In the end it doesn't matter whether this or that member state of the EU adopts the law. Three years after the directive is adopted it is justiciable in the European Court of Justice and states which haven't implemented it in domestic law can be taken to court and their domestic courts have to follow the precedent set by the ECJ.
I think it is asking too much for your average home user or even small sys admin to make this shift - unless it comes as "standard" in Windows (yes, I hate it too) or the key 'nix distros
In the UK the obsession with the "dynamism" of American capitalism continues largely unabated (often with government encouragement). Bill Gates is of course the principal exemplar of that dynamism (ie he is very, very rich) and is still feted as some sort of hero over here.
The argument that MS is an anti-competitive monopolist just hasn't broken through.
Seems O'Reilly are publishing a series of these. I heartily recommend their Linux Server Hacks book, btw. There is a Google one too - anyone care to comment on that?
Maybe this is stupid, I don't know. But... SCO basically allege that the scalability of today's Linux is the key issue. I have little doubt that their claims are pretty trashy, but IANAL and all that.
So why not just rewrite that multi-processor code for 2.6 anyway? Probably with a new team of developers to emphasise the clean room nature of it, I admit. Might set back the release date by 6 - 8 months, but it would nix SCO (hell, they might even collapse once it was clear that even if they won the court case it would have no impact on their rivals).
Why should we Europeans trust in another US monopoly? Indeed, why should you Americans trust in another monopoly?
As for the "world peace" point I am sure there are a few far right fruitcakes in America (you have plenty after all) who think that the EU is the Anti-Christ or whatever other biblical similie is de jour in the Heritage Foundation these days and are planning an attack. Meanwhile we are too busy eating our Quarter Pounders (or was that Royales?) to be bothered fighting you.
Well, IANAL and all that... but in this jurisdiction you also have a duty of confidentiality which does not even require an NDA - simply you cannot go blabbing about your employer's secrets. Also, we have no software patients here and neither did Finland in the early 1990s AFAIK.
Flamebait? Get out of here. It was a serious comment.
Re:Start with Lion's Unix Source Code commentary
on
Do You Know UNIX Secrets?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Just because it's in a book it doesn't mean you can rip it off. Try publishing your own version of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" say, and see how far you get. Even if you changed a few character names or even one or two twists in the plot my guess is that you won't get far.
Do you relize that an F# major has 6 sharps.
But, an F# is the same as a Gb (G flat) which has as 6 flats.
Actually F# and Gb are different notes. It is obviously easier for manufacturers of musical instruments to pretend they are the same notes and that is why you'd have to look long and hard for a tradition instrument that treated them as different, but there is no reason for computer based musical systems to treat them as the same tone.
Including MS, by the way. Just think about it - how similar is MS DOS to a low grade Unix shell? "Concepts, ideas, methodologies, standards"?
The GPL is viral - it's meant to be - (Good Thing)
on
What if SCO is Right?
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· Score: 1
Yes, the GPL is viral. If you use my GPL code then the "price" you pay me is that you make your code/IP freely available (if you distrbute, natch).
MS are right to be frightened of the GPL - it is meant to pulverise them - and is now doing so, because the GPL has a killer app called Linux.
So, stop pretending that the we should all deny MS's comments - what we should be concentrating on are the benefits to society of placing code in the form of common ownership the GPL promotes.
The true story is the triumph of American capitalism over Brit make-do-and-mend. WW2 represents Britain's last hurrah as a global power and this story illustrates the reality. Yes the Brits made the breakthrough, but only the Yanks could make it real:->
Cavity magnetrons were invented in the Second World War by the Brits (iirc, apologies to the Yanks if I am wrong) and were used to hunt and kill German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic. They blast electrons over small cavities and create microwave radiation - which was good enough to detect, by radar, submarines in the Atlantic swell. That, plus the combination of longer range bomber aircraft, finished the job started by Station X.
I am afraid your response illustrates how stupid you are.
Go down to Wall Street and tell them that information is not a good, is not somebody's property is not scarce and not destroyable.
On the point you are trying to make - about the physicality of some goods and not others, well Marx himself described himself as a critical utopian.
Personally I am unconvinced by a lot of arguments about super abundance, but ask yourself this: is it wholly inconceivable that at some point in the future we will not be able to fully automate the growing and the supply of food to every person in the planet with human intervention limited to merely cooking for pleasure?
Few rational people would give the answer that it is wholly inconceivable.
Let's just take a step back from all this and consider it from first principles --- imagine the Soviet Union had never existed, what did Marx mean by communism and how does it relate to free software?
Well,quite a bit actually. Marxists saw the communist society as one where people were freed from the realm of necessity - they worked for pleasure not cash (sounds like your average hacker).
Clearly such a society was one where goods were super-ambundant (unlike the USSR I may add) which is quite like software, as once you write a linux kernel it costs literally next to nothing to copy that to whomever wants it.
This what RMS means, I think, when he says software wants to be free.
These are the 'communist' ideas at the heart of free software and they are real and powerful. They have nothing to do with the Leninist butchery that was at the heart of the Soviet system.
Given that the experience of the USSR has effectively destoyed any rational debate about the term communism it is not much use as a debating point, but I'll just observe that it was Marx's view that the production process would advance so that more and more goods would be like software and that would create a communist society where the state would whither away.
Slashdot Mirror
Use the HURD, microkernels are the way of the future :)
Joking aside, I hope they don't use Linux - it would be good to see this scale of effort into something new, hell maybe even a microkernel based OS.
Linux is doing fine without them, and maybe they could increase the competition...
In the end it doesn't matter whether this or that member state of the EU adopts the law. Three years after the directive is adopted it is justiciable in the European Court of Justice and states which haven't implemented it in domestic law can be taken to court and their domestic courts have to follow the precedent set by the ECJ.
We don't all live in the US. Tough luck if your Congress wants to prove King Cnut wrong!
I think it is asking too much for your average home user or even small sys admin to make this shift - unless it comes as "standard" in Windows (yes, I hate it too) or the key 'nix distros
In the UK the obsession with the "dynamism" of American capitalism continues largely unabated (often with government encouragement). Bill Gates is of course the principal exemplar of that dynamism (ie he is very, very rich) and is still feted as some sort of hero over here.
The argument that MS is an anti-competitive monopolist just hasn't broken through.
A surprising fact is that if you'd invested your money in Red Hat two years ago you'd be wealthier now than then, but not if you'd put it in MSFT.
Mind you, if you'd put your money in, say, Red Hat, when they floated, you'd be a lot better off if you'd kept it in MSFT.
The really interesting thing is not the price, but the volume. Nots since the company was floated has there been this much trading in its shares.
Good luck to them, I say. A bit of financial bounce in companies associated with Linux would be good for all of us concerned with FOSS.
Seems O'Reilly are publishing a series of these. I heartily recommend their Linux Server Hacks book, btw. There is a Google one too - anyone care to comment on that?
Maybe this is stupid, I don't know. But... SCO basically allege that the scalability of today's Linux is the key issue. I have little doubt that their claims are pretty trashy, but IANAL and all that.
So why not just rewrite that multi-processor code for 2.6 anyway? Probably with a new team of developers to emphasise the clean room nature of it, I admit. Might set back the release date by 6 - 8 months, but it would nix SCO (hell, they might even collapse once it was clear that even if they won the court case it would have no impact on their rivals).
So, how stupid is this?
Why should we Europeans trust in another US monopoly? Indeed, why should you Americans trust in another monopoly?
As for the "world peace" point I am sure there are a few far right fruitcakes in America (you have plenty after all) who think that the EU is the Anti-Christ or whatever other biblical similie is de jour in the Heritage Foundation these days and are planning an attack. Meanwhile we are too busy eating our Quarter Pounders (or was that Royales?) to be bothered fighting you.
Well, IANAL and all that... but in this jurisdiction you also have a duty of confidentiality which does not even require an NDA - simply you cannot go blabbing about your employer's secrets. Also, we have no software patients here and neither did Finland in the early 1990s AFAIK.
Flamebait? Get out of here. It was a serious comment.
Just because it's in a book it doesn't mean you can rip it off. Try publishing your own version of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" say, and see how far you get. Even if you changed a few character names or even one or two twists in the plot my guess is that you won't get far.
This system is so cheap and so brilliant :)
I may be being a little harsh here but what exactly is the point in this?
Why, oh why, oh why do people keep asking this question on slashdot? Because it's there you idiot, because it's there...
Do you relize that an F# major has 6 sharps.
But, an F# is the same as a Gb (G flat) which has as 6 flats.
Actually F# and Gb are different notes. It is obviously easier for manufacturers of musical instruments to pretend they are the same notes and that is why you'd have to look long and hard for a tradition instrument that treated them as different, but there is no reason for computer based musical systems to treat them as the same tone.
Including MS, by the way. Just think about it - how similar is MS DOS to a low grade Unix shell? "Concepts, ideas, methodologies, standards"?
Yes, the GPL is viral. If you use my GPL code then the "price" you pay me is that you make your code/IP freely available (if you distrbute, natch).
MS are right to be frightened of the GPL - it is meant to pulverise them - and is now doing so, because the GPL has a killer app called Linux.
So, stop pretending that the we should all deny MS's comments - what we should be concentrating on are the benefits to society of placing code in the form of common ownership the GPL promotes.
Yes, you can. I accept that now. Still haven't seen a KOS webserver though, anybody know where one is running? Kudos to whomever...
No, you haven't. Where is the KOs webserver then?
The true story is the triumph of American capitalism over Brit make-do-and-mend. WW2 represents Britain's last hurrah as a global power and this story illustrates the reality. Yes the Brits made the breakthrough, but only the Yanks could make it real :->
Yes, it is on ADSL. My DC indicates that at least some people are seeing it. Apologies if you didn't.
Cavity magnetrons were invented in the Second World War by the Brits (iirc, apologies to the Yanks if I am wrong) and were used to hunt and kill German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic. They blast electrons over small cavities and create microwave radiation - which was good enough to detect, by radar, submarines in the Atlantic swell. That, plus the combination of longer range bomber aircraft, finished the job started by Station X.
I am afraid your response illustrates how stupid you are.
Go down to Wall Street and tell them that information is not a good, is not somebody's property is not scarce and not destroyable.
On the point you are trying to make - about the physicality of some goods and not others, well Marx himself described himself as a critical utopian.
Personally I am unconvinced by a lot of arguments about super abundance, but ask yourself this: is it wholly inconceivable that at some point in the future we will not be able to fully automate the growing and the supply of food to every person in the planet with human intervention limited to merely cooking for pleasure?
Few rational people would give the answer that it is wholly inconceivable.
Let's just take a step back from all this and consider it from first principles --- imagine the Soviet Union had never existed, what did Marx mean by communism and how does it relate to free software?
Well,quite a bit actually. Marxists saw the communist society as one where people were freed from the realm of necessity - they worked for pleasure not cash (sounds like your average hacker).
Clearly such a society was one where goods were super-ambundant (unlike the USSR I may add) which is quite like software, as once you write a linux kernel it costs literally next to nothing to copy that to whomever wants it.
This what RMS means, I think, when he says software wants to be free.
These are the 'communist' ideas at the heart of free software and they are real and powerful. They have nothing to do with the Leninist butchery that was at the heart of the Soviet system.
Given that the experience of the USSR has effectively destoyed any rational debate about the term communism it is not much use as a debating point, but I'll just observe that it was Marx's view that the production process would advance so that more and more goods would be like software and that would create a communist society where the state would whither away.