I'd just like to make a few short points, so I don't have to repeat them to those who have asked.
1) A GPL source code will continue to be available. 2.4.1, 2.4.2... will have a GPL source for *nix on this web page.
2) My particular Windows release is not released under GPL. Since people's source (patch) contributions have not stated any terms, I have decided to release this under Shareware, to protect the extra work I have done to make a good Windows release. However, I'll always respect peoples wishes. If someone has contributed some code and want it removed, you only have to ask (mail me personally), and it will be done. If this happens, I'll just rewrite the code myself, AND release it under GPL for your pleasure.
3) You can download and use 3rd party builds (like SilvereX's). It's also worth noting that alot of the knowledge needed to create SilvereX's build comes directly from me. -- Peter.
The rest of the thread seems to point out that he's using GPL libraries and thus has no grounds whatsoever for changing the license.
The idea that a contributor who doesn't specify a license is agreeing to whatever license the authors wants is idiotic. When the contributor doesn't specify a license, it should be obvious that they are implicitly agreeing to the license terms they recieved the software under (IE: GPL.) Assuming otherwise is just asking for a lawsuit.
The old, "my work is soo much more important than everyone else's" line of reasoning is laughable. Everyone thinks their own contribution is the most important one. Everyone thinks their package or program is the most important one. Free software works because the GPL requires you to put ego aside and work with the community.
Guess what, open source code counts as a publication. So as long as every-one keeps track of the dates of their patch submissions, i doubt there will be any big problems with patenting open source.
You have entirely too much faith in the system. If Martin Luther King can broadcast "I have a dream" around the world, live, to millions of homes, and later claim that it was an unpublished work.....well...you get the point.
Is it possible that the patents will cover certain types of online gambling as well as actual games?
If it does, then there is plenty of prior art. The slightest expansion of the scope of the patent makes it invalid. If "home video game system with a hard disk drive" == "desktop computer", then there is prior art on every aspect mentioned in the article.
What's funny is that the USPTO would allow a patent that depends on "home video game system with a hard disk drive" != "desktop computer".
I guess everyone needs to rush out and patent every bit of computer tech + console system. CF Card reader in a console, Printer attached to console, PDA syncing with console, console with RAID drives, GIF images on a console, video streaming on a console, doing taxes on a console, etc..etc..etc...
This parallel licensing, where projects are released under the GPL and then sublicensed to private entities under non free licenses in exchange for bling is probably ( imho ) the best way to make money on a free software project.
Horse-puckey...
It's a conflict of interest that consistently leads to abuses.
In the present case MySQL is pretending that GPL software is basicly non-commercial use only. It's a straight out lie, no matter how they dance around the issue. The Free Software Foundation is being very kind in stating that MySQL "marketing literature" isn't their concern.
MySQL AB isn't alone though.... Trolltech advances the idea that software you create using the GPL version of QT can't be reused in a commercial product. Their wording is careful, but the idea is wrong. You own the code you write, regardless of what libraries you used. Remove those libraries and you can do whatever you want. Their dual-licensing has also resulted in Linux PDAs which can't be synced to Linux desktops. Way to go...
PHP-Nuke has tried to pretend that various bits of code and advertising constitute a license declaration under the GPL. Basicly, GPL == adware. It's nonsense. Moreover, the PHP-Nuke advertising makes no mention that PHP-Nuke is itself a fork of Thatware.
ReiserFS, like PHPNuke wants to pretend that GPL software is adware for commercial products. Hans flipped out when Debian trimmed the marketing spiel out of mkfs.reiserfs. It's obviously not the intent of the license text clause of the GPL to advertise the benefits of non-free versions of GPL software.
Dual licensing is a bad idea. The only way you sell the commercial version is to make the GPL version unfriendly to business. Since the GPL was intended as a business friendly license, you're forced to misrepresent the GPL to sell licenses. If you want a dual-licensing business, don't use the GPL as the free license. Pick something that lets everyone know, from the get-go, that you're a commercial house intent on selling commercial software.
What you are calling a catch 22 is really just a bluff that didn't and could never have worked.
Well, yes, it's possible (likely even) that SCO is just being criminally deceitful. I get the same gut feeling, even if I'd like to believe McBride and Co have some ethics.
I'd rather not discount them on the basis that they're liars until it's proven in court though.
And he [McBride] predicted that "open blogs" like Slashdot will start to tell SCO's side of the story, and then the media will get to understand what is really going on.
Been there, done that...
The problem is that SCO built their business model around maintaining the status quo rather than fixing any legal problems that may or may not exist. Their ultimate goals hinge on SCO code existing in Linux and REMAINING HIDDEN SO THAT IT CAN'T BE REMOVED. Since SCO is betting on this legal catch-22 game and has refused consistently to provide the information necessary to fix the problems they claim exist, it doesn't make any sense to play along.
If SCO decides to drop the catch-22 game and focus on recouping damages from the people who donated the code improperly, I for one would be happy to examine their side of the story. They talk and talk and talk about how they want to fix this stuff, and they never ever make the slightest baby step toward following through. Accusations, innuendo, and vague references to "millions of lines of code" do not constitute working with the free software community to fix problems.
At this point though, even if SCO changed course and worked with the community....would you really believe their intentions were honest? Without new management, I couldn't.
I don't see what the big deal is - if you want to work developing ultra-bleeding-edge technology, it seems reasonable that the entity funding that research restrict what you're allowed to do after the fact.
No, they have the right to restrict the ex-employee from disclosing trade secrets. Sure, in the company's view the best way to keep him from disclosing company trade secrets is to require that he commit suicide when fired...I mean stop working when fired.
Isn't this the same sort of nonsense that SCO has been bitching about? It's right in the contract. If you ever had access to AT&T source code you must die when you lose access to that source code. It's the only way to be sure that a secret stays a secret.
In 2005 the software in Sarge will be as old as Woody is now. (Think Gnome 1.3.)
I don't understand why anyone believes this is a meaningful complaint. I know plenty of people still using Windows 95 and 98 on desktop systems, and I've installed Debian Woody on plenty of desktop systems. My desktop machine tracks unstable only because I need it for development. For the end-user, do you honestly think they want to install a new version of their OS every six months (or download 100+ MB of updates every month and sort out the problems those updates cause?)
The vast majority of computer users do not want to live on the bleeding edge. Your grandma does not know how to pick the optimal compiler flags. She doesn't know how to resolve errors with dpkg or rpm. Why force this nonsense on her?
My understanding is that the graphical front-end is more or less abandoned. I tried building it from source without any luck a few months back. It would be nice to see someone hack up a working installer using the GTK udebs, even if it's simply a gtk version of the current menus.
I personally use Unstable on 3 machines for desktop systems, and install it for others, and have very rarely had anything break.
Odd.. I maintain 5 packages in Debian and another 4 outside of Debian, and I see things breaking every few weeks on Unstable. Normally such bugs just stop the install process, you wait until the package maintainer fixes the problem and try again, but I've seen many people get bent out of shape over trivial apt-get error messages. These are a fact of life with Unstable but completely absent from Stable.
I use Debian Unstable on the three desktop systems in my office, but I've installed Debian Stable as a desktop system on my nephew's computer and the computers of anyone at the Houston LUG that wants to give Debian a try. Aside from the kernel, there are few real problems with the current version of Stable. KDE 2 and KDE 3 are virtually identical once you customize them. Mozilla has improved dramatically, and OpenOffice is absent from Stable, but you can pull these in through backports.
Web servers are where Stable really rocks though. Once you have things set up, there is very little tweaking to do. Once the Sarge migration takes place you've still got a full year to update those Woody systems before Debian will drop support. Subscribe to debian-security-announce on lists.debian.org and you'll rarely need to mess with a working Debian Stable server, just watch for security alerts that affect software you're running. OTOH, if you want to do something with MySQL or Samba that demands the newest versions you'll have to turn to a backport again.
For install-and-forget servers though, nothing beats Debian Stable.
Patents are to protect work that is publically disclose so the secrets of any invention don't get lost to society, and hence, after the patent expires, you can build upon that invention.
OTOH, I've never heard of any programmer digging through the archives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in hopes of learning new and usefully algorithms. The way patents are written makes them mostly useless as guides for how a piece of software works. If the sharing of information is not usefull in the real world then why do we keep this failed system?
Don't get me wrong, Webmin is great, it's at the top of my list fer shure, but that's not the be-all and end-all of systems management!! What about actual convenient tools like MRTG, Novell's eDirectory, RedCarpet, etc. etc.?
Huh? I'm not that familiar with eDirectory or RedCarpet, but MRTG isn't an all in one configuration interface like webmin. I though the only webmin alternatives were commercial products like:
The conspiracy theorist in me can't help but wonder if Microsoft's recent disregard for IE is an attempt to shed off a few percentage points of market share. If IE loses ground they can argue that the anti-trust remedies have been a success. Perhaps they'll argue the remedies have gone too far.
Once again, because Microsoft loses 100 bucks on each console sold, the more consoles they sell, the more money they lose.
The more units they build and sell the cheaper it should be to produce those units. At some point the total cost of producing Xbox's should be less than the total revenue from selling them and Microsoft makes it to step #3: Profit! It's called economies of scale. In Microsoft's case there is a possibility that the reliance on third parties for key components in the Xbox results in diseconomies of scale. Nvidia might up the price since they are the sole supplier of Xbox graphics chips, for instance.
Regardless of whether or not they're making any money on the Xbox though I'm suprised they haven't just given the damn things away. Maybee bundle it with a dozen games and sell it for the same $150 price. Bundling worked for IE, it can still work for the Xbox. They just need to destroy the value of console hardware so that Sony and Nintendo can't afford to compete.
it's only a container. and a descent player will not determin it's content by the extension.
But.......my file manager (and sometimes my browser) is launching the player based on the file extension. Using the same file extension will force me into telling my file manager to always open ogg files in a theora capable player. This might sound trivial if you're already playing all of your mp3s and oggs in xine or mplayer, but I'd much rather use an audio player (xmms) for audio files and a video player (xine) for video files.
A good video player UI is generally a bad audio player UI and vice-versa.
This has also led to a reexamination of code submission procedures. Now rogue code will be harder to slip into Linux (at least kernel).
At the very least it's provided a counterpoint to the "nobody is complaining" excuse for licensing laxness. Someone, somewhere, someday is bound to try and make a buck off complaining. Of course, code is easy to track in comparison to video/audio/graphics/etc. There are many instances where free software developers have grabbed images or graphics off the net and incorporated it into their otherwise clean projects. Hopefully more developers are beginning to realize that truely free software requires proof that all the various bits are really free. A few years back this would have been regarded as anal-retentive (Debian/FSF/RedHat/etc) Now it's a necessity.
The one thing that remains to be seen is whether IBM is willing to use its patent portfolio to pressure Microsoft not to suffocate F/OSS with its patents.
I think it's safe to say that free software is screwed if the current patent situation isn't reversed. Microsoft doesn't need to attack free software with patents. It can simply wait for all the goofy little patent lawsuit business to start looking at free software developers for ways to make a buck. Microsoft can afford to pay off these folks, free software developers can't. Imagine the SCO scenario repeated again and again over patents. Microsoft licenses the patent, free software developers can't or won't, so they get sued.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi All,
I'd just like to make a few short points, so I don't have to repeat them to those who have asked.
1) A GPL source code will continue to be available. 2.4.1, 2.4.2... will have a GPL source for *nix on this web page.
2) My particular Windows release is not released under GPL. Since people's source (patch) contributions have not stated any terms, I have decided to release this under Shareware, to protect the extra work I have done to make a good Windows release. However, I'll always respect peoples wishes. If someone has contributed some code and want it removed, you only have to ask (mail me personally), and it will be done. If this happens, I'll just rewrite the code myself, AND release it under GPL for your pleasure.
3) You can download and use 3rd party builds (like SilvereX's). It's also worth noting that alot of the knowledge needed to create SilvereX's build comes directly from me. -- Peter.
The rest of the thread seems to point out that he's using GPL libraries and thus has no grounds whatsoever for changing the license.
The idea that a contributor who doesn't specify a license is agreeing to whatever license the authors wants is idiotic. When the contributor doesn't specify a license, it should be obvious that they are implicitly agreeing to the license terms they recieved the software under (IE: GPL.) Assuming otherwise is just asking for a lawsuit.
The old, "my work is soo much more important than everyone else's" line of reasoning is laughable. Everyone thinks their own contribution is the most important one. Everyone thinks their package or program is the most important one. Free software works because the GPL requires you to put ego aside and work with the community.
Win95 was THE MOST ADVANCED OS in the world!
Win98 fixed all the bugs in Win95.
Win98SE fixed all the bugs in Win98.
WinME: The bugs strike back.
2. Bug gets labeled "undocumented feature"
tags 682568 + wishlist unreproducable upstream wontfix help
thanks
Guess what, open source code counts as a publication. So as long as every-one keeps track of the dates of their patch submissions, i doubt there will be any big problems with patenting open source.
You have entirely too much faith in the system. If Martin Luther King can broadcast "I have a dream" around the world, live, to millions of homes, and later claim that it was an unpublished work.....well...you get the point.
Is it possible that the patents will cover certain types of online gambling as well as actual games?
If it does, then there is plenty of prior art. The slightest expansion of the scope of the patent makes it invalid. If "home video game system with a hard disk drive" == "desktop computer", then there is prior art on every aspect mentioned in the article.
What's funny is that the USPTO would allow a patent that depends on "home video game system with a hard disk drive" != "desktop computer".
I guess everyone needs to rush out and patent every bit of computer tech + console system. CF Card reader in a console, Printer attached to console, PDA syncing with console, console with RAID drives, GIF images on a console, video streaming on a console, doing taxes on a console, etc..etc..etc...
This parallel licensing, where projects are released under the GPL and then sublicensed to private entities under non free licenses in exchange for bling is probably ( imho ) the best way to make money on a free software project.
Horse-puckey...
It's a conflict of interest that consistently leads to abuses.
In the present case MySQL is pretending that GPL software is basicly non-commercial use only. It's a straight out lie, no matter how they dance around the issue. The Free Software Foundation is being very kind in stating that MySQL "marketing literature" isn't their concern.
MySQL AB isn't alone though.... Trolltech advances the idea that software you create using the GPL version of QT can't be reused in a commercial product. Their wording is careful, but the idea is wrong. You own the code you write, regardless of what libraries you used. Remove those libraries and you can do whatever you want. Their dual-licensing has also resulted in Linux PDAs which can't be synced to Linux desktops. Way to go...
PHP-Nuke has tried to pretend that various bits of code and advertising constitute a license declaration under the GPL. Basicly, GPL == adware. It's nonsense. Moreover, the PHP-Nuke advertising makes no mention that PHP-Nuke is itself a fork of Thatware.
ReiserFS, like PHPNuke wants to pretend that GPL software is adware for commercial products. Hans flipped out when Debian trimmed the marketing spiel out of mkfs.reiserfs. It's obviously not the intent of the license text clause of the GPL to advertise the benefits of non-free versions of GPL software.
Dual licensing is a bad idea. The only way you sell the commercial version is to make the GPL version unfriendly to business. Since the GPL was intended as a business friendly license, you're forced to misrepresent the GPL to sell licenses. If you want a dual-licensing business, don't use the GPL as the free license. Pick something that lets everyone know, from the get-go, that you're a commercial house intent on selling commercial software.
What you are calling a catch 22 is really just a bluff that didn't and could never have worked.
Well, yes, it's possible (likely even) that SCO is just being criminally deceitful. I get the same gut feeling, even if I'd like to believe McBride and Co have some ethics.
I'd rather not discount them on the basis that they're liars until it's proven in court though.
And he [McBride] predicted that "open blogs" like Slashdot will start to tell SCO's side of the story, and then the media will get to understand what is really going on.
Been there, done that...
The problem is that SCO built their business model around maintaining the status quo rather than fixing any legal problems that may or may not exist. Their ultimate goals hinge on SCO code existing in Linux and REMAINING HIDDEN SO THAT IT CAN'T BE REMOVED. Since SCO is betting on this legal catch-22 game and has refused consistently to provide the information necessary to fix the problems they claim exist, it doesn't make any sense to play along.
If SCO decides to drop the catch-22 game and focus on recouping damages from the people who donated the code improperly, I for one would be happy to examine their side of the story. They talk and talk and talk about how they want to fix this stuff, and they never ever make the slightest baby step toward following through. Accusations, innuendo, and vague references to "millions of lines of code" do not constitute working with the free software community to fix problems.
At this point though, even if SCO changed course and worked with the community....would you really believe their intentions were honest? Without new management, I couldn't.
I don't see what the big deal is - if you want to work developing ultra-bleeding-edge technology, it seems reasonable that the entity funding that research restrict what you're allowed to do after the fact.
No, they have the right to restrict the ex-employee from disclosing trade secrets. Sure, in the company's view the best way to keep him from disclosing company trade secrets is to require that he commit suicide when fired...I mean stop working when fired.
Isn't this the same sort of nonsense that SCO has been bitching about? It's right in the contract. If you ever had access to AT&T source code you must die when you lose access to that source code. It's the only way to be sure that a secret stays a secret.
In 2005 the software in Sarge will be as old as Woody is now. (Think Gnome 1.3.)
I don't understand why anyone believes this is a meaningful complaint. I know plenty of people still using Windows 95 and 98 on desktop systems, and I've installed Debian Woody on plenty of desktop systems. My desktop machine tracks unstable only because I need it for development. For the end-user, do you honestly think they want to install a new version of their OS every six months (or download 100+ MB of updates every month and sort out the problems those updates cause?)
The vast majority of computer users do not want to live on the bleeding edge. Your grandma does not know how to pick the optimal compiler flags. She doesn't know how to resolve errors with dpkg or rpm. Why force this nonsense on her?
My understanding is that the graphical front-end is more or less abandoned. I tried building it from source without any luck a few months back. It would be nice to see someone hack up a working installer using the GTK udebs, even if it's simply a gtk version of the current menus.
I personally use Unstable on 3 machines for desktop systems, and install it for others, and have very rarely had anything break.
Odd.. I maintain 5 packages in Debian and another 4 outside of Debian, and I see things breaking every few weeks on Unstable. Normally such bugs just stop the install process, you wait until the package maintainer fixes the problem and try again, but I've seen many people get bent out of shape over trivial apt-get error messages. These are a fact of life with Unstable but completely absent from Stable.
I use Debian Unstable on the three desktop systems in my office, but I've installed Debian Stable as a desktop system on my nephew's computer and the computers of anyone at the Houston LUG that wants to give Debian a try. Aside from the kernel, there are few real problems with the current version of Stable. KDE 2 and KDE 3 are virtually identical once you customize them. Mozilla has improved dramatically, and OpenOffice is absent from Stable, but you can pull these in through backports.
Web servers are where Stable really rocks though. Once you have things set up, there is very little tweaking to do. Once the Sarge migration takes place you've still got a full year to update those Woody systems before Debian will drop support. Subscribe to debian-security-announce on lists.debian.org and you'll rarely need to mess with a working Debian Stable server, just watch for security alerts that affect software you're running. OTOH, if you want to do something with MySQL or Samba that demands the newest versions you'll have to turn to a backport again.
For install-and-forget servers though, nothing beats Debian Stable.
Patents are to protect work that is publically disclose so the secrets of any invention don't get lost to society, and hence, after the patent expires, you can build upon that invention.
OTOH, I've never heard of any programmer digging through the archives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in hopes of learning new and usefully algorithms. The way patents are written makes them mostly useless as guides for how a piece of software works. If the sharing of information is not usefull in the real world then why do we keep this failed system?
Here's the PDF Version
We are outsourcing national security software to Russia and China to save money!
Mathematically proof of Linux security is not feasible
Linux is foreign-source software
Slide 19 is terrific. RMS didn't agree with the war in Iraq so he must be inserting trojan code into GCC.
(Linux deployment) is spreading at an alarming rate
Plays fine in totem on Debian Sid.
1. A senator and a member of the house get togather and write a bill.
You really believe that? I was under the impression that they didn't bother to read most of the bills being voted on, much less write them.
Maybee I'm wrong in this case though. It's only 2 pages.
Don't get me wrong, Webmin is great, it's at the top of my list fer shure, but that's not the be-all and end-all of systems management!! What about actual convenient tools like MRTG, Novell's eDirectory, RedCarpet, etc. etc.?
Huh? I'm not that familiar with eDirectory or RedCarpet, but MRTG isn't an all in one configuration interface like webmin. I though the only webmin alternatives were commercial products like:
Ensim
Plesk
Cpanel
Are there free software uber-configuration products other than Webmin? I tend to stick to the command line over ssh myself.
netstat -nlp
Turn off all the services you don't need.
The conspiracy theorist in me can't help but wonder if Microsoft's recent disregard for IE is an attempt to shed off a few percentage points of market share. If IE loses ground they can argue that the anti-trust remedies have been a success. Perhaps they'll argue the remedies have gone too far.
People have been putting pedals side by side for years. Patents must have something new and innovative in them.
Then reverse the order of the pedals. Gas-Brake-Clutch, left to right. It's an obvious minor tweak, but that doesn't seem to matter any more.
Once again, because Microsoft loses 100 bucks on each console sold, the more consoles they sell, the more money they lose.
The more units they build and sell the cheaper it should be to produce those units. At some point the total cost of producing Xbox's should be less than the total revenue from selling them and Microsoft makes it to step #3: Profit! It's called economies of scale. In Microsoft's case there is a possibility that the reliance on third parties for key components in the Xbox results in diseconomies of scale. Nvidia might up the price since they are the sole supplier of Xbox graphics chips, for instance.
Regardless of whether or not they're making any money on the Xbox though I'm suprised they haven't just given the damn things away. Maybee bundle it with a dozen games and sell it for the same $150 price. Bundling worked for IE, it can still work for the Xbox. They just need to destroy the value of console hardware so that Sony and Nintendo can't afford to compete.
it's only a container. and a descent player will not determin it's content by the extension.
But.......my file manager (and sometimes my browser) is launching the player based on the file extension. Using the same file extension will force me into telling my file manager to always open ogg files in a theora capable player. This might sound trivial if you're already playing all of your mp3s and oggs in xine or mplayer, but I'd much rather use an audio player (xmms) for audio files and a video player (xine) for video files.
A good video player UI is generally a bad audio player UI and vice-versa.
I have come to the conclusion that if the seller were to list each item separately, he would probably double or triple his returns.
If you honestly believe this you should buy the set, split it up, and relist it.
This has also led to a reexamination of code submission procedures. Now rogue code will be harder to slip into Linux (at least kernel).
At the very least it's provided a counterpoint to the "nobody is complaining" excuse for licensing laxness. Someone, somewhere, someday is bound to try and make a buck off complaining. Of course, code is easy to track in comparison to video/audio/graphics/etc. There are many instances where free software developers have grabbed images or graphics off the net and incorporated it into their otherwise clean projects. Hopefully more developers are beginning to realize that truely free software requires proof that all the various bits are really free. A few years back this would have been regarded as anal-retentive (Debian/FSF/RedHat/etc) Now it's a necessity.
The one thing that remains to be seen is whether IBM is willing to use its patent portfolio to pressure Microsoft not to suffocate F/OSS with its patents.
I think it's safe to say that free software is screwed if the current patent situation isn't reversed. Microsoft doesn't need to attack free software with patents. It can simply wait for all the goofy little patent lawsuit business to start looking at free software developers for ways to make a buck. Microsoft can afford to pay off these folks, free software developers can't. Imagine the SCO scenario repeated again and again over patents. Microsoft licenses the patent, free software developers can't or won't, so they get sued.
walking around outside on a sunny day isn't the evilest of jobs.
Depending on where you live. In Houston the heat and humidity are hell. I'd gladly pay Darl $20 to mow my lawn.