Although the odds of winning are probably akin to playing the lottery, he's clearly only investing the lawyerly equivalent of a dollar in paying for his ticket.
And when you can't afford to put the signal on the air anymore, the ratio balances out perfectly... 0:0
Fortunately, this just isn't true. Your point implies that advertising is the only thing that funds content on the net. Anyone who was around prior to 1993 or so will tell you that while there might not have been as much content available, there was a lot less dross and a much higher signal to noise ratio.
Then in essence this software is rewritting a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright holder, is it not?
Not really, no. Think about the whole business about your right to make copies of other people's content. You don't have any. However, cacheing content is an integral part of how the web works. People who provide content know and understand this, and therefore provide it on that basis.
As a consequence, they are implicitly giving you permission to access that data and use it in a form that suits you, provided it's consistent with how the web generally works. (ie, accessed via client software on port 80.)
If providers object to that sort of copying of their content, they shouldn't put it on the web.
By putting something in the middle, you effectively are breaking that relationship.
I'm not doing anything of the sort. I followed a link that led me to a website. I don't have any sort of a relationship with the website's owner, yet he feels perfectly at liberty to pollute my desktop with his commercial bullshit.
Well, not on my desktop he doesn't.
You are now taking, but not giving in return.
I'm giving, all right. I'm giving my valuable time and attention to see what you have to say. What makes you think your website is worth even that?
The business model isn't flawed. Just because someone can come up with a way for you to steal content (effectively what this is).
It's nothing of the sort. You flatter yourself by thinking your content has any economic value. Perhaps if it *really* did, you wouldn't have to hawk it on the web. People would want to pay you real cash money directly for it.
doesn't mean that the business model is flawed.
In that case, you'll have nothing at all to worry about, will you?
And I noticed that you didn't bother to address any of the parent's other claims concerning invalidation of the open-source development method, et al.
That's right, I didn't. I wasn't responding to the parent post. I was responding to your inaccurate characterisation of the post that *you* were responding to.
Making a claim about the user interface does naught for these points, which are fairly important ones.
I didn't see any comment at all about the open source development method in the parent post. Perhaps you could point this section out to me? All I saw were his comments about his experience of Linux on the desktop, which coincidentally happen to match my own.
No, that was 90meg for the *last* update. I've been through the same process many, many times since I installed it around a year ago. It seems as though every time I turn around, it needs all of Gnome updating.
When I ran RedHat, it was the same sort of deal. Check the updates folders of any of the major distros. None of them are particularly small.
2) See above. I meant to write 90megs but the point still holds.
3) I agree. That's why I put it in there. However, it doesn't take anything away from the original argument, which was about the linux vs. windows on the desktop.
Its implicit in his discussion of the user interface. Who the hell cares about the user interface on a linux server? It's a command line, fer christ's sake.
Except MacOSX has the same problems re: drivers and games, doesn't it?
Uh, no. No it doesn't have the same problems at all.
As apple makes the hardware, they also write the drivers for them. Alternatively, third party hardware developers also write their own drivers.
There may be a problem getting drivers for hardware that is only designed to run on x86 machines, but then I can't find drivers to run Sun's hardware on my Pentium either.
Your ignorance to the fact that Linux is a superior operating system in all spectrums of performance, security and above all else stability.
Sigh. OK, I run three operating systems. Linux on my server, OSX on my laptop and Win2k on my desktop. I have to say that I've never noticed that performance of linux on the desktop is superior to Windows. My experience has been exactly the contrary. Linux on the desktop is slow, unresponsive and until quite recently, somewhat flaky with poor font rendering and a pretty poor user interface.
And I'm not a new or occasional user of linux either. I've been running it steadily since MacLinux/LinuxPPC and RedHat 5.2 so I think I'm in a position to make an informed decision here.
Now I think XP and 2k are the better of the Windows line of operating systems but like anything from Microsoft its usually half done when you get it SP1 and soon to be SP2 did not and I suspect won't fix half the problems and security issues still to be found.
I'm currently running Mandrake 9 on my server, and I hadn't patched it for a few weeks, so I just did an update at the weekend. I downloaded over 90gig of patches and critical software updates. I suspect that in actual bandwidth, I've used far more updating Mandrake than I have updating Windows 2000. (Or I would have done if I hadn't had to reinstall Windows 2000 as often as I have.)
Leaves me puzzling why you even commented. I would much rather use a Linux desktop then XP anyday.
You must be a masochist. While I share your ideological preference for free software, it doesn't run any of the software that I want on my desktop, and as a user experience it really doesn't come close to being as user friendly as Windows 2000. It's sluggish, clunky and has a long way to go yet before I'd be happy to give up Windows 2000 -- and there's really nothing I'd like better than to be able to do that.
I couldn't agree more with you. There's a strange intellectual cowardlyness amongst a lot of geeks on this, which I think in part comes from their reluctance to step outside technical discussions.
I'm not sure that's true. Look at the number of comments on the Symantec/Gun Control thread compared with the comments on this one.
Of course, I'm not sure what that means either. Perhaps that you have more wannabee geeks than real geeks reading Slashdot?
GPL puts up a barrier to closed source products which would like to use and improve GPL software in their own software
Deliberately so. That's precisely why it was written the way that it was.
Anyway, no one seems to be sure what the GPL says, you say no other people say yes, bla bla bla.
If you're having difficulty, can I suggest that you read the license? You get a copy with every single piece of GPL'ed software. It seems pretty clear to me, but there are a whole load of people who want to hijack other people's work without observing the licensing terms who wish it weren't so.
Maybe some of these gpl cases need to be debated in a court room.
SCO vs. IBM. Coming soon to a courthouse near you.
No. It's "free as in if you don't do what we'll say, we'll sue you back into the stone age."
Don't like the terms? Don't use the code. How easy can that be?
The GPL is just as draconian as anything the RIAA has done to date. Don't you ever forget that.
Don't be such a dimwit. When I can take a copy of the latest Britney Spears album and make as many copies as I like, provided I also distribute the sheet music with it, then your comparison might make some sense.
So companies such as IBM, SUN, SGI and dozens of other smaller companies would have to pay $799, per cpu, for Linux license.
Well, they'd either have to do that, or they'd have to stop using/paying for SCO software. Or stop using Linux. Does IBM etc. still pay an ongoing license fee to SCO? I thought that they'd paid for a license in perpetuity and therefore they wouldn't be a SCO customer any more. But as far as those companies like Sun and Microsoft who seem to be paying them license fees for something that is arguably in the public domain, then yes, I'd be quite happy to force those companies to choose sides. Go with the past, or go with the future.
After all, I don't see Apple paying SCO any money for a license, and they seem to have a perfectly functional operating system running on a generic unix base.
is that going to help GNU/Linux in any way? For IBM to run Linux on 16,000 processor box would cost almost $13 Million.
I believe it would help linux, yes. I believe that it would do so in a number of ways. Firstly, I think it would finally bankrupt SCO and that would help linux and open source software no end. Secondly, it would encourage these companies to put all of their unix efforts into developing for Open Source un*xes, rather than continuing to maintain their legacy closed source software. Finally, it would also send a very clear message to those people who seek to steal open source software and hijack it for their own purposes that the linux community isn't going to take it lying down. Yet again, linux (and by extension, all of us) are the winners.
I'd actually argue that by failing to do this, the open source community is sending a message to certain predatory people that says 'you can screw us over all you like. Try and steal our software, we don't mind. We're happy to let you steal a public good because no single person actually benefits from its ownership.' Sometimes, freedom has to be defended with every tool at your disposal and I believe that this is one of those occasions.
Now, are you sure you got flame
I think you can see by the way that your post has been moderated that there are clearly some deeply irrational people who post to Slashdot. So yes, it was very definitely a flame.
I'd have welcomed the sort of discussion around it that you're engaged in because even if it *is* a bad idea, it's very hard for me to see why it isn't one that isn't worth exploring.
Speaking of hypocracy, I'm inclined towards the view that this whole thread is the result of us being trolled by a hypocrite.
Lets just flip the thing on it's head for a moment. Assuming that the original poster believes that the RIAA has the moral right to pursue the actions that it pursues, then surely nobody could have any problem at all finding SCO's actions despicable and reprehensible.
However, the parent poster's response isn't to get angry about that, but rather his immediate emotion is to laugh about the situation.
I have to say, that doesn't strike me as the response of somebody genuinely concerned about the equitable pursuit of copyright violations. Rather, it strikes me as the typical attitude of a troll -- and a somewhat successful troll at that.
Equally, your argument is somewhat flawed; the whole point of this SCO hoo har is too decide WHO has the copyrights to apsects of the linux OS - wether code was stolen which was SCO code, which by implication would give SCO ownership of parts of Linux.
Well, SCO might have said that (along with many other obfuscating things) in their press releases. but they don't appear to be making such a claim in their IBM law suit.
If their recent filings to the court are true, they don't appear to actually *have* any examples of "stolen code" that they can point to.
Apparently, they seem to think that it's IBM's job to produce that for them.
Well, I said it right at the very beginning of this law suit and had the pants flamed off me for having the termerity to suggest it, but if I were either Linus or the FSF, I'd be adding a rider to my licenses that they can be used by anybody with the exception of SCO, who should have no right at all to distribute GPL'd software, and customers of SCO, who could only use it if they were prepared to pay $799 per processor to the Free Software Foundation.
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Then Mr Boies comes out looking as good as he did when Al Gore lost in Florida, but a little bit poorer.
This probably explains why he's allocated his most retarded and junior staff to work on the case.
Although the odds of winning are probably akin to playing the lottery, he's clearly only investing the lawyerly equivalent of a dollar in paying for his ticket.
And when you can't afford to put the signal on the air anymore, the ratio balances out perfectly... 0:0
Fortunately, this just isn't true. Your point implies that advertising is the only thing that funds content on the net. Anyone who was around prior to 1993 or so will tell you that while there might not have been as much content available, there was a lot less dross and a much higher signal to noise ratio.
They don't talk about the September that never ended for no reason.
Then in essence this software is rewritting a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright holder, is it not?
Not really, no. Think about the whole business about your right to make copies of other people's content. You don't have any. However, cacheing content is an integral part of how the web works. People who provide content know and understand this, and therefore provide it on that basis.
As a consequence, they are implicitly giving you permission to access that data and use it in a form that suits you, provided it's consistent with how the web generally works. (ie, accessed via client software on port 80.)
If providers object to that sort of copying of their content, they shouldn't put it on the web.
Gee, you sound like an asshole.
He sounds pretty smart to me.
In fact, I think I'd rather not welcome you to my site anymore. Would you mind giving me your IP address so I can block it at the firewall?
Ooh, can you do mine while you're at it as well?
By putting something in the middle, you effectively are breaking that relationship.
I'm not doing anything of the sort. I followed a link that led me to a website. I don't have any sort of a relationship with the website's owner, yet he feels perfectly at liberty to pollute my desktop with his commercial bullshit.
Well, not on my desktop he doesn't.
You are now taking, but not giving in return.
I'm giving, all right. I'm giving my valuable time and attention to see what you have to say. What makes you think your website is worth even that?
The business model isn't flawed. Just because someone can come up with a way for you to steal content (effectively what this is).
It's nothing of the sort. You flatter yourself by thinking your content has any economic value. Perhaps if it *really* did, you wouldn't have to hawk it on the web. People would want to pay you real cash money directly for it.
doesn't mean that the business model is flawed.
In that case, you'll have nothing at all to worry about, will you?
Whose an ass?
No, Who's on first, What's on second, I don't know is on third.
Leave the censoring and content-filtering out of a basic security product
Ads aren't content. Ads are anti-content. Ad-blocking software isn't censorship, its a feature for increasing the signal to noise ratio.
To anyone who isn't trying to sell me something I don't want, this is extremely obvious.
And I noticed that you didn't bother to address any of the parent's other claims concerning invalidation of the open-source development method, et al.
That's right, I didn't. I wasn't responding to the parent post. I was responding to your inaccurate characterisation of the post that *you* were responding to.
Making a claim about the user interface does naught for these points, which are fairly important ones.
I didn't see any comment at all about the open source development method in the parent post. Perhaps you could point this section out to me? All I saw were his comments about his experience of Linux on the desktop, which coincidentally happen to match my own.
No, that was 90meg for the *last* update. I've been through the same process many, many times since I installed it around a year ago. It seems as though every time I turn around, it needs all of Gnome updating.
When I ran RedHat, it was the same sort of deal. Check the updates folders of any of the major distros. None of them are particularly small.
You can't "act" like a monopoly. You either are one or not
Well, I suppose you *can* act like one. But it's pretty damn stupid if you don't happen to be one.
A bit like SCO with their 'monopoly' over unix licenses, in fact.
No I didn't, I just couldn't be bothered.
Google for OSX and games. There's no shortage.
1) I agree. That's why I still run 2000.
2) See above. I meant to write 90megs but the point still holds.
3) I agree. That's why I put it in there. However, it doesn't take anything away from the original argument, which was about the linux vs. windows on the desktop.
Sorry, I meant to write 90 megs.
I'm a dumbass.
Its implicit in his discussion of the user interface. Who the hell cares about the user interface on a linux server? It's a command line, fer christ's sake.
How many times since 5.1 have you bought their distro?
I've never bought a copy of Windows either. Do you think that perhaps Microsoft might decide to pack up and go home now as well?
Perhaps we need a RedHat tax on each computer sold?
Except MacOSX has the same problems re: drivers and games, doesn't it?
Uh, no. No it doesn't have the same problems at all.
As apple makes the hardware, they also write the drivers for them. Alternatively, third party hardware developers also write their own drivers.
There may be a problem getting drivers for hardware that is only designed to run on x86 machines, but then I can't find drivers to run Sun's hardware on my Pentium either.
Your ignorance to the fact that Linux is a superior operating system in all spectrums of performance, security and above all else stability.
Sigh. OK, I run three operating systems. Linux on my server, OSX on my laptop and Win2k on my desktop. I have to say that I've never noticed that performance of linux on the desktop is superior to Windows. My experience has been exactly the contrary. Linux on the desktop is slow, unresponsive and until quite recently, somewhat flaky with poor font rendering and a pretty poor user interface.
And I'm not a new or occasional user of linux either. I've been running it steadily since MacLinux/LinuxPPC and RedHat 5.2 so I think I'm in a position to make an informed decision here.
Now I think XP and 2k are the better of the Windows line of operating systems but like anything from Microsoft its usually half done when you get it SP1 and soon to be SP2 did not and I suspect won't fix half the problems and security issues still to be found.
I'm currently running Mandrake 9 on my server, and I hadn't patched it for a few weeks, so I just did an update at the weekend. I downloaded over 90gig of patches and critical software updates. I suspect that in actual bandwidth, I've used far more updating Mandrake than I have updating Windows 2000. (Or I would have done if I hadn't had to reinstall Windows 2000 as often as I have.)
Leaves me puzzling why you even commented. I would much rather use a Linux desktop then XP anyday.
You must be a masochist. While I share your ideological preference for free software, it doesn't run any of the software that I want on my desktop, and as a user experience it really doesn't come close to being as user friendly as Windows 2000. It's sluggish, clunky and has a long way to go yet before I'd be happy to give up Windows 2000 -- and there's really nothing I'd like better than to be able to do that.
I couldn't agree more with you. There's a strange intellectual cowardlyness amongst a lot of geeks on this, which I think in part comes from their reluctance to step outside technical discussions.
I'm not sure that's true. Look at the number of comments on the Symantec/Gun Control thread compared with the comments on this one.
Of course, I'm not sure what that means either. Perhaps that you have more wannabee geeks than real geeks reading Slashdot?
This prompts me to return to my normal mode of never posting anything to slashdot, or anywhere else on the internet
Promises, promises...
GPL puts up a barrier to closed source products which would like to use and improve GPL software in their own software
Deliberately so. That's precisely why it was written the way that it was.
Anyway, no one seems to be sure what the GPL says, you say no other people say yes, bla bla bla.
If you're having difficulty, can I suggest that you read the license? You get a copy with every single piece of GPL'ed software. It seems pretty clear to me, but there are a whole load of people who want to hijack other people's work without observing the licensing terms who wish it weren't so.
Maybe some of these gpl cases need to be debated in a court room.
SCO vs. IBM. Coming soon to a courthouse near you.
No. It's "free as in if you don't do what we'll say, we'll sue you back into the stone age."
Don't like the terms? Don't use the code. How easy can that be?
The GPL is just as draconian as anything the RIAA has done to date. Don't you ever forget that.
Don't be such a dimwit. When I can take a copy of the latest Britney Spears album and make as many copies as I like, provided I also distribute the sheet music with it, then your comparison might make some sense.
Sigh! When will I learn to stop feeding trolls...
So companies such as IBM, SUN, SGI and dozens of other smaller companies would have to pay $799, per cpu, for Linux license.
Well, they'd either have to do that, or they'd have to stop using/paying for SCO software. Or stop using Linux. Does IBM etc. still pay an ongoing license fee to SCO? I thought that they'd paid for a license in perpetuity and therefore they wouldn't be a SCO customer any more. But as far as those companies like Sun and Microsoft who seem to be paying them license fees for something that is arguably in the public domain, then yes, I'd be quite happy to force those companies to choose sides. Go with the past, or go with the future.
After all, I don't see Apple paying SCO any money for a license, and they seem to have a perfectly functional operating system running on a generic unix base.
is that going to help GNU/Linux in any way? For IBM to run Linux on 16,000 processor box would cost almost $13 Million.
I believe it would help linux, yes. I believe that it would do so in a number of ways. Firstly, I think it would finally bankrupt SCO and that would help linux and open source software no end. Secondly, it would encourage these companies to put all of their unix efforts into developing for Open Source un*xes, rather than continuing to maintain their legacy closed source software. Finally, it would also send a very clear message to those people who seek to steal open source software and hijack it for their own purposes that the linux community isn't going to take it lying down. Yet again, linux (and by extension, all of us) are the winners.
I'd actually argue that by failing to do this, the open source community is sending a message to certain predatory people that says 'you can screw us over all you like. Try and steal our software, we don't mind. We're happy to let you steal a public good because no single person actually benefits from its ownership.' Sometimes, freedom has to be defended with every tool at your disposal and I believe that this is one of those occasions. Now, are you sure you got flame
I think you can see by the way that your post has been moderated that there are clearly some deeply irrational people who post to Slashdot. So yes, it was very definitely a flame.
I'd have welcomed the sort of discussion around it that you're engaged in because even if it *is* a bad idea, it's very hard for me to see why it isn't one that isn't worth exploring.
I'm primarily upset by their hypocracy
Speaking of hypocracy, I'm inclined towards the view that this whole thread is the result of us being trolled by a hypocrite.
Lets just flip the thing on it's head for a moment. Assuming that the original poster believes that the RIAA has the moral right to pursue the actions that it pursues, then surely nobody could have any problem at all finding SCO's actions despicable and reprehensible.
However, the parent poster's response isn't to get angry about that, but rather his immediate emotion is to laugh about the situation.
I have to say, that doesn't strike me as the response of somebody genuinely concerned about the equitable pursuit of copyright violations. Rather, it strikes me as the typical attitude of a troll -- and a somewhat successful troll at that.
Equally, your argument is somewhat flawed; the whole point of this SCO hoo har is too decide WHO has the copyrights to apsects of the linux OS - wether code was stolen which was SCO code, which by implication would give SCO ownership of parts of Linux.
Well, SCO might have said that (along with many other obfuscating things) in their press releases. but they don't appear to be making such a claim in their IBM law suit.
If their recent filings to the court are true, they don't appear to actually *have* any examples of "stolen code" that they can point to.
Apparently, they seem to think that it's IBM's job to produce that for them.
Well, I said it right at the very beginning of this law suit and had the pants flamed off me for having the termerity to suggest it, but if I were either Linus or the FSF, I'd be adding a rider to my licenses that they can be used by anybody with the exception of SCO, who should have no right at all to distribute GPL'd software, and customers of SCO, who could only use it if they were prepared to pay $799 per processor to the Free Software Foundation.