The record labels' "case" is that copying their products is against the law. The possiblity that they might extract some incidental compensation from it doesn't undercut their case in the least.
Similarly, if everyone who downloaded a song voluntarily sent 2 cents to
the record company, that wouldn't make any difference either.
The record companies are a nasty lot. They illegally fix prices. They
corrupt lawmakers. They try to ban useful technologies just because
those technologies can be used in ways that are illegal and harmful
to their business. They have gained legal powers of search which are an invasion of privacy and ought to be repealed.
But they've called their opponents' bluff and gone after illegal file-sharers, and I've noticed that on slashdot at least, I'm seeing a really
poor hand. People don't care about defending freedom or privacy, they
just want to copy albums.
It's not the selfishness I object to, it's the stupidity. Even if you
do only care about copying albums, can't you see that you'd look
better if you pretended to be like me and care about freedom?
Indeed. And it's the reason why user-hostile terminals will never
be able to replace general purpose computers.
In the large financial company I work for, a proportion of the software
on the desktop is in-house developed. Will the corporate IT department
accept a windows upgrade that would mean every new release had to be
submitted to MS for signing? Will they accept an office upgrade that
would mean they can no longer exchange data between standard and in-house
applications? The PC has got to where it is because of its flexibility,
and that is too valuable to be abandoned.
For the home, the situation is more dangerous. People already listen
to CDs on CD players, watch DVDs on DVD players, and play games on
consoles. DVDs and some games are already DRM-protected with hardware
support, and the rest are likely to go that way. However, the general-purpose
computer still has enough different uses that it is likely to survive
in the domestic arena, even if some households will have user-hostile
devices instead.
The big danger suggested by hanssprudel in his intelligent comments is
that general communication channels like the web will be restricted to
user-hostile platforms. I think that is unlikely. The disadvantage of
a user-hostile platform (to a naive consumer) will be that it will not
be able to keep up in software terms with a platform for which anyone
can release applications. The advantage will be that it will be able to
play DRM-encoded content like CDs, but I think this role will be taken
over by other appliances; people will prefer to have a real PC and a
DRM-CD player than a crippled PC that can play DRM-CDs. Note that a
DVD player currently costs about the same as two DVDs, so the cost of
having two boxes isn't going to be the decisive issue.
The final point is that it won't work. The X-box can be cracked because
one signed game has a buffer overflow in its "load save game" function.
To successfully protect a user-hostile PC running browsers, office
applications, and games, every single signed application will have
to be completely free of vulnerabilities.
The benefit of the Dartmouth research is that the DRM-CD players might run linux
inside. It's not a big deal, but it's good for the manufacturers, it will
keep the costs down and reduce opportunites for MS lock-in
There are two reasons for wanting this in hardware, as opposed to just in the software:
To enforce rules that the user can't break ("hostile computing").
To prevent the boot loader from being corrupted by malware.
The second reason is a tiny capstone on a pyramid of security that most people haven't built to anywhere near the height where it would be useful. It can be practically disregarded.
All the other things you list can be done without hardware support, and the only catch is that the end user can choose to disable them. Even then, he might need to open up the box to do it. (password-protected BIOS, no booting except from hard disc: most PCs can do that.)
And you're wrong about worms. In most cases, as far as the OS is concerned, the worm isn't running. Some ordinary program (e.g. SQL Server in the case of the slammer worm) is running, but the worm, by feeding it bad data, has caused it to corrupt itself so that it has effectively become the worm. There is no "worm.exe" for a security processor to refuse to run.
The specialized areas thing just doesn't hold up. I have yet to see a single example of this that couldn't be solved by current hardware. A lot of people talk about company employees: but few employees have root on their computers anyways, so what is the point with the TCPA chip?
I don't have root on my win2k PC right now, but I've got a tomsrtbt floppy in my jacket pocket which works just fine.
Now, if the company was prepared to make the large investment in setting up a full TCPA-style architecture to stop me doing that, it would be prepared to make the much smaller investment in ripping the floppy drive out of my PC. As I say, I don't think the ordinary office desktop is a useful area for this.
I think real uses for this are very rare, just as PCs which are configured by their adminstrators to really lock down what the users can do are currently very rare. But they exist.
I know what I'll do. Whatever it comes to, I will not have a part of this, and I will simply refuse to accept having a computer that is hostile toward me.
Me too. But I think most of the world will be with us, not because they agree with our principles, but because the immediate, practical benefits of being able to run any piece of software on their PC without it being approved by any third party are far too great to sacrifice for the miniscule benefits (in normal circumstances) of "Trusted Computing".
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is valuable in some specialised areas. For high security systems, you want to know that only certain approved code can run.
What we care about is the preservation of general-purpose computers controlled by the user. If we aim to ensure that all computers are controlled only by the user, we will fail, and fail badly, because having, say, a firewall that cannot run introduced code is something so useful that we will not be able to prevent it.
I have hope: firstly, the overhead of trying to deploy this over a large office PC system (the main buyer of general-purpose PCs), will be too high for the benefits.
Secondly, the value of a general-purpose computer that will easily run new software is so high even for the ordinary home user that they will not be entirely replaced by DRM-enabled home entertainment consoles.
It is possible (but unlikely) that this infrastructure will eventually reach the **AA goal of preventing copying of their products. I can live with that provided that our ability to write software for our own computers isn't collateral damage.
What you say might be true, but it's far from clear. The code was also present in the 32V version of Unix, and if SGI copied from that, the lack of AT&T copyright notice would be explained by the fact that it was never there in the first place!
Since the code was clearly modified after being extracted from whatever version of Unix (it contains Linux-specific locking calls), it will probably be impossible to tell whether it was improperly copied from System V or properly copied from 32V.
many ad-ware and spy systems disguise themselves as fun download toys or much needed upgrades
An important principle that is often overlooked on/. is that where there is behaviour which is bad and should be illegal, the person with the right to complain about it should be the victim of the behaviour.
Now, if disguised ad-ware should be illegal, then the victim is the user who is deceived into installing it, not producers of products that compete with products advertised by the ad-ware.
Darl & co. don't answer straight questions. It takes a guy like this, whether he's just trolling or genuine, to show just how hopeless SCO's case is.
Look at the possibilities
The GPL is valid. SCO have knowingly distributed the kernel under the GPL. SCO lose.
The GPL is invalid, and code published with it attached is "all rights reserved". SCO have knowingly distributed Linus', IBM's and everbody else's code without permission. SCO lose.
The GPL is invalid, and code published with it attached is public domain. SCO have knowingly distributed the kernel under the GPL, so it's all public domain. SCO lose.
Time to put the underpants on the head and say "wibble"
If we had 150 million white supremacists to deal with it might be worth trying to understand them.
During the cold war, we made an effort to get along with the Communist block. We didn't agree with them, we didn't approve of them, and we didn't even like them, but we had to share a planet with them, and we can now look back at that time and congratulate ourselves on avoiding a catastrophe. If the catastrophe had happened, it would no doubt have soon become accepted wisdom that it was inevitable.
And you don't understand. Which are these countries where "women aren't allowed to drive"? Iraq? - no. Egypt? - no. Syria? - no. Saudi Arabia - yes. Iran? - bzzzzzt, they're not Arabs, try again...
And check his reasons for doing it: A wallet is a secure container for things you don't want to lose or have stolen. If I lost my wallet, the handful of medium-high importance passwords I would compromise would be among the least of my worries.
Using the same passwords for multiple different services is much more dangerous, and no-one could possibly memorise unrelated secure passwords for everything needed. I need about 20 just to do my work, and I'm usually required to change one or two of them every week.
The worst was my office voicemail. I rarely used it, and the required password change frequency was set so high that it demanded a new password every single time I tried to pick up a message. The end result was I turned the fscking thing off as it wasn't worth the effort to use.
People have an innate sense of risk. It's a product of millions of years of evolution.
I guess - putting words in his mouth - he would say his estimate of the burglary risk falls into this innate sense. He has a rough idea how often burglaries occur, he knows how accessible his back door is, and so on. It is in the case of exceptional or unfamiliar risks that people are not able to use their innate sense and are more likely to make or accept very bad decisions.
Open-source activists outside the USA can be quite quick (sometimes too quick) to play the "US domination" card as part of the anti-Microsoft hand.
This complaining by Microsoft is meant for domestic consumption only -- Microsoft are quite happy to turn the Microsoft vs Open Source argument into a US vs The World argument in front of the US public.
If the Asian countries were deliberately trying to shut MS out of the private-sector market, then MS would have the beginning of a case (only the beginning, mind. There is still a reasonable case for anti-trust action like the EU is taking). Under world trade rules, etc. you're not supposed to deliberately shut out foreign competition.
BUT... It is accepted, and very common, for governments to deliberately favour their own producers for government contracts. This can be for any reason, including economic, security, and strategic considerations. Microsoft really don't have a leg to stand on on this count.
It was supposed to be a parody. I didn't think much of it myself, but it was his first successful novel, so there were no "slavering fanboys" at that point, and some people evidently liked it.
All his books were just parody until "Equal Rites", where things started getting interesting...
I was at a talk he gave in about '91, when he was in the process of doing the rewrite, and he said something like "I went back and read it, and I thought 'Oh, God, this was written by a 17 year old. Not only that, but it was written by a 17 year old who had just read The Lord of the Rings!'"
So that's not a totally unjustified comment...
It's not quite equivalent, as the original Carpet People had been published, but was out of print by the time PTerry became popular. Apparently people were borrowing it from libraries, and selling the library copy for big money on the used market (and paying the much smaller fine to the library)
An MP was wanting to know why Customs representatives hadn't mentioned this incident when reporting to a Parliamentary inquiry into government IT security. A customs agent said:
she didn't want to compromise the ongoing police investigation by making the thefts public.
That is quite impressive. She seems to be implying that police were hoping that the thieves would think the machines hadn't been missed and therefore the thefts weren't being investigated, and that admitting the thefts to Members of Parliament would let the cat out of the bag that sharp-eyed customs agents had in fact got round to noticing that the machines were gone.
It reminds me of a great scene from a Gavin Lyall novel; "The Most Dangerous Game", I think. I don't have it handy, so I'm paraphrasing:
"He was really angry now, and if I made one more crack he would hit me. Which was a silly situation for him to get into, because it meant that I knew what he was going to do before he did..."
Free software authors need to be very wary about attempting to enforce their copyrights (or trademarks) for PR reasons.
SCO's FUD will in due course be destroyed in court, and the end result will be a public perception that third parties are not able to interfere with users of Free Software. Adding more lawsuits will not necessarily speed up this process and could confuse the public perception.
Meanwhile, it would be a very bad thing if the "FUD Ducks" of the world - MS shills like Rob Enderle - could point to something and say "If the Open Source hackers decide they don't like you, the IP landscape is so complex they can bring all sorts of lawsuits to stop you from using the software you've committed your business to." Any legal action taken against SCO must be tightly targetted against their legal threats, so it is really obvious that they are defending Free Software users and not attacking them. As SCO has produced a much greater weight of press releases than actual legal arguments, that is currently difficult.
Until the day that SCO actually bring law against Linux users, it's best to leave the legal side of things to IBM, who know what they're doing. They are suing SCO for damages for distributing IBM's Linux kernel code contrary to the provisions of the GPL (scan down to "SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM").
As a result of SCO's breaches of the GPL, countless developers and
users of Linux, including IBM, have suffered and will continue to suffer
damages and other irreparable injury. IBM is entitled to an award of damages
in an amount to be determined at trial and to an injunction prohibiting
SCO from its continuing and threatened breaches of the GPL.
I think the point is that it would be very easy to prevent any communication to or from the voting machine during voting hours, but that while, as you say, it would be possible to ensure that only outgoing communication can happen, it's relatively difficult to ensure and prove that the outgoing communication doesn't allow any incoming communication. Bear in mind that TCP/IP, for example, is inherently two-way; it's impossible to send packets unless you can receive ACK/NAK messages back.
You have a point in that opening up source can give you a disadvantage
by benefiting your competitors, and you may be right in your particular case.
However, I think it is a relatively unusual situation. Even in your company, I
imagine that not all the software you use is custom industry-specific applications.
Probably most of the rest of what you use you buy in, and that's one area you could
look at whether you would be better bringing in OSS and customising it to your
needs.
Another question is whether you are in a mature market. In your manufacturing
job, it may be that the only way you can increase sales is at the expense of your
competitors, but in some markets cutting costs might allow you to increase sales,
even if your competitors are benefiting from the same cost reductions, because
lowered prices increase the overall size of the market.
That said, your point explains why open source has been most successful for
completely general infrastructure software like Linux and Apache.
I have to say, I've just tried this out and I'm very impressed. I may have a look at stand-alone RSS viewers at home this evening, but they'll have to be very good to be an improvement on using Bloglines.
The whole point of RSS is that, unlike email, it is not push.
In fact, "push" vs "pull" is not very descriptive. You have a newsletter, a publisher who controls the content, and subscribers who read it. There is only one important question: where is the subscription recorded?
There are effectively three models:
The subscription is recorded in the subscriber's brain. The subscriber has to make a point of going after the content. This is the model for web pages. I am "subscribed" to publications like
The Risks Digest and Crypto-gram because I make a point of viewing the web pages regularly. This model is of little value to a lot of publishers, because their content is not valuable enough that users will make a point of keeping up in this way
The subscription is recorded in the publisher's system. This is how email newsletters work. It's fine for the publisher, but unsatisfactory for the reader as he can get subscribed to things he doesn't want. Separating bona-fide subscribed content from spam is very difficult for filtering systems, and the result is that delivery failure rates are rising. This is where we are now, this is where we want to get away from.
The subscription is recorded in the subscriber's software. This is the ideal. I can choose to subscribe to something, and no-one can make me subscribe to anything I don't want. The subscribed content will appear in front of me without my needing to remember it or pick it out of a list of a hundred browser bookmarks. RSS falls into this category.
My pet theory is that there is another method that fits in the third category: email retrieved directly from the publisher's system by the subscriber's system using POP3. I subscribe to the content by adding an account to my mail client with the publisher's POP server, and a username of my choice. Doing a "get email" on my mail client will bring down the newsletter along with my other email. (IMAP or NNTP could be used the same way). The advantage of this over RSS is that the clients are already widespread, although ideally they would be enhanced to support this model more smoothly.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the logic there - the RIAA can't sue a guy for breaking MIT's AUP.
The record labels' "case" is that copying their products is against the law. The possiblity that they might extract some incidental compensation from it doesn't undercut their case in the least.
Similarly, if everyone who downloaded a song voluntarily sent 2 cents to the record company, that wouldn't make any difference either.
The record companies are a nasty lot. They illegally fix prices. They corrupt lawmakers. They try to ban useful technologies just because those technologies can be used in ways that are illegal and harmful to their business. They have gained legal powers of search which are an invasion of privacy and ought to be repealed.
But they've called their opponents' bluff and gone after illegal file-sharers, and I've noticed that on slashdot at least, I'm seeing a really poor hand. People don't care about defending freedom or privacy, they just want to copy albums.
It's not the selfishness I object to, it's the stupidity. Even if you do only care about copying albums, can't you see that you'd look better if you pretended to be like me and care about freedom?
Indeed. And it's the reason why user-hostile terminals will never be able to replace general purpose computers.
In the large financial company I work for, a proportion of the software on the desktop is in-house developed. Will the corporate IT department accept a windows upgrade that would mean every new release had to be submitted to MS for signing? Will they accept an office upgrade that would mean they can no longer exchange data between standard and in-house applications? The PC has got to where it is because of its flexibility, and that is too valuable to be abandoned.
For the home, the situation is more dangerous. People already listen to CDs on CD players, watch DVDs on DVD players, and play games on consoles. DVDs and some games are already DRM-protected with hardware support, and the rest are likely to go that way. However, the general-purpose computer still has enough different uses that it is likely to survive in the domestic arena, even if some households will have user-hostile devices instead.
The big danger suggested by hanssprudel in his intelligent comments is that general communication channels like the web will be restricted to user-hostile platforms. I think that is unlikely. The disadvantage of a user-hostile platform (to a naive consumer) will be that it will not be able to keep up in software terms with a platform for which anyone can release applications. The advantage will be that it will be able to play DRM-encoded content like CDs, but I think this role will be taken over by other appliances; people will prefer to have a real PC and a DRM-CD player than a crippled PC that can play DRM-CDs. Note that a DVD player currently costs about the same as two DVDs, so the cost of having two boxes isn't going to be the decisive issue.
The final point is that it won't work. The X-box can be cracked because one signed game has a buffer overflow in its "load save game" function. To successfully protect a user-hostile PC running browsers, office applications, and games, every single signed application will have to be completely free of vulnerabilities.
The benefit of the Dartmouth research is that the DRM-CD players might run linux inside. It's not a big deal, but it's good for the manufacturers, it will keep the costs down and reduce opportunites for MS lock-in
There are two reasons for wanting this in hardware, as opposed to just in the software:
The second reason is a tiny capstone on a pyramid of security that most people haven't built to anywhere near the height where it would be useful. It can be practically disregarded.
All the other things you list can be done without hardware support, and the only catch is that the end user can choose to disable them. Even then, he might need to open up the box to do it. (password-protected BIOS, no booting except from hard disc: most PCs can do that.)
And you're wrong about worms. In most cases, as far as the OS is concerned, the worm isn't running. Some ordinary program (e.g. SQL Server in the case of the slammer worm) is running, but the worm, by feeding it bad data, has caused it to corrupt itself so that it has effectively become the worm. There is no "worm.exe" for a security processor to refuse to run.
The specialized areas thing just doesn't hold up. I have yet to see a single example of this that couldn't be solved by current hardware. A lot of people talk about company employees: but few employees have root on their computers anyways, so what is the point with the TCPA chip?
I don't have root on my win2k PC right now, but I've got a tomsrtbt floppy in my jacket pocket which works just fine.
Now, if the company was prepared to make the large investment in setting up a full TCPA-style architecture to stop me doing that, it would be prepared to make the much smaller investment in ripping the floppy drive out of my PC. As I say, I don't think the ordinary office desktop is a useful area for this.
I think real uses for this are very rare, just as PCs which are configured by their adminstrators to really lock down what the users can do are currently very rare. But they exist.
I know what I'll do. Whatever it comes to, I will not have a part of this, and I will simply refuse to accept having a computer that is hostile toward me.
Me too. But I think most of the world will be with us, not because they agree with our principles, but because the immediate, practical benefits of being able to run any piece of software on their PC without it being approved by any third party are far too great to sacrifice for the miniscule benefits (in normal circumstances) of "Trusted Computing".
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is valuable in some specialised areas. For high security systems, you want to know that only certain approved code can run.
What we care about is the preservation of general-purpose computers controlled by the user. If we aim to ensure that all computers are controlled only by the user, we will fail, and fail badly, because having, say, a firewall that cannot run introduced code is something so useful that we will not be able to prevent it.
I have hope: firstly, the overhead of trying to deploy this over a large office PC system (the main buyer of general-purpose PCs), will be too high for the benefits.
Secondly, the value of a general-purpose computer that will easily run new software is so high even for the ordinary home user that they will not be entirely replaced by DRM-enabled home entertainment consoles.
It is possible (but unlikely) that this infrastructure will eventually reach the **AA goal of preventing copying of their products. I can live with that provided that our ability to write software for our own computers isn't collateral damage.
What you say might be true, but it's far from clear. The code was also present in the 32V version of Unix, and if SGI copied from that, the lack of AT&T copyright notice would be explained by the fact that it was never there in the first place!
Since the code was clearly modified after being extracted from whatever version of Unix (it contains Linux-specific locking calls), it will probably be impossible to tell whether it was improperly copied from System V or properly copied from 32V.
many ad-ware and spy systems disguise themselves as fun download toys or much needed upgrades
An important principle that is often overlooked on /. is that where there is behaviour which is bad and should be illegal, the person with the right to complain about it should be the victim of the behaviour.
Now, if disguised ad-ware should be illegal, then the victim is the user who is deceived into installing it, not producers of products that compete with products advertised by the ad-ware.
Darl & co. don't answer straight questions. It takes a guy like this, whether he's just trolling or genuine, to show just how hopeless SCO's case is.
Look at the possibilitiesTime to put the underpants on the head and say "wibble"
If we had 150 million white supremacists to deal with it might be worth trying to understand them.
During the cold war, we made an effort to get along with the Communist block. We didn't agree with them, we didn't approve of them, and we didn't even like them, but we had to share a planet with them, and we can now look back at that time and congratulate ourselves on avoiding a catastrophe. If the catastrophe had happened, it would no doubt have soon become accepted wisdom that it was inevitable.
And you don't understand. Which are these countries where "women aren't allowed to drive"? Iraq? - no. Egypt? - no. Syria? - no. Saudi Arabia - yes. Iran? - bzzzzzt, they're not Arabs, try again...
And check his reasons for doing it: A wallet is a secure container for things you don't want to lose or have stolen. If I lost my wallet, the handful of medium-high importance passwords I would compromise would be among the least of my worries.
Using the same passwords for multiple different services is much more dangerous, and no-one could possibly memorise unrelated secure passwords for everything needed. I need about 20 just to do my work, and I'm usually required to change one or two of them every week.
The worst was my office voicemail. I rarely used it, and the required password change frequency was set so high that it demanded a new password every single time I tried to pick up a message. The end result was I turned the fscking thing off as it wasn't worth the effort to use.
Well, how would he know the risk of burglary?
He said:
I guess - putting words in his mouth - he would say his estimate of the burglary risk falls into this innate sense. He has a rough idea how often burglaries occur, he knows how accessible his back door is, and so on. It is in the case of exceptional or unfamiliar risks that people are not able to use their innate sense and are more likely to make or accept very bad decisions.Open-source activists outside the USA can be quite quick (sometimes too quick) to play the "US domination" card as part of the anti-Microsoft hand.
This complaining by Microsoft is meant for domestic consumption only -- Microsoft are quite happy to turn the Microsoft vs Open Source argument into a US vs The World argument in front of the US public.
If the Asian countries were deliberately trying to shut MS out of the private-sector market, then MS would have the beginning of a case (only the beginning, mind. There is still a reasonable case for anti-trust action like the EU is taking). Under world trade rules, etc. you're not supposed to deliberately shut out foreign competition.
BUT... It is accepted, and very common, for governments to deliberately favour their own producers for government contracts. This can be for any reason, including economic, security, and strategic considerations. Microsoft really don't have a leg to stand on on this count.
It was supposed to be a parody. I didn't think much of it myself, but it was his first successful novel, so there were no "slavering fanboys" at that point, and some people evidently liked it.
All his books were just parody until "Equal Rites", where things started getting interesting...
I was at a talk he gave in about '91, when he was in the process of doing the rewrite, and he said something like "I went back and read it, and I thought 'Oh, God, this was written by a 17 year old. Not only that, but it was written by a 17 year old who had just read The Lord of the Rings!'"
So that's not a totally unjustified comment...
It's not quite equivalent, as the original Carpet People had been published, but was out of print by the time PTerry became popular. Apparently people were borrowing it from libraries, and selling the library copy for big money on the used market (and paying the much smaller fine to the library)
Lovely quote from The Register:
An MP was wanting to know why Customs representatives hadn't mentioned this incident when reporting to a Parliamentary inquiry into government IT security. A customs agent said:
That is quite impressive. She seems to be implying that police were hoping that the thieves would think the machines hadn't been missed and therefore the thefts weren't being investigated, and that admitting the thefts to Members of Parliament would let the cat out of the bag that sharp-eyed customs agents had in fact got round to noticing that the machines were gone.It reminds me of a great scene from a Gavin Lyall novel; "The Most Dangerous Game", I think. I don't have it handy, so I'm paraphrasing:
Free software authors need to be very wary about attempting to enforce their copyrights (or trademarks) for PR reasons.
SCO's FUD will in due course be destroyed in court, and the end result will be a public perception that third parties are not able to interfere with users of Free Software. Adding more lawsuits will not necessarily speed up this process and could confuse the public perception.
Meanwhile, it would be a very bad thing if the "FUD Ducks" of the world - MS shills like Rob Enderle - could point to something and say "If the Open Source hackers decide they don't like you, the IP landscape is so complex they can bring all sorts of lawsuits to stop you from using the software you've committed your business to." Any legal action taken against SCO must be tightly targetted against their legal threats, so it is really obvious that they are defending Free Software users and not attacking them. As SCO has produced a much greater weight of press releases than actual legal arguments, that is currently difficult.
Until the day that SCO actually bring law against Linux users, it's best to leave the legal side of things to IBM, who know what they're doing. They are suing SCO for damages for distributing IBM's Linux kernel code contrary to the provisions of the GPL (scan down to "SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM").
SCO's motivationI think the point is that it would be very easy to prevent any communication to or from the voting machine during voting hours, but that while, as you say, it would be possible to ensure that only outgoing communication can happen, it's relatively difficult to ensure and prove that the outgoing communication doesn't allow any incoming communication. Bear in mind that TCP/IP, for example, is inherently two-way; it's impossible to send packets unless you can receive ACK/NAK messages back.
Evesham are medium-sized UK based
You have a point in that opening up source can give you a disadvantage by benefiting your competitors, and you may be right in your particular case. However, I think it is a relatively unusual situation. Even in your company, I imagine that not all the software you use is custom industry-specific applications. Probably most of the rest of what you use you buy in, and that's one area you could look at whether you would be better bringing in OSS and customising it to your needs.
Another question is whether you are in a mature market. In your manufacturing job, it may be that the only way you can increase sales is at the expense of your competitors, but in some markets cutting costs might allow you to increase sales, even if your competitors are benefiting from the same cost reductions, because lowered prices increase the overall size of the market.
That said, your point explains why open source has been most successful for completely general infrastructure software like Linux and Apache.
This is not a precedent (or precedence for that matter). It is a fine for contempt of court. It is not damages to any company.
I have to say, I've just tried this out and I'm very impressed. I may have a look at stand-alone RSS viewers at home this evening, but they'll have to be very good to be an improvement on using Bloglines.
The whole point of RSS is that, unlike email, it is not push.
In fact, "push" vs "pull" is not very descriptive. You have a newsletter, a publisher who controls the content, and subscribers who read it. There is only one important question: where is the subscription recorded?
There are effectively three models:
My pet theory is that there is another method that fits in the third category: email retrieved directly from the publisher's system by the subscriber's system using POP3. I subscribe to the content by adding an account to my mail client with the publisher's POP server, and a username of my choice. Doing a "get email" on my mail client will bring down the newsletter along with my other email. (IMAP or NNTP could be used the same way). The advantage of this over RSS is that the clients are already widespread, although ideally they would be enhanced to support this model more smoothly.