When I was a boy, I didn't have any interest in the "heavy machinery" Lego sets. I did fight quite a few mock battles with the medieval and space types, though.
I do remember a lot of non-combatant mundane kits, though. I had a search-and-rescue kit...
Some of the licenses probably prohibit redistribution, though potentially not all.
The reason why the the MPlayer folks being upset is more understandable is that Apple or Intel or whoever could ask the MPlayer people to stop at any time, and they would. Those codecs aren't core to mplayer functionality -- the wrapper code is, which lets folks use their own Windows DLLs. The DLL zip file is just a convenience. For a long time, people *did* just run the codec installers in Windows and then use the DLLs.
KISS, however, was asked to stop, and ignored the MPlayer people, and are now claiming that MPlayer might have misappropriated KISS code, which is pretty clearly ridiculous.
That doesn't mean that MPlayer is legally in the right, but I have a lot less of an ethical problem with them.
If Apple told MPlayer's folks to stop allowing folks to download some DLL, and MPlayer told them to go jump in a tree, or the MPlayer folks tried to claim that they made the DLL, then things might be a bit different.
The Linux community have dealt with KISS before, and KISS are providing the linux kernel sources and busybox. People are building NFS support into their players and other fun stuff.
KISS supports Vorbis and DivX. I will give them that -- these are folks that seem to tend more towards the OSS side of things.
On the other hand, the mplayer folks have been burned before by folks ripping off their code (and subsequent attempts to cover up said infringement through obfuscation), and are probably extremely ready to blow up over this. I suspect that, in their shoes, I'd be in about the same state of mind.
I kind of wish that someone like ESR or Perens, someone respected by the folks involved, could step in and lend a cooling touch, maybe mediate a bit. The FSF only seems to get involved when it's software that they own the copyright on.:-(
Now, *how* the hell would being mailbombed (hell, even by MPlayer developers) help KISS's case?
This came up with SCO. That was a different issue, though. It was extremely high profile, and the person asking people to stop was ESR, who is extremely concerned in Open Source as a cohesive movement and about managing PR.
On the other hand, I doubt that mailbombing will do much good. It tends to piss people off and make them stubborn. At this point, the sinking feeling that's probably going around KISS is more likely to do everyone good (i.e. they're more likely to fix things) than them being pissed off and stubborn. Furthermore, if they get constantly mailbombed, they end up turning into bitter spokesmen about how much the OSS community sucks. [shrug]
On the other hand, I think that it would be more than appropriate for KISS to donate something to the MPlayer folks if they're shown to be wrong. It does look extremely suspicious.
One of the first things I'd say reading this is that his reaction looks a lot like several other vendors I dealt with whose CEO simply could not believe that either their employees or their subcontractors would steal code.
Pretty much what I thought. He probably isn't intentionally lying, even if KISS is infringing (as seems likely). He naturally kicks into do-my-job-and-don't-admit-liability-mode.
If the mplayer guys are right it won't be too long before the KISS folks will be apologising.
I don't know. I'd like to think that is the case, but KISS is in a really lousy position. They can't settle with all the people that have contributed code to MPlayer. They will be open to civil cases against them for the earlier violations. This sort of thing is a real black mark to your company name to have all over the news. Finally, they're looking at the expense of auditing their code and possibly the loss of chunks of their code. I suspect that they are probably not legally able to GPL their code as a whole, as they may have licenses from other folks. Not good.
This really drives home the poor current legal situation with code.
Code is, increasingly, a commodity. It gets produced as cheaply as possible -- India, overseas, by companies willing to infringe --whatever. You have companies, little subcontractors, who are *never* going to get sued, or if they do, bob back up again. They have a phenomenal set of reasons to infringe copyrights. You have a lot of programmers, who, even if they *are* well-meaning, may not have proper legal knowledge on how far one can legally go. Having a company lawyer sitting in an office somewhere is not enough -- techies are woefully uneducated on IP issues, and *need* to know what they're talking about. I've seen so much bad information posted on Slashdot that it's really amazing.
Frankly, if I were designing a software engineering curriculum these days, I'd include at least one class on code-related IP issues in law.
It is very unpleasant for the defendant, because the defendant cannot settle, though. And, as it happens, lots of cases are resolved through settlements. This would mean that the defendant *has* to go through the court system.
As a follow-up -- one might think that a format could *imply* use of a copyright. This has been shot down in court. At one point, Sega tried to use copyright implied by a format to support a DRM scheme. Basically, the format for games for one of their consoles stated that games must be prefixed by a snippit of text. This text was copyrighted to Sega. Some third party game vendor wrote a game without purchasing a license from Sega. Sega, as one of the legal attacks on the company, claimed that the vendor had violated copyright. The court, however, found that the copyright was invalid -- that it could not be used in such a way.
You can copyright a particular expression of an idea. You cannot copyright an idea, however. You could copyright a tutorial that shows how to implement a format. You couldn't copyright the format, however.
A format may imply use of processes that are patented. Furthermore, a format, or processes involved, may be a trade secret. However, copyright does not apply to formats.
They are the actual Windows DLLs. The wrapper code is in mplayer.
Theoretically, Microsoft could bite 'em if their EULA prohibits allowing people to download the codecs, and I'm sure MS maintains a nice long list of OSS projects that they can attack if they need to. However, this is also a pretty minor thing. These are all DLLs that you can download and install on a Windows system freely. It's merely a convenience to people who don't want to find a Windows box, install the codecs, and then copy the codecs over. If they couldn't provide a download any more, it would hardly be a huge deal for the product.
Yes. However, technically the grandparent is correct. CVS is truly, truly awful from a security standpoint. Only the unstable branch is even remotely usable in an untrusted environment, and it's far from perfect. It's quite possible for anyone with commit access to forge CVS history, though it would take some doing.
On the other hand, I agree that this case is pretty darn clear-cut.
Because, in the past, MPlayer code *has* been stolen and used. And all of a sudden, out comes another media player. So, some MPlayer developer gets suspicious and figures that it's worth fifteen minutes of his time to strings it.
The argument that the MPlayer people were trying to steal KISS IP is ridiculous. It's *much* easier for almost all systems (with a few notable and extreme exceptions, such as registration number generation schemes or drivers talking to custom hardware...and sometimes not even for drivers) to simply examine then inputs and outputs of a program, and then reproduce an equivalent program. You treat it as a black box in such a case.
The MPlayer people certainly have the talent required to implement their own stuff, rather than spending ages decompiling some DVD player maker's code.
My guess is that there have been MPlayer developers poking at a number of systems looking to see if people have been swiping MPlayer code ever since the last big violation.
Now, it's an issue of ego and anger where it could have been a largely uninvolved and low key licence dispute.
I can't agree. MPlayer contains code from a *lot* of people (including me, and I hadn't even heard of all this until the Slashdot story). This code was GPL-licensed. The MPlayer core team does not have the legal ability to provide a non-GPLed license to MPlayer, unfortunately, as they have integrated many patches and code from other folks.
There are only two options. First, the copyright holders (probably most of whom are mplayer core members) may simply let things slide if the company removes the code. Now, that doesn't mean that KISS is legally clear (doing that would be extremely difficult, requiring all involved copyright holders to agree not to sue KISS for their old code). However, it might just be a minor imperfection if KISS yanked things. The MPlayer team already tried this, KISS ignored them.
The other option is that KISS opens and GPLs their code. Since they probably cannot do this due to licensing agreements with another company, they're in an uncomfortable situation, and are likely to do whatever they can to squeeze out of it.
Keep in mind that MPlayer is a popular project to steal code from. This has happened before, more egregiously, by media code vendors. Most of the MPlayer developers have an extremely short tolerance for this. They were already pissed off after last time.
The good news is that KISS is probably fucked to some extent. The company may not die, but you have a huge piece of PR all over the place about how you are violating code licenses. Anyone reading this when researching the company when considering doing business with them is going to be awfully leery of getting involved. I wouldn't touch 'em with a ten foot pole -- there are better choices.
KISS trying to play off the fact that they use Linux is ridiculous. Lots of people use Linux in their systems -- it's a hella fast way to get up and running, and it doesn't make any difference in this case whether they were running CE or Linux.
Perhaps, though Microsoft might have licensed the IP to them. There's another IP issue, though.
I there is code in MPlayer that, while legal, violates the agreement that the DVD Consortium forces vendors to sign into (like bypassing region codes and whatnot). KISS Technology is supposed to be a DVD system vendor, and may have signed this document. If they are, in fact, in violation of their DVD Consortium license, the DVD Consortium may revoke their license.
So, here's my thinking: If the code in question is really as simple and trivial as claimed by the MPlayer folks, then why bother facing this Danish DVD group?
A couple of reasons:
* Principle. You wrote code, it was ripped off, person making money on it not only won't follow your license but refuses to admit that you wrote it. This is wildly frusterating.
* Prescedent. If companies get away with making money off of ripping off GPLed code here, more and more will do so. A clear message needs to be sent that ripping off the OSS community is not acceptable. If you do it and are found out, you will be run into the ground.
* Potential greater violations. The subtitle reader was picked up on because it was easy to see. Who knows what other code, potentially more advanced, might also have been stolen from MPlayer?
* The value of the code itself. Even if it isn't massively complex, that's still code that you wrote that was stolen.
* Prestige. The guy making money off this promptly claimed that perhaps the MPlayer team stole *his* code. MPlayer is a prominent open source project. This is not a good thing for open source.
Frankly, I think there are few geeks that aren't fed up with NAT. NAT is a last-ditch technical hack to avoid address exhaustion that has now turned into both a severe impediment to the reliable functioning of huge amounts of Internet-using software and into a tool to allow price discrimination between home and business users -- after all, home users don't need to do anything but fetch email and fetch web pages, right?
I agree entirely with the author. It's incredibly frusterating to work around what's happening on the Internet. There are a lot of ways to pull it off, but they themselves are hacks and frequently involve introducing inefficiencies.
The fact that NAT is being used as a security tool says more about the pitiful state of out-of-box Windows IP security than anything about its actual value.
I've seen articles written by many, many frusterated computer scientist types. Stuart Cheshire (author of the famous Bolo and has written a couple of nice articles) has a particularly vitrolic set of responses.
He's sick of having to troubleshoot problems introduced by other folks. I can understand that.
Frankly, I'd never get services with a provider that required me to pay extra for more IPs or tried to get me to use NAT. The ISP I use, Telerama considers unlimited IPs (though only two statics) to be part of the basic DSL home package, which I consider pretty much what folks should be expecting from their ISPs. They don't do any of this ridiculous port blocking that has become increasingly popular.
Hey, his home page claims an *entire blog* devoted to non-Microsoft technologies. Intrigued, I cruised over there and was treated to gems like these:
How far behind is Mac gaming? I had to laugh out loud when I saw MacWorld's hilarious "2003 Game Hall of Fame," which reads like a list of PC games past. Which games made the list, you ask? Well, you'll have to think back a bit, because most of them debuted on the PC one to three years before they hit the Mac. Here are the PC release dates for the mainstream games that made the list (even the bizarro choice, Noiz2sa ["most difficult-to-pronounce" game, duh] was out on the PC first, though I couldn't find a release date):
Zoo Tycoon - Released on the PC October 2001 Unreal Tournament 2003 - Released on the PC September 2002 Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 - Released on the PC July 2002 Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - Released on the PC March 2002 Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Desert Siege - Released on the PC March 2002 Dungeon Siege - Released on the PC April 2002 Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - Released on the PC July 2003 (the sole simultaneous release) The Operative: No One Lives Forever - Released on the PC November 2000
On the PC, we're playing newer versions of these games now (I actually have both Tiger Woods 2004 and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, for example). But the funniest part of this roundup, of course, is the section titled 'Best Place to Get Classic Games." Clearly, that would be the Mac. But serious game players have know this for some time, so it's not a huge surprise. I just think it's interesting to see it so clearly demonstrated. posted 1/4/2004 10:55:32 PM
and
More egregiously, Apple still locks its customers into their proprietary music store and crappy AAC format.
(I wondered about this -- isn't WMA proprietary, and AAC open-speced as part of MPEG 4, or am I confused?)
Fair enough that there isn't a lot of stuff in Vorbis format out there.
But, on the other hand, how many people actually use WMA? Microsoft's been pushing it hard, but there has to be at *least* a hundred MP3s out there for each WMA.
Ack, never noticed annoying interesting encoding issues with ed2k urls and slashdot.
You'll need to remove the space between the 7 and the 9 -- slashdot mauls the text even not in a link. Sigh. Slashcode. Perhaps someone who's dealt with this before can figure out how to do a proper link.
Things aren't to the extent that they were in 1953, but there is still a decided difference between "girl" toys and "boy" toys. That doesn't mean everyone plays with just one or another, or that there isn't a gradient, or that there aren't toys that appeal to both girls and boys. However, the "Monster Oooze Factory" is going to sell better to boys, and the "Barbie Fun House" is going to sell better to girls.
I haven't really paid attention to Legos for years, but from what I've seen in your post and a brief glance at the Lego web site pretty much confirms my worries.
Legos was *always* about providing basic tools to build what you want. Building blocks were based on the same idea, but they allowed merely very vague, civil-style construction. Legos (well, at least Technics, which were the ones that I found interesting) allowed you to build all kinds of things -- a more friendly Erector set.
From what I see now, Legos have:
* Marketing tie-ins. If I could think of a single toy for which marketing tie-ins are actually detrimental, this has to be it. Why, why, why would you *ever* do this? Legos aren't just a puzzle -- hell, I rarely ever built the kit that you were "supposed" to build. They let you build what you want.
* Expense. I always found Legos to be disgustingly expensive as a kid, and they are much, much worse now. They really are just molded plastic, and patents aside, a company that specializes in selling lots of molded plastic should be good at doing so inexpensively. The only major changes might be slight materials change to improve grip and durability.
* The website sucks. Legos are one of the things for which a website could be incredibly valuable...and we have this annoying Flash monstrosity?
* Custom parts. Custom parts are a *terrible* idea. (You pointed out windshields. Actually, there were two windshield pieces that I remember that predated Technics. I think Space had a couple more. There are other ones, though.) Custom parts, including movie-tie-in parts, have a lot of disadvantages. They're frequently less useful outside of the kits they were designed around. They're probably much more expensive to produce. They inhibit the imagination component. When my childhood friend needed a custom part (say, a Technics rod 2.5 units long or so), he'd cut his own, with help from his father. The Pirate sets already had a lot of oddball parts. You don't need to make a perfectly colored Chevy door handle that's usable if you're, say, making a Chevy and nothing else.
* I remember that Legos used to have space, medival, pirate, and modern styles. Then Technics came. That's probably about where they should have stopped. More parts means more market fragmentation, more costs, and less nice interoperation. Most of these groups interoperated well with the others. Yes, Technic parts had holes in them, modern came with windshields, and medieval and pirate with trees and medieval-looking pieces, but that's about it. Just glancing at their page, they have "Advanced Designer", "Inventor", "TECHNIC", "Sports", "BIONICLE", "LEGO Racers", "Intelli-train", "Story Builder", "Spybotics", and "Mindstorms". These vary so much that it's much harder to use parts from different things together.
Here's my suggestions for the Lego folks. Not that I'm a brilliant marketing director, just that I know what I like and liked, and it sure as hell isn't what they're selling now.
* Evaluate the additional merchandise (watches, clothes, pens, etc). Dump anything not making money.
* Drop as many toy ranges as possible. Keep Mindstorms (which could be merged with Technics), and the basic four original kits. All types should be at least 90% effectively compatible with other kits, so that folks can amass large sets of compatible parts and go crazy building Lego things. Don't have more than 10% bizarre windshields in Space, or parrots in Pirate.
* Dump tie-in things. There are dolls and action figures that do a much better job of tie-ins than Legos. Legos are good because they're generic.
* You have a damned website and generic parts. Let people order (with some surcharge, perhaps 10%) custom kits of some minimum value (say, $50). This would appeal greatly to hardcore Lego fans. If they want just 300 10 unit rods, let them order that and that alone.
* You have a website. You have programs that let people design Lego c
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When I was a boy, I didn't have any interest in the "heavy machinery" Lego sets. I did fight quite a few mock battles with the medieval and space types, though.
I do remember a lot of non-combatant mundane kits, though. I had a search-and-rescue kit...
Are Apple's codecs, in fact, not redistributable in binary form?
Some of the licenses probably prohibit redistribution, though potentially not all.
The reason why the the MPlayer folks being upset is more understandable is that Apple or Intel or whoever could ask the MPlayer people to stop at any time, and they would. Those codecs aren't core to mplayer functionality -- the wrapper code is, which lets folks use their own Windows DLLs. The DLL zip file is just a convenience. For a long time, people *did* just run the codec installers in Windows and then use the DLLs.
KISS, however, was asked to stop, and ignored the MPlayer people, and are now claiming that MPlayer might have misappropriated KISS code, which is pretty clearly ridiculous.
That doesn't mean that MPlayer is legally in the right, but I have a lot less of an ethical problem with them.
If Apple told MPlayer's folks to stop allowing folks to download some DLL, and MPlayer told them to go jump in a tree, or the MPlayer folks tried to claim that they made the DLL, then things might be a bit different.
The Linux community have dealt with KISS before, and KISS are providing the linux kernel sources and busybox. People are building NFS support into their players and other fun stuff.
:-(
KISS supports Vorbis and DivX. I will give them that -- these are folks that seem to tend more towards the OSS side of things.
On the other hand, the mplayer folks have been burned before by folks ripping off their code (and subsequent attempts to cover up said infringement through obfuscation), and are probably extremely ready to blow up over this. I suspect that, in their shoes, I'd be in about the same state of mind.
I kind of wish that someone like ESR or Perens, someone respected by the folks involved, could step in and lend a cooling touch, maybe mediate a bit. The FSF only seems to get involved when it's software that they own the copyright on.
Now, *how* the hell would being mailbombed (hell, even by MPlayer developers) help KISS's case?
This came up with SCO. That was a different issue, though. It was extremely high profile, and the person asking people to stop was ESR, who is extremely concerned in Open Source as a cohesive movement and about managing PR.
On the other hand, I doubt that mailbombing will do much good. It tends to piss people off and make them stubborn. At this point, the sinking feeling that's probably going around KISS is more likely to do everyone good (i.e. they're more likely to fix things) than them being pissed off and stubborn. Furthermore, if they get constantly mailbombed, they end up turning into bitter spokesmen about how much the OSS community sucks. [shrug]
On the other hand, I think that it would be more than appropriate for KISS to donate something to the MPlayer folks if they're shown to be wrong. It does look extremely suspicious.
One of the first things I'd say reading this is that his reaction looks a lot like several other vendors I dealt with whose CEO simply could not believe that either their employees or their subcontractors would steal code.
Pretty much what I thought. He probably isn't intentionally lying, even if KISS is infringing (as seems likely). He naturally kicks into do-my-job-and-don't-admit-liability-mode.
If the mplayer guys are right it won't be too long before the KISS folks will be apologising.
I don't know. I'd like to think that is the case, but KISS is in a really lousy position. They can't settle with all the people that have contributed code to MPlayer. They will be open to civil cases against them for the earlier violations. This sort of thing is a real black mark to your company name to have all over the news. Finally, they're looking at the expense of auditing their code and possibly the loss of chunks of their code. I suspect that they are probably not legally able to GPL their code as a whole, as they may have licenses from other folks. Not good.
This really drives home the poor current legal situation with code.
Code is, increasingly, a commodity. It gets produced as cheaply as possible -- India, overseas, by companies willing to infringe --whatever. You have companies, little subcontractors, who are *never* going to get sued, or if they do, bob back up again. They have a phenomenal set of reasons to infringe copyrights. You have a lot of programmers, who, even if they *are* well-meaning, may not have proper legal knowledge on how far one can legally go. Having a company lawyer sitting in an office somewhere is not enough -- techies are woefully uneducated on IP issues, and *need* to know what they're talking about. I've seen so much bad information posted on Slashdot that it's really amazing.
Frankly, if I were designing a software engineering curriculum these days, I'd include at least one class on code-related IP issues in law.
Good point.
It is very unpleasant for the defendant, because the defendant cannot settle, though. And, as it happens, lots of cases are resolved through settlements. This would mean that the defendant *has* to go through the court system.
As a follow-up -- one might think that a format could *imply* use of a copyright. This has been shot down in court. At one point, Sega tried to use copyright implied by a format to support a DRM scheme. Basically, the format for games for one of their consoles stated that games must be prefixed by a snippit of text. This text was copyrighted to Sega. Some third party game vendor wrote a game without purchasing a license from Sega. Sega, as one of the legal attacks on the company, claimed that the vendor had violated copyright. The court, however, found that the copyright was invalid -- that it could not be used in such a way.
Formats can't be copyrighted.
You can copyright a particular expression of an idea. You cannot copyright an idea, however. You could copyright a tutorial that shows how to implement a format. You couldn't copyright the format, however.
A format may imply use of processes that are patented. Furthermore, a format, or processes involved, may be a trade secret. However, copyright does not apply to formats.
GPL@Court ... i'm really eager to see what is going to happen when the GPL goes to court.
:-)
It appears that the revolution will come...in Hungary.
They are the actual Windows DLLs. The wrapper code is in mplayer.
Theoretically, Microsoft could bite 'em if their EULA prohibits allowing people to download the codecs, and I'm sure MS maintains a nice long list of OSS projects that they can attack if they need to. However, this is also a pretty minor thing. These are all DLLs that you can download and install on a Windows system freely. It's merely a convenience to people who don't want to find a Windows box, install the codecs, and then copy the codecs over. If they couldn't provide a download any more, it would hardly be a huge deal for the product.
Doesn't SourceForge already have CVS?
Yes. However, technically the grandparent is correct. CVS is truly, truly awful from a security standpoint. Only the unstable branch is even remotely usable in an untrusted environment, and it's far from perfect. It's quite possible for anyone with commit access to forge CVS history, though it would take some doing.
On the other hand, I agree that this case is pretty darn clear-cut.
Because, in the past, MPlayer code *has* been stolen and used. And all of a sudden, out comes another media player. So, some MPlayer developer gets suspicious and figures that it's worth fifteen minutes of his time to strings it.
The argument that the MPlayer people were trying to steal KISS IP is ridiculous. It's *much* easier for almost all systems (with a few notable and extreme exceptions, such as registration number generation schemes or drivers talking to custom hardware...and sometimes not even for drivers) to simply examine then inputs and outputs of a program, and then reproduce an equivalent program. You treat it as a black box in such a case.
The MPlayer people certainly have the talent required to implement their own stuff, rather than spending ages decompiling some DVD player maker's code.
My guess is that there have been MPlayer developers poking at a number of systems looking to see if people have been swiping MPlayer code ever since the last big violation.
Now, it's an issue of ego and anger where it could have been a largely uninvolved and low key licence dispute.
I can't agree. MPlayer contains code from a *lot* of people (including me, and I hadn't even heard of all this until the Slashdot story). This code was GPL-licensed. The MPlayer core team does not have the legal ability to provide a non-GPLed license to MPlayer, unfortunately, as they have integrated many patches and code from other folks.
There are only two options. First, the copyright holders (probably most of whom are mplayer core members) may simply let things slide if the company removes the code. Now, that doesn't mean that KISS is legally clear (doing that would be extremely difficult, requiring all involved copyright holders to agree not to sue KISS for their old code). However, it might just be a minor imperfection if KISS yanked things. The MPlayer team already tried this, KISS ignored them.
The other option is that KISS opens and GPLs their code. Since they probably cannot do this due to licensing agreements with another company, they're in an uncomfortable situation, and are likely to do whatever they can to squeeze out of it.
Keep in mind that MPlayer is a popular project to steal code from. This has happened before, more egregiously, by media code vendors. Most of the MPlayer developers have an extremely short tolerance for this. They were already pissed off after last time.
The good news is that KISS is probably fucked to some extent. The company may not die, but you have a huge piece of PR all over the place about how you are violating code licenses. Anyone reading this when researching the company when considering doing business with them is going to be awfully leery of getting involved. I wouldn't touch 'em with a ten foot pole -- there are better choices.
KISS trying to play off the fact that they use Linux is ridiculous. Lots of people use Linux in their systems -- it's a hella fast way to get up and running, and it doesn't make any difference in this case whether they were running CE or Linux.
Perhaps, though Microsoft might have licensed the IP to them. There's another IP issue, though.
I there is code in MPlayer that, while legal, violates the agreement that the DVD Consortium forces vendors to sign into (like bypassing region codes and whatnot). KISS Technology is supposed to be a DVD system vendor, and may have signed this document. If they are, in fact, in violation of their DVD Consortium license, the DVD Consortium may revoke their license.
So, here's my thinking: If the code in question is really as simple and trivial as claimed by the MPlayer folks, then why bother facing this Danish DVD group?
A couple of reasons:
* Principle. You wrote code, it was ripped off, person making money on it not only won't follow your license but refuses to admit that you wrote it. This is wildly frusterating.
* Prescedent. If companies get away with making money off of ripping off GPLed code here, more and more will do so. A clear message needs to be sent that ripping off the OSS community is not acceptable. If you do it and are found out, you will be run into the ground.
* Potential greater violations. The subtitle reader was picked up on because it was easy to see. Who knows what other code, potentially more advanced, might also have been stolen from MPlayer?
* The value of the code itself. Even if it isn't massively complex, that's still code that you wrote that was stolen.
* Prestige. The guy making money off this promptly claimed that perhaps the MPlayer team stole *his* code. MPlayer is a prominent open source project. This is not a good thing for open source.
There are at least four here in Pittsburgh that cover my area, one of which is Telerama.
Frankly, I think there are few geeks that aren't fed up with NAT. NAT is a last-ditch technical hack to avoid address exhaustion that has now turned into both a severe impediment to the reliable functioning of huge amounts of Internet-using software and into a tool to allow price discrimination between home and business users -- after all, home users don't need to do anything but fetch email and fetch web pages, right?
I agree entirely with the author. It's incredibly frusterating to work around what's happening on the Internet. There are a lot of ways to pull it off, but they themselves are hacks and frequently involve introducing inefficiencies.
The fact that NAT is being used as a security tool says more about the pitiful state of out-of-box Windows IP security than anything about its actual value.
I've seen articles written by many, many frusterated computer scientist types. Stuart Cheshire (author of the famous Bolo and has written a couple of nice articles) has a particularly vitrolic set of responses.
He's sick of having to troubleshoot problems introduced by other folks. I can understand that.
Frankly, I'd never get services with a provider that required me to pay extra for more IPs or tried to get me to use NAT. The ISP I use, Telerama considers unlimited IPs (though only two statics) to be part of the basic DSL home package, which I consider pretty much what folks should be expecting from their ISPs. They don't do any of this ridiculous port blocking that has become increasingly popular.
Yeesh. Walden isn't "back to nature"?
That scares me as to what you've run into that *is* "back to nature". I get a vague image of PETA meets the Amish or something.
Hey, his home page claims an *entire blog* devoted to non-Microsoft technologies. Intrigued, I cruised over there and was treated to gems like these:
How far behind is Mac gaming?
I had to laugh out loud when I saw MacWorld's hilarious "2003 Game Hall of Fame," which reads like a list of PC games past. Which games made the list, you ask? Well, you'll have to think back a bit, because most of them debuted on the PC one to three years before they hit the Mac. Here are the PC release dates for the mainstream games that made the list (even the bizarro choice, Noiz2sa ["most difficult-to-pronounce" game, duh] was out on the PC first, though I couldn't find a release date):
Zoo Tycoon - Released on the PC October 2001
Unreal Tournament 2003 - Released on the PC September 2002
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 - Released on the PC July 2002
Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - Released on the PC March 2002
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Desert Siege - Released on the PC March 2002
Dungeon Siege - Released on the PC April 2002
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - Released on the PC July 2003 (the sole simultaneous release)
The Operative: No One Lives Forever - Released on the PC November 2000
On the PC, we're playing newer versions of these games now (I actually have both Tiger Woods 2004 and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, for example). But the funniest part of this roundup, of course, is the section titled 'Best Place to Get Classic Games." Clearly, that would be the Mac. But serious game players have know this for some time, so it's not a huge surprise. I just think it's interesting to see it so clearly demonstrated.
posted 1/4/2004 10:55:32 PM
and
More egregiously, Apple still locks its customers into their proprietary music store and crappy AAC format.
(I wondered about this -- isn't WMA proprietary, and AAC open-speced as part of MPEG 4, or am I confused?)
Fair enough that there isn't a lot of stuff in Vorbis format out there.
But, on the other hand, how many people actually use WMA? Microsoft's been pushing it hard, but there has to be at *least* a hundred MP3s out there for each WMA.
Ack, never noticed annoying interesting encoding issues with ed2k urls and slashdot.
4 17 994CAC242547AD0B60A6CE5238AF|/
You'll need to remove the space between the 7 and the 9 -- slashdot mauls the text even not in a link. Sigh. Slashcode. Perhaps someone who's dealt with this before can figure out how to do a proper link.
ed2k://|file|RvB_Episode20_LoRes.avi|35229696|0
For those who can't get at the thing because nobody bothered to put up a torrent, here is an ed2k link.
Things aren't to the extent that they were in 1953, but there is still a decided difference between "girl" toys and "boy" toys. That doesn't mean everyone plays with just one or another, or that there isn't a gradient, or that there aren't toys that appeal to both girls and boys. However, the "Monster Oooze Factory" is going to sell better to boys, and the "Barbie Fun House" is going to sell better to girls.
I haven't really paid attention to Legos for years, but from what I've seen in your post and a brief glance at the Lego web site pretty much confirms my worries.
Legos was *always* about providing basic tools to build what you want. Building blocks were based on the same idea, but they allowed merely very vague, civil-style construction. Legos (well, at least Technics, which were the ones that I found interesting) allowed you to build all kinds of things -- a more friendly Erector set.
From what I see now, Legos have:
* Marketing tie-ins. If I could think of a single toy for which marketing tie-ins are actually detrimental, this has to be it. Why, why, why would you *ever* do this? Legos aren't just a puzzle -- hell, I rarely ever built the kit that you were "supposed" to build. They let you build what you want.
* Expense. I always found Legos to be disgustingly expensive as a kid, and they are much, much worse now. They really are just molded plastic, and patents aside, a company that specializes in selling lots of molded plastic should be good at doing so inexpensively. The only major changes might be slight materials change to improve grip and durability.
* The website sucks. Legos are one of the things for which a website could be incredibly valuable...and we have this annoying Flash monstrosity?
* Custom parts. Custom parts are a *terrible* idea. (You pointed out windshields. Actually, there were two windshield pieces that I remember that predated Technics. I think Space had a couple more. There are other ones, though.) Custom parts, including movie-tie-in parts, have a lot of disadvantages. They're frequently less useful outside of the kits they were designed around. They're probably much more expensive to produce. They inhibit the imagination component. When my childhood friend needed a custom part (say, a Technics rod 2.5 units long or so), he'd cut his own, with help from his father. The Pirate sets already had a lot of oddball parts. You don't need to make a perfectly colored Chevy door handle that's usable if you're, say, making a Chevy and nothing else.
* I remember that Legos used to have space, medival, pirate, and modern styles. Then Technics came. That's probably about where they should have stopped. More parts means more market fragmentation, more costs, and less nice interoperation. Most of these groups interoperated well with the others. Yes, Technic parts had holes in them, modern came with windshields, and medieval and pirate with trees and medieval-looking pieces, but that's about it. Just glancing at their page, they have "Advanced Designer", "Inventor", "TECHNIC", "Sports", "BIONICLE", "LEGO Racers", "Intelli-train", "Story Builder", "Spybotics", and "Mindstorms". These vary so much that it's much harder to use parts from different things together.
Here's my suggestions for the Lego folks. Not that I'm a brilliant marketing director, just that I know what I like and liked, and it sure as hell isn't what they're selling now.
* Evaluate the additional merchandise (watches, clothes, pens, etc). Dump anything not making money.
* Drop as many toy ranges as possible. Keep Mindstorms (which could be merged with Technics), and the basic four original kits. All types should be at least 90% effectively compatible with other kits, so that folks can amass large sets of compatible parts and go crazy building Lego things. Don't have more than 10% bizarre windshields in Space, or parrots in Pirate.
* Dump tie-in things. There are dolls and action figures that do a much better job of tie-ins than Legos. Legos are good because they're generic.
* You have a damned website and generic parts. Let people order (with some surcharge, perhaps 10%) custom kits of some minimum value (say, $50). This would appeal greatly to hardcore Lego fans. If they want just 300 10 unit rods, let them order that and that alone.
* You have a website. You have programs that let people design Lego c