It's worth noting that the (c) convention, to my knowledge, doesn't have any legal force. The actual copyright symbol or the word "Copyright" is supposed to be spell out. That said, I can't imagine that a reasonable court wouldn't decide that "(c)" is sufficent, but it's not listed on the Copyright Offices website as one of the 3 standard forms. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#fnv
And if someone gave you a cow or corn for free, would you consider butchering/shucking them then?
Maybe corn. But not the cow. And outside the community of farmers who regularly butcher cows, nobody would think you were wierd for turning down a free cow that you had to butcher yourself. Different expectations, you see.
Gtk-Win32 apps won't share installations without hackery (some won't do it at all). Just another reason anyone claiming that Gtk-Win32 makes Gtk "cross platform" needs a hard smack.
An important point - despite SCOs public statements, they have not file any suits against end users "for running Linux". AutoZone is supposedly about the use of shared libraries, not the use of Linux per se. DCC was about DCCs requirement to certify. At NO TIME has SCO filed anything even approaching a copyright infringment suit against a linux user.
I also do not think that the end user is liable in this case - certainly there's an obligation to stop using the work if it's proven to infringe, morally at least. But the tone of his letter and the facts as claimed by the Mambo team and the developer in question really cast Connolly in a bad light and I suspect he's just being mouthy - the guy at the OSSI offered to work as a mediator. All Connolly needs to show to prove the code is his is a copy of his contract with the developer and and a few lines of code from his private tree. Between reasonable people it wouldn't take more than a couple hours to settle. If there's not enough trust it might take longer because they'll want to find a trusted third party to do the analysis. But still very reasonable.
Clarification: The developer in question made many more modifications that this specific one, but this one is the one that got put back into Mambo and is pissing him off.
From what I can tell from the articles, I don't see where this guy has anywhere to stand. Assuming that the developer is telling the whole truth, then he's got nothing - it's the developers copyright, not his. Even assuming that Connolly is telling the whole truth, I find it hard to believe that he's going to be able to any real damages. The code in question is small and the people distributing it are doing so in good faith. Trade secrets obviously won't apply to a frigging "leading story" block. Connolly also claims that he hasn't actually confirmed that the code in Mambo is similiar to the code in his product - why would anyone listen to legal threats when he hasn't even performed this minimal due dilligence?
If it was *not* a work for hire (which means that the copyright rests with the person paying for the work, rather than the developer), the Connolly is totally out of luck. Going from the developer to him is "distribution", and the GPL applies. Internal distribution at a company is only internal because it's the company holding the copyright, with developers performing works for hire.
If it _was_ a work for hire, then the contrbibution back to Mambo may be copyright infringment (developer says it's a re-implementation, not the same code), and that'd be a civil case between Connolly and the developer. If Connolly wins that case then Mambo will need to remove the code, but I doubt they (or users) would be liable for damages.
The
OSI position paper has a good summary of the various meanings of "Unix" and why when people say that Linux comes from Unix they don't mean it in the legal, code-copying sense.
Do you actually work for a commercial software developer? Have you ever actually developed commercial software? What you say is so foreign to my experience in professional software development, as well as the experiences of everyone I know or have talked to, that I have to assume that you're just making something up that sounds reasonable to you as an outsider. What you're describing is a myth that's presented in marketing. I suppose it's possible that some vendors work this way. Maybe some of the really important DoD or medical code is. On the other hand, maybe not cause I've seen code and processes that should be equally important and they're horrible. The vast majority of software out there is produced with a "good enough" atmosphere. This includes most small and medium sized OSS projects, like PHP.
A friend of mine works for a DSL ISP in Florida and has had installers for the local telco (who markets a competing DSL service) cut their lines while installing someone elses no less than 3 times.
You can mimic the key sequence, but you can't intercept and abort it at any level above a keyboard driver. Installing a keyboard driver will do it, however.
I'm not aware of any version of VNC for windows that sends the Ctrl-Alt-Delete sequence to the remote machine automatically, although you can send it via a menu option.
It's actually a _total_ hack, as the "local" app has no idea it's being displayed locally and obeys the servers concepts of things like screen geometry and decoration. Citrix is okay for what it does, and it's probably the best you can get out of Windows, and it certainly has features that X doesn't, but X provides a much stronger base for remoting, especially single applications.
py2exe is exactly what you asked for. There's similiar packagers for both Linux and OS X (Py_Freeze for linux, I'm not sure what the name of the OS X one is).
As for writing C extension modules, take a look at Weave.
The thing that sucks about Python and it's indentation-awareness is that it makes it very hard to keep code intact on web pages, in emails, etc. With C (or other) languages, the indentation is for human-readability only and is trivially recreated mechanically. With Python if a file gets borked up you have to fix it by hand and it can be a real pain.
The surprise factor of mixing tabs and spaces can be annoying, too.
I've come to like Python a lot and I do most of my coding in it now, but I still think the indetation thing was the wrong choice.
The testers and code auditors and everyone else who does the un-fun work that doesn't add features but instead makes sure that the code works for other people and that it stays in that condition. And I think the packagers, the ones who write the installation scripts and generally make software easy to use and easy to install also deserve a lot of credit.
You're being karma-whacked for being stupid, not for being unpopular (is stupidity unpopular?). It's a documented fact that he said it. If you wanted to clarify the issue and perhaps cut down on some of the knee-jerking that sort of statement tends to make, do that instead of making single line, incorrect, trollish posts.
He did, in fact, say this, although it was in the context of a speech at a fundraiser dinner. I think it's inappropriate for the CEO of a company that makes voting machines to be so obviously partisan, and it certainly wasn't the wisest thing he could have said, but I don't read a massive conspiracy to defraud into it the way some people do.
That said, while most of the problems with Diebold software can easily be explained by total incompetence and lack of regard for the importance of correct behavior (as opposed to the appearance of correct behavior), some thing are very hard to see as anything except a deliberate creation of a way to manipulate votes.
Congressmen(people?) have admitted it in other forums as well. But it shouldn't matter. Are you claiming that Moore falsified those interviews? Cause thats a pretty serious alegation, far more serious than creative editing or bias. You're going to need a lot more than a bitchy website for that one.
I'm not a liinguistics scholar or an expert on military history, but I'm guessing the history of "mama san" is something like this:
"Mama" is derisive/insulting slang for a woman in the US ("Hey, hot momma!", etc). Many US soldiers came to Vietnam by way of Okinawa (There was, and is, a major US military base there and it was used for staging deployment into Vietnam). In Okinawa, the local Japanese would address soldiers with respect "-san", and the solders would associate that with asian people. Add a dash of "all them squinty eyes look the same to me", and you get mama san.
Thats not how win2k did it's shadows. Win2k had (and was the first Windows to have) support for real alpha transparency. The only places the OS uses it is the dropshadow on the cursor and for the menu fade in effects, but it's available to any window and is trivial to implement.
A guy I know who lives in Florida and hosts out of his house was down for a week during the last hurricane. This time, he arranged for backups at 2 remote locations (one in Europe, one in Canada), archived everything to DVD-R, and got a generator to provide the time to do everything once the power goes out. Think everything is going to be just fine this time;)
I think you're a little confused. In the natural state, there's no such thing as IP or copyright. There's no protection whatsoever. The only way you can keep someone from using your work is not to give to them. This leads to people not being willing to distribute works at all, or to do so only under very limited circumstances. However, society has a lot to gain from the dissemination of art - contrary to the increasingly popular capitalist viewpoint, people are about more than simply subsisting while producing capital. Therefore, in the interest of serving the public interest (not the public _need_ - a healthy society and a healthy person is based on a lot more than food, air, and water), we have IP law with provides you with certain protections _in return_ for publishing your work where other people can see it. The important part of copyright is not the protection it grants, it's the reason for those protections. There's no such thing as "artists rights". If someone wants his works to be copyrighted for eternity, he can fuck the hell off. He doesn't need to be part of our society. He's getting a certain amount of consideration from society in return for his being willing to publish his works and allow others to build off of them. The gimme gimme grabby attitude of the big copyright holders is sickening and downright immoral. It's given us total crap like "subconcious infringment".
Maybe if they just copied from MS to replace the parts of Gnome that totally fucking suck. Like the file selector. And the color selector (to a lesser degreee). And the file browser. Other than those things, I pretty much like Gnome. I prefer to have my OK/Cancel buttons in the opposite order, cause I have years of muscle memory pushing me in that direction, but I manage. But the file selector is so the worst thing I've ever seen (and HOW many fucking years has it been bad?), and nautilus is the crappiest file browser around. I'm not just talking about the stupid "spatial metaphor", either.
There's minor differences because of things like padding. That's not whats happening here - there are (or so I gather from the mirrored posts available) patches and modifications to the xchat source to allow compilation under windows. Certainly the 30 day timer is a modification.
The win32 binary you can download is NOT reproducible from the source download. IE, he's providing a binary from his own, modified, private sources. That's a GPL violation.
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It's worth noting that the (c) convention, to my knowledge, doesn't have any legal force. The actual copyright symbol or the word "Copyright" is supposed to be spell out. That said, I can't imagine that a reasonable court wouldn't decide that "(c)" is sufficent, but it's not listed on the Copyright Offices website as one of the 3 standard forms. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#fnv
Maybe corn. But not the cow. And outside the community of farmers who regularly butcher cows, nobody would think you were wierd for turning down a free cow that you had to butcher yourself. Different expectations, you see.
Gtk-Win32 apps won't share installations without hackery (some won't do it at all). Just another reason anyone claiming that Gtk-Win32 makes Gtk "cross platform" needs a hard smack.
I also do not think that the end user is liable in this case - certainly there's an obligation to stop using the work if it's proven to infringe, morally at least. But the tone of his letter and the facts as claimed by the Mambo team and the developer in question really cast Connolly in a bad light and I suspect he's just being mouthy - the guy at the OSSI offered to work as a mediator. All Connolly needs to show to prove the code is his is a copy of his contract with the developer and and a few lines of code from his private tree. Between reasonable people it wouldn't take more than a couple hours to settle. If there's not enough trust it might take longer because they'll want to find a trusted third party to do the analysis. But still very reasonable.
From what I can tell from the articles, I don't see where this guy has anywhere to stand. Assuming that the developer is telling the whole truth, then he's got nothing - it's the developers copyright, not his. Even assuming that Connolly is telling the whole truth, I find it hard to believe that he's going to be able to any real damages. The code in question is small and the people distributing it are doing so in good faith. Trade secrets obviously won't apply to a frigging "leading story" block. Connolly also claims that he hasn't actually confirmed that the code in Mambo is similiar to the code in his product - why would anyone listen to legal threats when he hasn't even performed this minimal due dilligence?
If it _was_ a work for hire, then the contrbibution back to Mambo may be copyright infringment (developer says it's a re-implementation, not the same code), and that'd be a civil case between Connolly and the developer. If Connolly wins that case then Mambo will need to remove the code, but I doubt they (or users) would be liable for damages.
The OSI position paper has a good summary of the various meanings of "Unix" and why when people say that Linux comes from Unix they don't mean it in the legal, code-copying sense.
Do you actually work for a commercial software developer? Have you ever actually developed commercial software? What you say is so foreign to my experience in professional software development, as well as the experiences of everyone I know or have talked to, that I have to assume that you're just making something up that sounds reasonable to you as an outsider. What you're describing is a myth that's presented in marketing. I suppose it's possible that some vendors work this way. Maybe some of the really important DoD or medical code is. On the other hand, maybe not cause I've seen code and processes that should be equally important and they're horrible. The vast majority of software out there is produced with a "good enough" atmosphere. This includes most small and medium sized OSS projects, like PHP.
A friend of mine works for a DSL ISP in Florida and has had installers for the local telco (who markets a competing DSL service) cut their lines while installing someone elses no less than 3 times.
I'm not aware of any version of VNC for windows that sends the Ctrl-Alt-Delete sequence to the remote machine automatically, although you can send it via a menu option.
It's a good hack, but still a hack.
As for writing C extension modules, take a look at Weave.
The surprise factor of mixing tabs and spaces can be annoying, too.
I've come to like Python a lot and I do most of my coding in it now, but I still think the indetation thing was the wrong choice.
The testers and code auditors and everyone else who does the un-fun work that doesn't add features but instead makes sure that the code works for other people and that it stays in that condition. And I think the packagers, the ones who write the installation scripts and generally make software easy to use and easy to install also deserve a lot of credit.
On my machine, the nv drivers 2d performance is better than nvidia by a factor of 10, at least. It was pretty suprising.
You're being karma-whacked for being stupid, not for being unpopular (is stupidity unpopular?). It's a documented fact that he said it. If you wanted to clarify the issue and perhaps cut down on some of the knee-jerking that sort of statement tends to make, do that instead of making single line, incorrect, trollish posts.
That said, while most of the problems with Diebold software can easily be explained by total incompetence and lack of regard for the importance of correct behavior (as opposed to the appearance of correct behavior), some thing are very hard to see as anything except a deliberate creation of a way to manipulate votes.
Congressmen(people?) have admitted it in other forums as well. But it shouldn't matter. Are you claiming that Moore falsified those interviews? Cause thats a pretty serious alegation, far more serious than creative editing or bias. You're going to need a lot more than a bitchy website for that one.
I'm not a liinguistics scholar or an expert on military history, but I'm guessing the history of "mama san" is something like this: "Mama" is derisive/insulting slang for a woman in the US ("Hey, hot momma!", etc). Many US soldiers came to Vietnam by way of Okinawa (There was, and is, a major US military base there and it was used for staging deployment into Vietnam). In Okinawa, the local Japanese would address soldiers with respect "-san", and the solders would associate that with asian people. Add a dash of "all them squinty eyes look the same to me", and you get mama san.
Thats not how win2k did it's shadows. Win2k had (and was the first Windows to have) support for real alpha transparency. The only places the OS uses it is the dropshadow on the cursor and for the menu fade in effects, but it's available to any window and is trivial to implement.
A guy I know who lives in Florida and hosts out of his house was down for a week during the last hurricane. This time, he arranged for backups at 2 remote locations (one in Europe, one in Canada), archived everything to DVD-R, and got a generator to provide the time to do everything once the power goes out. Think everything is going to be just fine this time ;)
I think you're a little confused. In the natural state, there's no such thing as IP or copyright. There's no protection whatsoever. The only way you can keep someone from using your work is not to give to them. This leads to people not being willing to distribute works at all, or to do so only under very limited circumstances. However, society has a lot to gain from the dissemination of art - contrary to the increasingly popular capitalist viewpoint, people are about more than simply subsisting while producing capital. Therefore, in the interest of serving the public interest (not the public _need_ - a healthy society and a healthy person is based on a lot more than food, air, and water), we have IP law with provides you with certain protections _in return_ for publishing your work where other people can see it. The important part of copyright is not the protection it grants, it's the reason for those protections. There's no such thing as "artists rights". If someone wants his works to be copyrighted for eternity, he can fuck the hell off. He doesn't need to be part of our society. He's getting a certain amount of consideration from society in return for his being willing to publish his works and allow others to build off of them. The gimme gimme grabby attitude of the big copyright holders is sickening and downright immoral. It's given us total crap like "subconcious infringment".
Maybe if they just copied from MS to replace the parts of Gnome that totally fucking suck. Like the file selector. And the color selector (to a lesser degreee). And the file browser. Other than those things, I pretty much like Gnome. I prefer to have my OK/Cancel buttons in the opposite order, cause I have years of muscle memory pushing me in that direction, but I manage. But the file selector is so the worst thing I've ever seen (and HOW many fucking years has it been bad?), and nautilus is the crappiest file browser around. I'm not just talking about the stupid "spatial metaphor", either.
There's minor differences because of things like padding. That's not whats happening here - there are (or so I gather from the mirrored posts available) patches and modifications to the xchat source to allow compilation under windows. Certainly the 30 day timer is a modification.
The win32 binary you can download is NOT reproducible from the source download. IE, he's providing a binary from his own, modified, private sources. That's a GPL violation.