All the companies involved were: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Autodesk Incorporated, Borland International Incorporated, Lotus Development Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Novell Incorporated and Symantec Corporation.
A similar ruling is in effect in Finland since a number of years. The case was vs. Microsoft, decided by the supreme court that reselling MS Windows licenses is perfectly OK and Microsoft can't stop it. Don't have the reference handy, sorry.
I hope that ibiblio & the internet archive (archive.org) are moved away from their current hosting on Cogent's network, urgently.
You paying ?
Thought so.
The Internet works by everybody paying their own share of the costs. I'm not paying for your connectivity costs, you're not paying for mine. Note that if you don't pay enough to cover your ISP's real costs, your ISP will start behaving like Cogent does and you're then part of the problem.
Great timing to send urgent business email, normally delivered within seconds, only to find out that it has never been received.
You rely on email for critical communication ? Not a good idea.
Of course I do and so does everybody else. Don't be silly. It's no different from relying on your fax machine (which will just scan the documents and which might succeed at sending them at first opportunty the receiver is able to receive it; or having relied on the Telex network way back when - what did you do when the Telex line went dead? Hint: there was nothing you could do). The only real alternative the Internet today for any significant amount of data that needs to be transmitted intact is courier dispatch, but you don't use that unless the amount of data is huge.
I do wonder if this active sabotage of 3rd party Internet traffic might be class-actionable.
You suing ?
Thought so.
I'll be quite happy to join any class-action lawsuit against Cogent, thank you.
Keep in mind that unless Cogent both 1) claimed to route traffic from A to B and 2) then actively dropped traffic from A to B nothing bad would have happened. Now they knowingly mis-configured the routers to lie to other Internet carrier companies, thus causing this mass-outage. Surely it can't be too long before some entrepreneurial law firm picks up on this way of actively causing trouble for 3rd parties.
Since Cogent actively drops any traffic that's been even just in transit anywhere on the pretty big TeliaSonera International Carrier network (it's a tier 1 net that covers all of the US and Europe), your email messages will just be held at some random backup email server for a couple of days until you'll get a return notice saying your message hasn't been delivered yet. If you're lucky that is.
For any important/urgent emails, you now need to make a follow-up phone call, just to see if the message was delivered. (Yes, you could request a receipt when the message is opened, but it's optional for the receiver to send the receipt and many don't).
I hope that ibiblio & the internet archive (archive.org) are moved away from their current hosting on Cogent's network, urgently.
Great timing to send urgent business email, normally delivered within seconds, only to find out that it has never been received. I do wonder if this active sabotage of 3rd party Internet traffic might be class-actionable. Of course e-mail is just a tiny part of the overall losses that 3rd parties suffer from this.
Air traffic controller personnel, radar manufacturers, resellers etc have all been fighting this system for well over a decade, simply because it is a lot more cost effective than the present system while also being more useful and accurate. These people would rather have money in their own pockets than more secure flights that are consuming less fuel and saving airlines money by spending less time in the air. Even the US government has been fighting this system in the past, simply because it wasn't invented in the US and wasn't under US control:
From a January 1998 FAA report, entitled "Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) - Mission Need Statement-326":
"The FAA has set as an objective the promotion of U.S. aviation system technologies, products, and services. International initiatives are ongoing to develop end deploy automatic dependent surveillance systems. For example, the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) is working with an ADS-B technology known as VDL Mode 4. In light of this and other international initiatives, the U.S. runs the risk of surrendering technical leadership in a potentially lucrative and growing market. This will adversely affect the ability of U.S. avionics manufacturers and software companies to compete for international product markets."
The rest of that "scandalous" story is a conspiracy theory with no proof to back it up.
On the contrary, there is a lot of facts that backs up the conspiracy against Lans and this story has received a lot of investigation in Sweden from mainstream media. The Swedish government has protested to the US. Even the European Parliament has reacted.
This conspiracy involves both the color graphics patent as well as the ownership to the navigation systems patent, the Americans tried in fact to take ownership of it by burying a statement deep in a suggested settlement around the color graphics patent lawsuit settlement, but by now Lans had wisened up to what was going on and knew what to look for. When Lans did a small change to that statement so that he would still own all rights to the navigation related patent and his other inventions and signed the settlement, the other party was no longer interested in settling, in effect validating the conspiracy against Lans.
There's an investigative TV documentary, "The American Lawyer" (home page for the documentary). It was produced by one of the most respected investigative journalism teams in Sweden. You can watch the entire 55-minute documentary on the net here (in Swedish, of course). There's also a book by David Lagercrantz, Ett svenskt geni, it was first published in 2000, but rewritten, expanded and published again last year (I haven't read the book). The publisher of the book, Piratförlaget, is a mainstream publisher in Sweden, one of the three founders is one of Sweden's most famous investigative journalists.
another useful package: Mathomatic
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Mathomatic is a quick and handy package to use for your more everyday math problems. It celebrates 20 years since its first release this year and is still updated with its latest release, version 12.8.0, just three days ago.
For programmers, its 'code' command converts your math problem to source code in your choice of several programming languages.
What is the effect of the patents that are not licensed?
The licenses say:
B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.
Hmm, the realatively few edits of the person(s) at 1.0.22.53 talks against the reverse NAT hypothesis. Also, the first such edit was done as recently as 31st July 2007.
The simplest explanation of this could be that, from the server's point of view, the edit is coming through the IP address 1.0.22.5. It could be behind a reverse NAT setup, for example.
This is the network of http://prq.se/, the company famous for among other things hosting The Pirate Bay. They also have a tunneling service (info in Swedish only, the company is based in Stockholm, Sweden), so that you can route your traffic through one of their static IP numbers. It appears WikiLeaks could be taking this approach.
Click the History tab of the article. This reveals the edit history:
# (cur) (last) 20:56, 7 October 2007 1.0.22.53 (Talk) (7,349 bytes)
# (cur) (last) 19:22, 3 October 2007 Wikileaks (Talk | contribs) m (6,644 bytes)
# (cur) (last) 15:18, 29 September 2007 Wikileaks (Talk | contribs) m (6,624 bytes)
Running whois on the IP number 1.0.22.53 comes up with nothing, it's just a reserved net block, according to IANA. So, who could that be? Who's got the power to get anonymous IP number blocks?
$ whois 1.0.22.53
OrgName: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
OrgID: IANA
Address: 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
City: Marina del Rey
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 90292-6695
Country: US
OrgAbuseHandle: IANA-IP-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number
OrgAbusePhone: +1-310-301-5820
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@iana.org
OrgTecHandle: IANA-IP-ARIN
OrgTechName: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number
OrgTechPhone: +1-310-301-5820
OrgTechEmail: abuse@iana.org
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-10-06 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
Reporters may want to talk to Mr Jaakko Lehtinen who participated in the OOXML-meeting at the SFS and wrote this insightful comment (in finnish) regarding the decision to fire Mr Nirhamo:
October 1st, 2007, 22:03 by Jaakko Lehtinen
Re: Wrong opinions
Can it really be, that Microsoft would be involved in this decision as well.
I question what caused this lack of trust. We don't know that, as we're not told. This however causes suspicion regarding the SFS.
You see, I was there at the SFS's ooxml decision meeting, which ended in very even votes for and against and where the state's votes also were 2-2 — first even 3-1 against ooxml.
Mr Nirhamo handled his role as chairman in a very professional manner. He kept the discussion tightly within the agreed 'frame', to use contemporary wording. Some [attendees] tried to start for example comparing the existing standard and the suggested standard against each other, but that was ended immediately, as it was not on the agenda for the meeting. No kind of deviations to other subjects were allowed. Not even from Microsoft.
And it was a very well handled decision meeting, I dare say as someone who has been in meetings with hundreds of pretty big decision makers.
Rarely — hardly ever — have I seen and experienced such a great performance by the chair.
Further about speaking one's mind, he made it clear at least twice, that the SFS doesn't have and can't have any other opinion that the decision of that meeting.
Due to Microsoft's pressure he separately inquired if he can put forward his own opinion of the matter. The representatives of the SFS who were present gave him permission to temporarily diverge from his position as chair and to state his own opinion.
He then showed the facts, that he based his opinion on. These arguments could not be denied by Microsoft either. There are errors and contradictions in the ooxml-suggestion.
I am very sorry about how Mr Nirhamo has been treated and disappointed at the SFS's way of handling the matter, if the alleged lack of trust was due to that meeting.
In that case, the SFS does not deserve my trust.
This looks like a full-blown scandal at the SFS to me. Certainly, the SFS under managing director Pekka Järvinen, can not be trusted to create standards according to the SFS's charter (link in Finnish), which among other things says that the SFS is an independent organisation and that it should represent the interest of Finland.
____________ *) Although I believe this translation to be very good, I'm not a translator by trade.
[...] I don't see why this is such a big draw for most developers.
This is probably because often, you just want to make a small change in a program to make it solve the problem at hand. With Free Software, this is relatively easy. With proprietary software, you need to convince the supplier to do it (and maybe you can have the result next year) or you may need to write a completely new program from scratch to solve it. Developers prefer being able to fix the software the right way. Note that this is also economically much more effective: it often takes less time to actually implement the fix than to try to convince the supplier to implement the fix. This is just one of the reasons why Free Software continues to be used more and more.
As an open source developer I would be mighty discouraged to learn that folks would rather shell out a few hundred bucks instead of using free software. It would make me ask myself "what the hell is wrong with our stuff that it can't even compete for free against a very costly competitor?"
Most of the Free Software is of higher quality than its proprietary counterparts (as many studies have found), so it is wrong to suggest otherwise. However, it is also true that people who are not aware of their Free Software options do buy proprietary software. This, I believe, is mostly an effect of the power of marketing, or in other words, to fool people to spend money on bad software that harm the buyer's interests as is the case with Microsoft Vista, for example.
As a Free Software developer, I'm very much encouraged with the huge success that Free Software is and that it continues to grow exponentially in a snowball-like fashion. Some people seem to think that the Free Software era started only now that Free Software has received the interest and understanding of politicians. I've been around since nearly the beginning and there has never been a reason to regret that.
It seems they may be entertaining the idea of keeping the code under the CDDL and dual-license it under the GPL, v3. I think it would be much more productive to skip the CDDL and switch entirely to GPLv3, as there are three big problems with keeping the CDDL:
No GPL-only code import. More than 70% of all software available under an OSI-approved license is under the GPL (see Wheeler's essay, link below). Since Sun would require all GPL:d code they want to use to be dual-licensed as well, they can in fact only use GPL code that they can also get a CDDL-license for. This will be a tiny fraction, if any, of the vast amount of GPL:d quality code and libraries out there.
For example, OpenSolaris on the SPARC can't be built from source today (nearly two years after it became available under the CDDL), because they lack an open source disassembler (yes, they need a disassembler, it's due to how the kernel debugger works). A well known and proven disassembler exists in the GNU binutils, ported to just about every useful processor type there is. OpenSolaris, I am told, wouldn't be able to use that, because it isn't dual-licensed under the CDDL and is unlikely to ever be.
Fewer developers. If developers are forced to sign CA:s (contributor agreements) that make their contributions available under the CDDL, there is a risk that a section of the possible contributors from the GPL-only part of the world will not want to contribute.
Smaller rate of adoption. This is a consequence of the previous two points. In turn, this leads to less demand for OpenSolaris skills, so there is money on the line here for people who know OpenSolaris or are thinking about learning it in order to make a living.
For the obvious example of how GPL:d code is much more attractive and increases the rate of adoption even in cases when technically more advanced alternatives exist, consider that the BSD UNIX kernel never really took off in the way Linux has, even though in the early 90's the BSD kernel had an absolutely overwhelming technical lead at the time.
So what is it about the GPL that makes developers want to use it? I can't speak for others, but in my own case it boils down to this: in 1985, when I first came across the GPL, I thought about the matter and decided that the inheritance of my life-time software development work to future generations should not be that of a jail built out of proprietary source code. This excludes the BSD-type licenses, as they allow someone else to take away one or more of the four freedoms I've worked hard for to establish at every opportunity. (Even then, it was not always possible, unfortunately.)
On the other hand, the only reason I can see why developers may want to use BSD-type licenses are that they want to deny others one or more of the four freedoms, or need to be able to. If you are one of these developers, maybe you will reconsider your position on this some day when it is financially possible for you. It is now easier than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
Another reference, this one in the trade newspaper Tietoviikko (literally "informationweek"): Lisenssi ei estä jälleenmyyntiä
I think it's this one: http://www.finlex.fi/fi/oikeus/kko/kko/2003/20030088 (I don't have time to verify it, though).
A commentary on the case: Ostajalla oikeus myydä ostamansa tietokoneohjelman kappale edelleen — KKO:n ratkaisu levittämisoikeuden raukeamisesta (Rough translation: "Buyer has right to resell the copy of a program he has bought - Supreme Court decision on the ending of distribution right").
All the companies involved were: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Autodesk Incorporated, Borland International Incorporated, Lotus Development Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Novell Incorporated and Symantec Corporation.
A similar ruling is in effect in Finland since a number of years. The case was vs. Microsoft, decided by the supreme court that reselling MS Windows licenses is perfectly OK and Microsoft can't stop it. Don't have the reference handy, sorry.
The Internet works by everybody paying their own share of the costs. I'm not paying for your connectivity costs, you're not paying for mine. Note that if you don't pay enough to cover your ISP's real costs, your ISP will start behaving like Cogent does and you're then part of the problem.
Of course I do and so does everybody else. Don't be silly. It's no different from relying on your fax machine (which will just scan the documents and which might succeed at sending them at first opportunty the receiver is able to receive it; or having relied on the Telex network way back when - what did you do when the Telex line went dead? Hint: there was nothing you could do). The only real alternative the Internet today for any significant amount of data that needs to be transmitted intact is courier dispatch, but you don't use that unless the amount of data is huge.
I'll be quite happy to join any class-action lawsuit against Cogent, thank you.
Keep in mind that unless Cogent both 1) claimed to route traffic from A to B and 2) then actively dropped traffic from A to B nothing bad would have happened. Now they knowingly mis-configured the routers to lie to other Internet carrier companies, thus causing this mass-outage. Surely it can't be too long before some entrepreneurial law firm picks up on this way of actively causing trouble for 3rd parties.
Since Cogent actively drops any traffic that's been even just in transit anywhere on the pretty big TeliaSonera International Carrier network (it's a tier 1 net that covers all of the US and Europe), your email messages will just be held at some random backup email server for a couple of days until you'll get a return notice saying your message hasn't been delivered yet. If you're lucky that is.
For any important/urgent emails, you now need to make a follow-up phone call, just to see if the message was delivered. (Yes, you could request a receipt when the message is opened, but it's optional for the receiver to send the receipt and many don't).
I hope that ibiblio & the internet archive (archive.org) are moved away from their current hosting on Cogent's network, urgently.
Great timing to send urgent business email, normally delivered within seconds, only to find out that it has never been received. I do wonder if this active sabotage of 3rd party Internet traffic might be class-actionable. Of course e-mail is just a tiny part of the overall losses that 3rd parties suffer from this.
Please mod parent up. A troll moderator have modded it down to 0.
From a January 1998 FAA report, entitled "Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) - Mission Need Statement-326":
On the contrary, there is a lot of facts that backs up the conspiracy against Lans and this story has received a lot of investigation in Sweden from mainstream media. The Swedish government has protested to the US. Even the European Parliament has reacted.
This conspiracy involves both the color graphics patent as well as the ownership to the navigation systems patent, the Americans tried in fact to take ownership of it by burying a statement deep in a suggested settlement around the color graphics patent lawsuit settlement, but by now Lans had wisened up to what was going on and knew what to look for. When Lans did a small change to that statement so that he would still own all rights to the navigation related patent and his other inventions and signed the settlement, the other party was no longer interested in settling, in effect validating the conspiracy against Lans.
There's an investigative TV documentary, "The American Lawyer" (home page for the documentary). It was produced by one of the most respected investigative journalism teams in Sweden. You can watch the entire 55-minute documentary on the net here (in Swedish, of course). There's also a book by David Lagercrantz, Ett svenskt geni , it was first published in 2000, but rewritten, expanded and published again last year (I haven't read the book). The publisher of the book, Piratförlaget, is a mainstream publisher in Sweden, one of the three founders is one of Sweden's most famous investigative journalists.
For your information, Apple licensed the Lans color graphics patent as did IBM and others.
The ADS-B system was invented by Håkan Lans. His business home page: GP&C Systems International AB.
Mathomatic is a quick and handy package to use for your more everyday math problems. It celebrates 20 years since its first release this year and is still updated with its latest release, version 12.8.0, just three days ago.
For programmers, its 'code' command converts your math problem to source code in your choice of several programming languages.
For more info see http://www.mathomatic.org/math/adv.html
Many thanks for writing it, George Gesslein II.
What is the effect of the patents that are not licensed?
The licenses say:
Hmm, the realatively few edits of the person(s) at 1.0.22.53 talks against the reverse NAT hypothesis. Also, the first such edit was done as recently as 31st July 2007.
More fun:
This is the network of http://prq.se/, the company famous for among other things hosting The Pirate Bay. They also have a tunneling service (info in Swedish only, the company is based in Stockholm, Sweden), so that you can route your traffic through one of their static IP numbers. It appears WikiLeaks could be taking this approach.
There's a difference between "reserved" and "assigned" IP number blocks. This block is not assigned to anyone.
Good luck with getting that routed over the public internet.
See my full translation of Lehtinen's comment.
Translation of the original comment in finnish*:
This looks like a full-blown scandal at the SFS to me. Certainly, the SFS under managing director Pekka Järvinen, can not be trusted to create standards according to the SFS's charter (link in Finnish), which among other things says that the SFS is an independent organisation and that it should represent the interest of Finland.
____________
*) Although I believe this translation to be very good, I'm not a translator by trade.
You're may be looking for the Linux Terminal Server Project.
This is probably because often, you just want to make a small change in a program to make it solve the problem at hand. With Free Software, this is relatively easy. With proprietary software, you need to convince the supplier to do it (and maybe you can have the result next year) or you may need to write a completely new program from scratch to solve it. Developers prefer being able to fix the software the right way. Note that this is also economically much more effective: it often takes less time to actually implement the fix than to try to convince the supplier to implement the fix. This is just one of the reasons why Free Software continues to be used more and more.
Most of the Free Software is of higher quality than its proprietary counterparts (as many studies have found), so it is wrong to suggest otherwise. However, it is also true that people who are not aware of their Free Software options do buy proprietary software. This, I believe, is mostly an effect of the power of marketing, or in other words, to fool people to spend money on bad software that harm the buyer's interests as is the case with Microsoft Vista, for example.
As a Free Software developer, I'm very much encouraged with the huge success that Free Software is and that it continues to grow exponentially in a snowball-like fashion. Some people seem to think that the Free Software era started only now that Free Software has received the interest and understanding of politicians. I've been around since nearly the beginning and there has never been a reason to regret that.
It seems they may be entertaining the idea of keeping the code under the CDDL and dual-license it under the GPL, v3. I think it would be much more productive to skip the CDDL and switch entirely to GPLv3, as there are three big problems with keeping the CDDL:
For example, OpenSolaris on the SPARC can't be built from source today (nearly two years after it became available under the CDDL), because they lack an open source disassembler (yes, they need a disassembler, it's due to how the kernel debugger works). A well known and proven disassembler exists in the GNU binutils, ported to just about every useful processor type there is. OpenSolaris, I am told, wouldn't be able to use that, because it isn't dual-licensed under the CDDL and is unlikely to ever be.
For the obvious example of how GPL:d code is much more attractive and increases the rate of adoption even in cases when technically more advanced alternatives exist, consider that the BSD UNIX kernel never really took off in the way Linux has, even though in the early 90's the BSD kernel had an absolutely overwhelming technical lead at the time.
Much of the confused discussion on the opensolaris-discuss mailing list (warning: it takes days to read this and you don't particularly want to) could have been avoided, had the participants read David A. Wheeler's recently updated essay Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else. and been at least vaguely familiar with the Free Software philosophy.
So what is it about the GPL that makes developers want to use it? I can't speak for others, but in my own case it boils down to this: in 1985, when I first came across the GPL, I thought about the matter and decided that the inheritance of my life-time software development work to future generations should not be that of a jail built out of proprietary source code. This excludes the BSD-type licenses, as they allow someone else to take away one or more of the four freedoms I've worked hard for to establish at every opportunity. (Even then, it was not always possible, unfortunately.)
On the other hand, the only reason I can see why developers may want to use BSD-type licenses are that they want to deny others one or more of the four freedoms, or need to be able to. If you are one of these developers, maybe you will reconsider your position on this some day when it is financially possible for you. It is now easier than ever.
Thanks, that was interesting.