In actual fact, if SCO hadn't taken the hardline stance, there probably wouldn't have been any trouble - they'd have said what the code was, it would have been removed, there would have been a communal effort to track down how it happened - there's many ways to resolve these issues without taking the hardline stance. As it happens, though, the hardline stance IS the law. The gist of this argument is about whether or not it's fair, and I think it certainly is - SCO is claiming to have known about the code for YEARS. That's simply unacceptable, in my opinion.
Unless Hormel starts marketing either email filters or bulk email software, I don't see how it's an issue. Trademarks only cover things withing a specific trade.
In simple words? Yes. If said company is dependent on selling both the proprietary code and the GPL code. If you totally depend on one product for your existence, and someone steals it, you may very well go out of business. This is a common tactic used by people suing small companies.
Remeber that this would have to be a) code that the company is totally reliant on for buisness b) code usefull enough that it can be integrated into a GPL product c) the company is ALSO totally reliant on selling this GPL product and d) the code is fundamental enough that, once inserted into the GPL product it can't be removed.
I daresay you can't come up with a any reasonable scenario that covers all those situations. The SCO case doesn't, by the way.
They should stop selling the software because they're attempting to exert IP rights to it in violation of that license. There's no wiggle room here - if they know that there's code that shouldn't be under the GPL, then they need to remove that code from the GPLed code before distributing. If that code is inherent to the GPLed code and can't be trivially removed, then they've got a serious problem, need to contact the developers and other owners of the GPLed code and start working things out. Simply ignoring the license on all the other code that doesn't belong to them and continuing to resell it is immoral and probably illegal.
"Take back the accidental GPLing" is a ridiculous phrase. You can't accidently GPL something, and if you did you couldn't take it back. If someone stole code from you, and GPLed it without the right to do so, then you have a case - that's not an accidental GPLing, that's IP theft (or piracy or whatever) by whoever did it.
And what makes this especially dicey is the fact that software world lives in a derived world. Remember when using API's you are creating a derivative piece of work from a legal point of view.
I'd be astonished if a German court actually decided this. It'd mean that whoever owned an operating system also owned rights to all software developed for it - basically SCO's case (heh!). It'd be the death of the software industry in Germany, and probably of IT development in general.
You'd have a hard time convincing a court that it's due dilligence to do a software audit before compiling and installing it - particularly if installing with the developer-provided makefiles. If you distribute binaries, I don't see how you'd have any case at all.
You'd probably have a hard time convincing them that backuping up your hard drive was due dilligence, either - in any case, I've never seen installation instructions for an open source program that told you to do either of those things. In fact, I can't think of a closed-source program that does either. (I'm not counting operating systems as programs in this context). Usage instructions for partitioning software generally say you should back things up (as they should).
I'd be willing to be almost any amount of money that you aren't intimately familiar with the source code for any reasonable amount of the software that you personally use. In fact, I doubt that you've even read all of it - it'd take years for a system of any reasonable size. To expect every user of open source software to do that is ridiculous.
Data aware table support, that fully exploits the W3C HTML spec - have to be toggleable of course, on a per table basis. This would let you use rich grid controls to view tables of data instead of requiring the designer to resort to silly DHTML/CSS/JavaScript tricks to emulate this.
Greater awareness of page data in general - type ahead link selection is great, but something like a drop down nav box with all the links on the page would be nice.
Better back/forward history, as the parent mentioned.
Granular control of page sections - basically, expose the DOM to the end user. If I want to collapse a section, I should be able to do that on my end without the web designer needing to provide a JavaScript interface for me.
Yes, I know I could implement all this stuff in Mozilla. Some of it probably even has been. I could even implement it pretty easily in IE (IE exposes alot more functionality that people usually think it does, you just have to know how to look). But I don't have the time. Let someone who's job it is to work on browsers do it.
The alpha channel in Win2k is accellerated (use it on hardware with hardware transparency, and then on hardware with it and see the difference in performance, especially resizing), but Quartz Extreme is a whole other deal - the desktop is rendered as an OpenGL scene. Thats why doing stuff like scaling the whole desktop is easy (although you can do something like that pretty simply in Windows, too). Longhorn supposedly renders the desktop using DirectX in a similiar manner.
This is not true. Copyright law makes specific exemption for copying neccesary for functionality - which includes copying to the hard drive for installation and copies in memory for using. It also makes specific exemption for backups. This is because copyright is supposed to keep you from benefiting at the expense of the original owner by distributing copies, not to keep you from doing whatever you want in the privacy of your own home.
If he'd had 5 figures of medical bills for the skin grafts needed to reconstruct his genitals from the third degree burns inflicted on them, they might have. Especially if it was a male jury. The McDonalds case is hardly as open and shut as people like to make it out to be.
I still think this is bullhooey. At least one court case has agreed with me, too - the software is not presented as a license, it's presented as a sale. There's no signature and no consideration involved. The license on the box doesn't present the full terms and conditions ("You agree to something arbitrary that you don't have access to" can hardly be considered a meaningful description of the terms). If the EULA was presented at the register and you signed for it then, that would be a different story.
Stuff you download where the license terms are presented up front also has a lot more validity in my eyes (although, again, I question the power of companies to enforce these terms).
As for the DMCA, it's not illegal to crack your own stuff, only to provide tools or information to allow other people to crack it (this is a nod to fair use). I can't see any reason why a court would consider you bound to terms that you didn't even implicitly agree too, especially when there's no legal obligation for you to agree to those terms.
I know you're just being trollish and scathing, but "I didn't want to pay for it, so I made it myself" is an excellent attitude for someone to have. IMO, anyway.
Thats funny, because it's not consistent with my experience - after installing Windows, it wants to run Windows Update to get new software, etc. After installing, Redhat (8, last one I installed. I downloaded the 9 CDs 6 times from 4 different mirrors and got a corrupt image every time. Stupid Redhat) wants to run up2date after an install. Granted, this wasn't the server version...
I was at the Windows 2003 launch in NY, and the dude giving the presentation touched briefly on Linux (it was very interesting, actually - he certainly didn't dwell on it, was basically dismissive). They did show some benchmarks (against Redhat 5, oddly enough) but the impression given was that they aren't interested in competing in a pure performance arena. He was hyping Windows 2003 as an end-to-end solution, because of all the bundled middleware and groupware and whatnot. And lets be honest, if thats what you want, Linux isn't going to provide it - certainly not out of the box.
It's perfectly accessible to average Joe - maybe not Joe's grandma, though. Power settings. If you're on a laptop (where it's more common to want to do this) you can access it via the battery icon in the systray.
On the other hand, there's been alot of training and design effort to keep people from using the power button on thier PC to turn them off - you're suppose to use shut down. And if you do THAT, the hibernate/suspend/etc are right there in front of you.
In any case, the main reason computers don't work like this is a technology issue, not a UI issue, as the grandparent mentioned.
It's actually.... 3. One for each product. (Well, okay. Newest version of VS is more than 1 CD, but you can use just 1 if you don't want to install the MSDN collection)
I've seen them, although I can't provide any refrences (I'm lazy). Part of the technique is that cents are often written smaller than the "Dollar" price. One of the people I knew in school habitually referred to stuff by the dollar amount - if it was 1.49, she'd say it cost a dollar. Drove me nuts.
The OP is a doofus, but there is a specific, reasonable meaning for the "Microsoft Tax". It's nonsesical applied to Apple. The "Microsoft Tax" is the additional cost to ALL computers from an OEM, because MS licensing requires them to pay for an OEM version of Windows for every machine shipped, not just the ones actually sold. This means that even an empty machine from one of the OEMs with this kind of licensing (every major one, at least at the time people started using this term) has it's price increased by the cost (to them) of an OEM Windows license. That's the Microsoft Tax.
See, I think that falls down. If someone sells you a box, and that box has a copy of Harry Potter in it, you get to keep the book. The burden of making sure that you're selling what you think you're selling is on the distributor. Likewise, if you order a book from Amazon, and they send you 2 copies (but bill you for one), you get to keep the extra copy. You don't need a license to read a book, so your example falls down there, too.
Now, you can certainly make the claim that the work required to authenticate all the code in the Linux codebase is massive and that due dilligence doesn't require auditing everything - that'd be something for a court to decide, obviously - but you've got NO excuse for knowing infringment. If the Caldera linux distro that they are continuing to distribute and sell has any of the code they claim to own in it, then they've release that code under the GPL. Period. There's wiggle room with supporting previous releases. There's even wiggle room with the amount of time before they took the freely available images off thier website. But there certainly is no wiggle room with the continued distribution of Caldera Linux - the GPL is very clear. Any code you release under the GPL must either be clear of IP claims, or you must offer a license freely to anyone who recieves the code, under terms no more restrictive than the GPL itself. Period.
Re:Predictive Compiling
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 2, Informative
MSVC doesn't do predictive compilation. I understand there's some third party tools you can use to fake it. Edit/Continue debugging is something else.
Slashdot Mirror
In actual fact, if SCO hadn't taken the hardline stance, there probably wouldn't have been any trouble - they'd have said what the code was, it would have been removed, there would have been a communal effort to track down how it happened - there's many ways to resolve these issues without taking the hardline stance. As it happens, though, the hardline stance IS the law. The gist of this argument is about whether or not it's fair, and I think it certainly is - SCO is claiming to have known about the code for YEARS. That's simply unacceptable, in my opinion.
Unless Hormel starts marketing either email filters or bulk email software, I don't see how it's an issue. Trademarks only cover things withing a specific trade.
Remeber that this would have to be a) code that the company is totally reliant on for buisness b) code usefull enough that it can be integrated into a GPL product c) the company is ALSO totally reliant on selling this GPL product and d) the code is fundamental enough that, once inserted into the GPL product it can't be removed.
I daresay you can't come up with a any reasonable scenario that covers all those situations. The SCO case doesn't, by the way.
"Take back the accidental GPLing" is a ridiculous phrase. You can't accidently GPL something, and if you did you couldn't take it back. If someone stole code from you, and GPLed it without the right to do so, then you have a case - that's not an accidental GPLing, that's IP theft (or piracy or whatever) by whoever did it.
I'd be astonished if a German court actually decided this. It'd mean that whoever owned an operating system also owned rights to all software developed for it - basically SCO's case (heh!). It'd be the death of the software industry in Germany, and probably of IT development in general.
You'd probably have a hard time convincing them that backuping up your hard drive was due dilligence, either - in any case, I've never seen installation instructions for an open source program that told you to do either of those things. In fact, I can't think of a closed-source program that does either. (I'm not counting operating systems as programs in this context). Usage instructions for partitioning software generally say you should back things up (as they should).
I'd be willing to be almost any amount of money that you aren't intimately familiar with the source code for any reasonable amount of the software that you personally use. In fact, I doubt that you've even read all of it - it'd take years for a system of any reasonable size. To expect every user of open source software to do that is ridiculous.
Data aware table support, that fully exploits the W3C HTML spec - have to be toggleable of course, on a per table basis. This would let you use rich grid controls to view tables of data instead of requiring the designer to resort to silly DHTML/CSS/JavaScript tricks to emulate this.
Greater awareness of page data in general - type ahead link selection is great, but something like a drop down nav box with all the links on the page would be nice.
Better back/forward history, as the parent mentioned.
Granular control of page sections - basically, expose the DOM to the end user. If I want to collapse a section, I should be able to do that on my end without the web designer needing to provide a JavaScript interface for me.
Yes, I know I could implement all this stuff in Mozilla. Some of it probably even has been. I could even implement it pretty easily in IE (IE exposes alot more functionality that people usually think it does, you just have to know how to look). But I don't have the time. Let someone who's job it is to work on browsers do it.
The alpha channel in Win2k is accellerated (use it on hardware with hardware transparency, and then on hardware with it and see the difference in performance, especially resizing), but Quartz Extreme is a whole other deal - the desktop is rendered as an OpenGL scene. Thats why doing stuff like scaling the whole desktop is easy (although you can do something like that pretty simply in Windows, too). Longhorn supposedly renders the desktop using DirectX in a similiar manner.
This is not true. Copyright law makes specific exemption for copying neccesary for functionality - which includes copying to the hard drive for installation and copies in memory for using. It also makes specific exemption for backups. This is because copyright is supposed to keep you from benefiting at the expense of the original owner by distributing copies, not to keep you from doing whatever you want in the privacy of your own home.
If he'd had 5 figures of medical bills for the skin grafts needed to reconstruct his genitals from the third degree burns inflicted on them, they might have. Especially if it was a male jury. The McDonalds case is hardly as open and shut as people like to make it out to be.
Stuff you download where the license terms are presented up front also has a lot more validity in my eyes (although, again, I question the power of companies to enforce these terms). As for the DMCA, it's not illegal to crack your own stuff, only to provide tools or information to allow other people to crack it (this is a nod to fair use). I can't see any reason why a court would consider you bound to terms that you didn't even implicitly agree too, especially when there's no legal obligation for you to agree to those terms.
The GNU coding guidelines actually state that you should actively try to code differently than any source code you're referring from.
Maybe it's because that's a BSD style license rather than a GPL style one. I dunno.
I know you're just being trollish and scathing, but "I didn't want to pay for it, so I made it myself" is an excellent attitude for someone to have. IMO, anyway.
Thats funny, because it's not consistent with my experience - after installing Windows, it wants to run Windows Update to get new software, etc. After installing, Redhat (8, last one I installed. I downloaded the 9 CDs 6 times from 4 different mirrors and got a corrupt image every time. Stupid Redhat) wants to run up2date after an install. Granted, this wasn't the server version...
I was at the Windows 2003 launch in NY, and the dude giving the presentation touched briefly on Linux (it was very interesting, actually - he certainly didn't dwell on it, was basically dismissive). They did show some benchmarks (against Redhat 5, oddly enough) but the impression given was that they aren't interested in competing in a pure performance arena. He was hyping Windows 2003 as an end-to-end solution, because of all the bundled middleware and groupware and whatnot. And lets be honest, if thats what you want, Linux isn't going to provide it - certainly not out of the box.
On the other hand, there's been alot of training and design effort to keep people from using the power button on thier PC to turn them off - you're suppose to use shut down. And if you do THAT, the hibernate/suspend/etc are right there in front of you.
In any case, the main reason computers don't work like this is a technology issue, not a UI issue, as the grandparent mentioned.
It's actually.... 3. One for each product. (Well, okay. Newest version of VS is more than 1 CD, but you can use just 1 if you don't want to install the MSDN collection)
The Activestate Perl IDE supposedly has a step through regexp debugger. Someday I'm going to have to get that thing.
Perl-style regexps tend to be used on things that post-date perl. Things that pre-date perl obviously do not use perl-style regexps.
I've seen them, although I can't provide any refrences (I'm lazy). Part of the technique is that cents are often written smaller than the "Dollar" price. One of the people I knew in school habitually referred to stuff by the dollar amount - if it was 1.49, she'd say it cost a dollar. Drove me nuts.
The OP is a doofus, but there is a specific, reasonable meaning for the "Microsoft Tax". It's nonsesical applied to Apple. The "Microsoft Tax" is the additional cost to ALL computers from an OEM, because MS licensing requires them to pay for an OEM version of Windows for every machine shipped, not just the ones actually sold. This means that even an empty machine from one of the OEMs with this kind of licensing (every major one, at least at the time people started using this term) has it's price increased by the cost (to them) of an OEM Windows license. That's the Microsoft Tax.
Now, you can certainly make the claim that the work required to authenticate all the code in the Linux codebase is massive and that due dilligence doesn't require auditing everything - that'd be something for a court to decide, obviously - but you've got NO excuse for knowing infringment. If the Caldera linux distro that they are continuing to distribute and sell has any of the code they claim to own in it, then they've release that code under the GPL. Period. There's wiggle room with supporting previous releases. There's even wiggle room with the amount of time before they took the freely available images off thier website. But there certainly is no wiggle room with the continued distribution of Caldera Linux - the GPL is very clear. Any code you release under the GPL must either be clear of IP claims, or you must offer a license freely to anyone who recieves the code, under terms no more restrictive than the GPL itself. Period.
MSVC doesn't do predictive compilation. I understand there's some third party tools you can use to fake it. Edit/Continue debugging is something else.
It's good to know that facism hasn't totally gone out of style. Go back to social studies and learn what governments are supposed to be for.