To me it's kinda like woodworking/carpentry. You could either teach the students all about the tools, how to use them, etc, etc and then start teaching them about "concepts" such as joints, styles, etc. Or you could show them various pieces of furniture and how/why they were built that way, and the various features, then you could get into how to build it. Both ways have the pluses and minuses. What I like, is a mixture, just like woodworking class. Show me how to use the tools, but show me how with "concepts" in mind. e.g. show me how to use the table saw by letting me cut pieces/create rabbits and making a simple drawer. In this way, you show them the syntax (which for similar reasons to those who have already mentioned this), but also start to slowly feed them concepts and algorithms. What I _don't_ like are things that start off with syntax, but use lame/non useful examples to practice the syntax on. Have them create "real" stuff right off the bat (like the drawer, don't just have'em cut wood).
What I've seen of the "current crop of programmers" is that they are not very good with fundamental concepts and they are especially bad a breaking problems down and then applying the tool (whatever language/programming "style" that happens to be). So I know guys who know Java like the back of their hand, but when it comes to solving problems, they don't know _how_ to think about solving it. I also know some masters grads who can talk algorithms and concepts till their blue in the face, but they couldn't actually implement it if you wrote half the code for them.
Didn't a cable/satellite company do this once? Where they somehow sent a re-program signal to their cards. Those who had illegal service ended up seeing a message to the effect of, "if you see this message and are having problems with the cable signal, please call xxx-xxxx". I recall that it was amazingly effective in "trapping" quite a few cable/sat pirates.
Yes that could be done for shows in production, but what about re-runs?
My guess would be "in band" commercials. Direct overlaying of banners (ala last World Cup) and advertising "tickers", similar to sports/news tickers (though tickers could be easily defeated by some contraption). And yes, more product placement in new shows.
But unless the PVR can read into the future, how can you forward through commercials during a live/first occurrence event
Yes, this is obviously true. BUT, if a PVR (or whatever) can be programmed to detect the presence of a commerical, then it can be programmed to automatically do something else when a commercial comes on, say switch to different channel (as a matter of fact, if the thing were real good, it could be scanning the other channels to figure out which out of a preset list is currently NOT showing a commercial, and switch you to that, in prioritized order). Heck, one could even imagine a station that is designed with this in mind and pumps some amusing content to you in 30-60 second blocks. Since it can do minor time shifting, if you missed a small portion of programming (say you went to the kitchen and it took a minute longer than you thought it would) then it could simply buffer the show and let it run into the first minute of the next commercial break (bascially the "pause live tv" feature, but commercial space aware). Lots of possibilities.
So this is getting interesting. More and more companies are coming up with technologies to zap commercials. If the technology is robust and usage widespread, will we see a fundamental shift in how we "pay" for tv content? After all, much of the cost of over the air tv is subsidized by commercials, so what if (in a web crash way) advertisers say, hey, if people are zapping the commercials, we are not going to run them/pay a heck of a lot less for them. Say that this is widespread (again, like the rollercoaster that web advertising has gone through), will the networks then be forced to shift their business models? What would they shift them to? Would this be the begining of the end of "free" over the air tv? I personally know of only a couple of people who do not have cable/satellite, is OTATV a dinosaur anyway? Is the price we'll pay for being able to zap commericials be that we'll have to pay more for content?
How does tracking what you watch equate to knowing what you're doing (other than knowing that you're flipping through the channels?). I am as pissed as anyone about the original decision, but let's not make too much of a leap here.
No, then it would a completely different matter altogther. Then you would be looking at something much closer to gun manufacturers and Napster wouldn't be in anywhere near as much hot water as they are now.
Napsters big problem was that they knowingly hosted information and provided infrastructure that facilitated the illegal transfer of copyrighted material. The key word here is knowingly. They let this activity go on for a long time before the lawsuits came and forced them to try to do something about it. Note that the results of the suits were to get Napster to block this transfer, not to shut the service down. It was this inability to block the transfers (not to mention the shakey business model they were trying to move to anyway), that has led to their current situation.
Notice my post said nothing about the BSA (either one), it only mentioned the issue of license agreements and peoples perceptions of what should be enforced (and how it should be enforced) and what I preceived as a hypocritical stance that many take on this matter. You mentioned the raiding of the schools, if that school was truely pirating software, then why shouldn't they be raided (well ok maybe raided is a bit harsh, but made to be brought into compliance). They are breaking the terms of the software license. Just because BSA doesn't give a flip about GPL doesn't mean that non GPL'esque licenses should'nt be enforced.
This reminds me of people who criticize Christians when they mean to criticize the Church. Why take my statements as somehow supporting BSA when my post obviously does nothing of the sort.
In life, if we don't like the laws, we work to change them. We don't make murder legal if we disagree with a law that makes killing in self defense illegal. We work to get that law changed while the broader law stays in effect. This is a community that revolves around a concept, a concept that is tied intimately with it's license, so to say that licenses (and the enforcement thereof) is bogus is hypocritical.
That's like complaining after I give you $10 that I took away $90, because I could have given you $100....
No, it like saying that you will give me $100 and then saying, "oh, but you'll have to spend it in a manner that I approve, or I won't give it to you".
Why wasn't MS-Windows compatible with all that installed base
Well back then there were some real technical reasons why those apps weren't "compatable" with Windows (did you actually use Windows 1.0, shudder). Remember that Office is just an amalgamation of standalone products. Excel was an excellent spreadsheet when it was first released. It was in many ways superiour to the current (at the time) version of 123 (who was the only "real" competitor by then). Even Word was an excellent product (at least I thought), even the DOS version. Access is a johnny-come-lately so I won't mention that. One of the reasons that "Office" was able to take hold was that back then even though they did have competition, they were actually competitive products. Framework and Symphony were feature bloated, buggy products that promised much but delivered little. VisiCalc was passed eons ago by 123 who was then passed up when they didn't jump on the Windows bandwagon fast enough by Excel (which first appeared on the Mac if you'll remember). WordStar was passed eons ago by WordPerfect who followed the same fate as Lotus, not realizing the importance of having a Windows version.
That being said, I agree with you about the whole lack of competition thing (and I even said as much many posts ago on this thread), that is the real lynchpin to this whole crappy EULA situation that we face now. However I think of the current EULA situation similarly to the whole copy protection issue in the 80's. Software companies did it because it was the thing to do. It was commonly accepted at the time. But then users started getting tired of the whole thing, and companies realized that it wasen't really doing any good anyway, so the whole thing was dropped (for the most part).
It had about 99% of the functions 99% of users will ever need for text processing
Whoa now, don't even get me started on that subject. Many of my friends will tell of bitter memories of me whining on about how software has effectively gone nowhere since the mid 80's, software feature bloat, software instability, software "quality, what's that" and on and on.
But IIRC, one of the primary reasons you where able to buy that copy of WordStar for that cheap was that they were on the way out. Having been passed by both Word and WordPerfect in the DOS market. They had the CPM market all sewn up, but they never really made it in the DOS world. Don't forget that back then, there were even more competitors than that even, DisplayWrite (or whatever IBM had), AshtonTate had a WP as well. Back then were the glory days for software market competitiveness, and yes, that did help bring the price of software down. However, for those players that were strong then, they usually priced their software at the $200-$500 range (funny, basically the same as it is now), but they were willing to give substantial discounts off of "retail" to attract people from competitors.
However, for the community at large, it's better to have a boy selling T-shirts silk-screened with stencils created with pirated AutoCAD than having the same boy selling crack.
Well, can't argue with that:) But it's even better for the community if he didn't pirate that copy of AutoCAD to begin with. While it's great that he's an entrepreneur, that doesn't justify his use of "pirated" software to further his cause. Just as he would be quite unhappy if someone made a copy of his design and started selling "his" shirts.
They used to sell their products very cheap
When was that? When was Office ever that cheap? When was AutoCAD cheap? When was PhotoShop cheap. When was Lotus 123 cheap. When was dBase cheap? People keep mentioning this idea that all software was next to nothing in price, but I sure don't remember this time. I think what people are remembering (drumroll please) is when we actually had some competition in the major software categories. At one point you could upgrade from WordPerfect to Word for next to nothing, why, because WP was competition for Word. Now Word/Office has no competition, so people like M$ are free to place whatever ridiculous licene restrictions in place. Hell, if someone came out with a "worthy" competitor for Office that businesses actually started adopting, you'd bet that M$ would be forced to respond. As a matter of fact, I think that this is the only way M$ will be forced to change anything, as the govt seems it's typical useless self in this regard. Anyway, this really is a seperate discussion about licenses and where they're headed. Personally I believe that licenses become more restrictive because of the current economies of the software industry (vs some nefarious plot by the software illuminati). It costs serious bucks now to produce software of any magnitude (unless of course you can convince a loose network of nerds with too much time on their hands to do the work for you for free;). And one way companies try to recoup their costs is by using licensing to produce revenue in one form or another. Not only that, but licensing is also used to strongarm both endusers and distributers/retailers. M$ obviously uses licensing as a major negotiating tool with hardware OEM's.
Yes you are correct, I mis-spoke when I said it took away my right. What I meant to say was, that in the case of say a c++ library, the GPL grants me restricted rights, with one of those restrictions being that I can not produce proprietary software that uses that library. Now it is a restriction in the sense that many other third party libraries do not not grant you that right (nice double negative there eh), and that is what I had in mind when I said that it "takes it away". It is also a restriction in the sense that it does grant me the right to distribute, but it does take away a portion of that right based on usage.
Which really brings me to the one of the cruxes of what I was really trying to say with all this (yes, there really was something). GPL says here is a license, you can use our stuff in said manner, as long as your usage follows our beliefs on usage. This I say is really no different, in the broad sense, than many (not all) of the commercial licenses. They are all pushing a groups agenda and software usage doctrine to benefit that group. Given that, and given the fact that others have replied to me with a "don't like it, don't use it" type of response, it's funny that people here are so vocal about other licenses, and more importantly, cavalier about the breaking of other licenses. Whether you like them or not, if the other license does not break any laws, they are just as valid as the GPL and they both attempt to do the same thing.
Yes, I understand your first point and I agree with it, but we must keep in mind that the issue of GPL vs other licenses is a sticky one, and that we must be careful when we choose to attack what other people think of as reasonable use of their property. Some would have a larger problem with the GPL being too restrictive and therefore on the wrong side of the moral line.
I don't totally agree with your second point though (at least moraly). Just because "no one gets hurt" does not justification for "breaking the law" make. If I break into someones house while they're gone, watch their tv (assuming it was already on) and made some local phone calls (they have flat rate local calling) and then leave without disturbing anything, just because it was a zero sum crime, it is still a crime. And I seriously doubt that anyone would say, "oh that's ok, no one got hurt, so they are free to do it whenever they want".
The GPL is really a *grant*, because it takes no rights away from the user
What, it takes away my right to produce commercial software and not distribute my source along with it. That isn't a grant, that's a restriction of use. Again, just because the idealism behind the GPL and other more commercial licenses are different (and quite mutually exclusive in many ways), doesn't change the fact that the GPL is indeed a license. Heck, it's more restrictive that the BSD license. Now there's a free license for you, use it in any way you want, just cite the original license holder.
It does not prohibit someone from buying or otherwise obtaining a distributed copy
What ever the justification might be, we're still talking license agreements. That the GPL has a noble reason for restricting the use of it's software means nothing from a legal standpoint. We can not justify being hypocritical about the following of license agreements by saying that we don't agree with the reasoning behind company x's license. If I thought the idea of GPL was bogus and was going to destroy software as we know it, doesn't give me a moral (not to mention legal) leg to stand on if I decide to ignore the GPL.
I fully understand the reasoning behind the GPL, but the fact is that the GPL has that word in it, yes the L word. It's still a license, that we would all like others to follow regardless of their reasons for why they don't want to.
I know, flame away, dock me a point, but the same people who whine about attempts to keep people from "pirating/breaking license agreements" will be the same ones who blast Sony for not following the GPL to the letter.
Actually, I was referring to back in the early/mid 80's where price was a HUGE factor in the use of borland tools. True, they also had good stuff, but their price point (esp compared to M$ developers tools), really allowed an entire generation of programmer-wannabe's to turn into programmers.
"Back in the day", they used to have one of the friendliest licenses out there (the "treat this software like a book" license) and a great many people bought their stuff because of the low price and reasonable license. You could even install it on a another computer, and as long as two people weren't using the software at the same time, it was ok.
If/when Caldera drives a stake through the heart of SCO Unix, it will bring an end to what was a very interesting journey for Unix in general. The trail of this version of Unix back to it's origin really strikes at the heart of where *ix is at this point in time. Going back to AT&T and Sun and the OSF (DEC/IBM/et al). Those of us who are old timers will silently mourn the day when it does pass, as it will represent a passing of a generation gone by.
I tend to believe it will shift the economy, and move it in a new, more promising direction
Care to elaborate?
Of course I want content to be free, I want cars, houses, and food to be free to, but I realize that a great many things can not be, because these things are not free to create (I know a lot _can_ be free, but there are a great many things that can't/won't/shouldn't). If content is free, who pays those who create the content? Seems to me that the web is an excellent example of this. When things first started, most sites where free, but now that reality has struck, many free sites are either gone or now charge (or push ads). Also, it's not like the concept of "free" content came about with the internet age, off the air tv and radio are the ultimate (and very, very, old) examples of "free" content.
A copyright, under US Law, is automatic: The creator of the work is automatically granted the copyright
But there is an implicit license between you, the copyright holder, and us, the readers of your content. That license, which is set by the copyright laws, gives a standard set of restrictions on your work. Because of these copyright laws, you don't have to have an explicit license agreement, unless you want to grant/deny rights that are not covered by standard copyright. So how does copyright NOT imply a license?
Slashdot Mirror
The book is $18.40 at bn.com but only $16.10 at amazon
Yeah, but Amazon will lose your order.
To me it's kinda like woodworking/carpentry. You could either teach the students all about the tools, how to use them, etc, etc and then start teaching them about "concepts" such as joints, styles, etc. Or you could show them various pieces of furniture and how/why they were built that way, and the various features, then you could get into how to build it. Both ways have the pluses and minuses. What I like, is a mixture, just like woodworking class. Show me how to use the tools, but show me how with "concepts" in mind. e.g. show me how to use the table saw by letting me cut pieces/create rabbits and making a simple drawer. In this way, you show them the syntax (which for similar reasons to those who have already mentioned this), but also start to slowly feed them concepts and algorithms. What I _don't_ like are things that start off with syntax, but use lame/non useful examples to practice the syntax on. Have them create "real" stuff right off the bat (like the drawer, don't just have'em cut wood).
What I've seen of the "current crop of programmers" is that they are not very good with fundamental concepts and they are especially bad a breaking problems down and then applying the tool (whatever language/programming "style" that happens to be). So I know guys who know Java like the back of their hand, but when it comes to solving problems, they don't know _how_ to think about solving it. I also know some masters grads who can talk algorithms and concepts till their blue in the face, but they couldn't actually implement it if you wrote half the code for them.
Didn't a cable/satellite company do this once? Where they somehow sent a re-program signal to their cards. Those who had illegal service ended up seeing a message to the effect of, "if you see this message and are having problems with the cable signal, please call xxx-xxxx". I recall that it was amazingly effective in "trapping" quite a few cable/sat pirates.
Yes that could be done for shows in production, but what about re-runs?
My guess would be "in band" commercials. Direct overlaying of banners (ala last World Cup) and advertising "tickers", similar to sports/news tickers (though tickers could be easily defeated by some contraption). And yes, more product placement in new shows.
But unless the PVR can read into the future, how can you forward through commercials during a live/first occurrence event
Yes, this is obviously true. BUT, if a PVR (or whatever) can be programmed to detect the presence of a commerical, then it can be programmed to automatically do something else when a commercial comes on, say switch to different channel (as a matter of fact, if the thing were real good, it could be scanning the other channels to figure out which out of a preset list is currently NOT showing a commercial, and switch you to that, in prioritized order). Heck, one could even imagine a station that is designed with this in mind and pumps some amusing content to you in 30-60 second blocks. Since it can do minor time shifting, if you missed a small portion of programming (say you went to the kitchen and it took a minute longer than you thought it would) then it could simply buffer the show and let it run into the first minute of the next commercial break (bascially the "pause live tv" feature, but commercial space aware). Lots of possibilities.
So this is getting interesting. More and more companies are coming up with technologies to zap commercials. If the technology is robust and usage widespread, will we see a fundamental shift in how we "pay" for tv content? After all, much of the cost of over the air tv is subsidized by commercials, so what if (in a web crash way) advertisers say, hey, if people are zapping the commercials, we are not going to run them/pay a heck of a lot less for them. Say that this is widespread (again, like the rollercoaster that web advertising has gone through), will the networks then be forced to shift their business models? What would they shift them to? Would this be the begining of the end of "free" over the air tv? I personally know of only a couple of people who do not have cable/satellite, is OTATV a dinosaur anyway? Is the price we'll pay for being able to zap commericials be that we'll have to pay more for content?
How does tracking what you watch equate to knowing what you're doing (other than knowing that you're flipping through the channels?). I am as pissed as anyone about the original decision, but let's not make too much of a leap here.
No, then it would a completely different matter altogther. Then you would be looking at something much closer to gun manufacturers and Napster wouldn't be in anywhere near as much hot water as they are now.
Napsters big problem was that they knowingly hosted information and provided infrastructure that facilitated the illegal transfer of copyrighted material. The key word here is knowingly. They let this activity go on for a long time before the lawsuits came and forced them to try to do something about it. Note that the results of the suits were to get Napster to block this transfer, not to shut the service down. It was this inability to block the transfers (not to mention the shakey business model they were trying to move to anyway), that has led to their current situation.
Notice my post said nothing about the BSA (either one), it only mentioned the issue of license agreements and peoples perceptions of what should be enforced (and how it should be enforced) and what I preceived as a hypocritical stance that many take on this matter. You mentioned the raiding of the schools, if that school was truely pirating software, then why shouldn't they be raided (well ok maybe raided is a bit harsh, but made to be brought into compliance). They are breaking the terms of the software license. Just because BSA doesn't give a flip about GPL doesn't mean that non GPL'esque licenses should'nt be enforced.
This reminds me of people who criticize Christians when they mean to criticize the Church. Why take my statements as somehow supporting BSA when my post obviously does nothing of the sort.
In life, if we don't like the laws, we work to change them. We don't make murder legal if we disagree with a law that makes killing in self defense illegal. We work to get that law changed while the broader law stays in effect. This is a community that revolves around a concept, a concept that is tied intimately with it's license, so to say that licenses (and the enforcement thereof) is bogus is hypocritical.
That's like complaining after I give you $10 that I took away $90, because I could have given you $100....
No, it like saying that you will give me $100 and then saying, "oh, but you'll have to spend it in a manner that I approve, or I won't give it to you".
Why wasn't MS-Windows compatible with all that installed base
Well back then there were some real technical reasons why those apps weren't "compatable" with Windows (did you actually use Windows 1.0, shudder). Remember that Office is just an amalgamation of standalone products. Excel was an excellent spreadsheet when it was first released. It was in many ways superiour to the current (at the time) version of 123 (who was the only "real" competitor by then). Even Word was an excellent product (at least I thought), even the DOS version. Access is a johnny-come-lately so I won't mention that. One of the reasons that "Office" was able to take hold was that back then even though they did have competition, they were actually competitive products. Framework and Symphony were feature bloated, buggy products that promised much but delivered little. VisiCalc was passed eons ago by 123 who was then passed up when they didn't jump on the Windows bandwagon fast enough by Excel (which first appeared on the Mac if you'll remember). WordStar was passed eons ago by WordPerfect who followed the same fate as Lotus, not realizing the importance of having a Windows version.
That being said, I agree with you about the whole lack of competition thing (and I even said as much many posts ago on this thread), that is the real lynchpin to this whole crappy EULA situation that we face now. However I think of the current EULA situation similarly to the whole copy protection issue in the 80's. Software companies did it because it was the thing to do. It was commonly accepted at the time. But then users started getting tired of the whole thing, and companies realized that it wasen't really doing any good anyway, so the whole thing was dropped (for the most part).
The GPL is a License, but not a EULA. Using GPL'ed software does not in any way require accepting the terms of the GPL.
Unless what you're "using" is say a developers library. In which case it does.
It had about 99% of the functions 99% of users will ever need for text processing
Whoa now, don't even get me started on that subject. Many of my friends will tell of bitter memories of me whining on about how software has effectively gone nowhere since the mid 80's, software feature bloat, software instability, software "quality, what's that" and on and on.
But IIRC, one of the primary reasons you where able to buy that copy of WordStar for that cheap was that they were on the way out. Having been passed by both Word and WordPerfect in the DOS market. They had the CPM market all sewn up, but they never really made it in the DOS world. Don't forget that back then, there were even more competitors than that even, DisplayWrite (or whatever IBM had), AshtonTate had a WP as well. Back then were the glory days for software market competitiveness, and yes, that did help bring the price of software down. However, for those players that were strong then, they usually priced their software at the $200-$500 range (funny, basically the same as it is now), but they were willing to give substantial discounts off of "retail" to attract people from competitors.
However, for the community at large, it's better to have a boy selling T-shirts silk-screened with stencils created with pirated AutoCAD than having the same boy selling crack.
:) But it's even better for the community if he didn't pirate that copy of AutoCAD to begin with. While it's great that he's an entrepreneur, that doesn't justify his use of "pirated" software to further his cause. Just as he would be quite unhappy if someone made a copy of his design and started selling "his" shirts.
;). And one way companies try to recoup their costs is by using licensing to produce revenue in one form or another. Not only that, but licensing is also used to strongarm both endusers and distributers/retailers. M$ obviously uses licensing as a major negotiating tool with hardware OEM's.
Well, can't argue with that
They used to sell their products very cheap
When was that? When was Office ever that cheap? When was AutoCAD cheap? When was PhotoShop cheap. When was Lotus 123 cheap. When was dBase cheap? People keep mentioning this idea that all software was next to nothing in price, but I sure don't remember this time. I think what people are remembering (drumroll please) is when we actually had some competition in the major software categories. At one point you could upgrade from WordPerfect to Word for next to nothing, why, because WP was competition for Word. Now Word/Office has no competition, so people like M$ are free to place whatever ridiculous licene restrictions in place. Hell, if someone came out with a "worthy" competitor for Office that businesses actually started adopting, you'd bet that M$ would be forced to respond. As a matter of fact, I think that this is the only way M$ will be forced to change anything, as the govt seems it's typical useless self in this regard. Anyway, this really is a seperate discussion about licenses and where they're headed. Personally I believe that licenses become more restrictive because of the current economies of the software industry (vs some nefarious plot by the software illuminati). It costs serious bucks now to produce software of any magnitude (unless of course you can convince a loose network of nerds with too much time on their hands to do the work for you for free
Yes you are correct, I mis-spoke when I said it took away my right. What I meant to say was, that in the case of say a c++ library, the GPL grants me restricted rights, with one of those restrictions being that I can not produce proprietary software that uses that library. Now it is a restriction in the sense that many other third party libraries do not not grant you that right (nice double negative there eh), and that is what I had in mind when I said that it "takes it away". It is also a restriction in the sense that it does grant me the right to distribute, but it does take away a portion of that right based on usage.
Which really brings me to the one of the cruxes of what I was really trying to say with all this (yes, there really was something). GPL says here is a license, you can use our stuff in said manner, as long as your usage follows our beliefs on usage. This I say is really no different, in the broad sense, than many (not all) of the commercial licenses. They are all pushing a groups agenda and software usage doctrine to benefit that group. Given that, and given the fact that others have replied to me with a "don't like it, don't use it" type of response, it's funny that people here are so vocal about other licenses, and more importantly, cavalier about the breaking of other licenses. Whether you like them or not, if the other license does not break any laws, they are just as valid as the GPL and they both attempt to do the same thing.
Yes, I understand your first point and I agree with it, but we must keep in mind that the issue of GPL vs other licenses is a sticky one, and that we must be careful when we choose to attack what other people think of as reasonable use of their property. Some would have a larger problem with the GPL being too restrictive and therefore on the wrong side of the moral line.
I don't totally agree with your second point though (at least moraly). Just because "no one gets hurt" does not justification for "breaking the law" make. If I break into someones house while they're gone, watch their tv (assuming it was already on) and made some local phone calls (they have flat rate local calling) and then leave without disturbing anything, just because it was a zero sum crime, it is still a crime. And I seriously doubt that anyone would say, "oh that's ok, no one got hurt, so they are free to do it whenever they want".
The GPL is really a *grant*, because it takes no rights away from the user
What, it takes away my right to produce commercial software and not distribute my source along with it. That isn't a grant, that's a restriction of use. Again, just because the idealism behind the GPL and other more commercial licenses are different (and quite mutually exclusive in many ways), doesn't change the fact that the GPL is indeed a license. Heck, it's more restrictive that the BSD license. Now there's a free license for you, use it in any way you want, just cite the original license holder.
Ooops, cut and paste mixup there. Ignore the quoted portion as it was from a different post. Good thing I wasn't cutting and pasting my Visa #'s.
It does not prohibit someone from buying or otherwise obtaining a distributed copy
What ever the justification might be, we're still talking license agreements. That the GPL has a noble reason for restricting the use of it's software means nothing from a legal standpoint. We can not justify being hypocritical about the following of license agreements by saying that we don't agree with the reasoning behind company x's license. If I thought the idea of GPL was bogus and was going to destroy software as we know it, doesn't give me a moral (not to mention legal) leg to stand on if I decide to ignore the GPL.
I fully understand the reasoning behind the GPL, but the fact is that the GPL has that word in it, yes the L word. It's still a license, that we would all like others to follow regardless of their reasons for why they don't want to.
Willing to abide by legal licensing agreements
Does this include the GPL?
I know, flame away, dock me a point, but the same people who whine about attempts to keep people from "pirating/breaking license agreements" will be the same ones who blast Sony for not following the GPL to the letter.
Actually, I was referring to back in the early/mid 80's where price was a HUGE factor in the use of borland tools. True, they also had good stuff, but their price point (esp compared to M$ developers tools), really allowed an entire generation of programmer-wannabe's to turn into programmers.
"Back in the day", they used to have one of the friendliest licenses out there (the "treat this software like a book" license) and a great many people bought their stuff because of the low price and reasonable license. You could even install it on a another computer, and as long as two people weren't using the software at the same time, it was ok.
If/when Caldera drives a stake through the heart of SCO Unix, it will bring an end to what was a very interesting journey for Unix in general. The trail of this version of Unix back to it's origin really strikes at the heart of where *ix is at this point in time. Going back to AT&T and Sun and the OSF (DEC/IBM/et al). Those of us who are old timers will silently mourn the day when it does pass, as it will represent a passing of a generation gone by.
sigh
I tend to believe it will shift the economy, and move it in a new, more promising direction
Care to elaborate?
Of course I want content to be free, I want cars, houses, and food to be free to, but I realize that a great many things can not be, because these things are not free to create (I know a lot _can_ be free, but there are a great many things that can't/won't/shouldn't). If content is free, who pays those who create the content? Seems to me that the web is an excellent example of this. When things first started, most sites where free, but now that reality has struck, many free sites are either gone or now charge (or push ads). Also, it's not like the concept of "free" content came about with the internet age, off the air tv and radio are the ultimate (and very, very, old) examples of "free" content.
A copyright, under US Law, is automatic: The creator of the work is automatically granted the copyright
But there is an implicit license between you, the copyright holder, and us, the readers of your content. That license, which is set by the copyright laws, gives a standard set of restrictions on your work. Because of these copyright laws, you don't have to have an explicit license agreement, unless you want to grant/deny rights that are not covered by standard copyright. So how does copyright NOT imply a license?