Ximian is asking you to pay $119.40 per year for software that is functionally on par with Microsoft Windows. I wouldn't pay $120 per year for Windows, and I'm not going to pay $120 for Ximian GNOME, either.
Even if you buy every release of Red Hat Linux, it won't cost you $120 per year. And that's an entire operating system (with GNOME included!), not just a pretty GUI.
Remember, folks, it's still legal to mirror this stuff. It's all GPL.
--Patrick, who will continue paying $0 per year for software
lets say your car is stolen and your phone with the GPS system is in the car. If the GPS is enabled at all times you could theoreticly goto your service provider or the police and they could pin-point the location of your stolen vechical.
Point 1: OnStar already does this and is quickly becoming standard in GM vehicles. The Pontiac Montana minivan even has TV ads trumpeting this feature. No, GM doesn't admit that the same feature allows them to track your location (and speed!) at all times.
Point 2: It would be possible for your phone to send encrypted packets containing its location. Those packets can only be encrypted by some key that only the customer holds. Voila, stolen phone/car recovery without the tracking bugaboo. And, yes, cell phones already have encryption chips.
When you are in an emergency, I'm sure the last thing you want to do is to forget to turn on the GPS(or if it's done automatically, wait for it to pinpoint your location)
How about a setting that runs GPS at all times, but only shares the location with the phone company during 911 calls? Yes, this is possible, as GPS is entirely local, and the phone company doesn't get your location unless your phone specifically sends it.
A complaint I haven't seen yet: the GPS antenna and circuitry suck down a substantial amount of battery power if they're figuring your location constantly. They're also not all that cheap. I certainly would like to see non-E911 phones remain available.
The most recent citation is May of 1997. The title itself refers to "the next millennium" -- even Microsoft isn't so arrogant as to think they can make predictions 1,000 years out.
I think I actually read parts of that article four years ago when I was considering interning in the Systems/Networking group at MSR. Mumble mumble 2001 copyright date mumble.
Monopolies topple themselves eventually, and Microsoft is well on its way.
I seem to recall Eric Raymond predicting that Microsoft would be "relegated to irrelevance within 18 months" about 3 years ago, using many of the same points you do. The reports of Microsoft's death have always been a bit exaggerated.
Microsoft is a heavily diversified company. If they lose one battle -- say, PDAs -- they can easily fall back on the OS, applications, games, the X-box, Ultimate TV, MSN, Hotmail, etc., etc. They sell software, hardware, and Internet services. Most of their divisions turn a profit independently.
In spite of the old "competing against itself" saw, Microsoft has sold something like eight major versions of Office, six major versions of Windows, and three (arguably four) major versions of NT. Companies do buy upgrades eventually.
And what of free software? It has taken a second-place position in the server market and a second-place position in the desktop market. I'm not holding my breath for it to overtake Microsoft in either arena.
Since Be was crushed in large part due to Microsoft's unethical business practices, that's $360 million dollars in damages right there--or a third of a billion.
Ouch! That's fully one percent of the cash Microsoft has sitting, gathering mold in its bank accounts.:)
And, of course, that assumes that anyone could prove that Be really was worth $120 million. Apple probably offered to buy with stock. At the height of the "irrational exuberance." On the notion that someday Be might make money -- an unproven concept at best. I believe it would be hard to prove, even to the "preponderance of the evidence" required for a civil suit, that Be was worth anywhere near what you claim.
But your points are well taken. The remedies the government has suggested so far are peanuts compared with what essentially every consumer software company in the US could be asking for.
But this is a false premise. Perhaps we should instead ask what would happen if the law that already exists which make proprietary licenses possible did not exist.
Proprietary licenses can exist in the absence of copyright law. Forget copyright law for a moment -- yeah, yeah, everyone at Slashdot hates it. Even me.
In a Libertarian society, you have a right to make any commercial transaction you want, so long as it does not infringe by coercion the rights of others. I could offer you a product in exchange for your promise to waive your right to free speech for a year. You can take or leave the deal, and the government will enforce it as a matter of contract law. I have no right to coerce you into taking the deal, but once you take it, I have every right to see that you stick by it. Rights-abridging agreements, from NDAs and non-compete clauses to software licenses, are just legal contracts that you can choose not to sign if you like.
Its like arguing that because I do not kill people, the murder laws do not apply to me.
Entirely different. First of all, murder laws exist because my right to life is much more important than your right (as it were) to murder me. So a murder law actually is a law: the government protects my fundamental right to life by threatening force upon you if you kill me. Software licenses are contract, not law. The only law here is the enforcement of contracts. Even Libertarians recognize the need for contracts.
"A Libertarian society lets you trade life, liberty, or property however you like."
Well this is all very well but all of those three things are words like freedom open to interpretation.
Even if I'd said that Libertarianism lets you trade flugnuts, mumblewarts, and cheeticks, the point would be the same. You may have a fundamental right to your mumblewarts, but you also have the right to waive that right in a contract. If you waive that right, then contract law -- not copyright law -- dictates what you may and may not do.
Proprietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage".
Not at all. You have the right to not use the software, in which case its author has no state-enforced rights over you. Consider a software vendor who offers you this: "I will give you this software if you will give me your first-born child." You have every right to decline; his offer has not decreased your flerbage in any way (unless you're foolish enough to accept it). Similarly, if he offers: "I will give you this software if you give up your right to make copies of it," you have the freedom to accept or decline. If you decline, it's a noop -- you don't get the software, and you don't give up any of your freedoms.
A Libertarian society lets you trade life, liberty, or property however you like. It just doesn't give anyone (including the government) the right to take them away by coercion.
Copyright is nothing but a government granted monopoly.
Check Eric's essay again. He doesn't use the word "copyright" once. What he suggests is a license. Eric's words:
I write proprietary software to have fun and make money. Part of my flerbage is that I can offer people a license that says "I trade you my software on the condition that you (a) pay me some money, and (b) don't give a copy to anyone else."
What he's suggesting is a contract, allowing the user to use some software in trade for money and a promise not to give the software to anyone else. Contracts are allowed under Libertarianism, right? I have the freedom to give away whatever freedoms I choose to give away.
Shipping and aviation regulations are imposed at a country's physical
borders. They affect only the individuals and businesses who wish to
interact with the country itself.
What France is trying to do to Yahoo, in contrast, will have a globally
chilling effect. France is trying to shut down Yahoo's auctions of
Nazi-related collectables not at French borders, but on servers thousands
of miles away, intended for non-French audiences. If they succeed, Yahoo
will no longer be able to offer these auctions anywhere.
French laws concerning shipping don't affect what goods I can
manufacture in the U.S. unless I try to ship those goods into France. By
the same token, French censorship of the Internet shouldn't affect what
content I can produce in the U.S. Censored content should be stopped at
French borders, not at the source.
To be fair: the U.S. is no better. Our DMCA gets Norwegians and Russians
arrested. Our Carnivore will intercept e-mails well beyond our borders.
Our patent laws affect software authors and distributors world-wide. The
U.S. (and California in particular, it seems) has a rather elastic sense
of its jurisdiction, too.
A country's right to exert control over the Internet ends at the country's
borders.
Microsoft has major customers including banks and other data farms which use Samba across their worldwide networks.
If Microsoft makes NT6 incompatible with Samba, these customers get to choose to stop using NT or stop using Samba. Microsoft is probably safe in betting that they'll stop using Samba -- which means more, not fewer, licenses sold. Microsoft's history is one of gratuitous incompatibilities and product lock-ins. With Media Player, they've added patent intimidation to their arsenal. Using patents to lock Samba out of NT6 networks would be nothing unexpected.
We must remember though that the whole world is not kept under US law
Samba would lose its U.S. developers, its U.S. distribution channels (everyone from RedHat to SGI), and its air of legitimacy among U.S. businesses. The same "major customers" that use large networks with both NT and Samba will be very wary of using any software that violates patents and cannot be written or supported within U.S. borders. Microsoft could make Samba as much of a battleground as DeCSS has been.
Next time they will think before starting a script with #!/bin/bash.
Picky point, but let's chalk it up under "educating other developers..."
Starting a script with #!/bin/bash is the right thing to do, if you've (for whatever reason) used bash-specific constructs in your script. What's wrong is starting it with #!/bin/sh so that it fails halfway through running with a page of syntax errors.
Since autoconf puts in the #!/bin/sh line for you don't use bashisms in your configure.in. Please. Learn what's a bashism and what's not.
I might even go so far as to suggest that cross-platform developers install a lighter shell as/bin/sh (ash, for example). The key thing is that it's sh-compliant but not bash. Then see how many configure scripts break. In a build of GNOME 1.4, I think it's at least 4.
(I'd also -- happily! -- settle for all the commercial Unixes making bash their default. Total cost: $0. Value to advanced users: priceless. Sun, are you listening?)
--Patrick, also frustrated by how much babysitting building GNOME under Solaris requires
McNealy says some disingenuous things and some wrong things, glossing over points left and right to make his flimsy argument.
Any company that doesn't properly safeguard people's personal information will suffer the same fate as a bank that doesn't safeguard people's money.
Safeguarding money is the primary thing you expect a bank to do, so your decision of a bank will be based on its ability to keep your money safe for you. Privacy is rarely one's primary concern in picking a company. Most people will pick a privacy-violating company to save a couple of bucks, to the point that companies with fair privacy policies will be playing at a disadvantage.
Take medical records. If you're in an accident, do you want an ambulance driver to be able to access your medical records online? I think you do.
Yes. That does not imply that I want my medical records on the public Internet. Here's a better idea: carry your medical history around on a (possibly electronic) tag, physically on your body. If you're in a wreck, the ambulance driver can scan the tag to find your medications, allergies, etc., but no cracker or spammer can steal or buy your information without physically approaching you.
Even if I did want my medical records on the Internet, that doesn't mean I want my buying habits, my physical location, and my web-browsing preferences tracked, too.
One of the chief benefits, to use a more routine example, is personalized service. In exchange for a little information, you can get an online experience that's more in tune with your interests and needs.
Keep it optional, and only collect the information you need. Merchant sites shouldn't need me to establish an account and shouldn't remember my address and credit card number unless I ask them to. A portal site doesn't need your e-mail address or a clicktrail just to display a stock quote or a weather map. Many people are willing to trade convenience for privacy -- just because McNealy isn't doesn't mean the entire industry should follow his suggestions.
I have agreed to let my car company, for instance, track my every move through GPS satellites.
GPS is a lovely system in that only you know your location. OnStar (or whatever similar system) only reveals your location through its cellular-network connection. GPS itself is excellent from a privacy standpoint.
I find it comforting to know that, should my air bag deploy, they know where I am and can send help.
Obviously, you should only have to reveal your location if your air bag deploys. Unless you crash or specifically ask for directions, your car manufacturer has no reason and no right to know your location.
Someday soon you could find yourself in a strange city and your Web-enabled wireless phone will be able to recommend a nearby restaurant based on your fondness for French, Italian or Mexican cuisine
Slow down, cowboy. I'd rather not share my food-purchasing habits with just anyone within cell-phone range, just so that restaurants who want my business can spam me with "click here to make a reservation" ads. The right way to do this is to have my GPS-enabled phone do a search for "Mexican restaurant Boston" when you tell it to. I don't want every Mexican restaurant in Boston to start sending me pitches as soon as I get off the plane.
To put this in context: lots of people seem to think I'm interested in pyramid schemes, weight-loss programs, pornography, and laser printer supplies, at least judging by the contents of my e-mail inbox. Merchants are not very discerning about who they think will be interested in their ads.
Letting restaurants send my ads through my cell phone primarily benefits one entity: my cell phone provider. You can be sure that they'll charge a healthy fee per ad forwarded, even though it costs them essentially nothing. Your location is valuable information, and your cell phone provider has no right to discern it (let alone sell it!) without your permission.
most people would gladly reveal their personal preferences, as long as they feel certain the information won't be misused.
Do you suppose Scott has actually gone out and surveyed people, or do you think he's just speaking for himself? Again, I don't want Scott's windbag opinions dictating the service that companies offer me. Also: how does Scott propose to guarantee that information won't be misused? Companies violate (and change) privacy policies all the time. Companies' credit-card databases get broken into. Does Scott have a magic bullet to fix these problems, or is he just dismissing them as irrelevant? I'm in no way "certain" that my private information is being safeguarded.
So far the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself.
Bull. Amazon changed its privacy policy without letting people opt out. eToys sold its customer list to the highest bidder. One company I deal with told me that they "do not, ever, sell customer lists to third parties except when it's legal to do so." Cute. When money talks, privacy walks.
Most companies now post formal privacy policies on their Web sites
Ten pages of dense legalese isn't very helpful. Privacy policies are rarely customizable in any meaningful way. I'd take a lower interest rate on my bank account in trade for the assurance that my banker isn't selling my banking habits to any credit merchant who asks, but I don't have that option. Posting a "we can screw you, here's how" policy isn't much help, even assuming that the company actually follows it and has no security breaches.
allow visitors to have a say in how information about them is used.
Is he talking about the "don't send me junk mail" opt-out check boxes, or about the not-yet-implemented P3P? Either way, it's a token gesture.
Maybe some enterprising magazine will start publishing an annual list of the companies with the best policies and practices. The Privacy 500,
perhaps.
Consumer Reports has started writing about privacy, and from their stories, the picture looks bleak. They've concluded that the best option is to complain publicly and lobby for legislation. Informing consumers isn't enough, because there aren't meaningful privacy options availble.
Ugly privacy policies I can't change, just off the top of my head: my grocery store tracks my purchases so that they can design store layout and coupons to compel me to buy more. My phone company tracks my calling habits to pitch long distance plans that I don't want. (And they typically call at 8:30AM with such pitches.) My credit cards all track my purchases and sell the information to merchants. My bank sells information about my mortgage so that third parties can try to sell me insurance. Many of the web sites I visit track my click-trails to find ways to manipulate me into spending more time at their site. Many web merchants that I buy from insist that establish an account before I can buy anything, and a few even remember my credit card even once the transaction is over. I'm currently healty, but once I have a medical record worth selling, I'm sure my health insurer will find someone to sell it to.
I should have the right to demand that information about me be protected while it's needed, destroyed when it's no longer needed, and never sold to third parties, ever.
Linux comes bundled with far more than Windows does: word processors, browsers, music software, e-mail software, encryption programs, and on and on. Timothy suggests that this is okay because
but then, they're independently written and optional.
In the eyes of the law anyway, the reason Linux's bundling is legal is that neither Linux nor any distribution is a monopoly. The finding that Microsoft broke antitrust law by bundling IE depends on the notion that Microsoft is a monopoly -- they spent far more energy fighting the monopoly claim than they did fighting the bundling claim.
From a moral point of view, perhaps the most relevant reason that bundling in Linux is not predatorial is that most distributions bundle several of everything. Pick one or more from each category: Netscape/Mozilla/Lynx/w3m, pine/elm/mutt, KDE/GNOME/fvwm, Freeamp/amp/xmms, and so on.
You could even package a script with libfaim that goes out and downloads AIM.EXE from wherever AOL makes it available to the general public. Then you reduce the burden on the user, and you reduce the likelihood of people providing differing versions of AIM.EXE.
4.) add support for a server that you request bytes of aim.exe from
Don't send the bytes. That's probably illegal. Send the hash. The server could hash the entire AIM binary several times per second. Plus, you can cache whatever AOL is asking for this week, which eliminates nearly all of the hashing load.
The real problems with that are the network bandwidth you'd have to provide and the potential privacy issues involved in having every libfaim-linked binary "phone home" to your server.
too many possibilities you'd need more memory than there are atoms, unless i'm severely overestimating how many possible chunks of n bytes there are in aim.exe. Isn't it actually at least (the file size)! factorial, since they can start anywhere and go for any length?
Fuzzy math.:) The memory required would be 8n(n-1), where n is the file size in bytes. There are n 1-byte strings, n-1 2-byte strings,..., 1 n byte string. Thus there are n(n-1)/2 different contiguous strings available. Each sum costs 16 bytes, thus 8n(n-1) bytes total cost. It's high (1-10TB), but not nearly so large as you suggest.
It can be performed at somewhere between 20 and 40 megabytes per second on 16 byte strings
Far faster than the proposed server's network connection -- MD5ing on the fly isn't the bottleneck.
said something to the effect that copylefting software (GNU, open-source, GPL, Free Software, you know the deal) is harmful.
He said:
Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer.... I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.... I'm an American, I believe in the American Way. I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat.
In later clarifications, he claimed that he really only meant the GPL, and really only in the context of tax-supported, government-developed software. In other words, tax-paying American companies should be allowed to release proprietary versions of any software developed with tax money.
As a parting off-topic shot: Microsoft pays no taxes, so Allchin's claim that tax-paying companies should be allowed to co-op taxpayer-funded code doesn't apply to Microsoft anyway. Put that in your tax-loophole pipe and smoke it.
How about populist, then? Whether relaxing copyright restrictions or padding SW VA education and health care budgets, you have to admit (whether or not you agree with how he does it!) Boucher is looking out for actual humans in his district.
"Progressive" is just as vague a term as "conservative," you're right. Neither title alone tells you much about what its proponents stand for.
If they'd just leave us alone, we'll figure it out ourselves, and without all the hassle.
I wish I could believe that. But this probably isn't the place for a debate on Libertarianism.:)
I'm sorry you're in Helm's land, but I've got you beat -- I'm in MS, so I have to claim Trent Lott and Thad Cochran.
It's a toss-up. I'm looking forward to voting against Helms next November.:)
Read it again -- I was saying that I had not heard anybody except 10 Amendment nuts (I mean that in a nice way) saying that the Federal Congress had no business making any such laws.
You're right, of course, about what you said. My brain flipped a negation in there somewhere. I'd still argue that Congress's lack of a right to pass the DMCA stems from the first amendment (it abridges freedom of speech).
The best thing is for the DMCA to be tested by the courts, and for them to strike the law down.
Any successful challenge to the DMCA will have to go all the way to the Supreme Court -- the monied interests who got it passed in the first place can hire enough lawyers to see to that. For a case to get to the Supreme Court, a brave, wealthy, and lucky defendant must work his way through at least three appeals. 2600 is doing this now, and it's proving to be both draining and expensive. Overturning a law in the courts is not easy, quick, or cheap.
The way checks and balances work is that Congress can pass any damn fool law they want, but the courts run clean-up behind them.
Unfortunately, the courts can only strike down unconstitutional laws, not foolish ones. Congress passes stupid laws all the time that don't get challenged in the courts, or don't get overturned because they're not strictly unconstitutional.
IIRC, Judge Kaplan ruled against 2600 not because he agreed with the DMCA but because he didn't think he had constitutional grounds to overturn it.
Amending and repealing laws is as effective as, and less contentious than, overturning them in a court.
If Boucher wants to fix it, he needs to work to repeal the law altogether
He's up against a lot of opposition even amending it. The DMCA passed by an overwhelming (if off-the-record!) vote, and I don't think many in congress yet see problems with it. Repealing it isn't possible, at least for now. Perfection is the enemy of the merely good -- settle for good, because perfection ain't going to happen.
the prole-feed he's feeding us
Given how few of us are empowered or constituents, I don't think he has that much call to pander here. It's not as if he's giving a political rally in his home district and bragging about pork construction projects he has sent his constituents' way.
Boucher's legislative record on his own site: tobacco giveaways, fiddling with bankruptcy laws, health insurace giveaways to children, prescription medicine for seniors, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Ah, and therein lies one of the major problems with representative democracy: you have to take the bad with the good. There's a good chance that any challenger southwest Virginia can produce would be just as bad on tobacco and pork-politics issues without the progressive views on Internet and copyright law. Boucher is, on some issues, a much-needed voice of reason. Give him credit for that.
I'm very difficult to please, I guess, but I'm not impressed.
I am. Given the parade of conservatives and idiots that Virginians have elected in the last decade, Boucher is impressively progressive. Besides, as a North Carolinian, I get to measure him against Jesse Helms. Anyone, compared to Helms, looks enlightened and progressive.;)
the DMCA and UCITA -- Congress passed these abortions
Congress didn't pass UCITA. UCITA has been presented to state legislatures, and two of them -- Virginia and Maryland -- have passed it. As awful as UCITA is, states are almost certainly within their rights to pass it, as it's really just a clarification of contract law. (In short, the UCITA states that several specific provisions found in click-wrap contracts are enforceable under contract law, even without any signed or notarized agreement taking place.)
Congress had no right to pass these laws in the first place, except for the occasional 10th Amendment nut.
The tenth amendment neither expands nor contracts federal (congressional) or state powers. It just says that governmental privileges not explicitly granted to the federal congress and not explicitly denied the states, is granted to the states. Thus, it certainly doesn't expand the powers of the federal congress, as you suggest.
"Don't worry, I'm writing a NEW law that sucks differently!"
Rep. Boucher actually does want to amend the DMCA and reaffirm the fact that fair use trumps DMCA protections. Give him some credit -- what he suggests is a significant improvement over the status quo.
Since all https certificates come from and are checked against Verisign, then Verisign could theoretically track who is going to what SSL site.
Fortunately, no. Every browser that supports verification of SSL certificates includes a static list of trusted certificate authorities. The cert validation (against Verisign, Thawte, RSA, or whomever else) occurs entirely within the browser, without any network communication.
Your ISP, and anyone else on the request path, can see the source and destination IP addresses for your SSL requests. No central party, Versign or otherwise, sees all users' traffic.
The fifth ammendment protects him from having to give out his key
No, it doesn't. First, the fifth ammendment only protects you from criminally incriminating yourself. If you've been granted immunity, or if the material being subpoena'd is non-incriminating, you have no protection for it. If you refuse a subpoena, you can go to jail for contempt of court, even if you're not the one on trial.
Second, I believe that the fifth ammendment only applies to direct testimony. Courts can demand material evidence and can issue search warrants even if they may end up incriminating you. Do you really think you can turn away a cop with a search warrant by telling him, "Yes, there's something illegal in my house. If you saw it, it would incriminate me, so I won't let you in."
And third, the FOIA gives citizens access to any governmental records that don't compromise national security.
Even if we were talking about e-mails with incriminating content, which we're not, they would be directly analogous to the Nixon tapes that the Supreme Court successfully subpoena'd in the 1970s. Nixon couldn't keep his tapes private 30 years ago, and Bush the Younger can't keep his e-mails private today.
there's extreme pressure on the makers to not produce them
The legitimate manufacturers have all signed licenses saying that they'll enforce region coding. Any illegitimate manufacturers are in violation of the DMCA and will get hauled into court. Even if a manufacturer made an unlicensed DVD player and managed to escape the DMCA, they'd have to convince Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Circuit City to sell it before it would have any real impact.
The "extreme pressure" preventing regionless DVD players is really contract and copyright law, as well as retail realities. Fortunately, there are no bans (yet?) on general-purpose hard drives, and their retail channels are well established. No eulogies yet, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you buy every release of Red Hat Linux, it won't cost you $120 per year. And that's an entire operating system (with GNOME included!), not just a pretty GUI.
Remember, folks, it's still legal to mirror this stuff. It's all GPL.
--Patrick, who will continue paying $0 per year for software
Point 1: OnStar already does this and is quickly becoming standard in GM vehicles. The Pontiac Montana minivan even has TV ads trumpeting this feature. No, GM doesn't admit that the same feature allows them to track your location (and speed!) at all times.
Point 2: It would be possible for your phone to send encrypted packets containing its location. Those packets can only be encrypted by some key that only the customer holds. Voila, stolen phone/car recovery without the tracking bugaboo. And, yes, cell phones already have encryption chips.
Point 3: s/vehical/vehicle/g. :)
How about a setting that runs GPS at all times, but only shares the location with the phone company during 911 calls? Yes, this is possible, as GPS is entirely local, and the phone company doesn't get your location unless your phone specifically sends it.
A complaint I haven't seen yet: the GPS antenna and circuitry suck down a substantial amount of battery power if they're figuring your location constantly. They're also not all that cheap. I certainly would like to see non-E911 phones remain available.
You beat me to it. :)
The most recent citation is May of 1997. The title itself refers to "the next millennium" -- even Microsoft isn't so arrogant as to think they can make predictions 1,000 years out.
I think I actually read parts of that article four years ago when I was considering interning in the Systems/Networking group at MSR. Mumble mumble 2001 copyright date mumble.
--Patrick
I seem to recall Eric Raymond predicting that Microsoft would be "relegated to irrelevance within 18 months" about 3 years ago, using many of the same points you do. The reports of Microsoft's death have always been a bit exaggerated.
Microsoft is a heavily diversified company. If they lose one battle -- say, PDAs -- they can easily fall back on the OS, applications, games, the X-box, Ultimate TV, MSN, Hotmail, etc., etc. They sell software, hardware, and Internet services. Most of their divisions turn a profit independently.
In spite of the old "competing against itself" saw, Microsoft has sold something like eight major versions of Office, six major versions of Windows, and three (arguably four) major versions of NT. Companies do buy upgrades eventually.
And what of free software? It has taken a second-place position in the server market and a second-place position in the desktop market. I'm not holding my breath for it to overtake Microsoft in either arena.
--Patrick. Not an apologist, just a realist.
Ouch! That's fully one percent of the cash Microsoft has sitting, gathering mold in its bank accounts. :)
And, of course, that assumes that anyone could prove that Be really was worth $120 million. Apple probably offered to buy with stock. At the height of the "irrational exuberance." On the notion that someday Be might make money -- an unproven concept at best. I believe it would be hard to prove, even to the "preponderance of the evidence" required for a civil suit, that Be was worth anywhere near what you claim.
But your points are well taken. The remedies the government has suggested so far are peanuts compared with what essentially every consumer software company in the US could be asking for.
--Patrick
Proprietary licenses can exist in the absence of copyright law. Forget copyright law for a moment -- yeah, yeah, everyone at Slashdot hates it. Even me.
In a Libertarian society, you have a right to make any commercial transaction you want, so long as it does not infringe by coercion the rights of others. I could offer you a product in exchange for your promise to waive your right to free speech for a year. You can take or leave the deal, and the government will enforce it as a matter of contract law. I have no right to coerce you into taking the deal, but once you take it, I have every right to see that you stick by it. Rights-abridging agreements, from NDAs and non-compete clauses to software licenses, are just legal contracts that you can choose not to sign if you like.
Its like arguing that because I do not kill people, the murder laws do not apply to me.
Entirely different. First of all, murder laws exist because my right to life is much more important than your right (as it were) to murder me. So a murder law actually is a law: the government protects my fundamental right to life by threatening force upon you if you kill me. Software licenses are contract, not law. The only law here is the enforcement of contracts. Even Libertarians recognize the need for contracts.
"A Libertarian society lets you trade life, liberty, or property however you like."
Well this is all very well but all of those three things are words like freedom open to interpretation.
Even if I'd said that Libertarianism lets you trade flugnuts, mumblewarts, and cheeticks, the point would be the same. You may have a fundamental right to your mumblewarts, but you also have the right to waive that right in a contract. If you waive that right, then contract law -- not copyright law -- dictates what you may and may not do.
--Patrick
I've got Nulix, a wonderful operating system developed by people who like to write code
He should have said NUG/Nulix. There he goes, denying credit the NUG project so richly deserves.
--Patrick
Not at all. You have the right to not use the software, in which case its author has no state-enforced rights over you. Consider a software vendor who offers you this: "I will give you this software if you will give me your first-born child." You have every right to decline; his offer has not decreased your flerbage in any way (unless you're foolish enough to accept it). Similarly, if he offers: "I will give you this software if you give up your right to make copies of it," you have the freedom to accept or decline. If you decline, it's a noop -- you don't get the software, and you don't give up any of your freedoms.
A Libertarian society lets you trade life, liberty, or property however you like. It just doesn't give anyone (including the government) the right to take them away by coercion.
--Patrick
Check Eric's essay again. He doesn't use the word "copyright" once. What he suggests is a license. Eric's words:
What he's suggesting is a contract, allowing the user to use some software in trade for money and a promise not to give the software to anyone else. Contracts are allowed under Libertarianism, right? I have the freedom to give away whatever freedoms I choose to give away.
--Patrick
What France is trying to do to Yahoo, in contrast, will have a globally chilling effect. France is trying to shut down Yahoo's auctions of Nazi-related collectables not at French borders, but on servers thousands of miles away, intended for non-French audiences. If they succeed, Yahoo will no longer be able to offer these auctions anywhere.
French laws concerning shipping don't affect what goods I can manufacture in the U.S. unless I try to ship those goods into France. By the same token, French censorship of the Internet shouldn't affect what content I can produce in the U.S. Censored content should be stopped at French borders, not at the source.
To be fair: the U.S. is no better. Our DMCA gets Norwegians and Russians arrested. Our Carnivore will intercept e-mails well beyond our borders. Our patent laws affect software authors and distributors world-wide. The U.S. (and California in particular, it seems) has a rather elastic sense of its jurisdiction, too.
A country's right to exert control over the Internet ends at the country's borders.
--Patrick
So the technology is already better at face recognition than a woman in Oklahoma. Technology: 1. Humanity: 0.
If Microsoft makes NT6 incompatible with Samba, these customers get to choose to stop using NT or stop using Samba. Microsoft is probably safe in betting that they'll stop using Samba -- which means more, not fewer, licenses sold. Microsoft's history is one of gratuitous incompatibilities and product lock-ins. With Media Player, they've added patent intimidation to their arsenal. Using patents to lock Samba out of NT6 networks would be nothing unexpected.
We must remember though that the whole world is not kept under US law
Samba would lose its U.S. developers, its U.S. distribution channels (everyone from RedHat to SGI), and its air of legitimacy among U.S. businesses. The same "major customers" that use large networks with both NT and Samba will be very wary of using any software that violates patents and cannot be written or supported within U.S. borders. Microsoft could make Samba as much of a battleground as DeCSS has been.
Picky point, but let's chalk it up under "educating other developers..."
Starting a script with #!/bin/bash is the right thing to do, if you've (for whatever reason) used bash-specific constructs in your script. What's wrong is starting it with #!/bin/sh so that it fails halfway through running with a page of syntax errors.
Since autoconf puts in the #!/bin/sh line for you don't use bashisms in your configure.in. Please. Learn what's a bashism and what's not.
I might even go so far as to suggest that cross-platform developers install a lighter shell as /bin/sh (ash, for example). The key thing is that it's sh-compliant but not bash. Then see how many configure scripts break. In a build of GNOME 1.4, I think it's at least 4.
(I'd also -- happily! -- settle for all the commercial Unixes making bash their default. Total cost: $0. Value to advanced users: priceless. Sun, are you listening?)
--Patrick, also frustrated by how much babysitting building GNOME under Solaris requires
Any company that doesn't properly safeguard people's personal information will suffer the same fate as a bank that doesn't safeguard people's money.
Safeguarding money is the primary thing you expect a bank to do, so your decision of a bank will be based on its ability to keep your money safe for you. Privacy is rarely one's primary concern in picking a company. Most people will pick a privacy-violating company to save a couple of bucks, to the point that companies with fair privacy policies will be playing at a disadvantage.
Take medical records. If you're in an accident, do you want an ambulance driver to be able to access your medical records online? I think you do.
Yes. That does not imply that I want my medical records on the public Internet. Here's a better idea: carry your medical history around on a (possibly electronic) tag, physically on your body. If you're in a wreck, the ambulance driver can scan the tag to find your medications, allergies, etc., but no cracker or spammer can steal or buy your information without physically approaching you.
Even if I did want my medical records on the Internet, that doesn't mean I want my buying habits, my physical location, and my web-browsing preferences tracked, too.
One of the chief benefits, to use a more routine example, is personalized service. In exchange for a little information, you can get an online experience that's more in tune with your interests and needs.
Keep it optional, and only collect the information you need. Merchant sites shouldn't need me to establish an account and shouldn't remember my address and credit card number unless I ask them to. A portal site doesn't need your e-mail address or a clicktrail just to display a stock quote or a weather map. Many people are willing to trade convenience for privacy -- just because McNealy isn't doesn't mean the entire industry should follow his suggestions.
I have agreed to let my car company, for instance, track my every move through GPS satellites.
GPS is a lovely system in that only you know your location. OnStar (or whatever similar system) only reveals your location through its cellular-network connection. GPS itself is excellent from a privacy standpoint.
I find it comforting to know that, should my air bag deploy, they know where I am and can send help.
Obviously, you should only have to reveal your location if your air bag deploys. Unless you crash or specifically ask for directions, your car manufacturer has no reason and no right to know your location.
Someday soon you could find yourself in a strange city and your Web-enabled wireless phone will be able to recommend a nearby restaurant based on your fondness for French, Italian or Mexican cuisine
Slow down, cowboy. I'd rather not share my food-purchasing habits with just anyone within cell-phone range, just so that restaurants who want my business can spam me with "click here to make a reservation" ads. The right way to do this is to have my GPS-enabled phone do a search for "Mexican restaurant Boston" when you tell it to. I don't want every Mexican restaurant in Boston to start sending me pitches as soon as I get off the plane.
To put this in context: lots of people seem to think I'm interested in pyramid schemes, weight-loss programs, pornography, and laser printer supplies, at least judging by the contents of my e-mail inbox. Merchants are not very discerning about who they think will be interested in their ads.
Letting restaurants send my ads through my cell phone primarily benefits one entity: my cell phone provider. You can be sure that they'll charge a healthy fee per ad forwarded, even though it costs them essentially nothing. Your location is valuable information, and your cell phone provider has no right to discern it (let alone sell it!) without your permission.
most people would gladly reveal their personal preferences, as long as they feel certain the information won't be misused.
Do you suppose Scott has actually gone out and surveyed people, or do you think he's just speaking for himself? Again, I don't want Scott's windbag opinions dictating the service that companies offer me. Also: how does Scott propose to guarantee that information won't be misused? Companies violate (and change) privacy policies all the time. Companies' credit-card databases get broken into. Does Scott have a magic bullet to fix these problems, or is he just dismissing them as irrelevant? I'm in no way "certain" that my private information is being safeguarded.
So far the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself.
Bull. Amazon changed its privacy policy without letting people opt out. eToys sold its customer list to the highest bidder. One company I deal with told me that they "do not, ever, sell customer lists to third parties except when it's legal to do so." Cute. When money talks, privacy walks.
Most companies now post formal privacy policies on their Web sites
Ten pages of dense legalese isn't very helpful. Privacy policies are rarely customizable in any meaningful way. I'd take a lower interest rate on my bank account in trade for the assurance that my banker isn't selling my banking habits to any credit merchant who asks, but I don't have that option. Posting a "we can screw you, here's how" policy isn't much help, even assuming that the company actually follows it and has no security breaches.
allow visitors to have a say in how information about them is used.
Is he talking about the "don't send me junk mail" opt-out check boxes, or about the not-yet-implemented P3P? Either way, it's a token gesture.
Maybe some enterprising magazine will start publishing an annual list of the companies with the best policies and practices. The Privacy 500, perhaps.
Consumer Reports has started writing about privacy, and from their stories, the picture looks bleak. They've concluded that the best option is to complain publicly and lobby for legislation. Informing consumers isn't enough, because there aren't meaningful privacy options availble.
Ugly privacy policies I can't change, just off the top of my head: my grocery store tracks my purchases so that they can design store layout and coupons to compel me to buy more. My phone company tracks my calling habits to pitch long distance plans that I don't want. (And they typically call at 8:30AM with such pitches.) My credit cards all track my purchases and sell the information to merchants. My bank sells information about my mortgage so that third parties can try to sell me insurance. Many of the web sites I visit track my click-trails to find ways to manipulate me into spending more time at their site. Many web merchants that I buy from insist that establish an account before I can buy anything, and a few even remember my credit card even once the transaction is over. I'm currently healty, but once I have a medical record worth selling, I'm sure my health insurer will find someone to sell it to.
I should have the right to demand that information about me be protected while it's needed, destroyed when it's no longer needed, and never sold to third parties, ever.
but then, they're independently written and optional.
In the eyes of the law anyway, the reason Linux's bundling is legal is that neither Linux nor any distribution is a monopoly. The finding that Microsoft broke antitrust law by bundling IE depends on the notion that Microsoft is a monopoly -- they spent far more energy fighting the monopoly claim than they did fighting the bundling claim.
From a moral point of view, perhaps the most relevant reason that bundling in Linux is not predatorial is that most distributions bundle several of everything. Pick one or more from each category: Netscape/Mozilla/Lynx/w3m, pine/elm/mutt, KDE/GNOME/fvwm, Freeamp/amp/xmms, and so on.
You could even package a script with libfaim that goes out and downloads AIM.EXE from wherever AOL makes it available to the general public. Then you reduce the burden on the user, and you reduce the likelihood of people providing differing versions of AIM.EXE.
4.) add support for a server that you request bytes of aim.exe from
Don't send the bytes. That's probably illegal. Send the hash. The server could hash the entire AIM binary several times per second. Plus, you can cache whatever AOL is asking for this week, which eliminates nearly all of the hashing load.
The real problems with that are the network bandwidth you'd have to provide and the potential privacy issues involved in having every libfaim-linked binary "phone home" to your server.
Fuzzy math. :) The memory required would be 8n(n-1), where n is the file size in bytes. There are n 1-byte strings, n-1 2-byte strings, ..., 1 n byte string. Thus there are n(n-1)/2 different contiguous strings available. Each sum costs 16 bytes, thus 8n(n-1) bytes total cost. It's high (1-10TB), but not nearly so large as you suggest.
It can be performed at somewhere between 20 and 40 megabytes per second on 16 byte strings
Far faster than the proposed server's network connection -- MD5ing on the fly isn't the bottleneck.
Jim Allchin.
said something to the effect that copylefting software (GNU, open-source, GPL, Free Software, you know the deal) is harmful.
He said:
In later clarifications, he claimed that he really only meant the GPL, and really only in the context of tax-supported, government-developed software. In other words, tax-paying American companies should be allowed to release proprietary versions of any software developed with tax money.
That issue has been flogged thoroughly elsewhere.
As a parting off-topic shot: Microsoft pays no taxes, so Allchin's claim that tax-paying companies should be allowed to co-op taxpayer-funded code doesn't apply to Microsoft anyway. Put that in your tax-loophole pipe and smoke it.
--Patrick
How about populist, then? Whether relaxing copyright restrictions or padding SW VA education and health care budgets, you have to admit (whether or not you agree with how he does it!) Boucher is looking out for actual humans in his district.
"Progressive" is just as vague a term as "conservative," you're right. Neither title alone tells you much about what its proponents stand for.
If they'd just leave us alone, we'll figure it out ourselves, and without all the hassle.
I wish I could believe that. But this probably isn't the place for a debate on Libertarianism. :)
I'm sorry you're in Helm's land, but I've got you beat -- I'm in MS, so I have to claim Trent Lott and Thad Cochran.
It's a toss-up. I'm looking forward to voting against Helms next November. :)
--Patrick
You're right, of course, about what you said. My brain flipped a negation in there somewhere. I'd still argue that Congress's lack of a right to pass the DMCA stems from the first amendment (it abridges freedom of speech).
The best thing is for the DMCA to be tested by the courts, and for them to strike the law down.
Any successful challenge to the DMCA will have to go all the way to the Supreme Court -- the monied interests who got it passed in the first place can hire enough lawyers to see to that. For a case to get to the Supreme Court, a brave, wealthy, and lucky defendant must work his way through at least three appeals. 2600 is doing this now, and it's proving to be both draining and expensive. Overturning a law in the courts is not easy, quick, or cheap.
The way checks and balances work is that Congress can pass any damn fool law they want, but the courts run clean-up behind them.
Unfortunately, the courts can only strike down unconstitutional laws, not foolish ones. Congress passes stupid laws all the time that don't get challenged in the courts, or don't get overturned because they're not strictly unconstitutional.
IIRC, Judge Kaplan ruled against 2600 not because he agreed with the DMCA but because he didn't think he had constitutional grounds to overturn it.
Amending and repealing laws is as effective as, and less contentious than, overturning them in a court.
If Boucher wants to fix it, he needs to work to repeal the law altogether
He's up against a lot of opposition even amending it. The DMCA passed by an overwhelming (if off-the-record!) vote, and I don't think many in congress yet see problems with it. Repealing it isn't possible, at least for now. Perfection is the enemy of the merely good -- settle for good, because perfection ain't going to happen.
the prole-feed he's feeding us
Given how few of us are empowered or constituents, I don't think he has that much call to pander here. It's not as if he's giving a political rally in his home district and bragging about pork construction projects he has sent his constituents' way.
Boucher's legislative record on his own site: tobacco giveaways, fiddling with bankruptcy laws, health insurace giveaways to children, prescription medicine for seniors, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Ah, and therein lies one of the major problems with representative democracy: you have to take the bad with the good. There's a good chance that any challenger southwest Virginia can produce would be just as bad on tobacco and pork-politics issues without the progressive views on Internet and copyright law. Boucher is, on some issues, a much-needed voice of reason. Give him credit for that.
I'm very difficult to please, I guess, but I'm not impressed.
I am. Given the parade of conservatives and idiots that Virginians have elected in the last decade, Boucher is impressively progressive. Besides, as a North Carolinian, I get to measure him against Jesse Helms. Anyone, compared to Helms, looks enlightened and progressive. ;)
--Patrick
Congress didn't pass UCITA. UCITA has been presented to state legislatures, and two of them -- Virginia and Maryland -- have passed it. As awful as UCITA is, states are almost certainly within their rights to pass it, as it's really just a clarification of contract law. (In short, the UCITA states that several specific provisions found in click-wrap contracts are enforceable under contract law, even without any signed or notarized agreement taking place.)
Congress had no right to pass these laws in the first place, except for the occasional 10th Amendment nut.
The tenth amendment neither expands nor contracts federal (congressional) or state powers. It just says that governmental privileges not explicitly granted to the federal congress and not explicitly denied the states, is granted to the states. Thus, it certainly doesn't expand the powers of the federal congress, as you suggest.
"Don't worry, I'm writing a NEW law that sucks differently!"
Rep. Boucher actually does want to amend the DMCA and reaffirm the fact that fair use trumps DMCA protections. Give him some credit -- what he suggests is a significant improvement over the status quo.
Fortunately, no. Every browser that supports verification of SSL certificates includes a static list of trusted certificate authorities. The cert validation (against Verisign, Thawte, RSA, or whomever else) occurs entirely within the browser, without any network communication.
Your ISP, and anyone else on the request path, can see the source and destination IP addresses for your SSL requests. No central party, Versign or otherwise, sees all users' traffic.
No, it doesn't. First, the fifth ammendment only protects you from criminally incriminating yourself. If you've been granted immunity, or if the material being subpoena'd is non-incriminating, you have no protection for it. If you refuse a subpoena, you can go to jail for contempt of court, even if you're not the one on trial.
Second, I believe that the fifth ammendment only applies to direct testimony. Courts can demand material evidence and can issue search warrants even if they may end up incriminating you. Do you really think you can turn away a cop with a search warrant by telling him, "Yes, there's something illegal in my house. If you saw it, it would incriminate me, so I won't let you in."
And third, the FOIA gives citizens access to any governmental records that don't compromise national security.
Even if we were talking about e-mails with incriminating content, which we're not, they would be directly analogous to the Nixon tapes that the Supreme Court successfully subpoena'd in the 1970s. Nixon couldn't keep his tapes private 30 years ago, and Bush the Younger can't keep his e-mails private today.
Sucks to be the president, I guess. :)
The legitimate manufacturers have all signed licenses saying that they'll enforce region coding. Any illegitimate manufacturers are in violation of the DMCA and will get hauled into court. Even if a manufacturer made an unlicensed DVD player and managed to escape the DMCA, they'd have to convince Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Circuit City to sell it before it would have any real impact.
The "extreme pressure" preventing regionless DVD players is really contract and copyright law, as well as retail realities. Fortunately, there are no bans (yet?) on general-purpose hard drives, and their retail channels are well established. No eulogies yet, please.