This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
I think this (along with, of course, other parts of the license) is fair warning to developers that their code is not only subject to the particular version of the license under which they submitted it, but to any later version. If the developer didn't want their code to fall under GPLv3, they shouldn't have licensed it under GPLv2. Personally, I trust the motives and integrity of the FSF enough to license my code under GPLv2 in the belief that GPLv3 will work for me as well. Remember, though: if something is licensed under GPLv2, then GPLv3 comes into effect, other people can act as if it is licensed under either version.
Part of the problem with that is that someone could then distribute binaries, presumably for profit of some kind, and make the sources publicly available but hard to obtain. How would you stop someone from, say, obscuring the location of the sources, requiring free registration (read: handing over of e-mail address to spammers) to the site to obtain them, or some other such nonsense? Requiring them to be distributed with the binaries means that the sources are guaranteed to be as easy to obtain as the binaries.
...since there cannot be much to an ant. Certainly not much sophisticated processing ability.
Why do people automatically assume that ants, and for that matter, other non-human animals, are simple and/or dumb and/or not self-aware? It seems this idea that humans are so tremendously much more complex than any other organism sprouts from thin air (or thick ego), and it would take a dolphin obtaining a Ph.D. in particle physics to convince them otherwise.
At least, it suggests that ant behavior is not as simple as I had thought.
Probably not. Our behaviour is as complex as it is mainly due to the degree of social interaction inherent to our species. Now, show me an ant, and I will show you a social creature if there ever was any.
Not at all. Varyingly complex behaviour designed to fool other animals (same or different species) is instinctive and genetic in many species. However, ants are much more socially dependent than most animals and would not benefit from stashing food for themselves individually.
It would be interesting to see if they put such "do not enter" markers on the far side of food locations, near the interface with another competing colony. My guess is the ants can distinguish the originating colony of the pheromones, though.
Nonsense. There are products out there (software and otherwise) that make Windows and other Microsoft products look about as complex in design as a desk lamp, yet they are essentially free of bugs.
Listen to how ridiculous this sounds applied to a car:
As much as we may despise it, a Ford Focus is a very large, complex piece of equipment. As bugs are fixed and features added, more bugs are created and so the cycle goes on. This is the reality of automotive engineering. Does he really think that if Ford could fix every bug they wouldn't do it?
Look at all those Focuses broken down along the side of the road. Oops! The Focus just swerved, crashed into a pole and exploded in flames, for no apparent reason. Oh well, I guess we can't expect Ford to fix every bug.
Many of your points are quite valid and of course they apply within the framework of the system I'm talking about. In Ontario (and similarly elsewhere in North America) one does not have to be a P.Eng. (or non-PEO equivalent) to have an engineering job, and in fact many P.Eng.'s have jobs where they are not hired in that capacity but rather just as "regular" engineers.
Where the ethics and liability issues come in is the point where someone has to have the final say on something, especially safety-related. You can talk about everything being cross-checked by everyone, but somewhere down the line someone has to rubber-stamp the final product. Enter the P.Eng. Depending on the discipline(s) the project falls under and the nature of the project, it may require a sign-off (seal) by a P.Eng. The process of becoming a P.Eng. (and the enforceability of the attached rules) is designed so that whoever is paying the P.Eng. to seal something knows by default that the P.Eng. is competent, ethical and meticulous in approving a project.
As for legal liability being worthless, utter nonsense. If a civil P.Eng. signs off on a truss design for a bridge, and the bridge collapses, it will be fairly simple to trace the failure to that truss and that truss to the P.Eng. who signed off on it. Civil engineer gets the boot, a hefty fine and a "you'll never work in this town again" sendoff -- and it's very easy to be proven negligent in these cases. The civil engineer knows this beforehand, however, and won't sign off on a poor design (as we can safely say a P.Eng. is competent enough to know).
You say you'd prefer a system where no one is personally liable, and everyone is collectively liable, but they avoid failure by cross-checking each other. To do this, every engineer in the project would have to be equally competent in every field the project involved. Otherwise, someone is going to end up being the authority on a given area, and then your collective liability falls apart, because it's that person's fault when that person's part of the project fails. I'm sure you'd love to work like this, as would I, because we are the engineers and we don't want that kind of responsibility if we can avoid it. However, it would be extremely irresponsible to run a company like that. Collectively liable means company liable. No thanks. Send the prints to a P.Eng. (consulting firm), pay him/her a buttload of money, and let him/her take the responsibility when something goes wrong. In fact, most of the time a company has no other legal choice, because the lawmakers don't want companies gambling with lives to save the money that they would pay the P.Eng.'s firm otherwise.
I believe the Engineering Council UK (www.engc.org.uk) is more what I'm talking about in the UK.
Again, it's not the status or recognition that is in question. It's the legal responsibility. You can fuddle all day about how much recognition you get, but as far as legal responsibility goes, you either have it or you don't.
If professional engineers are not regulated, in the same way medical doctors and lawyers are regulated, then there is no legal guarantee of quality and soundness of workmanship, and no significant legal incentive against screwing up. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you screw up and don't belong to a regulated profession, the party getting screwed has no legal recourse against you.
Clients and employers of professional engineers realize this, and it is the basis upon which we are hired. They know that we are bound to a code of ethics and that if we are found in violation of it in the least, we are subject to severe fines and our careers are essentially over. They can rest assured that we won't, in general, subject ourselves to this possibility, and that if we do they will probably be able to recover any incurred costs through legal action.
Tell me, if you were to write buggy software that resulted in lives being lost, could anything worse happen to you personally than being fired? Could the company sue you for all the damages incurred to them? Could you be stripped of your title as an engineer, so that you couldn't just hop over to the next town and find a shiny new job?
You can argue that it is a protection racket in the sense that it protects engineers from being underpaid or otherwise disadvantaged due to the incompetence or immorality of other engineers, because if such an organization didn't exist, essentially anyone could claim to be an "engineer" and run around mucking things up for the rest of us. And yes, it does mean higher wages: it makes perfect sense, as in addition to the skills of the engineer the employer or client is now paying for a legally enforced guarantee of workmanship.
I don't think the implication was that Software Engineering is not a true occupation. There's no question of that.
The dispute about whether Software Engineers should really be called engineers stems from the fact that engineering is a regulated profession (in virtually every jurisdiction where it is practised), yet to my knowledge most if not all Software Engineering degrees are not true accredited degrees (this is going to change very soon in Ontario as Waterloo and McMaster Universities are accrediting their Software Engineering degrees). Thus, unless you are a licensed engineer under a governing body of professional engineers, like the PEO in Ontario, you have no legal liability for your actions as an engineer, and it is probably illegal to claim professionally to be an engineer at all (to avoid the misconception that you bring the associated legal responsibilities with your work).
You can take your responsibilities as seriously as you like, but that means squat to your clients or the court unless you are a registered, regulated professional engineer.
How cautious would you be if you didn't know about the dots, though?
This is another system designed to trap people in their own ignorance. Your comment proves that it would be ineffective against all but the dumbest counterfeiters if it were well-known, so the feds hide it and don't inform the public (for your Security, of course) so as to catch all but the smartest or most paranoid counterfeiters.
It's basically entrapment. They should concentrate on deterrents, but instead they just try to catch and imprison all the troublemakers.
The Shadowy Organization probably doesn't have all that information on file directly, but clearly the idea behind setting up this "deal" with the printer manufacturers is that they can obtain the information from them when they need it (say, when they find a fake twenty with the dot pattern embedded).
Who's to say what it takes for them to obtain this information and how they use it? I'm personally not satisfied to just think "they'll only obtain it when they need it, and they will only use it for a Good Cause". It's not paranoia, it's like Murphy's law: if it can be abused, it probably will be.
So if they were to outsource Captain America, would he be renamed to Captain India? (Would he sport orange, white and green? Would his shield have a huge Chakra design on it?)
There's a lab at school with a bunch of Sun Ultra 10 workstations that use the Type 5 optical mouse and the reflective grid mousepad. Every time we turn on the fluoros in there, all the monitors that have gone into powersave mode wake up.
Bill Gates' credit card number was just one out of thousands of numbers taken from several servers. There is nothing to compare here. You're just trying to stir up shit with Linux zealots by creating an apparent double standard where none exists (or at least if it does, you're giving a terrible example).
Side note: the vast majority of people who claim to be "trying to help", regardless of what security measure they have circumvented, are actually just messing around for kicks and would rather be seen as a friend than an enemy when the shit hits the fan. This "white hat" and "black hat" nonsense was concocted by corporate computer security consultants, who of course know nothing about computer security and need to do something to justify their salaries. Most of the general public and especially corporate executives are paranoid and have a hard time believing that hackers aren't after their precious profits.
I know I didn't say it, but I don't really count Hotmail, MSN or any other Microsoft-run services in the context of this article, because they aren't really customers licensing the Passport system. It didn't even occur to me while I was posting because I am one of those very few people that has never had a Hotmail account (well, I had a throwaway account once long before MS bought HoTMaiL, and thus even longer before Passport).
I realize that, which is why there would subsequently need to be a legal definition of abandonware (well, it would actually be a definition of !abandonware) as many people have pointed out. However, this type of legal decision would put the onus on Disney in this case to renew their copyright by making sure their stuff fits the !abandonware definition, whatever that requires on their part. That way, if a company really does abandon the product, it will automatically lapse into abandonware status and won't be held stagnant by a dead copyright.
Creative Commons licenses can apply to a lot more than just music. They are currently used with writings, visual arts, photography, film/theatre, music, research, and more, and could potentially apply to anything that a copyright can.
The copyright holder often stops distributing the work before the copyright term is up. I don't have statistics, but it seems logical to assume that in the vast majority of these cases that happens because the work stops being profitable; therefore, in those cases, the fact that the work is being distributed by someone else is not hurting the copyright holder's profit at that point. The copyright term can be cut short here without curtailing (and indeed, enhancing) the principle behind finite copyright terms.
If we follow your reasoning, why have copyright terms at all? Works should stay copyrighted forever and ever until the copyright holder (who may have inherited the copyright from a great-grandfather) decides to let it go.
Would this case, if ruled in Kahle's favor, make abandonware legal?
People have been distributing old, abandoned software (mostly from the 1980s) on web sites for years, knowing that it is illegal but under the likely correct assumption that they are doing the publisher no harm whatsoever. I have never heard of any true abandonware resulting in legal action, but currently a company that holds the copyright for a program can go after someone distributing it online for free. It makes no difference if they still sell it, support it or even remember it exists.
Of course, there would have to be some kind of definition for what constitutes abandonware, but that would be the case with all other works as well so I'm confident they'll figure that part out. I hope Kahle wins this one, personally.
Not really. This is with reference to works that are no longer available... basically, he's saying that retaining copyright restrictions on abandonware is unconstitutional, and I agree.
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This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
I think this (along with, of course, other parts of the license) is fair warning to developers that their code is not only subject to the particular version of the license under which they submitted it, but to any later version. If the developer didn't want their code to fall under GPLv3, they shouldn't have licensed it under GPLv2. Personally, I trust the motives and integrity of the FSF enough to license my code under GPLv2 in the belief that GPLv3 will work for me as well. Remember, though: if something is licensed under GPLv2, then GPLv3 comes into effect, other people can act as if it is licensed under either version.
Part of the problem with that is that someone could then distribute binaries, presumably for profit of some kind, and make the sources publicly available but hard to obtain. How would you stop someone from, say, obscuring the location of the sources, requiring free registration (read: handing over of e-mail address to spammers) to the site to obtain them, or some other such nonsense? Requiring them to be distributed with the binaries means that the sources are guaranteed to be as easy to obtain as the binaries.
Because the GPL has, you know, so much to do with robots and everything...
Why do people automatically assume that ants, and for that matter, other non-human animals, are simple and/or dumb and/or not self-aware? It seems this idea that humans are so tremendously much more complex than any other organism sprouts from thin air (or thick ego), and it would take a dolphin obtaining a Ph.D. in particle physics to convince them otherwise.
At least, it suggests that ant behavior is not as simple as I had thought.
Probably not. Our behaviour is as complex as it is mainly due to the degree of social interaction inherent to our species. Now, show me an ant, and I will show you a social creature if there ever was any.
Not at all. Varyingly complex behaviour designed to fool other animals (same or different species) is instinctive and genetic in many species. However, ants are much more socially dependent than most animals and would not benefit from stashing food for themselves individually.
It would be interesting to see if they put such "do not enter" markers on the far side of food locations, near the interface with another competing colony. My guess is the ants can distinguish the originating colony of the pheromones, though.
Nonsense. There are products out there (software and otherwise) that make Windows and other Microsoft products look about as complex in design as a desk lamp, yet they are essentially free of bugs.
Listen to how ridiculous this sounds applied to a car:
As much as we may despise it, a Ford Focus is a very large, complex piece of equipment. As bugs are fixed and features added, more bugs are created and so the cycle goes on. This is the reality of automotive engineering. Does he really think that if Ford could fix every bug they wouldn't do it?
Look at all those Focuses broken down along the side of the road. Oops! The Focus just swerved, crashed into a pole and exploded in flames, for no apparent reason. Oh well, I guess we can't expect Ford to fix every bug.
Many of your points are quite valid and of course they apply within the framework of the system I'm talking about. In Ontario (and similarly elsewhere in North America) one does not have to be a P.Eng. (or non-PEO equivalent) to have an engineering job, and in fact many P.Eng.'s have jobs where they are not hired in that capacity but rather just as "regular" engineers.
Where the ethics and liability issues come in is the point where someone has to have the final say on something, especially safety-related. You can talk about everything being cross-checked by everyone, but somewhere down the line someone has to rubber-stamp the final product. Enter the P.Eng. Depending on the discipline(s) the project falls under and the nature of the project, it may require a sign-off (seal) by a P.Eng. The process of becoming a P.Eng. (and the enforceability of the attached rules) is designed so that whoever is paying the P.Eng. to seal something knows by default that the P.Eng. is competent, ethical and meticulous in approving a project.
As for legal liability being worthless, utter nonsense. If a civil P.Eng. signs off on a truss design for a bridge, and the bridge collapses, it will be fairly simple to trace the failure to that truss and that truss to the P.Eng. who signed off on it. Civil engineer gets the boot, a hefty fine and a "you'll never work in this town again" sendoff -- and it's very easy to be proven negligent in these cases. The civil engineer knows this beforehand, however, and won't sign off on a poor design (as we can safely say a P.Eng. is competent enough to know).
You say you'd prefer a system where no one is personally liable, and everyone is collectively liable, but they avoid failure by cross-checking each other. To do this, every engineer in the project would have to be equally competent in every field the project involved. Otherwise, someone is going to end up being the authority on a given area, and then your collective liability falls apart, because it's that person's fault when that person's part of the project fails. I'm sure you'd love to work like this, as would I, because we are the engineers and we don't want that kind of responsibility if we can avoid it. However, it would be extremely irresponsible to run a company like that. Collectively liable means company liable. No thanks. Send the prints to a P.Eng. (consulting firm), pay him/her a buttload of money, and let him/her take the responsibility when something goes wrong. In fact, most of the time a company has no other legal choice, because the lawmakers don't want companies gambling with lives to save the money that they would pay the P.Eng.'s firm otherwise.
I believe the Engineering Council UK (www.engc.org.uk) is more what I'm talking about in the UK.
Again, it's not the status or recognition that is in question. It's the legal responsibility. You can fuddle all day about how much recognition you get, but as far as legal responsibility goes, you either have it or you don't.
If professional engineers are not regulated, in the same way medical doctors and lawyers are regulated, then there is no legal guarantee of quality and soundness of workmanship, and no significant legal incentive against screwing up. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you screw up and don't belong to a regulated profession, the party getting screwed has no legal recourse against you.
Clients and employers of professional engineers realize this, and it is the basis upon which we are hired. They know that we are bound to a code of ethics and that if we are found in violation of it in the least, we are subject to severe fines and our careers are essentially over. They can rest assured that we won't, in general, subject ourselves to this possibility, and that if we do they will probably be able to recover any incurred costs through legal action.
Tell me, if you were to write buggy software that resulted in lives being lost, could anything worse happen to you personally than being fired? Could the company sue you for all the damages incurred to them? Could you be stripped of your title as an engineer, so that you couldn't just hop over to the next town and find a shiny new job?
You can argue that it is a protection racket in the sense that it protects engineers from being underpaid or otherwise disadvantaged due to the incompetence or immorality of other engineers, because if such an organization didn't exist, essentially anyone could claim to be an "engineer" and run around mucking things up for the rest of us. And yes, it does mean higher wages: it makes perfect sense, as in addition to the skills of the engineer the employer or client is now paying for a legally enforced guarantee of workmanship.
I don't think the implication was that Software Engineering is not a true occupation. There's no question of that.
The dispute about whether Software Engineers should really be called engineers stems from the fact that engineering is a regulated profession (in virtually every jurisdiction where it is practised), yet to my knowledge most if not all Software Engineering degrees are not true accredited degrees (this is going to change very soon in Ontario as Waterloo and McMaster Universities are accrediting their Software Engineering degrees). Thus, unless you are a licensed engineer under a governing body of professional engineers, like the PEO in Ontario, you have no legal liability for your actions as an engineer, and it is probably illegal to claim professionally to be an engineer at all (to avoid the misconception that you bring the associated legal responsibilities with your work).
You can take your responsibilities as seriously as you like, but that means squat to your clients or the court unless you are a registered, regulated professional engineer.
How cautious would you be if you didn't know about the dots, though?
This is another system designed to trap people in their own ignorance. Your comment proves that it would be ineffective against all but the dumbest counterfeiters if it were well-known, so the feds hide it and don't inform the public (for your Security, of course) so as to catch all but the smartest or most paranoid counterfeiters.
It's basically entrapment. They should concentrate on deterrents, but instead they just try to catch and imprison all the troublemakers.
The Shadowy Organization probably doesn't have all that information on file directly, but clearly the idea behind setting up this "deal" with the printer manufacturers is that they can obtain the information from them when they need it (say, when they find a fake twenty with the dot pattern embedded).
Who's to say what it takes for them to obtain this information and how they use it? I'm personally not satisfied to just think "they'll only obtain it when they need it, and they will only use it for a Good Cause". It's not paranoia, it's like Murphy's law: if it can be abused, it probably will be.
So if they were to outsource Captain America, would he be renamed to Captain India? (Would he sport orange, white and green? Would his shield have a huge Chakra design on it?)
There's a lab at school with a bunch of Sun Ultra 10 workstations that use the Type 5 optical mouse and the reflective grid mousepad. Every time we turn on the fluoros in there, all the monitors that have gone into powersave mode wake up.
The /. effect was making it hard for me to see the big picture, so get it here.
It's a screenshot of 4DWM. I didn't say the screenshot itself was from 1992.
I remember SGI's 4DWM having completely vector based graphics back in 1992 (and probably before that). Has anyone else done it in the interim?
Bill Gates' credit card number was just one out of thousands of numbers taken from several servers. There is nothing to compare here. You're just trying to stir up shit with Linux zealots by creating an apparent double standard where none exists (or at least if it does, you're giving a terrible example).
Side note: the vast majority of people who claim to be "trying to help", regardless of what security measure they have circumvented, are actually just messing around for kicks and would rather be seen as a friend than an enemy when the shit hits the fan. This "white hat" and "black hat" nonsense was concocted by corporate computer security consultants, who of course know nothing about computer security and need to do something to justify their salaries. Most of the general public and especially corporate executives are paranoid and have a hard time believing that hackers aren't after their precious profits.
The BSA? Aren't those the guys who drive around in vans equipped with patented Pirated Software Detector satellite dishes and radar units?
I know I didn't say it, but I don't really count Hotmail, MSN or any other Microsoft-run services in the context of this article, because they aren't really customers licensing the Passport system. It didn't even occur to me while I was posting because I am one of those very few people that has never had a Hotmail account (well, I had a throwaway account once long before MS bought HoTMaiL, and thus even longer before Passport).
1. I have yet to meet someone who actually has (let alone uses) a .NET Passport.
2. If you are thinking about replying to this message with "I Do!", then I probably won't meet you, so see 1.
I realize that, which is why there would subsequently need to be a legal definition of abandonware (well, it would actually be a definition of !abandonware) as many people have pointed out. However, this type of legal decision would put the onus on Disney in this case to renew their copyright by making sure their stuff fits the !abandonware definition, whatever that requires on their part. That way, if a company really does abandon the product, it will automatically lapse into abandonware status and won't be held stagnant by a dead copyright.
Creative Commons licenses can apply to a lot more than just music. They are currently used with writings, visual arts, photography, film/theatre, music, research, and more, and could potentially apply to anything that a copyright can.
The copyright holder often stops distributing the work before the copyright term is up. I don't have statistics, but it seems logical to assume that in the vast majority of these cases that happens because the work stops being profitable; therefore, in those cases, the fact that the work is being distributed by someone else is not hurting the copyright holder's profit at that point. The copyright term can be cut short here without curtailing (and indeed, enhancing) the principle behind finite copyright terms.
If we follow your reasoning, why have copyright terms at all? Works should stay copyrighted forever and ever until the copyright holder (who may have inherited the copyright from a great-grandfather) decides to let it go.
Would this case, if ruled in Kahle's favor, make abandonware legal?
People have been distributing old, abandoned software (mostly from the 1980s) on web sites for years, knowing that it is illegal but under the likely correct assumption that they are doing the publisher no harm whatsoever. I have never heard of any true abandonware resulting in legal action, but currently a company that holds the copyright for a program can go after someone distributing it online for free. It makes no difference if they still sell it, support it or even remember it exists.
Of course, there would have to be some kind of definition for what constitutes abandonware, but that would be the case with all other works as well so I'm confident they'll figure that part out. I hope Kahle wins this one, personally.
Not really. This is with reference to works that are no longer available... basically, he's saying that retaining copyright restrictions on abandonware is unconstitutional, and I agree.