Yeah goddamit! Go bankrupt and have to rely on social welfare to pay for your food so you can fight this case.. oh wait.. we're dismantling the welfare..
Oh well, nobody said democracy would be easy. Whaddya mean corporate state?
The country they're in wanted them there - if they didn't, they wouldn't be there. They decided that this was the best offer they could get.
That all sounds just lovely, until you start taking a decent look at who "they" really are. Are "they" the Sudanese people who got forced off of their land by Sudan soldiers and weaponry bought and paid for by Talisman Energy Inc. that wanted the land?
Are "they" the 12 year old girls that Nike 'hires' from obscenely poor neighborhoods and puts to live in a compound surrounded by chain-link fences and razor-wire?
Are "they" the cocoa bean picking slaves who get caught and beaten if they try to leave the plantations down in South America?
The ones who suffer from these companies are not the "they" that let the companies in.. the ones that let the companies in are the despotic governments and dictators that are willing to line their own pockets at the expense of the people - and keep their power by using a portion of their money to buy weapons from America and shooting those who would rebel, or even simply calling America in when certain forces threaten to "de-stabilize" the region.
When you realize that "de-stabilize" is very often just a code word for "trying to kick out the companies", the falsehood that they let the companies in becomes patently obvious.
It could backfire. The last thing we need is some porn industry exec saying, "Yeah! People are finding it too easy to get our stuff and aren't paying for it.."
Actually, Open Source is very relevant to internal software - some would say more relevant because you can use open source but are under no obligations to release either code or binaries to the general public. If your individual contractor has a background in several Open Source projects, he is more in a position to examine a company's needs and say "There's something out there that can do most of that already, and I can modify it quickly and easily to match your need exactly."
We need to move from a business model of hiring programmers and then giving them tasks to a business model of putting out bids and selecting the applicant most able to provide the work within your budget/time constraints.
Remember that competitive edge requires first use - if you're using something developed for free, your competitors have equal access. If on the other hand you've paid to have something developed in-house, it could just as easily be an end-user application for your employees to use. If it gives your employees a competitive edge on your competition - even if it's just by having it first - that's worth money to a company.
Also remember that while companies may release their modifications under an open source liscence, they are under no obligation to advertise that - and in fact need only provide the source to those people who request it. That companies like RedHat and Mandrake make their OSS freely available is because they know that their customer base is more likely than not going to be asking for access to the source anyway due to the evangelical bent and it winds up being cheaper just leaving it completely free to download.
I see companies using Open Source to develop their internal products, use them for a while until they develop something better, then release it to the general public to see if the mass coding community can come up with something they haven't already thought of and incorporate it into their current product. Best of both worlds situation, really, early competitive edge followed by many minds development.
I'd advise you to pick up more at that price while you still can.
To see what the levy is going to do (basically double for blank CDs and cassette tapes, and expand to include MP3 players and DVDs) you can check out this link:
So we have approximately 181,000 Mb of unexplained "digital content". The way he talks about ripping the CD's 2 years ago makes it sound as if he has not purchased any since.
Given:
he says he's a pirate,
he also seems to be quite familiar with the P2P sharing mechanism
he has over 170 gigabytes of unexplained "digital content"
I think you can safely assume that ripping was not the only activity he did.
1. It is the CBDTPA, not the SSSCA. Make sure you reference the correct legislation. It may be the same to us, but there's a world of difference to the congresscritter.
2. This legislation will create nearly insurmountable challenges and cause serious harm to the computer hardware industry for the benefit of the copyright control industry which is only one-tenth the size.
3. This legislation eliminates the need for the copyright control industry to create partnerships with the hardware industry to achieve their goals, thus robbing the economy of that growth as well.
4. Do not insult your congresscritter. Do not accuse them of taking bribes or being stupid. Do not accuse them of being bought off. They may be any or all of these things, but don't accuse them of it.
5. Tell them you support them, think their ideas and ideals are worthwhile, and voted for them in the last election because of this. (If you do not and don't feel comfortable lying, don't say anything about how you voted or who you support)
5. Your vote in the next election rides primarily on this particular issue - larger than any individual candidate's ideas or ideals.
6. The copyright control industry has refused to use the legislation already in existance to prosecute copyright infringers - only those who would provide the means. How serious can the problem be if they do not even make cursory attempts bring actual offenders to justice?
7. Stay calm and very courteous. Write your letter, leave it for two hours or more, then look over it again.
8. The issues of audio cassettes and VCRs, both of which were supposedly going to kill the industry - have not. This is certainly an equivalent over-reaction
9. The legislation assumes that you and the congresscritter are criminals already, and cannot hold yourself in check without some sort of technical provisions. Feel free to say how the legislation insults the congresscritter.
10. The software industry has been dealing with this problem since its inception, but has not required legislation forcing another industry to change their business, why is the copyright control industry different?
11. If your congresscritter is Democrat: This legislation unfairly impacts the less fortunate who are not able to afford the new DRM equipped devices and may in future be unable to access content.
12. If your congresscritter is Republican: This legislation will work as an unfair tax on hardware makers who will have to research and develop this technology. This will wind up most affecting those who make the majority of computer hardware purchases - the successful American businessman.
Myself, I will simply disagree with the end user license agreement. I will not use the software. Chances are your thousands of hours of work has created an unstable low-quality piece of software that I would be helpless to make any changes to. Even if it worked without a flaw, I would still be helpless to make any changes to it. In the end, I will not use your shareware software not because I dislike the software but because I disagree with your terms.
And that is 100% absolutely the correct thing to do. If you disagree with the terms, don't use it. No problem with that whatsoever. Ethically and economically it is the best choice.
It's these people who disagree with the terms but then decide they're going to use it anyway that shareware developers are having troubles with.
No, American AC in Paris claimed that the creator is omnipotent. He can declare the terms of the contract and your only option is to accept it or not.
I argue that the consumer has certain rights that cannot be taken away, regardless of the existence of a contract. This is comparable to the fact that an employer may not have you sign a contract that pays you less than the minimum wage.
Actually, an employer can sign you to any damn contract they like. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is that we have laws that we say supercede contract law - minimum wage being one of them.
So long as the software creators terms do not violate any of those type of laws, then he can declare the terms of the contract, and your only option is to accept it or not. To argue otherwise is to suggest that because everybody has a "right" to not starve, I should be able to walk into a restaurant and demand they feed me for nothing.
What happened was that the Democrats wanted recounts in only those counties which they knew they would get a higher number of votes when the "non-votes" were counted
This is a blatant falsehood, as there was an offer on the table of having the entire state of Florida recount for a period. The republicans rejected that offer in short order.
I believe if every single county in Florida were to have done a re-count you'd have gotten the same outcome... statistically, the random number of poorly punched cards should be distributed in such a way that it shouldn't alter the basic percentage of votes for each candidate.
Well, if every county had the same voting ballot, I'd grant you this point. They didn't though - that was the big kerfuffle, remember? Different communities were allowed to draw up their ballots differently. Which means your assumption of a statistically equal chance is dead wrong.
However, even when forced unconstitutionally to accept some recounts from predominantely democratic communities, Bush STILL won...
Yes, he did. And on further recounting by the media of the ballots that would have been re-examined (those rejected as "no-vote") Bush still would have won by the narrowest of margins. The funny thing is though, when they recounted and included the double-punched ballots where there was a clear-intent (ergo, someone had written a vote down on them) then Gore won by a slight margin. Doesn't mean much - other than Bush was elected by the law rather than the people. But we knew that anyway - that's what the electoral college is.
That all being said, I won't argue your rendition of the legal measures taken - merely point out that it was a republican controlled legislature, with republican appointees that effectively shut down the counting before the courts had ruled. All, as you say, completely legal.
If the camouflage can alter on the fly, I think it could be very effective.
Camouflage now works partially by blending in the surroundings, and partially by altering or breaking up the shape of a human form.
Having the pattern being able to shift could make it nearly impossible to spot a human form. The trick would be to make the pattern shifting subtle enough.
I have not seen a single solid argument against extensions that makes screwing everything we have over worth it.
AKA Lock-in.. and you're right.
Because most of the user base is trained now in file extensions, it's going to be difficult to do away with them.
And really, the only reason I could suggest for doing away with them are the limitations on the three letter extension. As more software packages and custom packages are created, sooner or later we're going to wind up with a confusion in name-space. I've found this happens already with some propietary formats - two separate programs happen to use the same extension for their files, over-writing each other in the registry. Which means sometimes I try to open one file and get the wrong program which consequently chokes on the incompatible format. Not a huge thing, but still an annoyance.
What I am saying is that OSS is done primarily by people with free time and money due to their employment for very large institutions (universities/large corporations) as indicated in this study [osdn.com]. Their time/money and education is funded through some method, and, in this case, it is generally the sales of commercial software (and generally not services), and university salaries.
1. University salaries won't be disappearing if software becomes all GPL. (It won't anyway, but that's another story) There is an argument to be made that with less money being spent on restrictive liscences, Universities will be able to hire more staff and thus produce more developers available for OSS.
2. While it may be generally the sales of commercial software, and generally not services that funds OSS developers, they key to that is "right now." Every industry goes through change. Red Hat's reaching profitability is perhaps an example of where software development will wind up - the money in support rather than creation.
This is essentially what Bruce argues, and I don't beleive he says anywhere in the article that it's going to be all wine and roses moving from here to a GPL-centric world. Lots of people who are paid for "software creation" specifically will likely suffer.. many of them will find employment back in the "software support" area, some won't.
I personally tend to believe that as we get more people into software support positions, the quality of OSS in general will go up, for the simple reasons that developers will get sick of dealing with problem X sixty times a day and work up a patch to solve it quickly and efficiently.
The musicians are so dumb, they'll whore for the record companies for fifteen cents. Yet they give away millions to the same company. It staggers the immagination just how stupid these guys are.
An artist wants to get their music heard by as many people as possible. That requires radio. The RIAA controls what goes on the radio. Ergo, an artist must deal with the RIAA companies.
Does this mean they're happy about it? Heck no. But right now there's no other game in town.
Of course you can always go and download a Java VM and you can even download one from Microsoft (!). Isn't that fair enough?
That's what the case will likely be deciding. I imagine your argument is similar to the one that Microsoft will be using.
However, as the courts have already ruled that Microsoft has illegally made use of its monopoly to damage companies, MS will be arguing against precedent. Sun will likely point to Netscape to show how the illegal leveraging of the monopoly damaged that company, even though you could alway s freely download Netscape as well.
As an additional point, the Microsoft VM is really no longer compatible with modern Java, so the version that XP directs you to is, for all intents and purposes, broken. MS provides no way to find Sun's Java VM, and mom & pop user who aren't in tune with the computer industry really won't have any idea of where to get a working one, or for that matter even that there is a working one. Sun will no doubt be using this as proof that, rather than being rehabilitated, MS is still trying to use its monopoly to harm other companies.
If Sun gets its way, couldn't then Real Networks and AOL ask to get their products included with Windows XP?
I imagine that they could, and expect that they will. I'll go even further and suggest that Real might have a decent chance of winning (if Sun does) as Windows Media Player could be seen as a leveraged competitive product. I'm not so sure about AOL though - it's harder to prove you're being damaged when you've already got the lion's share.
On January 23, 2001 Microsoft and Sun settled on the lawsuit about Microsoft shipping non-standard versions of Java.... Microsoft decided not to included the Java VM with Windows XP, kind of saying we don't need your stinking POS. Now, on this new lawsuit Sun asks among other things for: "Preliminary injunctions prior to trial requiring Microsoft to: Distribute Sun's current, binary implementation of Java Plug-in as part of Windows XP and Internet Explorer." Why don't they make up their fucking mind?
There's no confusion here.. note the original settlement terms you provide:
Sun has agreed to grant Microsoft a limited license to continue to distribute its current version of the software, provided that all future versions of such products pass Sun's compatibility tests. [emphasis added]
Sun has always wanted Java distributed with MS-Windows. They just wanted a properly compatible version. When MS got told they had to play fair and couldn't use their usual embrace & extend strategy, they basically picked up their toys and went home.
Now Sun is saying that since they're the only game in town, they don't get to just pick up their toys and go home. They have a responsibility to the public/market to allow anybody to play.. but they still have to play fair.
Of course they're not doing it for the good of the community. Anybody who thinks that is daft. But it's not just a hand out either, it's redress for wrongs done.
Another way to think of it is like Sun has a net, but the big bully MS has been keeping Sun from getting to the public stream so that MS can market all the fish on their own. Now that MS has been recognized as being in the big bully position, Sun's wanting them to pay up for keeping them from fishing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah goddamit! Go bankrupt and have to rely on social welfare to pay for your food so you can fight this case.. oh wait.. we're dismantling the welfare..
Oh well, nobody said democracy would be easy. Whaddya mean corporate state?
The country they're in wanted them there - if they didn't, they wouldn't be there. They decided that this was the best offer they could get.
That all sounds just lovely, until you start taking a decent look at who "they" really are. Are "they" the Sudanese people who got forced off of their land by Sudan soldiers and weaponry bought and paid for by Talisman Energy Inc. that wanted the land?
Are "they" the 12 year old girls that Nike 'hires' from obscenely poor neighborhoods and puts to live in a compound surrounded by chain-link fences and razor-wire?
Are "they" the cocoa bean picking slaves who get caught and beaten if they try to leave the plantations down in South America?
The ones who suffer from these companies are not the "they" that let the companies in.. the ones that let the companies in are the despotic governments and dictators that are willing to line their own pockets at the expense of the people - and keep their power by using a portion of their money to buy weapons from America and shooting those who would rebel, or even simply calling America in when certain forces threaten to "de-stabilize" the region.
When you realize that "de-stabilize" is very often just a code word for "trying to kick out the companies", the falsehood that they let the companies in becomes patently obvious.
It could backfire. The last thing we need is some porn industry exec saying, "Yeah! People are finding it too easy to get our stuff and aren't paying for it.."
So help us help the guy out.. give us his web address so we can all check it out and buy.
If he doesn't have one.. you're a tech geek, arentcha?
Actually, Open Source is very relevant to internal software - some would say more relevant because you can use open source but are under no obligations to release either code or binaries to the general public. If your individual contractor has a background in several Open Source projects, he is more in a position to examine a company's needs and say "There's something out there that can do most of that already, and I can modify it quickly and easily to match your need exactly."
We need to move from a business model of hiring programmers and then giving them tasks to a business model of putting out bids and selecting the applicant most able to provide the work within your budget/time constraints.
Remember that competitive edge requires first use - if you're using something developed for free, your competitors have equal access. If on the other hand you've paid to have something developed in-house, it could just as easily be an end-user application for your employees to use. If it gives your employees a competitive edge on your competition - even if it's just by having it first - that's worth money to a company.
Also remember that while companies may release their modifications under an open source liscence, they are under no obligation to advertise that - and in fact need only provide the source to those people who request it. That companies like RedHat and Mandrake make their OSS freely available is because they know that their customer base is more likely than not going to be asking for access to the source anyway due to the evangelical bent and it winds up being cheaper just leaving it completely free to download.
I see companies using Open Source to develop their internal products, use them for a while until they develop something better, then release it to the general public to see if the mass coding community can come up with something they haven't already thought of and incorporate it into their current product. Best of both worlds situation, really, early competitive edge followed by many minds development.
I'd advise you to pick up more at that price while you still can.
To see what the levy is going to do (basically double for blank CDs and cassette tapes, and expand to include MP3 players and DVDs) you can check out this link:
http://www.sycorp.com/levy/index.htm
270 CDs @ ~14 songs each = ~3800 songs.
3800 songs @ ~5Mb/song = ~19000Mb.
1 Gig = ~1000 Mb.
200 Gig = ~200000 Mb
200000Mb-19000Mb= 181000Mb
So we have approximately 181,000 Mb of unexplained "digital content". The way he talks about ripping the CD's 2 years ago makes it sound as if he has not purchased any since.
Given:
he says he's a pirate,
he also seems to be quite familiar with the P2P sharing mechanism
he has over 170 gigabytes of unexplained "digital content"
I think you can safely assume that ripping was not the only activity he did.
I dunno. People pay ~$10 for two hours entertainment at the theatres these days.. so why not?
1. It is the CBDTPA, not the SSSCA. Make sure you reference the correct legislation. It may be the same to us, but there's a world of difference to the congresscritter.
2. This legislation will create nearly insurmountable challenges and cause serious harm to the computer hardware industry for the benefit of the copyright control industry which is only one-tenth the size.
3. This legislation eliminates the need for the copyright control industry to create partnerships with the hardware industry to achieve their goals, thus robbing the economy of that growth as well.
4. Do not insult your congresscritter. Do not accuse them of taking bribes or being stupid. Do not accuse them of being bought off. They may be any or all of these things, but don't accuse them of it.
5. Tell them you support them, think their ideas and ideals are worthwhile, and voted for them in the last election because of this. (If you do not and don't feel comfortable lying, don't say anything about how you voted or who you support)
5. Your vote in the next election rides primarily on this particular issue - larger than any individual candidate's ideas or ideals.
6. The copyright control industry has refused to use the legislation already in existance to prosecute copyright infringers - only those who would provide the means. How serious can the problem be if they do not even make cursory attempts bring actual offenders to justice?
7. Stay calm and very courteous. Write your letter, leave it for two hours or more, then look over it again.
8. The issues of audio cassettes and VCRs, both of which were supposedly going to kill the industry - have not. This is certainly an equivalent over-reaction
9. The legislation assumes that you and the congresscritter are criminals already, and cannot hold yourself in check without some sort of technical provisions. Feel free to say how the legislation insults the congresscritter.
10. The software industry has been dealing with this problem since its inception, but has not required legislation forcing another industry to change their business, why is the copyright control industry different?
11. If your congresscritter is Democrat:
This legislation unfairly impacts the less fortunate who are not able to afford the new DRM equipped devices and may in future be unable to access content.
12. If your congresscritter is Republican:
This legislation will work as an unfair tax on hardware makers who will have to research and develop this technology. This will wind up most affecting those who make the majority of computer hardware purchases - the successful American businessman.
Why is it that I only have mod points when the crap posters are out? You are of course absolutely correct.
Aw man.. can't I just use my Lucida Handwriting font?
Myself, I will simply disagree with the end user license agreement. I will not use the software. Chances are your thousands of hours of work has created an unstable low-quality piece of software that I would be helpless to make any changes to. Even if it worked without a flaw, I would still be helpless to make any changes to it. In the end, I will not use your shareware software not because I dislike the software but because I disagree with your terms.
And that is 100% absolutely the correct thing to do. If you disagree with the terms, don't use it. No problem with that whatsoever. Ethically and economically it is the best choice.
It's these people who disagree with the terms but then decide they're going to use it anyway that shareware developers are having troubles with.
I argue that the consumer has certain rights that cannot be taken away, regardless of the existence of a contract. This is comparable to the fact that an employer may not have you sign a contract that pays you less than the minimum wage.
Actually, an employer can sign you to any damn contract they like. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is that we have laws that we say supercede contract law - minimum wage being one of them.
So long as the software creators terms do not violate any of those type of laws, then he can declare the terms of the contract, and your only option is to accept it or not. To argue otherwise is to suggest that because everybody has a "right" to not starve, I should be able to walk into a restaurant and demand they feed me for nothing.
What happened was that the Democrats wanted recounts in only those counties which they knew they would get a higher number of votes when the "non-votes" were counted
This is a blatant falsehood, as there was an offer on the table of having the entire state of Florida recount for a period. The republicans rejected that offer in short order.
I believe if every single county in Florida were to have done a re-count you'd have gotten the same outcome... statistically, the random number of poorly punched cards should be distributed in such a way that it shouldn't alter the basic percentage of votes for each candidate.
Well, if every county had the same voting ballot, I'd grant you this point. They didn't though - that was the big kerfuffle, remember? Different communities were allowed to draw up their ballots differently. Which means your assumption of a statistically equal chance is dead wrong.
However, even when forced unconstitutionally to accept some recounts from predominantely democratic communities, Bush STILL won...
Yes, he did. And on further recounting by the media of the ballots that would have been re-examined (those rejected as "no-vote") Bush still would have won by the narrowest of margins. The funny thing is though, when they recounted and included the double-punched ballots where there was a clear-intent (ergo, someone had written a vote down on them) then Gore won by a slight margin. Doesn't mean much - other than Bush was elected by the law rather than the people. But we knew that anyway - that's what the electoral college is.
That all being said, I won't argue your rendition of the legal measures taken - merely point out that it was a republican controlled legislature, with republican appointees that effectively shut down the counting before the courts had ruled. All, as you say, completely legal.
Moral or fair? Well.. that can be debated.
If the camouflage can alter on the fly, I think it could be very effective.
Camouflage now works partially by blending in the surroundings, and partially by altering or breaking up the shape of a human form.
Having the pattern being able to shift could make it nearly impossible to spot a human form. The trick would be to make the pattern shifting subtle enough.
Cool.. so all I need to do to sort through the pictures of my collection of stamps is store them in a text-based format? Just a sec...
HEY! You bastard! Now I can't see any of my goddamn stamps!
:-)
Well.. okay.. so they weren't stamps to begin with.. but still!
I have not seen a single solid argument against extensions that makes screwing everything we have over worth it.
AKA Lock-in.. and you're right.
Because most of the user base is trained now in file extensions, it's going to be difficult to do away with them.
And really, the only reason I could suggest for doing away with them are the limitations on the three letter extension. As more software packages and custom packages are created, sooner or later we're going to wind up with a confusion in name-space. I've found this happens already with some propietary formats - two separate programs happen to use the same extension for their files, over-writing each other in the registry. Which means sometimes I try to open one file and get the wrong program which consequently chokes on the incompatible format. Not a huge thing, but still an annoyance.
Try www.kungfuchess.com for a taste of marmalade. Real Time Chess.
What I am saying is that OSS is done primarily by people with free time and money due to their employment for very large institutions (universities/large corporations) as indicated in this study [osdn.com]. Their time/money and education is funded through some method, and, in this case, it is generally the sales of commercial software (and generally not services), and university salaries.
1. University salaries won't be disappearing if software becomes all GPL. (It won't anyway, but that's another story) There is an argument to be made that with less money being spent on restrictive liscences, Universities will be able to hire more staff and thus produce more developers available for OSS.
2. While it may be generally the sales of commercial software, and generally not services that funds OSS developers, they key to that is "right now." Every industry goes through change. Red Hat's reaching profitability is perhaps an example of where software development will wind up - the money in support rather than creation.
This is essentially what Bruce argues, and I don't beleive he says anywhere in the article that it's going to be all wine and roses moving from here to a GPL-centric world. Lots of people who are paid for "software creation" specifically will likely suffer.. many of them will find employment back in the "software support" area, some won't.
I personally tend to believe that as we get more people into software support positions, the quality of OSS in general will go up, for the simple reasons that developers will get sick of dealing with problem X sixty times a day and work up a patch to solve it quickly and efficiently.
You forgot:
D) GM didn't charge any extra for a full-featured radio. A GM CD-player will cost you an extra $200 bucks currently.
I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet.
The Seattle WTO protests getting big enough to warrant prime-time media coverage.
Superior firepower only purchases peace from those afraid to die.
Don't forget that either.
The musicians are so dumb, they'll whore for the record companies for fifteen cents. Yet they give away millions to the same company. It staggers the immagination just how stupid these guys are.
An artist wants to get their music heard by as many people as possible. That requires radio. The RIAA controls what goes on the radio. Ergo, an artist must deal with the RIAA companies.
Does this mean they're happy about it? Heck no. But right now there's no other game in town.
Of course you can always go and download a Java VM and you can even download one from Microsoft (!). Isn't that fair enough?
That's what the case will likely be deciding. I imagine your argument is similar to the one that Microsoft will be using.
However, as the courts have already ruled that Microsoft has illegally made use of its monopoly to damage companies, MS will be arguing against precedent. Sun will likely point to Netscape to show how the illegal leveraging of the monopoly damaged that company, even though you could alway s freely download Netscape as well.
As an additional point, the Microsoft VM is really no longer compatible with modern Java, so the version that XP directs you to is, for all intents and purposes, broken. MS provides no way to find Sun's Java VM, and mom & pop user who aren't in tune with the computer industry really won't have any idea of where to get a working one, or for that matter even that there is a working one. Sun will no doubt be using this as proof that, rather than being rehabilitated, MS is still trying to use its monopoly to harm other companies.
If Sun gets its way, couldn't then Real Networks and AOL ask to get their products included with Windows XP?
I imagine that they could, and expect that they will. I'll go even further and suggest that Real might have a decent chance of winning (if Sun does) as Windows Media Player could be seen as a leveraged competitive product. I'm not so sure about AOL though - it's harder to prove you're being damaged when you've already got the lion's share.
On January 23, 2001 Microsoft and Sun settled on the lawsuit about Microsoft shipping non-standard versions of Java. ... Microsoft decided not to included the Java VM with Windows XP, kind of saying we don't need your stinking POS. Now, on this new lawsuit Sun asks among other things for: "Preliminary injunctions prior to trial requiring Microsoft to: Distribute Sun's current, binary implementation of Java Plug-in as part of Windows XP and Internet Explorer." Why don't they make up their fucking mind?
There's no confusion here.. note the original settlement terms you provide:
Sun has agreed to grant Microsoft a limited license to continue to distribute its current version of the software, provided that all future versions of such products pass Sun's compatibility tests. [emphasis added]
Sun has always wanted Java distributed with MS-Windows. They just wanted a properly compatible version. When MS got told they had to play fair and couldn't use their usual embrace & extend strategy, they basically picked up their toys and went home.
Now Sun is saying that since they're the only game in town, they don't get to just pick up their toys and go home. They have a responsibility to the public/market to allow anybody to play.. but they still have to play fair.
Of course they're not doing it for the good of the community. Anybody who thinks that is daft. But it's not just a hand out either, it's redress for wrongs done.
Another way to think of it is like Sun has a net, but the big bully MS has been keeping Sun from getting to the public stream so that MS can market all the fish on their own. Now that MS has been recognized as being in the big bully position, Sun's wanting them to pay up for keeping them from fishing.