My post (parent) is wrong. Having re-read MS's license, it's entirely a covenant not to assert patents. This clears both questions since there is no sublicensing issue here.
MS further states that OOXML will be an "open and royalty-free" specification.
This sounds nice, but is a serious trap.
Microsoft "open and royalty-free" licenses are normally non-transferrable: users of software written by licensees have to get their own license to use the software. This sounds fine in principle, but in practice it makes writing free (or even open-source) software relying on such licensed technology impractical: people who download your software will have to individually logon to Microsoft's website, identify themselves, and exectue a license. As you are probably aware, the GPL is incompatible with such a setup. You see, non-MS people expect "Open" to be more than just "open for anyone to implement", it also means: "open for anyone to sublicense".
In particular, patents related to this technology must be made clear from the get-go.
MS adding ODF support to Office is great. It's what they should have done from the start (MS-Word has always supported import/export from other word processors, in large part to attract customers to switfch).
Actually, I was in error. GP really complained that his word-processor wasn't bug-free, which is silly. In any case what you say is obvious -- I was going to add that to my post but then decided to make it brief.
What GP was mad about is not that user processes can have bugs, but that user processes could be in a position to threaten the stability of the operating system. He's wrong about the nature of the threat we're talking about here, but that's a separate point.
What they did promise is not to sue their own customers:
Microsoft reserves the right to update (including discontinue) the foregoing covenant pursuant to the terms of the Patent Cooperation Agreement between Novell and Microsoft that was publicly announced on November 2, 2006; however, the covenant will continue as to specific copies of Covered Products distributed by Microsoft for Revenue before the end of the Term.
As you can plainly see, at any time it wishes Microsoft is free to "discontinue" the convenant and then sue Novell's customsers, as well Novell and anyone else who contributed code to SuSE and might have thought the convenant protected them. The only exception is for Microsoft's paying customers, and event their covenant is only guaranteed to last for the 5-year term of the convenant, at the end of which they can be sued too.
"The amended reforms make it clear consumers can transfer the music they own onto devices such as iPods and enable the next wave of technology by allowing people to record a TV or radio program on mobile devices to watch it at a more convenient time," according to Attorney-General Ruddock
From where I'm sitting this is a misapprehension of the way copyright law is supposed to work. His approach seems to be as follows: Start with the assumption that all copying is bad. Then theorize what the next wave of technology is going to be, decide that you like it, and carve out special exemption for this technology from your draconian law. Rather, you make the law ignore technology and concertrate on the content. I think the original American system (reasonable copyright term coupled with "fair use") would be quite sufficient today, for example.
Digging deeper, it seems the shill is still an MS employee. Can you really trust someone who says he "will be participating as a private citizen rather than a Microsoft employee" in a committee that affects a significant Microsoft business interest?
If he can provide a reasobale argument as to why ODF should not be implemented, He should be an advisor. If I were in charge I would want both sides fully represented...
I think this kind of thinking exemplifies a fundamental problem with the way decisions are made in the US. Certainly all sides should be heard -- but they should not be represented in the actual decision-making. Public employees who make decisions should report to only one boss -- the people -- and should know the technical business and how to evaluate information. They should receive input from any and all sources -- but they should not owe allegiance to any outside interests.
Both sides of the Microsoft vs ODF battle are special interests.
Indeed, but you have to understand the difference between a lobbyist advocating a solution (he was paid to do so regardless of the merits) and a civil servant advocating a solution (he was paid to dispassionately figure out what the best solution is). Appointing a lobbyist for a policy-making committee is silly not because we may disagree with his former employer, but because lobbying and making policy decisions require completely orthogonal skills. For example, I would expect a former lobbyist called upon to make decisions to give undue credence to other lobbists, and to care about political agenda more than technical issues.
Leaving the "market" to achieve a social goal relies on two assumptions:
There is a market in the first place (i.e. competition).
The economic valuation is similar to the social one.
In this case there certainly is a market, but it leads to results we don't like. The problem is that the extra profits gained from selling to a small minority (the disabled) are probably much less than the expenses in accomodating them. Therefore it is rational for most retailers to simply ignore the disabled. Of course there will be a market solution: the disabled will have to use more expensive approaches (retailers who specifically cater for them, for example).
What's wrong with that? First, on the money side, many of us believe that the disabled shouldn't have to bear all the costs of their disability -- that society should bear some of them. In this case we are forcing Target (and, indirectly, all of Target's customers) to pay for the fact that blind shoppers can't use a website which seeing users can.
More importantly, you have to realize that, both to the disabled person and to society, the value of shopping at Target extends beyond the price advantage.
First of all, the US government can't deny you a passport (even if they want you on a no-fly list!) -- see Kent v. Dulles. Secondly, US Citizens have the right to enter and leave the US (I can't find the USSC citation -- sorry). This proposal is thus manifestly unconstitutional -- unless they try claiming that "you have the right to leave the US, but not by the means of transportation of your choice". This has worked for the government in the cases about the right to travel anonymously and the airport identification requirements.
Certainly I wouldn't be surpised if the CIA is buying technology from Google -- be it search technology, information presentation technology (Google Earth), etc. What's wrong with that?
The article contained no indications that the Google was providing the CIA with information about users!
I want people trying to influence this election unfairly to be Americans
Unfortunately, Diebold disagrees with you. They prefer the run this election to the tune of "may the best cracker win". I mean, the US government has such an world-reaching influence that it makes sense to have a global election process, right? That's probably why they tabulate election results on unsecured Windows PCs and why the sell voting machines with less integrity and security than an XBox.
Mr. Soghoian's website confirms that he's a student in information security. Thus it's no longer obvious why the university shouldn't defend him if need be.
In all seriousness, Indiana University's legal team have essentially said I'm on my own. Thus, if this issue becomes serious, and the feds knock at my door, any offers of pro-bono legal assistance would be much appreciated.
I assumed the guy is a faculty member, but it turns out he's only a student. In that case it's true he can't rely on the university to give him legal help. Note, however, that even faculty aren't always protected -- during the SDMI Challenge bruhaha, Princeton's University Counsel was agressively defeneding Ed Felten and his team, but researchers in other universities didn't fare that well.
I think the proposed opinions of the parties reflect who's currently in power more than anything else. The people who won are suspect of gaining from election misconduct; the people who lost are suspicious of the system.
That said, having a voter-verifiable trail (with the paper ballots being the 'official' votes) is certainly the most secure way to go. I'm not sure that the current voting machine technology actually gives efficiency gains (there are so many technical problems in maintaining the machines and running them on election day), but persumably in the future that would improve, also as people become more used to computers.
It's true that it's difficult to forget Diebold's CEO promising to deliver the election to the Republicans. The most scary part for me is that the voting machine is a general-purpose computer with no cryptographic hardware. For a non-citizen it's amusing to note that an average ATM is probably better designed than a Diebold voting machine.
If making money for the universities was the only outcome, I might agree with you. However, there are some important issues you aren't considering.
If universities need more money, won't it be better to simply fund them directly? While your indirect funding system is merit-based in that they have to get good results to profit, I'd say the public would benefit more when drugs developed from government-funded research were cheap.
The main question is who actually gets to enjoy the profits. Universities are generally not venture capitalists. They get the patents, but they cannot provide money for the development of the application. Someone else (usually a large drug company) will risk their money in developing the application. This means that the drug company will buy (or get an exclusive license to) the patent from the university. Then they will make a lot of money selling the drug back to the public. This is not dissimilar to the situation with the journals (we do the research, the peer-review and the editing for free and then they charge us atrocious subscriptions). At the end the public is paying twice: once in taxes to do the research, and then again to the drug company to buy the drug the public paid for developing.
Now, you may say that since the drug company put up the capital and is taking a risk, they deserve a large share of the profits. The problem is that the public already paid a lot of money and took a risk: not all grants result in patentable inventions. The university doesn't have to take this into consideration when negotiating with the drug company, since they don't have to consider the public's expenses -- they only have to consider their own potential gain. The normal rule is that the government is not allowed to patent stuff. This should extent to reserach done with government money unless the rule is that the university has to license the patent to anyone who asks.
Finally, you may say that without the monopoly assured by the exclusive license to the patent, the drug company won't try developing the drug at all (the basic reserach done at the university, after all, does not usually end the work that needs to be done). There's a reason we allow drug patents! If we don't allow monopolies for government-funded reserach, the companies might only develop drugs they patented themselves which means the reserach won't get us anywhere. I'm not sure they is a problem since I guess reserach is sufficiently expensive that they'll take freebies from the government when offered, but I'm no expert. This is the main question in my mind.
I want to know and read what failed research is out there, who did it, why, and how much it cost.
There's a problem with this: scientists can't promise success. I'll be afraid of accepting a grant if it's based on me promising to deliver results. The current system is that my next grant application will be reviewed based on what I did with the previous one. But it's crazy to expect basic research to work like clockwork. Moreover, it's difficult to judge things in hindsight. In mathematics in most cases people don't solve the problem they set out to solve, and in any case they do it in a completely different way from what they said they will. It's best to think of a theoretical science grant and giving someone money and saying "just do something good with it". What you really want to know is how many papers were written using the grant and if they were good, but not if the specific things the reseracher thought they might do three years ago were actually done.
Experimental science is very different. Grants are much bigger and are earmarked for specific projects. But still, say the project failed -- what the scientist wanted to do cannot be done. Then this is, in itself, a scientific result. Now it may be that in hindsight it may have been better to fund a different approach that might have worked, but the real question is whether this could have been figured out in advance.
Currently some journals (especially the very prestigious ones like Nature) want to have complete control of the paper. At the start this means they won't take anything the public has seen before -- that's part of their take on only publishing "original research" [hence the reasonable six-month delay in the proposed law]. But they also insist on having the copyright in the article assigned to them [they mostly need some form of this so they can disseminate the article in new ways that didn't exist when it was written]. Unfortunately, sometime they take these ideas too far (as in preventing people from publishing the papers on their own websites).
The internet is slowly forcing the journals to change. This law will make them chagne faster. They will have to accept that their function will be limited to providing reputation (via peer-review and editorial policy), and in some cases providing the first view of a paper. However, they will no longer be the only way to get the paper so the value of a journal subscription will go down.
In math and physics the researches are already annoyed by the system. Essentially it works like this: we do the research, often being paid by the public via a government grant. Then we write the papers. Then we referee papers for journals for free, and serve as journal editors for free -- no scientist gets paid by the journal for either writing the paper or checking that it's correct. Then the journal turns around and charges the community money to read the papers. Of course this is untenable and open-access journals are beginning to flourish. Moreover all journals live with people posting the paper to their website (either the preprint or the journal version) as well as having preprints freely available from the arXiV. Still some journals are expensive beyond belief (given that they get the content for free and all the editing is done for free and all they are giving is reputation). Many researchers will have nothign to do with an Elsevier journal because of this kind of behaviour.
As a scientist I have to say this is a great idea, but it misses the main problem of government-funded research. Certainly if the public paid for the research, they should be able to read the paper, but an even more important issue is that of patentability. The current situation is: we (taxpayers) pay for basic research. Then the universities get to patent the results. Next, private companies license the patents and get a monopoly on sale of products embodying the results of reserach we paid for. The rule has to be that the results of research that has been funded by the public are not patentable. If you want to patent the result, use private money (industry grants, university tutition money, whatever).
Indeed the problem of judging the obviuosness in hindsight is difficult. However, the Federal Circuit's solution is ridiculous. They have said that the only way to make sure that a patent was obvious at the time of invention is if there existed written public record at the time describing the idea. This creates a perverse situation: if an extension of an invention is so immediate that no-one would bother to point it out in writing, then it's legally a "non-obvious" idea and you may patent this extension. At the same time people who think of less obvious extensions (in the everyday sense of the word) would tend to write them down. Along the way, an important element of the patent system has been written out of the law by the court: the "Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art" (PHOSITA). The test of patentability in the law is whether the invention would have been obvious to a PHOSITA [at the time of invention and not in hindsight, of course].
One way to show the idea would have been obvious to the hypothetical PHOSITA is to show written work suggesting this literal idea. The Federal Circuit says this is the only way they'll accept. In effect, they have eliminated PHOSITA's skill in the art -- his own expertise. The EFF is arguing that this is especially bad for F/OSS developers. F/OSS is a collaborative low-budget enterprise. Most projects can't afford a patent department, or filing for defensive patents. Even worse, F/OSS developers are people or ordinary skill in the art of software development. If something seems obvious to them in view of the prior art they know then they assume it can't be patentable -- that's what the law says, after all. Also, software people don't tend to document every silly extension to every idea they see. Then it turns out that their skill in the art is irrelevant -- what's important is whether the small extension they made was litterally written down by another developer.
Why not let people who don't need accessibility use the cheap 'inaccessible' applications, and let the 5% who need accessibility use the "MS Office with a plugin" option?
Doing this would require IT support for two software applications (i.e. MS-Office and OpenOffice.org) which creates various complications. It's much simpler from the technical side to only give the users one application for each task the need to accomplish. In this way state-wide IT policy is very different from a home office install. You should be suspicious of this development, however, since IT policy isn't fixed in time and this may be an attempt to keep MS-Office installed long enough for MS to achieve a political reversal of the original switch decision.
Note that there are implications to this "bacteriological pesticide": while the phages are naturally occuring viruses, they are not normally ingested in large amounts. It is not inconcievable that they could have effects, for example, on the bacterial culture in our intestines. I hope someone here is knowledgeable enough to comment on this.
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My post (parent) is wrong. Having re-read MS's license, it's entirely a covenant not to assert patents. This clears both questions since there is no sublicensing issue here.
- Microsoft "open and royalty-free" licenses are normally non-transferrable: users of software written by licensees have to get their own license to use the software. This sounds fine in principle, but in practice it makes writing free (or even open-source) software relying on such licensed technology impractical: people who download your software will have to individually logon to Microsoft's website, identify themselves, and exectue a license. As you are probably aware, the GPL is incompatible with such a setup. You see, non-MS people expect "Open" to be more than just "open for anyone to implement", it also means: "open for anyone to sublicense".
- In particular, patents related to this technology must be made clear from the get-go.
MS adding ODF support to Office is great. It's what they should have done from the start (MS-Word has always supported import/export from other word processors, in large part to attract customers to switfch).Actually, I was in error. GP really complained that his word-processor wasn't bug-free, which is silly. In any case what you say is obvious -- I was going to add that to my post but then decided to make it brief.
What GP was mad about is not that user processes can have bugs, but that user processes could be in a position to threaten the stability of the operating system. He's wrong about the nature of the threat we're talking about here, but that's a separate point.
From where I'm sitting this is a misapprehension of the way copyright law is supposed to work. His approach seems to be as follows: Start with the assumption that all copying is bad. Then theorize what the next wave of technology is going to be, decide that you like it, and carve out special exemption for this technology from your draconian law. Rather, you make the law ignore technology and concertrate on the content. I think the original American system (reasonable copyright term coupled with "fair use") would be quite sufficient today, for example.
Wish I could do it myself.
Digging deeper, it seems the shill is still an MS employee. Can you really trust someone who says he "will be participating as a private citizen rather than a Microsoft employee" in a committee that affects a significant Microsoft business interest?
I think this kind of thinking exemplifies a fundamental problem with the way decisions are made in the US. Certainly all sides should be heard -- but they should not be represented in the actual decision-making. Public employees who make decisions should report to only one boss -- the people -- and should know the technical business and how to evaluate information. They should receive input from any and all sources -- but they should not owe allegiance to any outside interests.
Indeed, but you have to understand the difference between a lobbyist advocating a solution (he was paid to do so regardless of the merits) and a civil servant advocating a solution (he was paid to dispassionately figure out what the best solution is). Appointing a lobbyist for a policy-making committee is silly not because we may disagree with his former employer, but because lobbying and making policy decisions require completely orthogonal skills. For example, I would expect a former lobbyist called upon to make decisions to give undue credence to other lobbists, and to care about political agenda more than technical issues.
- There is a market in the first place (i.e. competition).
- The economic valuation is similar to the social one.
In this case there certainly is a market, but it leads to results we don't like. The problem is that the extra profits gained from selling to a small minority (the disabled) are probably much less than the expenses in accomodating them. Therefore it is rational for most retailers to simply ignore the disabled. Of course there will be a market solution: the disabled will have to use more expensive approaches (retailers who specifically cater for them, for example).What's wrong with that? First, on the money side, many of us believe that the disabled shouldn't have to bear all the costs of their disability -- that society should bear some of them. In this case we are forcing Target (and, indirectly, all of Target's customers) to pay for the fact that blind shoppers can't use a website which seeing users can.
More importantly, you have to realize that, both to the disabled person and to society, the value of shopping at Target extends beyond the price advantage.
We've already hashed this out once.
First of all, the US government can't deny you a passport (even if they want you on a no-fly list!) -- see Kent v. Dulles. Secondly, US Citizens have the right to enter and leave the US (I can't find the USSC citation -- sorry). This proposal is thus manifestly unconstitutional -- unless they try claiming that "you have the right to leave the US, but not by the means of transportation of your choice". This has worked for the government in the cases about the right to travel anonymously and the airport identification requirements.
Certainly I wouldn't be surpised if the CIA is buying technology from Google -- be it search technology, information presentation technology (Google Earth), etc. What's wrong with that? The article contained no indications that the Google was providing the CIA with information about users!
Unfortunately, Diebold disagrees with you. They prefer the run this election to the tune of "may the best cracker win". I mean, the US government has such an world-reaching influence that it makes sense to have a global election process, right? That's probably why they tabulate election results on unsecured Windows PCs and why the sell voting machines with less integrity and security than an XBox.
Mr. Soghoian's website confirms that he's a student in information security. Thus it's no longer obvious why the university shouldn't defend him if need be.
I assumed the guy is a faculty member, but it turns out he's only a student. In that case it's true he can't rely on the university to give him legal help. Note, however, that even faculty aren't always protected -- during the SDMI Challenge bruhaha, Princeton's University Counsel was agressively defeneding Ed Felten and his team, but researchers in other universities didn't fare that well.
I think the proposed opinions of the parties reflect who's currently in power more than anything else. The people who won are suspect of gaining from election misconduct; the people who lost are suspicious of the system. That said, having a voter-verifiable trail (with the paper ballots being the 'official' votes) is certainly the most secure way to go. I'm not sure that the current voting machine technology actually gives efficiency gains (there are so many technical problems in maintaining the machines and running them on election day), but persumably in the future that would improve, also as people become more used to computers. It's true that it's difficult to forget Diebold's CEO promising to deliver the election to the Republicans. The most scary part for me is that the voting machine is a general-purpose computer with no cryptographic hardware. For a non-citizen it's amusing to note that an average ATM is probably better designed than a Diebold voting machine.
If making money for the universities was the only outcome, I might agree with you. However, there are some important issues you aren't considering.
There's a problem with this: scientists can't promise success. I'll be afraid of accepting a grant if it's based on me promising to deliver results. The current system is that my next grant application will be reviewed based on what I did with the previous one. But it's crazy to expect basic research to work like clockwork. Moreover, it's difficult to judge things in hindsight. In mathematics in most cases people don't solve the problem they set out to solve, and in any case they do it in a completely different way from what they said they will. It's best to think of a theoretical science grant and giving someone money and saying "just do something good with it". What you really want to know is how many papers were written using the grant and if they were good, but not if the specific things the reseracher thought they might do three years ago were actually done.
Experimental science is very different. Grants are much bigger and are earmarked for specific projects. But still, say the project failed -- what the scientist wanted to do cannot be done. Then this is, in itself, a scientific result. Now it may be that in hindsight it may have been better to fund a different approach that might have worked, but the real question is whether this could have been figured out in advance.
Currently some journals (especially the very prestigious ones like Nature) want to have complete control of the paper. At the start this means they won't take anything the public has seen before -- that's part of their take on only publishing "original research" [hence the reasonable six-month delay in the proposed law]. But they also insist on having the copyright in the article assigned to them [they mostly need some form of this so they can disseminate the article in new ways that didn't exist when it was written]. Unfortunately, sometime they take these ideas too far (as in preventing people from publishing the papers on their own websites).
The internet is slowly forcing the journals to change. This law will make them chagne faster. They will have to accept that their function will be limited to providing reputation (via peer-review and editorial policy), and in some cases providing the first view of a paper. However, they will no longer be the only way to get the paper so the value of a journal subscription will go down.
In math and physics the researches are already annoyed by the system. Essentially it works like this: we do the research, often being paid by the public via a government grant. Then we write the papers. Then we referee papers for journals for free, and serve as journal editors for free -- no scientist gets paid by the journal for either writing the paper or checking that it's correct. Then the journal turns around and charges the community money to read the papers. Of course this is untenable and open-access journals are beginning to flourish. Moreover all journals live with people posting the paper to their website (either the preprint or the journal version) as well as having preprints freely available from the arXiV. Still some journals are expensive beyond belief (given that they get the content for free and all the editing is done for free and all they are giving is reputation). Many researchers will have nothign to do with an Elsevier journal because of this kind of behaviour.
As a scientist I have to say this is a great idea, but it misses the main problem of government-funded research. Certainly if the public paid for the research, they should be able to read the paper, but an even more important issue is that of patentability. The current situation is: we (taxpayers) pay for basic research. Then the universities get to patent the results. Next, private companies license the patents and get a monopoly on sale of products embodying the results of reserach we paid for. The rule has to be that the results of research that has been funded by the public are not patentable. If you want to patent the result, use private money (industry grants, university tutition money, whatever).
Indeed the problem of judging the obviuosness in hindsight is difficult. However, the Federal Circuit's solution is ridiculous. They have said that the only way to make sure that a patent was obvious at the time of invention is if there existed written public record at the time describing the idea. This creates a perverse situation: if an extension of an invention is so immediate that no-one would bother to point it out in writing, then it's legally a "non-obvious" idea and you may patent this extension. At the same time people who think of less obvious extensions (in the everyday sense of the word) would tend to write them down. Along the way, an important element of the patent system has been written out of the law by the court: the "Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art" (PHOSITA). The test of patentability in the law is whether the invention would have been obvious to a PHOSITA [at the time of invention and not in hindsight, of course].
One way to show the idea would have been obvious to the hypothetical PHOSITA is to show written work suggesting this literal idea. The Federal Circuit says this is the only way they'll accept. In effect, they have eliminated PHOSITA's skill in the art -- his own expertise. The EFF is arguing that this is especially bad for F/OSS developers. F/OSS is a collaborative low-budget enterprise. Most projects can't afford a patent department, or filing for defensive patents. Even worse, F/OSS developers are people or ordinary skill in the art of software development. If something seems obvious to them in view of the prior art they know then they assume it can't be patentable -- that's what the law says, after all. Also, software people don't tend to document every silly extension to every idea they see. Then it turns out that their skill in the art is irrelevant -- what's important is whether the small extension they made was litterally written down by another developer.
Doing this would require IT support for two software applications (i.e. MS-Office and OpenOffice.org) which creates various complications. It's much simpler from the technical side to only give the users one application for each task the need to accomplish. In this way state-wide IT policy is very different from a home office install. You should be suspicious of this development, however, since IT policy isn't fixed in time and this may be an attempt to keep MS-Office installed long enough for MS to achieve a political reversal of the original switch decision.
Note that there are implications to this "bacteriological pesticide": while the phages are naturally occuring viruses, they are not normally ingested in large amounts. It is not inconcievable that they could have effects, for example, on the bacterial culture in our intestines. I hope someone here is knowledgeable enough to comment on this.