I wanted to let people on this list know that Ada Core Technologies has
signed a contract with Compaq to implement GNAT on OpenVMS for ia64. We
already have three ia64 machines in house, and are busy working on the
initial step of bootstrapping the current version of GNAT on ia64.
EUCD.INFO. You can
donate money to help, tax deducible in France.
A proposal has been made last week to the national
parliament to consider stating explicitely that
data format, protocols and encryption are not
technical measures of protection in the sense
of the European Union Copyright Directive.
I took the time to read the license and I
your analysis of the FAQ might be correct, but the wording of the
License (talking about Contribution, probably not a PDF) and the FAQ (talking about the PDF on Nature web site) are both quite poor and inconsistent.
Supposing the Contribution is an ASCII text (simple email),
Nature will build a PDF that the author
can put on its own web site (and has other print
rights). Now by signing the License to Publish
the exclusive rights to publish the Contribution - see 1(a) of the license - are given to Nature by the author, so it's not clear that's
just PDF layout stuff, the author might not
be able to do anything at all with its own original
ASCII text.
Well, we'll see what happen when an author
decides to put its original contributed
text in an online archive.
The Nature grant of some rights is a joke, see
below from the FAQ. You have no right to reuse
your own article excepted in printed paper form, yeah. The way is still long until science and public interest recovers from these thieves...
How can I show my article to my colleagues?
By sending a link to the paper on your website. You may not distribute the PDF by email, on listservs or on open archives. Please remember that although the content of the article is your copyright, its presentation (i.e. its typographical layout as a printed page) remains our copyright.
If you remove the Monte Carlo test, the P4 composite
result turns out to be 9.3% better for icc, quite
a different figure than 20% (even if icc is of course still better on 3 out of 4 tests).
Well you can obviously play with words. Why did
SPEC dudes bother splitting between SPECint and SPECfp after all?:).
I sent this on December 10th, no answer or update to the page:
Hi, I just saw your posting on the GCC list and was surprised
by your analysis about Scimark 2.0 "Overall, Intel produces code that is 15% faster".
If you look at the detailed result, you'll find out that the Monte Carlo tests
is an obvious problem for GCC since it produces code 3 times as slow as Intel
whereas on other tests it is on par. This discrepency explains about all of the 15%
difference in the composite difference (which is a simple arithmetic average),
so "overall" is a bit strong:).
Interested I took a look at the Monte Carlo test, and it turns out
to be 20 lines of code that generate random numbers using
integer arithmetic, ie not floating point intensive stuff at all
which is quite at odd with your statement "I've found this benchmark reflects the performance
I can expect in my own numerical applications".
My conclusion is that GCC is probably missing one obvious integer optimisation that
Intel compiler does, but I don't think we can generalize from this
particular point.
You can quote me on a public forum if you want to. I write
numerical intensive code for a living at a big bank.
The two stage compilers were calling the gnat_to_gnu_entity in different order (as authorized by the C language) leading
to different debugging id assigned to both created types
hence the object debugging information comparison
failure.
Luckily it stroke me while reading the entry point in the compiler and thinking
about non-determinism.
I just submitted the following comment to agpl@fsf.org:
Hi, I think that the reference to HTTP could be replaced:
* d) If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work.
HTTP is not defined in the license, and the rest of the paragraph stays general with "interaction through a computer network".
Why not word the requirement to send the source using the same way as the original software did?
Since the goal is to allow the user to get the source code file on its computer, may
be it's better to state only the goal as "the user interacting with the software through a computer network
must be able to download the complete source code through a computer network as well"
(sorry non native and non lawyer).
As it is worded, if the original software sends the source by FTP (because for exemple it is an FTP server),
it looks like if I change a line of code, I must implement a whole HTTP server as well just to send
the modified sources, looks bizarre to me:). Also in the future
if HTTP makes no longer sense for this purpose (because
the whole word is a network of HURD machines talking
through a new GNU protocol:), it makes the license
obsolete.
Also by "any user" do you mean any user originally granted access to the feature
permitting the download in the original software?
With a few thousands illegal patents delivered by
europe software patent factory, it would be fun to count
how many patents this government sponsored software infringes:). Hopefully
some German politicians clearly said no to patents. After France, there's hope to get a software patents free Europe if Germany officials say no too.
I believe a good model for liability in the software
field is to move to the service and practitioner of the field model.
A customer
asks a practitioner of the software field to solve a particular problem. The practitioner then writes and/or
reuse and/or adapt existing software to solve the customer problem.
Then the provider is liable for having provided
a wrong solution according to current practices
of the field.
For example delivering a closed source software with poor security track record
as part of a contract specifying security
as critical would rank as an obvious cause of liability,
since the provider choosed it amongst
various solutions, he/she will have to justify
its choice before a court.
I believe the regular mechanism to cover potential
liability damage in other fields, insurance companies, will play
its cleaning up role by not accepting
to cover software solution providers with poor practices.
It will probably also make the free software
code base the center of most of these
service providers, since it easy easy
to customize, most of the code base have
well known status, and there is no hairy
licensing issues when you use them
As for shrink wrap software, it should
install on the designated system, but after
that you probably have no recourse at all
if this doesn't work that well.
I attended a lawyer conference on software licenses and liabilities, and there are vague
texts and no case law, and most lawyers were
quite sure that the standard warranty disclaimer
was with high probability invalid (under French law). They talked about services and "open source", and some recognized that using that
as scientific knowledge and having practioners
use it to deliver solution was like architects
building bridges vs people creating mathematical
models of gravity: the scientist is not responsible if an architect use his/her model
(reviewed and published in good faith) to design a bridge and it falls down, it is
obviously the architect responsability to
choose a model that works, to the level of the
accepted practice of the field of course.
If the architect has a solid track record,
if the phenomenom is beyond current knowledge,
then it is up to insurance companies.
Since a piece of software shares a lot
with a theorem applying to symbolic information
I find this model of liability very pertinent
to the software field.
Disclaimer: I am not a Lawyer
Random Euro-URLs
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And of course the EuroLinux web site and FFII web site (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure
) have links to a lot of ressources and interesting readings.
We, european citizens, are seeking ways to get other european countries take position against
the current proposed european law that opens
the gates of unrestricted software and ideas patenting.If you're willing to help the cause, please
contact your local free software association
and try to get some activism in place together
with the established assiociations like the FSF Europe. If you are French or German
you can even make a tax-deducible donation,
it may help the cause too.
In the age of DMCA, SSSCA, and angelic companies
running after all those evil pirates in order to protect their beloved authors that deserve their protection, how comes
no one has yet sued the biggest copyright
infringer of all times... the Google cache?
Well in the pure patent prior art case, you just pay a lawyer to patent it, corrupt your friendly patent office to accept it, then threaten the author who obviously won't fight since it will cost him/her a lot of money and time (and may be jail time).
This is currently at work, and it works quite well for the big conglomerates against the people (anything comes to mind?).
Second case, you change one comma somewhere
and you patent your change, since you spent
money paying someone to change the comma, you're innovating right? So you can patent, otherwise
who would invent anything for the poor of us?
If the thing is a protocol, you pay an ad campaign, get people to use your modified and patented protocol (or protected by whatever law
bought by the big conglomerates, I assume I don't
need to mention lawS I'm talking about here)
then when the original author tries to update
the original code base to interoperate with the bastardized version, you sue him/her
crying that you want government to protect your
right to make a buck, woooo the big evil pirates, GPL kills innovation, FSF people are bad = communist = terrorists = anti american etc... (need I point to any recent news?).
RMS genius was to use the very same weapon that
the big copyright conglomerates in order to
protect something fundamental, the people
right to take advantage of the information age to
share freely more and more knowledge in
particular in the form of source code in the
software field.
The big commercial-only entities want
people right to create and share destroyed
since they want to control completely all creation. They buy legislation, but they
don't have enough power to break the fundamentals
of copyright law, hence they can't break the GPL.
The only thing they can do is to spread FUD or
confuse the issue.
That is the point missed by the article, the
GPL is our protection against this trend,
and it is temporary in the sense that
when the law will state clearly that people
have the unlimited right to understand, create and share
information on any medium and so the big
conglomerates are defeated, then the GPL
and most existing more or less defensive licensing scheme are all irrelevant.
But in the meantime we're better off with
GPL wherever it makes sense, and all
form of GPL-bashing or trying to put
bad words in the mouth of the FSF people
are to be looked at with a critical eye.
Never forget that the BSD and most other
license are very weak at protecting our collective work in the current environment. Under BSD, any company
could take our code, slightly change a protocol, patent it
and sue the original authors, and even without patent it could sue for frivolous legal reasons
or prevent any further work on the original
source base.
This year (2001) for the first time the Internet will surpass the Minitel in volume of payment in France.
The French Prime Minister is Protestant, not Catholic. Religion is not a primary concern in France, and lot of people have the view that religion (catholic and other) looks more about killing each other than loving and helping each other. This might be because History is taught in school, so people have a chance to weight on the issues involved before running to church.
One thing about the "grande ecoles" is that they specializing you only the last year (or the last two years), and they're either free (think $1K/year + living costs with cheap on-campus housing and food, mostly paid by state if your family doesnt have enough money) or you're paid to attend.
The other thing is that even if your parent
are billionaire, you can't get into a public engineering school if you don't pass the anonymous public exams ranked high enough. In short when in, you're not smart monkeys building the school reputation for rich-daddy ultimate idiots.
France is built and run by engineers, not marketroids or money-making guyes (although this is slowly changing), so we have quite decent public shared infrastructure (I you think about it that's the most efficient solution!).
Each state maintain a list where citizen can register their email and say wether they want spam or not.
State can have citizen identified for the purpose of this site (state does that all the time:).
Businesses must compare their intended spam recipient list against the state base and remove
all addresses marked unwilling to receive spam.
Citizens have access to special court (and/or consumer associations) to resolve issues when they still receive spam. Small spam is fined, big or repeatitive after trial spam goes to jail.
A small refinement: the same person can register an email where spam is ok and another where spam is not, so businesses get for free a list of address where spam is ok (may be with category of interest, etc...)
Then some UN-like thing does the connection of the willing state database and provide an international service.
To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, gcc-announce at gcc dot gnu dot org
Subject: Removal of support for GCC hosted on UWIN
From: Mark Mitchell mark at codesourcery dot com
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 00:39:17 -0800
We've learned that the usage of GCC on U/WIN involves a violation of
the GNU GPL, linking GCC with a non-free third-party support library;
therefore, we have removed the support for such usage.
Note that GCC is merely a special case: it is a violation of the GPL
to link *any* GPL'd program with the U/WIN support library.
--
Mark Mitchell mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC http://www.codesourcery.com
Note that might want to have a look at the Ada 95 language, it has pretty good support for portable multi-threading (aka tasking, builtin into the language) and a very good compiler: GNAT.
I did test Athlon against P3 on my work numerical programs, and the Athlon always won the FPop per cycle game (and sometimes by far!). PovRay and other numerical benchmarks show the athlon winning. Butwhy does the Pentium comes ahead on SPECfp? Better optimizing compiler on Intel side? Cache issues? AMD doesn't care?
I must admit that this casts a new light on the FSF insistance on getting the copyright assigned before accepting projects under their umbrella. I see that getting this kind of copyright bomb in a major piece of free software or open source can become ugly real fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Announcement on GNAT for ia64/OpenVMS on 14Mar2002
This is great and it's the right thing to do!
Laurent
EUCD.INFO. You can donate money to help, tax deducible in France.
A proposal has been made last week to the national parliament to consider stating explicitely that data format, protocols and encryption are not technical measures of protection in the sense of the European Union Copyright Directive.
Laurent
I took the time to read the license and I your analysis of the FAQ might be correct, but the wording of the License (talking about Contribution, probably not a PDF) and the FAQ (talking about the PDF on Nature web site) are both quite poor and inconsistent.
Supposing the Contribution is an ASCII text (simple email), Nature will build a PDF that the author can put on its own web site (and has other print rights). Now by signing the License to Publish the exclusive rights to publish the Contribution - see 1(a) of the license - are given to Nature by the author, so it's not clear that's just PDF layout stuff, the author might not be able to do anything at all with its own original ASCII text.
Well, we'll see what happen when an author decides to put its original contributed text in an online archive.
If you remove the Monte Carlo test, the P4 composite result turns out to be 9.3% better for icc, quite a different figure than 20% (even if icc is of course still better on 3 out of 4 tests).
Well you can obviously play with words. Why did SPEC dudes bother splitting between SPECint and SPECfp after all? :).
Cute :).
Laurent
With a few thousands illegal patents delivered by europe software patent factory, it would be fun to count how many patents this government sponsored software infringes :). Hopefully
some German politicians clearly said no to patents. After France, there's hope to get a software patents free Europe if Germany officials say no too.
I believe a good model for liability in the software field is to move to the service and practitioner of the field model.
A customer asks a practitioner of the software field to solve a particular problem. The practitioner then writes and/or reuse and/or adapt existing software to solve the customer problem. Then the provider is liable for having provided a wrong solution according to current practices of the field.
For example delivering a closed source software with poor security track record as part of a contract specifying security as critical would rank as an obvious cause of liability, since the provider choosed it amongst various solutions, he/she will have to justify its choice before a court.
I believe the regular mechanism to cover potential liability damage in other fields, insurance companies, will play its cleaning up role by not accepting to cover software solution providers with poor practices.
It will probably also make the free software code base the center of most of these service providers, since it easy easy to customize, most of the code base have well known status, and there is no hairy licensing issues when you use them
As for shrink wrap software, it should install on the designated system, but after that you probably have no recourse at all if this doesn't work that well.
I attended a lawyer conference on software licenses and liabilities, and there are vague texts and no case law, and most lawyers were quite sure that the standard warranty disclaimer was with high probability invalid (under French law). They talked about services and "open source", and some recognized that using that as scientific knowledge and having practioners use it to deliver solution was like architects building bridges vs people creating mathematical models of gravity: the scientist is not responsible if an architect use his/her model (reviewed and published in good faith) to design a bridge and it falls down, it is obviously the architect responsability to choose a model that works, to the level of the accepted practice of the field of course. If the architect has a solid track record, if the phenomenom is beyond current knowledge, then it is up to insurance companies.
Since a piece of software shares a lot with a theorem applying to symbolic information I find this model of liability very pertinent to the software field.
Disclaimer: I am not a Lawyer
The prime source of information about software patents in Europe is the patents mailing list on the AFUL web site (french free unix user group).
Some information is also available on the APRIL web site (french association for research in free software).
In particular, to date, all the big (poll-wise) candidates to the french presidential election have expressed their opposition to software patents, see in french Haro sur les brevets and Tous les candidats dans l'opposition.
And of course the EuroLinux web site and FFII web site (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure ) have links to a lot of ressources and interesting readings.
We, european citizens, are seeking ways to get other european countries take position against the current proposed european law that opens the gates of unrestricted software and ideas patenting.If you're willing to help the cause, please contact your local free software association and try to get some activism in place together with the established assiociations like the FSF Europe. If you are French or German you can even make a tax-deducible donation, it may help the cause too.
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>
In the age of DMCA, SSSCA, and angelic companies running after all those evil pirates in order to protect their beloved authors that deserve their protection, how comes no one has yet sued the biggest copyright infringer of all times ... the Google cache?
So where's the magic?
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>
Well in the pure patent prior art case, you just pay a lawyer to patent it, corrupt your friendly patent office to accept it, then threaten the author who obviously won't fight since it will cost him/her a lot of money and time (and may be jail time). This is currently at work, and it works quite well for the big conglomerates against the people (anything comes to mind?).
Second case, you change one comma somewhere and you patent your change, since you spent money paying someone to change the comma, you're innovating right? So you can patent, otherwise who would invent anything for the poor of us? If the thing is a protocol, you pay an ad campaign, get people to use your modified and patented protocol (or protected by whatever law bought by the big conglomerates, I assume I don't need to mention lawS I'm talking about here) then when the original author tries to update the original code base to interoperate with the bastardized version, you sue him/her crying that you want government to protect your right to make a buck, woooo the big evil pirates, GPL kills innovation, FSF people are bad = communist = terrorists = anti american etc... (need I point to any recent news?).
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>
RMS genius was to use the very same weapon that the big copyright conglomerates in order to protect something fundamental, the people right to take advantage of the information age to share freely more and more knowledge in particular in the form of source code in the software field.
The big commercial-only entities want people right to create and share destroyed since they want to control completely all creation. They buy legislation, but they don't have enough power to break the fundamentals of copyright law, hence they can't break the GPL. The only thing they can do is to spread FUD or confuse the issue.
That is the point missed by the article, the GPL is our protection against this trend, and it is temporary in the sense that when the law will state clearly that people have the unlimited right to understand, create and share information on any medium and so the big conglomerates are defeated, then the GPL and most existing more or less defensive licensing scheme are all irrelevant.
But in the meantime we're better off with GPL wherever it makes sense, and all form of GPL-bashing or trying to put bad words in the mouth of the FSF people are to be looked at with a critical eye.
Never forget that the BSD and most other license are very weak at protecting our collective work in the current environment. Under BSD, any company could take our code, slightly change a protocol, patent it and sue the original authors, and even without patent it could sue for frivolous legal reasons or prevent any further work on the original source base.
--
Laurent <guerby@acm.org>
Does he plan to make all the out of print books
text available?
Here
Any URL in english?
Each state maintain a list where citizen can register their email and say wether they want spam or not. :).
State can have citizen identified for the purpose of this site (state does that all the time
Businesses must compare their intended spam recipient list against the state base and remove
all addresses marked unwilling to receive spam.
Citizens have access to special court (and/or consumer associations) to resolve issues when they still receive spam. Small spam is fined, big or repeatitive after trial spam goes to jail.
A small refinement: the same person can register an email where spam is ok and another where spam is not, so businesses get for free a list of address where spam is ok (may be with category of interest, etc...)
Then some UN-like thing does the connection of the willing state database and provide an international service.
Laurent
I guess it's about time to save all those precious sourceforge projects CVS bits elsewhere before everything is shut down and it's too late...
Have a look at:
they both contain real derivative pricing code.
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>
Could you tell us more about this issue?
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>
Note that might want to have a look at the Ada 95 language, it has pretty good support for portable multi-threading (aka tasking, builtin into the language) and a very good compiler: GNAT.
Laurent
Thanks for any information!
I must admit that this casts a new light on the FSF insistance on getting the copyright assigned before accepting projects under their umbrella. I see that getting this kind of copyright bomb in a major piece of free software or open source can become ugly real fast.
.. before posting this only one article, /. potential material on patents:
Laurent