Regarding point 1... this is NOT a 'legal' (whatever that means internationally) reason to invade.
Legal means nothing between nations. Law implies a higher power, and there is no such thing (that all the nations will recognize, all the time).
We (America) have, are, and will build offensive weapons to use on whoever we deem a significant threat.
Yep. A reasonable person might say that the government of Iraq (and now N korea) were building WMD because we are a very real threat to them. Not because we want to attack them, but because no slave state can stand if there is a free state near by. We give hope to the masses, and make it impossible to keep them in line. Let me say that more clearly: we would have been a threat to them even if entirely disarmed.
I think that there is a very clear moral distinction here, between our WMD and N. Korea's: it's the difference between killing an armed robber, and killing your victim during an armed robbery.
... we don't kill dissenters... we just start slowly removing their right to dissent...
The US looks terrible when we compare it to the ideal. It looks ideal when we compare it to anything else.
"which tyrant is next" the one that US put into power 30 years ago or could be 20 years ago...
Finally, we're fixing some old mistakes. Better late than never!
... ask the CIAs, they would have a definite answer.
Maybe it'll be the government of Germany. We put'em there, about 50 years ago, and it begins to look as though they've gone sour. With France as an ally, they wouldn't stand a chance.
Seriously, I'd push for Syria, since we're on a roll in the region, but Saudi Arabia or N. Korea (notice how deftly I brought this thread back on topic!) would be good choices, too!
Sorry; the one seemed to imply the other. I jumped to a wrong conclusion.
You're right about the point I missed:
My point was the following:
Regarding any topic, our government is not always knowledgeable nor honest.
I think that it's pretty sad that with the unassailable reasons which I listed above, our government focused on the WMD, which might have been the least plausible and certainly the most tendentious. Having focused everyone's attentions there, our government shouldn't be surprised that the second guessers are focusing their criticism in the same place.
... we still have not found any weapons of mass destruction In Iraq...
Why would this matter, to you or to anyone else? Whether or not Hussein was able to successfully build stuff to kill us, he was still able to kill his own people, and we put a stop to that.
Do you think that it really doesn't matter what the wogs do to each other? I think that the people there are human, and it would have been terribly inhumane to leave them to suffer from Hussein and the Baathists.
There were three entirely adequate reasons for the US to attack Iraq:
1) Its government appeared to be trying to build weapons which it could use against us, and would surely have used them against us if it could.
2) Its government was surely sponsoring terrorism.
3) Its government was murdering its citizens to stay in power.
Points (1) and (2) might seem doubtful to you, though not (before the invasion) to anyone who didn't have contracts there. Point (3) has never been disputed, before or after, by even the most rabid Baathist or French propaganda minister.
If we DO find some WMD there, we can all shiver a delicious shiver and say: ``Wow! that was close!'', but it won't matter. Saving the Iraqis from their own government was far more than reason enough.
I think that the only question remaining about the invasion of Iraq is: ``Which tyrant is next?''
I'd like to know whether full de-regulation of the telecommunication industry in the United States has benefited customer service...
We'd all like to know what full deregulation would bring. We're still waiting for full deregulation of telecom here in the US. You'll be able to recognize it when it happens. Full deregulation will mean that anybody will be able to offer any kind of service to anyone, anywhere, any time, any way, WITHOUT going to the FCC, state utility boards, usw. That hasn't happened yet, and isn't on the horizon.
What we have here is PARTIAL deregulation: the old, established monopolies have been set free to gouge us, on the condition that they allow a few startups to barely exist, to provide the illusion of competition. The government regulatory agencies still protect the interests of everyone but the telecom users.
Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other?
That's exactly what they did in the early 80's. I had a utility disk which would allow my PC-XT to read more than fourty soft-sectored 5 1/4 inch formats, almost all CPM.
Sounds pretty idiotic in retrospect, right?
Yes, it was idiotic in retrospect, after IBM had come along and left all their little monopolies in shambles. But in prospect, the many little companies[1] saw lock-in, and monopoly profits. It was obvious that the incompatible formats were worst for the purchasers, and eventually worst for the industry, but any one manufacturer who didn't make a uniquely incompatible format was leaving money on the table.
Once IBM had established a standard, no matter how bad, every manufacturer could, in fact had to, use it. Then the industry expanded, and instead of getting large profits on every one of their hundreds of sales, the computer (now clone) manufacturers get small profits on each of their millions of sales.
[1] ``Many little companies'' included Vector Graphics, Northstar, Kaypro, Otrona (a really NEAT little portable), Altos, and dozens of others which have slipped my mind.
>>Have you already forgotten Tianeman square? Communist China is a brutal, repressive, murderous regime.
>The Chinese are doing what the Chinese have always done: been overwhelmed and absorbed the invader. Time after time, century after century.
That argument is fatally flawed: first there is no invader (unless you count Maoism): you answered with a non sequitur. Second, Chinese culture was able to assimilate several waves of Northern invaders because the Northern invaders moved in among them, and became them.
When the British, Germans, et cetera, WERE invaders in China, they didn't get assimilated. The reason was the steamship: they could send their young'uns home to be educated, and get a fresh crop of administrators from home every year. Even with sailing ships, the British managed to avoid assimilation in India for 300 years.
Believe it or not there ARE problems with US and European "democracy"- like we don't have it.
Actually, that's not a bug; that's a feature. Athens had democracy, all those thousands of years ago. That's how Socrates came to be murdered. Democracy, REAL democracy, the kind we definitely DON'T have, is mob rule, and has always ended in tyranny or anarchy followed by tyranny. Democracy is way harder on minorities than what we have.
What we have (in the US) is a representational republic. It is the worst form of government in the world, with the exception only of all other forms which have ever been tried. Our government looks AWFUL, if we compare it to the ideal. If we compare it to any other government, we laugh at the poor, benighted fools who admire that other government, and thank God that we're not that bad off.
You said that you've worked in China. My brother-in-law has worked in China for years. He's Taiwanese, so speaks the language almost like a native, and blends in pretty well. China and the Chinese are in a bad way, over all. They're dirt poor, and their government is trying to slaughter the unpopular folks just fast enough to keep the rest scared into submission. Right now, that's mostly Christians and the Falun Gong. The mandatory abortion laws have resulted in wide-spread infanticide, inside and outside of hospitals. But, I digress.
Just to get this rant back on topic, I'm sure that the Chinese could put several ships on the moon. After all, it can be done with 1960s technology. They'll bridge quite a bit of the distance with Chinese corpses.
The post you were replying to said:
If they get a lunar base, bank on it that it will be heavily militarized and its top priority will be to learn how to drop rocks on American cities
and you replied:
How much notice would you get ? Quite long enough to launch a retaliatory strike before the rock even arrives.
That's why I'm sure that the US would see a Chinese NEO station as a far greater threat than a moon base would be.
Chinese society is heavily militarized, in the sense that the People's Army is a large force in the power structure. We can be sure that any Chinese space program will mirror Chinese society. We can also be sure that China is an enemy country. No slave state can afford to have a free state nearby, and even with all our very real, very serious problems here in the US, the difference between mainland China and the US is the difference between Hell and Heaven. We may not know that, but I can assure you that the Chinese people, and their government, do know it. The people respond by trying to get here, and the government responds by stepping up the slaughter of their people, and by trying to harm us in any way they think they can.
If you're using Excel, you should be aware that its statistical methods are flawed. Look here for some pointers to the sort of troubles I'm talking about.
The problem isn't that Excel comes from MS or that it is closed source (except in a round-about way): the problem is that the flaws which make Excel unsuited for statistical analysis don't affect sales enough to justify the cost of fixing them.
In other words, what you're saying is that code released under the BSD license is "public domain" and can be copied and pasted into GPLed code without copyright statement or attribution? Nice.
Except for the ``public domain'' part, I believe that is roughly what the BSD license calls for. It's this ``you can do whatever you want with it'' stuff that the BSD people always brag about.
Exactly what the modified BSD license calls for (copied from here):
2.2. Berkeley-based copyrights:
2.2.1. General
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
So, the question becomes: ``How much can we copy and paste before it becomes `redistribution'?'' Probably a lot less than a whole source code file, probably a lot more than 10 or 15 lines. MAybe even what Chris Sontag calls ``large blocks''.
If some Linux kernel coder DID improperly redistribute BSD without the attribution, that's naughty and needs to be fixed, but SCO has no standing in the matter, which is the only thing that matters for present purposes.
>>If the code comes to Linux via BSD, as I postulated, we and IBM should be in the clear: we couldn't be expected to know that BSD had somehow stolen it from SCO
>I'm not so sure about that - they're going after the linux community on precisely those bases (ie, linux users unwittingly using tainted code), and I don't know that ignorance in this instance is enough to get off the hook. Doesn't mean they're right about anything else, but if BSD kept "borrowing" after 1994, it could be problematic. Again, I would ask Darl why they aren't hitting BSD?
We'd be in the clear, in the sense that we would have behaved prudently and responsibly. If we had KNOWINGLY used SCO's stuff, or if a reasonably diligent person would have known that we were doing so, we'd have some potential for problems. If the BSD folks stole it and released it as their own, we'd have to scramble to get it out of our kernel, but no one could say that ``we should have known''.
>>This seems to be the most likely scenario. In fact, it seems very probable that they realized, some time back, that they could....copy some good parts from Linux into SCO server/Xenix/whatever...claim that Linux copied it from them....etc
>Yeah, I'm wondering, assuming this gets to court, where the burden of proof will lie.
I believe that the burden of proof lies with SCO, as the accuser. THey'll have to show only that the preponderance of the evidence favors them, a much lower hurdle than in a criminal prosecution.
I'm not sure where we'd be if this does get to court. I can envision it going something like this:
(IBM's witness)... And finally, your honor, infringing section 652 was committed to CVS on 11 Feb 1996, by LinuxGeek.
(SCO's mouthpiece) Who is LinuxGeek?
(IBM's witness) Umm... we're still trying to figure that out. But, he didn't work for us!
Presumably, it would be up to SCO to prove absolutely that they put it in their codebase before it got in the kernel. Now, interestingly, this is damned easy for Linux to prove - kernel source is open - but could be hard for SCO since it could be tough for them to prove they're not fudging commit dates - them being closed source and all (HA!).
Again, not absolutely, they only need a preponderence of the evidence.
I think that we have a pretty good, provable history as far as time goes. But what about proving attribution? Do we know who wrote each thing that got checked in? Do we know them only by nickname, or can we send them a subpoena? I suppose that if we DON'T know who checked in an offending bit of code, we can allege that it was an SCO employee, but I've no idea how far that would fly.
SCO has it easier, in a way: all they have to worry about is whether someone's conscience will start itching, and make that person tell the truth. SCO can simply present whatever records they have, under oath, and unless somebody's honesty gets the better of him, we'll never know the truth.
What I want to know is whether:
# 1. The code was pre-1994 from BSD, but they somehow don't think the 1994 agreement is transferrable or even valid, or
If the code comes from BSD, then we're in the clear [1].
# 2. The code in question was written by Novell or (God forbid) SCO after 1994. If written by Novell, did they explicitly give it to the OSS community or was it just that they didn't enforce the violation? If the latter, this could pose problems...or,
In this case, there's a problem indeed. If Novell sold SCO an exclusive ``license to sublicense'', Novell may or may not be able to let us off the hook. If the code comes to Linux via BSD, as I postulated, we and IBM should be in the clear: we couldn't be expected to know that BSD had somehow stolen it from SCO [2]. If the code comes to Linux via IBM, IBM has a problem [3]. Linus and the kernel gang will have to scramble to clean out the offending stuff in either event.
# 3. Did SCO illegally copy code from BSD (or elsewhere) post-1994? I will say, it will be very important to see source tree commit dates even if they do have some interesting code similarities
This seems to be the most likely scenario. In fact, it seems very probable that they realized, some time back, that they could:
1) copy some good parts from Linux into SCO server/Xenix/whatever
2) claim that Linux copied it from them,
3) sue the deepest pockets around for using ``their'' code
4) PROFIT!
The scary thing is that this is a better business plan than a lot of the venture capitalists' favorite companies had two years ago.
[1] Unless BSD somehow got it from SCO or whoever, as in your point 2. It's more likely that SCO got it from BSD, as I propose in my four steps to (fraudulent) profit, above.
[2] I shouldn't have to say that this is ridiculously unlikely. Should I?
How many lines of code in the Linux kernel are a direct copyright violation? It's very extensive. It is many different sections of code ranging from five to 10 to 15 lines of code in multiple places that are of issue, up to large blocks of code that have been inappropriately copied into Linux in violation of our source-code licensing contract. That's in the kernel itself, so it is significant. It is not a line or two here or there. It was quite a surprise for us.
So, there are also some big blocks. What do you want to bet that those big blocks are the things which have been copied from BSD? What do you want to bet that they match up to SCO's stuff because the unix code that SCO bought the rights to sublicense has in it the BSD code which AT&T illegally copied?
In other words, anything in Linux which ``belongs to SCO'' has probably actually been copied, perfectly legitimately, from BSD. And of course, anything BSD is safe from SCO, whether SCO has the copyrights or not. At worst, Linux will have to incorporate the BSD advertising. More likely, the advertising clause was removed before the copying was done.
I suspect that IBM knows this. It would help explain their lack of panic.
All SCO has to prove is that portions of code that it licensed for AIX to IBM ended up being used in Linux.
Look at how much code already is shared between the various BSD and Linux flavours already.
The BSD code probably looks suspiciously like the licensed Unix code, since they come from the same base. Remember, the reason that AT&T lost was that they'd been copying some of that BSD stuff...
I think that if there is anything that SCO licensed to IBM in the Linux kernel, that it would be reasonable to assume that it came there legitimately, via BSD, or was copied from Linux in the first place, by SCO or some previous owner. In a criminal case, it would be all over. SCO need only show a preponderance of evidence, since this is a civil case, but even if the offending code is real, showing that it got there the way SCO claims won't be trivial.
Even if IBM loses, it isn't obvious that any IBM customers, or corporate Linux users, will be inconvenienced. In fact, I think that it seems very unlikely that anyone other than IBM would have to pony up.
Whether the resulting FUD hurts our adoption isn't clear, either: Linux is a lot more popular than BSD was when it went through lawsuit purgatory.
I'm holding off on getting a new car until I get get a hydrogen one.
Gee, MY car burns hydrogen! What are you waiting for?
My car runs on hydrogen, which is bound by carbon so it isn't so gaseous. C8H16 or so (chemistry was a long time back). Or did you mean ``uses a fuel cell which burns H_2''? I'd like something like that too; the current technology has too many moving parts. I'm not holding my breath.
While we're talking bluesky stuff, here's something interesting: tapping the vaccuume energy. The guy's got a patent, and claims that he'll be producing commercial quantities Real Soon Now (TM).
Typically, "pig in a poke" implies unforseen trouble or concealed problems that reveal themselves later, kinda like a used car.
When you buy a pig in a poke, you had better head straight home with it, and have a sturdy pen ready for the pig.
When you buy a pig in a poke, without looking in the poke, you're quite likely to find, when you get home, that the piglet you thought you bought was a cat. No wonder the little piggy's squeals sounded so much like ``miao''.
A pig in a poke is a usually a fraud: there's a reason they aren't showing you the goods. ``Letting the cat out of the bag'' is what happens when someone opens the poke BEFORE you've bought the ``pig''. With the fraud exposed, you back out of the deal.
Getting back on topic, I'd say that anyone who sent SCO a license fee on the strength of their extortion letter bought a pig in a poke. Novell has let the cat out of the bag, by showing that SCO's threats are empty: there's no way SCO can sue a business they've no pre-existing contractual relationship with (I think. IANALATINLA).
What would it take to start going on the offensive instead of the defensive, here?
I think it would take the same things I advocated for going on the defensive: letters, grassroots efforts, volunteer time. If you're part of Mr. Congresscritter's support base, part of what gets him re-elected, he's going to listen, at least a bit. He's going to try not to hurt you on the issues you've told him are important (defensive), and he's going to try to at least make a show of helping you on them (offensive).
That's how the mega-corps and mega-unions have done so well at getting the legislators' ears: they've been very effective at keeping the same old suspects in office.
... I'm probably being really naive here, not being a guy that keeps up with/understands politics well.
You have to understand and keep up with politics. The people who do are the people who run things. If you aren't willing to do that, you cede the field to those who are willing, e.g., the RIAA, MPAA, **AA, et cetera.
<rant>
This points out an obvious moral: the fewer things that government has power over, and the less power it has over those few things, the less time we are forced to spend participating in it, and the less bribe money the corps will be willing to drop on the politicians[1]. When the things you care about are put into the political arena, you must either go there too, or give up the things you care about.
Going a bit further with this rant, big business generally WANTS a lot of things we care about in the political arena. That way, instead of having to compete equally with each other, and with us, they can buy a politician or two and get rid of the competition. Or, they can buy their way around an inconvenient legal principle. Experience has told big business (and all the rest of us!) that a few people with a lot of motivation (and a lot of money helps) can get whatever they want at the expense of the rest of us, as long as the actual cost to each is hidden [2], or very small[3]. When the cost is hidden, or trivially small in dollars per voter, the people who are being harmed (generally a HUGE majority) just don't bother to get out and influence their legislators. The tiny minority who do have a motive can profit at the expense of everyone else.
That's how we got our Clean Air Act in the US. Before the Clean Air Act, there was no such thing as a license to pollute. Anyone who could show that he or his property was being damaged by a specific polluter could get restitution, or shut down the polluter, or both. There are some obvious problems with this as a safeguard to the environment, but the Clean Air Act didn't address any of those problems. Instead, it addressed the one problem that mattered to the big businesses: at least in theory, someone's billion-dollar plant could be shut down if it did damage to some little old lady's cat (and thus infringed on her property right to keep cats at that location). So, big business funded the Sierra Club and similar efforts, and bought some legislators, and got the Clean Air Act: they can get Federal licenses to pollute, and once they've got one, they can kill all the cats and infringe upon all the property rights they want to. This is A Good Thing for them, despite the high cost of compliance: there is no uncertainty about what they can get away with.
</rant>
[1] This suggests that reducing the power of government would actually accomplish what campaign finance reform purports to accomplish: it would lessen the incentive for big business and big money to buy elections, and thus accomplish campaign finance reform.
[2] An excellent example of a measure having a hidden cost to the public would be steel tarrifs.
[3] An example of a measure with a very small cost to each member of the public might be a million dollar Federal highway project for Senator Snort's district. Senator Snort's campaign was funded by several highway construction contractors and unions.
Would it be fair to say that are elected officals only agenda is to do whatever the mega-corporation of the week has to say should be law?
No. It would be fair to say that our elected officials' only agenda is to get re-elected. If mega-corp-of-the-week is more effective at aiding that cause than we are, they get to write the laws. If we're more effective, WE get to.
Are there actually elected officals who are are looking out for the common person's liberties, and such? If so, why are there not more of them?
Not many, and they won't be there long, unless the common people bother to find out who they are, and support them. We can support the good guys with money, but that won't go far if mega-corp-of-the-week decides to target them by funding their opponents. We can support the good guys by telling everyone we know WHY they're good. We can support the good guys with our time, by volunteering in their campaigns, year after year.
It's all either expensive, or time-consuming, or both. That's why the mega-corps (and the mega-unions) generally do better at getting their way than we do.
This is good news, but: the setback to the people behind these bills is only temporary. They stand to loose their livelihoods eventually, if they don't significantly curtail our freedoms. They aren't going to take ``no'' for an answer.
The lobbyists WILL be back next year, and the year after, and they'll keep telling bigger lies, and offering bigger bribes, until either they get their way, or the industries which fund them shrivel up. Or, perhaps, until we make such a big noise that the politicians decide that this is an untouchable issue.
Remember: the lobbyists only have to win ONCE in each state. We only have to get careless or complacent ONCE to let them win. This was good news, but the battle isn't nearly over yet.
We need to keep educating the unwashed masses, need to keep letter-writing campaigns going, and generally need to keep following up. We also need to volunteer in the re-election campaigns of the clueful few who are on the right side here. And tell other candidates why we chose to volunteer for Mr. Clueful instead of Mr. Other.
Those bribes from the lobbyists are only valuable to the legislators if they believe that the bribe can buy more votes than the legislation will cost them. When a lobbyist walks into a legislator's office and says: ``I'd like to talk to you about strengthening copyright...'', the legislator needs to be able to point to a pile of letters on his desk and say: `` These letters are from voters who are on the other side, and I get a big stack like that every day. I'd like to help, but I can't afford to. Why, I'd loose half my campaign workers if I even listened to you!''
If SCO didn't explicitely choose to include the code in Linux (it really is stolen, as they claim), then SCO also didn't explicitely choose to license the code under the GPL.
I think that the counter-argument to this is that:
SCO chose to peddle Linux.
Before they knew it contained bits of code they held copyright to, one might say that their decision to release that code under the GPL was inadvertent, and they shouldn't be held to it. That's weak, but plausible.
AFTER they knew that their copyrighted code was in there, the above,weak, argument is simply gone. ``Your honor, we did release code which we knew was our code under the terms of the GPL, but now we wish we hadn't, so please fix it for us.'' I really don't think that's going to fly in an honest court, though that may not be a problem here.
... many of the omish in northern michigan have very nice homes and lives and have NO ELECTRICITY...
You misspelled that: it's Ohmish, not ``omish''. Note that it's capitalized, as befits a proper noun.
The Ohmish do without electricity because of their high resistance to the modern world. Their opposite, so to speak, are the Mhoish, or Siemenites, whose beliefs are quite conductive to amenities like electricity.
Re:Intel C++ Compiler 7.1 Rules
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GCC 3.3 Released
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>>How about the object code? Can its object code be linked to code compiled by gcc, or is using this an all-or-nothing proposition?
>Yup. But not necessarily in the reverse. ICC doesn't support all of GCC's extensions, but enough of them to build the Linux kernel.
Better than I expected. That's good.
In my original post I just wanted to point out that however wonderful Intel's compiler might be, it's completely useless for a surprisingly large subset of the machines which run Linux and the three *BSDs. Its also useless for AIX and Solaris and HPUX and TRU64 machines.
Of course, anyone who can benefit by using the Intel compiler shouldn't let its x86-specific nature stop him. Far better to allow youself to be stopped by the sort of ethical considerations which led RMS to write GCC in the first place, if you're going to let anything stop you.
So, the mozilla developers slapped the linux community in the face when they wrote the MPL.
I'd say that the only difference between Mozilla developers and NASA is that the Moz developers paid their own way, while NASA has been funded by me (and you too, if you're in the US). That gives me a right to criticise NASA which I really don't have for Mozilla. The vital difference is that when the Moz developers license their code, it's really their code. When NASA licenses ``their code'', it's partly mine, in the sense that you and I paid for it.
I think there's one other difference, too: didn't Mozilla at least attempt to dual-license, using MPL and GPL? So, I'd say that NASA is morally bound to behave better than this, and isn't living up to their moral obligations, while the Moz team has behaved rather better than they absolutely had to.
Would you react this way if NASA had decided to release all of the code under a BSD-type license,...
No. The BSD license, or public domain, would allow us to actually USE the code we paid to develop, in the sense of incorporating it into our own works. The MPL precludes that sort of use. That's what makes it a slap in the face of the Linux community, specifically.
... creating essentially the same situation,...
In essence, the situation is totally different, as I just explained.
... but without quite as much benefit to NASA?
Here's an important but apparently subtle distinction: NASA exists to serve the US citizens, and is funded by them. NOT ``We exist to serve them, and fund them.''
Again, I, and every other citizen, have paid for the work NASA has done. We should be allowed to make use of it on equal terms. GPL licensing would allow that: everyone could use the work equally, and no-one could obtain a monopoly over it. We start equal, and stay that way. That's fair to all. RedHat and Cygnus and Trolltech show us that you can build a business on the GPL, and IBM and others have shown that existing megacorps can profit from the GPL.
A BSD-style license would allow authors of GPL'd software to reuse the code, but would allow, at least potentially, someone to obtain a monopoly using the code. I object to that.
The MPL has at least the same problems as the BSD licese, plus at least the additional problem that MPL'ed code cannot be linked to GPL'ed code. I keep saying ``at least'' because unlike the GPL, the MPL is full of lawyer-speak, and will require long and careful parsing, with a copy of Black's close at hand.
I object to using such a license as the MPL for code for which I have been forced to pay. The GPL seems an acceptable choice for code which we have ALL been forced to pay for, with the BSD license running a very distant second. MPL really isn't in the running, as far as I'm concerned.
The Mozilla Public License (MPL).
This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason.
This means that any MPL program may be distributed with GPL software, but cannot be reused with it. That is, Mozilla and Linux may be distributed together, but you can't take any substantial code from Mozilla and use it to make Gimp better.
I just can't see how this particular choice of license makes things better for the Linux community. NASA seems to be deliberately slapping us in the face with this.
It seems, from the PDF document (page 8) that their intent is to enable commercial exploitation of their code:
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) attempts to strike a middle ground between promoting
free source development by commercial enterprises and protecting free source developers.
Like the GPL, it requires that any and all changes to code (derivative works)
covered by the license must be made publicly available. [snip]
I think that since I've paid once for this proposed code, through my taxes, that there's something fundamentally wrong with allowing NASA to give the code to a business which will ask me to pay for it a second time.
I'm sure that NASA hopes to collect a fat bribe... no, a fat license fee... no, a ``contribution to the Space Program''. That's what I said above, in the preceeding paragraph: this robbery is motivated by a desire to gouge me a second time for the work I paid for once.
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Legal means nothing between nations. Law implies a higher power, and there is no such thing (that all the nations will recognize, all the time).
We (America) have, are, and will build offensive weapons to use on whoever we deem a significant threat.
Yep. A reasonable person might say that the government of Iraq (and now N korea) were building WMD because we are a very real threat to them. Not because we want to attack them, but because no slave state can stand if there is a free state near by. We give hope to the masses, and make it impossible to keep them in line. Let me say that more clearly: we would have been a threat to them even if entirely disarmed.
I think that there is a very clear moral distinction here, between our WMD and N. Korea's: it's the difference between killing an armed robber, and killing your victim during an armed robbery.
The US looks terrible when we compare it to the ideal. It looks ideal when we compare it to anything else.
Finally, we're fixing some old mistakes. Better late than never!
Maybe it'll be the government of Germany. We put'em there, about 50 years ago, and it begins to look as though they've gone sour. With France as an ally, they wouldn't stand a chance.
Seriously, I'd push for Syria, since we're on a roll in the region, but Saudi Arabia or N. Korea (notice how deftly I brought this thread back on topic!) would be good choices, too!
You're right about the point I missed:
My point was the following:
Regarding any topic, our government is not always knowledgeable nor honest.
I think that it's pretty sad that with the unassailable reasons which I listed above, our government focused on the WMD, which might have been the least plausible and certainly the most tendentious. Having focused everyone's attentions there, our government shouldn't be surprised that the second guessers are focusing their criticism in the same place.
Why would this matter, to you or to anyone else? Whether or not Hussein was able to successfully build stuff to kill us, he was still able to kill his own people, and we put a stop to that.
Do you think that it really doesn't matter what the wogs do to each other? I think that the people there are human, and it would have been terribly inhumane to leave them to suffer from Hussein and the Baathists.
There were three entirely adequate reasons for the US to attack Iraq:
1) Its government appeared to be trying to build weapons which it could use against us, and would surely have used them against us if it could.
2) Its government was surely sponsoring terrorism.
3) Its government was murdering its citizens to stay in power.
Points (1) and (2) might seem doubtful to you, though not (before the invasion) to anyone who didn't have contracts there. Point (3) has never been disputed, before or after, by even the most rabid Baathist or French propaganda minister.
If we DO find some WMD there, we can all shiver a delicious shiver and say: ``Wow! that was close!'', but it won't matter. Saving the Iraqis from their own government was far more than reason enough.
I think that the only question remaining about the invasion of Iraq is: ``Which tyrant is next?''
We'd all like to know what full deregulation would bring. We're still waiting for full deregulation of telecom here in the US. You'll be able to recognize it when it happens. Full deregulation will mean that anybody will be able to offer any kind of service to anyone, anywhere, any time, any way, WITHOUT going to the FCC, state utility boards, usw. That hasn't happened yet, and isn't on the horizon.
What we have here is PARTIAL deregulation: the old, established monopolies have been set free to gouge us, on the condition that they allow a few startups to barely exist, to provide the illusion of competition. The government regulatory agencies still protect the interests of everyone but the telecom users.
That's exactly what they did in the early 80's. I had a utility disk which would allow my PC-XT to read more than fourty soft-sectored 5 1/4 inch formats, almost all CPM.
Sounds pretty idiotic in retrospect, right?
Yes, it was idiotic in retrospect, after IBM had come along and left all their little monopolies in shambles. But in prospect, the many little companies[1] saw lock-in, and monopoly profits. It was obvious that the incompatible formats were worst for the purchasers, and eventually worst for the industry, but any one manufacturer who didn't make a uniquely incompatible format was leaving money on the table.
Once IBM had established a standard, no matter how bad, every manufacturer could, in fact had to, use it. Then the industry expanded, and instead of getting large profits on every one of their hundreds of sales, the computer (now clone) manufacturers get small profits on each of their millions of sales.
[1] ``Many little companies'' included Vector Graphics, Northstar, Kaypro, Otrona (a really NEAT little portable), Altos, and dozens of others which have slipped my mind.
>The Chinese are doing what the Chinese have always done: been overwhelmed and absorbed the invader. Time after time, century after century.
That argument is fatally flawed: first there is no invader (unless you count Maoism): you answered with a non sequitur. Second, Chinese culture was able to assimilate several waves of Northern invaders because the Northern invaders moved in among them, and became them.
When the British, Germans, et cetera, WERE invaders in China, they didn't get assimilated. The reason was the steamship: they could send their young'uns home to be educated, and get a fresh crop of administrators from home every year. Even with sailing ships, the British managed to avoid assimilation in India for 300 years.
Believe it or not there ARE problems with US and European "democracy"- like we don't have it.
Actually, that's not a bug; that's a feature. Athens had democracy, all those thousands of years ago. That's how Socrates came to be murdered. Democracy, REAL democracy, the kind we definitely DON'T have, is mob rule, and has always ended in tyranny or anarchy followed by tyranny. Democracy is way harder on minorities than what we have.
What we have (in the US) is a representational republic. It is the worst form of government in the world, with the exception only of all other forms which have ever been tried. Our government looks AWFUL, if we compare it to the ideal. If we compare it to any other government, we laugh at the poor, benighted fools who admire that other government, and thank God that we're not that bad off.
You said that you've worked in China. My brother-in-law has worked in China for years. He's Taiwanese, so speaks the language almost like a native, and blends in pretty well. China and the Chinese are in a bad way, over all. They're dirt poor, and their government is trying to slaughter the unpopular folks just fast enough to keep the rest scared into submission. Right now, that's mostly Christians and the Falun Gong. The mandatory abortion laws have resulted in wide-spread infanticide, inside and outside of hospitals. But, I digress.
Just to get this rant back on topic, I'm sure that the Chinese could put several ships on the moon. After all, it can be done with 1960s technology. They'll bridge quite a bit of the distance with Chinese corpses.
The post you were replying to said:
If they get a lunar base, bank on it that it will be heavily militarized and its top priority will be to learn how to drop rocks on American cities
and you replied:
How much notice would you get ? Quite long enough to launch a retaliatory strike before the rock even arrives.
That's why I'm sure that the US would see a Chinese NEO station as a far greater threat than a moon base would be.
Chinese society is heavily militarized, in the sense that the People's Army is a large force in the power structure. We can be sure that any Chinese space program will mirror Chinese society. We can also be sure that China is an enemy country. No slave state can afford to have a free state nearby, and even with all our very real, very serious problems here in the US, the difference between mainland China and the US is the difference between Hell and Heaven. We may not know that, but I can assure you that the Chinese people, and their government, do know it. The people respond by trying to get here, and the government responds by stepping up the slaughter of their people, and by trying to harm us in any way they think they can.
This guy's trolling. Mod parent post down, please.
The problem isn't that Excel comes from MS or that it is closed source (except in a round-about way): the problem is that the flaws which make Excel unsuited for statistical analysis don't affect sales enough to justify the cost of fixing them.
I think that this picture says it all.
Except for the ``public domain'' part, I believe that is roughly what the BSD license calls for. It's this ``you can do whatever you want with it'' stuff that the BSD people always brag about.
Exactly what the modified BSD license calls for (copied from here):
So, the question becomes: ``How much can we copy and paste before it becomes `redistribution'?'' Probably a lot less than a whole source code file, probably a lot more than 10 or 15 lines. MAybe even what Chris Sontag calls ``large blocks''.If some Linux kernel coder DID improperly redistribute BSD without the attribution, that's naughty and needs to be fixed, but SCO has no standing in the matter, which is the only thing that matters for present purposes.
>I'm not so sure about that - they're going after the linux community on precisely those bases (ie, linux users unwittingly using tainted code), and I don't know that ignorance in this instance is enough to get off the hook. Doesn't mean they're right about anything else, but if BSD kept "borrowing" after 1994, it could be problematic. Again, I would ask Darl why they aren't hitting BSD?
We'd be in the clear, in the sense that we would have behaved prudently and responsibly. If we had KNOWINGLY used SCO's stuff, or if a reasonably diligent person would have known that we were doing so, we'd have some potential for problems. If the BSD folks stole it and released it as their own, we'd have to scramble to get it out of our kernel, but no one could say that ``we should have known''.
>>This seems to be the most likely scenario. In fact, it seems very probable that they realized, some time back, that they could....copy some good parts from Linux into SCO server/Xenix/whatever...claim that Linux copied it from them....etc
>Yeah, I'm wondering, assuming this gets to court, where the burden of proof will lie.
I believe that the burden of proof lies with SCO, as the accuser. THey'll have to show only that the preponderance of the evidence favors them, a much lower hurdle than in a criminal prosecution.
I'm not sure where we'd be if this does get to court. I can envision it going something like this:
(IBM's witness) ... And finally, your honor, infringing section 652 was committed to CVS on 11 Feb 1996, by LinuxGeek.
(SCO's mouthpiece) Who is LinuxGeek?
(IBM's witness) Umm ... we're still trying to figure that out. But, he didn't work for us!
Presumably, it would be up to SCO to prove absolutely that they put it in their codebase before it got in the kernel. Now, interestingly, this is damned easy for Linux to prove - kernel source is open - but could be hard for SCO since it could be tough for them to prove they're not fudging commit dates - them being closed source and all (HA!).
Again, not absolutely, they only need a preponderence of the evidence.
I think that we have a pretty good, provable history as far as time goes. But what about proving attribution? Do we know who wrote each thing that got checked in? Do we know them only by nickname, or can we send them a subpoena? I suppose that if we DON'T know who checked in an offending bit of code, we can allege that it was an SCO employee, but I've no idea how far that would fly.
SCO has it easier, in a way: all they have to worry about is whether someone's conscience will start itching, and make that person tell the truth. SCO can simply present whatever records they have, under oath, and unless somebody's honesty gets the better of him, we'll never know the truth.
# 1. The code was pre-1994 from BSD, but they somehow don't think the 1994 agreement is transferrable or even valid, or
If the code comes from BSD, then we're in the clear [1].
# 2. The code in question was written by Novell or (God forbid) SCO after 1994. If written by Novell, did they explicitly give it to the OSS community or was it just that they didn't enforce the violation? If the latter, this could pose problems...or,
In this case, there's a problem indeed. If Novell sold SCO an exclusive ``license to sublicense'', Novell may or may not be able to let us off the hook. If the code comes to Linux via BSD, as I postulated, we and IBM should be in the clear: we couldn't be expected to know that BSD had somehow stolen it from SCO [2]. If the code comes to Linux via IBM, IBM has a problem [3]. Linus and the kernel gang will have to scramble to clean out the offending stuff in either event.
# 3. Did SCO illegally copy code from BSD (or elsewhere) post-1994? I will say, it will be very important to see source tree commit dates even if they do have some interesting code similarities
This seems to be the most likely scenario. In fact, it seems very probable that they realized, some time back, that they could:
1) copy some good parts from Linux into SCO server/Xenix/whatever
2) claim that Linux copied it from them,
3) sue the deepest pockets around for using ``their'' code
4) PROFIT!
The scary thing is that this is a better business plan than a lot of the venture capitalists' favorite companies had two years ago.
[1] Unless BSD somehow got it from SCO or whoever, as in your point 2. It's more likely that SCO got it from BSD, as I propose in my four steps to (fraudulent) profit, above.
[2] I shouldn't have to say that this is ridiculously unlikely. Should I?
[3] This seems ridiculously unlikely, too.
In other words, anything in Linux which ``belongs to SCO'' has probably actually been copied, perfectly legitimately, from BSD. And of course, anything BSD is safe from SCO, whether SCO has the copyrights or not. At worst, Linux will have to incorporate the BSD advertising. More likely, the advertising clause was removed before the copying was done.
I suspect that IBM knows this. It would help explain their lack of panic.
Look at how much code already is shared between the various BSD and Linux flavours already.
The BSD code probably looks suspiciously like the licensed Unix code, since they come from the same base. Remember, the reason that AT&T lost was that they'd been copying some of that BSD stuff ...
I think that if there is anything that SCO licensed to IBM in the Linux kernel, that it would be reasonable to assume that it came there legitimately, via BSD, or was copied from Linux in the first place, by SCO or some previous owner. In a criminal case, it would be all over. SCO need only show a preponderance of evidence, since this is a civil case, but even if the offending code is real, showing that it got there the way SCO claims won't be trivial.
Even if IBM loses, it isn't obvious that any IBM customers, or corporate Linux users, will be inconvenienced. In fact, I think that it seems very unlikely that anyone other than IBM would have to pony up.
Whether the resulting FUD hurts our adoption isn't clear, either: Linux is a lot more popular than BSD was when it went through lawsuit purgatory.
Gee, MY car burns hydrogen! What are you waiting for?
My car runs on hydrogen, which is bound by carbon so it isn't so gaseous. C8H16 or so (chemistry was a long time back). Or did you mean ``uses a fuel cell which burns H_2''? I'd like something like that too; the current technology has too many moving parts. I'm not holding my breath.
While we're talking bluesky stuff, here's something interesting: tapping the vaccuume energy. The guy's got a patent, and claims that he'll be producing commercial quantities Real Soon Now (TM).
When you buy a pig in a poke, you had better head straight home with it, and have a sturdy pen ready for the pig.
When you buy a pig in a poke, without looking in the poke, you're quite likely to find, when you get home, that the piglet you thought you bought was a cat. No wonder the little piggy's squeals sounded so much like ``miao''.
A pig in a poke is a usually a fraud: there's a reason they aren't showing you the goods. ``Letting the cat out of the bag'' is what happens when someone opens the poke BEFORE you've bought the ``pig''. With the fraud exposed, you back out of the deal.
Getting back on topic, I'd say that anyone who sent SCO a license fee on the strength of their extortion letter bought a pig in a poke. Novell has let the cat out of the bag, by showing that SCO's threats are empty: there's no way SCO can sue a business they've no pre-existing contractual relationship with (I think. IANALATINLA).
I think it would take the same things I advocated for going on the defensive: letters, grassroots efforts, volunteer time. If you're part of Mr. Congresscritter's support base, part of what gets him re-elected, he's going to listen, at least a bit. He's going to try not to hurt you on the issues you've told him are important (defensive), and he's going to try to at least make a show of helping you on them (offensive).
That's how the mega-corps and mega-unions have done so well at getting the legislators' ears: they've been very effective at keeping the same old suspects in office.
You have to understand and keep up with politics. The people who do are the people who run things. If you aren't willing to do that, you cede the field to those who are willing, e.g., the RIAA, MPAA, **AA, et cetera.
<rant>
This points out an obvious moral: the fewer things that government has power over, and the less power it has over those few things, the less time we are forced to spend participating in it, and the less bribe money the corps will be willing to drop on the politicians[1]. When the things you care about are put into the political arena, you must either go there too, or give up the things you care about.
Going a bit further with this rant, big business generally WANTS a lot of things we care about in the political arena. That way, instead of having to compete equally with each other, and with us, they can buy a politician or two and get rid of the competition. Or, they can buy their way around an inconvenient legal principle. Experience has told big business (and all the rest of us!) that a few people with a lot of motivation (and a lot of money helps) can get whatever they want at the expense of the rest of us, as long as the actual cost to each is hidden [2], or very small[3]. When the cost is hidden, or trivially small in dollars per voter, the people who are being harmed (generally a HUGE majority) just don't bother to get out and influence their legislators. The tiny minority who do have a motive can profit at the expense of everyone else.
That's how we got our Clean Air Act in the US. Before the Clean Air Act, there was no such thing as a license to pollute. Anyone who could show that he or his property was being damaged by a specific polluter could get restitution, or shut down the polluter, or both. There are some obvious problems with this as a safeguard to the environment, but the Clean Air Act didn't address any of those problems. Instead, it addressed the one problem that mattered to the big businesses: at least in theory, someone's billion-dollar plant could be shut down if it did damage to some little old lady's cat (and thus infringed on her property right to keep cats at that location). So, big business funded the Sierra Club and similar efforts, and bought some legislators, and got the Clean Air Act: they can get Federal licenses to pollute, and once they've got one, they can kill all the cats and infringe upon all the property rights they want to. This is A Good Thing for them, despite the high cost of compliance: there is no uncertainty about what they can get away with.
</rant>
[1] This suggests that reducing the power of government would actually accomplish what campaign finance reform purports to accomplish: it would lessen the incentive for big business and big money to buy elections, and thus accomplish campaign finance reform.
[2] An excellent example of a measure having a hidden cost to the public would be steel tarrifs.
[3] An example of a measure with a very small cost to each member of the public might be a million dollar Federal highway project for Senator Snort's district. Senator Snort's campaign was funded by several highway construction contractors and unions.
No. It would be fair to say that our elected officials' only agenda is to get re-elected. If mega-corp-of-the-week is more effective at aiding that cause than we are, they get to write the laws. If we're more effective, WE get to.
Are there actually elected officals who are are looking out for the common person's liberties, and such? If so, why are there not more of them?
Not many, and they won't be there long, unless the common people bother to find out who they are, and support them. We can support the good guys with money, but that won't go far if mega-corp-of-the-week decides to target them by funding their opponents. We can support the good guys by telling everyone we know WHY they're good. We can support the good guys with our time, by volunteering in their campaigns, year after year.
It's all either expensive, or time-consuming, or both. That's why the mega-corps (and the mega-unions) generally do better at getting their way than we do.
The lobbyists WILL be back next year, and the year after, and they'll keep telling bigger lies, and offering bigger bribes, until either they get their way, or the industries which fund them shrivel up. Or, perhaps, until we make such a big noise that the politicians decide that this is an untouchable issue.
Remember: the lobbyists only have to win ONCE in each state. We only have to get careless or complacent ONCE to let them win. This was good news, but the battle isn't nearly over yet.
We need to keep educating the unwashed masses, need to keep letter-writing campaigns going, and generally need to keep following up. We also need to volunteer in the re-election campaigns of the clueful few who are on the right side here. And tell other candidates why we chose to volunteer for Mr. Clueful instead of Mr. Other.
Those bribes from the lobbyists are only valuable to the legislators if they believe that the bribe can buy more votes than the legislation will cost them. When a lobbyist walks into a legislator's office and says: ``I'd like to talk to you about strengthening copyright ...'', the legislator needs to be able to point to a pile of letters on his desk and say: `` These letters are from voters who are on the other side, and I get a big stack like that every day. I'd like to help, but I can't afford to. Why, I'd loose half my campaign workers if I even listened to you!''
This isn't a privacy problem: just keep your money under your tin-foil beanie!
I think that the counter-argument to this is that:
SCO chose to peddle Linux.
Before they knew it contained bits of code they held copyright to, one might say that their decision to release that code under the GPL was inadvertent, and they shouldn't be held to it. That's weak, but plausible.
AFTER they knew that their copyrighted code was in there, the above,weak, argument is simply gone. ``Your honor, we did release code which we knew was our code under the terms of the GPL, but now we wish we hadn't, so please fix it for us.'' I really don't think that's going to fly in an honest court, though that may not be a problem here.
You misspelled that: it's Ohmish, not ``omish''. Note that it's capitalized, as befits a proper noun.
The Ohmish do without electricity because of their high resistance to the modern world. Their opposite, so to speak, are the Mhoish, or Siemenites, whose beliefs are quite conductive to amenities like electricity.
>Yup. But not necessarily in the reverse. ICC doesn't support all of GCC's extensions, but enough of them to build the Linux kernel.
Better than I expected. That's good.
In my original post I just wanted to point out that however wonderful Intel's compiler might be, it's completely useless for a surprisingly large subset of the machines which run Linux and the three *BSDs. Its also useless for AIX and Solaris and HPUX and TRU64 machines.
Of course, anyone who can benefit by using the Intel compiler shouldn't let its x86-specific nature stop him. Far better to allow youself to be stopped by the sort of ethical considerations which led RMS to write GCC in the first place, if you're going to let anything stop you.
I'd say that the only difference between Mozilla developers and NASA is that the Moz developers paid their own way, while NASA has been funded by me (and you too, if you're in the US). That gives me a right to criticise NASA which I really don't have for Mozilla. The vital difference is that when the Moz developers license their code, it's really their code. When NASA licenses ``their code'', it's partly mine, in the sense that you and I paid for it.
I think there's one other difference, too: didn't Mozilla at least attempt to dual-license, using MPL and GPL? So, I'd say that NASA is morally bound to behave better than this, and isn't living up to their moral obligations, while the Moz team has behaved rather better than they absolutely had to.
Would you react this way if NASA had decided to release all of the code under a BSD-type license, ...
No. The BSD license, or public domain, would allow us to actually USE the code we paid to develop, in the sense of incorporating it into our own works. The MPL precludes that sort of use. That's what makes it a slap in the face of the Linux community, specifically.
In essence, the situation is totally different, as I just explained.
Here's an important but apparently subtle distinction: NASA exists to serve the US citizens, and is funded by them. NOT ``We exist to serve them, and fund them.''
Again, I, and every other citizen, have paid for the work NASA has done. We should be allowed to make use of it on equal terms. GPL licensing would allow that: everyone could use the work equally, and no-one could obtain a monopoly over it. We start equal, and stay that way. That's fair to all. RedHat and Cygnus and Trolltech show us that you can build a business on the GPL, and IBM and others have shown that existing megacorps can profit from the GPL.
A BSD-style license would allow authors of GPL'd software to reuse the code, but would allow, at least potentially, someone to obtain a monopoly using the code. I object to that.
The MPL has at least the same problems as the BSD licese, plus at least the additional problem that MPL'ed code cannot be linked to GPL'ed code. I keep saying ``at least'' because unlike the GPL, the MPL is full of lawyer-speak, and will require long and careful parsing, with a copy of Black's close at hand.
I object to using such a license as the MPL for code for which I have been forced to pay. The GPL seems an acceptable choice for code which we have ALL been forced to pay for, with the BSD license running a very distant second. MPL really isn't in the running, as far as I'm concerned.
I just can't see how this particular choice of license makes things better for the Linux community. NASA seems to be deliberately slapping us in the face with this.
It seems, from the PDF document (page 8) that their intent is to enable commercial exploitation of their code:
I think that since I've paid once for this proposed code, through my taxes, that there's something fundamentally wrong with allowing NASA to give the code to a business which will ask me to pay for it a second time.I'm sure that NASA hopes to collect a fat bribe ... no, a fat license fee ... no, a ``contribution to the Space Program''. That's what I said above, in the preceeding paragraph: this robbery is motivated by a desire to gouge me a second time for the work I paid for once.