In many other countries such a lawsuit would not have the slightest chance of success and nobody would try it.
On the other hand, there would be a chance to sue the person who took the picture and made it publicly available (under whatever license) without the written consent of the person depicted, or a parent of the person depicted if the person is underage.
This has nothing to do with licenses or copyright and everything with the (possible) violation of personal rights by publishing the picture without a legally binding permission.
At least in countries with a decent legal system it would.
As long as they make it easily turn off and onable I do not think that is really too important. It is definitely not something I ever worried about and having it or not having it makes really no big difference.
I wish as much work would go into all those things that DO make a big difference, like syncing my mobile phone (not possible), moving mp3s to my mobile phones memory card (not possible), using my mobile phone for internet access (not possible), using my GPS device (not possible), remotely operating my digital camera (not possible), etc.
So I guess, by analogy, not looking at a billboard or just ignoring tv ads, let alone turning them down or going to the WC while they run is theft too?
I know about the desaster in Yellowstone National Park and I know of other failed attempts to "preserve nature". But I still think that there should be more interest in trying not to let so many species die out once and for all because we destroy ecosystems by the thousands of sqare kilometres. Not because those species are cute and furry, but because we will need them and the ecosystem they make up, deseperately, one day.
I wish more people would invest their intelligence into how to protect the life forms (and that includes everything from slimy single-cell organisms to snow tigers) on this globe that are already there. Nobody will be able to bring them back, ever, after they are gone. And many of them are disappearing, probably most of them unnoticed.
If this is against the agreement, sue them. If you agreed to them being able to arbitrarily filter or throttle your internet access, accept it or change the provider.
It is hard to imagine that this should be part of a legal and valid contract with an internet service provider, at least in my country, but if this is indeed the case, there should be plenty of competition to change to.
Nice to see hackers have fun with the iphone. But for the rest of us: why doesn't apple allow us to install our own applications? Why does apple force us to go with one specific provider? Why does Apple not support UMTS, WAP, Flash etc.? Why does Apple not allow us to replace the battery ourselves? Why does Apple not let us do stuff with the thing that we have been doing on other phones for years? Why does Apple think that a nice look and a user interface that misses tactile feedback and therefore cannot be used without constantly staring at it can make up for all those missing functionality?
But the real interesting question is: why is a crappy, overpriced piece of geek trash like the iPhone causing that much hype? Are people nuts?
that there is no objective way to measure the quality of research. For this, one would have to know what "quality" means and already there, opinions are highly divergent. But of course the beancounters of the money-giving institutions need some yardstick and so there are and have been different yardsticks in different countries and at different times. Scientists will quickly adapt to any yardstick: if you get money and jobs by publishing a lot, they will publish a lot. If you get it by getting cited, they will get cited. If you get it by not publishing and having lots of patents or company cooperations instead, this is what will happen. None of this will ensure research though, that will advance the state of the art. Most of these regulations and rules imposed by beancounters will simply take the time and energy away from scientists who want to do research.
Ultimately, science, like art, often has to be useless to be good. In many cases however, useless science might eventually and surprisingly turn out to be quite useful indeed, practically. Take number theory: what beancounter of the world would have guessed that this esoteric branch of pure matematics would once become the fundamental force behind e-commerce, authentification and authorization systems and other applications of electronic cryptography?
in democracies it is the people who elect their assholes. Don't blame Bush and his gang, blame the idiot US citizens who voted for him. And do not give me that argument about "restricted choice". It is also the idiots, ultimately, that are responsible for the choice because they have directly or indirectly voted for people who made the rules.
Granted, at some point a popular asshole might change your democracy back to dictatorship or at least autocracy, but still, blame your idiot fellow citizens for that.
And of course, this applies to all other democracies. No one forced the Italians to vote for the asshole Berlusconi, they did it out of their own dumb will.
I guess you must have extreme distress buying cars, cell phones, or even computers: all those choices! Oh the clarity of an oligopoly where you can "choose" between two or three relevant options and still be confident that it does not really make a difference. No confusion, no self-doubt. Just the reassuring feeling that it does not matter what you choose anyways.
Why not leave it to the users of the software whether they accept those limitations or not? What business is it of the original authors to decide whether the end users of the modified software should have the choice to accept such limited software or not? I do not see much freedom in this, just a crusade to enforce what some people think is right on everyone else.
The point is that that in democracies, morality gets into laws by compromise and a process of agreement on common ground, not by an individual or small group trying to enforce it on everyone else. Linus argues that while the license should make software free it should not limit how it is used and instead give that choice to the users. I think DRM or software patents are a bad thing, but is the GPL the correct vehicle to make these things go away?
I think the issue is that you cannot just license individually contributed parts under either GPL2 or GPL3 whatever the contributor wishes, because v2 and v3 are incompatible (because of how v3 has been constructed). So either all parts get re-licensed or none. Linus speaks on behalf of those who *wish* not to relicense their code, for the reasons given by Linus. Again, this is all just about the kernel which is made of many many parts from many different contributors (some unknown) who would all have to agree to re-license their work.
Anyone is free to add free/open software to Linux under GPL2 or GPL3 however they see fit, of course, that is not the point here.
Contrary to your post, Linus makes a lot of good points and actually supports his view with arguments. Good arguments in my opinion. The bottom line is that what you call "closing loopholes" is regarded by Linus as "taking away choice and freedom". You might not agree with him, but he has the right to that opinion and many (me included) tend to agree with him. That is what happens all the time in democracies: people struggle to somehow compromise on a common view of what is moral and that compromise eventually ends up to some extend in the legal system. The followers of GPLv3 tend to fanatically control each and every aspect so that nothing they do not like could ever happen in relation with any GPL-d software. Through this, they take away choice and that is exactly the hypocrisy that Linus mentions.
All those statements where made in the context of a discussion thread on the Linux kernel mailing list about whether the kernel should be re-licensed under GPLv3. Personally I agree with Linus and if you read the original thread on the mailing list (or part of it), things will make much more sense than what can be gathered from the article.
I think Linus' statements make much more sense in context.
For instance, several posters here have responded to "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate 'morality' with 'legality'," by pointing out that all western legal systems represent morality in some way. However that is missing the point, and I think, not what Linus meant. Democratic systems compromise on a *common* idea of how morality should be represented by laws. This is entirely different from religious fanatics or totalitarian states where the moral ideas of an individual or small group is the only acceptable one. The point Linus is making here is that the GPLv3 is used as a vehicle to impose upon others the ideas of a few and regulate what Linus thinks should be a matter of choice.
I agree with Linus point of view: it might be wrong to trust in the choice of users. Maybe users will not do what I wish they would do - not buy DRM protected music etc. Maybe this will lead to a point where Linux needs a program that can play DRM protected media. But still, I think that taking that choice away from future Linux users would be the totalitarian way of trying to achieve things. Personally I would not want that. I hate DRM, software patents, vendor lock it, but as a *NIX user of more than a decade, I do not want Linux (and other open source software) to become the blunt weapon of a few fanatics instead of an inviting and competitive alternative.
This looks like a nice idea, but my feeling is that it would really mean not much more than wasted resources. This is a fight against several powerful lobbies, and most people in these lobbies are lawyers.
I would think that it would be more effective to fight dumb patent legislation where it comes from: legislation. Invest the time and effort to organize yourselves, to put pressure on your MPs, to form groups withing universities and even better, companies that make their official statement heard.
The sad situation at the moment is that nearly nobody who is against software patents comes even close to the people and processes that are relevant. Change *that* and you might improve the system instead of hacking it.
It is child's dream and even more unrealistic and absurd than the dreams of techno geeks of the 50ies about how everything would be driven by nuclear power, the whole earth covered with concrete buildings, robots everywhere etc. The only way for humanity to survive is to realize that the only habitat we have is precious planet earth. I doubt that we will manage to keep it intact long enough to develop even the technology to just get to the next solar system.
Let alone one, that we will be able to feed and sustain a colony. Because.. in order to survive on a planet we would need more than just the technology to get there. We would need an ecosystem to live in. And it is very unlikely to find one anywhere "close" as measured in multiples of the distance to the closed solar system. Or to find one that only just can maintain our own ecosystem, let alone bring that ecosystem there (arche noah spaceship?)
I do not know whether thinking about colonizing the galaxy while being unable to keep our own planet intact and feeding and treating humanely the majority of the people on earth is just stupid or insane. Maybe it is harmless, but if it leads to the thought we dont have to care about sustaining the environment because we can colonize other planets anyways, then it is dangerous too.
1) let people vote about whether global warming is happening and what the causes are. While we are at it, let them vote about what pi should be. 2) his view is just as valid as the views of the scientific community because... well because... just so.
What is bizarre is that of course it is the likes of him who do what he supposedly rejects: politicise science.
Another conservative who has no clue but happens to get heard because he is a high-ranked politician.
To summarize: MS is protecting the poor Express customers from the evils of complexity, because providing an addon that allows unit testing would overwhelm them ("The vast majority of our customer base, now with 14 million downloads, isn't even professional developers, its non-professionals").
Think of the poor customers -- they might download something they normally wouldn't even know it existed.
Neat.
Serves the guy right when he messes with idiots of that caliber.
If you sleep with dogs you will get up with fleas. If he wants to be altruistic, if he wants to share and even make money with what he shares he should look into open source software where this is a part of the design. If you try this with closed source software of an international quasi-monopolistic mega-corporation you should not be surprised if you get slapped should you do something they do not like or is against their rules.
We are used to much nastier stuff from MS than just threatening or ruining a single little programmer.
OK, I am using a Creative Zen with Ubuntu and it mounts like an USB stick just fine. However, I'd not call this syncing. Usually, I have a growing collection of music or podcasts on my harddisk and I want to e.g. copy the new ones to the mp3 player and remove the ones I have already listened to on my player or even in my collection.
Tracking what I have already listened to and using this information for archiving, deleting, copying etc. of tracks seems like the obvious and natural thing to do, but I havent figured out any way how to do this under Ubuntu.
So -- is this because I missed something or because it cannot be done?
Thanks for that clarification. Will there be an API so that clients (extensions) can store arbitrary additional metadata for history and bookmark entries?
And yes, forgot to mention that the Thunderbird back-end for addresses stores just as much as the one for emails:)
Unfortunately my impression is that the Mozilla foundation does not invest much of its accumulated fortune into bringing Thunderbird into the 21st century (what do they actually *do* with the money, anyways?)
Mork is indeed braindead, but it is as far as I understand not used for bookmarks (which uses essentially a plain HTML file), it is used for email metadata in Thunderbird (and Seamonkey).
Unfortunately, there is no indication that any work is done to move the backend for storing emails and email metadata in Thunderbird to something sensible. The way how this is done now prevents a lot of useful functions and extensions from getting implemented -- it is just not worth the hassle with a back-end that is based on mbox and mork.
IANAL either, but I would expect legislation to make clear that if such a thing could happen, it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to protect their precious work instead of showing it to the whole world and then complain. If that afro smiley is that precious, they should only show it to registered users after a password-protected login. In low resolution. With a user-specific digital fingerprint.
I never understood why there is not a minimum burden on the copyright holder to adequately protect their work before they complain. Nobody is forced to make their stuff available on a publich website and nobody is forced to let their stuff get indexed by search engines.
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In many other countries such a lawsuit would not have the slightest chance of success and nobody would try it.
On the other hand, there would be a chance to sue the person who took the picture and made it publicly available (under whatever license) without the written consent of the person depicted, or a parent of the person depicted if the person is underage.
This has nothing to do with licenses or copyright and everything with the (possible) violation of personal rights by publishing the picture without a legally binding permission.
At least in countries with a decent legal system it would.
As long as they make it easily turn off and onable I do not think that is really too important. It is definitely not something I ever worried about and having it or not having it makes really no big difference.
I wish as much work would go into all those things that DO make a big difference, like syncing my mobile phone (not possible), moving mp3s to my mobile phones memory card (not possible), using my mobile phone for internet access (not possible), using my GPS device (not possible), remotely operating my digital camera (not possible), etc.
So I guess, by analogy, not looking at a billboard or just ignoring tv ads, let alone turning them down or going to the WC while they run is theft too?
I know about the desaster in Yellowstone National Park and I know of other failed attempts to "preserve nature". But I still think that there should be more interest in trying not to let so many species die out once and for all because we destroy ecosystems by the thousands of sqare kilometres. Not because those species are cute and furry, but because we will need them and the ecosystem they make up, deseperately, one day.
I wish more people would invest their intelligence into how to protect the life forms (and that includes everything from slimy single-cell organisms to snow tigers) on this globe that are already there. Nobody will be able to bring them back, ever, after they are gone. And many of them are disappearing, probably most of them unnoticed.
If this is against the agreement, sue them. If you agreed to them being able to arbitrarily filter or throttle your internet access, accept it or change the provider.
It is hard to imagine that this should be part of a legal and valid contract with an internet service provider, at least in my country, but if this is indeed the case, there should be plenty of competition to change to.
Nice to see hackers have fun with the iphone. But for the rest of us: why doesn't apple allow us to install our own applications? Why does apple force us to go with one specific provider? Why does Apple not support UMTS, WAP, Flash etc.? Why does Apple not allow us to replace the battery ourselves? Why does Apple not let us do stuff with the thing that we have been doing on other phones for years? Why does Apple think that a nice look and a user interface that misses tactile feedback and therefore cannot be used without constantly staring at it can make up for all those missing functionality?
But the real interesting question is: why is a crappy, overpriced piece of geek trash like the iPhone causing that much hype? Are people nuts?
that there is no objective way to measure the quality of research. For this, one would have to know what "quality" means and already there, opinions are highly divergent. But of course the beancounters of the money-giving institutions need some yardstick and so there are and have been different yardsticks in different countries and at different times. Scientists will quickly adapt to any yardstick: if you get money and jobs by publishing a lot, they will publish a lot. If you get it by getting cited, they will get cited. If you get it by not publishing and having lots of patents or company cooperations instead, this is what will happen. None of this will ensure research though, that will advance the state of the art. Most of these regulations and rules imposed by beancounters will simply take the time and energy away from scientists who want to do research.
Ultimately, science, like art, often has to be useless to be good. In many cases however, useless science might eventually and surprisingly turn out to be quite useful indeed, practically. Take number theory: what beancounter of the world would have guessed that this esoteric branch of pure matematics would once become the fundamental force behind e-commerce, authentification and authorization systems and other applications of electronic cryptography?
in democracies it is the people who elect their assholes. Don't blame Bush and his gang, blame the idiot US citizens who voted for him. And do not give me that argument about "restricted choice". It is also the idiots, ultimately, that are responsible for the choice because they have directly or indirectly voted for people who made the rules.
Granted, at some point a popular asshole might change your democracy back to dictatorship or at least autocracy, but still, blame your idiot fellow citizens for that.
And of course, this applies to all other democracies. No one forced the Italians to vote for the asshole Berlusconi, they did it out of their own dumb will.
I guess you must have extreme distress buying cars, cell phones, or even computers: all those choices! Oh the clarity of an oligopoly where you can "choose" between two or three relevant options and still be confident that it does not really make a difference. No confusion, no self-doubt. Just the reassuring feeling that it does not matter what you choose anyways.
Why not leave it to the users of the software whether they accept those limitations or not? What business is it of the original authors to decide whether the end users of the modified software should have the choice to accept such limited software or not? I do not see much freedom in this, just a crusade to enforce what some people think is right on everyone else.
The point is that that in democracies, morality gets into laws by compromise and a process of agreement on common ground, not by an individual or small group trying to enforce it on everyone else. Linus argues that while the license should make software free it should not limit how it is used and instead give that choice to the users. I think DRM or software patents are a bad thing, but is the GPL the correct vehicle to make these things go away?
I think the issue is that you cannot just license individually contributed parts under either GPL2 or GPL3 whatever the contributor wishes, because v2 and v3 are incompatible (because of how v3 has been constructed). So either all parts get re-licensed or none. Linus speaks on behalf of those who *wish* not to relicense their code, for the reasons given by Linus.
Again, this is all just about the kernel which is made of many many parts from many different contributors (some unknown) who would all have to agree to re-license their work.
Anyone is free to add free/open software to Linux under GPL2 or GPL3 however they see fit, of course, that is not the point here.
Contrary to your post, Linus makes a lot of good points and actually supports his view with arguments. Good arguments in my opinion. The bottom line is that what you call "closing loopholes" is regarded by Linus as "taking away choice and freedom". You might not agree with him, but he has the right to that opinion and many (me included) tend to agree with him. That is what happens all the time in democracies: people struggle to somehow compromise on a common view of what is moral and that compromise eventually ends up to some extend in the legal system.
The followers of GPLv3 tend to fanatically control each and every aspect so that nothing they do not like could ever happen in relation with any GPL-d software. Through this, they take away choice and that is exactly the hypocrisy that Linus mentions.
All those statements where made in the context of a discussion thread on the Linux kernel mailing list about whether the kernel should be re-licensed under GPLv3. Personally I agree with Linus and if you read the original thread on the mailing list (or part of it), things will make much more sense than what can be gathered from the article.
That article can create some misunderstandings about what Torvalds actually said and meant. If you want to form your own opinion, read the email discussion thread (it is huge) at http://marc.info/?t=118136815500004&r=36&w=4 and Linus' posts e.g. at http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=118235728513045 &w=4 and http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=118236278730043 &w=4 .
I think Linus' statements make much more sense in context.
For instance, several posters here have responded to "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate 'morality' with 'legality'," by pointing out that all western legal systems represent morality in some way. However that is missing the point, and I think, not what Linus meant. Democratic systems compromise on a *common* idea of how morality should be represented by laws. This is entirely different from religious fanatics or totalitarian states where the moral ideas of an individual or small group is the only acceptable one. The point Linus is making here is that the GPLv3 is used as a vehicle to impose upon others the ideas of a few and regulate what Linus thinks should be a matter of choice.
I agree with Linus point of view: it might be wrong to trust in the choice of users. Maybe users will not do what I wish they would do - not buy DRM protected music etc. Maybe this will lead to a point where Linux needs a program that can play DRM protected media. But still, I think that taking that choice away from future Linux users would be the totalitarian way of trying to achieve things. Personally I would not want that. I hate DRM, software patents, vendor lock it, but as a *NIX user of more than a decade, I do not want Linux (and other open source software) to become the blunt weapon of a few fanatics instead of an inviting and competitive alternative.
This looks like a nice idea, but my feeling is that it would really mean not much more than wasted resources. This is a fight against several powerful lobbies, and most people in these lobbies are lawyers.
I would think that it would be more effective to fight dumb patent legislation where it comes from: legislation. Invest the time and effort to organize yourselves, to put pressure on your MPs, to form groups withing universities and even better, companies that make their official statement heard.
The sad situation at the moment is that nearly nobody who is against software patents comes even close to the people and processes that are relevant. Change *that* and you might improve the system instead of hacking it.
It is child's dream and even more unrealistic and absurd than the dreams of techno geeks of the 50ies about how everything would be driven by nuclear power, the whole earth covered with concrete buildings, robots everywhere etc. The only way for humanity to survive is to realize that the only habitat we have is precious planet earth. I doubt that we will manage to keep it intact long enough to develop even the technology to just get to the next solar system.
.. in order to survive on a planet we would need more than just the technology to get there. We would need an ecosystem to live in. And it is very unlikely to find one anywhere "close" as measured in multiples of the distance to the closed solar system. Or to find one that only just can maintain our own ecosystem, let alone bring that ecosystem there (arche noah spaceship?)
Let alone one, that we will be able to feed and sustain a colony. Because
I do not know whether thinking about colonizing the galaxy while being unable to keep our own planet intact and feeding and treating humanely the majority of the people on earth is just stupid or insane. Maybe it is harmless, but if it leads to the thought we dont have to care about sustaining the environment because we can colonize other planets anyways, then it is dangerous too.
1) let people vote about whether global warming is happening and what the causes are. While we are at it, let them vote about what pi should be. 2) his view is just as valid as the views of the scientific community because ... well because ... just so.
What is bizarre is that of course it is the likes of him who do what he supposedly rejects: politicise science.
Another conservative who has no clue but happens to get heard because he is a high-ranked politician.
To summarize: MS is protecting the poor Express customers from the evils of complexity, because providing an addon that allows unit testing would overwhelm them ("The vast majority of our customer base, now with 14 million downloads, isn't even professional developers, its non-professionals").
Think of the poor customers -- they might download something they normally wouldn't even know it existed.
Neat.
Serves the guy right when he messes with idiots of that caliber.
If you sleep with dogs you will get up with fleas. If he wants to be altruistic, if he wants to share and even make money with what he shares he should look into open source software where this is a part of the design.
If you try this with closed source software of an international quasi-monopolistic mega-corporation you should not be surprised if you get slapped should you do something they do not like or is against their rules.
We are used to much nastier stuff from MS than just threatening or ruining a single little programmer.
OK, I am using a Creative Zen with Ubuntu and it mounts like an USB stick just fine.
However, I'd not call this syncing. Usually, I have a growing collection of music or podcasts on my harddisk and I want to e.g. copy the new ones to the mp3 player and remove the ones I have already listened to on my player or even in my collection.
Tracking what I have already listened to and using this information for archiving, deleting, copying etc. of tracks seems like the obvious and natural thing to do, but I havent figured out any way how to do this under Ubuntu.
So -- is this because I missed something or because it cannot be done?
Thanks for that clarification. Will there be an API so that clients (extensions) can store arbitrary additional metadata for history and bookmark entries?
:)
And yes, forgot to mention that the Thunderbird back-end for addresses stores just as much as the one for emails
Unfortunately my impression is that the Mozilla foundation does not invest much of its accumulated fortune into bringing Thunderbird into the 21st century (what do they actually *do* with the money, anyways?)
Mork is indeed braindead, but it is as far as I understand not used for bookmarks (which uses essentially a plain HTML file), it is used for email metadata in Thunderbird (and Seamonkey).
Unfortunately, there is no indication that any work is done to move the backend for storing emails and email metadata in Thunderbird to something sensible. The way how this is done now prevents a lot of useful functions and extensions from getting implemented -- it is just not worth the hassle with a back-end that is based on mbox and mork.
IANAL either, but I would expect legislation to make clear that if such a thing could happen, it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to protect their precious work instead of showing it to the whole world and then complain. If that afro smiley is that precious, they should only show it to registered users after a password-protected login. In low resolution. With a user-specific digital fingerprint.
I never understood why there is not a minimum burden on the copyright holder to adequately protect their work before they complain. Nobody is forced to make their stuff available on a publich website and nobody is forced to let their stuff get indexed by search engines.