If done right, proper patent laws can protect opensource, small businesses as well as big businesses agains evil businesses (big and small).
The current text, however, allows abuse of the law in a way that:
will allow small businesses to suddenly `pop up' and sue big businesses for enormous amounts of money because they happen to have a lucky patent lingering around covering something the big business uses
will allow big businesses to intimidate others with their patent portfolio and resources to enforce it
The directive is brought up as an A-item, which means it is uncontroverial and can be passed without discussion and even without actually voting.
Obviously this directive is *not* uncontroversial, so it'd be a very bad thing if it got passed during the meeting monday.
the 5:40AM AC is *almost* right: An A-item is an item on which there already was uncontroversial consensus. It will not be discussed and (get this!) not even voted for, but simply passed.
That's why A-items can appear on the agenda of unrelated council meetings.
Now it's absolutely preposterous that this is brought up as an A-item, since if they would vote right now, there probably wouldn't be a majority (since Holland will abstain instead of voting `yes', and new member Poland will probably not vote `yes' either).
> If you cache pages, you become responsible for their content.
At least in Europe, this is not true, since it'd fall under 2000/31/EG article 13, right?
Well, every spare-time free software developer can obviously decide for himself what to build and how to build it, but I also agree cross-platformness is something cool that deserves more attention.
After all, if you're coding in C++ for example, there's no real reason your program shouldn't be able to run on Windows or Mac, is there? Same goes even more for the various scripting languages.
How do you mean? The current versions of BSD-licensed software obviously cannot be suddenly 'un-BSD-licensed'. New releases of the same software may be licensed under another license, but this is no different from GPLed software
>> doesn't protect you from patents
Err, sure, but the GPL can't protect you from patents either, obviously.
(don't get me wrong, I usually prefer the GPL for my own projects, but it's a bad thing to attribute properties to it that it can't live up to)
A couple of years ago, a company called BOXX presented the 'Conportable':
http://boxx.net/product/computer.htm
Looks even cooler imho (you have a laptop and a desktop *and* a 'web pad') - except I don't believe it ever hit the market. Still thrilled by the idea though.
The small percentage of users using Free MSN clients is too small. Not high enough to be a big enough 'shrink' in people's access lists.
If I look at my contact list, I think I would continue to use MSN if all non-MS-MSN-users would quit. And i'm in a geeky environment. Now imagine what the effect would be in a non-geeky environment. Probably too little to really notice.
It's a well-known fact that the older versions of the MSN protocol didn't use SSL yet, and this one does. This makes the new MSN protocol significantly more 'secure', in certain aspects at least.
They think everyone should start using SSL, to which I agree. To accomplish that, they'll be cutting off everyone who isn't using the new protocol yet.
(note that this has little to do with the issue of paying license costs for non-MS clients: gaim, for instance, already understands the SSL-based protocol)
Sounds like something i've been thinking of implementing for some time - not for the whole city, just friends and friends-of-friends, etcetera. Too bad the implementation doesn't look like it also supports making other categories (like CD's or, hell why not, old hardware.)
Anyone happen to know such software that is more flexible in that respect? Shouldn't be all that hard to build, but hey, i'm lazy:)
The GPL isn't about use: it's about distribution. It's perfectly fine to link proprietary code with GPL code, as long as you don't distribute it.
Let's suppose there is SCO non-GPL code in linux. (keep in mind that they claim they didn't put it there, someone else did). It'd be perfectly legal for them to enforce their IP rights, and ask you to pay for using their code.
They could *not*, however, distribute linux: that would be distributing mixed GPL and non-GPL code, and the GPL indeed forbids that.
(Note that this also goes for everyone else: even if Red Hat paid SCO, they couldn't distribute linux versions that include the non-GPL SCO code).
it means they do what everyone does, and wait for SCO to *prove* that we need to pay them for continuing to use linux
(interesting point, btw, that in the hypothetical situation where SCO indeed proves there's non-GPL SCO code in linux, a user could buy the SCO license and use linux legally, but a distributor could *not* buy such a license and distribute this sco-'enhanced' linux legally.
Of course, once the offending code has been removed everything will be back to normal again.)
With respect to signature verification, don't the 'debsig-verify' and 'debian-keyring' packages provide this functionality?
I haven't used it on debian itself, but I know adamantix (a security-oriented distro, not entirely unlike SE Linux, based on debian) uses this to verify the downloaded packages.
With respect to point 3, autoconfiguration is indeed nice, but your statement about the routing tables is false. In fact, the size and efficiency of the routing tables are two of the great 'plus' sides of IPv6. To put is simply: since we don't have to be so thrifty with the address space, we're more free to do this properly.
As for point 4, you certainly have a point there, but with the MTU discovery in IPv6 (which prevents the (expensive!) fragmentation found in IPv4) you might actually see improvements there, too.
First, making statements about 'The Debian Developers' is a bit.. err.. daring.
Those people you talked to that hadn't heard of TrustedDebian yet haven't read the Debian Weekly News issue of March 25th, 2003.
It's quite clearly stated on the site that the mailinglist archives require you to login for technical reasons, and that this will be fixed at some point in time (not exactly a priority).
And indeed the lists show who are involved in the project, and who is leading it.
I didn't have many problems, using a debian box as the router/firewall for my home network. autoconfiguration is a matter of 'apt-get install radvd' and editting a ridiculously simple configuration file... and I'm just a student, I actually barely had any experience with ipv4 routing when I started this.
Of course this is a fun service provided by the frienly sixxs folks, but it's obvious that when used on a large scale it's not exactly practical: *.com.sixxs.org and friends seem to CNAME to ipv6gate.sixxs.org, which means your request will be sent to sixxs, translated and forwarded to the ipv4 site, and the result translated at sixxs and forwarded to you. Even if the site is a local machine (with globally routable address), and sixxs is very far away from you!
If you want to make heavy use of this kind of things, there are several other interesting and fun ways to reach the ipv4 internet from an ipv6-only network. One is to use a dns proxy that returns 'special' ipv6 addresses even for names that usually only have an A record, and then translate packets going to such addresses to ipv4 packets (in a way very similar to NAT) on the dual-stack router.
I've documented some of my experiences/experiments with this (modest, but practical) at http://ipv6.bzzt.net.
Not only is it stable and complete, I'm pleased that wxWindows is under ongoing active development in the Open-Source tradition.
The mailinglists are, though high-traffic, very informative and the atmosphere is friendly (hardly any flames, 'dumb' questions are usually anwered with 'check the docs at....' instead of 'RTFM, you dumbass').
Though the bulk of the wxWindows code is written by a small group of core developers, the development process is very 'open': decisions are often made based on discussion on the mailinglists, and patches usually well-appreciated.
As with QT, wxWindows is also very much worth considering when developing single-platform or even non-GUI applications (check out the wxBase port).
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The current text, however, allows abuse of the law in a way that:
The directive is brought up as an A-item, which means it is uncontroverial and can be passed without discussion and even without actually voting. Obviously this directive is *not* uncontroversial, so it'd be a very bad thing if it got passed during the meeting monday.
the 5:40AM AC is *almost* right: An A-item is an item on which there already was uncontroversial consensus. It will not be discussed and (get this!) not even voted for, but simply passed. That's why A-items can appear on the agenda of unrelated council meetings. Now it's absolutely preposterous that this is brought up as an A-item, since if they would vote right now, there probably wouldn't be a majority (since Holland will abstain instead of voting `yes', and new member Poland will probably not vote `yes' either).
> Sometimes all you need is authentication.
Certainly - but does plaintext-ssl provide that? If the page is sent over in plain text, it could have been altered in transit, for example.
Or are the pages signed or something? But then we could check the signature, right?...
> If you cache pages, you become responsible for their content. At least in Europe, this is not true, since it'd fall under 2000/31/EG article 13, right?
Well, every spare-time free software developer can obviously decide for himself what to build and how to build it, but I also agree cross-platformness is something cool that deserves more attention.
After all, if you're coding in C++ for example, there's no real reason your program shouldn't be able to run on Windows or Mac, is there? Same goes even more for the various scripting languages.
>> BSD can be highjacked anytime
How do you mean? The current versions of BSD-licensed software obviously cannot be suddenly 'un-BSD-licensed'. New releases of the same software may be licensed under another license, but this is no different from GPLed software
>> doesn't protect you from patents
Err, sure, but the GPL can't protect you from patents either, obviously.
(don't get me wrong, I usually prefer the GPL for my own projects, but it's a bad thing to attribute properties to it that it can't live up to)
http://boxx.net/product/computer.htm
Looks even cooler imho (you have a laptop and a desktop *and* a 'web pad') - except I don't believe it ever hit the market. Still thrilled by the idea though.
If I look at my contact list, I think I would continue to use MSN if all non-MS-MSN-users would quit. And i'm in a geeky environment. Now imagine what the effect would be in a non-geeky environment. Probably too little to really notice.
They think everyone should start using SSL, to which I agree. To accomplish that, they'll be cutting off everyone who isn't using the new protocol yet.
(note that this has little to do with the issue of paying license costs for non-MS clients: gaim, for instance, already understands the SSL-based protocol)
http://opendb.sf.net
looks pretty neat.
Anyone happen to know such software that is more flexible in that respect? Shouldn't be all that hard to build, but hey, i'm lazy :)
Let's suppose there is SCO non-GPL code in linux. (keep in mind that they claim they didn't put it there, someone else did). It'd be perfectly legal for them to enforce their IP rights, and ask you to pay for using their code.
They could *not*, however, distribute linux: that would be distributing mixed GPL and non-GPL code, and the GPL indeed forbids that.
(Note that this also goes for everyone else: even if Red Hat paid SCO, they couldn't distribute linux versions that include the non-GPL SCO code).
(interesting point, btw, that in the hypothetical situation where SCO indeed proves there's non-GPL SCO code in linux, a user could buy the SCO license and use linux legally, but a distributor could *not* buy such a license and distribute this sco-'enhanced' linux legally.
Of course, once the offending code has been removed everything will be back to normal again.)
... is that this article was writtin 5 years ago. I don't believe Gentoo really existed back then :).
It's interesting to see how similar the .deb system is to the FreeBSD Ports collection, if you look beyond the details.
Alien allows you to convert LSB, Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware Packages into Debian packages, which can be installed with dpkg
Not sure how well it handles dependencies and such, though.
I haven't used it on debian itself, but I know adamantix (a security-oriented distro, not entirely unlike SE Linux, based on debian) uses this to verify the downloaded packages.
As for point 4, you certainly have a point there, but with the MTU discovery in IPv6 (which prevents the (expensive!) fragmentation found in IPv4) you might actually see improvements there, too.
Are you sure you have 'hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/yourdisk'? It makes a huge difference, and seems to be off by default quite often still...
Those people you talked to that hadn't heard of TrustedDebian yet haven't read the Debian Weekly News issue of March 25th, 2003.
It's quite clearly stated on the site that the mailinglist archives require you to login for technical reasons, and that this will be fixed at some point in time (not exactly a priority).
And indeed the lists show who are involved in the project, and who is leading it.
I didn't have many problems, using a debian box as the router/firewall for my home network. autoconfiguration is a matter of 'apt-get install radvd' and editting a ridiculously simple configuration file... and I'm just a student, I actually barely had any experience with ipv4 routing when I started this.
If you want to make heavy use of this kind of things, there are several other interesting and fun ways to reach the ipv4 internet from an ipv6-only network. One is to use a dns proxy that returns 'special' ipv6 addresses even for names that usually only have an A record, and then translate packets going to such addresses to ipv4 packets (in a way very similar to NAT) on the dual-stack router.
I've documented some of my experiences/experiments with this (modest, but practical) at http://ipv6.bzzt.net.
I haven't used wxPython, but in wxWindows the wxTextCtrl seems to support it using the wxTE_RIGHT style flag.
> wxPython has begun to incorporate numerous "high-level composition widgets" >that AFAIK don't exist in wxWindows itself, such as calendar controls.
The wxCalendarCtrl has been part of wxWindows for a long time...
The mailinglists are, though high-traffic, very informative and the atmosphere is friendly (hardly any flames, 'dumb' questions are usually anwered with 'check the docs at ....' instead of 'RTFM, you dumbass').
Though the bulk of the wxWindows code is written by a small group of core developers, the development process is very 'open': decisions are often made based on discussion on the mailinglists, and patches usually well-appreciated.
As with QT, wxWindows is also very much worth considering when developing single-platform or even non-GUI applications (check out the wxBase port).