It also doesn't help the following case- you read in 4 bytes from a file, then read in a variable number of bytes based on the last read. You get a read exception. Which read failed?
The whole point of exceptions is that you don't care. If you care about each specific read, you wrap each read in it's own block (the same as error conditions, except that you'd use an if block).
Whats the state of all your objects?
This is why object-oriented C++ is so wonderful and Java is so bad - your objects are automagically in the correct state because you allocate and clean up resources in thier destructors. If an object is in scope, it's in a clean state. If it's not in scope, it's not. You can write some really concise, clean, reliable code using this concept - it's where the true power of objects comes into play. In C, you have to manually check EVERY call and clean up EVERY resource - it's very susceptible to programmer error, especially in deeply nested call chains with gotos and whatnot all over the place (like the Linux kernel, for example). In Java, which doesn't have destructors, it's even worse because you've got exceptions with no automatic cleanup, which means you've got to have all sorts of ugly nested try/catch/finally and state management.
Exceptions are a nice way of dealing with problems, especially nested calls. But combined with destructors, they're a magnificent way of keeping error handling safe.
People use goto in C because they want a nice exit point in the case of failure. People use exceptions for exactly the same reason - it simplifies error handling. It's true that it's physically seperate from the code, but on the other hand it's within the same block so you've got a visual/indendation indication at least. If you think exceptions are a maintainers nightmare, then you've never tried to fix an error in a function with 40 different exit points, with almost identical cleanup code at every point. A C programmer would use a goto so that there's not so much duplicate code and it's easier to maintain. A C++ programmer would use exceptions and automatic objects to do exactly the same thing, in roughly the same lines of code, with with even less (quite possible 0) duplicate code and greater modularity.
COM is a documented standard and as object models go it's not bad. Better than CORBA, anyway.
Re:Sacrifice hardware for the good of software?
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
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· Score: 1, Interesting
And all their customers and clients use Office because.....
Microsoft has really managed to sell this concept. They subtly play it up in marketing literature (despite the fact that Office is not backwards compatible, and it's forward compatability isn't any better than, say, OpenOffice). Any singly major supplier (especially, say, the US Government) that puts it's foot down and insists that all documents be available in some format that isn't Office (honestly, rtf is more than sufficent for pretty much everything these people ship back and forth. The main reason it's in.doc is because people can't be bothered to save it as something else) will change the landscape. This is why Microsoft will get down on it's knees if anyone important looks seriously at ditching Office.
It's actually a property of the base object class. Try this: Python 2.3.3 (#51, Dec 18 2003, 20:22:39) [MSC v.1200 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> class Foo(object): ... pass ... >>> len(Foo()) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<input>", line 1, in ? TypeError: len() of unsized object >>>
For the casual programmer, they work exactly the same way. The Python way allows for more syntatically correct exceptions to be thrown. Trying to use the various interface wrappers will generate TypeError exceptions, while trying to call non-existant methods will generate AttributeError exceptions.
1) why do I need to include 'self' as the first parameter of each method definition?
Several reasons: requiring the explicit parameter fits a Python Zen concept (explicit is better than implicit), it avoids adding a new keyword to the language (you can call self whatever you want) and it supports these features when you you have things like class methods.
2) In Python people tend to prefer, for example, to find the length of an array by saying:
length( array ) instead of array.length (the latter being the way you would do it in Ruby). Of course Pythonistas are now screaming that you can also say: array.__length__ (or something similar) in Python as well.
array.__len__(). The double underscore convetion is really widely used in python, and the global level functions that wrap them are a common Python idiom. They're the Python version of Java Interfaces (you can iterate over anything that implements __iter__, you can convert to a string anything that implements __str__, etc. You can get the length of anything that implements __len__). I don't see this as tacked on OO, I see this as a very powerful way of integrating objects. As an excellent example, you can call anything that implements __call__, using the standard () syntax (I understand Ruby has a similiar concept).
Distribution of a GPLed product, or a derived work thereof, without following the terms of the GPL is a copyright violation (barring corner cases like mutliple licensing, etc). So I think that'd fall nicely under "illegal".
It's pretty easy to write code like this (not this simple, of course), but the harder part is actually getting away with it in an election. You'd want something a lot more intelligent, like only swinging close votes. Your code will also generate more votes than voters, another no-no. Hiding the more complicated logic neccesary is a lot harder.
Here's the thing about the Daily Show. It's not hard hitting political commentary show. It's a comedy news show. Jon is unfailingly polite with his guests - it's rare that there's any sort of serious content to the interviews. I actually really like seeing how people respond to that sort of atmosphere - some celebrities/guests play it really well, some don't.
A year or so (maybe 2?) ago, a very conservative author came on. He'd written some partisan puff piece, the sort of thing Michael Moore writes. He obviously believed in what he wrote and wasn't a slick spinmaster, and he was getting visibly upset when the audience was reacting poorly to what he was saying (Daily Show audience is generally liberal), but Jon kept everything under control, calmed down the audience, and made a point of respecting what the guy had to say and keeping everything amiable. Thats what he does really well - a lot of other shows, ones on CNN included, would have gone the easy route and just poked fun at the guy till he blew up or stormed off.
It's not his job to be "hardball". And he's less "soft" than he is "polite and considerate". It's the Daily Show, not How Fast Can We Piss Off The Nutjob, which would be a better name for Crossfire. So what the Crossfire guys were calling him on was his interview technique in general, which is polite and non-confrontational. Which is fine. If Bush had the balls to show up on the Daily Show he'd get the same treatment.
A shill for the Democratic Party? Well, maybe. I don't really know much about his personal politics other than that he leans liberal. He doesn't shirk from making fun of Democratic buffoonery, though, and takes glee in showing up the left lunatic fringe. If he's a shill he's either a terrible one or a really, really good one.
The whole point here is what other people have said - how incredibly sad is it that a major show on CNN can't stand up to the Daily Show? They have to resort to attacking his methodology? What's wrong with that? They couldn't get past the fact that he won't "stick it" to Kerry. It's not his job to stick it to Kerry. It's his job to bring the Funny. CNN should be the one sticking it to Kerry, AND to Bush, and CNN fails that miserably. The fact that Daily Show gets so much attention as a news show is part of how ridiculous the media is right now - it shouldn't even be a question.
There's no such thing as "bit rot" per se - things like fragmentation can cause a gradual decrease in performance, but not failure. The term is used in software development because of the way old parts of source code don't get looked at and updated and touched.
Simply put - the "maintenance" that we refer to with software, and that's being compared to cars above is in fact no such thing. Every patch and update that's issued is to correct a _mistake_ in the software - not something that gradually failed because of wear. Cars need regular maintaining because they're physical objects in a physical environment and the stresses and imperfections of that environment cause real physical damage that needs to be repaired. Software "maintenance" is actually incremental development - it's correct mistakes that are in the original.
All that said, software (at least most of it) is far, far more complex than your typical car, and has had far less time to mature. The physical limits that a car operates in are well defined and well understood, and the vehicles are designed with that in mind. There are well known and well understood physical requirements and those requirements are easily tested. Software lives in a very different environment with a very different level of contstraint and a very different level of user expectation.
When you're editing project settings, you can select any combination of build targets to be editing - simply drop down the combo box, select "multiple" and select the targets to edit.
That's ridiculous - any exploit or user with sufficent systems to access the sytem directories in windows has sufficent access to get the path to them. You could make a very slight case for determing OS version/distro version from where certain files are stored (a _very_ slight case). The security concerns of this sort of action under Winows are practically none. The ability to open the TTY is a bit (well, a lot) more dangerous so I agree that it's an important fix for that reason alone.
Organizations have ways of letting things be known. I'm sure that the government and the CIA are no different, especially in light of the fact that W's dad was the head of it. I would be very, very suprised if there wasn't an undercurrent of what kind of information was desired, and if that undercurrent didn't directly affect what was delivered to the Presidents desk. It'd be the same under any administration, of course.
That said, I still have to slam Bush pretty hard for the way he handled and is handling it - obviously he can't back down now, but he's spinning like a top to keep any blame off of himself - the mark of a poor leader. It's his reponsibility to ensure that he gets all his information, and if there are beuracratic problems preventing that it's his job to bring those to light and to solve them. It shouldn't need to wait for partisan commissions and depostions and hearings - a real president would have been livid over being fed incomplete or false information and would have done something about it.
the 64bit-ness provides a speed boost to the 32bit apps and OS
This is a lie. Period. The word size of a processor has nothing to do with it's speed. The increased performance of the AMD64 and G5 chips are because of architectural improvements, not because they're 64 bit.
I haven't read all of them yet but just the first one (5,306,951) is crazy. It basically covers the concept of having RTTI and taking different actions based on the runtime type of an object. The main example included in the patent is embedded objects in a word processor. OLE is almost certainly covered by this. In fact, any object system that handles dispatch based on type is. There have also been a series of continuations, meaning this dates back as far as the 1980s. On the other hand, the listed prior art is minimal, so perhaps it can be invalidated on those grounds.
What consideration? The only consideration involved is the use of the software, which only applies if the software is licensed, not sold, which only applies if you toss out all reasonable expectation of right of first sale and decide that just because it's sold as a retail product doesn't mean it actually is one. I've got no problem with licensing software but it needs to be sold as such, not as a retail product. If you're going to sell it, over the shelf and without an up front (ie, before paying) disclosure and acceptance of the contract terms, then you need to accept the fact that your product will be treated like any other retail item (say, a CD or a book) and you don't get to leverage other restrictions.
I've said it before - the industry wants it's cake and to eat it too, and the courts are letting them. To a degree which would be unthinkable in any other industry. Books are sold, not licensed. Sometimes special books/documents are licensed, under an NDA or similiar - you agree to and sign the NDA BEFORE you get the book. It's a term of the sale, not a post-sale condition. That makes all the difference in the world. I can't think of a single non-software item where you pay up front, but must agree to terms of use before you are actually able to use it. There's a lot of case law about behavior indicating acceptance of contracts - whats that have to say about minors buying software? The industry will happily sell to minors, who can't legally agree to the EULA. That's either fraud (they're taking money in exchange for a license they can't grant), or as long as you're under 18 you can happily ignore EULAs and simply obey copyright law. How about the fact that they present this as a retail sale in general? The software industry, both retailers and distributors, does nothing to support it's contention that software is licensed and not sold. Software companies even report sales as sales, and not licensing income. Everyone, from CEOs to accountants to clerks refers to it as a sale. It's ridiculous to let this sort of double talk stand.
I still think it's a crock of crap. Also, depending on the circumstances, a verbal agreement to buy something is hardly binding - that's why we have the formalization of the contract. If you find the house to be unacceptable on further inspection, or if the seller won't agree to your terms, you change your mind. No harm, no foul. Further, you don't pay for a house and THEN sign the papers. The circumstances aren't the same. In any case verbal contracts are notoriously weak, thats why we have paper ones. It's also not relevant because there's not even a verbal contract involved here.
The economic argument is bunk - removing the power of EULAs would only stimulate the economy through increased inovation. They do nothing but extend copyright monopoly powers to previously unacceptable levels. In reading the decision, it's painfully obvious that the judge (and other courts) are uneducated about technology, although I imagine that the EFFs lawyers could have tried to be a bit more explict (like defining "hack value", which the decision notes wasn't defined). One the cases the decision was based on was a DVD case which found that "using" a DVD is different than "decrypting" it, which any technical person could tell you is false - the only way to use a DVD involves decryption.
This ruling essentially gives carte blanche to software producers to override copyright law. Further, there is nothing in the decision that pertains specifically to software - there's no reason that a CD or book publisher couldn't stick the same sticker on and make the same claims, citing this case. Hopefully, these sort of arguments will come up on appeal.
There's several other problems with the decision - the judge seems to have decided on his own that the actual purpose of bnetd is piracy rather than interoperability, he claims that because it's free there is no commercial value beyond piracy (clearly false, the fact that the creators chose not to exploit it doesn't mean there was no value), and he dismisses the EFFs first sale claims by stating that purchase of software is not in fact a purchase without citing any supporting cases. There was a California case that supported the opposite point, I hope the EFF can bring that up on appeal as well. The judge also seems to make the decision that just because EULAs are common practice, they have power - he essentially states that people should ASSUME the prescence of an EULA, and therefore should assume when purchasing a product that they are waiving rights they are assured by law. I can't put into words how much this disgusts me. The precdent this sort of thing sets just staggers the imagination.
The idea that EULAs can in principle never be binding at all is daft.
I don't see why. What basis is there for them to have any force? They meet pretty much every definition of "not a contract". They're additional conditions after the sale, which is a no no under every consumer protection law ever dating back centuries. They're contracts of adhesion, because you don't have the opportunity to negotiate. They're questionably contracts at all, because copyright law explicitly provides you with every right you need to use software you've bought, EULAs notwithstanding. Right of first sale generally indicates that if it looks and acts like a retail purchase, it _is_ one, no matter if after the fact a company wants to call it a "license". The only rationale for them to have any effect is, in essence, the argument that if you throw a ton of text at someone with a button labelled "I Agree", that somehow a legally binding contract is created. This crap would get laughed out of court, and public opinion, in ANY other context. Period.
Even more than that, whats the moral imperative for an EULA? Software publishers don't need any of the rights they claim to market a product. How is the right to forbid reverse engineering (despite explicit legislation preserving that right!) essential to them? Or the right to forbid users from measuring and making statements about performance? Or, in fact, ANYTHING except "you can't make copies of this and give them to all your friends", which is neatly covered by copyright law?
An EULA could be binding if it was presented in terms of a contract, like, say, a cell phone contract. There's a form, you fill it out, it's countersigned by the retailer, you pay your money, you go home. The software industry wants to be able to generate onerous licensing terms AND have the benefit of acting like a normal retail sale and it just pisses me off that so many judges seem to buy into this crap.
Even if you could return it, no questions asked - it STILL wouldn't pass muster in any other context. It's been tried in tons of industries. The auto industry tried it. The book publishers tried it. The music and movie publishers tried it. Every other time, it's been shot down. I don't know what the hell is wrong with this judge. This is basic, basic stuff about the integritry of the market. Think of how shitty your life would be if everything you bought could have binding, post-sale conditions of use. Think how broken and fucked up our economy would be!
You can't buy contentment but by god you can lose it if you don't have money. Friends and family are a pretty cold comfort when you can't afford clothing for your children and you spend half your time trying to figure out what relative you haven't hit up for cash lately. Crumbling job markets suck.
This is untrue - I have never seen (retail) software where the full contents of the EULA were accessible without running the installer (or at least opening the package). There's a small sticker with something to the effect of "there's an EULA for this somewhere". That's totally aside from the point that I cannot see how any judge can reasonably claim that an EULA has any standing. It's clearly not a contract. The only case law I've read seems to have the judge saying that he thinks the software industry derserves to have this sort of extra power, so he's going to let them have it. With all the retorical whining about activist judges, why don't people pick on this sort of nonsense?
Got any facts? Your other points are well taken but I seriously doubt that most bnetd users are pirating Blizzard games. It's not like there's a whole competing system, bnetd is for local (lan) games over the internet, like when you want to play with a couple friends without the crappiness that is Battle.net. I don't know anyone who uses bnetd to play pirated versions - I don't even know anyone with a pirated version of a Blizzard game, even the people who have (lots) of other pirated games.
This especially pisses me off because a lot of the current form of fair use (especially right of first sale) exists because book publishers tried to do exactly the same thing, thus eliminating the market for used books. It didn't fly then, why the hell does it fly now? Software publishers don't need EULAs! Copyright law provides all the protection and rights they need to work effectively. Harsher EULAs don't inhibit piracy - a pirate will violate an EULA even faster than he'll violate copyright, and with far more moral legitimacy. The ONLY thing EULAs provide to the software industry is the power to control consumers and the market and thats a crock of horseshit.
If you want to license your software instead of selling it, do it right. Require a signed (and countersigne) agreement up front. This is a pain in the ass and doesn't get you into retail stores, but thats your problem and you need to deal with it if your product is that sensitive and important. If you're going to sell retail, then you can treat your software just like a book with no problems.
On a side note - if someone has written or can provide me with a pointer to a "license agreement" that basically says there is no license, you're bound by copyright law alone, here's a summary of your rights and restrictions I would be grateful, because I'm lousy at writing that stuff myself.
Assuming that BigCorps legal staff isn't totally imcompetent, then Alice's contract with them will specify that this is a work for hire, with all copyrights belonging to BigCorp. So in copyright terms, Alice never has any rights to the code, and her sending it over to BigCorp when she's done isn't "distribution" any more than handing a CD back to someone that dropped it is.
In this particular case the claim is that the donated code is NOT the same - if it is, then there's possibly a problem. On the other hand, the description of the code is that it's minimal, and it may not qualify for copyright protection regardless. I come down very much against Connelly (sp?) on this though - he's said so much stuff that outright isn't true, and his admitted claim that he didn't even check his code against the code from from Mambo before raising a fuss makes it pretty clear that he's more interested in the fuss than anything else.
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The whole point of exceptions is that you don't care. If you care about each specific read, you wrap each read in it's own block (the same as error conditions, except that you'd use an if block).
Whats the state of all your objects?
This is why object-oriented C++ is so wonderful and Java is so bad - your objects are automagically in the correct state because you allocate and clean up resources in thier destructors. If an object is in scope, it's in a clean state. If it's not in scope, it's not. You can write some really concise, clean, reliable code using this concept - it's where the true power of objects comes into play. In C, you have to manually check EVERY call and clean up EVERY resource - it's very susceptible to programmer error, especially in deeply nested call chains with gotos and whatnot all over the place (like the Linux kernel, for example). In Java, which doesn't have destructors, it's even worse because you've got exceptions with no automatic cleanup, which means you've got to have all sorts of ugly nested try/catch/finally and state management.
Exceptions are a nice way of dealing with problems, especially nested calls. But combined with destructors, they're a magnificent way of keeping error handling safe.
People use goto in C because they want a nice exit point in the case of failure. People use exceptions for exactly the same reason - it simplifies error handling. It's true that it's physically seperate from the code, but on the other hand it's within the same block so you've got a visual/indendation indication at least. If you think exceptions are a maintainers nightmare, then you've never tried to fix an error in a function with 40 different exit points, with almost identical cleanup code at every point. A C programmer would use a goto so that there's not so much duplicate code and it's easier to maintain. A C++ programmer would use exceptions and automatic objects to do exactly the same thing, in roughly the same lines of code, with with even less (quite possible 0) duplicate code and greater modularity.
COM is a documented standard and as object models go it's not bad. Better than CORBA, anyway.
Microsoft has really managed to sell this concept. They subtly play it up in marketing literature (despite the fact that Office is not backwards compatible, and it's forward compatability isn't any better than, say, OpenOffice). Any singly major supplier (especially, say, the US Government) that puts it's foot down and insists that all documents be available in some format that isn't Office (honestly, rtf is more than sufficent for pretty much everything these people ship back and forth. The main reason it's in .doc is because people can't be bothered to save it as something else) will change the landscape. This is why Microsoft will get down on it's knees if anyone important looks seriously at ditching Office.
It's actually a property of the base object class.
Try this:
Python 2.3.3 (#51, Dec 18 2003, 20:22:39) [MSC v.1200 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> class Foo(object):
... pass
...
>>> len(Foo())
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<input>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: len() of unsized object
>>>
For the casual programmer, they work exactly the same way. The Python way allows for more syntatically correct exceptions to be thrown. Trying to use the various interface wrappers will generate TypeError exceptions, while trying to call non-existant methods will generate AttributeError exceptions.
Several reasons: requiring the explicit parameter fits a Python Zen concept (explicit is better than implicit), it avoids adding a new keyword to the language (you can call self whatever you want) and it supports these features when you you have things like class methods.
2) In Python people tend to prefer, for example, to find the length of an array by saying: length( array ) instead of array.length (the latter being the way you would do it in Ruby). Of course Pythonistas are now screaming that you can also say: array.__length__ (or something similar) in Python as well.
array.__len__(). The double underscore convetion is really widely used in python, and the global level functions that wrap them are a common Python idiom. They're the Python version of Java Interfaces (you can iterate over anything that implements __iter__, you can convert to a string anything that implements __str__, etc. You can get the length of anything that implements __len__). I don't see this as tacked on OO, I see this as a very powerful way of integrating objects. As an excellent example, you can call anything that implements __call__, using the standard () syntax (I understand Ruby has a similiar concept).
Incidently, "breach of copyright" is _precisely_ "piracy" in the RIAA sense.
Distribution of a GPLed product, or a derived work thereof, without following the terms of the GPL is a copyright violation (barring corner cases like mutliple licensing, etc). So I think that'd fall nicely under "illegal".
It's pretty easy to write code like this (not this simple, of course), but the harder part is actually getting away with it in an election. You'd want something a lot more intelligent, like only swinging close votes. Your code will also generate more votes than voters, another no-no. Hiding the more complicated logic neccesary is a lot harder.
A year or so (maybe 2?) ago, a very conservative author came on. He'd written some partisan puff piece, the sort of thing Michael Moore writes. He obviously believed in what he wrote and wasn't a slick spinmaster, and he was getting visibly upset when the audience was reacting poorly to what he was saying (Daily Show audience is generally liberal), but Jon kept everything under control, calmed down the audience, and made a point of respecting what the guy had to say and keeping everything amiable. Thats what he does really well - a lot of other shows, ones on CNN included, would have gone the easy route and just poked fun at the guy till he blew up or stormed off.
It's not his job to be "hardball". And he's less "soft" than he is "polite and considerate". It's the Daily Show, not How Fast Can We Piss Off The Nutjob, which would be a better name for Crossfire. So what the Crossfire guys were calling him on was his interview technique in general, which is polite and non-confrontational. Which is fine. If Bush had the balls to show up on the Daily Show he'd get the same treatment.
A shill for the Democratic Party? Well, maybe. I don't really know much about his personal politics other than that he leans liberal. He doesn't shirk from making fun of Democratic buffoonery, though, and takes glee in showing up the left lunatic fringe. If he's a shill he's either a terrible one or a really, really good one.
The whole point here is what other people have said - how incredibly sad is it that a major show on CNN can't stand up to the Daily Show? They have to resort to attacking his methodology? What's wrong with that? They couldn't get past the fact that he won't "stick it" to Kerry. It's not his job to stick it to Kerry. It's his job to bring the Funny. CNN should be the one sticking it to Kerry, AND to Bush, and CNN fails that miserably. The fact that Daily Show gets so much attention as a news show is part of how ridiculous the media is right now - it shouldn't even be a question.
Simply put - the "maintenance" that we refer to with software, and that's being compared to cars above is in fact no such thing. Every patch and update that's issued is to correct a _mistake_ in the software - not something that gradually failed because of wear. Cars need regular maintaining because they're physical objects in a physical environment and the stresses and imperfections of that environment cause real physical damage that needs to be repaired. Software "maintenance" is actually incremental development - it's correct mistakes that are in the original.
All that said, software (at least most of it) is far, far more complex than your typical car, and has had far less time to mature. The physical limits that a car operates in are well defined and well understood, and the vehicles are designed with that in mind. There are well known and well understood physical requirements and those requirements are easily tested. Software lives in a very different environment with a very different level of contstraint and a very different level of user expectation.
There's a J# which is intended for porting Java code. I'm not really familiar with it so I can't say how similiar it is to Java, though.
When you're editing project settings, you can select any combination of build targets to be editing - simply drop down the combo box, select "multiple" and select the targets to edit.
That's ridiculous - any exploit or user with sufficent systems to access the sytem directories in windows has sufficent access to get the path to them. You could make a very slight case for determing OS version/distro version from where certain files are stored (a _very_ slight case). The security concerns of this sort of action under Winows are practically none. The ability to open the TTY is a bit (well, a lot) more dangerous so I agree that it's an important fix for that reason alone.
That said, I still have to slam Bush pretty hard for the way he handled and is handling it - obviously he can't back down now, but he's spinning like a top to keep any blame off of himself - the mark of a poor leader. It's his reponsibility to ensure that he gets all his information, and if there are beuracratic problems preventing that it's his job to bring those to light and to solve them. It shouldn't need to wait for partisan commissions and depostions and hearings - a real president would have been livid over being fed incomplete or false information and would have done something about it.
This is a lie. Period. The word size of a processor has nothing to do with it's speed. The increased performance of the AMD64 and G5 chips are because of architectural improvements, not because they're 64 bit.
I haven't read all of them yet but just the first one (5,306,951) is crazy. It basically covers the concept of having RTTI and taking different actions based on the runtime type of an object. The main example included in the patent is embedded objects in a word processor. OLE is almost certainly covered by this. In fact, any object system that handles dispatch based on type is. There have also been a series of continuations, meaning this dates back as far as the 1980s. On the other hand, the listed prior art is minimal, so perhaps it can be invalidated on those grounds.
I've said it before - the industry wants it's cake and to eat it too, and the courts are letting them. To a degree which would be unthinkable in any other industry. Books are sold, not licensed. Sometimes special books/documents are licensed, under an NDA or similiar - you agree to and sign the NDA BEFORE you get the book. It's a term of the sale, not a post-sale condition. That makes all the difference in the world. I can't think of a single non-software item where you pay up front, but must agree to terms of use before you are actually able to use it. There's a lot of case law about behavior indicating acceptance of contracts - whats that have to say about minors buying software? The industry will happily sell to minors, who can't legally agree to the EULA. That's either fraud (they're taking money in exchange for a license they can't grant), or as long as you're under 18 you can happily ignore EULAs and simply obey copyright law. How about the fact that they present this as a retail sale in general? The software industry, both retailers and distributors, does nothing to support it's contention that software is licensed and not sold. Software companies even report sales as sales, and not licensing income. Everyone, from CEOs to accountants to clerks refers to it as a sale. It's ridiculous to let this sort of double talk stand.
The economic argument is bunk - removing the power of EULAs would only stimulate the economy through increased inovation. They do nothing but extend copyright monopoly powers to previously unacceptable levels. In reading the decision, it's painfully obvious that the judge (and other courts) are uneducated about technology, although I imagine that the EFFs lawyers could have tried to be a bit more explict (like defining "hack value", which the decision notes wasn't defined). One the cases the decision was based on was a DVD case which found that "using" a DVD is different than "decrypting" it, which any technical person could tell you is false - the only way to use a DVD involves decryption.
This ruling essentially gives carte blanche to software producers to override copyright law. Further, there is nothing in the decision that pertains specifically to software - there's no reason that a CD or book publisher couldn't stick the same sticker on and make the same claims, citing this case. Hopefully, these sort of arguments will come up on appeal.
There's several other problems with the decision - the judge seems to have decided on his own that the actual purpose of bnetd is piracy rather than interoperability, he claims that because it's free there is no commercial value beyond piracy (clearly false, the fact that the creators chose not to exploit it doesn't mean there was no value), and he dismisses the EFFs first sale claims by stating that purchase of software is not in fact a purchase without citing any supporting cases. There was a California case that supported the opposite point, I hope the EFF can bring that up on appeal as well. The judge also seems to make the decision that just because EULAs are common practice, they have power - he essentially states that people should ASSUME the prescence of an EULA, and therefore should assume when purchasing a product that they are waiving rights they are assured by law. I can't put into words how much this disgusts me. The precdent this sort of thing sets just staggers the imagination.
I don't see why. What basis is there for them to have any force? They meet pretty much every definition of "not a contract". They're additional conditions after the sale, which is a no no under every consumer protection law ever dating back centuries. They're contracts of adhesion, because you don't have the opportunity to negotiate. They're questionably contracts at all, because copyright law explicitly provides you with every right you need to use software you've bought, EULAs notwithstanding. Right of first sale generally indicates that if it looks and acts like a retail purchase, it _is_ one, no matter if after the fact a company wants to call it a "license". The only rationale for them to have any effect is, in essence, the argument that if you throw a ton of text at someone with a button labelled "I Agree", that somehow a legally binding contract is created. This crap would get laughed out of court, and public opinion, in ANY other context. Period.
Even more than that, whats the moral imperative for an EULA? Software publishers don't need any of the rights they claim to market a product. How is the right to forbid reverse engineering (despite explicit legislation preserving that right!) essential to them? Or the right to forbid users from measuring and making statements about performance? Or, in fact, ANYTHING except "you can't make copies of this and give them to all your friends", which is neatly covered by copyright law?
An EULA could be binding if it was presented in terms of a contract, like, say, a cell phone contract. There's a form, you fill it out, it's countersigned by the retailer, you pay your money, you go home. The software industry wants to be able to generate onerous licensing terms AND have the benefit of acting like a normal retail sale and it just pisses me off that so many judges seem to buy into this crap.
Even if you could return it, no questions asked - it STILL wouldn't pass muster in any other context. It's been tried in tons of industries. The auto industry tried it. The book publishers tried it. The music and movie publishers tried it. Every other time, it's been shot down. I don't know what the hell is wrong with this judge. This is basic, basic stuff about the integritry of the market. Think of how shitty your life would be if everything you bought could have binding, post-sale conditions of use. Think how broken and fucked up our economy would be!
You can't buy contentment but by god you can lose it if you don't have money. Friends and family are a pretty cold comfort when you can't afford clothing for your children and you spend half your time trying to figure out what relative you haven't hit up for cash lately. Crumbling job markets suck.
This is untrue - I have never seen (retail) software where the full contents of the EULA were accessible without running the installer (or at least opening the package). There's a small sticker with something to the effect of "there's an EULA for this somewhere". That's totally aside from the point that I cannot see how any judge can reasonably claim that an EULA has any standing. It's clearly not a contract. The only case law I've read seems to have the judge saying that he thinks the software industry derserves to have this sort of extra power, so he's going to let them have it. With all the retorical whining about activist judges, why don't people pick on this sort of nonsense?
Got any facts? Your other points are well taken but I seriously doubt that most bnetd users are pirating Blizzard games. It's not like there's a whole competing system, bnetd is for local (lan) games over the internet, like when you want to play with a couple friends without the crappiness that is Battle.net. I don't know anyone who uses bnetd to play pirated versions - I don't even know anyone with a pirated version of a Blizzard game, even the people who have (lots) of other pirated games.
If you want to license your software instead of selling it, do it right. Require a signed (and countersigne) agreement up front. This is a pain in the ass and doesn't get you into retail stores, but thats your problem and you need to deal with it if your product is that sensitive and important. If you're going to sell retail, then you can treat your software just like a book with no problems.
On a side note - if someone has written or can provide me with a pointer to a "license agreement" that basically says there is no license, you're bound by copyright law alone, here's a summary of your rights and restrictions I would be grateful, because I'm lousy at writing that stuff myself.
In this particular case the claim is that the donated code is NOT the same - if it is, then there's possibly a problem. On the other hand, the description of the code is that it's minimal, and it may not qualify for copyright protection regardless. I come down very much against Connelly (sp?) on this though - he's said so much stuff that outright isn't true, and his admitted claim that he didn't even check his code against the code from from Mambo before raising a fuss makes it pretty clear that he's more interested in the fuss than anything else.