Come on, do any developers actually think this is a good idea? No?
According to the article, Bruce Perens thinks it's a good idea.
However, there's also an implication that he's providing consulting services to the company.
Which is not to say that there's a direct causal relationship between one thing and the other. I presume that Perens wouldn't be selling his expertise unless he thought it was a good idea in the first place.
That said though, I have no idea whether Bruce Perens is a developer. All I know about him is that he's a guy who posts to Slashdot sometimes, but I presume what credibility he has stems from the fact that he once did something that some coders think highly of.
The perception of a problem isn't worth arguing about.
I have to say, I don't like this idea any more than you do. It seems to me to be an attempt to cash in by building a business on the back of SCO's lawsuit.
But I think you're dead wrong about the perception of a problem. The 'perception' of a problem was what caused the invasion of Iraq. The fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction didn't mean a goddamned thing to all those people who were bombed and shot in the process, because the perception was that those weapons actually existed somewhere -- it was just a matter of finding them.
IANAL either, but the difference is obvious. If you gave everyone that bought your novel the right to reproduce it, that right is also revoked. He can't sue for mere possession, but he can sue for copyright infringement, since that right is now null and void.
While what you say is strictly true, it ignores a basic principle of tort law, which is that the reason for bringing a law suit is to recover one's damages.
So even if someone does copy a code fragment into something else, before the copyright owner can go around suing other people, they have to be able to show that that they've sufferered economic loss as a result of that person's actions.
Therefore, if I take a code fragment from your desktop publishing software, and incorporate it into my music sequencing software, how do you -- as a company -- suffer economic loss as a consequence of my using that software?
There's a quantifiable loss from the company who wrote the music sequencing software, because they should have licensed the code and would be paying royalties, so that one is easy. The end user issue just isn't that straightforward -- which is why SCO is suing companies that had a prior financial relationship with them. ie, they used to use SCO unix, now they use Linux, so by using Linux they deprive SCO of their sales.
But think back to the issue over the compression routines in gifs. Did anyone argue that end users should be sued because they were using software that made use of the patented compression routines? Of course not, because they weren't responsible for any financial loss to the company, therefore there wasn't any form of appropriate redress.
Ultimately, I believe that this point will emerge during the course of SCO's current lawsuits against end users but SCO are bringing the lawsuits in the hope of striking fear into the heart of other corporate end users in the hope of either persuading millions of linux users to stump up for a license, or as part of the information war in their pump and dump stock scheme.
But why would they want to expend them on something with such a HUGE and totally unpredictable risk.
Ah, Darl. It's good to see that you've finally got yourself a real account to do your Astroturfing from. Congratulations...
More seriously though, why do you suppose that the risk is either huge or completely unpredictable? Just because you don't have the personal capacity to quantify the risk in this manner, that doesn't mean that it isn't doable.
The average person would think that earthquake insurance in California is a huge and unquantifiable risk, but insurers still manage to quantify that risk for all of their customers, every year.
And why would they do that? Because it's a profitable activity, of course.
Well that would've been a better idea. Just force spammers via the law to label all their spam in the subject line with a common word like "[UBE]" or "[ADULT]".
I've got a better idea yet. Force all the spammers to label all their spam [SPAM] and we're all set.
And fewer still are old enough to remember the works of H. Rider Haggard (which is where Rumpole's author, John Mortimer originally appropriated it from.)
Yeah. And American friends have suggested that if I pay by credit card and fly British Airways, I almost certainly wouldn't have had this trouble, but I don't care. I don't see that how I pay and who I choose to fly with are anyone's business but my own -- and they certainly aren't issues I feel I need to account for.
Specifically if the immigration officer is an avid Fox news viewer, or a worshipper of pea brained blonde annorexic chicks who like to spew hate.
Perhaps it's different in other parts of the country -- I recall flying into Philidelphia and Orlando in the past and not finding this -- but my impressions of the immigration officers at JFK is that they are all like this.
They are always polite, but it is frustrating constantly being checked two, three times.
I don't mind being stopped and questioned. That's fine. What bothered me was the attitude of the original immigration guy, and then what I saw in the room where I was forced to wait for three hours, accompanied almost exclusively by people with brown skin, presumably from Islamic countries.
There was one other white guy among us (and I'd guess there were forty or fifty people waiting in this room) and he was someone I originally presumed was an Italian American because of his looks and his strong Brooklyn accent.
He'd been to Italy for a holiday and they were asking him if he'd ever been arrested. Apparently, he'd been arrested for something minor around thirty years before, and they were sending him back to Italy -- even though he'd lived in the USA since he was a kid.
The whole experience gave me some idea how those Jews must have felt when they were being shipped out of Europe, trying to get to the New World and the freedom they'd heard about, only to be confronted by bureaucrats who were happy to send them back to the gas chambers.
And I know that sounds like I'm overstating things, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that the experience was sufficiently unpleasant to stop me going back.
From a personal perspective: I've travelled the US about 15 times and spent a significant amount of my tourist Euro there.
In the words of the famous AOL subscriber, "Me too."
I've been to the USA at least twice a year for the last ten years. I was actually in NYC the Oct. after the WTC crash, because I wanted to support the NY hotel and tourist economy at that time. It was really peculiar and very moving to be in Greenwich Village at 10.00pm on a Thursday evening and see the streets deserted aside from a few homeless people and a handful of kids.
Last time I flew was November last year. Air tickets were cheap (around 200 return) so I paid cash. I also made the mistake of flying Air France because I couldn't get a BA flight.
On arrival, the immigration guy gave me the third degree. What was the purpose of my visit? What did I do for a living? Had I ever been arrested? (Answer: no.) What had I been arrested for?
It seems that my answers didn't satisfy him, because he escalated my case, sending me to the 'big room' in which mine was the only white face to be seen.
They kept me hanging around for about three hours, whereupon a senior official came along and asked me a more polite series of questions. (What was the purpose of my visit? Where was I staying? When would I be leaving, etc.) This lasted about two minutes and then they let me in.
Needless to say, I won't be going again. I love the USA and I have some very close friends who are Americans, but in future they can spend their dollars here in Europe, because I'll be fucked if I'm going back there without a significant regime change.
Which particular section of the US constitution are they referring to?
I don't recall anything in there about the right to spam, the right to install spyware or the write to take over someone else's computer in pursuit of the almighty dollar -- but as a UK citizen I admit to not having read it as closely as a US citizen may have done.
That was an apache vulnerability, not a core OS vulnerability.
Strictly speaking, you could say the same thing about the various SSH exploits that have been around as well, but I don't think I've ever owned a Linux box that would be useable without it. And you can't have it both ways. If Linux is a useable operating system, then it *isn't* just a kernel any more. It's the whole ball of wax.
This Mac OSX worm is a very different animal.
It's different in the sense that nobody has ever actually been infected by it. However, the existence of this particular design flaw has been known to pretty well everyone familiar with OSX since OSX was in beta. The decision to remove the old-style resource fork metadata and use Windows style file typing was actually the subject of enormously heated opposition for this very reason.
Why, do you suppose that Linux is somehow immune to worms and trojans? Perhaps you should tell all those people who were infected by the Ramen worm a while back that they needn't have bothered doing a clean install.
And I find it comforting that fetuses in these places are being made safe because their parents have guns to use in their defense against the advancing hordes.
Damn straight. Every prospective parent needs an Uzi or a Heckler and Koch submachine gun to fend off the tribes of forcible abortionists that are roaming the USA, whipping out fetuses while armed with nothing more than a twenty year old vaccum cleaners, a blunt knitting needle and a rusty sardine can lid.
And Praise the Lord for the existence of right-thinking patriots like you, with the forethought and insight to warn the population about this little known impending threat to future generations of Christian Americans.
Remember, if someone posing as a vaccuum cleaner salesman turns up at your door, it's almost certainly one of these forcible abortionists on a reconnaisance mission.
However, many, many people say it to themselves every time they download a piece of software and it doesn't run because it needs to be re-compiled on their platform.
Those would be dumb people, I take it? The same sort of people who go out and buy a piece of Windows software and expect it to run on a Mac?
"What do you mean, it's intended for a PC? My Powerbook belongs to me, so it's personal, and it's definitely a computer. Therefore it's a Personal Computer!"
So then they go to Best Buy and purchase something that runs, but crashes, but at least it runs.
Well, I tend to do some basic research on the software I want to use before I install it, but if I never bothered, I think I'd be a lot angrier about software that I'd paid for that didn't work, than I would about software that I'd downloaded for free that had a similar problem.
your chain of logic appears to be:
1. If you take the time and effort to acquaint yourself with something like great music, art, wine, whatever, then you might come to appreciate them.
Correct so far, yes.
2. Regardless of whether you come to appreciate them, your life will be enriched by them.
Not quite. It's more like this: even if you don't come to appreciate those things, your life is enriched by the process of enquiry. You understand yourself and the world a little better, which is inevitably enriching.
If you *do* come to enjoy them, then there's a whole world of interest and experience out there for you to explore -- a process that's also inevitably enriching.
I could spend that time and energy doing something else which, if you'll pardon the economic lingo, is more likely to give me a higher rate of return on the investment.
How do you evaluate that? I can see how you might think that you stand more chance of enjoying say, Motley Crue than Miles Davis, but unless you actually took the trouble to invest the time in understanding Miles, I don't know how you can evaluate the value of the reward that you'd get for your investment?
Maybe being able to identify the various subtle flavors in wine would be enriching in itself, but whatever pleasure that knowledge might give me would be massively outweighed by the extreme unpleasantness of having to taste all that wine.
It doesn't work that way. You really just have to educate your palate to enjoy one (or find one that you like), and then everything else is simply a comparison to that. Is it better or is it worse? If you never find one that you do like though, it's unlikely that you're going to taste a whole load more.
Why do you assume I'm the one having the problem, here?:)
I dunno. Perhaps because I think that your lack of interest in experiences that challenge your status quo are inevitably likely to result in an intellectually and emotionally impoverished life?
And if it was just you, it wouldn't be a problem at all, but it seems to be a major American tendency these days. Look, for example, at the number of books read per capita, and the various politicians that don't own a passport and are proud of never having left the USA. I think it's a tendency that is currently reducing a once great country to one dominated by paranoia and mediocrity.
I just hope you're still a young man, and will inevitably come to recognize how limiting this erroneous sort of thinking actually is. Because if you're over 25, then you really *do* have a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, do any developers actually think this is a good idea? No?
According to the article, Bruce Perens thinks it's a good idea.
However, there's also an implication that he's providing consulting services to the company.
Which is not to say that there's a direct causal relationship between one thing and the other. I presume that Perens wouldn't be selling his expertise unless he thought it was a good idea in the first place.
That said though, I have no idea whether Bruce Perens is a developer. All I know about him is that he's a guy who posts to Slashdot sometimes, but I presume what credibility he has stems from the fact that he once did something that some coders think highly of.
The perception of a problem isn't worth arguing about.
I have to say, I don't like this idea any more than you do. It seems to me to be an attempt to cash in by building a business on the back of SCO's lawsuit.
But I think you're dead wrong about the perception of a problem. The 'perception' of a problem was what caused the invasion of Iraq. The fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction didn't mean a goddamned thing to all those people who were bombed and shot in the process, because the perception was that those weapons actually existed somewhere -- it was just a matter of finding them.
IANAL either, but the difference is obvious. If you gave everyone that bought your novel the right to reproduce it, that right is also revoked. He can't sue for mere possession, but he can sue for copyright infringement, since that right is now null and void.
While what you say is strictly true, it ignores a basic principle of tort law, which is that the reason for bringing a law suit is to recover one's damages.
So even if someone does copy a code fragment into something else, before the copyright owner can go around suing other people, they have to be able to show that that they've sufferered economic loss as a result of that person's actions.
Therefore, if I take a code fragment from your desktop publishing software, and incorporate it into my music sequencing software, how do you -- as a company -- suffer economic loss as a consequence of my using that software?
There's a quantifiable loss from the company who wrote the music sequencing software, because they should have licensed the code and would be paying royalties, so that one is easy. The end user issue just isn't that straightforward -- which is why SCO is suing companies that had a prior financial relationship with them. ie, they used to use SCO unix, now they use Linux, so by using Linux they deprive SCO of their sales.
But think back to the issue over the compression routines in gifs. Did anyone argue that end users should be sued because they were using software that made use of the patented compression routines? Of course not, because they weren't responsible for any financial loss to the company, therefore there wasn't any form of appropriate redress.
Ultimately, I believe that this point will emerge during the course of SCO's current lawsuits against end users but SCO are bringing the lawsuits in the hope of striking fear into the heart of other corporate end users in the hope of either persuading millions of linux users to stump up for a license, or as part of the information war in their pump and dump stock scheme.
IANAL, but I(love)ANAL.
But why would they want to expend them on something with such a HUGE and totally unpredictable risk.
Ah, Darl. It's good to see that you've finally got yourself a real account to do your Astroturfing from. Congratulations...
More seriously though, why do you suppose that the risk is either huge or completely unpredictable? Just because you don't have the personal capacity to quantify the risk in this manner, that doesn't mean that it isn't doable.
The average person would think that earthquake insurance in California is a huge and unquantifiable risk, but insurers still manage to quantify that risk for all of their customers, every year.
And why would they do that? Because it's a profitable activity, of course.
Well that would've been a better idea. Just force spammers via the law to label all their spam in the subject line with a common word like "[UBE]" or "[ADULT]".
I've got a better idea yet. Force all the spammers to label all their spam [SPAM] and we're all set.
Was Steve Ballmer unavailable? Just wait until he hears about this.
"There's only room for ONE dancing monkeyboy in this company!"
And fewer still are old enough to remember the works of H. Rider Haggard (which is where Rumpole's author, John Mortimer originally appropriated it from.)
Isn't this called a "double whammy"?
Yeah. And American friends have suggested that if I pay by credit card and fly British Airways, I almost certainly wouldn't have had this trouble, but I don't care. I don't see that how I pay and who I choose to fly with are anyone's business but my own -- and they certainly aren't issues I feel I need to account for.
Specifically if the immigration officer is an avid Fox news viewer, or a worshipper of pea brained blonde annorexic chicks who like to spew hate.
Perhaps it's different in other parts of the country -- I recall flying into Philidelphia and Orlando in the past and not finding this -- but my impressions of the immigration officers at JFK is that they are all like this.
They are always polite, but it is frustrating constantly being checked two, three times.
I don't mind being stopped and questioned. That's fine. What bothered me was the attitude of the original immigration guy, and then what I saw in the room where I was forced to wait for three hours, accompanied almost exclusively by people with brown skin, presumably from Islamic countries.
There was one other white guy among us (and I'd guess there were forty or fifty people waiting in this room) and he was someone I originally presumed was an Italian American because of his looks and his strong Brooklyn accent.
He'd been to Italy for a holiday and they were asking him if he'd ever been arrested. Apparently, he'd been arrested for something minor around thirty years before, and they were sending him back to Italy -- even though he'd lived in the USA since he was a kid.
The whole experience gave me some idea how those Jews must have felt when they were being shipped out of Europe, trying to get to the New World and the freedom they'd heard about, only to be confronted by bureaucrats who were happy to send them back to the gas chambers.
And I know that sounds like I'm overstating things, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that the experience was sufficiently unpleasant to stop me going back.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass about Windows right now. What I want to see is a good discussion of what's going on at Stanford.
I think you're at the wrong website for that...
FWIW, I do agree with you though
Good thing you have a lot of karma and mod points from one-sidedly promoting Linux in the past.
Free clue: perhaps if you cared enough to get yourself a user account and to log into it when you posted, you might have some too?
And to block any of your potential witty retorts, I'm rubber and you're glue.
Over-defensive little thing, aren't we?
From a personal perspective: I've travelled the US about 15 times and spent a significant amount of my tourist Euro there.
In the words of the famous AOL subscriber, "Me too."
I've been to the USA at least twice a year for the last ten years. I was actually in NYC the Oct. after the WTC crash, because I wanted to support the NY hotel and tourist economy at that time. It was really peculiar and very moving to be in Greenwich Village at 10.00pm on a Thursday evening and see the streets deserted aside from a few homeless people and a handful of kids.
Last time I flew was November last year. Air tickets were cheap (around 200 return) so I paid cash. I also made the mistake of flying Air France because I couldn't get a BA flight.
On arrival, the immigration guy gave me the third degree. What was the purpose of my visit? What did I do for a living? Had I ever been arrested? (Answer: no.) What had I been arrested for?
It seems that my answers didn't satisfy him, because he escalated my case, sending me to the 'big room' in which mine was the only white face to be seen.
They kept me hanging around for about three hours, whereupon a senior official came along and asked me a more polite series of questions. (What was the purpose of my visit? Where was I staying? When would I be leaving, etc.) This lasted about two minutes and then they let me in.
Needless to say, I won't be going again. I love the USA and I have some very close friends who are Americans, but in future they can spend their dollars here in Europe, because I'll be fucked if I'm going back there without a significant regime change.
Which particular section of the US constitution are they referring to? I don't recall anything in there about the right to spam, the right to install spyware or the write to take over someone else's computer in pursuit of the almighty dollar -- but as a UK citizen I admit to not having read it as closely as a US citizen may have done.
Remember the other old saw as well. In twenty years time, the girl you marry will *be* her mother.
Be afraid...
That was an apache vulnerability, not a core OS vulnerability.
Strictly speaking, you could say the same thing about the various SSH exploits that have been around as well, but I don't think I've ever owned a Linux box that would be useable without it. And you can't have it both ways. If Linux is a useable operating system, then it *isn't* just a kernel any more. It's the whole ball of wax.
This Mac OSX worm is a very different animal.
It's different in the sense that nobody has ever actually been infected by it. However, the existence of this particular design flaw has been known to pretty well everyone familiar with OSX since OSX was in beta. The decision to remove the old-style resource fork metadata and use Windows style file typing was actually the subject of enormously heated opposition for this very reason.
Actually, I was just making the point that mac zealots irritate the hell out of me - ITS NOT PERFECT.
A really original and insightful point that *nobody* has ever made on Slashdot before.
But, call me a troll if you will, its not the point I intended to make.
Troll, flamebait, redundant... any one of them would seem perfectly apt to me.
Why, do you suppose that Linux is somehow immune to worms and trojans? Perhaps you should tell all those people who were infected by the Ramen worm a while back that they needn't have bothered doing a clean install.
Your mindless trolling would lead anyone to draw that assumption.
And I find it comforting that fetuses in these places are being made safe because their parents have guns to use in their defense against the advancing hordes.
Damn straight. Every prospective parent needs an Uzi or a Heckler and Koch submachine gun to fend off the tribes of forcible abortionists that are roaming the USA, whipping out fetuses while armed with nothing more than a twenty year old vaccum cleaners, a blunt knitting needle and a rusty sardine can lid.
And Praise the Lord for the existence of right-thinking patriots like you, with the forethought and insight to warn the population about this little known impending threat to future generations of Christian Americans.
Remember, if someone posing as a vaccuum cleaner salesman turns up at your door, it's almost certainly one of these forcible abortionists on a reconnaisance mission.
Shoot first and ask questions later.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order
This message has been brought to you by Well-scrubbed Geeks for a Free America.
Google also have another service whereby you host Google adverts inside your own site, everytime someone clicks you get paid like a normal banner ad.
Oh, ok. This makes a little more sense.
In that case, I owe the parent an apology for calling him dumb.
Right, because terrorism never occurs in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.
Of course it does. People are always blowing up US embassies and the like here. Just ask all those people in Madrid.
Oh, wait, that's different because those people didn't have to cross an ocean to do it, right?
Yeah, we've got our own Timothy McVeigh type characters as well.
However, many, many people say it to themselves every time they download a piece of software and it doesn't run because it needs to be re-compiled on their platform.
Those would be dumb people, I take it? The same sort of people who go out and buy a piece of Windows software and expect it to run on a Mac?
"What do you mean, it's intended for a PC? My Powerbook belongs to me, so it's personal, and it's definitely a computer. Therefore it's a Personal Computer!"
So then they go to Best Buy and purchase something that runs, but crashes, but at least it runs.
Well, I tend to do some basic research on the software I want to use before I install it, but if I never bothered, I think I'd be a lot angrier about software that I'd paid for that didn't work, than I would about software that I'd downloaded for free that had a similar problem.
If he was clever
...and then have Google advertise them via their advertising program...
Unlike you...
he would set up a few websites
and rake the money in slowly over a length of time.
Every time he clicks on a link to his own website, he -- as the website owner -- pays Google for it.
Now how do you suppose he's going to make any money at that?
..that man could play the banjo like anything.
Could he play it like a euphonium? That's something I'd *really* like to see -- a man with a three legged dog, playing the banjo like a euphonium.
your chain of logic appears to be:
:)
1. If you take the time and effort to acquaint yourself with something like great music, art, wine, whatever, then you might come to appreciate them.
Correct so far, yes.
2. Regardless of whether you come to appreciate them, your life will be enriched by them.
Not quite. It's more like this: even if you don't come to appreciate those things, your life is enriched by the process of enquiry. You understand yourself and the world a little better, which is inevitably enriching.
If you *do* come to enjoy them, then there's a whole world of interest and experience out there for you to explore -- a process that's also inevitably enriching.
I could spend that time and energy doing something else which, if you'll pardon the economic lingo, is more likely to give me a higher rate of return on the investment.
How do you evaluate that? I can see how you might think that you stand more chance of enjoying say, Motley Crue than Miles Davis, but unless you actually took the trouble to invest the time in understanding Miles, I don't know how you can evaluate the value of the reward that you'd get for your investment?
Maybe being able to identify the various subtle flavors in wine would be enriching in itself, but whatever pleasure that knowledge might give me would be massively outweighed by the extreme unpleasantness of having to taste all that wine.
It doesn't work that way. You really just have to educate your palate to enjoy one (or find one that you like), and then everything else is simply a comparison to that. Is it better or is it worse? If you never find one that you do like though, it's unlikely that you're going to taste a whole load more.
Why do you assume I'm the one having the problem, here?
I dunno. Perhaps because I think that your lack of interest in experiences that challenge your status quo are inevitably likely to result in an intellectually and emotionally impoverished life?
And if it was just you, it wouldn't be a problem at all, but it seems to be a major American tendency these days. Look, for example, at the number of books read per capita, and the various politicians that don't own a passport and are proud of never having left the USA. I think it's a tendency that is currently reducing a once great country to one dominated by paranoia and mediocrity.
I just hope you're still a young man, and will inevitably come to recognize how limiting this erroneous sort of thinking actually is. Because if you're over 25, then you really *do* have a problem.