You have just blabbed away your right to gripe when the RIAA and MPAA attempt to time-limit your use of "their" copyrighted material.
I don't see why. First, there is a difference between personal use and commercial redistribution. Second, if the RIAA and MPAA rules are the law of the land, I expect Google to play by them as well when it comes to my content.
This very question of the copyright status of public postings has been tried and precedent has been set: Your Usenet posts aren't really copyrighted.
Oh? Would you care to share the case law?
Adjust your expectations of privacy downward.
I have, as have most other people. But the on-line world is poorer for it, because if every word is "on the record", people either post anonymously or they don't engage in informal discussions. You just can't have informal on-line conversations with friends if everything is recorded.
I've been posting to UseNet since 1990/91 and I've never had a feeling that my comments would cease to exist.
I never expected that my comments would "cease to exist": of course, there were backup tapes. However, there is a big difference between archiving them on some tape somewhere and republishing a massive database of comments 15 years after the fact.
None of that has any bearing on the question of copyrights. For example, just because TV networks broadcast stuff and lots of people tape them doesn't mean you can freely redistribute those tapes before the copyright is up.
So, do you expect to make money with the stuff you wrote on the net?
No. But I do expect other people not to make money from my postings, and I do expect that people don't engage in massive copyright violation and redistribute large collections of postings with expiration dates of a few weeks after 15 years.
If you don't like people seeing your old posts, well tough luck. Perhaps you should have thought about it before posting.
I see. And you apply the same reasoning to all copyrighted works? Microsoft shouldn't publish software if they didn't want people to pirate it?
Besides, the effect of your kind of attitude is that there is no space for informal discussions on-line without pseudonyms, because everything can be republished. That's a shame, although in 2001 it is enough of a reality that many people are using pseudonyms.
(In case you were wondering, no, I didn't post anything on USENET I have to be ashamed of. Some of my USENET postings actually got republished as printed articles. But that's not the point.)
I find this very offensive and intrusive. Those postings were made in the expectation that they were part of an informal, temporary discussion group, not a permanent archive searchable by anybody and everybody in perpetuity.
And legally, those postings are not in the public domain and Google has no right to republish them beyond the purpose that their authors originally implicitly gave permission for: temporary distribution on USENET.
it's some magic fairyland where you don't need to market, document, or support your "project"
There is no magic about it. There are many costs in commercial projects that simply don't exist for open source projects, or at least are much lower. And the few costs that do exist (documentation, support, etc.) are unbundled. There are also many risks associated with commercial software that users of open source software avoid (security, slow bug fixes, finite lifetime, deliberate incompatibilities, etc.).
I think the incredulity people like you express at the idea of open source software is simply because of a limited notion of what software is or what it is used for. I'm not claiming that there is one "right" development model, I'm merely claiming that when open source software meets the needs of a user community, it ends up being cheaper and less risky than equivalent commercial software. I have no problem with companies like Microsoft and Apple catering to the "rest of them", as long as they keep the protocols and infrastructure open and I don't have to use their stuff.
I don't expect you to look at financial statements, but do you ever venture outside your cubicle? As mindbogglingly large as the "project" in which you are a cog may appear to you, if you wander around your company, you may discover that most of the offices (and expenses) are devoted to marketing, sales, corporate officers, legal, training, support, documentation, and business functions. With open source, those costs are separate from the development effort. Some of them go away entirely, and others you only pay for if you need them.
Of course, commercial development itself has a lot of deadwood, since employees can justify many purchases with time-to-market or expected revenue. Open source developers are much more cost conscious because they have to be.
Sustainable open-source development is driven by simple, hard-nosed economic considerations and cost-benefit considerations. Given that almost all the costs in commercial software development are due to marketing, distribution, and testing, rather than development, it shouldn't be hard even for an ecnonomist to figure out why it makes economic sense for people to develop, and support the development of, open source software.
Commercial software companies are an inefficient means to avoid the tragedy of the commons for a good that otherwise costs essentially nothing for the public to enjoy. But with software, as opposed to many other goods, it turns out that development costs are so low that the benefit you derive from non-programming users, who still contribute bug reports and suggestions for enhancements out of self-interest, usually more than makes up for the development costs. And open source software as a marketing tool, as a tool to establish standards, and for establishing reputations is also very valuable.
Gosh, all these people talking to each other, and no central servers of any kind (except for a few 900 numbers). How does anybody make money?
Actually, the fact that your mindset became widespread is probably one of the worst things that happened to the web and Internet. It used to be mostly P2P until VCs and other companies started hijacking previously decentralized services and putting them on big, inefficient, hard-to-maintain, vulnerable central servers.
P2P represents a return to the roots of the web and Internet. If you want to chat with someone or exchange information with other people, you put it on a machine you control. Hopefully, ISPs and web hosting servicese will improve the quality of their product in response to increased demand. Improved services means both better outgoing bandwidth, better usage metering, and better naming services (so that people can find you).
Oh, in case you still don't get it, the people who make money with P2P is the ISPs, software, and hardware makers.
The Qt/E on the Zaurus afaik is a licensed version from TrollTech, though a non commercial version running under the GPL can be acquired from TrollTech.
So that would suggest that the actual display code running on the the Sharp is, in fact, not open source (this is one of the reasons why dual licenses are so annoying). What about other parts of Lineo?
Running Qtopia under X11 is currently tried by several people and there is an interesting project running a VNC server on top of X11 so the built-in VNC client can display it under Qtopia.
Running X11 applications under VNC popped up through a VNC server under Qtopia is not an acceptable solution for any software you want to use regularly or give to other people: the window management doesn't integrate and you can't cut and paste. Furthermore, some of the most important X11 utilities aren't useful in that mode: input methods, screen dump, session record/playback, shortcuts, etc.
Running Qtopia under X11 is currently tried by several people
That will be nice for users of the iPaq and other X11-based handhelds, who will then get the same handheld apps that run on the Sharp without the limitations of its "embedded" display engine.
Even if that weren't the case, though, it's pretty much the same place you're standing if you were developing for PalmOS or WinCE/PPC.
If the proposition is "this is no worse than PalmOS or WinCE", that's not a particularly good one. I expect more from Linux, and not just technically.
This tool is the most open of any of the palm devices I've seen;
Perhaps you haven't seen much then. The Compaq iPaq runs full Linux with X11 and allows you to use whatever toolkit you like. The AgendaVR runs a full version of Linux and X11 as well. Availability of powerful handhelds running fully open Linux has not been a problem.
anyone with any Linux or UNIX experience at all is going to be able to make this thing do backflips.
Well, no. A Java programmer can create Java applications for it, but a Java programmer can also create Java applications for Palm or WinCE. A C programmer can't write any GUI apps for it. And a C++ programmer has to learn a new toolkit and completely change the GUI code of their existing X11 applications.
It's a very interesting unit.
It is. It is also too bad that Sharp didn't have the guts to go with completely open and unencumbered software and standards.
What makes Debian work is not apt/deb, but the fact that there is a big, distributed infrastructure of people doing the packaging and doing the testing. And that makes it work rather well, but it requires a lot of effort. And it still breaks occasionally, sometimes very seriously.
Rpm is getting a bad rap because it is actually a bit more flexible in practice: because it uses
file dependencies extensively, you can, in fact, install rpm packages on systems even if you don't have a whole dependency infrastructure built around them or if some of the files come from manual installations. That's why so many more RPM packages are distributed on people's web sites than Debian packages. But this comes at a cost: as people try to do more (uncoordinated packaging), more things can go wrong. Some of the combinations you might want to install are simply impossible. With apt, you wouldn't even try because it's not a choice. With rpm, you can try but it fails, and rpm is then blamed for the failure.
If you could build an infrastructure like the Debian project around rpm, I expect it would do just as well as the apt/deb mechanism (the automatic download managers already exist).
I use mostly apt/deb right now, but I have also used rpm a lot in the past. Altogether, I think neither rpm nor deb/apt have really solved the packaging and system update problem completely yet. They are both rather imperfect solutions, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
The device runs Lineo and Qt/Embedded. Is Lineo completely open source or are there proprietary components? Can I recompile every binary on it from scratch? Is the screen buffer driver code in its version of Qt/Embedded open source (so that one can port X11 to it)?
If it ran X11, it wouldn't just have Qt applications ported over, it would also have all the AgendaVR and Familiar programs ported over, plus the handwriting recognition and input software.
Mmm... ugly, non-portable, AND obscure. A winning combo. QT can at least be used on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc.:)
I'm not sure what you mean. FLTK runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, and MacOS, with several other ports in the work. It's tiny, and you'd be hard pressed telling an FLTK application from ones written in other toolkits. And it's the de-facto standard for handheld Linux and lots of applications have been written in it.
But with X11, you aren't limited to one toolkit, you can still run Qt apps if you like. Qt/Embedded pretty much forces everybody to buy into Qt, a great business move for Troll Tech, but no good for everybody else.
Actually, my spy network tells me that Sharp paid TrollTech to develop QPE.
So? Qt is still being released under the GPL to generate business for Qt from commercial customers. You may think that arrangement is pretty swell, I think it will ultimately kill Linux on handhelds if any commercial developer has to pay thousands of dollars before being able to create GUI software for something like the Sharp.
Now we just need apps! apps! apps! so that Sharp will ship this thing retail and sell them at best buy.
As an open source developer, why would I want to develop for an embedded toolkit that almost nobody uses? A toolkit that's put out in this form as an advertising gimmick by a software company? A toolkit that takes over the screen and excludes all other open source GUI software?
And as a commercial developer, why would I want to develop for a toolkit that's more expensive than an MSDN subscription and is used on almost no platforms?
Sharp shot themselves in the foot when they picked Lineo and Qt/Embedded--there is no way this is going to attract a large developer following. They should have gone with X11/FLTK on Familiar or something combo like that. It's too bad, too, because the hardware is really nice.
(FTR, Nintendo has patented what looks to be the entirety of the N64 console, thus perchance making reverse engineering an N64 illegal--not yet court tested.)
A patent does not prohibit reverse engineering. To the contrary: if the patent is on the entire game console, it should be detailed enough so that people could build another one: a valid patent must describe the invention in sufficient detail that someone of ordinary skill can build one.
Is a mid-size window with a puzzle piece. It seems like they are trying to open up a full-scren Flash window (I am sooo disappointed). It would be really bad for browsers to allow this, not only because it's annoying but also because it allows Trojan horses (pop up a screen that looks like a Windows NT loging screen, for example).
I have seen many secretaries, writers, and scientists getting started with UNIX. Most people have no problems with command line tools and get proficient at them faster than at GUI tools. Among many other advantages, command line tools and text-based tools are much easier to document and explain.
The main reason Windows seems so "usable" is because people already spent years learning it. And, pictures and graphics engage people (just like television), whether they actually help or not. Of course, people coming from Windows expect the same interface on Linux, just like UNIX users have tools like Cygwin on Windows. But there is little that's intrinsically intuitive about the way Windows handles files, applications, and all that.
Well, do you believe people were biologically much different, say, 10000 years ago from the way they are today? If not, then civilization is a question of culture, and civilizations could have started and perished a number of times before ours.
So, computers have gotten a lot faster. What does that have to do with Microsoft?
The 1970s and 1980s had UNIX and lots of mainframe operating systems, close in functionality and power at the kernel and command level to what we have today. The 1970s and 1980s also had Smalltalk, NeXT, and many other systems, systems with powerful GUIs and IDEs that still better anything Microsoft has today.
Thanks to Windows and Microsoft's aggressive marketing, everyone and their mom now uses computers for things that were strictly reserved to academia only ten years ago.
Oh, please. The software industry has stagnated because of Microsoft's influence over the last decade. There were lots of innovative, low-cost, powerful personal computing platforms as well as high-end business systems being developed, crushed by Microsoft's dominance. Microsoft ushered in the dark ages of the computing industry. Thanking them for that is kind of like thanking Stalin for the "progress" the Soviet Union has made.
Yes, Microsoft shouldn't have to support outdated messy software like Windows 95 forever. But the real question is: why did Microsoft get away with selling such a mess as recent as five years ago? It's not like there have been any major breakthroughs in general purpose operating systems in the last couple of decades. Today's Windows NT/XP isn't all that different from what people already had in the 1970's and 1980's.
The irony is, of course, that while Microsoft has been learning on the job and shipping outdated software, customers have been financing their learning experience and suffered from frequent, incompatible upgrades to boot.
Well, yes--that was what I was referring to.
E-ink is actually a comparative latecomer. The original electronic paper is probably Gyricon, which was created some time in the 1980s.
The problem with both E-ink and Gyricon is that it's still hard to get high resolution, pixel-addressable displays. But they have a good shot--unlike all the LCD and OLE technologies, they need no active elements per pixel, since the medium itself stores the image.
Well, there are licenses Debian cannot accept because they conflict with other licenses of software that is essential to Debian. And then there are licenses that Debian won't accept because people may have some philosophical disagreement with it.
I think this case is the latter. There is no legal reason for Debian not to use this CODEC based on this clause (maybe there are other clauses that I don't know about). And for a video CODEC, the clause makes a lot of sense. I'd suggest Debian should change their policy on this one. Besides, Debian even distributes and supports proprietary and closed source software like acroread and NVidia drivers, so why be so picky about this one? To me, even Qt seems like it's iffier than this.
According to that definition, it is "Open Source": the license does allow (some) modifications and derived works, and it does allow them to be distributed under the same terms.
In any case, who cares whether opensource.org approves or not, and whether it complies with their particular definition of "Open Source"? The question everybody should ask for themselves: does this license guarantee what I need? At least as far as this clause is concerned, I don't see a problem. I can port the software and I can enhance it and I can redistribute the changes. I can't change the format, but, then, I wouldn't want to, and, in fact, I actually prefer if you wouldn't either.
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I don't see why. First, there is a difference between personal use and commercial redistribution. Second, if the RIAA and MPAA rules are the law of the land, I expect Google to play by them as well when it comes to my content.
This very question of the copyright status of public postings has been tried and precedent has been set: Your Usenet posts aren't really copyrighted.
Oh? Would you care to share the case law?
Adjust your expectations of privacy downward.
I have, as have most other people. But the on-line world is poorer for it, because if every word is "on the record", people either post anonymously or they don't engage in informal discussions. You just can't have informal on-line conversations with friends if everything is recorded.
I never expected that my comments would "cease to exist": of course, there were backup tapes. However, there is a big difference between archiving them on some tape somewhere and republishing a massive database of comments 15 years after the fact.
None of that has any bearing on the question of copyrights. For example, just because TV networks broadcast stuff and lots of people tape them doesn't mean you can freely redistribute those tapes before the copyright is up.
Moderators: someone expressing a different opinion from you is not a "Troll".
No. But I do expect other people not to make money from my postings, and I do expect that people don't engage in massive copyright violation and redistribute large collections of postings with expiration dates of a few weeks after 15 years.
If you don't like people seeing your old posts, well tough luck. Perhaps you should have thought about it before posting.
I see. And you apply the same reasoning to all copyrighted works? Microsoft shouldn't publish software if they didn't want people to pirate it?
Besides, the effect of your kind of attitude is that there is no space for informal discussions on-line without pseudonyms, because everything can be republished. That's a shame, although in 2001 it is enough of a reality that many people are using pseudonyms.
(In case you were wondering, no, I didn't post anything on USENET I have to be ashamed of. Some of my USENET postings actually got republished as printed articles. But that's not the point.)
And legally, those postings are not in the public domain and Google has no right to republish them beyond the purpose that their authors originally implicitly gave permission for: temporary distribution on USENET.
There is no magic about it. There are many costs in commercial projects that simply don't exist for open source projects, or at least are much lower. And the few costs that do exist (documentation, support, etc.) are unbundled. There are also many risks associated with commercial software that users of open source software avoid (security, slow bug fixes, finite lifetime, deliberate incompatibilities, etc.).
I think the incredulity people like you express at the idea of open source software is simply because of a limited notion of what software is or what it is used for. I'm not claiming that there is one "right" development model, I'm merely claiming that when open source software meets the needs of a user community, it ends up being cheaper and less risky than equivalent commercial software. I have no problem with companies like Microsoft and Apple catering to the "rest of them", as long as they keep the protocols and infrastructure open and I don't have to use their stuff.
Of course, commercial development itself has a lot of deadwood, since employees can justify many purchases with time-to-market or expected revenue. Open source developers are much more cost conscious because they have to be.
Commercial software companies are an inefficient means to avoid the tragedy of the commons for a good that otherwise costs essentially nothing for the public to enjoy. But with software, as opposed to many other goods, it turns out that development costs are so low that the benefit you derive from non-programming users, who still contribute bug reports and suggestions for enhancements out of self-interest, usually more than makes up for the development costs. And open source software as a marketing tool, as a tool to establish standards, and for establishing reputations is also very valuable.
Actually, the fact that your mindset became widespread is probably one of the worst things that happened to the web and Internet. It used to be mostly P2P until VCs and other companies started hijacking previously decentralized services and putting them on big, inefficient, hard-to-maintain, vulnerable central servers.
P2P represents a return to the roots of the web and Internet. If you want to chat with someone or exchange information with other people, you put it on a machine you control. Hopefully, ISPs and web hosting servicese will improve the quality of their product in response to increased demand. Improved services means both better outgoing bandwidth, better usage metering, and better naming services (so that people can find you).
Oh, in case you still don't get it, the people who make money with P2P is the ISPs, software, and hardware makers.
So that would suggest that the actual display code running on the the Sharp is, in fact, not open source (this is one of the reasons why dual licenses are so annoying). What about other parts of Lineo?
Running Qtopia under X11 is currently tried by several people and there is an interesting project running a VNC server on top of X11 so the built-in VNC client can display it under Qtopia.
Running X11 applications under VNC popped up through a VNC server under Qtopia is not an acceptable solution for any software you want to use regularly or give to other people: the window management doesn't integrate and you can't cut and paste. Furthermore, some of the most important X11 utilities aren't useful in that mode: input methods, screen dump, session record/playback, shortcuts, etc.
Running Qtopia under X11 is currently tried by several people
That will be nice for users of the iPaq and other X11-based handhelds, who will then get the same handheld apps that run on the Sharp without the limitations of its "embedded" display engine.
If the proposition is "this is no worse than PalmOS or WinCE", that's not a particularly good one. I expect more from Linux, and not just technically.
This tool is the most open of any of the palm devices I've seen;
Perhaps you haven't seen much then. The Compaq iPaq runs full Linux with X11 and allows you to use whatever toolkit you like. The AgendaVR runs a full version of Linux and X11 as well. Availability of powerful handhelds running fully open Linux has not been a problem.
anyone with any Linux or UNIX experience at all is going to be able to make this thing do backflips.
Well, no. A Java programmer can create Java applications for it, but a Java programmer can also create Java applications for Palm or WinCE. A C programmer can't write any GUI apps for it. And a C++ programmer has to learn a new toolkit and completely change the GUI code of their existing X11 applications.
It's a very interesting unit.
It is. It is also too bad that Sharp didn't have the guts to go with completely open and unencumbered software and standards.
Rpm is getting a bad rap because it is actually a bit more flexible in practice: because it uses file dependencies extensively, you can, in fact, install rpm packages on systems even if you don't have a whole dependency infrastructure built around them or if some of the files come from manual installations. That's why so many more RPM packages are distributed on people's web sites than Debian packages. But this comes at a cost: as people try to do more (uncoordinated packaging), more things can go wrong. Some of the combinations you might want to install are simply impossible. With apt, you wouldn't even try because it's not a choice. With rpm, you can try but it fails, and rpm is then blamed for the failure.
If you could build an infrastructure like the Debian project around rpm, I expect it would do just as well as the apt/deb mechanism (the automatic download managers already exist).
I use mostly apt/deb right now, but I have also used rpm a lot in the past. Altogether, I think neither rpm nor deb/apt have really solved the packaging and system update problem completely yet. They are both rather imperfect solutions, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
The device runs Lineo and Qt/Embedded. Is Lineo completely open source or are there proprietary components? Can I recompile every binary on it from scratch? Is the screen buffer driver code in its version of Qt/Embedded open source (so that one can port X11 to it)?
If it ran X11, it wouldn't just have Qt applications ported over, it would also have all the AgendaVR and Familiar programs ported over, plus the handwriting recognition and input software.
Mmm... ugly, non-portable, AND obscure. A winning combo. QT can at least be used on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc. :)
I'm not sure what you mean. FLTK runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, and MacOS, with several other ports in the work. It's tiny, and you'd be hard pressed telling an FLTK application from ones written in other toolkits. And it's the de-facto standard for handheld Linux and lots of applications have been written in it.
But with X11, you aren't limited to one toolkit, you can still run Qt apps if you like. Qt/Embedded pretty much forces everybody to buy into Qt, a great business move for Troll Tech, but no good for everybody else.
Actually, my spy network tells me that Sharp paid TrollTech to develop QPE.
So? Qt is still being released under the GPL to generate business for Qt from commercial customers. You may think that arrangement is pretty swell, I think it will ultimately kill Linux on handhelds if any commercial developer has to pay thousands of dollars before being able to create GUI software for something like the Sharp.
As an open source developer, why would I want to develop for an embedded toolkit that almost nobody uses? A toolkit that's put out in this form as an advertising gimmick by a software company? A toolkit that takes over the screen and excludes all other open source GUI software?
And as a commercial developer, why would I want to develop for a toolkit that's more expensive than an MSDN subscription and is used on almost no platforms?
Sharp shot themselves in the foot when they picked Lineo and Qt/Embedded--there is no way this is going to attract a large developer following. They should have gone with X11/FLTK on Familiar or something combo like that. It's too bad, too, because the hardware is really nice.
A patent does not prohibit reverse engineering. To the contrary: if the patent is on the entire game console, it should be detailed enough so that people could build another one: a valid patent must describe the invention in sufficient detail that someone of ordinary skill can build one.
Is a mid-size window with a puzzle piece. It seems like they are trying to open up a full-scren Flash window (I am sooo disappointed). It would be really bad for browsers to allow this, not only because it's annoying but also because it allows Trojan horses (pop up a screen that looks like a Windows NT loging screen, for example).
The main reason Windows seems so "usable" is because people already spent years learning it. And, pictures and graphics engage people (just like television), whether they actually help or not. Of course, people coming from Windows expect the same interface on Linux, just like UNIX users have tools like Cygwin on Windows. But there is little that's intrinsically intuitive about the way Windows handles files, applications, and all that.
Well, do you believe people were biologically much different, say, 10000 years ago from the way they are today? If not, then civilization is a question of culture, and civilizations could have started and perished a number of times before ours.
The 1970s and 1980s had UNIX and lots of mainframe operating systems, close in functionality and power at the kernel and command level to what we have today. The 1970s and 1980s also had Smalltalk, NeXT, and many other systems, systems with powerful GUIs and IDEs that still better anything Microsoft has today.
Thanks to Windows and Microsoft's aggressive marketing, everyone and their mom now uses computers for things that were strictly reserved to academia only ten years ago.
Oh, please. The software industry has stagnated because of Microsoft's influence over the last decade. There were lots of innovative, low-cost, powerful personal computing platforms as well as high-end business systems being developed, crushed by Microsoft's dominance. Microsoft ushered in the dark ages of the computing industry. Thanking them for that is kind of like thanking Stalin for the "progress" the Soviet Union has made.
The irony is, of course, that while Microsoft has been learning on the job and shipping outdated software, customers have been financing their learning experience and suffered from frequent, incompatible upgrades to boot.
The problem with both E-ink and Gyricon is that it's still hard to get high resolution, pixel-addressable displays. But they have a good shot--unlike all the LCD and OLE technologies, they need no active elements per pixel, since the medium itself stores the image.
I think this case is the latter. There is no legal reason for Debian not to use this CODEC based on this clause (maybe there are other clauses that I don't know about). And for a video CODEC, the clause makes a lot of sense. I'd suggest Debian should change their policy on this one. Besides, Debian even distributes and supports proprietary and closed source software like acroread and NVidia drivers, so why be so picky about this one? To me, even Qt seems like it's iffier than this.
In any case, who cares whether opensource.org approves or not, and whether it complies with their particular definition of "Open Source"? The question everybody should ask for themselves: does this license guarantee what I need? At least as far as this clause is concerned, I don't see a problem. I can port the software and I can enhance it and I can redistribute the changes. I can't change the format, but, then, I wouldn't want to, and, in fact, I actually prefer if you wouldn't either.