Written primarily by a free software attorney whose doctors also recommended an implanted ICD and who examined 1) the regulatory requirements, 2) what the device makers have to actually submit to the FDA (not source code), and some other relevant security and design characteristics like just how close to you a controller device would need to be before being able to connect with and control your implanted device, in order to make an informed decision about the surgery.
One of the most important issues discovered during this process was just how little doctors had through of these issues, if at all. If your doctor is recommending an implanted device, whatever you decide about the treatment, it is important to discuss these issues with your doctors and help them understand your concerns.
The "Bates Master" program mentioned in the original post can be found here: http://www.batesmaster.com/
Their tag line? "Open Source - Because the best experience is the one you control."
A couple of misstatements here in an otherwise interesting post:
A paper book last forever.
Before there was "bitrot" for digital files there was plain old "rot" for everything else, pressed paper books no exception. Those interested in the immortality of books need look no further than the library of Alexandria and the damage to the store of human knowledge done by its destruction.
A paper book can be read by anyone
Though very old, writing is a technology like any other. At a lower level on the technology stack you could say that "A paper book can be read by anyone who is literate and sighted." While it is true that ebooks require an electronic storage device as opposed to a paper one, those electronic storage devices are also capable of reading ebooks aloud, sharing information and culture with the illiterate and blind people in our own societies and preserving pronunciation and accent information for future generations.
In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.
Is the persistence of those particular physical objects what has enormously benefited humankind, or is it the knowledge and information they offer? While I can imagine scenarios where studying the physical books is of value to historians, I think we can likely agree that most of humankind will benefit only from the content of the books and will likely never know of or come into contact with the physical specimens in the old books room of Oxford's library.
What value then do books add to the persistence of human knowledge? Stone tablets are more durable and cell phones are owned in large areas of the geographic and socioeconomic world where owning a library is simply infeasible.
If we want to preserve knowledge, it seems to me that digital technologies offer us a larger scale, more ubiquitous, distributed, self-correcting, mechanism, for spreading and maintaining knowledge than ever before. While it is true that the current crop of format spats is making it difficult for consumers, the net effect is clearly in the right direction. And as all of the formats continue to converge on html, those incompatibilities gradually disappear and we are left with the native format of the web, which is the most universal and accessible format for displaying formatted text since the advent of printing.
How about distributing all of our social network and other currently centralized services ala: the Freedom Box idea?
Alternately, replacing your router with something powerful enough to also run a Tor node, as mentioned earlier in the comments, or an Asterix server, or all of that together, would be a nice use.
The web is a way of linking computers together, social networks are a way for people to manage what information goes to which of the people they know in particular social contexts. The two are not the same. The web works just fine without any awareness of social contexts and social networks exist just fine without computers at all.
What we need is a way to make our digital communication tools more like our analog expectations about information management, which means designing systems that allow the controlled sharing of information about our lives with the right groups of people in private, not on personal webpages broadcasting to the world.
That could take many forms. I want a system that just handles making secure connections to my various contacts and parceling out what information gets sent to those contacts based on my history with them. Something like this: Freedom Box Schematic
I don't care if the phone makers want to rebirth the shareware market of the early '90s; eventually people will get tired of paying per feature and expect the good ones to be rolled into the core functionality of the OS or the larger applications they use, ala winzip.
What worries me about android is how all the phones they sell with it still need to be jail broken before you can make use of the freedoms in the free operating system. Surely that's a greater threat to your control over the software in your life than the fact that people are also willing to sell you closed software.
Today's settlement between Microsoft and TomTom ends one phase of the community's response to Microsoft patent aggression, and begins another. On the basis of the information we have, we have no reason to believe that TomTom's settlement agreement with Microsoft violates the license on the kernel, Linux, or any other free software used in its products. The settlement neither implies that Microsoft patents are valid nor that TomTom's products were or are infringing.
The FAT filesystem patents on which Microsoft sued are now and have always been invalid patents in our professional opinion. SFLC remains committed to protecting the interests of our clients and the community. We will act forcefully to protect all users and developers of free software against further intimidation or interference from these patents.
SFLC, working with the Open Invention Network and the Linux Foundation, is pleased to participate in a coordinated, carefully graduated response on behalf of all the community's members to ongoing anti-competitive Microsoft conduct. We believe in strength through unity, and we think our community's unity in the face of these threats has helped to bring about Microsoft's quick settlement on all issues with TomTom.
To me, a solution is to use a flexible format that can be easily reformatted to fit the display device or paper. This way, the same source document could be used generate a text that someone would find easily readable on a computer screen, PDA, ebook reader, or when printed on paper. One format that could meet the above requirement is HTML.
Right, you want the work to be reflow-able (HTML + CSS) or recompile-able (LaTeX) to work with different screens sizes and printing. If you are dealing with sufficiently complex material, you may have to use LaTeX, especially until we get to the point where you can get the same sort of printer control from HTML+CSS+SVG as you can from LaTeX generated ps/pdf.
So yeah, using "Open Source" to talk about a book, where all the components are visible, might be a little silly, but, if we're doing any transformations or format shifts to that output, we might still need sources.
FSF and gpl-violations.org are co-operating closely. gpl-violations and FSF have handled some cases regarding busybox before and have handled them successfully (i.e., out-of-court settlements have been achieved).
You're thinking of SFLC, which is run by Eben Moglen. Nither FSF nor gpl-violations.org are in a position to enforce GPL violations against Busybox, since the Busybox developers hold all their own copyrights. FSF does enforcement on the GNU project copyrights and gpl-violations does enforcement on Harold Welte's copyrights in the Linux kernel.
Also, the X40s have a built in SD slot so you don't need to worry about packing/losing USB dongles. I don't know what your OS situation is but I can confirm that the SD card slot works out of the box with Ubuntu.
Patents are granted and enforced by the federal government, who before 1989 did not allow patents on software. In that year, the federal courts declared software algorithms to be patentable, despite the fact that the software industry had been booming without government intervention in the form of patents. Today, software developers continue to pay patent holders for permission to distribute their own programs, and the government continues to enforce this scheme."
Well, the government grants patents on software and then enforces them. As a result, software makers end up paying money to distribute software that they wrote. Regardless of how you would go about pricing your software, that sounds like a tax to me.
You could make the exact same argument about all patents actually. In a world where patent holders license their patents, they amount to a government granted ability for private individuals to tax the rest of the market. Normally, people don't care because the costs are kept invisible to consumers and because many people believe that non-software patents are useful and that the resulting increase in prices is just.
Actually hey did exactly what you suggest. The numbers they use are only those of patent settlements and legal fees directed specifically against windows and office and the only sales numbers they used are estimates of windows computers sold over the same period.
The SFLC paper only takes into account suits directed against Windows or Office, then divides that over the total number of windows machines sold during the same period. There may be some slippage there for systems sold without a version of Office, but you don't need to spread the damages over the whole product line unless you think that Microsoft's whole product line infringed the patent in question and the plaintiffs simply didn't mention them in their suits.
The formula is presented in the article, and it only takes into account suits specifically directed against windows or office. Now, it is possible that the future licensing costs for those patents will be lower, but given the amazing vagueness of software patents, I don't see any reason to believe that Microsoft's settlement costs, or their ratio of settlement costs to units of product sold, will go down in the next few years.
But even if we go with the assumption that these costs scale, these aren't copyright cases. Microsoft didn't buy functional code from anyone for incorporation, they wrote all the functionality on their own. The real thing to consider is whether the existence of these patents helped add functionality at all. If not, then that $21.50 being siphoned away from actually useful development.
Actually, the original posting is misleading. The $4.3 billion is just from settlements of lawsuits specifically aimed at Windows or Office and the accompanying costs of defending against the lawsuits that they won. Secret settlements and legal fees related to other products were not considered in SFLC's paper.
The article is not about the economics of software distribution, or the relation of legal costs to other costs in software development. It is about how software patents specifically add to the cost of distributing software today. Now, if you really think Amazon should have a 20 year monopoly on clicking on a link as a way of ordering something online, then maybe everything we're talking about is really a novel and non-obvious invention valuable enough to society to warrant government granted monopolistic rights. In that case, I guess it's all equally "software development". I tend to think it's basically all garbage and only actually used to shake down companies and funnel lots of money to pay patent lawyers. Since this one component cost goes towards a worthless system, I care how much of any of my purchases goes towards supporting it.
Conveniently, Linux has avoided these costs. If it matters to you that people end up paying more because of these software patent costs in the first place, then this might be important to you.
You could say that you get a similar situation with the Mob. Most people don't pay much attention because the costs they add to consumer goods are spread throughout society. Now if you pointed out to someone that, through various additional money spend in shipping things through the ports, and assembling them in various towns, 15% of the cost of a new car went to the mob, [I have no numbers for that, just tossing one out] they might actually start paying attention. If you could then point to a different type of car and tell them that this type of car was produced without a dime going to the mob, that might suddenly be a reason to use it. It is a question of showing people how the things they might abstractly agree are bad happen to directly impact their lives and how their actions can, in turn, help shift resources away from those bad ends.
Let's skip past the ars write up, whose factually inaccurate and dismissive assertions have been unquestioningly repeated all over this thread, and look at the actual document that the SFLC released. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/pate nt-tax.html
First some corrections:
- SFLC does not assume that Windows and Office are the only products that Microsoft sold during the time period in question, they specifically state that the 4 billion dollars in settlements were only the settlements "to plaintiffs claiming that Microsoft's Windows and Office products infringed their patents."
- Similarly, SFLC does not claim that all of Microsoft's legal fees are directly related to patent defense, in fact how much Microsoft pays in legal fees overall is never mentioned. The fees they talk about are those specifically related to patent defense, and they get their figures directly from a published 2005 interview with Brad Smith, Microsoft's General Counsel.
Ok, now to the actual main points of the study.
Software patents are not about innovation. The software industry was doing very well before the legal system did an about face and decided that software could be patented. The software industries in the rest of the world do perfectly well without patents. And, just in case you thought that the whole system was just harmless, the biggest player in the industry has to pay billions of dollars in legal and settlement fees just to get their products out of the door. Imagine then the what trouble these patents must cause for people without the ability to pay billions of dollars in settlement costs in order to distribute software that they independently wrote.
Playing with software patents gets everyone burned.
Very true. Especially since the retroactive extension of copyright in the US cordons off not only the culture of today but also the cultural artifacts of your childhood and those of your parents and their parents. So, even if you make the argument that you can replace the culture of today, which seems an extreme unlikelihood within a broadcast culture, you are still closed off from the majority of recorded culture. This is already your culture, you can't simply buy a new history regardless of how much you wish to avoid patronizing the companies with a legal monopoly on selling you access to yours.
If you are looking for more that fsfeurope's plain text diff, FSF is providing a strikethrough version of this second Draft, that highlights all the changed text from Draft 1, in LaTex, Postscript, and PDF
Lets remember the motivation that all the Napster knock-off services are trying to push on schools: liability shielding.
Besides bandwith issues, which, as another poster has already pointed, out can be readilly capped per MAC address, a school's only practical concern with copyright infringement taking place over their network is that the RIAA and MPAA are thrashing about in the dark trying to find the best people to hit with lawsuits over it.
We know that music rental services have been peddeling themselves as less messy alternatives than having to turn over identifying information on your students to the RIAA when their Jane Doe lawsuits hit your network, but this is a minor inconvience compared to the possible lawsuits the entertainment industry lawers might cook up. What happens when the industry decides to sue the colleges themselves for contributing to large scale infringement because they didn't take steps to control how the children in their care used the bleeding edge networking tools that the school provided?
A music distribution service without RIAA content will not really stop the Jane Doe lawsuits against your students, but taking affirmative steps to try and build up a climate of non-infringing music sharing might be enough to ward off a neglience claim down the road. In terms of building that climate I think it makes a good deal of sense to pick a service that has an open procedure for bands to add their music and that even allows students to distribute their own music, both things that Mindawn has.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't always that way. From back in 2010:
Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices (related video) (BBC summary of the main story)
Written primarily by a free software attorney whose doctors also recommended an implanted ICD and who examined 1) the regulatory requirements, 2) what the device makers have to actually submit to the FDA (not source code), and some other relevant security and design characteristics like just how close to you a controller device would need to be before being able to connect with and control your implanted device, in order to make an informed decision about the surgery.
One of the most important issues discovered during this process was just how little doctors had through of these issues, if at all. If your doctor is recommending an implanted device, whatever you decide about the treatment, it is important to discuss these issues with your doctors and help them understand your concerns.
The "Bates Master" program mentioned in the original post can be found here: http://www.batesmaster.com/ Their tag line? "Open Source - Because the best experience is the one you control."
Because that's a lot of ongoing expense to get a bunch of bitcoins.
A paper book last forever.
Before there was "bitrot" for digital files there was plain old "rot" for everything else, pressed paper books no exception. Those interested in the immortality of books need look no further than the library of Alexandria and the damage to the store of human knowledge done by its destruction.
A paper book can be read by anyone
Though very old, writing is a technology like any other. At a lower level on the technology stack you could say that "A paper book can be read by anyone who is literate and sighted." While it is true that ebooks require an electronic storage device as opposed to a paper one, those electronic storage devices are also capable of reading ebooks aloud, sharing information and culture with the illiterate and blind people in our own societies and preserving pronunciation and accent information for future generations.
In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.
Is the persistence of those particular physical objects what has enormously benefited humankind, or is it the knowledge and information they offer? While I can imagine scenarios where studying the physical books is of value to historians, I think we can likely agree that most of humankind will benefit only from the content of the books and will likely never know of or come into contact with the physical specimens in the old books room of Oxford's library.
What value then do books add to the persistence of human knowledge? Stone tablets are more durable and cell phones are owned in large areas of the geographic and socioeconomic world where owning a library is simply infeasible.
If we want to preserve knowledge, it seems to me that digital technologies offer us a larger scale, more ubiquitous, distributed, self-correcting, mechanism, for spreading and maintaining knowledge than ever before. While it is true that the current crop of format spats is making it difficult for consumers, the net effect is clearly in the right direction. And as all of the formats continue to converge on html, those incompatibilities gradually disappear and we are left with the native format of the web, which is the most universal and accessible format for displaying formatted text since the advent of printing.
How about distributing all of our social network and other currently centralized services ala: the Freedom Box idea?
Alternately, replacing your router with something powerful enough to also run a Tor node, as mentioned earlier in the comments, or an Asterix server, or all of that together, would be a nice use.
The web is a way of linking computers together, social networks are a way for people to manage what information goes to which of the people they know in particular social contexts. The two are not the same. The web works just fine without any awareness of social contexts and social networks exist just fine without computers at all.
What we need is a way to make our digital communication tools more like our analog expectations about information management, which means designing systems that allow the controlled sharing of information about our lives with the right groups of people in private, not on personal webpages broadcasting to the world.
That could take many forms. I want a system that just handles making secure connections to my various contacts and parceling out what information gets sent to those contacts based on my history with them. Something like this: Freedom Box Schematic
I don't care if the phone makers want to rebirth the shareware market of the early '90s; eventually people will get tired of paying per feature and expect the good ones to be rolled into the core functionality of the OS or the larger applications they use, ala winzip.
What worries me about android is how all the phones they sell with it still need to be jail broken before you can make use of the freedoms in the free operating system. Surely that's a greater threat to your control over the software in your life than the fact that people are also willing to sell you closed software.
Eben Moglen wrote a much more interesting take on this six years ago called "The dotCommunist Manifesto" http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html that is still worth reading. Though maybe read ""Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought" http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html instead.
Today's settlement between Microsoft and TomTom ends one phase of the community's response to Microsoft patent aggression, and begins another. On the basis of the information we have, we have no reason to believe that TomTom's settlement agreement with Microsoft violates the license on the kernel, Linux, or any other free software used in its products. The settlement neither implies that Microsoft patents are valid nor that TomTom's products were or are infringing.
The FAT filesystem patents on which Microsoft sued are now and have always been invalid patents in our professional opinion. SFLC remains committed to protecting the interests of our clients and the community. We will act forcefully to protect all users and developers of free software against further intimidation or interference from these patents.
SFLC, working with the Open Invention Network and the Linux Foundation, is pleased to participate in a coordinated, carefully graduated response on behalf of all the community's members to ongoing anti-competitive Microsoft conduct. We believe in strength through unity, and we think our community's unity in the face of these threats has helped to bring about Microsoft's quick settlement on all issues with TomTom.
It's perfect! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba_libre
Zordak wrote:
To me, a solution is to use a flexible format that can be easily reformatted to fit the display device or paper. This way, the same source document could be used generate a text that someone would find easily readable on a computer screen, PDA, ebook reader, or when printed on paper. One format that could meet the above requirement is HTML.
Right, you want the work to be reflow-able (HTML + CSS) or recompile-able (LaTeX) to work with different screens sizes and printing. If you are dealing with sufficiently complex material, you may have to use LaTeX, especially until we get to the point where you can get the same sort of printer control from HTML+CSS+SVG as you can from LaTeX generated ps/pdf.
So yeah, using "Open Source" to talk about a book, where all the components are visible, might be a little silly, but, if we're doing any transformations or format shifts to that output, we might still need sources.
FSF and gpl-violations.org are co-operating closely. gpl-violations and FSF have handled some cases regarding busybox before and have handled them successfully (i.e., out-of-court settlements have been achieved).
You're thinking of SFLC, which is run by Eben Moglen. Nither FSF nor gpl-violations.org are in a position to enforce GPL violations against Busybox, since the Busybox developers hold all their own copyrights. FSF does enforcement on the GNU project copyrights and gpl-violations does enforcement on Harold Welte's copyrights in the Linux kernel.Also, the X40s have a built in SD slot so you don't need to worry about packing/losing USB dongles. I don't know what your OS situation is but I can confirm that the SD card slot works out of the box with Ubuntu.
From http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/pate nt-tax.html
"Why Do You Call It A Patent "Tax"?
Patents are granted and enforced by the federal government, who before 1989 did not allow patents on software. In that year, the federal courts declared software algorithms to be patentable, despite the fact that the software industry had been booming without government intervention in the form of patents. Today, software developers continue to pay patent holders for permission to distribute their own programs, and the government continues to enforce this scheme."
Well, the government grants patents on software and then enforces them. As a result, software makers end up paying money to distribute software that they wrote. Regardless of how you would go about pricing your software, that sounds like a tax to me.
You could make the exact same argument about all patents actually. In a world where patent holders license their patents, they amount to a government granted ability for private individuals to tax the rest of the market. Normally, people don't care because the costs are kept invisible to consumers and because many people believe that non-software patents are useful and that the resulting increase in prices is just.
Actually hey did exactly what you suggest. The numbers they use are only those of patent settlements and legal fees directed specifically against windows and office and the only sales numbers they used are estimates of windows computers sold over the same period.
Just sloppy reporting on the initial post
Yes. :)
The SFLC paper only takes into account suits directed against Windows or Office, then divides that over the total number of windows machines sold during the same period. There may be some slippage there for systems sold without a version of Office, but you don't need to spread the damages over the whole product line unless you think that Microsoft's whole product line infringed the patent in question and the plaintiffs simply didn't mention them in their suits.
The formula is presented in the article, and it only takes into account suits specifically directed against windows or office. Now, it is possible that the future licensing costs for those patents will be lower, but given the amazing vagueness of software patents, I don't see any reason to believe that Microsoft's settlement costs, or their ratio of settlement costs to units of product sold, will go down in the next few years.
But even if we go with the assumption that these costs scale, these aren't copyright cases. Microsoft didn't buy functional code from anyone for incorporation, they wrote all the functionality on their own. The real thing to consider is whether the existence of these patents helped add functionality at all. If not, then that $21.50 being siphoned away from actually useful development.
Beats me, but if someone told you that it worked out to 5-15%, wouldn't you think it was time to change the system around?
Actually, the original posting is misleading. The $4.3 billion is just from settlements of lawsuits specifically aimed at Windows or Office and the accompanying costs of defending against the lawsuits that they won. Secret settlements and legal fees related to other products were not considered in SFLC's paper.
The article is not about the economics of software distribution, or the relation of legal costs to other costs in software development. It is about how software patents specifically add to the cost of distributing software today. Now, if you really think Amazon should have a 20 year monopoly on clicking on a link as a way of ordering something online, then maybe everything we're talking about is really a novel and non-obvious invention valuable enough to society to warrant government granted monopolistic rights. In that case, I guess it's all equally "software development". I tend to think it's basically all garbage and only actually used to shake down companies and funnel lots of money to pay patent lawyers. Since this one component cost goes towards a worthless system, I care how much of any of my purchases goes towards supporting it.
Conveniently, Linux has avoided these costs. If it matters to you that people end up paying more because of these software patent costs in the first place, then this might be important to you.
You could say that you get a similar situation with the Mob. Most people don't pay much attention because the costs they add to consumer goods are spread throughout society. Now if you pointed out to someone that, through various additional money spend in shipping things through the ports, and assembling them in various towns, 15% of the cost of a new car went to the mob, [I have no numbers for that, just tossing one out] they might actually start paying attention. If you could then point to a different type of car and tell them that this type of car was produced without a dime going to the mob, that might suddenly be a reason to use it. It is a question of showing people how the things they might abstractly agree are bad happen to directly impact their lives and how their actions can, in turn, help shift resources away from those bad ends.
Let's skip past the ars write up, whose factually inaccurate and dismissive assertions have been unquestioningly repeated all over this thread, and look at the actual document that the SFLC released. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/pate nt-tax.html
First some corrections:
- SFLC does not assume that Windows and Office are the only products that Microsoft sold during the time period in question, they specifically state that the 4 billion dollars in settlements were only the settlements "to plaintiffs claiming that Microsoft's Windows and Office products infringed their patents."
- Similarly, SFLC does not claim that all of Microsoft's legal fees are directly related to patent defense, in fact how much Microsoft pays in legal fees overall is never mentioned. The fees they talk about are those specifically related to patent defense, and they get their figures directly from a published 2005 interview with Brad Smith, Microsoft's General Counsel.
Ok, now to the actual main points of the study.
Software patents are not about innovation. The software industry was doing very well before the legal system did an about face and decided that software could be patented. The software industries in the rest of the world do perfectly well without patents. And, just in case you thought that the whole system was just harmless, the biggest player in the industry has to pay billions of dollars in legal and settlement fees just to get their products out of the door. Imagine then the what trouble these patents must cause for people without the ability to pay billions of dollars in settlement costs in order to distribute software that they independently wrote.
Playing with software patents gets everyone burned.
Very true. Especially since the retroactive extension of copyright in the US cordons off not only the culture of today but also the cultural artifacts of your childhood and those of your parents and their parents. So, even if you make the argument that you can replace the culture of today, which seems an extreme unlikelihood within a broadcast culture, you are still closed off from the majority of recorded culture. This is already your culture, you can't simply buy a new history regardless of how much you wish to avoid patronizing the companies with a legal monopoly on selling you access to yours.
If you are looking for more that fsfeurope's plain text diff, FSF is providing a strikethrough version of this second Draft, that highlights all the changed text from Draft 1, in LaTex, Postscript, and PDF
Lets remember the motivation that all the Napster knock-off services are trying to push on schools: liability shielding.
Besides bandwith issues, which, as another poster has already pointed, out can be readilly capped per MAC address, a school's only practical concern with copyright infringement taking place over their network is that the RIAA and MPAA are thrashing about in the dark trying to find the best people to hit with lawsuits over it.
We know that music rental services have been peddeling themselves as less messy alternatives than having to turn over identifying information on your students to the RIAA when their Jane Doe lawsuits hit your network, but this is a minor inconvience compared to the possible lawsuits the entertainment industry lawers might cook up. What happens when the industry decides to sue the colleges themselves for contributing to large scale infringement because they didn't take steps to control how the children in their care used the bleeding edge networking tools that the school provided?
A music distribution service without RIAA content will not really stop the Jane Doe lawsuits against your students, but taking affirmative steps to try and build up a climate of non-infringing music sharing might be enough to ward off a neglience claim down the road. In terms of building that climate I think it makes a good deal of sense to pick a service that has an open procedure for bands to add their music and that even allows students to distribute their own music, both things that Mindawn has.