Drivers are written for hardware.. the bulk of the driver is not the tiny bit of glue that joins it to the kernel. In any case, the NVIDIA drivers are not just "ports" of the Windows drivers to Linux.. that's a terribly simplistic view - in fact, NVIDIA has been criticized for failing to reuse much of the existing open DRI/DRM infrastructure. I recently looked at another binary-only driver for ISDN cards. They do something similar to NVIDIA in that they release an "open source" wrapper for their binary-only.a lib. So you can see exactly the parts that anyone could possibly argue are "derivative" and the parts that are proprietary. I estimate it is 99.9% new code which has nothing to do with Linux. To claim that this driver is a derivative work of Linux is just absurd, but if it fits with your world view, people tolerate it.. and moan when reality doesn't conform.
What part of this is hard to understand? Science is a derivative process. Taking a scientific paper, extending it, editing it, making corrections and republishing it is a normal part of science. Demanding that people make no profit from doing such things is just a great way to discourage it.
4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions: b. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.
and section 3 is:
3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below: c. to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and, d. to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.
See that "Publicly Perform" bit? You may not do that for commercial advantage.
Maybe I just like Romulans, but when I hear that the LHC will be making black holes I don't think about "woo, the earth is gunna get swallowed!" I wonder if there are any cool ways to use them for power generation.
And just in case no-one can see his point, consider that pharmaceutical researchers will be required to purchase a different license to use medical research published under a CC-non-commercial license to actually make drugs that save lives. In a way, this announcement is a step backwards, as previously there was no explicit non-commercial requirement on scientific papers. In fact, it was assumed to be the opposite.
By why isn't MEMS used to make better STMs and AFMs?.. which you could use to make even smaller machines.. which could be used to make even smaller machines.. until you get to this stuff.
No.. what I said is that if you don't distribute any GPL code then your code does not need to be GPL, even if the end user is intended to link it to GPL code to use it.
That is, what I'm saying is that Nvidia are smart enough not to be breaking the law.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood.
[..] he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) [..]
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. [..]
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One- two!...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. [..]
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
One week he had his employers behind him.. and he had some IBM lawyers too. The next week it was silence.. then the whole "Free Linux Driver Development" campaign started. It's kinda annoying.. Greg, like many other people in the Linux community, extols the virtues of openness.. but as soon as a lawyer tells them to keep quite on something, they do. We may never know the legal advice (or legal threats) he received. That's a shame.
You have to read the findings of the case. They court specifically says that copyright cannot be used to lock out competitors. Requiring that people agree to your licensing demands is a lock out.
There's been a bunch of cases where interoperability has been singled out as desirable. It seems hard to believe that a case presented in that way would fail. Distributing GPL software with proprietary extensions is pretty clearly a violation, but distributing proprietary extensions separately is a much murkier matter.. The tolerance of it by the Linux devs is getting beyond a joke. Even Greg KH has stopped rattling his saber and is trying to play it political now.
If there is a requirement for modules to identify their licensing, as with Linux,
That shit is so illegal and it's dangerous as hell too. The Lexmark case has broadcast loudly what the supremes think of technical measures being used to prevent interoperability like this. The court held that the use of the Toner Loading Program as a "lock-out code", within the sense established in the 9th Circuit's Sega v. Accolade opinion (not previously binding on the Lexmark panel, which is 6th Circuit), rendered it uncopyrightable as a matter of law and therefore fair game for copying without any license whatsoever, for the purpose of interoperating with Lexmark's printers. If the court found similarly for MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") then it could be disastrous. Anything from the module license checking code to the whole kernel could be found uncopyrightable.
According to the GPL, BSD-like-licensed code that is distributed in binary form must be accompanied by the full corresponding source code or an offer to provide the source code valid for 5 years (or whatever). That's what the BSD nerds are complaining about.
There's no case law that even suggests that copying an API can result in a copyright infringement. That's SCO all over again.
define "bad". RMS thinks proprietary plugins would be bad because he thinks everything proprietary is bad.
But let me give you an example. I once worked at a company called Codeplay in the UK. They made compilers, proprietary compilers, and one of their biggest markets was the Playstation 2. Everyone used GCC to develop on the PS2. Ok, a few people used Metroworks' compiler - whatever. So they were directly competing with GCC. Our C++ support was horrid. Our C support was better, but one of the things I did was write automated testing tools that compiled "random" C programs with GCC and out compiler and compared the warning/error messages and output from running the program if it actually managed to compile. Anyway, some of the guys there had written instruction schedulers for GCC that made the code generated by GCC for the PS2 actually half decent. This code never saw the light of day because it would have competed with Codeplay's offering. If GCC had a plugin framework (and wasn't so nazi about proprietary extensions) we would have completely changed our business model. Our customers most certainly would have preferred it.
Friend of mine once pointed out that practically the whole "let's GPL the library so any apps that use it have to be GPL too" strategy has been thoroughly dismantled by the BSD community.
Consider libedit. It's a BSD-like licensed replacement for libreadline - RMS's favorite example of "strategic" non-use of the LGPL. It's binary compatible with libreadline. So you can create your app and link it to libedit and happily distribute it under the BSD. To claim that libedit is somehow a derived work of libreadline because it has the same binary interface would be absurd. However, many installation scripts make a symbolic link from/usr/lib/libedit ->/usr/lib/libreadline.
That's the strong case for dynamic linking == derivative work.. plugin frameworks have always been the weak case. If the strong case doesn't stand up anymore, how can the weak case?
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see proprietary plugins for GCC anymore than I like seeing all the proprietary modules for the Linux kernel. But claiming there is some clear legal principle that makes them a copyright violation is a joke.
Umm.. no. This is exactly why RMS is so against GCC having a plugin framework. IF (and only if) you don't distribute GPL code with the plugin THEN you are free to place your plugin under any license you like.
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure. [...] The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit":)
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.
Wow. I hope the paper is not as inane as her quotes. There's a difference between passive conservation and active geo-engineering. What Solomon is trying to say is that even if we all hold hands and try to conserve that it'll make no difference because the damage is already done. Of course, to acknowledge this is difficult if you buy into environmental conservationism, as Solomon obviously does, so you end up with quotes like "I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it".
Slashdot Mirror
Drivers are written for hardware.. the bulk of the driver is not the tiny bit of glue that joins it to the kernel. In any case, the NVIDIA drivers are not just "ports" of the Windows drivers to Linux.. that's a terribly simplistic view - in fact, NVIDIA has been criticized for failing to reuse much of the existing open DRI/DRM infrastructure. I recently looked at another binary-only driver for ISDN cards. They do something similar to NVIDIA in that they release an "open source" wrapper for their binary-only .a lib. So you can see exactly the parts that anyone could possibly argue are "derivative" and the parts that are proprietary. I estimate it is 99.9% new code which has nothing to do with Linux. To claim that this driver is a derivative work of Linux is just absurd, but if it fits with your world view, people tolerate it.. and moan when reality doesn't conform.
What part of this is hard to understand? Science is a derivative process. Taking a scientific paper, extending it, editing it, making corrections and republishing it is a normal part of science. Demanding that people make no profit from doing such things is just a great way to discourage it.
I think the whole point of these micro-black-holes is that you can't feed them. They don't exist for long enough to eat anything.
Which is why the LHC scientists think it is comical that people are worried.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode
4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
b. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.
and section 3 is:
3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:
c. to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
d. to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.
See that "Publicly Perform" bit? You may not do that for commercial advantage.
Maybe I just like Romulans, but when I hear that the LHC will be making black holes I don't think about "woo, the earth is gunna get swallowed!" I wonder if there are any cool ways to use them for power generation.
And just in case no-one can see his point, consider that pharmaceutical researchers will be required to purchase a different license to use medical research published under a CC-non-commercial license to actually make drugs that save lives. In a way, this announcement is a step backwards, as previously there was no explicit non-commercial requirement on scientific papers. In fact, it was assumed to be the opposite.
By why isn't MEMS used to make better STMs and AFMs? .. which you could use to make even smaller machines .. which could be used to make even smaller machines .. until you get to this stuff.
It's like they're not even trying.
No.. what I said is that if you don't distribute any GPL code then your code does not need to be GPL, even if the end user is intended to link it to GPL code to use it.
That is, what I'm saying is that Nvidia are smart enough not to be breaking the law.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! ...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood.
[..] he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) [..]
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. [..]
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One- two! ...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. [..]
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
One week he had his employers behind him.. and he had some IBM lawyers too. The next week it was silence.. then the whole "Free Linux Driver Development" campaign started. It's kinda annoying.. Greg, like many other people in the Linux community, extols the virtues of openness.. but as soon as a lawyer tells them to keep quite on something, they do. We may never know the legal advice (or legal threats) he received. That's a shame.
You have to read the findings of the case. They court specifically says that copyright cannot be used to lock out competitors. Requiring that people agree to your licensing demands is a lock out.
There's been a bunch of cases where interoperability has been singled out as desirable. It seems hard to believe that a case presented in that way would fail. Distributing GPL software with proprietary extensions is pretty clearly a violation, but distributing proprietary extensions separately is a much murkier matter.. The tolerance of it by the Linux devs is getting beyond a joke. Even Greg KH has stopped rattling his saber and is trying to play it political now.
If there is a requirement for modules to identify their licensing, as with Linux,
That shit is so illegal and it's dangerous as hell too. The Lexmark case has broadcast loudly what the supremes think of technical measures being used to prevent interoperability like this. The court held that the use of the Toner Loading Program as a "lock-out code", within the sense established in the 9th Circuit's Sega v. Accolade opinion (not previously binding on the Lexmark panel, which is 6th Circuit), rendered it uncopyrightable as a matter of law and therefore fair game for copying without any license whatsoever, for the purpose of interoperating with Lexmark's printers. If the court found similarly for MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") then it could be disastrous. Anything from the module license checking code to the whole kernel could be found uncopyrightable.
According to the GPL, BSD-like-licensed code that is distributed in binary form must be accompanied by the full corresponding source code or an offer to provide the source code valid for 5 years (or whatever). That's what the BSD nerds are complaining about.
There's no case law that even suggests that copying an API can result in a copyright infringement. That's SCO all over again.
define "bad". RMS thinks proprietary plugins would be bad because he thinks everything proprietary is bad.
But let me give you an example. I once worked at a company called Codeplay in the UK. They made compilers, proprietary compilers, and one of their biggest markets was the Playstation 2. Everyone used GCC to develop on the PS2. Ok, a few people used Metroworks' compiler - whatever. So they were directly competing with GCC. Our C++ support was horrid. Our C support was better, but one of the things I did was write automated testing tools that compiled "random" C programs with GCC and out compiler and compared the warning/error messages and output from running the program if it actually managed to compile. Anyway, some of the guys there had written instruction schedulers for GCC that made the code generated by GCC for the PS2 actually half decent. This code never saw the light of day because it would have competed with Codeplay's offering. If GCC had a plugin framework (and wasn't so nazi about proprietary extensions) we would have completely changed our business model. Our customers most certainly would have preferred it.
Sorry for the multiple replies.
Friend of mine once pointed out that practically the whole "let's GPL the library so any apps that use it have to be GPL too" strategy has been thoroughly dismantled by the BSD community.
Consider libedit. It's a BSD-like licensed replacement for libreadline - RMS's favorite example of "strategic" non-use of the LGPL. It's binary compatible with libreadline. So you can create your app and link it to libedit and happily distribute it under the BSD. To claim that libedit is somehow a derived work of libreadline because it has the same binary interface would be absurd. However, many installation scripts make a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libedit -> /usr/lib/libreadline.
That's the strong case for dynamic linking == derivative work.. plugin frameworks have always been the weak case. If the strong case doesn't stand up anymore, how can the weak case?
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see proprietary plugins for GCC anymore than I like seeing all the proprietary modules for the Linux kernel. But claiming there is some clear legal principle that makes them a copyright violation is a joke.
I think KDE gets quite enough criticism ;)
No it's not Bruce. It's exactly what has been said by legal representatives of the FSF.. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Plugins
call it a "dumb question" doesn't do that justice.
hehe, sure they are.
Umm.. no. This is exactly why RMS is so against GCC having a plugin framework. IF (and only if) you don't distribute GPL code with the plugin THEN you are free to place your plugin under any license you like.
Reminds me of this incident.
I'm talking about Al Gore you ignorant fuck.
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
[...]
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit" :)
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.
Wow. I hope the paper is not as inane as her quotes. There's a difference between passive conservation and active geo-engineering. What Solomon is trying to say is that even if we all hold hands and try to conserve that it'll make no difference because the damage is already done. Of course, to acknowledge this is difficult if you buy into environmental conservationism, as Solomon obviously does, so you end up with quotes like "I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it".