By delivering binary-only drivers, manufacturers can only support a very small fraction of the amount of different possible configurations. Now, since a huge percentage of users only use a very small set of possible configurations, that is ok for most people -- but it makes it much more difficult for someone to investigate other options.
Practical examples abound: off course most manufacturers only deliver drivers for windows, but also vendors that support linux with binary-only drivers usually support only a few kernels / distributions. Running linux on something other than x86 (such as an ibook) is completely unsupported.
If you want to have choice in what you buy and run, don't support binary only drivers. Don't buy WLAN devices that can only be gotten to work with ndiswrapper. Support manufacurers that do give code or documentations to the community. And be vocal: make sure that unwilling vendors know that this is important for us.
The reverse engineering clause seems to cover SAMBA and so on - they don't have to pay a license fee because they haven't seen all the secret stuff.
The licence effectively says: if you never ever look at anything this licence covers, then this licence does not apply to you. Sort of like some country having a law that anyone who never sets foot in that country or has any sort of dealings with it, does not have to adhere to that countries laws.
That seems pretty obvious to me. In other words, whatever this licence has to say about SAMBA is moot -- since SAMBA has nothing to do with the licence in the first place.
The European commission has said that the royalties MS asks are 'excessive'. That means that they don't think it is unreasonable to ask for royalties at all. And asking 'per-user' or 'per-server' royalties effectively makes it impossable for free software to get such a licence.
Obviously, the rest of the licence is ridiculous -- MS getting all your code, you having to implement any DRM they choose to put into it, audit-trails, very excessive royalties -- so MS has a lot of room to get closer to what the EU wants without having to let OS benefit as well.
There are two issues here: does the company get the original GPL code (I'd say no) and does the company get the OP's changes to the GPL code (I'd say yes).
There are actually three issues: those you mention, plus the possible GPL-violation. If the company is distributing the derived work without adhering to the GPL, they are violating the copyright of the owner of the original code. This seems to be IBM. Notify them, and they can force the company to either adhere to the GPL, or stop distributing.
I was thinking along the same lines -- give the scientists more than one line of data: the original data, the same data, but delayed by a couple of dayes, and some other sources of data, but don't let them know which of the data is which, and let them do their magic with all the sources. If they still find the same correlations in the 'real' random data, but not in the others, then I would be much more convinced.
I haven't actually read the relevant portions of the licence itself, but from this section of the FAQ, it would seem you are right.
If you are the orriginal author of some software, you could add an exception to the GPL, sort of analogous to the exception that allows you to use MySQL with PHP. With something like OpenOffice.org, that would be a problem, since it is very difficult to get all the contributers to consent to such a change of licence.
BeOS was innovative in many respects. At least it was a nice, clean implementation of some great idea's, and therefore makes a very good base for further improvements. So the worth of the Haiku project is twofold: making sure those innovations go somewhere, and making a base which can be further improved upon. I think there is definitely a need for something like that.
Oh, and I would still like to hear about how Be was 'lacking' from the PP.
but you could still uninstall a program simply by doing a rm -r/apps/foo/*.
No, that would only remove the hardlinks in that directory, those in/bin etc. would remain. Using symlinks in the */bin directories, combined with some scripts that automatically update those directories, would help some, but this, as you can see, is starting to get really messy.
I think that getting rid of all those/bin,/sbin,/usr/local/lib, etc directories would be a very good idea. Keeping data for applications separate is a much better idea. Putting that data in seperate directories could work, especially if those directories have some kind of standard layout. The problem of long $PATH variables is probably a sign that that variable is not really up to this task, maybe a variable $APPS could replace it -- it could look something like 'APPS=/apps/*,/home/me/apps,/home/joe/public/apps,/extra/apps/matlab', or something. A set of extra tools could exist to list commands. Commands could even be mapped to categories, using configfiles in the application directories. Ah, the possibilities!
Anyway, I don't think any currently existing way is ideal, and a lot of thought could be put into improving it, but actuating any sort of change will be very hard indeed.
Precicely. I don't really care what MS uses for a document standard, but It would we really great if what my neigbour sends me is something open, and I can be sure that if I send him a document I will be able to read it.
The fact that windows is closed source is not the worst problem with it, the worst problem is all the applications with closed standards that people use that run on it. If everybody used open standards to communicate, everyone could use Windows for all I care, but it would make it possible for me to use Linux without all the headaches of explaining why I couldn't read someone's attachement or see some movie someone posted on a webpage.
I really don't care how widespread Linux is. I just want to be able to use it without hassle.
This only apply's to the Chinese internal market. I'm sorry, but whatever the chinese do in their internal market is none of your business (or mine). In the same way I don't really consider copying a cd from a friend as stealing, I can't really see this as theft, as long as it stays restricted to their own internal market -- which is easy to accomplish, because as soon as such a device is exported to the US, it does become subject to the patent laws in the US.
Lets make a SF analogue, that might be appreciated here. Suppose that an alien spaceship crashes on this planet. If (for instance) the americans find it, take it apart, and build their own spaceship, would anyone consider this theft of the IP of an alien species? Are we stealing their ideas? Of course not. But that alien species will probably quickly stop any ideas of selling our spaceships in their territory.
Simply regard China as a different planet. If they have different ideas about owning ideas than we have, that is their right. Don't ever assume the right to enfore 'your' 'Intellectual property' somewhere else, because the notions of IP are just something to protect a market system -- and you can't decide for someone else how they should run their markets.
In the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg), the trademark for Open Office belongs to a company called 'Open Office'. See their
website (in Dutch).
They do ICT work for offices, based on Linux and other free software. They distribute OpenOffice.org, among other things, but are completely unrelated to the OpenOffice.org project.
Groklaws opinion is based on the following lines from the MS offering:
Our obligations will not apply to the extent that the claim or adverse final judgment is based on:
(ii) the combination of the covered software with a non-Microsoft product, data, or business process;
(iii) damages attributable to the value of the use of a non-Microsoft product, data, or business process;
Note the first line: running other software is only a problem if the claims or judgements against you are due to the combination of that software with MS's.
That means that if it is clearly the MS product that infringes, the agreement does not allow MS to back out.
I suppose the difference must be in what the object orbits: an asteroid is something that orbits the sun, while moonlets orbit smaller things like moons, or maybe asteroids. IANAA, however:)
... note that this will benefit *all* OSS, and not just OpenBSD.
Well, except for Debian, which does not distribute non-free software at all. It might distribute a script to easily download and install te binary firmware, but that is allready possible today.
Well, I sometimes remove spyware for people, and after that I usually install Firefox for them. A few months later, they've usually managed to install a lot more spyware, Firefox or no -- if a friend shows them some 'cool' program, they will install it, they want that filesharing program to download mp3z after all...
So pretty soon I will have a PDA, a cellphone, and an mp3-player, all with built in cameras. To what end? Why should I walk around with all those cameras in my pocket?
Sure, you don't have to buy them all, and you can go for a model without a camera, but it seems that every 'high-end' gizmo that comes out has to have a camera onboard to sell, while at least for me, in none of these cases the camera is a reason to buy one.
The GPL does not require disclosure of source code for *use* of the software. It also does not require one to *release* the source code, only provide it to customers. The Busybox hall of shame page seems to have gross misunderstanding of the GPL.
From the linked hall of shame page:
Do everyone a favor and don't break the law -- if you use busybox, comply with the busybox license by releasing the source code with your product.
I don't think that indicates the gross misunderstanding you imply. He might have used the word 'use', but I am pretty sure that he only ment it in a context where the product it is used is distributed.
Jan
Re:Executive summary (=for the lazy who don't RTFA
on
Review of Doom 3 on Linux
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Maybe, but isn't Doom3 running on Microsoft's 3D API on Windows and OpenGL on Linux?
As others have mentioned, this is not true: Doom3 uses OpenGL on both platforms. At the same time, Doom3 is also often mentioned as an example of 'Direct3D 9.0c' graphics performance. That's because it is one of the first, and right now arguable the most important, game using all the new nice features in the last DirectX. But without using Direct3D.
This reminds me of older detective novels, where letters typed on typewriters are often important clues. The forensics lab looks at the blackmail note, and knows the exact brand and type of the typewriter it was written on - after which the killer, being the only one in a hundred miles with that specific typewriter, is easily found:)
... to do a job that seems to already be done by survelience satellites, airplanes and ground.
I suppose they are a lot cheaper to maintain and run than airplanes, while flying at the same altitudes, so they would be largely a replacements for them. Cheaper, of course, means that they will be able to put a lot more of them up there.
What it has to do with the risk of terrorism is anyones guess, it just seems to fit in the recent list of updated 'security' implementations that I don't really see the point of.
There are at least some games where voice acting is important. This is the kind of game where the story actually matters, and the characters are important. Voice communicates a lot, so it makes characters more alive, and so the story itself becomes more alive. <p> The other side of that is that if a game has voice acting, it better be good. Bad voice acting can ruin a story as much as good voice acting can improve it (Neverwinter Nights comes to mind). If characters sound like they don't believe what they are saying, You won't believe what they're saying either. <p> So yeah, if a game features voice acting, those voices should be done by actors. They might have found cheaper ones, but still -- Christopher Lee does have one of the best voices in movie history:-) <p> Jan
Powerpoint can be a very useful tool in presenting something, and probably also for presenting a side in a legal dispute. However, there are good and bad powerpoint presentations. The good kind presents information, while the bad kind only pretends to show information - what it really contains is a lot of emotional intimidation.
I've seen a lot of powerpoint presentations in my life, and generally, I can discern the good ones from the bad ones. Within my own field of expertise, of course.
When I think of a court, I think of two lawyers, who are both being paid to believe and defend one side of a difference in oppinion. Both of them know much more than me about law, and are trained in talking just so people believe them. I don't know how lawyers speak, because I don't know many lawyers, and don't spend much time in a courtroom. I don't know the tricks they use, so I would probably have a much harder time discerning a 'good' defence from a 'bad' one.
Personally, I'd be more affraid of the lawyer, then of his presentation technique.
Slashdot Mirror
By delivering binary-only drivers, manufacturers can only support a very small fraction of the amount of different possible configurations. Now, since a huge percentage of users only use a very small set of possible configurations, that is ok for most people -- but it makes it much more difficult for someone to investigate other options.
Practical examples abound: off course most manufacturers only deliver drivers for windows, but also vendors that support linux with binary-only drivers usually support only a few kernels / distributions. Running linux on something other than x86 (such as an ibook) is completely unsupported.
If you want to have choice in what you buy and run, don't support binary only drivers. Don't buy WLAN devices that can only be gotten to work with ndiswrapper. Support manufacurers that do give code or documentations to the community. And be vocal: make sure that unwilling vendors know that this is important for us.
Jan
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryUpgradeNotes
:-)
If this goes as easily as most of my past debian upgrades, I will be running Hoary in about 30 minutes
Jan
That seems pretty obvious to me. In other words, whatever this licence has to say about SAMBA is moot -- since SAMBA has nothing to do with the licence in the first place.
Jan
The European commission has said that the royalties MS asks are 'excessive'. That means that they don't think it is unreasonable to ask for royalties at all. And asking 'per-user' or 'per-server' royalties effectively makes it impossable for free software to get such a licence.
Obviously, the rest of the licence is ridiculous -- MS getting all your code, you having to implement any DRM they choose to put into it, audit-trails, very excessive royalties -- so MS has a lot of room to get closer to what the EU wants without having to let OS benefit as well.
Jan
Jan
I was thinking along the same lines -- give the scientists more than one line of data: the original data, the same data, but delayed by a couple of dayes, and some other sources of data, but don't let them know which of the data is which, and let them do their magic with all the sources. If they still find the same correlations in the 'real' random data, but not in the others, then I would be much more convinced.
Jan
I haven't actually read the relevant portions of the licence itself, but from this section of the FAQ, it would seem you are right.
If you are the orriginal author of some software, you could add an exception to the GPL, sort of analogous to the exception that allows you to use MySQL with PHP. With something like OpenOffice.org, that would be a problem, since it is very difficult to get all the contributers to consent to such a change of licence.
I think he's barking at the wrong tree here.
BeOS was innovative in many respects. At least it was a nice, clean implementation of some great idea's, and therefore makes a very good base for further improvements. So the worth of the Haiku project is twofold: making sure those innovations go somewhere, and making a base which can be further improved upon. I think there is definitely a need for something like that.
Oh, and I would still like to hear about how Be was 'lacking' from the PP.
Jan
Would be my choice :)
No, that would only remove the hardlinks in that directory, those in /bin etc. would remain. Using symlinks in the */bin directories, combined with some scripts that automatically update those directories, would help some, but this, as you can see, is starting to get really messy.
I think that getting rid of all those /bin, /sbin, /usr/local/lib, etc directories would be a very good idea. Keeping data for applications separate is a much better idea. Putting that data in seperate directories could work, especially if those directories have some kind of standard layout. The problem of long $PATH variables is probably a sign that that variable is not really up to this task, maybe a variable $APPS could replace it -- it could look something like 'APPS=/apps/*,/home/me/apps,/home/joe/public/apps, /extra/apps/matlab', or something. A set of extra tools could exist to list commands. Commands could even be mapped to categories, using configfiles in the application directories. Ah, the possibilities!
Anyway, I don't think any currently existing way is ideal, and a lot of thought could be put into improving it, but actuating any sort of change will be very hard indeed.
Jan
The fact that windows is closed source is not the worst problem with it, the worst problem is all the applications with closed standards that people use that run on it. If everybody used open standards to communicate, everyone could use Windows for all I care, but it would make it possible for me to use Linux without all the headaches of explaining why I couldn't read someone's attachement or see some movie someone posted on a webpage.
I really don't care how widespread Linux is. I just want to be able to use it without hassle.
Jan
Lets make a SF analogue, that might be appreciated here. Suppose that an alien spaceship crashes on this planet. If (for instance) the americans find it, take it apart, and build their own spaceship, would anyone consider this theft of the IP of an alien species? Are we stealing their ideas? Of course not. But that alien species will probably quickly stop any ideas of selling our spaceships in their territory.
Simply regard China as a different planet. If they have different ideas about owning ideas than we have, that is their right. Don't ever assume the right to enfore 'your' 'Intellectual property' somewhere else, because the notions of IP are just something to protect a market system -- and you can't decide for someone else how they should run their markets.
Jan
They do ICT work for offices, based on Linux and other free software. They distribute OpenOffice.org, among other things, but are completely unrelated to the OpenOffice.org project.
Jan
That means that if it is clearly the MS product that infringes, the agreement does not allow MS to back out.
I feel that Groklaw is wrong on this.
Jan
I suppose the difference must be in what the object orbits: an asteroid is something that orbits the sun, while moonlets orbit smaller things like moons, or maybe asteroids. IANAA, however :)
Jan
Well, except for Debian, which does not distribute non-free software at all. It might distribute a script to easily download and install te binary firmware, but that is allready possible today.
Jan
Well, I sometimes remove spyware for people, and after that I usually install Firefox for them. A few months later, they've usually managed to install a lot more spyware, Firefox or no -- if a friend shows them some 'cool' program, they will install it, they want that filesharing program to download mp3z after all...
Software is not the answer, education is.
Jan
Sure, you don't have to buy them all, and you can go for a model without a camera, but it seems that every 'high-end' gizmo that comes out has to have a camera onboard to sell, while at least for me, in none of these cases the camera is a reason to buy one.
Jan
Jan
As others have mentioned, this is not true: Doom3 uses OpenGL on both platforms. At the same time, Doom3 is also often mentioned as an example of 'Direct3D 9.0c' graphics performance. That's because it is one of the first, and right now arguable the most important, game using all the new nice features in the last DirectX. But without using Direct3D.
Confusing, eh?
Jan
This reminds me of older detective novels, where letters typed on typewriters are often important clues. The forensics lab looks at the blackmail note, and knows the exact brand and type of the typewriter it was written on - after which the killer, being the only one in a hundred miles with that specific typewriter, is easily found :)
Jan
I suppose they are a lot cheaper to maintain and run than airplanes, while flying at the same altitudes, so they would be largely a replacements for them. Cheaper, of course, means that they will be able to put a lot more of them up there.
What it has to do with the risk of terrorism is anyones guess, it just seems to fit in the recent list of updated 'security' implementations that I don't really see the point of.
Jan
There are at least some games where voice acting is important. This is the kind of game where the story actually matters, and the characters are important. Voice communicates a lot, so it makes characters more alive, and so the story itself becomes more alive. :-)
<p>
The other side of that is that if a game has voice acting, it better be good. Bad voice acting can ruin a story as much as good voice acting can improve it (Neverwinter Nights comes to mind). If characters sound like they don't believe what they are saying, You won't believe what they're saying either.
<p>
So yeah, if a game features voice acting, those voices should be done by actors. They might have found cheaper ones, but still -- Christopher Lee does have one of the best voices in movie history
<p>
Jan
I've seen a lot of powerpoint presentations in my life, and generally, I can discern the good ones from the bad ones. Within my own field of expertise, of course.
When I think of a court, I think of two lawyers, who are both being paid to believe and defend one side of a difference in oppinion. Both of them know much more than me about law, and are trained in talking just so people believe them. I don't know how lawyers speak, because I don't know many lawyers, and don't spend much time in a courtroom. I don't know the tricks they use, so I would probably have a much harder time discerning a 'good' defence from a 'bad' one.
Personally, I'd be more affraid of the lawyer, then of his presentation technique.
-jdv
Anybody else keeps reading 'The British Pornographic Institute'?