be left high and dry. On the other hand, if you develop for Netscape/Mozilla, you will have plenty of warning about changing APIs (since development is open) and the chances are extremely high that a software company, somewhere, will continue supporting the old APIs.
You don't have to release source to be DFSG-compliant (Open Source). You just have to allow the source to be distributed as wide as the binaries. Since Slashdot binaries are not available, Slashdot source doesn't need to be either.
> MS will support NT & 98 for four years > after they stop shipping. It is in their > standard support agreement.
Well since two years ago, it has not been possible to get a copy of Win 3.1 which has had all known security holes patched, and Win 3.1 stopped shipping only two years before that. I think "not fixing root exploits" is not the same as "supporting".
Didn't MS claim to have lost some of the Win 3.x source code last year? That was less than four years after they stopped shipping it. How they're supposed to "support" a product to which they don't even have the source code, I don't know.
> Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), has done > everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.
I guess, then, that you've never wanted a text box where the text gets auto-selected when you click on it. I've seen professional programmers resort to using SendKeys to overcome this.
> if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, > you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point. I wanna shoot first, Me Me Me! Excel has this stupid limit of 65536 rows in a spreadsheet. Dunno if that's true for Excel 2000, but it's true for Excel 97. It's not that difficult to allow sheets of arbitrary size - see Gnumeric source for proof. This shows why it's crazy to trust your future with Microsoft - that's something simple which has bugged me since 1993 and they've still not fixed it, and there's f*** all I can do about it.
A lot of companies are set to get their fingers burnt with Access. I mean, I'm sure it's a good product for some things, but MS seem to be pushing it for niches which are completely unsuitable, leaving a mess if the database needs to grow. "Upgrade to SQL server", I'm sure they'll be saying then.
This post doesn't seem to refute any of the arguments of the previous post. Rather it seems to use sarcasm as a tool to avoid needing a rational argument.
Corel appear to be trying all the stuff you mention except 1 (which is impossible since so much of Linux is owned by hundreds of different people) and 2 which would be throwing away the biggest advantage that they have - free maintenance of the stuff which is already there.
> Why the hell would my aunt want to concern herself with GCC? I don't know, you tell me, why would your aunt want to concern herself with GCC?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the right to reverse-engineer is well-established throughout the European Union. That's presumably too big a market to ignore.
This question might be slightly offtopic: If I buy the VHS video of (say) The Matrix, then I have paid for a license to watch the film within my own home. I can't give my friend a copy, because he hasn't bought a license. So by this logic, if I know someone who has the DVD of The Matrix, I ought to be able to legally take a DVD copy and watch that, since I have the license. Right?
The same should apply to music: if I buy a battered old record of Queen's Greatest Hits at a second hand shop for next to nothing, I should then have the right to download the CD-quality MP3s of the songs for my own personal use.
Does anyone know if this argument will hold up in court?
Another point is that IBM is so large and complex (incoherent?) that its different divisions often have competing products. E.g. AIX, OS/2, Linux and Windows NT are all sold by IBM.
> To say that his [Linus'] presence makes an unconventional result a near certainty is crazy. How do we know this guy? Because he wrote a Unix clone.
...) but in 1991 it was a novelty.
The kernel may have been a clone, but the open development method was totally new, for something as complex as a kernel. (386BSD may have been open-source, but it was not openly-developed). Now there are many projects run similarly (gnome, kde, mozilla,
--
Divec
Yes, probably - how old are circulating dollar bills, on average?
Am I correct that American notes never cease to be legal tender?
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that a 1776 dollar bill is still legal tender in the US. It's probably not difficult to match 1776 technology with today's consumer electronics.
I think everyone's just anticipating the way MS might use this result for anti-linux FUD. They've got the dollars to shout loud enough to seriously mislead people about what the rating means. If the playing field was level I'd agree with you.
You can make perl binaries. But my point was that the right to not publish something at all is compatible with the DFSG.
> If I had to support netscape right now it'd double my work.
Even if this is true, might that not mean less work in the long run? If MS chooses to change the APIs in IE6+, you're going to be left high and dry. On the other hand, if you develop for Netscape/Mozilla, you will have plenty of warning about changing APIs (since development is open) and the chances are extremely high that a software company, somewhere, will continue supporting the old APIs.
You don't have to release source to be DFSG-compliant (Open Source). You just have to allow the source to be distributed as wide as the binaries. Since Slashdot binaries are not available, Slashdot source doesn't need to be either.
> Staroffice for Linux seems to work just
> fine with 96 MB of RAM. I have noticed
> problems with 32 or even 64 MB
If you have enough swap space, it shouldn't even be able to tell the difference - it'd go slowly but it shouldn't be any more unstable.
If you use that method, then TAB to the box, it doesn't do anything.
> MS will support NT & 98 for four years
> after they stop shipping. It is in their
> standard support agreement.
Well since two years ago, it has not been possible to get a copy of Win 3.1 which has had all known security holes patched, and Win 3.1 stopped shipping only two years before that. I think "not fixing root exploits" is not the same as "supporting".
Didn't MS claim to have lost some of the Win 3.x source code last year? That was less than four years after they stopped shipping it. How they're supposed to "support" a product to which they don't even have the source code, I don't know.
Hmm, so what do you do if Microsoft chooses to kill Active X at some future date? Would that not leave you high and dry?
> StarOffice with its 1min+ startup time and 100MB memory requirements
You are exaggerating there, right? SO50 starts in about 15 sec on my 32MB Cyrix 200
> Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), has done
> everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.
I guess, then, that you've never wanted a text box where the text gets auto-selected when you click on it. I've seen professional programmers resort to using SendKeys to overcome this.
> if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, > you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point. I wanna shoot first, Me Me Me! Excel has this stupid limit of 65536 rows in a spreadsheet. Dunno if that's true for Excel 2000, but it's true for Excel 97. It's not that difficult to allow sheets of arbitrary size - see Gnumeric source for proof. This shows why it's crazy to trust your future with Microsoft - that's something simple which has bugged me since 1993 and they've still not fixed it, and there's f*** all I can do about it.
I saw it too. Bizzare.
(confirmation != redundant)
Erm ... in 1933, Hitler was President. In 1923, Hitler was a punk in Munich. But your point still stands.
A lot of companies are set to get their fingers burnt with Access. I mean, I'm sure it's a good product for some things, but MS seem to be pushing it for niches which are completely unsuitable, leaving a mess if the database needs to grow. "Upgrade to SQL server", I'm sure they'll be saying then.
Parody counts as fair use, and so isn't copyright violation.
This post doesn't seem to refute any of the arguments of the previous post. Rather it seems to use sarcasm as a tool to avoid needing a rational argument.
>In what way does Microsoft prevent you from running Linux and running
>your huge library of Linux apps like XEyes and XCalc and XTerm?
It doesn't, but it probably got $89 out of him/her when he bought his computer.
Corel appear to be trying all the stuff you mention except 1 (which is impossible since so much of Linux is owned by hundreds of different people) and 2 which would be throwing away the biggest advantage that they have - free maintenance of the stuff which is already there.
> Why the hell would my aunt want to concern herself with GCC?
I don't know, you tell me, why would your aunt want to concern herself with GCC?