They must provide a written offer with their product, though. Not providing that is a violation itself. (I don't know if they do but judging from the discussion I suspect they don't)
But do they ship a copy of the license text with the product? And do they point you to this download page for the source? (This is a serious question...I don't know because I've never seen a KISS player)
You don't need to offer the source code yourself; you may direct people who ask for the source to somebody else's FTP site.
This is false. You don't fulfill the requirements of the GPL by doing this.
What you can do, of course, is to offer the source and also point them into the direction of somebody else's FTP site for convenience and hope they don't insist on getting it from you.
Just read up in the GPL and you will find that you in fact cannot distribute the Kernel regardless of the fact that you did or did not do modifications to it.
That is, unless you accept the GPL, which clearly states that you have to distribute the source with it, or, a written offer, valid for three years.
This requirement cannot be fulfilled by providing links to third parties distributing the source (e.g. kernel.org). This is because these third parties are not under your control and could cease to offer their services before the three years are up.
So yes, even if your kernel is absolutely unmodified you have to provide the source if you distribute it.
(This is not a huge issue...it's not like people will be swarming to download your source. Most users will have no interest in getting the source from you.)
Well, not only with fixing bugs but with the attitude the XFree-guys display. Answering to a valid request with insults like this Thomas Dickey guy did just shows the utter lack of respect these people have for other developers.
Seriously, if someone on a project of mine would show an attitude like this asshole he would be off the team before the first reply to his insult drops in.
The real question is, why do so many think they are entitled to using "bits" of free software? These "bits" are copyrighted works and you must license them to be able to incorporate the into your own programs. (And if you don't like the licensing terms of the GPL you are free to contact the author to negotiate about a different license.)
It seems funny to me that makers of proprietary software claim to not understand this concept.
No, quite the contrary. Verisign will persuade the lawmakers that the blocking makes them lose income and that it therefore is like stealing.
In the end they will sue 12 year olds for DNS theft.
The original court order was issued because the judge(s) thought it likely that the claims SCO made where untrue and damaging to the competition.
Actually, IIRC, SCO didn't defend itself against the injunction in the German court so the injunction was issued not on the basis of probability of the claims being true but by default. This was a political move by SCO because they would have had to provide proof to the German court and they chose to concentrate on the trial in the US instead.
This is great because it can be handled on connection while all filtering methods only work on already received messages.
Maybe this could be improved to also initiate an smtp connection to the From-address and discard the connection attempt if there is no such user on the other side.
I don't know how that works out for you europeans though.
In Germany, both exist. Ignorance of the law applies only on a very limited basis, though. Basically, it is a valid defense if there is a basis for the ignorance (for example if a foreigner does something that is clearly legal in his country, but is not in Germany) and the ignorance was not avoidable (meaning there was no commonly comprehensible reason for said foreigner to know about the law).
For Germany it was "unfair business practices". Trying to gain business advantages by badmouthing your competitor falls under this. SCO Germany could have easily defended themselves by providing proof to their claims, which they chose not to do.
The system isn't flawless, though. In Germany often non-commercial web sites are hit by those injunctions because of minimal failures in complying with regulations concerning identification of the web site's publisher (There are endless detailed laws describing what you have to provide for publisher identification in Germany. This includes among tons of stuff email address and phone number as well as tax-number).
In Germany lawyers can make a living issueing "warnings" about these non-compliances to web masters and charging their expenses to those warned. These "expenses" typically include "several hours" of research at typical lawyers rates.
Copyright law is an exemption on capitalistic principles. It was made so artists could make a living creating art, since art was deemed "valuable" for the society as a whole. This was a compromise where the public gave up on a part of their rights to promote art.
When the big corporations came along and bought laws, which were designed not to promote art, but to guarantee them a revenue stream, they broke this compromise and stole this right from the public.
Breaking these laws is taking what rightfully (although not "lawfully") belongs to you anyway.
Yes, in Germany, for example, it is not illegal to download copyrighted material, only to upload. The German copyright law focusses on distribution and doesn't really deal with possession of said material.
Possessing copies of copyrighted material falls under fair use and since traditionally you would get your copies, like tapes copied off records, from friends (which is covered by fair use) the lawmakers chose not to bother with sorting out where the material came from.
(of course this might change soon if the RIAA et al offer enough money to the German lawmakers)
(BTW computer software is separately excluded from fair use)
A creator can license his code under the GPL and at the same time license it under different terms (read: for monetary compensation) to third parties. The damages incurred by people using his GPLed code in closed-source applications are the damages of the original creator not being able to license it under a commercial license for licensees, who don't want to be bound by the terms of the GPL.
Re:Doom9 is my hero, dvd2svcd owns you.
on
Video Codec Comparison
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, but XVID is subject to the mpeg-4 patents, which makes it somewhat non-free. At the moment it is an "educational codec" that can't be used in production.
This might also be the reason it is only distributed as source code.
Many European countries have a different legal system than this.
There's a hirarchy of courts going from local or county courts to state courts to federal courts. Both sides in a criminal trial can appeal to the courts decision within a certain time claiming either that facts haven't been considered, or, that the consideration of the facts was faulty.
Because of this the court's ruling includes a statement that the ruling only becomes final, if no appeals are made within the specified time.
This actually helps many people to get their case out of the often biased local courts into the often less biased and better qualified higher courts.
In Germany, you have no right to know wether you have been bugged - not even (or rather: especially) when it was a mistake.
Although the recordings have to be erased if they did not produce court relevant material, they are usually not, since only the police knows about them anyway.
It is a German tradition to regard the citizens as tributaries. That's why we dont have any conspiracy theories - there's no need to conspire against someone who you regard as property.
Now there are also 20 possibilities for a response, that's already 400 possibilities for the first move and answer.
If you disregard the fact that the first moves may open new possibilities and keep calculating with 20 possibilities then the third move has already 8000 possibilities, the next one 160.000
After only 10 moves (5 on each side) this number alredy grows to 104.900.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 and the game has just started.
You would need a big Beowulf Cluster to build such a tree.
Slashdot Mirror
They must provide a written offer with their product, though. Not providing that is a violation itself. (I don't know if they do but judging from the discussion I suspect they don't)
But do they ship a copy of the license text with the product? And do they point you to this download page for the source? (This is a serious question...I don't know because I've never seen a KISS player)
This is false. You don't fulfill the requirements of the GPL by doing this.
What you can do, of course, is to offer the source and also point them into the direction of somebody else's FTP site for convenience and hope they don't insist on getting it from you.
Just read up in the GPL and you will find that you in fact cannot distribute the Kernel regardless of the fact that you did or did not do modifications to it.
That is, unless you accept the GPL, which clearly states that you have to distribute the source with it, or, a written offer, valid for three years.
This requirement cannot be fulfilled by providing links to third parties distributing the source (e.g. kernel.org). This is because these third parties are not under your control and could cease to offer their services before the three years are up.
So yes, even if your kernel is absolutely unmodified you have to provide the source if you distribute it.
(This is not a huge issue...it's not like people will be swarming to download your source. Most users will have no interest in getting the source from you.)
Seriously, if someone on a project of mine would show an attitude like this asshole he would be off the team before the first reply to his insult drops in.
It seems funny to me that makers of proprietary software claim to not understand this concept.
No, quite the contrary. Verisign will persuade the lawmakers that the blocking makes them lose income and that it therefore is like stealing. In the end they will sue 12 year olds for DNS theft.
under German law, yes. (This is why they won't do this, they'll just link to the root of sco.com instead, which would probably be OK under German law)
Actually, IIRC, SCO didn't defend itself against the injunction in the German court so the injunction was issued not on the basis of probability of the claims being true but by default. This was a political move by SCO because they would have had to provide proof to the German court and they chose to concentrate on the trial in the US instead.
Maybe this could be improved to also initiate an smtp connection to the From-address and discard the connection attempt if there is no such user on the other side.
In Germany, both exist. Ignorance of the law applies only on a very limited basis, though. Basically, it is a valid defense if there is a basis for the ignorance (for example if a foreigner does something that is clearly legal in his country, but is not in Germany) and the ignorance was not avoidable (meaning there was no commonly comprehensible reason for said foreigner to know about the law).
Because these systems provide a hardware abstraction layer that makes writing games for the variety of today's hardware feasible.
Well, it worked for the "intellectual property" crowd.
The system isn't flawless, though. In Germany often non-commercial web sites are hit by those injunctions because of minimal failures in complying with regulations concerning identification of the web site's publisher (There are endless detailed laws describing what you have to provide for publisher identification in Germany. This includes among tons of stuff email address and phone number as well as tax-number).
In Germany lawyers can make a living issueing "warnings" about these non-compliances to web masters and charging their expenses to those warned. These "expenses" typically include "several hours" of research at typical lawyers rates.
When the big corporations came along and bought laws, which were designed not to promote art, but to guarantee them a revenue stream, they broke this compromise and stole this right from the public.
Breaking these laws is taking what rightfully (although not "lawfully") belongs to you anyway.
Possessing copies of copyrighted material falls under fair use and since traditionally you would get your copies, like tapes copied off records, from friends (which is covered by fair use) the lawmakers chose not to bother with sorting out where the material came from.
(of course this might change soon if the RIAA et al offer enough money to the German lawmakers)
(BTW computer software is separately excluded from fair use)
The so called 'short squeeze'
That's one of the reasons the Free Software Foundation asks contributors to GNU projects to assign their copyright to them.
He is German (or Germanophil...I don't want to insult him if he is Swiss or Austrian). I German, ei is pronounced like the English i.
A creator can license his code under the GPL and at the same time license it under different terms (read: for monetary compensation) to third parties. The damages incurred by people using his GPLed code in closed-source applications are the damages of the original creator not being able to license it under a commercial license for licensees, who don't want to be bound by the terms of the GPL.
This might also be the reason it is only distributed as source code.
Think about a graphics artist. At 2400 dpi (a common scanning resolution) a page has already 1.5 GB.
There's a hirarchy of courts going from local or county courts to state courts to federal courts. Both sides in a criminal trial can appeal to the courts decision within a certain time claiming either that facts haven't been considered, or, that the consideration of the facts was faulty.
Because of this the court's ruling includes a statement that the ruling only becomes final, if no appeals are made within the specified time.
This actually helps many people to get their case out of the often biased local courts into the often less biased and better qualified higher courts.
Although the recordings have to be erased if they did not produce court relevant material, they are usually not, since only the police knows about them anyway.
It is a German tradition to regard the citizens as tributaries. That's why we dont have any conspiracy theories - there's no need to conspire against someone who you regard as property.
There are 20 possibilities for a first move:
Now there are also 20 possibilities for a response, that's already 400 possibilities for the first move and answer.
If you disregard the fact that the first moves may open new possibilities and keep calculating with 20 possibilities then the third move has already 8000 possibilities, the next one 160.000
After only 10 moves (5 on each side) this number alredy grows to 104.900.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 and the game has just started.
You would need a big Beowulf Cluster to build such a tree.