Scroll to A Brief History of Windows NT/2000/XP by Andrew Tanenbaum. This is a problem regardless of software license. The unique problem that open source faces is that people do it as well as working at the same time.
I see your point...
If it's a small project I wouldn't worry too much in any case. Otherwise, make the programmers agree to some statement before you'll accept their work (it could be an "informal" email). And always remember that estoppel is your best friend.
The problem is that the contributor himself may not fully understand what he can and what he cannot do.
And then after something comes up, I'd have a big company telling me to shut down my project (because it may not be
possible to revert a big, findamental patch, for example).
IANAL, but my key fear with using any copyrighted material is authors being able to revoke a license. Copyright and licensing laws are quite strong after all.
Not in the case of the GNU GPL, as far as I understand. I have asked a lawyer about this once (last year I guess).
I suppose you mean I should get him to GPG-sign a letter? That seems interesting.
Something like: the contributor signs a statement *and* the key he'll use to commit to the repository (because my CVS doesn't use GPG keys). If anything goes wrong, then I have his letter stating that everything is legal, and if he didn't have the right to do that, he's in trouble and I'm not.
But does that always work? regardless of what he claims, if the code is not his, it may belong to someone. And I may need to revert the commit. And if his contribution was part of a restructuring that went on two years ago, it means the project needs to start from scratch...
Well, Turnitin.com IS using the students' papers to generate a profit. Without the copyright infringment, turnitin.com doesn't have much of a business. That's the point.
Actually, the school is hiring a company to do something that teachers and schools have done for years. Turnitin.com is not making profit by directly using the contents, and is not selling the content either. It sells a service that checks the content.
And frankly, the fact that a student writes a paper for a class doesn't mean that paper can't generate a profit. A good paper might be picked up by a newspaper and published. It might be included in a book. They do have commerical value.
I myself have used parts of papers I have written to write a few encyclopedia entries that I was paid for. It's my work, and my work can't be used by a for-profit company without my permission. It's called copyright infringment.
But who said you can't do that, even if the paper is in their database?
The same thing goes when you register your work somewhere to make sure you can have your copyrights protected -- someone will need to store it, and they do have the right to charge for the service. The copyright is still yours. They can't sell or publish the content without your permission.
It protects my rights. What if I don't want my works in the database because I am opposed to having my works in an electronic form?
Well, they you wouldn't pass my course when I was a teacher, because I only accepted homework and all assignments in electronic form.:-) And guess what? Local law requires me to store every test and assignment from every student for three years.
I wrote plenty of papers for school over my time there, some of which I later rehashed and even considered publishing,
No problem with that, since those databases are not used to steal your work. They are actually used to make sure no other student will cheat by stealing your work! Would you be happy if this happeend:
You write a paper for a course
5 years later you try to publish it
You are told you're not supposed to publish, because you copied the work from someone else
And then you find out that another student, one year before, had copied your work -- and that's why you couldn't publish it
If that ever happened, a database would assure that the work is really yours (sue and call the school as witness)
whether it was written for profit or not, I own the copyright on that paper. I can choose who has the right to copy that paper and use it for commercial purposes.
Sure. And nobody said you don't own the copyright to that work. But the teacher needs to be able to compare papers, computer programs, etc. It's been like that since, well, ever, and I think it qualifies as fair use.
Can this group not see that it's in their interest academically to root out cheating so that everyone is forced to work and learn if they want to pass?
I guess some students can't see that. Some do, but can't develop the necessary discipline to study hard enough, or is not motivated, or whatever -- and then when they are supposed to take a test or deliver a paper, they cheat, and try hard to believe that they "could learn it later" or that the subject "is not that important", or that theyr not cheating themselves.
Their work. Their IP. It is so then protected and nobody can copy it without their agreement.
It's sad to see people using the concept of intellectual property in such way. IP is a capitalist concept, which exists to protect your profits (I'm talking about IP, not authorship). And a paper written by a student has a different purpose. It was not written for generating profit. It is supposed to exercise writing skills and consolidate knowledge and abilities. And those works need to have quality and authorship checked.
But who cares? "School and teachers are evil. Student is good. IP protects student. Hence IP is valid in this case". Right?
I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it.
Are you comparing your personal, private phone book and messages with an assignment that was made by a student for a course that he's taking, and is supposed to have its quality and originality? A student paper is not "private".
The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
FUD. (Yes, you are using vague sentences to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt).
There is no way "the amount of data that is being processed through it" will "catch genuine work". Please elaborate on how this would happen.
2. This company is storing students' papers in their database and using them without permission. This is a completely different situation.
I was a teacher once. And I once had to return 95% (REALLY, NINETY FIVE PERCENT) of all the assignments I had given to students, just because they all copied and pasted fro the Internet. They did an awful job (dumb/random copy and paste, used babelfish, etc), and learned nothing.
You know what? The student produces a paper because he was told to do so by the teacher. And the paper has a purpose: make the student exercise his writing abilities, and help him consolidate what he learned. I don't think this should be seen as an IP issue. Intellectual Property has to do with innovation, which is not the case here. And yes, lots of students will cheat (I know what I'm talking about), if they don't think they'll be caught. It turns out that later, when they're looking for a job (or trying to be rpomoted), they'll notice that they don't have that nice ability to summarize their ideas -- or that they don't know exactly how to write a parser (or how to use statistical tests to help fix some load problem with some machines, or whatever). And they won't even consider that as a consequence of their cheating when they were undergrads.
So, I think it works like this: "we" (the teachers) have the right to share information among ourselves, to help check if a student is cheating. And this is because we want our students to be successful in their lives (and not only get a stupid piece of paper that says "Engineer", or "B.S"). Please don't try to use the idea of intellectual property to help students cheat. It's not why the concept exists, and it's a serious misuse of it.
I think teachers and schools keeping old papers, assignments, tests, etc is a very good thing. For the stdents, mostly (even though they don't understand it).
If someone reads something off a website (or hate forum) and then go out and do something, does it make it the forums / websites fault?
I agree with you, but it seems taht both in Brazil and in the US (as well as several other countries) there is a growing feeling that "people must be controlled". And making the medium responsible for the message is one of the ways to control people. (Think Napster and P2P in general).
It may have to be with overpopulation: it's all hard to control, and the problems become more evident -- but more rules and control are not the answer, IMHO. Less people and decentralization would be much better. (But then the &@#^ Economy would stop growing, wouldn't it?)
By the way... Before people start bashing me: When I say "less people" I don't mean we should start killing the oens who are already there. Just stopping making so many more human beings would help... And I also don't like the idea of a fee per extra children (er, noone in the world would think of that would they? Hmmmm?)
It's all about education... Tell people that more people means a world that is harder to keep organized (not to mention less resources and other problems), and see if they stop, er, "reproducing". But I think I'm too naive.
I ware glasses, and people used to use this as a method of getting to me, it was actually the fact that i did damn well in school, even when i had only 50%~ attendance, and they were jelious. Yet the only way they could get at me, would be making jokes about my glasses. They couldn't cope when i made jokes about my glasses too, when i would turn around and use them as an aerial for the radio which wouldn't work. It would confuse them to have someone putting them selfs down.
I know what you mean, and I did that several times too in my life (not even because others were bothering me, but because it's FUN!) However, this is not something someone else can do for you. The person (or community) being offended needs to agree to do that, to make fun of themselves, to not care about what others say.
But the big problem is, what several of these groups do is not only "make fun of people". They can get violent. Since the article mentions Brazil: I am Brazilian, and I'm telling you, part of those Brazilian racist groups are skinheads and similars. Making fun of yourself doesn't help in this case (which is unfortunate...)
Re:A serious issue with old packages
on
Debian 3.0r4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The recent PHP security flaw has made this issue apparent. The version packaged for Woody is 4.1.x. The PHP developers no longer pay any attention to the 4.1 branch and their recent release for the newer 4.x release which fixed the security issues, also had other fixes included, making it difficult to backport them to the 4.1 branch. Last time I checked, no one on the Debian side had stepped up to fix the issue in 4.1.
As someone pointed out in response to another post, the same problem happens with Cyrus (the version in Woody doesn't have security updates from upstream).
What is the status of alcohol fueled cars in Brazil? I read back in the early 90s that they were producing massive amounts of alcohol from the sugar beat and sugar cane for use in cars. It seemed that such a country might have the ability to a renewable energy superpower at some point.
Yes -- that was a great idea, but... There were two problems: one, starting the car was hard in the winter (alcohol won't burn as easily as gasoline), and two, alcohol is more corrosive, and would screw up some parts of the engine.
Because of those problems, and also some wrong moves by the car industry, success was limited until recently. The good news is that not only the electronic injection technology now makes your car start even when it's very cold, but also... (Aha, this is the great part) we now have cars that can use both alcohol *and* gasoline (yes, mixed in any proportion you want)! Yeah, it sounds strange, but works! I hope this will help get more people using alcohol as fuel. It comes rfom sugar cane (which you can plant again, and again), and pollutes much less than gasoline.
It's legal to be a slut, but it's illegal to be a whore? That makes no sense. It's illegal to sell something that it's perfectly alright to give away for free. Why?
I'm not taking any position -- but I think the argument is something like,
"when there is money involved, there are two problems: first, people may prefer prostitution to other forms of work, and also, there is exploitation of the prostitutes, which is difficult to fight."
(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong)
In Brazil, as far as I remember, prostitution is not a crime. Exploiting prostitutes is.
I don't think so. I live in Brazil, and although I do not know much about the Kyoto Protocol, I do know taht my country had quite some work to do in order to comply. We are "polluting less", but I can't give you more details on this (I'd have to research). However, I do remember clearly that I read in a newspaper something to the effect of "we have managed to comply with the protocol so far by reducing...".
One important issue is nuclear waste. Why, instead of making unmanned trips to Mars and the Moon, don't people start investing in finding ways to send nuclear waste far away, cheaply?
I guess it is just semi-newsworthy that someone is combining it with a callback service and offering it as a service.
Well, as I understand callback spoofs your caller ID as a
(maybe not planned) side-effect, since the machine will call the calee with its own number. It seems like the new part is only that you can choose the number from which you seem to be calling from.
This sounds to me like a simple callback system. It has been used by people who want to reduce the price they pay for international calls -- for several years.
(You call the callback answering maching, it waits until you dial the number you want; then you hang up; the machine calls the number for you, and calls you. You're not calling "from" your country, and won't have to pay the rates charged there.)
Don't forget that at the time there was no viable alternative. Now Arch or Subversion may be reasonable alternatives that would provide most or all of the advantages of BK, but they weren't ready for the mainstream 2 years ago. It was BK or nothing. As it was it took a lot of convincing to get Linus to try it as he was pretty sceptical that any version control system could be unobtrusive enough to be worth using.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenWRT comes with QoS scripts that will help you prioritize packets. I installed it and now P2P never interferes with HTTP, DNS and other traffic.
Scroll to A Brief History of Windows NT/2000/XP by Andrew Tanenbaum. This is a problem regardless of software license. The unique problem that open source faces is that people do it as well as working at the same time.
I see your point...
If it's a small project I wouldn't worry too much in any case. Otherwise, make the programmers agree to some statement before you'll accept their work (it could be an "informal" email). And always remember that estoppel is your best friend.
The problem is that the contributor himself may not fully understand what he can and what he cannot do. And then after something comes up, I'd have a big company telling me to shut down my project (because it may not be possible to revert a big, findamental patch, for example).
IANAL, but my key fear with using any copyrighted material is authors being able to revoke a license. Copyright and licensing laws are quite strong after all.
Not in the case of the GNU GPL, as far as I understand. I have asked a lawyer about this once (last year I guess).
"because my CVS doesn't use GPG keys"
I meant, "my VCS, Monotone, uses a key that is not compatible with GPG"
I suppose you mean I should get him to GPG-sign a letter?
That seems interesting.
Something like: the contributor signs a statement *and* the key he'll use
to commit to the repository (because my CVS doesn't use GPG keys). If anything
goes wrong, then I have his letter stating that everything is legal, and if he
didn't have the right to do that, he's in trouble and I'm not.
But does that always work? regardless of what he claims, if the code is not his,
it may belong to someone. And I may need to revert the commit. And if his
contribution was part of a restructuring that went on two years ago, it means
the project needs to start from scratch...
Or am I wrong?
(Yeah, I'm paranoid.)
Well, Turnitin.com IS using the students' papers to generate a profit. Without the copyright infringment, turnitin.com doesn't have much of a business. That's the point.
Actually, the school is hiring a company to do something that teachers and schools have done for years. Turnitin.com is not making profit by directly using the contents, and is not selling the content either. It sells a service that checks the content.
And frankly, the fact that a student writes a paper for a class doesn't mean that paper can't generate a profit. A good paper might be picked up by a newspaper and published. It might be included in a book. They do have commerical value.
I myself have used parts of papers I have written to write a few encyclopedia entries that I was paid for. It's my work, and my work can't be used by a for-profit company without my permission. It's called copyright infringment.
But who said you can't do that, even if the paper is in their database?
The same thing goes when you register your work somewhere to make sure you can have your copyrights protected -- someone will need to store it, and they do have the right to charge for the service. The copyright is still yours. They can't sell or publish the content without your permission.
Well, they you wouldn't pass my course when I was a teacher, because I only accepted homework and all assignments in electronic form.
I wrote plenty of papers for school over my time there, some of which I later rehashed and even considered publishing,
No problem with that, since those databases are not used to steal your work. They are actually used to make sure no other student will cheat by stealing your work! Would you be happy if this happeend:
- You write a paper for a course
- 5 years later you try to publish it
- You are told you're not supposed to publish, because you copied the work from someone else
- And then you find out that another student, one year before, had copied your work -- and that's why you couldn't publish it
If that ever happened, a database would assure that the work is really yours (sue and call the school as witness)whether it was written for profit or not, I own the copyright on that paper. I can choose who has the right to copy that paper and use it for commercial purposes.
Sure. And nobody said you don't own the copyright to that work. But the teacher needs to be able to compare papers, computer programs, etc. It's been like that since, well, ever, and I think it qualifies as fair use.
Can this group not see that it's in their interest academically to root out cheating so that everyone is forced to work and learn if they want to pass?
I guess some students can't see that. Some do, but can't develop the necessary discipline to study hard enough, or is not motivated, or whatever -- and then when they are supposed to take a test or deliver a paper, they cheat, and try hard to believe that they "could learn it later" or that the subject "is not that important", or that theyr not cheating themselves.
to have its quality and originality
I mean "to have its quality and originality checked"
Their work. Their IP. It is so then protected and nobody can copy it without their agreement.
It's sad to see people using the concept of intellectual property in such way. IP is a capitalist concept, which exists to protect your profits (I'm talking about IP, not authorship). And a paper written by a student has a different purpose. It was not written for generating profit. It is supposed to exercise writing skills and consolidate knowledge and abilities. And those works need to have quality and authorship checked.
But who cares? "School and teachers are evil. Student is good. IP protects student. Hence IP is valid in this case". Right?
I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it.
Are you comparing your personal, private phone book and messages with an assignment that was made by a student for a course that he's taking, and is supposed to have its quality and originality? A student paper is not "private".
The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
FUD. (Yes, you are using vague sentences to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt). There is no way "the amount of data that is being processed through it" will "catch genuine work". Please elaborate on how this would happen.
2. This company is storing students' papers in their database and using them without permission. This is a completely different situation.
I was a teacher once. And I once had to return 95% (REALLY, NINETY FIVE PERCENT) of all the assignments I had given to students, just because they all copied and pasted fro the Internet. They did an awful job (dumb/random copy and paste, used babelfish, etc), and learned nothing.
You know what? The student produces a paper because he was told to do so by the teacher. And the paper has a purpose: make the student exercise his writing abilities, and help him consolidate what he learned. I don't think this should be seen as an IP issue. Intellectual Property has to do with innovation, which is not the case here. And yes, lots of students will cheat (I know what I'm talking about), if they don't think they'll be caught. It turns out that later, when they're looking for a job (or trying to be rpomoted), they'll notice that they don't have that nice ability to summarize their ideas -- or that they don't know exactly how to write a parser (or how to use statistical tests to help fix some load problem with some machines, or whatever). And they won't even consider that as a consequence of their cheating when they were undergrads.
So, I think it works like this: "we" (the teachers) have the right to share information among ourselves, to help check if a student is cheating. And this is because we want our students to be successful in their lives (and not only get a stupid piece of paper that says "Engineer", or "B.S"). Please don't try to use the idea of intellectual property to help students cheat. It's not why the concept exists, and it's a serious misuse of it.
I think teachers and schools keeping old papers, assignments, tests, etc is a very good thing. For the stdents, mostly (even though they don't understand it).
If someone reads something off a website (or hate forum) and then go out and do something, does it make it the forums / websites fault?
I agree with you, but it seems taht both in Brazil and in the US (as well as several other countries) there is a growing feeling that "people must be controlled". And making the medium responsible for the message is one of the ways to control people. (Think Napster and P2P in general).
It may have to be with overpopulation: it's all hard to control, and the problems become more evident -- but more rules and control are not the answer, IMHO. Less people and decentralization would be much better. (But then the &@#^ Economy would stop growing, wouldn't it?)
By the way... Before people start bashing me: When I say "less people" I don't mean we should start killing the oens who are already there. Just stopping making so many more human beings would help... And I also don't like the idea of a fee per extra children (er, noone in the world would think of that would they? Hmmmm?) It's all about education... Tell people that more people means a world that is harder to keep organized (not to mention less resources and other problems), and see if they stop, er, "reproducing". But I think I'm too naive.
I ware glasses, and people used to use this as a method of getting to me, it was actually the fact that i did damn well in school, even when i had only 50%~ attendance, and they were jelious. Yet the only way they could get at me, would be making jokes about my glasses. They couldn't cope when i made jokes about my glasses too, when i would turn around and use them as an aerial for the radio which wouldn't work. It would confuse them to have someone putting them selfs down.
I know what you mean, and I did that several times too in my life (not even because others were bothering me, but because it's FUN!) However, this is not something someone else can do for you. The person (or community) being offended needs to agree to do that, to make fun of themselves, to not care about what others say.
But the big problem is, what several of these groups do is not only "make fun of people". They can get violent. Since the article mentions Brazil: I am Brazilian, and I'm telling you, part of those Brazilian racist groups are skinheads and similars. Making fun of yourself doesn't help in this case (which is unfortunate...)
Wear & Tear on hardware is by nature, Wear & Tear on software is by design
On hardware? By nature? You certainly never heard of programmed obsolescence...
Are they getting a patent on it?
The recent PHP security flaw has made this issue apparent. The version packaged for Woody is 4.1.x. The PHP developers no longer pay any attention to the 4.1 branch and their recent release for the newer 4.x release which fixed the security issues, also had other fixes included, making it difficult to backport them to the 4.1 branch. Last time I checked, no one on the Debian side had stepped up to fix the issue in 4.1.
As someone pointed out in response to another post, the same problem happens with Cyrus (the version in Woody doesn't have security updates from upstream).
What is the status of alcohol fueled cars in Brazil? I read back in the early 90s that they were producing massive amounts of alcohol from the sugar beat and sugar cane for use in cars. It seemed that such a country might have the ability to a renewable energy superpower at some point.
Yes -- that was a great idea, but... There were two problems: one, starting the car was hard in the winter (alcohol won't burn as easily as gasoline), and two, alcohol is more corrosive, and would screw up some parts of the engine.
Because of those problems, and also some wrong moves by the car industry, success was limited until recently. The good news is that not only the electronic injection technology now makes your car start even when it's very cold, but also... (Aha, this is the great part) we now have cars that can use both alcohol *and* gasoline (yes, mixed in any proportion you want)! Yeah, it sounds strange, but works! I hope this will help get more people using alcohol as fuel. It comes rfom sugar cane (which you can plant again, and again), and pollutes much less than gasoline.
It's legal to be a slut, but it's illegal to be a whore? That makes no sense. It's illegal to sell something that it's perfectly alright to give away for free. Why?
I'm not taking any position -- but I think the argument is something like,
"when there is money involved, there are two problems: first, people may prefer prostitution to other forms of work, and also, there is exploitation of the prostitutes, which is difficult to fight."
(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong)
In Brazil, as far as I remember, prostitution is not a crime. Exploiting prostitutes is.
I'm sorry; this is a quote from the Kyoto Treaty?
...".
I don't think so. I live in Brazil, and although I do not know much about the Kyoto Protocol, I do know taht my country had quite some work to do in order to comply. We are "polluting less", but I can't give you more details on this (I'd have to research). However, I do remember clearly that I read in a newspaper something to the effect of "we have managed to comply with the protocol so far by reducing
One important issue is nuclear waste. Why, instead of making unmanned trips to Mars and the Moon, don't people start investing in finding ways to send nuclear waste far away, cheaply?
I guess it is just semi-newsworthy that someone is combining it with a callback service and offering it as a service.
Well, as I understand callback spoofs your caller ID as a (maybe not planned) side-effect, since the machine will call the calee with its own number. It seems like the new part is only that you can choose the number from which you seem to be calling from.
This sounds to me like a simple callback system. It has been used by people who want to reduce the price they pay for international calls -- for several years.
v ice
(You call the callback answering maching, it waits until you dial the number you want; then you hang up; the machine calls the number for you, and calls you. You're not calling "from" your country, and won't have to pay the rates charged there.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=callback+phone+ser
No, that would not be me, because I don't live in the US.
Yes, but how can you tell it doesn't happen in your country too?
Don't forget that at the time there was no viable alternative. Now Arch or Subversion may be reasonable alternatives that would provide most or all of the advantages of BK, but they weren't ready for the mainstream 2 years ago. It was BK or nothing. As it was it took a lot of convincing to get Linus to try it as he was pretty sceptical that any version control system could be unobtrusive enough to be worth using.
Yes, I had forgotten about that. You're right...