Lack of legalese is considered harmful, particularly in our litigious society. Code with no license is completely unusable and a liability, particularly if someone can claim to show a trail of ownership, which Github does establish.
Unfortunately, commentary on licenses, particularly BSD vs. GPL, falls into the purview of Poe's law. They could be trolling, or they could be totally serious and there's no way to tell.
They've just noticed that licenses like BSD is better open source license than GPL.
I love it when people take subjective opinion and present it as if it were fact. Going BSD does mean you give up on copyleft.
BSD license is truly in the spirit of freedom. Anyone, either open or closed source projects, can use BSD licensed code.
It depends on your goals. GPL is very clear in its intent to keep the sources of the software it covers open, and that necessarily excludes closed source projects.
I see the two comments up top completely missing the point, as does the original submitter.
only about 15% of them had a clearly identifiable license in their top-level directories.
This is why. And this is because they don't understand copyright law and don't realize that unless they explicitly put the code into the public domain or apply a license, no one can touch it without violating copyright law.
It's probably a mixture of that and outright laziness.
I don't see any actual argument being made here that highlights how Wayland could possibly be obsolete by the time it is widely deployed. Mir doesn't even exist, and the only arguments for it were purely uninformed FUD.
There's a reason that business schools all talk about producing widgets - because the product doesn't matter.
Maybe that's why so many good companies start to crumble when they go public. Maybe that's why EA does the shit they do. The people running the company don't care about the product because they were taught it doesn't matter.
How can you possibly produce a good product when your mindset involves "the product doesn't matter"?
can someone explain why we have more than a post per week either about or mentioning Wayland for the last couple of months?
Because there's been a lot of activity in the desktop rendering space, particularly with Canonical using SurfaceFlinger and announcing Mir amid a spray of FUD.
Of course, we could just start arbitrarily ignoring projects and other things that Ecuador doesn't like.
Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt. * No one will allow for cuts of any real substance. * The richest in the nation and the corporations they own engage in concerted tax-evasion efforts.
its not like anything changed from 2003, or hell, even the 90s.
Oh right, the monopoly continues to bite us in the ass.
Mozilla will die the same painful slow death that Netscape did.
I don't see that happening. Mostly because at this point Mozilla isn't being financially strangled by a company leveraging a monopoly.
The reason Mozilla exists in the first place is that all the shitty Netscape devs needed somewhere to go work after the first one fell apart when Sun realized how useless they really were.
Ah, I see you prefer to spew insults rather than say anything of value.
Well, they're not glibc compatible. You can use them with Xorg and a standard GNU userspace via a wrapper like libhybris, which was developed for Mer and is being used by Ubuntu Mobile.
The fact is, all companies extract money from certain groups (their customers).
I use "extract" in a more pejorative sense. More like pumping oil from the ground or sap from a tree, rather than receiving in exchange for good of some value.
As long as both parties enter into these transactions voluntarily
Companies rarely enter into these sorts of agreements in a truly voluntary manner. Rather, they choose with a gun to their head.
It's "Planned Obsolescence," actually, and isn't highlighted by the examples you cite, as those are caused by shifts in industry (the shift away from PowerPC was now 7 years ago.)
A better example is how handset makers design a device and support it poorly once it is sold (leaving security holes open, not porting versions of Android that the hardware is more than capable of running) with the goal of rendering it obsolete and pushing users to buy the next device.
The problem is that a patent is (in a way) like a legal document - you assumed the purpose is that any programmer should be able to implement it.
No. My point was that patents are intended to convey information such that an professional in the field would be able to look at it, determine that it was unique or novel, and be able to leverage it.
Wrapping it up in legalese that can only be understood by people of an unrelated profession means the ability for the patent to convey knowledge to professionals in the intended field nullifies the value.
Myrhvold prefers this state, as it causes the USPTO to blindly rubber stamp bad patents and makes it a battlefield for lawyers to attack and be paranoid in, defaulting towards licensing fees rather than fighting bad patents.
you could always read the rest of the patent, you know. Given a hundred or hundred-fifty page document, why should it be a requirement that you have to extract all of the knowledge in it merely by reading the last two or three pages, or a few paragraphs up at the front?
Are there patents that reach 150 pages? How is a patent clerk supposed to determine that the invention covered in that tome is worthy of a patent?
How is a corporate lawyer supposed to discern whether or not they infringe, or an engineer to determine if the patent is even useful?
If my method and your method are different, why would your patent cover mine?
That's why they work in vagaries, and mostly try throwing shit at the wall until they see what sticks. The answer is that it may not cover it, but you'll have to engage in a protracted court battle and rely on a jury (thus destroying Myrhvold's argument that mere mortals cannot possibly understand claims meant to be read by lawyers) to determine one way or another.
Myrhvold's hope is that you'll just capitulate before their lawyerly army and pay them the license fees they demand.
If the claims are incomprehensible then the patent has no value. How many times has it been stated that reading the summary doesn't actually tell you what the patent is up to?
Summaries are often vague, and from some companies the summary doesn't change between patents though the claims do. That's broken.
why don't software patents ever seem to include code?
Because when you get down to it, "software patents" are actually "method patents," where they patent a method of doing something. This is why Bilski was so big because that attacked "business method patents," another realm full of horribly obscure patents that require a lawyer to read and have little value other than to attack competitors.
What you describe might be valuable, at least as a resource, but then I could work around it by writing different code, possibly in a different language, that gives me the same output for a given input. The value in knowledge retention there is, as I noted, solved by releasing your code as open source.
No, I do not think the U.S. patent system is broken.
Why did we ask him this question? We knew that we'd get an answer like this, and it's because he directly profits from the broken patent system and has a vested interest in perpetuating it.
At least he admits that they directly back patent trolls.
It happens that Lodsys and Oasis bought them, and they chose to pursue patent assertion, and also litigation. I have no control over what they would do with the patents.
You insult our intelligence, Mr. Myhrvold. They didn't just happen to be the ones to buy them. I fully expect that with a real investigation, one that could get behind the hand-waving of corporate accounting, it could be shown that IV has a vested interest in the outcome of the patent suits those companies pursued. That's why you put them under shell companies anyway: if the suit is lost due to non-infringement or invalidation, the only thing lost is the lawyer's time and the singular patent. No further assets are at risk. But if you win, then you receive a portion of the award. Undoubtedly a "debt" carried by the troll and written off as a loss if it fails.
the reality is that the patent system was the world’s first experiment with open source.
So what you're saying is now we have actual open source, therefore patents are no longer necessary? We're shedding the insistence on hoarding knowledge, and moving into a new era?
Nonsense. You're just trying to twist your preferred means of extracting money from others to try and conjure up support for it.
The same goes for Intellectual Ventures. When the critical remarks become too shrill or over the top, it is just hard to take it seriously as anything approaching constructive criticism.
I suppose that depends at what point you consider such remarks to be "shrill or over the top." For you I imagine that's the moment someone suggests that the patent system is broken, or that software shouldn't be patentable. That is to say, the moment anyone suggests that your business model is unsustainable and dangerous to the economy.
Not knowing how to read a patent.
If I, as a software developer, cannot read a software patent and understand how it is implemented then the patent has no value. None. Patents are meant to be used by engineers to reproduce the patented mechanism. This is also why patents are absolute shit for anything other than electromechanical devices.
Say you aren’t a programmer and you try to read some code – say in C – you could probably sort of understand some of it because “if”, “else” and similar constructs can be interpreted a bit using their English language meaning. But you can’t really understand the code that way. Well, a patent is similar.
No it's not. It means a patent is garbage that's been obscured and made useless for the purpose of CONVEYING KNOWLEDGE.
Of course, the interpretation that said patents are overly broad tends to be correct. Software patents, in particular, are deliberately written to be overly broad so that they can be used against as many people as possible. To instill as much fear across as many companies and industries as they can in the hopes that enough people pay the licensing fees before someone stands up and fights it in court.
Slashdot Mirror
Lack of legalese is considered harmful, particularly in our litigious society. Code with no license is completely unusable and a liability, particularly if someone can claim to show a trail of ownership, which Github does establish.
Ooh, I can twist this one around:
That's a good one!
What exactly would be the outcome of a "GPL-only" world?
Which comprises a whole 15% of all projects. I would like to see what the numbers would be if that percentage was greater. Who knows, it may shift.
Unfortunately, commentary on licenses, particularly BSD vs. GPL, falls into the purview of Poe's law. They could be trolling, or they could be totally serious and there's no way to tell.
I love it when people take subjective opinion and present it as if it were fact. Going BSD does mean you give up on copyleft.
It depends on your goals. GPL is very clear in its intent to keep the sources of the software it covers open, and that necessarily excludes closed source projects.
I see the two comments up top completely missing the point, as does the original submitter.
This is why. And this is because they don't understand copyright law and don't realize that unless they explicitly put the code into the public domain or apply a license, no one can touch it without violating copyright law.
It's probably a mixture of that and outright laziness.
Is this what qualifies as an argument on Slashdot these days? Idiocy like this?
I don't see any actual argument being made here that highlights how Wayland could possibly be obsolete by the time it is widely deployed. Mir doesn't even exist, and the only arguments for it were purely uninformed FUD.
Because of all the unused cruft in X that makes maintaining it a hairy beast.
Nope, it just means that Wayland is a poor fit for your niche use case.
Maybe that's why so many good companies start to crumble when they go public. Maybe that's why EA does the shit they do. The people running the company don't care about the product because they were taught it doesn't matter.
How can you possibly produce a good product when your mindset involves "the product doesn't matter"?
Lucky that you have never had an HDCP handshake failure.
Because there's been a lot of activity in the desktop rendering space, particularly with Canonical using SurfaceFlinger and announcing Mir amid a spray of FUD.
Of course, we could just start arbitrarily ignoring projects and other things that Ecuador doesn't like.
Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
* No one will allow for cuts of any real substance.
* The richest in the nation and the corporations they own engage in concerted tax-evasion efforts.
By what measure?
Oh right, the monopoly continues to bite us in the ass.
I don't see that happening. Mostly because at this point Mozilla isn't being financially strangled by a company leveraging a monopoly.
Ah, I see you prefer to spew insults rather than say anything of value.
Well, they're not glibc compatible. You can use them with Xorg and a standard GNU userspace via a wrapper like libhybris, which was developed for Mer and is being used by Ubuntu Mobile.
I use "extract" in a more pejorative sense. More like pumping oil from the ground or sap from a tree, rather than receiving in exchange for good of some value.
Companies rarely enter into these sorts of agreements in a truly voluntary manner. Rather, they choose with a gun to their head.
It's "Planned Obsolescence," actually, and isn't highlighted by the examples you cite, as those are caused by shifts in industry (the shift away from PowerPC was now 7 years ago.)
A better example is how handset makers design a device and support it poorly once it is sold (leaving security holes open, not porting versions of Android that the hardware is more than capable of running) with the goal of rendering it obsolete and pushing users to buy the next device.
No. My point was that patents are intended to convey information such that an professional in the field would be able to look at it, determine that it was unique or novel, and be able to leverage it.
Wrapping it up in legalese that can only be understood by people of an unrelated profession means the ability for the patent to convey knowledge to professionals in the intended field nullifies the value.
Myrhvold prefers this state, as it causes the USPTO to blindly rubber stamp bad patents and makes it a battlefield for lawyers to attack and be paranoid in, defaulting towards licensing fees rather than fighting bad patents.
Are there patents that reach 150 pages? How is a patent clerk supposed to determine that the invention covered in that tome is worthy of a patent?
How is a corporate lawyer supposed to discern whether or not they infringe, or an engineer to determine if the patent is even useful?
Why would Google do that, when Google themselves help fund Mozilla?
That's why they work in vagaries, and mostly try throwing shit at the wall until they see what sticks. The answer is that it may not cover it, but you'll have to engage in a protracted court battle and rely on a jury (thus destroying Myrhvold's argument that mere mortals cannot possibly understand claims meant to be read by lawyers) to determine one way or another.
Myrhvold's hope is that you'll just capitulate before their lawyerly army and pay them the license fees they demand.
If the claims are incomprehensible then the patent has no value. How many times has it been stated that reading the summary doesn't actually tell you what the patent is up to?
Summaries are often vague, and from some companies the summary doesn't change between patents though the claims do. That's broken.
Because when you get down to it, "software patents" are actually "method patents," where they patent a method of doing something. This is why Bilski was so big because that attacked "business method patents," another realm full of horribly obscure patents that require a lawyer to read and have little value other than to attack competitors.
What you describe might be valuable, at least as a resource, but then I could work around it by writing different code, possibly in a different language, that gives me the same output for a given input. The value in knowledge retention there is, as I noted, solved by releasing your code as open source.
Why did we ask him this question? We knew that we'd get an answer like this, and it's because he directly profits from the broken patent system and has a vested interest in perpetuating it.
At least he admits that they directly back patent trolls.
You insult our intelligence, Mr. Myhrvold. They didn't just happen to be the ones to buy them. I fully expect that with a real investigation, one that could get behind the hand-waving of corporate accounting, it could be shown that IV has a vested interest in the outcome of the patent suits those companies pursued. That's why you put them under shell companies anyway: if the suit is lost due to non-infringement or invalidation, the only thing lost is the lawyer's time and the singular patent. No further assets are at risk. But if you win, then you receive a portion of the award. Undoubtedly a "debt" carried by the troll and written off as a loss if it fails.
So what you're saying is now we have actual open source, therefore patents are no longer necessary? We're shedding the insistence on hoarding knowledge, and moving into a new era?
Nonsense. You're just trying to twist your preferred means of extracting money from others to try and conjure up support for it.
I suppose that depends at what point you consider such remarks to be "shrill or over the top." For you I imagine that's the moment someone suggests that the patent system is broken, or that software shouldn't be patentable. That is to say, the moment anyone suggests that your business model is unsustainable and dangerous to the economy.
If I, as a software developer, cannot read a software patent and understand how it is implemented then the patent has no value . None. Patents are meant to be used by engineers to reproduce the patented mechanism. This is also why patents are absolute shit for anything other than electromechanical devices.
No it's not. It means a patent is garbage that's been obscured and made useless for the purpose of CONVEYING KNOWLEDGE.
Of course, the interpretation that said patents are overly broad tends to be correct. Software patents, in particular, are deliberately written to be overly broad so that they can be used against as many people as possible. To instill as much fear across as many companies and industries as they can in the hopes that enough people pay the licensing fees before someone stands up and fights it in court.