This is not true. The GPL specifically addresses patents -- it if you cannot grant all the rights under the GPL (right to produce derivate works and the like) you cannot GPL your code.
That being said, it would still be a pain in the ass for the GPL-using world, since we'd have to go back and rewrite code, but there would be no liability for anyone other than the person trying to insert patent-infringing code.
See, the difference between corporations and a community of people is that:
(a) There is no single atomic point where a "partner/foe" evaluation is made.
(b) Communities actually care about percieved relationships and treatments, and have a long memory. Every bias and irritation from years of experience comes out, because there's no requirement to "present a corporate front".
(c) If you have screwed people over quite a bit, you will pay for it for a long, long time in attacks, even when unjustified. Microsoft screwed a *lot* of people over for a long time (not that they've stopped). As a result, a lot of people really don't like Microsoft, and will bash them for anything they do (take SP2 as an example).
This means that there is no "person" who Unisys can win over to win over the open source world. Not ESR, not RMS, not Linus, not Perens, Lessig or PJ. It will take a long time and a lot of nice treatment for a long time, and probably be very discouraging.
If you want someone to support your platform, to write documentation for it and to avoid introducing compatibility issues, and they are doing this in their *hobby time*, then they have to feel rather friendly toward you. Unisys has spent years screwing people over in a rather unjustified manner. They wasted the time of *many* open source developers and users in the form of removed and disabled features, legal problems, anguished discussions, reformatting images, information campaigns, debugging software ported to PNG and other alternatives, and so forth.
So, is it impossible for Unisys to get OSS people to like them? No. Are there people in the OSS community that don't have any problem with them? Sure. Is it going to be long, hard and expensive (much more expensive than all the money they got from the GIF licensing stuff)? Probably.
The "convergence" move arose out of the success of the PC. The idea is that general purpose devices can work really well, and allow reuse of components. The problem is that the reason the PC did well is because it was open, general purpose, reconfigurable, and available from many sources. There is no General Purpose Cell Phone 2004 Standard. I can't just buy a "phone platform" and replace parts in it from another vendor. Instead, I have to buy an increasingly expensive, proprietary and complex system. On a PC, I can tone down complexity -- on a cell, I have to use whatever I'm offered.
On a "converged" open platform like the PC, I don't lose choice over what I buy. I might like WinAMP over Sonique, Wordperfect over Word, and Firefox over Internet Explorer. That's okay, because I can still pick and choose the elements of my converged device. On a closed (i.e. unsuccessful) converged platform, this is not the case. Cell providers sell these all-in-one packages, where one must use every element of one of several packages -- you either get phone model Foo or phone model Baz.
The same goes for game platforms, set-top/cable boxes, watches, and so on, and so forth.
You might find a young American lawyer that "works" 100 hours a week, but he sure as hell isn't getting 100 hours of work done a week.
I'd say that, if anything, Americans already understand the philosophy of slacking better than the French. However, the French keep resource usage in check by simply not letting you buy as many goods (require others to do as much work). In the US, you are kept at your place of employment to keep you from spending that time consuming goods.
Relative pay depends more on the fact that the US has a more advanced set of marketers than the French, and thus generates more sales to foreign consumers.
It would go some way to show there is some kind of justice in the world.
You clearly haven't read enough Dilbert.
"Political grafitti artist"
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 2, Funny
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job that allows you to sit in a padded adjustible height chair and browse the internet, you are probably already better off than the vast majority of humanity....And if you are going to slack, slack productively! Become an activist or a political grafitti artist or something so the rest of us slobs have something amusing to look out on through our windows.
"Oh, yes, and sir, the VP of international business development is out spraypainting our walls with 'Terrorists must die!' again."
I used to work at an English-language newspaper in central Europe and we made the editorial decision to stop capitalizing in late 2002. Yes, yes we all knew about the 'an internet (network of networks) vs. the Internet' argument, but in the end, we dropped the capital to keep better consistency with the rules of English grammar -- i.e. that it's more akin to 'the sun' than to 'the Queen'.
The Sun is often capitalized, and it is certainly at least as correct as "sun" when referring to that star about which we are orbiting.
Of course, for techies, using the term "Sun" capitalized poses a risk of confusion with a large technology company...
In astronomical parlance, you are correct. Or if you are Roman. However "Moon" is, in common English, the correct proper noun to refer to the single moon that circles Earth.
Ironically enough, the Midwest is not even close to being the middle of the west -- the origins date to colonial times, so the Midwest is actually in the northeastern part of the United States.
I never found a reason to capitalize works like internet, web, etc. unless grammar demanded it (like starting a sentence). The question now is, how long is it going to take the rest of the world to catch on.
Cruel world, isn't it? I'm sure the Ebonics people sympathize with your plight.
Actually, if you're just trying to be Wired (which means being relentlessly hip to try to avoid losing their self-assumed position as authority on Internet culture), there's a fair number of predictable "next moves":
Internet becomes "iNet". This is to fit with Apple's product naming scheme, which is cool, and therefore something that Wired is terribly concerned about associating itself with.
"I see" becomes "i c". Wired constantly promotes the claim that the Internet (oops, sorry -- "internet") is going to completely drive our lives and our culture, and currently most authorship is done via chat. What better way to argue their point than to let themselves be completely swayed by typos and shortcuts from chat?
Micropayments are "hip", so Wired stops selling "subscriptions" and starts selling "micropayments in twelve chunk block minimums".
"Internet time", or "beats" (a desperate attempt by Swatch, who has put every useful gadget and more onto a watch, to produce new required features to drive watch sales) will be adopted by Wired. I'm not sure that "beats" are hip or not, but they're certainly stupid and Internet culture-oriented, so Wired should love them. They can say "It took me @45 to write this article".
Wired will no longer refer to themselves as a "magazine". "Magazines" are pre-Internet culture, and "'zine" is only marginally more "hip". No, tablet computers are "hip", and so Wired will sell "paper tablets".
Speaking of "'zine", almost any word can be made more hip by chopping some prefix off and replacing the prefix with an apostrophe. We know this because a couple of sci fi authors have done this. Therefore, I won't "Download and read Wired on the Internet by 4:00 PM". Instead, I'll "'nload 'n rez wired on the internet by @3452". Where would we be without Wired for entertainment?
The internet was never a brand name, thus, there was no need to capitalize it.
Capitalization is determined by whether or not something is a proper noun, not by whether it is a brand name. The Internet is a proper noun, as opposed to "the internet", which would refer to, say, one's private corporate internet.
If you'd like other examples: nobody owns the "Pacific Ocean", but because there is only one "Pacific Ocean" (despite being many oceans that could be called pacific) we capitalize it. There are many moons, but only one Moon. There are many presidents, but President as a title is capitalized, because it is used as a proper noun.
The proper way to refer to Google is "Google" when using the term as a noun -- it is a proper noun that refers to a company. The *verb* "google", meaning "to search for on Google", is not capitalized.
I can run this just fine over my local network. A number of even things like interactive network games use TCP. It's true that UDP and a fancy scheduling engine might improve performance, but it's hardly unusable with just TCP, at least over links that aren't overloaded.
(a) Nobody cares. Nobody, most of all Wired (which tries to coin terms and screw with the language unsuccessfully on a very frequent basis) has the ability to just decree that everyone is going to change capitalization or spelling of a word. The includes dictionaries -- they just codify common usage.
(b) Insofar as there is a correct way of doing things, "Internet" should be capitalized. We use "the Internet". It is a proper noun (which, surprise surprise, should be capitalized) that refers to something quite different from "an internet" -- I can build "an internet" running IPX attaching a couple of networks, but "the Internet" runs IP and is a rather large entity that currently spans the world.
(c) I hate journalists that try to leave their mark on the world by affecting the language.
(d) Tell you what. I think that there's "no reason to capitalize 'Wired'" -- after all, there's another term, "wired", which exists, and surely we should just merge the two. So from now on, "Wired" can be referred to as "wired". Of course, the newly-redubbed "wired" people will probably take issue with this, as it's confusing and doesn't gain anything, and violates English rules, but I want to get my name out there on etymologies for mucking with a word. It's "wired" now. Oh, and "Tony Long", the editor pushing this? He can be "tony long", or just "long" for short.
Microsoft: "Hi there! I'm Microsoft, and I just want to play friendly and build up value for my own products. I have no interest in your markets. You don't have to worry about us!"
The number of companies that have been subsequently crushed or eaten goes on and on and on...
Would you summarize the points on which your license differs frommajor OSS licenses, such as the BSD license and the GPL? With respect to patents, just to clarify the license: if I choose to take a chunk of source code from Ingres, modify it, and incorporate it into another open source project, does the license you are using provide me with assurance that I am not infringing upon patents, as the GPL does?
How do you intend to compete with Postgres and MySQL? If I search for "Postgres" and "Postgresql" on freshmeat.net, I turn up about 400 hits, and for "MySQL" about 1200 hits -- "Ingres" turns up merely 4 hits. That's an awful lot of established projects using the Big Two open source databases. These two have been in place for a while now, and has attracted a tremendous amount of development interest -- and developers generally hack on what they actually use. There is a lot of existing Postgres/MySQL experience in place. How do you intend to bridge this gap? Or do you intend to do so -- is that a goal of interest?
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This is not true. The GPL specifically addresses patents -- it if you cannot grant all the rights under the GPL (right to produce derivate works and the like) you cannot GPL your code.
That being said, it would still be a pain in the ass for the GPL-using world, since we'd have to go back and rewrite code, but there would be no liability for anyone other than the person trying to insert patent-infringing code.
You would really think that a product name like that would be a Dilbertism, but no, it's a real thing.
See, the difference between corporations and a community of people is that:
(a) There is no single atomic point where a "partner/foe" evaluation is made.
(b) Communities actually care about percieved relationships and treatments, and have a long memory. Every bias and irritation from years of experience comes out, because there's no requirement to "present a corporate front".
(c) If you have screwed people over quite a bit, you will pay for it for a long, long time in attacks, even when unjustified. Microsoft screwed a *lot* of people over for a long time (not that they've stopped). As a result, a lot of people really don't like Microsoft, and will bash them for anything they do (take SP2 as an example).
This means that there is no "person" who Unisys can win over to win over the open source world. Not ESR, not RMS, not Linus, not Perens, Lessig or PJ. It will take a long time and a lot of nice treatment for a long time, and probably be very discouraging.
If you want someone to support your platform, to write documentation for it and to avoid introducing compatibility issues, and they are doing this in their *hobby time*, then they have to feel rather friendly toward you. Unisys has spent years screwing people over in a rather unjustified manner. They wasted the time of *many* open source developers and users in the form of removed and disabled features, legal problems, anguished discussions, reformatting images, information campaigns, debugging software ported to PNG and other alternatives, and so forth.
So, is it impossible for Unisys to get OSS people to like them? No. Are there people in the OSS community that don't have any problem with them? Sure. Is it going to be long, hard and expensive (much more expensive than all the money they got from the GIF licensing stuff)? Probably.
The "convergence" move arose out of the success of the PC. The idea is that general purpose devices can work really well, and allow reuse of components. The problem is that the reason the PC did well is because it was open, general purpose, reconfigurable, and available from many sources. There is no General Purpose Cell Phone 2004 Standard. I can't just buy a "phone platform" and replace parts in it from another vendor. Instead, I have to buy an increasingly expensive, proprietary and complex system. On a PC, I can tone down complexity -- on a cell, I have to use whatever I'm offered.
On a "converged" open platform like the PC, I don't lose choice over what I buy. I might like WinAMP over Sonique, Wordperfect over Word, and Firefox over Internet Explorer. That's okay, because I can still pick and choose the elements of my converged device. On a closed (i.e. unsuccessful) converged platform, this is not the case. Cell providers sell these all-in-one packages, where one must use every element of one of several packages -- you either get phone model Foo or phone model Baz.
The same goes for game platforms, set-top/cable boxes, watches, and so on, and so forth.
Yeah, it is funny, because those workers were being subsidized by other US workers, non-autoworkers, like us.
You might find a young American lawyer that "works" 100 hours a week, but he sure as hell isn't getting 100 hours of work done a week.
I'd say that, if anything, Americans already understand the philosophy of slacking better than the French. However, the French keep resource usage in check by simply not letting you buy as many goods (require others to do as much work). In the US, you are kept at your place of employment to keep you from spending that time consuming goods.
Relative pay depends more on the fact that the US has a more advanced set of marketers than the French, and thus generates more sales to foreign consumers.
It would go some way to show there is some kind of justice in the world.
You clearly haven't read enough Dilbert.
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job that allows you to sit in a padded adjustible height chair and browse the internet, you are probably already better off than the vast majority of humanity....And if you are going to slack, slack productively! Become an activist or a political grafitti artist or something so the rest of us slobs have something amusing to look out on through our windows.
"Oh, yes, and sir, the VP of international business development is out spraypainting our walls with 'Terrorists must die!' again."
I never said "proper noun"; I said "proper name."
I'm aware of that.
I used to work at an English-language newspaper in central Europe and we made the editorial decision to stop capitalizing in late 2002. Yes, yes we all knew about the 'an internet (network of networks) vs. the Internet' argument, but in the end, we dropped the capital to keep better consistency with the rules of English grammar -- i.e. that it's more akin to 'the sun' than to 'the Queen'.
The Sun is often capitalized, and it is certainly at least as correct as "sun" when referring to that star about which we are orbiting.
Of course, for techies, using the term "Sun" capitalized poses a risk of confusion with a large technology company...
In astronomical parlance, you are correct. Or if you are Roman. However "Moon" is, in common English, the correct proper noun to refer to the single moon that circles Earth.
We're violently agreeing.
Wired defines "Mirriam-Webster" as "a bunch of pompous jackasses who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes". :-)
Ironically enough, the Midwest is not even close to being the middle of the west -- the origins date to colonial times, so the Midwest is actually in the northeastern part of the United States.
WiFi/802.11b/Wireless Ethernet
flat panel LCD/LCD/flat panel
TiVO/PVR
Red Hat/RedHat/Redhat
I never found a reason to capitalize works like internet, web, etc. unless grammar demanded it (like starting a sentence). The question now is, how long is it going to take the rest of the world to catch on.
Cruel world, isn't it? I'm sure the Ebonics people sympathize with your plight.
Actually, if you're just trying to be Wired (which means being relentlessly hip to try to avoid losing their self-assumed position as authority on Internet culture), there's a fair number of predictable "next moves":
Internet becomes "iNet". This is to fit with Apple's product naming scheme, which is cool, and therefore something that Wired is terribly concerned about associating itself with.
"I see" becomes "i c". Wired constantly promotes the claim that the Internet (oops, sorry -- "internet") is going to completely drive our lives and our culture, and currently most authorship is done via chat. What better way to argue their point than to let themselves be completely swayed by typos and shortcuts from chat?
Micropayments are "hip", so Wired stops selling "subscriptions" and starts selling "micropayments in twelve chunk block minimums".
"Internet time", or "beats" (a desperate attempt by Swatch, who has put every useful gadget and more onto a watch, to produce new required features to drive watch sales) will be adopted by Wired. I'm not sure that "beats" are hip or not, but they're certainly stupid and Internet culture-oriented, so Wired should love them. They can say "It took me @45 to write this article".
Wired will no longer refer to themselves as a "magazine". "Magazines" are pre-Internet culture, and "'zine" is only marginally more "hip". No, tablet computers are "hip", and so Wired will sell "paper tablets".
Speaking of "'zine", almost any word can be made more hip by chopping some prefix off and replacing the prefix with an apostrophe. We know this because a couple of sci fi authors have done this. Therefore, I won't "Download and read Wired on the Internet by 4:00 PM". Instead, I'll "'nload 'n rez wired on the internet by @3452". Where would we be without Wired for entertainment?
The internet was never a brand name, thus, there was no need to capitalize it.
Capitalization is determined by whether or not something is a proper noun, not by whether it is a brand name. The Internet is a proper noun, as opposed to "the internet", which would refer to, say, one's private corporate internet.
If you'd like other examples: nobody owns the "Pacific Ocean", but because there is only one "Pacific Ocean" (despite being many oceans that could be called pacific) we capitalize it. There are many moons, but only one Moon. There are many presidents, but President as a title is capitalized, because it is used as a proper noun.
The proper way to refer to Google is "Google" when using the term as a noun -- it is a proper noun that refers to a company. The *verb* "google", meaning "to search for on Google", is not capitalized.
I can run this just fine over my local network. A number of even things like interactive network games use TCP. It's true that UDP and a fancy scheduling engine might improve performance, but it's hardly unusable with just TCP, at least over links that aren't overloaded.
(a) Nobody cares. Nobody, most of all Wired (which tries to coin terms and screw with the language unsuccessfully on a very frequent basis) has the ability to just decree that everyone is going to change capitalization or spelling of a word. The includes dictionaries -- they just codify common usage.
(b) Insofar as there is a correct way of doing things, "Internet" should be capitalized. We use "the Internet". It is a proper noun (which, surprise surprise, should be capitalized) that refers to something quite different from "an internet" -- I can build "an internet" running IPX attaching a couple of networks, but "the Internet" runs IP and is a rather large entity that currently spans the world.
(c) I hate journalists that try to leave their mark on the world by affecting the language.
(d) Tell you what. I think that there's "no reason to capitalize 'Wired'" -- after all, there's another term, "wired", which exists, and surely we should just merge the two. So from now on, "Wired" can be referred to as "wired". Of course, the newly-redubbed "wired" people will probably take issue with this, as it's confusing and doesn't gain anything, and violates English rules, but I want to get my name out there on etymologies for mucking with a word. It's "wired" now. Oh, and "Tony Long", the editor pushing this? He can be "tony long", or just "long" for short.
I regularly use floppies because it's easier to plop in a floppy, copy one file and pop out the floppy
Remember, kids, Don't Copy That Floppy!
Yeah, this hasn't ever happened before:
Microsoft: "Hi there! I'm Microsoft, and I just want to play friendly and build up value for my own products. I have no interest in your markets. You don't have to worry about us!"
The number of companies that have been subsequently crushed or eaten goes on and on and on...
Would you summarize the points on which your license differs frommajor OSS licenses, such as the BSD license and the GPL? With respect to patents, just to clarify the license: if I choose to take a chunk of source code from Ingres, modify it, and incorporate it into another open source project, does the license you are using provide me with assurance that I am not infringing upon patents, as the GPL does?
Can you give us some idea of the pricing on the support packages, or will these be negotiated on a case-by-case basis?
How do you intend to compete with Postgres and MySQL? If I search for "Postgres" and "Postgresql" on freshmeat.net, I turn up about 400 hits, and for "MySQL" about 1200 hits -- "Ingres" turns up merely 4 hits. That's an awful lot of established projects using the Big Two open source databases. These two have been in place for a while now, and has attracted a tremendous amount of development interest -- and developers generally hack on what they actually use. There is a lot of existing Postgres/MySQL experience in place. How do you intend to bridge this gap? Or do you intend to do so -- is that a goal of interest?