You raised a couple good points here. Linus hasn't made gobs of money off it, unlike, say the CEO and stock owners of say RedHat. IMHO, I think this is a good thing, since it largely separates major corporate influence from the kernel.
But you're right, there are other OS's out there, and if you don't like one, you can go use another. I had a kernel-hacker friend that did just that. He left Linux for NetBSD a couple years ago, and he never looked back.
His reasons were valid for the time, that the code was too hard to read. Segments of code weren't well documented, and kludges poped up in the most surpising of places.
One of the other posts raised a good point -- a lack of good kernel documentation, and the unintentional difficulty of getting the knowledge to add things to the kernel. This by itself wouldn't be so bad, if control of the Linux kernel. It doesn't sound very democratic, does it?
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not complaining that the development process of Linux is or isn't democratic, of course it's not, However I feel it's just irresponsible to say things like, "anyone can make changes to to the open source package," when there's little chance that those changes will be implemented in the official Linux kernel. And I have heard that qoute from different people in the past.
I'll stay with Linux as long as the pissing matches upstream doesn't affect my water supply.
In my state (Indiana) they have a "Use Tax". This has never been anything new, it's always existed. It's purpose was to keep people from going over the state line to get things at a cheaper tax rate.
In Indiana, the rule is somewhat special. The tax here is 5% mandated by law. If you go to a state and pay no sales tax or a tax less than the mandated tax, you must pay the difference on a line item.
In Iowa, and probably other states, there is not a line item on the tax form that you have to send in. The use tax is buried in the instructions, and you must send a check to a PO box.
Note that they don't give you a refund if you pay a higher tax than the state you're living in.
What it really is, is a way for the state to penalize people who don't keep records for purchases, then when you get audited they can ream large fines up your ass and call you a "Tax Deviant."
e.g. The last time I checked, food was non taxable in Iowa. If I go to Iowa, buy some non-taxable food, bring it back to Indiana, where it is taxable, I would be break the Indiana state tax law if I didn't submit the dfference in taxes. Amazing, isn't it?
your experience is not at all common. you're worth more with more experience. right out of school, you have no experience, so obviously you're worth less
I've got 4 years of experience in the software industry, and am being paid LESS than incoming college graduates. In fact this is all TOO common.
When was the last time you used an air-conditioner or Bobcat Godthwait's Big Ass Show to research your term-paper?
When was the last time you were in Oklahoma during September? Oklahoma has got to be the most boring and the hottest place to be during during early fall. And if you go there, you need entertainment and air conditioning.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anyone coming there from major cities.
They apparently had NO contract or other written or verbal agreement giving them the right ot use the universities PRIVATELY owned network (it's not a public right, you know..).
Correct me if I'm wrong but Okey State is a PUBLIC college funded from the state's tax dollars. They ALSO had the right to use the network because they were given OSU email accounts and also server space. So it's not one of those too things.
What they didn't have the permission to do was to use the service from their dorm room. And that's the difference. Even though it's on campus, and it's a part of the university, it's not an "approved" access point on the network.
The University's claim gets pretty thin when you live in college supplied housing. It gets even thinner when the access port is in the same building where you live.
I can't imagine it ever being a big deal for them in the future.
Actually, you're wrong about that. Any criminal offense might need to be discussed with future employers. Also, any arrests might prevent an them from obtaining a job from one of the big 3 defense contractors, since many of those jobs require security clearances.
I also don't think it hurts the college very much either. Even before this incident I would have rated Okey State right around last for Computer Science / Engineering degrees.
And depending upon the school and depending upon the criminal offense, the offense may have to go through the conduct system. They might pay the school a fine, might get kicked out, or be suspended for a semester.
Who you can really thank for this atrocity is America's Cable companies for the laws on signal theft. Because without them, we wouldn't have such strict laws on the books in the first place. And instead the students may have gotten a slap on the wrist, rather than a trip to the judge.
A 3 to 5 year patent on a truly groundbreaking patent is too short. Don't get me wrong here, I am against software patents. But, if it takes 10 years to develop a patent, and the application is granted for only 3 years, many inventors will stop working towards ground breaking development.
I think the RSA algorithm deserved a patent. I also think it deserved a 17 year patent too. If it had a 3 year patent, the industry would have ignored it until the patent expired, and the inventors would not have made much monetary profit from it -- which defeats the whole point of a patent. RSA would have kept the algorithm as a trade secret, and then no one would have been able to benefit from their work -- except for RSA, of course.
There needs to be a scalable system for the length of time patents have been given. For instance, RSA really did deserve a patent because the work was so groundbreaking. You can't hold the 1-click patent up to it, but we are stuck with it for the next 17 years. The ATT XOR patent falls into this category too. The company can still apply for its patent, but the length of time for which the patent is granted, say 1 year for the one-click patent, may make companies decide hard which ideas they choose to patent.
The alternative is a patent for everything under the sun.
There is a difference between, say, investigating someone and creating a database of all your tax returns and W-2s, or all the "letters to the editor" you have written to the NYT. But it seems like a small one to me. If all you're doing is collecting information on those electronic bits that I make public, I think that's fair. If they're applying a subversive filter on that info, I think I'd be a bit pissed.
The LAPD was caught wiretapping phones in LAX looking for drugs. They got a warrant, and tapped 150,000 phone calls. Of course they made hundreds of drug arrests, but the vast majority of the calls were made by law-abiding citizens. I believe that monitoring citizens for unamerican activity is unfair at any level. Think of it, it's not really a "karma" rating. Look at it more as the "Slashdot Subversiveness Scale."
I dare say, I saw the words "evil" and "Miscellaneous Unsubversive" written on the pages in the files of the cattle mutilations. And that on is just funny by itself.
First, a movie like Titanic grossed a Billion (with a capital B) dollars. So valuing the average run-of-the-mill movie at $50,000,000 seems pretty fair to me.
And, did you see the Kevin Mitnick interview on CBS this weekend? Mitnick tried to use the same argument that you did above, but eventually conceded that he did, in fact, "steal" the Solaris source code among other things.
You can call it anything you want. "Stealing", or "Making an illegal copy", or "Not depriving them of their trade secrets." But when the judge hands down the sentence, he will most assuredly convict you of "stealing".
Just get on with it Lucas. Put them on DVD's, and then when you have time, put out a collector's edition of the DVD's with ADDED NEW FEATURES and a price of +$40 per disc.
That's a cute way of rephrasing "Intellectual Property" theft, or IP theft for short.
Which is more valuable, a $5 DVD or a near perfect digital copy of a $50,000,000 movie? From a standpoint of the lawyers, the IP of the $50,000,000 movie is much more valuable than a pirated $5 DVD. And you can be sure they'll point that out in your defense trial.
I think the motion picture industry understood the potential for pirating DVD movies, that you didn't need a deCSS program to create a perfect copy of the DVD.
But if you had the *pure* digital source, you could create copies on any format, even if it's one more convenient than DVD's, and bypass the regional codings entirely.
So in that sense, it is copy protection and not "playback" protection.
Again, that's living dangerously. Even if you're right, even it if was under the pretenses for creating a linux DVD player, the distribution of the DeCSS source could be seen as the original breaking of a trade secret, or publicizing an "unpublished work". And the Industry would still have the full force of the law behind them.
IMHO this leaves DeCSS in a wierd position because it used to be posted more of a pirating tool then an interoperability tool. But DeCSS, css-auth, LiViD stuff, etc are now being used primarily for interoperability.
I'm amazed at the cavalier attitude people have to the law when posting the DeCSS source. I bet most of the people didn't consult a lawyer before the distribution of software they should have known violated copyright law.
I'm confident that the DVD consortium will argue that "Sure, so you decoded it for interoperability. But you didn't protect the trade secret when you distributed the working code. There's no free speech issue here. Fair Use law doesn't cover the breaking of trade secrets."
A reasonable judge should be able to see it this way....
And that's where the folly is in your logic. A reasonable judge could rule against DeCSS -- *GASP* -- finding that it is fine to reverse engineer the CSS for interoperability, just as long as reasonable steps were made for protecting what the defendents should have know what was a "trade secret".
Reasonable steps might be that the DeCSS was distributed as a complete pre-compiled DVD player rather than an open-source program that exposes the inner-workings of CSS.
I'm a little shocked that a lot of people replying in here are living dangerously with the legal issues.
If a box gave you a clearer TV signals from your cable, but also *unadvertedly* unscrambled the spice channel, do you really think the courts would say, "Oh yeah, so it is unscrambled. Tough luck cable companies."?
Admittedly, the analogy isn't perfect, but it shows the point. Just because something may be useful in one way, doesn't make it illegal in another, no matter how pure the motive. To say otherwise is foolish.
DeCSS does in fact make piracy of DVDs easier by making it easier to re-encode the material as.vcd's or otherwise. It doesn't, however, make something possible that was once impossible. Programs that extract the materials by listening in on video and audio hardware while a sanctioned player is in use have been around for some time now (Two years, I think someone said once.) Let's not get all up in arms about "You can't use it for piracy," because you can.
I think it's safe to say that *ANY* open source DVD player would suffer from this problem. Someone could tinker with it to just get the decoded video stream and nothing else. The "piracy" argument was legal maneuvering by the consortium to impress the judge.
There has been a shift in recent years in the legislation of security. Instead of ensuring that companies are using good security algorithms, we've made the cracking of proprietary security schemes illegal, no matter how bad the security may be.
The DeCSS code was not written with illegally obtained information. (i.e. employee of Zoran takes secret information home with him and writes the program, violating his NDA.)
According to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it is the product of an attempt to circumvent the copy-protection mechanism, and therefore illegal. Even though the hack was in Europe, the law still applies to people in the US who distribute it.
Reverse engineering for compatibility sake is legal in the USA. This is how Compaq et al created the first PC clones back in the 80's
Aha. But no longer, thanks to (you guessed it!) the DMCA.
IANAL but you're treading thin legally here. LiViD took the source from DeCSS and incorporated it into another software package. Just because it is *more* than just a decoder doesn't give it any better legal standing under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The piece of knowledge that LiViD needs to work is a trade secret of the DVD consortium. Also, you forgot that many of the defendants were only "linking" to the DeCSS software site. The DVD lawsuit threatens how Web sites are linked.
Yet another round of people saying, "Here we go again."
I'm wondering if the only reason that Slashdot still covers the Amiga is that it makes good drama. Y'know, kinda like a soap opera for the keyboard-enabled culture. There can't be THAT many amiga owners anymore, can there? Do 500 Amiga owners and falling deserve this kind of attention on slashdot?
I should've known better than to believe that Gateway would have actually created a new desktop for people that was different than the generic PC they usually produce. Of course, the Amiga community never did learn their lesson with ESCOM, which pretty much did the same thing, apparently trying to get people to buy ESCOM branded PC's. And now everyone is supposed to take Amino on faith, that they will actually do something, anything, and release a computer that lives up to the AMIGA name.
Sorry Amino. It's not you. After following the Amiga story for 5 or 6 years, I know better. There's no way in hell that you can create a decent machine that lives up to the Amiga name. Even if you release a computer it better be fast, and it better capture the excitement that the Amiga did a decade ago, otherwise we'll just be laughing ourselves to the grave.
If you believe (and I think that many of you do) that openly published source code should be protected speech, then you cannot hold someone criminally liable for distributing source code. That person may, however, be held legally responsible in a civil, and ordered to pay restitution by a jury of your peers, *but* it still doesn't make them a criminal.
Writing a book on how to make a silencer, or an automatic machine gun, is not illegal. But actually owning either of those weapons is a federal crime. Distributing the book to a group of people you know that have legally-shady motives may make you liable in a court of law.
There have been people who have replied that the distribution needs to be controlled. I would like to point out that this would not make you criminally negligent as there is no law currently requiring that you do control distribution. It's only good legal advice because the tool you create might be one that takes down sun.com.
Notice that I've only been talking about the legal aspects, for good reason. They are easy. The ethical dillemnas can get pretty hairy as already mentioned.
Of all the ethical examples out there, there is a real-life case that happened about 4 years ago. Some of you may still remember this.
Dan Farmer was an SGI Sysadmin, he released SATAN to the general public. After that, he was fired, by SGI. He wasn't sued, or put in jail -- just held ethically responsible for releasing a "dangerous" utility onto the internet, and subsequently canned. But Farmer's motives for releasing it, were very ethical. By releasing this tool, systems connected on the internet will have better protection from crackers.
Both SGI and Farmer had equally valid points, it was just that SGI didn't share Farmer's view. SGI took, in their view, the proper action by the ethical violation that Farmer had done.
So really, the answer to who should be held ethically responsible, depends upon the ethical view that you hold.
BTW, in case you're planning on using this for your paper, I just want to share one more thing with you.
(C) 1999 by author. May not be reprinted outside of the domain slashdot.org without the author's permission.
;^) There. Now you can't copy/paste it into your assignment and stay legally and ethically correct.
From the looks, it looks like a Gnome or KDE based system using the winodwmaker window manager, with modifications that probably won't let you into a shell.
Interesting also, I quote, (And not question-mark;)
"When developing Xetos we took care about the usability of the operating system and had an eye on existing operating systems."
And...
"Due to the Linux kernel, you can benefit already from a large number of applications. No matter if you are looking for office-, graphic-, or multimedia applications - Iwin Xetos provides you with the right software base."
So apparently they're talking on both sides of their mouth. Not only do they blast Unix for being too hard to learn, but Xetos can use a wealth of applications written for Linux, a variant of Unix. At any rate, it looks like it has a UNIX core. Hmmm...
Linux was never meant to be a mainstream OS. And why was it never meant to be a mainstream OS?
Because UNIX IS NOT USER FRIENDLY. As long as the kernel is intertwined with GNU Unix, it will never be. The issues are just too complex for most people. Just try to explain to your Mom, how to ifconfig your lan card and set up IP routing to go through the gateway. (And don't say, "oh my mom can do that, maybe you need a new mom". My mom sure as hell can't do that, and I don't need a new mom, either.;^)
And the funny part is that no one is even attempting to create an Easy-Linux disto. Sure there are winlinux distros coming out and Caldera Open Linux, but I still wouldn't give those to my Mom to use and expect her to know how it works. And don't think COAS is a solution, because it's not, and neither is linuxconf.
Linux was built from the ground up as a windows alternative. The problem was that the people who were building it up originally were Unix natives, and really just wanted a Unix-like system that they would have more power over than with Windows running on their PC's. And now, other people using Linux are expecting it to be a mainstream platform. In it's current condition, it will never be.
Oh, btw, the creators of Linux succeeded with their original goals. I now have more power over my box than I did with Windows, but ease of use was never an original design goal. It is the cause of some Linux factions that are turning this into a war with MS, battling tooth and nail until the very end. The original idea of linux was to be an alternative OS to Windows. Now we're battling for the desktop. And in the industry, we'd call that Requirements Creep.
An observant person might note that Windows really has the same problem in reverse. It was meant to be easy to use, but has problems being a true powerhouse OS. And in this sense, it costs money to do things that somone can do on Linux for free, and in many cases have an easier time at it. When I fiddle around with MS Word, I often yearn for the commandline tools I have with linux to search the document, or to do a regex substitution. And then I think how much simpler it would be with linux at least until the next glibc upgrade comes out.
Furthermore, in the OS market, there are lots of battles that could lose the war. Office Apps is another biggie. Even if we have a nice browser, we still won't have the office apps. Ease of use is another. So is stability and compatability with existing hardware.
Lastly, I have a solution to the problem your wife experienced. If a site wants to ignore 5 to 20% of a potential market by using incompatible Java code on their servers, fine with me. They certainly won't get my business dollar, but rather a letter of complaint, "Because your site didn't work with my browser, I bought it over at Brand X's site instead." A few of those will turn some heads in the Sales Department.
Just stop trying to convince people of something that Linux is not. Okay? You'll sleep much better at night.
It will become a reality when any large computer company, like Apple or IBM realize that there really is a market for these things, and they move from the R&D dept. to Marketing.
So far the only real product I've seen that fits that description is the one from IBM a while back.
Note that no other MAJOR-BRAND-NAME (other than IBM, who will need a year to release theirs) computer manufacturer sees a market for it yet. I guess that means it will be a while.
Slashdot Mirror
You raised a couple good points here. Linus hasn't made gobs of money off it, unlike, say the CEO and stock owners of say RedHat. IMHO, I think this is a good thing, since it largely separates major corporate influence from the kernel.
But you're right, there are other OS's out there, and if you don't like one, you can go use another. I had a kernel-hacker friend that did just that. He left Linux for NetBSD a couple years ago, and he never looked back.
His reasons were valid for the time, that the code was too hard to read. Segments of code weren't well documented, and kludges poped up in the most surpising of places.
One of the other posts raised a good point -- a lack of good kernel documentation, and the unintentional difficulty of getting the knowledge to add things to the kernel. This by itself wouldn't be so bad, if control of the Linux kernel. It doesn't sound very democratic, does it?
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not complaining that the development process of Linux is or isn't democratic, of course it's not, However I feel it's just irresponsible to say things like, "anyone can make changes to to the open source package," when there's little chance that those changes will be implemented in the official Linux kernel. And I have heard that qoute from different people in the past.
I'll stay with Linux as long as the pissing matches upstream doesn't affect my water supply.
In my state (Indiana) they have a "Use Tax". This has never been anything new, it's always existed. It's purpose was to keep people from going over the state line to get things at a cheaper tax rate.
In Indiana, the rule is somewhat special. The tax here is 5% mandated by law. If you go to a state and pay no sales tax or a tax less than the mandated tax, you must pay the difference on a line item.
In Iowa, and probably other states, there is not a line item on the tax form that you have to send in. The use tax is buried in the instructions, and you must send a check to a PO box.
Note that they don't give you a refund if you pay a higher tax than the state you're living in.
What it really is, is a way for the state to penalize people who don't keep records for purchases, then when you get audited they can ream large fines up your ass and call you a "Tax Deviant."
e.g. The last time I checked, food was non taxable in Iowa. If I go to Iowa, buy some non-taxable food, bring it back to Indiana, where it is taxable, I would be break the Indiana state tax law if I didn't submit the dfference in taxes. Amazing, isn't it?
Oh... I"m sorry I didn't make myself clear.
I AM a college graduate. Back in '96.
Wrong!
your experience is not at all common. you're worth more with more experience. right out of school, you have no experience, so obviously you're worth less
I've got 4 years of experience in the software industry, and am being paid LESS than incoming college graduates. In fact this is all TOO common.
--R
I think that you underestimated the cost of the LCD screen by an order of magnitude.
If it wasn't for the screen, I'd say you'd probably be right.
When was the last time you used an air-conditioner or Bobcat Godthwait's Big Ass Show to research your term-paper?
When was the last time you were in Oklahoma during September? Oklahoma has got to be the most boring and the hottest place to be during during early fall. And if you go there, you need entertainment and air conditioning.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anyone coming there from major cities.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Okey State is a PUBLIC college funded from the state's tax dollars. They ALSO had the right to use the network because they were given OSU email accounts and also server space. So it's not one of those too things.
What they didn't have the permission to do was to use the service from their dorm room. And that's the difference. Even though it's on campus, and it's a part of the university, it's not an "approved" access point on the network.
The University's claim gets pretty thin when you live in college supplied housing. It gets even thinner when the access port is in the same building where you live.
Actually, you're wrong about that. Any criminal offense might need to be discussed with future employers. Also, any arrests might prevent an them from obtaining a job from one of the big 3 defense contractors, since many of those jobs require security clearances.
I also don't think it hurts the college very much either. Even before this incident I would have rated Okey State right around last for Computer Science / Engineering degrees.
And depending upon the school and depending upon the criminal offense, the offense may have to go through the conduct system. They might pay the school a fine, might get kicked out, or be suspended for a semester.
Who you can really thank for this atrocity is America's Cable companies for the laws on signal theft. Because without them, we wouldn't have such strict laws on the books in the first place. And instead the students may have gotten a slap on the wrist, rather than a trip to the judge.
A 3 to 5 year patent on a truly groundbreaking patent is too short. Don't get me wrong here, I am against software patents. But, if it takes 10 years to develop a patent, and the application is granted for only 3 years, many inventors will stop working towards ground breaking development.
I think the RSA algorithm deserved a patent. I also think it deserved a 17 year patent too. If it had a 3 year patent, the industry would have ignored it until the patent expired, and the inventors would not have made much monetary profit from it -- which defeats the whole point of a patent. RSA would have kept the algorithm as a trade secret, and then no one would have been able to benefit from their work -- except for RSA, of course.
There needs to be a scalable system for the length of time patents have been given. For instance, RSA really did deserve a patent because the work was so groundbreaking. You can't hold the 1-click patent up to it, but we are stuck with it for the next 17 years. The ATT XOR patent falls into this category too. The company can still apply for its patent, but the length of time for which the patent is granted, say 1 year for the one-click patent, may make companies decide hard which ideas they choose to patent.
The alternative is a patent for everything under the sun.
--R
There is a difference between, say, investigating someone and creating a database of all your tax returns and W-2s, or all the "letters to the editor" you have written to the NYT. But it seems like a small one to me. If all you're doing is collecting information on those electronic bits that I make public, I think that's fair. If they're applying a subversive filter on that info, I think I'd be a bit pissed.
The LAPD was caught wiretapping phones in LAX looking for drugs. They got a warrant, and tapped
150,000 phone calls. Of course they made hundreds of drug arrests, but the vast majority of the calls were made by law-abiding citizens. I believe that monitoring citizens for unamerican activity is unfair at any level. Think of it, it's not really a "karma" rating. Look at it more as the "Slashdot Subversiveness Scale."
Why don't we just ask for it under the FOIA. ;^)
I dare say, I saw the words "evil" and "Miscellaneous Unsubversive" written on the pages in the files of the cattle mutilations. And that on is just funny by itself.
This argument is weak.
First, a movie like Titanic grossed a Billion (with a capital B) dollars. So valuing the average run-of-the-mill movie at $50,000,000 seems pretty fair to me.
And, did you see the Kevin Mitnick interview on CBS this weekend? Mitnick tried to use the same argument that you did above, but eventually conceded that he did, in fact, "steal" the Solaris source code among other things.
You can call it anything you want. "Stealing", or "Making an illegal copy", or "Not depriving them of their trade secrets." But when the judge hands down the sentence, he will most assuredly convict you of "stealing".
Just get on with it Lucas. Put them on DVD's, and then when you have time, put out a collector's edition of the DVD's with ADDED NEW FEATURES and a price of +$40 per disc.
That's a cute way of rephrasing "Intellectual Property" theft, or IP theft for short.
Which is more valuable, a $5 DVD or a near perfect digital copy of a $50,000,000 movie? From a standpoint of the lawyers, the IP of the $50,000,000 movie is much more valuable than a pirated $5 DVD. And you can be sure they'll point that out in your defense trial.
I think the motion picture industry understood the potential for pirating DVD movies, that you didn't need a deCSS program to create a perfect copy of the DVD.
But if you had the *pure* digital source, you could create copies on any format, even if it's one more convenient than DVD's, and bypass the regional codings entirely.
So in that sense, it is copy protection and not "playback" protection.
Again, that's living dangerously. Even if you're right, even it if was under the pretenses for creating a linux DVD player, the distribution of the DeCSS source could be seen as the original breaking of a trade secret, or publicizing an "unpublished work". And the Industry would still have the full force of the law behind them.
I'm amazed at the cavalier attitude people have to the law when posting the DeCSS source. I bet most of the people didn't consult a lawyer before the distribution of software they should have known violated copyright law.
I'm confident that the DVD consortium will argue that "Sure, so you decoded it for interoperability. But you didn't protect the trade secret when you distributed the working code. There's no free speech issue here. Fair Use law doesn't cover the breaking of trade secrets."
A reasonable judge should be able to see it this way....
And that's where the folly is in your logic. A reasonable judge could rule against DeCSS -- *GASP* -- finding that it is fine to reverse engineer the CSS for interoperability, just as long as reasonable steps were made for protecting what the defendents should have know what was a "trade secret".
Reasonable steps might be that the DeCSS was distributed as a complete pre-compiled DVD player rather than an open-source program that exposes the inner-workings of CSS.
I'm a little shocked that a lot of people replying in here are living dangerously with the legal issues.
If a box gave you a clearer TV signals from your cable, but also *unadvertedly* unscrambled the spice channel, do you really think the courts would say, "Oh yeah, so it is unscrambled. Tough luck cable companies."?
Admittedly, the analogy isn't perfect, but it shows the point. Just because something may be useful in one way, doesn't make it illegal in another, no matter how pure the motive. To say otherwise is foolish.
DeCSS does in fact make piracy of DVDs easier by making it easier to re-encode the material as .vcd's or otherwise. It doesn't, however, make something possible
that was once impossible. Programs that extract the materials by listening in on video and audio hardware while a sanctioned player is in use have been around for
some time now (Two years, I think someone said once.) Let's not get all up in arms about "You can't use it for piracy," because you can.
I think it's safe to say that *ANY* open source DVD player would suffer from this problem. Someone could tinker with it to just get the decoded video stream and nothing else. The "piracy" argument was legal maneuvering by the consortium to impress the judge.
There has been a shift in recent years in the legislation of security. Instead of ensuring that companies are using good security algorithms, we've made the cracking of proprietary security schemes illegal, no matter how bad the security may be.
The DeCSS code was not written with illegally obtained information. (i.e. employee of Zoran takes secret information home with him and writes the program,
violating his NDA.)
According to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it is the product of an attempt to circumvent the copy-protection mechanism, and therefore illegal. Even though the hack was in Europe, the law still applies to people in the US who distribute it.
Reverse engineering for compatibility sake is legal in the USA. This is how Compaq et al created the first PC clones back in the 80's
Aha. But no longer, thanks to (you guessed it!) the DMCA.
IANAL but you're treading thin legally here. LiViD took the source from DeCSS and incorporated it into another software package. Just because it is *more* than just a decoder doesn't give it any better legal standing under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The piece of knowledge that LiViD needs to work is a trade secret of the DVD consortium. Also, you forgot that many of the defendants were only "linking" to the DeCSS software site. The DVD lawsuit threatens how Web sites are linked.
Yet another round of people saying, "Here we go again."
I'm wondering if the only reason that Slashdot still covers the Amiga is that it makes good drama. Y'know, kinda like a soap opera for the keyboard-enabled culture. There can't be THAT many amiga owners anymore, can there? Do 500 Amiga owners and falling deserve this kind of attention on slashdot?
I should've known better than to believe that Gateway would have actually created a new desktop for people that was different than the generic PC they usually produce. Of course, the Amiga community never did learn their lesson with ESCOM, which pretty much did the same thing, apparently trying to get people to buy ESCOM branded PC's. And now everyone is supposed to take Amino on faith, that they will actually do something, anything, and release a computer that lives up to the AMIGA name.
Sorry Amino. It's not you. After following the Amiga story for 5 or 6 years, I know better. There's no way in hell that you can create a decent machine that lives up to the Amiga name. Even if you release a computer it better be fast, and it better capture the excitement that the Amiga did a decade ago, otherwise we'll just be laughing ourselves to the grave.
What an embarassment.
It's pretty simple, (At least the legal part is)
If you believe (and I think that many of you do) that openly published source code should be protected speech, then you cannot hold someone criminally liable for distributing source code. That person may, however, be held legally responsible in a civil, and ordered to pay restitution by a jury of your peers, *but* it still doesn't make them a criminal.
Writing a book on how to make a silencer, or an automatic machine gun, is not illegal. But actually owning either of those weapons is a federal crime. Distributing the book to a group of people you know that have legally-shady motives may make you liable in a court of law.
There have been people who have replied that the distribution needs to be controlled. I would like to point out that this would not make you criminally negligent as there is no law currently requiring that you do control distribution. It's only good legal advice because the tool you create might be one that takes down sun.com.
Notice that I've only been talking about the legal aspects, for good reason. They are easy. The ethical dillemnas can get pretty hairy as already mentioned.
Of all the ethical examples out there, there is a real-life case that happened about 4 years ago. Some of you may still remember this.
Dan Farmer was an SGI Sysadmin, he released SATAN to the general public. After that, he was fired, by SGI. He wasn't sued, or put in jail -- just held ethically responsible for releasing a "dangerous" utility onto the internet, and subsequently canned. But Farmer's motives for releasing it, were very ethical. By releasing this tool, systems connected on the internet will have better protection from crackers.
Both SGI and Farmer had equally valid points, it was just that SGI didn't share Farmer's view. SGI took, in their view, the proper action by the ethical violation that Farmer had done.
So really, the answer to who should be held ethically responsible, depends upon the ethical view that you hold.
BTW, in case you're planning on using this for your paper, I just want to share one more thing with you.
(C) 1999 by author. May not be reprinted outside of the domain slashdot.org without the author's permission.
;^) There. Now you can't copy/paste it into your assignment and stay legally and ethically correct.
From the looks, it looks like a Gnome or KDE based system using the winodwmaker window manager, with modifications that probably won't let you into a shell.
;)
Interesting also, I quote, (And not question-mark
"When developing Xetos we took care about the usability of the operating system and had an eye on existing operating systems."
And...
"Due to the Linux kernel, you can benefit already from a large number of applications. No matter if you are looking for office-, graphic-, or multimedia applications - Iwin Xetos provides you with the right software base."
So apparently they're talking on both sides of their mouth. Not only do they blast Unix for being too hard to learn, but Xetos can use a wealth of applications written for Linux, a variant of Unix. At any rate, it looks like it has a UNIX core. Hmmm...
--Rob
ARGH!
;^)
Linux was never meant to be a mainstream OS. And why was it never meant to be a mainstream OS?
Because UNIX IS NOT USER FRIENDLY. As long as the kernel is intertwined with GNU Unix, it will never be. The issues are just too complex for most people. Just try to explain to your Mom, how to ifconfig your lan card and set up IP routing to go through the gateway. (And don't say, "oh my mom can do that, maybe you need a new mom". My mom sure as hell can't do that, and I don't need a new mom, either.
And the funny part is that no one is even attempting to create an Easy-Linux disto. Sure there are winlinux distros coming out and Caldera Open Linux, but I still wouldn't give those to my Mom to use and expect her to know how it works. And don't think COAS is a solution, because it's not, and neither is linuxconf.
Linux was built from the ground up as a windows alternative. The problem was that the people who were building it up originally were Unix natives, and really just wanted a Unix-like system that they would have more power over than with Windows running on their PC's. And now, other people using Linux are expecting it to be a mainstream platform. In it's current condition, it will never be.
Oh, btw, the creators of Linux succeeded with their original goals. I now have more power over my box than I did with Windows, but ease of use was never an original design goal. It is the cause of some Linux factions that are turning this into a war with MS, battling tooth and nail until the very end. The original idea of linux was to be an alternative OS to Windows. Now we're battling for the desktop. And in the industry, we'd call that Requirements Creep.
An observant person might note that Windows really has the same problem in reverse. It was meant to be easy to use, but has problems being a true powerhouse OS. And in this sense, it costs money to do things that somone can do on Linux for free, and in many cases have an easier time at it. When I fiddle around with MS Word, I often yearn for the commandline tools I have with linux to search the document, or to do a regex substitution. And then I think how much simpler it would be with linux at least until the next glibc upgrade comes out.
Furthermore, in the OS market, there are lots of battles that could lose the war. Office Apps is another biggie. Even if we have a nice browser, we still won't have the office apps. Ease of use is another. So is stability and compatability with existing hardware.
Lastly, I have a solution to the problem your wife experienced. If a site wants to ignore 5 to 20% of a potential market by using incompatible Java code on their servers, fine with me. They certainly won't get my business dollar, but rather a letter of complaint, "Because your site didn't work with my browser, I bought it over at Brand X's site instead." A few of those will turn some heads in the Sales Department.
Just stop trying to convince people of something that Linux is not. Okay? You'll sleep much better at night.
--R
It will become a reality when any large computer company, like Apple or IBM realize that there really is a market for these things, and they move from the R&D dept. to Marketing.
So far the only real product I've seen that fits that description is the one from IBM a while back.
Note that no other MAJOR-BRAND-NAME (other than IBM, who will need a year to release theirs) computer manufacturer sees a market for it yet. I guess that means it will be a while.