That would make an incentive for people to kill you so they can steal your work.
People already have incentive to kill other people to take their work. It's robbery gone bad, and inheritance. I doubt there's enough value in any public domain work to make a death sentence worth facing.
No Arabic - no one has mentioned being able to do it, for one thing.
And another, while I think of it--
DP is set up to take OCRed texts. ABBY&Y, while an amazing multilingual OCR program (176 languages, using the scripts of Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, and Georgian), doesn't handle Arabic. You'd have to get an Arabic OCR program to handle them, and considering non-English texts tend to take a long time to go through, it's not something they'll jump at buying.
But the publishers still have copyright on their specific printing.
I've heard this in the context of German law, but never in the context of American law. American law requires significant creative effort to be copyrighted, which dumping text to paper rarely counts. (New footnotes and illustartions are a different matter, of course.)
US copyright is either life+50 with a 20-year extension that's coming under the SC right now, or 70 years +20 for copyrights held by an (immortal) corporation.
Historically, the US has been on an X years rule for copyright, and the US copyright law has a lot of cruft relating to that. Anything published before 1923 has fallen into the public domain. Anything published between then and 1978, if it hasn't fallen into the public domain, has a flat 95 years, or 75 if the SC tosses out the extension. Life plus x years only kicks in if it was printed after 1978.
It's not based on who holds the copyright, it's based on the creator's life span. So even if a corporation holds the copyright, it still expires. If it was done as a work for hire, it gets a straight 100 years (IIRC). So there's no big loophole for immortal corporations in there.
There has to be a better way, a programming way, to get this done without having to look at all of the files with human eyes.
If there were, then the ocr program would have done it. It requires large amounts of context and pattern recognition, things humans are much better at than computers.
There are probably millions of books that are out of copyright. http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html has a list of ones that are in process or released, but it's no where near a tiny fragment of the number of books out of copyright. Arguably, they all need to be done; personally, I put emphasis on the literature by famous authors (Millay, Tolstoy) and the non-fiction that everyone should have access to -- especially first-hand and soon after the fact accounts of historical events.
They always say "Foreward (c) 2002 John Doe", but I have never seen that copyright was claimed over a whole work
That's weird. I almost never see that; usually I'll see a plain 'Copyright (c) 2002 John Doe' that obviously should only cover an introduction or something, but never mentions that. At an extreme, I've seen books that were photocopies of the originals, and nothing else, that claimed copyright.
I think a company that intentionally misrepresented an altered work as that of a famous author would be liable to fraud charges.
It is true, that when you read Shakespeare, what you read doesn't look like what was originally printed. Modern editions of Shakespeare have updated the spelling and made it consistent, and typeset it in modern forms (with the long s, for example.)
I would imagine that any spelling errors found in the text should be reproduced intact, in the interest of accurately representing the original work
Usually, Project Gutenberg volunteers correct spelling errors where they are obviously errors. The original work, as in what the author intended, is usually more interesting then that physical edition, which to reproduce we'd really need to keep page numbers and other junk.
For one example, my current project is a cookbook published in the 1730's, and so far I've corrected Apricocr to Apricock and Lemon to Lemmon; in both cases the form I corrected it to was overwhelming used in the text.
Torvalds's instructions are to call the Linux operating system "just plain 'Linux,'" so that's what people must do.
Assuming, of course, that you're someone who thinks that the Linux trademark matters. If you're someone like Linus Torvalds, and realize that the trademark is a legally formality that only exists because of lawyers and idiots, and you aren't one of them, then you can do what ever you find reasonable with the word Linux.
If he says, "Call it just plain 'Linux,'" then that's what you have to do. It's not a question of encouraging. It's black-and-white.
I'm sure it's black and white to you. I'm also sure that those of us inside the community understand that he really doesn't care, and has the trademark only as a formality.
According to Marcus Brinkmann:
Note that Linus did explicitely say that he does not want to enforce the
Linux trademark he owns, so this is a different pair of shoes.
Trademark licensing is a business transaction, not a legal one.
A signed letter, then. An interview with a third party is not the way that business decisions are communicated.
So these days I just tell people to call it just plain "Linux" and nothing more.
That doesn't mean he sues people who don't call it just Linux; that means he encourages people to call it just Linux.
Torvalds explicitly denied
The normal way to explicitly deny use of a trademark is through your lawyer.
Consequently, the name "GNU/Linux" is an infringement on Torvalds's trademark.
And as I mentioned before, Debian GNU/Linux has existed for six years, with Torvald knowing about it. To this day, SPI has failed to get a letter from Torvald's lawyers about the issue. Letting someone use your trademark in business for years with your full knowledge is not what you do if you mean to specifically deny that use.
Honestly, I'm not sure the Linux trademark is valid anymore. I'm not familar with any attempt to police the mark, and there's a million different distributions called Linux with no quality control, which are two major issues in keeping a trademark.
And what gives Linus Torvalds the right to say what the name of the OS is?
The United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Nope. That gives Linus Torvalds control over the word Linux. It doesn't give him any right over what the name of the OS is, if it doesn't include Linux. If it does include Linux, then GNU/Linux is as good as Red Hat Linux or Corel Linux; Linus has given explicit permission for all those names.
The reason people drop the "GNU/" part of the name "GNU/Linux" is because "Linux," [...] is a registered trademark
Bull. That has nothing to do with it. It's all about personal preference. If it really was a legal thing, don't you think that Debian GNU/Linux (around for 6 years, and holding over a 10% share of Linux users) would be concerned? (Yes, the name is Debian GNU/Linux, and yes, if you study their history, you'll know they've been diligent about crossing their legal t's.)
Calling anything "GNU/Linux" without Linus Torvald's permission is infringement, and it's illegal.
Good thing Linus Torvald gave RMS permission, then, isn't it?
The name of the operating system is "Linux," and unless Torvalds says otherwise,
And what gives Linus Torvalds the right to say what the name of the OS is? He wrote a kernel; a cast of thousands wrote the rest, and it is assembled into an operating system by at least a dozen different groups.
So why don't they just rip the grungy device-driver stuff from the Linux kernel rather reinventing a square-cornered wheel?
They're using the OSKit's Mach, which has already ripped the grungy device-driver stuff from Linux and repackged in a nice convientent Mach-sized package, which is what the Hurd needs.
These guys are obviously smart, and can be writing software to find cures for cancer and AIDS.
If anyone had a theory on how to do that, the National Institute of Health would be shoveling money at them.
But, hey, why do any of that when you can be working on HURD?
And I guess talking at slashdot is the best you can do. If you want to harass someone for doing something when they could be engaged in something better, perhaps you should get up and start working on _something_.
One might as easily talk about the philosophy of screwdrivers, or the epistemology of motor oil.
Or, say, the philosophy of writing.
I'd like to point out that there has been essentially no notable innovation in Emacs since Greenberg's work in 1979. Since then, it's been coast, coast, coast all the way.
If, mind you, coast, coast, coast means the writing of thousands of lines of code, including a newsreader and webbrowser. If coast, coast, coast means supporting some (human) languages before anyone other non-specialized program did. If coast, coast, coast means supporting every new programming language and document format that came along. If coast, coast, coast means becoming a complete IDE, even more, a complete OS to itself in someways, such that some people never need to leave emacs. But if that's true, then you're basically excluding all evolutionary growth; that's like saying all word processors did between WordStar for CP/M and Word 2002 is coast, coast, coast.
Just like you'll find no non-trivial features unique to the Windows NT kernel, or the Mac OS X kernel. Production kernels aren't the place to be playing around with unique features - they're the place to getting the old stuff to work rock solid.
But then again, you think "both MS and Apple's default window managers don't compare favorablywith many of the X11 WMs out there," so it's clear that your opinion on such matters is highly suspect at best.
You're a SGI stockholder, so you have both monetary and emotional investment in the issue - few people like to believe they made a mistake with their money. And yet because he holds an opinion you disagree with - an opinion that obviously many agree with, or else everyone would running Windows or Mac look-alike WMs - his opinion is highly suspect.
I'm talking about exact functional copies of software,
You mean like Quattro Pro (sued for having the exact same menus and keys as Lotus 123)?
It started with the original GNU programs-- feature-for-feature copies of AT&T's utilities--
So it would have been better to toss a new interface on? Why? From everything I've heard, the GNU utilities were and many ways still are vastly superior to the proprietary duplictates, from having more features to actually working when fed 8-bit data and 150-character lines.
In any case, what about Perl, TeX, Emacs and NetPBM? They all blazed trails where nobody else had gone.
Microsoft...
You mean the people who created yet another PDF? While open source people created DjVu, a format that can encode data in ways that make it feasible to put scans of books on the web?
lots of other people are already thinking.
Apparently a lot of people who don't actually use free software, and don't feel the need for some of these tools.
That's fundamentally the problem with the open source community. By and large, they're more interested in stealing other people's ideas
Because there weren't a million Lotus 123 clones out there, until the killer Lotus 123 clone. Windows has never completely ripped off the Macintosh; and Word didn't look exactly like every other wordprocessor out there. There weren't a million Doom rip-offs written, either. All closed source.
Depends on doing the counting. The vast majority of those people who buy Mac OS X don't think they buying a *BSD; they're buying the next version of Mac OS.
It's exactly the same delusion that makes people still think that "compilers are so smart nowadays that they can easily create better assembly code that humans" when that is and always has been patently untrue.
Compilers can produce better assmebly code than humans. The problem is, humans cheat. If the contest was to produce the best assembly code from the GCC source in an hour, without assistance, no human has a chance in hell of even making an entry. If the contest is to produce the fastest assembly code, with no limit, then while most current compilers might not win, there's no reason to believe that a competitor could not be written to brute force the problem. The problem is that humans set up the rules, so that computers have to produce a solution in a few minutes, and without looking at their opponent's solution, whereas a human can spend hours or days working at the problem, and see what a compiler would output. Furthermore, a human gets a chance to check his code, and maybe even change the problem, whereas a compiler has to solve the problem exactly as written and has to get it right the first time. Under those conditions, no wonder compilers win!
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That would make an incentive for people to kill you so they can steal your work.
People already have incentive to kill other people to take their work. It's robbery gone bad, and inheritance. I doubt there's enough value in any public domain work to make a death sentence worth facing.
No Arabic - no one has mentioned being able to do it, for one thing.
And another, while I think of it--
DP is set up to take OCRed texts. ABBY&Y, while an amazing multilingual OCR program (176 languages, using the scripts of Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, and Georgian), doesn't handle Arabic. You'd have to get an Arabic OCR program to handle them, and considering non-English texts tend to take a long time to go through, it's not something they'll jump at buying.
But the publishers still have copyright on their specific printing.
I've heard this in the context of German law, but never in the context of American law. American law requires significant creative effort to be copyrighted, which dumping text to paper rarely counts. (New footnotes and illustartions are a different matter, of course.)
US copyright is either life+50 with a 20-year extension that's coming under the SC right now, or 70 years +20 for copyrights held by an (immortal) corporation.
Historically, the US has been on an X years rule for copyright, and the US copyright law has a lot of cruft relating to that. Anything published before 1923 has fallen into the public domain. Anything published between then and 1978, if it hasn't fallen into the public domain, has a flat 95 years, or 75 if the SC tosses out the extension. Life plus x years only kicks in if it was printed after 1978.
It's not based on who holds the copyright, it's based on the creator's life span. So even if a corporation holds the copyright, it still expires. If it was done as a work for hire, it gets a straight 100 years (IIRC). So there's no big loophole for immortal corporations in there.
There has to be a better way, a programming way, to get this done without having to look at all of the files with human eyes.
If there were, then the ocr program would have done it. It requires large amounts of context and pattern recognition, things humans are much better at than computers.
There are probably millions of books that are out of copyright. http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html has a list of ones that are in process or released, but it's no where near a tiny fragment of the number of books out of copyright. Arguably, they all need to be done; personally, I put emphasis on the literature by famous authors (Millay, Tolstoy) and the non-fiction that everyone should have access to -- especially first-hand and soon after the fact accounts of historical events.
They always say "Foreward (c) 2002 John Doe", but I have never seen that copyright was claimed over a whole work
That's weird. I almost never see that; usually I'll see a plain 'Copyright (c) 2002 John Doe' that obviously should only cover an introduction or something, but never mentions that. At an extreme, I've seen books that were photocopies of the originals, and nothing else, that claimed copyright.
I think a company that intentionally misrepresented an altered work as that of a famous author would be liable to fraud charges.
It is true, that when you read Shakespeare, what you read doesn't look like what was originally printed. Modern editions of Shakespeare have updated the spelling and made it consistent, and typeset it in modern forms (with the long s, for example.)
I would imagine that any spelling errors found in the text should be reproduced intact, in the interest of accurately representing the original work
Usually, Project Gutenberg volunteers correct spelling errors where they are obviously errors. The original work, as in what the author intended, is usually more interesting then that physical edition, which to reproduce we'd really need to keep page numbers and other junk.
For one example, my current project is a cookbook published in the 1730's, and so far I've corrected Apricocr to Apricock and Lemon to Lemmon; in both cases the form I corrected it to was overwhelming used in the text.
They have shorter copyright terms than the good ol' USA does.
That's not exactly true. Australia is life+50 years, where as the US is post-1923. Neither one is a subset of the other.
Will there be any support for proofing in other languages (french, spanish, arabic, etc...)?
DP has had books in Dutch, French, Spanish and German. No Arabic - no one has mentioned being able to do it, for one thing.
Would we be able to post those books if they're not copyrighted in the US but copyrighted in other countries?
Project Gutenberg only worries about the US copyright. If it's not copyrighted in the US, they'll do it.
Torvalds's instructions are to call the Linux operating system "just plain 'Linux,'" so that's what people must do.
Assuming, of course, that you're someone who thinks that the Linux trademark matters. If you're someone like Linus Torvalds, and realize that the trademark is a legally formality that only exists because of lawyers and idiots, and you aren't one of them, then you can do what ever you find reasonable with the word Linux.
I'm sure it's black and white to you. I'm also sure that those of us inside the community understand that he really doesn't care, and has the trademark only as a formality.
According to Marcus Brinkmann:
Trademark licensing is a business transaction, not a legal one.
A signed letter, then. An interview with a third party is not the way that business decisions are communicated.
So these days I just tell people to call it just plain "Linux" and nothing more.
That doesn't mean he sues people who don't call it just Linux; that means he encourages people to call it just Linux.
Torvalds explicitly denied
The normal way to explicitly deny use of a trademark is through your lawyer.
Consequently, the name "GNU/Linux" is an infringement on Torvalds's trademark.
And as I mentioned before, Debian GNU/Linux has existed for six years, with Torvald knowing about it. To this day, SPI has failed to get a letter from Torvald's lawyers about the issue. Letting someone use your trademark in business for years with your full knowledge is not what you do if you mean to specifically deny that use.
Honestly, I'm not sure the Linux trademark is valid anymore. I'm not familar with any attempt to police the mark, and there's a million different distributions called Linux with no quality control, which are two major issues in keeping a trademark.
If you prefer, though, you can use Intel's C compiler, or Metrowerks's, or whichever compiler will work with your target architecture.
Not for Linux. Linux compiles under one compiler - GCC. The kernel depends on many GCC extensions.
That never happened, did it?
Yes, it did.
http://www.tlug.jp/docs/linus.html
And what gives Linus Torvalds the right to say what the name of the OS is?
The United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Nope. That gives Linus Torvalds control over the word Linux. It doesn't give him any right over what the name of the OS is, if it doesn't include Linux. If it does include Linux, then GNU/Linux is as good as Red Hat Linux or Corel Linux; Linus has given explicit permission for all those names.
The reason people drop the "GNU/" part of the name "GNU/Linux" is because "Linux," [...] is a registered trademark
Bull. That has nothing to do with it. It's all about personal preference. If it really was a legal thing, don't you think that Debian GNU/Linux (around for 6 years, and holding over a 10% share of Linux users) would be concerned? (Yes, the name is Debian GNU/Linux, and yes, if you study their history, you'll know they've been diligent about crossing their legal t's.)
Calling anything "GNU/Linux" without Linus Torvald's permission is infringement, and it's illegal.
Good thing Linus Torvald gave RMS permission, then, isn't it?
The name of the operating system is "Linux," and unless Torvalds says otherwise,
And what gives Linus Torvalds the right to say what the name of the OS is? He wrote a kernel; a cast of thousands wrote the rest, and it is assembled into an operating system by at least a dozen different groups.
So why don't they just rip the grungy device-driver stuff from the Linux kernel rather reinventing a square-cornered wheel?
They're using the OSKit's Mach, which has already ripped the grungy device-driver stuff from Linux and repackged in a nice convientent Mach-sized package, which is what the Hurd needs.
These guys are obviously smart, and can be writing software to find cures for cancer and AIDS.
If anyone had a theory on how to do that, the National Institute of Health would be shoveling money at them.
But, hey, why do any of that when you can be working on HURD?
And I guess talking at slashdot is the best you can do. If you want to harass someone for doing something when they could be engaged in something better, perhaps you should get up and start working on _something_.
One might as easily talk about the philosophy of screwdrivers, or the epistemology of motor oil.
Or, say, the philosophy of writing.
I'd like to point out that there has been essentially no notable innovation in Emacs since Greenberg's work in 1979. Since then, it's been coast, coast, coast all the way.
If, mind you, coast, coast, coast means the writing of thousands of lines of code, including a newsreader and webbrowser. If coast, coast, coast means supporting some (human) languages before anyone other non-specialized program did. If coast, coast, coast means supporting every new programming language and document format that came along. If coast, coast, coast means becoming a complete IDE, even more, a complete OS to itself in someways, such that some people never need to leave emacs. But if that's true, then you're basically excluding all evolutionary growth; that's like saying all word processors did between WordStar for CP/M and Word 2002 is coast, coast, coast.
I found no non-trivial features unique to Linux.
Just like you'll find no non-trivial features unique to the Windows NT kernel, or the Mac OS X kernel. Production kernels aren't the place to be playing around with unique features - they're the place to getting the old stuff to work rock solid.
But then again, you think "both MS and Apple's default window managers don't compare favorablywith many of the X11 WMs out there," so it's clear that your opinion on such matters is highly suspect at best.
You're a SGI stockholder, so you have both monetary and emotional investment in the issue - few people like to believe they made a mistake with their money. And yet because he holds an opinion you disagree with - an opinion that obviously many agree with, or else everyone would running Windows or Mac look-alike WMs - his opinion is highly suspect.
I'm talking about exact functional copies of software,
You mean like Quattro Pro (sued for having the exact same menus and keys as Lotus 123)?
It started with the original GNU programs-- feature-for-feature copies of AT&T's utilities--
So it would have been better to toss a new interface on? Why? From everything I've heard, the GNU utilities were and many ways still are vastly superior to the proprietary duplictates, from having more features to actually working when fed 8-bit data and 150-character lines.
In any case, what about Perl, TeX, Emacs and NetPBM? They all blazed trails where nobody else had gone.
Microsoft...
You mean the people who created yet another PDF? While open source people created DjVu, a format that can encode data in ways that make it feasible to put scans of books on the web?
lots of other people are already thinking.
Apparently a lot of people who don't actually use free software, and don't feel the need for some of these tools.
That's fundamentally the problem with the open source community. By and large, they're more interested in stealing other people's ideas
Because there weren't a million Lotus 123 clones out there, until the killer Lotus 123 clone. Windows has never completely ripped off the Macintosh; and Word didn't look exactly like every other wordprocessor out there. There weren't a million Doom rip-offs written, either. All closed source.
Mac OS X counts as a BSD
Depends on doing the counting. The vast majority of those people who buy Mac OS X don't think they buying a *BSD; they're buying the next version of Mac OS.
It's exactly the same delusion that makes people still think that "compilers are so smart nowadays that they can easily create better assembly code that humans" when that is and always has been patently untrue.
Compilers can produce better assmebly code than humans. The problem is, humans cheat. If the contest was to produce the best assembly code from the GCC source in an hour, without assistance, no human has a chance in hell of even making an entry. If the contest is to produce the fastest assembly code, with no limit, then while most current compilers might not win, there's no reason to believe that a competitor could not be written to brute force the problem. The problem is that humans set up the rules, so that computers have to produce a solution in a few minutes, and without looking at their opponent's solution, whereas a human can spend hours or days working at the problem, and see what a compiler would output. Furthermore, a human gets a chance to check his code, and maybe even change the problem, whereas a compiler has to solve the problem exactly as written and has to get it right the first time. Under those conditions, no wonder compilers win!