Mostly because it's money that puts food on the table and a roof over the head. And in the end, those are two very important things in life.
Yes, they are two very important things in life. But they're not the only two very important things in life.
Plenty of people who write free software are putting food on the table and a roof over their head. Some of them are doing it through that free software work; others are doing it through other things they do. Why is it an either/or proposition? Are you really suggesting that each and every free software developer is housed and supported by their parents?
Um, measuring the worth of something in terms of how much it makes you happy? How much you enjoy(ed) it? How proud it makes you? How satisfied with it, and with your accomplishments, you are?
The deal he had with the porn sites had him getting paid for referrals. Not for referrals that actually sign on, but simply the number of referrals. So he was screwing over the people who were paying him, as well.
In fact, that's apparently why he targeted the kids. According to his admission, it wasn't that he had some thing about making kids see porn. It was that kids were more likely to make spelling errors, so they were more likely to come across his typosquatting websites; so if he targeted kids, his referral numbers would be higher.
The thing that worries me about the law is this: what constitutes "use"? What constitutes "using" a misleading domain name? What this guy did surely does. But what about posting a link in which you try to trick people into seeing the goatse man by using a yahoo.com redirect. Is that using a misleading domain name (yahoo.com) to manipulate someone into viewing obscene content? The law itself does not say "use = registering a domain name and setting up a website at". I don't have any problem with this guy getting prosecuted; but I worry that the law is so vague that half the trolls on/. are breaking Federal law.
I didn't say that Debian should steal software from OS X, just implementation ideas
I know, and I wasn't suggesting you did. I was just being flip more than anything else -- suggesting that when you said "(OSX) is what Debian really should strive to become", you probably meant "OSX provides a user experience that Debian really should strive to equal." My jokes are always funnier when I explain them, sadly.
Having a book that contains step by step hacks seems like reading a cookbook to become a chef. It just doesn't work that way.
No, I agree, it doesn't work that way. But it can start that way. Your cooking analogy is particularly apt. I started out just following recpies by rote. As I did it, I got confidence that I was indeed capable of cooking yummy things without destroying the kitchen. Then I started playing with recipes to see how things would change if I altered the script. Now I'm reasonably good at making up good dishes on the fly, without recipe, based just on what I have or what I can get that's fresh. Following someone else's directions isn't really hacking; but it can be a good place to start developing an interest in so doing.
The heat death argument relies on the 2nd law of thermodynamics -i.e. there can't be an entropy loss. But this is not exactly true. It is unbelievable improbable that an entropy loss occurs. If one supposes that time goes one after a heat death, there can and will be a restructuring(*) of the universe. The probability that a restructuring happens is unbelievable small. But as time approaches infinity, the probability that this happens will approach one.
Such an argument would only hold if that unbelievably small probability is also constant (or at least, decreases sufficiently slowly). In fact, in the cosmological context, it's continually decreasing, because of the expansion and the consequential redshifting away of free particle energies. Then, on top of that, there's the expectation of what are essentially one-way processes associated with baryon number violation. A bath of photons, neutrinos, and electrons, their energies well below constantly decreasing from the expansion, isn't going to form a new solar system.
Of course they understand basic calculus. They just also understand the currently prevailing model for the constitution of the universe and its evolution. To have the accelerating expansion stop accelerating, decelerate, or turn over would require some additional, extremely bizarre physics that's not indicated by any observation or experiment we presently have. This may seem like an odd constraint for me to place when we're talking about something as bizarre as "dark energy", but it isn't. There were a lot of theoretical reasons from both cosmology and elementary particle physics (and even a few vague extragalactic observational reasons) to at least consider that the cosmological constant may be nonzero; that's why the two high-z supernova teams did their work. And now there's still harder data suggesting same. In contrast, there's just no reason whatsoever to presume unbelievably bizarre physics of the form necessary to produce the behavior to which you appeal. The scale-factor dependence of the currently-known components of the Universe don't have the higher-order derivative behavior you appeal to; while coming up with a hypothetical field that does is pretty damned hard. That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course; it just means the odds are very highly against you. The claims they're making are
almost certainly true.
Like most people in this thread, you haven't bothered to read (or understand) the "problem clause."
No, like some people, as well as the folks at Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, etc., I have read and understood it. Distributing GPL'd source which must be linked against X is an issue. You can assert that it's not an issue all you like; the folks who ARE lawyers (e.g. Moglen, lawyers on debian-legal, etc.) disagree.
And finally, you think that a comparison between drug laws and software licenses is apt, but can't see a connection between RMS's obnoxious advertising and XFree's obnoxious advertising? Even for slashdot, I'm astounded.
Oh for heaven's sakes, it was a comparison in logical structure (i.e. that both situations involve something which is quite reasonable but legally hazardous), not a comparison of severity.
If you're going to troll, do me a favor and be slightly more transparent about it, so I won't take you seriously and waste time on replying. TIA.
While I can see the point of some of this, surely it isn't up to distro maintainers to decide which licences I can and can't accept for me.
No, but it is up to the distro maintainers to not break the law, which they would do if they distributed GPL'd software linked against libraries which are under a license that explicitly conflicts with the GPL. As has been explained by several people, multiple times in this thread.
The XFree clause, on the other hand, would be satisfied by adding that line to a text file included with the distribution. I fail to see why this is a problem -- it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
My sister was sick with terminal cancer. There were various times, before she went into Hospice, when she was in a lot of pain and had difficulty getting pain meds, and was interested in trying to get ahold of marijuana. I knew people who had it, and could have gotten it for her, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to me -- except for the fact that it would have been illegal and I could have gone to jail.
That's the sort of issue here. It's not whether the added restriction is reasonable or not. I personally think it's quite reasonable taken by itself. The problem is that it's a restriction at all, in a circumstance where adding a restriction creates an opportunity for distro providers to break the law (see below).
Also, despite what many people in this discussion have claimed, I see no evidence that GPLed software can't link to XFree.
Say I'm GNOME. My software is GPL'd. My software links against xlibs. Because my software links against xlibs, I have to obey the new restriction in the new XFree86 license. I make my software available to Red Hat, and I say "Here's the license covering my software, which says that when you redistribute it, it must be under exactly the same license I'm giving you, without any additional restrictions. Oh, and when you redistribute it, you must put this additional restriction on it, too." It is logically impossible to satisfy both of those constraints, and ignoring them is illegal.
Finally, I see absolutely no difference between this and RMS's insistance on GNU/Linux -- except the fact that what the XFree project wants is far less obnoxious.
I can't for the life of me imagine what this issue has to do with the current situation -- unless you're aware of some legal ramifications of not calling it "GNU/Linux" that I'm not?
What is the big deal about a few lines of giving credit where credit is due? I'm guessing from your response that it goes beyond that?
My understanding (which could be wrong) is this: it's not that that clause is morally or ethically a bad thing. It's that that clause makes the license incompatible with the GPL, which explicitly rules out putting additional restrictions on the redistribution of the code beyond those already in the GPL. It doesn't matter whether you or I or anyone else thinks the additional restrictions are reasonable; additional restrictions make the license incompatible with the GPL.
A problem with the GPL, then? I don't think so. How do you write a license that, in advance, imagines every possible restriction on redistribution of code and takes care of allowing reasonable ones while forbidding unreasonable ones? The ostensible purpose of the GPL is to preserve freedom, so that's the side the FSF wanted to err upon; so "no more restrictions."
So what if the new XF86 license is incompatible with the GPL? Well, that means that the redistribution of any GPL'd software that links against XF86 software (such as xlibs) is a license violation, and therefore illegal. So the redistribution of e.g. GNOME, KDE, etc., under these circumstances would be illegal.
So people are not upset that the XF86 folks (or, specifically, David Dawes) are making an unreasonable demand for credit for their work. They're upset that he's created this unsolveable license conflict where, previously, up until January 30th, none existed . ..a license conflict because of a license change which seems to be provoked by nothing (who, exactly, wasn't giving XF86 credit for their work), and which will likely take a lot of time and work (developing a new X server under a different license) to solve.
That's my understanding. If it's wrong, I hope someone who knows more about this will chime in.
> from what I understand copyright restricts the act
> of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's
> implimentation of something as much as you like,
> then go impliment something similiar yourself.
> As long as you do not copy the code verbatim
> you are not in violation of copyright law.
What you're saying about copyright is correct;
[ snip ]
No, it isn't, and I don't know why I said it was. Too much crack today or something. The law on derivative works would make this not true, at least according to my understanding of Brad Templeton's
10 Big Myths about copyright.
> I hope you weren't planning on ever contributing
> to any Open Source projects after doing that. If
> it's later demonstrated that you had access to
> the W2K source and contributed vaguely similar
> code (even by accident) to a project, it could
> have severe repercussions for that project.
IANAL but I do read Groklaw, and from what I understand copyright restricts the act of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's implimentation of something as much as you like, then go impliment something similiar yourself. As long as you do not copy the code verbatim you are not in violation of copyright law.
What you're saying about copyright is correct; but
that probably isn't what MS would come after you (and your open source project) for. It'd be patent and trade secret violations.
That said, I don't know whether the unauthorized release of code would invalidate subsequent trade secret claims. On one hand, it seems crazy to lose trade secret protections because of an illegal or unauthorized act; OTOH, it seems crazy to call something a secret that, well, isn't.
Maybe someone who is a lawyer can discuss.
This is kind of misleading. Watching a movie costs less than $10 a person. So yes, our priorities are such that we are occasionally willing to pay somewhere around $5/hour for entertainment. That's not to say that any individual values acting talent in the millions.
I don't think it's misleading. The issue isn't that we value acting talent in the millions, but rather that we value it more than just about anything else. We're willing, as you say, to give that $10 to go see a single movie; but we're not willing to give that $10 to education, public safety, or public health . ..even though $10 from each U.S. citizen -- one less movie a year for each of us -- would raise the annual salary of every firefighter in the United States by $10,000. Now there's a career in which people do risk life and health, and get paid poorly for doing so. We could easily change that; we choose not to. Those are our priorities. Pass the popcorn.
It's looking more and more like the right financial choice for movie enthusiasts is to buy a high-quality entertainment system and rent the DVD. Rental is cheaper than a movie ticket, you only have to pay for one DVD no matter how many people are watching, you don't (YMMV) have to deal with trailers and whatnot, and you can pause it when you have to pee. Besides, it enhances non-movie experiences, like console gaming, too.
Some films look better on the 70 foot screen. But most of them, I agree, are just as good (if not better) at home.
Why are actors paid $50,000,000 for doing a film instead of, say, $50,000 or $200,000? It's just acting. It's not like they're risking their life or health.
Well, $50M is a bit of an exaggeration -- you're not going to find many (any?) examples of that high a figure -- but some actors do get paid a lot of money, even millions of dollars, to do a film, yes. Why so much? Because that's what the market is. They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are.
I think we're at the start of a trend which will end up with people who work in industries where copying is a problem being paid less, and people who actually provide something useful to society, such as teachers, nurses, etc getting paid more.
That would be nice; but it's hard to imagine. As long as people value entertainment more than they do education, public safety, or public health, entertainment will be where the money goes. And as long as the main contributing factor to the success or failure of a movie continues to be perceived (rightly or wrongly) as its acting lineup or director, directors and acting talent will get big money. However, it's certainly possible that some of that money that would otherwise go to foleys, carpenters, sound editors, costume tailors, etc. (which for a typical movie is comparable to the money than the acting talent earns, simply because there's a lot more crew than actors) will be spent on anti-piracy crap instead, with the result that the foleys/carpenters/sound editors/costume tailors/etc. make less.
Didn't a republican president resign over things like this?
No. A Republican president resigned over a massive illegal campaign of domestic spying and sabotage, of which the breakin to which you refer was only one small part; the coverup of that breakin was mainly intended to keep investigators from finding out about the overall campaign and all the other things they'd done.
I understand the tendency we all have now to compare every political scandal with Watergate (right down to giving scandals names of the form "_fill_in_the_blank_here_gate"); and maybe a whole bunch more illegal/unethical crap will be discovered that makes this current situation comparable. But right now, it isn't.
Of course I wouldn't mistake it, but read the URL aloud and the joke is immediately apparent.
That doesn't matter, according to the letter of the law. The only thing that matters is whether a person would reasonably think that it was actually Microsoft.
The reference to the fordsucks case is specious. In that case, the protected mark ("Ford") was actually used, rather than a similar-sounding one (e.g. "Phord"). That made seem like nitpicking to you; but it isn't, since use of the same mark is what's required for the Trademark Dilution Act to come into play. The "tarnishment" constraint only applied because they specifically referred to "Ford."
Of course, that's trademark law, and the resolution of domain name disputes through WIPO are a different animal and can be decided on other criteria. But in a court of law, this kid would be on firm ground . ..if he could afford to stick up for himself, of course.
Just think about it, why isn't the domain name "RoweSoft" or "MichaelRoweSoft"... it's an obvious play directly on Microsoft's Trademark.
But that's not what trademark law says it's concerned with. U.S. trademark law explicitly states, in so many words, that to be an infringement, the potentially infringing mark must be such that someone could reasonably mistake the mark for the protected trademark. This is in Canada, of course; but I'd be stunned if their trademark protection laws were that different from the U.S.
Are you honestly telling me that if you came upon this kid's website, with a domain of mikerowesoft.com, you'd go "wow! What an odd domain for Microsoft to use! And what an odd website for them to have!"
Just last year, Linus said 2003 would be a year for desktop Linux.
Source, please? Thanks in advance.
Besides, 2.6 was also geared for server use, with its SMP and other improvements. We got some new schedulers that happened to snap things up for XFree86, but I haven't noticed a difference.
Yeah, you have to use Linux in order to notice the difference. People who use Linux and have switched to 2.6 generally do.
If I was running Linux on a Atari ST or a PA-RISC machine, I would gladly admit that I was pretty much alone in the universe. I certainly wouldn't demand that one of the Linux's world premiere distributions stop and serve the needs of my obsolete garbage hardware.
Well, be careful with your verbs. I personally wouldn't demand anything, no matter what hardware I'm running. I am, after all, using an operating system and software that I got for free, from people who aren't asking much from me in return. But I'd be damned glad that they do support me on my Atari ST (if I had one), and I'd be bummed if they decided to no longer do so.
I guess I cannot fathom the venom people show at the idea of supporting lots of architectures. Again, therre are tons of distros that support only x86, or only a small set of architecutres. Do we really need to have the only distribution that supports some uncommon processor realigned so that we can have one hundred and one distributions that concentrate on x86/x86-64/ia64, instead of only a hundred? What in the world is the point to that?
And if the answer is "those other distros that concentrate on x86, have the latest packages, etc., aren't Debian enough . ..they don't use.debs/apt/etc. . ..", well, the Debian-derived distros (Knoppix, Libranet, Xandros, Lindows, etc.) exist for that purpose. I liked Libranet 2.7 a lot when I first used it; I haven't used Knoppix, but a lot of people seem to like it and it does exactly what you want (concentrate on x86 and make easily available recent versions of packages).
So what exactly is the problem again?
You can bet that most of these non-x86 types are "non-production" users. The only non-x86 systems that still matter are AMD64, Itanium, and PowerPC. And those aren't exactly what Debian is worrying about.
Debian certainly does seem to care about those, as even a casual familiarity with the development community would indicate. And as for those being the only non-x86 systems that matter -- that should come as some news to IBM and various big iron providers, and the organizations that run those servers.
This attitude permeates even the x86 side of Debian. While Dell et al churn out millions of machines which Debian refuses to support,
Huh? I can't imagine what you mean by this. I know a fair number of people who run Debian on Dell machines.
Debian has taken hardware nostalgia to truly cult-like levels. The scary thing is how this obsession is cloaked as "Freedom".
I'm not saying take effort away from supporting other platforms. I'm just saying release to packages to unstable for individual platforms as soon as they come available, rather than sitting on them until all platforms have been packaged.
My understanding is that this gets suggested quite frequently -- so take heart in that there are lots of people who feel the same way as you. As I understand it (IANADD, and if I'm wrong, I hope one will chime in), the counterarguments are:
1) this makes life a lot harder for the package maintainers, who now have to simultaneously maintain two different "new" versions of the package (since bugs will be reported on each version by the communities that use them);
2) it incredibly complicates the process by which packages in unstable propagate down to testing (the built-by-script assembly area for the next release);
3) in the end, the x86 version and the "everyone else" version of each package would have to come back into sync in testing anyway before a release could be made.
IMHO Debian needs to cut back on the number of supported architectures
If you were one of the people who ran Linux on one of those "other" architectures, you wouldn't feel this way. There are already a hundred gazillion distributions that focus on just a few architectures, and very few that try to be platform-agnostic. Why, exactly, do we need to take one of the very few latter, and convert it to yet another one of the former?
OK, I'm going to take advantage of your post to inquire about this stuff. My question is only sorta on-topic for this story, but it is inspired by it (and by this sub-thread).
I'm a Linux audio user, not a programmer. I use JACK primarily because JACK is required to use Rosegarden4 (MIDI sequencer), which I use with my soundcard's onboard synth as a composition tool, to play with tunes before trying them out with the band I'm in. And I understand that it's necessary to use Ardour effectively, which I'd like to do when I can afford a soundcard that makes it worthwhile, like the RME Hammerfall or whatever.
But I don't really know what I'm doing with JACK -- when I run it, it's by typing in a command that I know works, but which I don't really understand -- and your response here highlighted for me some of my confusion. So here I go.
1. What the hell is a signal graph (re: your response above)? Of what I've read about JACK, that's the first time I've seen that expression?
Or by "signal graph" do you simply mean "a graphical environment for stringing together a sequence of signal processing modules into an overall application"?
2. You say that JACK is for communications between different processes. My understanding was that JACK was for communication between different sources/sinks of audio signal. Those could be processes, but they could also be hardware devices. For instance, when I start jackd prior to running rosegarden4, I tell it to use the ALSA driver for output. In fact, I thought that it could really be anything that could provide or accept an audio signal (even files, network URLs, etc.), since some sort of "virtual device" could be specified for them. Is that not correct? And if it is correct, how is that different from Gstreamer then?
3. What do you mean by "with Gstreamer the whole graph is in-process"? Are you saying that you use the graphical signal path editor to create an application out of modules, but when you're done it links (in the post-compilation sense) the modules together into a single executable which has the capability described by the network? Because otherwise -- if the modules do their work independently and pass data between each other -- that sounds like processes talking to processes, just like with JACK. What am I missing?
4. My understanding of the whole point of JACK is that it's for low-latency audio work. But it sits between processes, or between devices and processes, or whatever; how can that be lower-latency than if JACK wasn't there at all. For example, rosegarden4 uses JACK to pass data to the ALSA driver for my soundcard. How can that be lower-latency than if rosegarden4 just talked to the ALSA driver directly?
I guess another "point" to JACK is to provide a common interface . ..that way, applications and modules don't have to know how to talk to all the possible other apps/modules out there someone might wanna combine them with; rather, they just all have to know how to talk to jackd. And that makes sense, and sounds like it'd be a good thing, for inter-process communication. But why is that a good thing for output? Isn't the whole point (or, a whole point, anyway) of having sound drivers to have a unifirm output interface? How does outputting to jackd to output to the ALSA driver any better than just outputting directly to the ALSA driver?
Well, that's enough to start with. If you (or anyone else) can provide insight, much thanks. I've read online docs about JACK and ALSA, and the Gstreamer summary linked to in this article, but am obviously still quite confused.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly because it's money that puts food on the table and a roof over the head. And in the end, those are two very important things in life.
Yes, they are two very important things in life. But they're not the only two very important things in life.
Plenty of people who write free software are putting food on the table and a roof over their head. Some of them are doing it through that free software work; others are doing it through other things they do. Why is it an either/or proposition? Are you really suggesting that each and every free software developer is housed and supported by their parents?
Do you have a better idea? I cannot think of one.
Um, measuring the worth of something in terms of how much it makes you happy? How much you enjoy(ed) it? How proud it makes you? How satisfied with it, and with your accomplishments, you are?
The deal he had with the porn sites had him getting paid for referrals. Not for referrals that actually sign on, but simply the number of referrals. So he was screwing over the people who were paying him, as well.
In fact, that's apparently why he targeted the kids. According to his admission, it wasn't that he had some thing about making kids see porn. It was that kids were more likely to make spelling errors, so they were more likely to come across his typosquatting websites; so if he targeted kids, his referral numbers would be higher.
The thing that worries me about the law is this: what constitutes "use"? What constitutes "using" a misleading domain name? What this guy did surely does. But what about posting a link in which you try to trick people into seeing the goatse man by using a yahoo.com redirect. Is that using a misleading domain name (yahoo.com) to manipulate someone into viewing obscene content? The law itself does not say "use = registering a domain name and setting up a website at". I don't have any problem with this guy getting prosecuted; but I worry that the law is so vague that half the trolls on
I didn't say that Debian should steal software from OS X, just implementation ideas
I know, and I wasn't suggesting you did. I was just being flip more than anything else -- suggesting that when you said "(OSX) is what Debian really should strive to become", you probably meant "OSX provides a user experience that Debian really should strive to equal." My jokes are always funnier when I explain them, sadly.
Having a book that contains step by step hacks seems like reading a cookbook to become a chef. It just doesn't work that way.
No, I agree, it doesn't work that way. But it can start that way. Your cooking analogy is particularly apt. I started out just following recpies by rote. As I did it, I got confidence that I was indeed capable of cooking yummy things without destroying the kitchen. Then I started playing with recipes to see how things would change if I altered the script. Now I'm reasonably good at making up good dishes on the fly, without recipe, based just on what I have or what I can get that's fresh. Following someone else's directions isn't really hacking; but it can be a good place to start developing an interest in so doing.
OS X is really a marvel, though - it's what Debian really should strive to become.
Except, of course, for the parts that run afoul of this.
The heat death argument relies on the 2nd law of thermodynamics -i.e. there can't be an entropy loss. But this is not exactly true. It is unbelievable improbable that an entropy loss occurs. If one supposes that time goes one after a heat death, there can and will be a restructuring(*) of the universe. The probability that a restructuring happens is unbelievable small. But as time approaches infinity, the probability that this happens will approach one.
Such an argument would only hold if that unbelievably small probability is also constant (or at least, decreases sufficiently slowly). In fact, in the cosmological context, it's continually decreasing, because of the expansion and the consequential redshifting away of free particle energies. Then, on top of that, there's the expectation of what are essentially one-way processes associated with baryon number violation. A bath of photons, neutrinos, and electrons, their energies well below constantly decreasing from the expansion, isn't going to form a new solar system.
Of course they understand basic calculus. They just also understand the currently prevailing model for the constitution of the universe and its evolution. To have the accelerating expansion stop accelerating, decelerate, or turn over would require some additional, extremely bizarre physics that's not indicated by any observation or experiment we presently have. This may seem like an odd constraint for me to place when we're talking about something as bizarre as "dark energy", but it isn't. There were a lot of theoretical reasons from both cosmology and elementary particle physics (and even a few vague extragalactic observational reasons) to at least consider that the cosmological constant may be nonzero; that's why the two high-z supernova teams did their work. And now there's still harder data suggesting same. In contrast, there's just no reason whatsoever to presume unbelievably bizarre physics of the form necessary to produce the behavior to which you appeal. The scale-factor dependence of the currently-known components of the Universe don't have the higher-order derivative behavior you appeal to; while coming up with a hypothetical field that does is pretty damned hard. That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course; it just means the odds are very highly against you. The claims they're making are almost certainly true.
Like most people in this thread, you haven't bothered to read (or understand) the "problem clause."
No, like some people, as well as the folks at Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, etc., I have read and understood it. Distributing GPL'd source which must be linked against X is an issue. You can assert that it's not an issue all you like; the folks who ARE lawyers (e.g. Moglen, lawyers on debian-legal, etc.) disagree.
And finally, you think that a comparison between drug laws and software licenses is apt, but can't see a connection between RMS's obnoxious advertising and XFree's obnoxious advertising? Even for slashdot, I'm astounded.
Oh for heaven's sakes, it was a comparison in logical structure (i.e. that both situations involve something which is quite reasonable but legally hazardous), not a comparison of severity. If you're going to troll, do me a favor and be slightly more transparent about it, so I won't take you seriously and waste time on replying. TIA.
While I can see the point of some of this, surely it isn't up to distro maintainers to decide which licences I can and can't accept for me.
No, but it is up to the distro maintainers to not break the law, which they would do if they distributed GPL'd software linked against libraries which are under a license that explicitly conflicts with the GPL. As has been explained by several people, multiple times in this thread.
The XFree clause, on the other hand, would be satisfied by adding that line to a text file included with the distribution. I fail to see why this is a problem -- it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
My sister was sick with terminal cancer. There were various times, before she went into Hospice, when she was in a lot of pain and had difficulty getting pain meds, and was interested in trying to get ahold of marijuana. I knew people who had it, and could have gotten it for her, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to me -- except for the fact that it would have been illegal and I could have gone to jail.
That's the sort of issue here. It's not whether the added restriction is reasonable or not. I personally think it's quite reasonable taken by itself. The problem is that it's a restriction at all, in a circumstance where adding a restriction creates an opportunity for distro providers to break the law (see below).
Also, despite what many people in this discussion have claimed, I see no evidence that GPLed software can't link to XFree.
Say I'm GNOME. My software is GPL'd. My software links against xlibs. Because my software links against xlibs, I have to obey the new restriction in the new XFree86 license. I make my software available to Red Hat, and I say "Here's the license covering my software, which says that when you redistribute it, it must be under exactly the same license I'm giving you, without any additional restrictions. Oh, and when you redistribute it, you must put this additional restriction on it, too." It is logically impossible to satisfy both of those constraints, and ignoring them is illegal.
Finally, I see absolutely no difference between this and RMS's insistance on GNU/Linux -- except the fact that what the XFree project wants is far less obnoxious.
I can't for the life of me imagine what this issue has to do with the current situation -- unless you're aware of some legal ramifications of not calling it "GNU/Linux" that I'm not?
Why is this obnoxious?
What is the big deal about a few lines of giving credit where credit is due? I'm guessing from your response that it goes beyond that?
My understanding (which could be wrong) is this: it's not that that clause is morally or ethically a bad thing. It's that that clause makes the license incompatible with the GPL, which explicitly rules out putting additional restrictions on the redistribution of the code beyond those already in the GPL. It doesn't matter whether you or I or anyone else thinks the additional restrictions are reasonable; additional restrictions make the license incompatible with the GPL.
A problem with the GPL, then? I don't think so. How do you write a license that, in advance, imagines every possible restriction on redistribution of code and takes care of allowing reasonable ones while forbidding unreasonable ones? The ostensible purpose of the GPL is to preserve freedom, so that's the side the FSF wanted to err upon; so "no more restrictions."
So what if the new XF86 license is incompatible with the GPL? Well, that means that the redistribution of any GPL'd software that links against XF86 software (such as xlibs) is a license violation, and therefore illegal. So the redistribution of e.g. GNOME, KDE, etc., under these circumstances would be illegal.
So people are not upset that the XF86 folks (or, specifically, David Dawes) are making an unreasonable demand for credit for their work. They're upset that he's created this unsolveable license conflict where, previously, up until January 30th, none existed . . .a license conflict because of a license change which seems to be provoked by nothing (who, exactly, wasn't giving XF86 credit for their work), and which will likely take a lot of time and work (developing a new X server under a different license) to solve.
That's my understanding. If it's wrong, I hope someone who knows more about this will chime in.
Correcting myself . . .
> from what I understand copyright restricts the act
> of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's
> implimentation of something as much as you like,
> then go impliment something similiar yourself.
> As long as you do not copy the code verbatim
> you are not in violation of copyright law.
What you're saying about copyright is correct;
[ snip ]
No, it isn't, and I don't know why I said it was. Too much crack today or something. The law on derivative works would make this not true, at least according to my understanding of Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about copyright.
> I hope you weren't planning on ever contributing
> to any Open Source projects after doing that. If
> it's later demonstrated that you had access to
> the W2K source and contributed vaguely similar
> code (even by accident) to a project, it could
> have severe repercussions for that project.
IANAL but I do read Groklaw, and from what I understand copyright restricts the act of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's implimentation of something as much as you like, then go impliment something similiar yourself. As long as you do not copy the code verbatim you are not in violation of copyright law.
What you're saying about copyright is correct; but that probably isn't what MS would come after you (and your open source project) for. It'd be patent and trade secret violations.
That said, I don't know whether the unauthorized release of code would invalidate subsequent trade secret claims. On one hand, it seems crazy to lose trade secret protections because of an illegal or unauthorized act; OTOH, it seems crazy to call something a secret that, well, isn't. Maybe someone who is a lawyer can discuss.
This is kind of misleading. Watching a movie costs less than $10 a person. So yes, our priorities are such that we are occasionally willing to pay somewhere around $5/hour for entertainment. That's not to say that any individual values acting talent in the millions.
I don't think it's misleading. The issue isn't that we value acting talent in the millions, but rather that we value it more than just about anything else. We're willing, as you say, to give that $10 to go see a single movie; but we're not willing to give that $10 to education, public safety, or public health . . .even though $10 from each U.S. citizen -- one less movie a year for each of us -- would raise the annual salary of every firefighter in the United States by $10,000. Now there's a career in which people do risk life and health, and get paid poorly for doing so. We could easily change that; we choose not to. Those are our priorities. Pass the popcorn.
It's looking more and more like the right financial choice for movie enthusiasts is to buy a high-quality entertainment system and rent the DVD. Rental is cheaper than a movie ticket, you only have to pay for one DVD no matter how many people are watching, you don't (YMMV) have to deal with trailers and whatnot, and you can pause it when you have to pee. Besides, it enhances non-movie experiences, like console gaming, too.
Some films look better on the 70 foot screen. But most of them, I agree, are just as good (if not better) at home.
Why are actors paid $50,000,000 for doing a film instead of, say, $50,000 or $200,000? It's just acting. It's not like they're risking their life or health.
Well, $50M is a bit of an exaggeration -- you're not going to find many (any?) examples of that high a figure -- but some actors do get paid a lot of money, even millions of dollars, to do a film, yes. Why so much? Because that's what the market is. They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are.
I think we're at the start of a trend which will end up with people who work in industries where copying is a problem being paid less, and people who actually provide something useful to society, such as teachers, nurses, etc getting paid more.
That would be nice; but it's hard to imagine. As long as people value entertainment more than they do education, public safety, or public health, entertainment will be where the money goes. And as long as the main contributing factor to the success or failure of a movie continues to be perceived (rightly or wrongly) as its acting lineup or director, directors and acting talent will get big money. However, it's certainly possible that some of that money that would otherwise go to foleys, carpenters, sound editors, costume tailors, etc. (which for a typical movie is comparable to the money than the acting talent earns, simply because there's a lot more crew than actors) will be spent on anti-piracy crap instead, with the result that the foleys/carpenters/sound editors/costume tailors/etc. make less.
Didn't a republican president resign over things like this?
No. A Republican president resigned over a massive illegal campaign of domestic spying and sabotage, of which the breakin to which you refer was only one small part; the coverup of that breakin was mainly intended to keep investigators from finding out about the overall campaign and all the other things they'd done.
I understand the tendency we all have now to compare every political scandal with Watergate (right down to giving scandals names of the form "_fill_in_the_blank_here_gate"); and maybe a whole bunch more illegal/unethical crap will be discovered that makes this current situation comparable. But right now, it isn't.
Of course I wouldn't mistake it, but read the URL aloud and the joke is immediately apparent.
That doesn't matter, according to the letter of the law. The only thing that matters is whether a person would reasonably think that it was actually Microsoft.
The reference to the fordsucks case is specious. In that case, the protected mark ("Ford") was actually used, rather than a similar-sounding one (e.g. "Phord"). That made seem like nitpicking to you; but it isn't, since use of the same mark is what's required for the Trademark Dilution Act to come into play. The "tarnishment" constraint only applied because they specifically referred to "Ford."
Of course, that's trademark law, and the resolution of domain name disputes through WIPO are a different animal and can be decided on other criteria. But in a court of law, this kid would be on firm ground . . .if he could afford to stick up for himself, of course.
Just think about it, why isn't the domain name "RoweSoft" or "MichaelRoweSoft"... it's an obvious play directly on Microsoft's Trademark.
But that's not what trademark law says it's concerned with. U.S. trademark law explicitly states, in so many words, that to be an infringement, the potentially infringing mark must be such that someone could reasonably mistake the mark for the protected trademark. This is in Canada, of course; but I'd be stunned if their trademark protection laws were that different from the U.S.
Are you honestly telling me that if you came upon this kid's website, with a domain of mikerowesoft.com, you'd go "wow! What an odd domain for Microsoft to use! And what an odd website for them to have!"
Just last year, Linus said 2003 would be a year for desktop Linux.
Source, please? Thanks in advance.
Besides, 2.6 was also geared for server use, with its SMP and other improvements. We got some new schedulers that happened to snap things up for XFree86, but I haven't noticed a difference.
Yeah, you have to use Linux in order to notice the difference. People who use Linux and have switched to 2.6 generally do.
If I was running Linux on a Atari ST or a PA-RISC machine, I would gladly admit that I was pretty much alone in the universe. I certainly wouldn't demand that one of the Linux's world premiere distributions stop and serve the needs of my obsolete garbage hardware.
Well, be careful with your verbs. I personally wouldn't demand anything, no matter what hardware I'm running. I am, after all, using an operating system and software that I got for free, from people who aren't asking much from me in return. But I'd be damned glad that they do support me on my Atari ST (if I had one), and I'd be bummed if they decided to no longer do so.
I guess I cannot fathom the venom people show at the idea of supporting lots of architectures. Again, therre are tons of distros that support only x86, or only a small set of architecutres. Do we really need to have the only distribution that supports some uncommon processor realigned so that we can have one hundred and one distributions that concentrate on x86/x86-64/ia64, instead of only a hundred? What in the world is the point to that?
And if the answer is "those other distros that concentrate on x86, have the latest packages, etc., aren't Debian enough . . .they don't use .debs/apt/etc. . . .", well, the Debian-derived distros (Knoppix, Libranet, Xandros, Lindows, etc.) exist for that purpose. I liked Libranet 2.7 a lot when I first used it; I haven't used Knoppix, but a lot of people seem to like it and it does exactly what you want (concentrate on x86 and make easily available recent versions of packages).
So what exactly is the problem again?
You can bet that most of these non-x86 types are "non-production" users. The only non-x86 systems that still matter are AMD64, Itanium, and PowerPC. And those aren't exactly what Debian is worrying about.
Debian certainly does seem to care about those, as even a casual familiarity with the development community would indicate. And as for those being the only non-x86 systems that matter -- that should come as some news to IBM and various big iron providers, and the organizations that run those servers.
This attitude permeates even the x86 side of Debian. While Dell et al churn out millions of machines which Debian refuses to support,
Huh? I can't imagine what you mean by this. I know a fair number of people who run Debian on Dell machines.
Debian has taken hardware nostalgia to truly cult-like levels. The scary thing is how this obsession is cloaked as "Freedom".
OH! I get it now. You were trolling.
I'm not saying take effort away from supporting other platforms. I'm just saying release to packages to unstable for individual platforms as soon as they come available, rather than sitting on them until all platforms have been packaged.
My understanding is that this gets suggested quite frequently -- so take heart in that there are lots of people who feel the same way as you. As I understand it (IANADD, and if I'm wrong, I hope one will chime in), the counterarguments are:
1) this makes life a lot harder for the package maintainers, who now have to simultaneously maintain two different "new" versions of the package (since bugs will be reported on each version by the communities that use them);
2) it incredibly complicates the process by which packages in unstable propagate down to testing (the built-by-script assembly area for the next release);
3) in the end, the x86 version and the "everyone else" version of each package would have to come back into sync in testing anyway before a release could be made.
IMHO Debian needs to cut back on the number of supported architectures
If you were one of the people who ran Linux on one of those "other" architectures, you wouldn't feel this way. There are already a hundred gazillion distributions that focus on just a few architectures, and very few that try to be platform-agnostic. Why, exactly, do we need to take one of the very few latter, and convert it to yet another one of the former?
OK, I'm going to take advantage of your post to inquire about this stuff. My question is only sorta on-topic for this story, but it is inspired by it (and by this sub-thread).
I'm a Linux audio user, not a programmer. I use JACK primarily because JACK is required to use Rosegarden4 (MIDI sequencer), which I use with my soundcard's onboard synth as a composition tool, to play with tunes before trying them out with the band I'm in. And I understand that it's necessary to use Ardour effectively, which I'd like to do when I can afford a soundcard that makes it worthwhile, like the RME Hammerfall or whatever.
But I don't really know what I'm doing with JACK -- when I run it, it's by typing in a command that I know works, but which I don't really understand -- and your response here highlighted for me some of my confusion. So here I go.
1. What the hell is a signal graph (re: your response above)? Of what I've read about JACK, that's the first time I've seen that expression? Or by "signal graph" do you simply mean "a graphical environment for stringing together a sequence of signal processing modules into an overall application"?
2. You say that JACK is for communications between different processes. My understanding was that JACK was for communication between different sources/sinks of audio signal. Those could be processes, but they could also be hardware devices. For instance, when I start jackd prior to running rosegarden4, I tell it to use the ALSA driver for output. In fact, I thought that it could really be anything that could provide or accept an audio signal (even files, network URLs, etc.), since some sort of "virtual device" could be specified for them. Is that not correct? And if it is correct, how is that different from Gstreamer then?
3. What do you mean by "with Gstreamer the whole graph is in-process"? Are you saying that you use the graphical signal path editor to create an application out of modules, but when you're done it links (in the post-compilation sense) the modules together into a single executable which has the capability described by the network? Because otherwise -- if the modules do their work independently and pass data between each other -- that sounds like processes talking to processes, just like with JACK. What am I missing?
4. My understanding of the whole point of JACK is that it's for low-latency audio work. But it sits between processes, or between devices and processes, or whatever; how can that be lower-latency than if JACK wasn't there at all. For example, rosegarden4 uses JACK to pass data to the ALSA driver for my soundcard. How can that be lower-latency than if rosegarden4 just talked to the ALSA driver directly?
I guess another "point" to JACK is to provide a common interface . . .that way, applications and modules don't have to know how to talk to all the possible other apps/modules out there someone might wanna combine them with; rather, they just all have to know how to talk to jackd. And that makes sense, and sounds like it'd be a good thing, for inter-process communication. But why is that a good thing for output? Isn't the whole point (or, a whole point, anyway) of having sound drivers to have a unifirm output interface? How does outputting to jackd to output to the ALSA driver any better than just outputting directly to the ALSA driver?
Well, that's enough to start with. If you (or anyone else) can provide insight, much thanks. I've read online docs about JACK and ALSA, and the Gstreamer summary linked to in this article, but am obviously still quite confused.