If cracking is a crime at all (much less a very serious one), then a computer is property which can be trespassed on. The data I have on it is my property. I have no real problem with this as long as it is consistent. However, if this is the case, then if I have a PC with Linux and Microsoft's OS install formats my disk, I can sue them and win because they destroyed my property. If I'm on Windows and I install Quicktime or MS Media Player, and it grabs control of all my image files, I can sue because it is disrupting my property in ways I didn't ask for or desire. In short, if cracking is a crime at all, then the computer industry are criminals, because so much of what they do invades your computer's 'space' and changes stuff around as if they owned it- sometimes causing data loss and other types of damage. There's no way around this- even if the current situation isn't this clearcut, the trend toward smart updates and remote-disable copy protection completely goes into the same areas crackers go. In a situation where Microsoft wants to be able to block and withhold your computer use when _they_ think you've done something wrong, where is the difference? It obliterates the concept of computer data as property- and if computers are not property but a public resource you don't actually own, then there is no argument that crackers shouldn't be allowed to access them. If computer data is property, then the computer industry is working very hard to make it effectively not be property anymore. Isn't that the root of the problem?
Free Software: denotes a form of licensing (the 'GPL') that places the availability and flow of information above all other concerns, including the self-interest of the software authors. Free Software (as opposed to Open Source) can be considered 'information sharing at all costs'.
I, too, would like to see ESR back off from the griping about RMS, and the GPL. I _like_ the GPL, and I like the way it obsessively and unbreakably protects code from ever being withheld or taken away from the community. It's about maintaining flow of information, nothing more, nothing less. That's important- it's strategically important. If commercial vendors don't want to give information to the community (which they can participate in with impunity, all they like, under the rules of the community), then they _should_ be writing proprietary software, instead of jumping on bandwagons they do not understand. There's sure to be many commercial vendors who _will_ give information permanently to the community (under the GPL, for instance) for reasons of their own, such as wanting to take a mindshare lead, or companies whose strength is support and services, or companies who distribute software so big that it's unappealing to try and download all of it, or companies which can legitimately claim to be releasing an 'engine' and selling an 'artwork' that runs on the engine and is copyright as if it were a novel or painting. I don't know if ESR ever _will_ see things this way, but I greatly desire him to lay off RMS and the GPL. To some, this license and its colorful inventor are extremely important, irreplacable. Quit dissing on it.
Absolutely. I totally agree with 'scumdamn' on this one. Linux itself, built on code licensed under the GPL, is an example of what can happen when a bit of the 'what's best for society' gets a word in edgewise. You have to be willing to put a little effort in for the community. Community isn't _built_ by selfishness, it is eroded. You can have both selfishness and community- they do balance out and you can have both- but you can't have community by using only selfishness.
I'm sorry, but I am unhappy seeing yet another 'open source' license turn up that undercuts what the GPL's about. It's this simple- the GPL is primarily, blinderedly, obsessively about causing the flow of information to continue and be unblockable. That's it! That is the primary goal. The GPL is brilliant in its singleminded pursuit of this goal. There isn't a situation that couldn't be dealt with under the GPL. Every detail is perfectly realized in fulfilling this goal. For instance, there's no requirement to get consent of previous authors- so a piece of software, once GPLed, is guaranteed to live as long as it's needed, even if the original author wants to kill it! The doctrine that source follows binaries provides the opportunity to safely _use_ such software or privately develop it with no conditions on the development- and the use of 'distribution' is on a personal level that applies even to one person getting a GPLed software project from his boss at work- that person under the GPL _owns_ the software and has rights to redistribute under the GPL, any way he pleases so long as the source accompanies it. It's amazing that RMS saw all this- perhaps he didn't, perhaps it's simply the logical consequence of his passion for unhindered flow of information. The important thing is, it's here, it's available, and in fact Linux (at least big chunks of it) are licensed through the GPL, making Linux a form of information that cannot be effectively blocked or confined. It's distressing but probably shouldn't be surprising to see these continued efforts- efforts that can only be to 'make a license that seems free/open but still allows the originator to block or withhold their information for the sake of profit'. Now, profit's dandy- wish I had more of it- lots of ways to get it, too. Freedom's dandy too- highflown words, pontificating, all very fun. However, the point at which the seeking of profit starts to undercut the safeguards of the GPL that keep information un-blockable- is the point at which my sympathy runs out. The mere fact that this is granting extra benefits to the writer of the software isn't enough to impress me, either. Such a person is perfectly free to write proprietary software, nothing is stopping them, an entire legal edifice built around intellectual property is ready to defend their rights to do so. People writing open source software ought to consider what they are writing it for. What is Linux for, when you think about it? What good is it? There are commercial Unices that are arguably as good technically, even better (depending on your particular requirements). What's so special about Linux? Linux cannot be taken away. Not even Linus can- if he threw a fit and decided never to share anything again, the license he chose, the GPL, would ensure that the work would continue, and would be available to all who wanted to get involved. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Even if Linus himself tried furiously to block any further development, along with the whole bunch of top-level maintainers. Linux _cannot_, legally, be taken away- that would be quite blatant contract breach, and nothing that is GPL can be withheld from you, no matter what anyone thinks, even if the original author gets nasty and wants to totally starve you of information. Now, would that be the case if Linus was granted the special dispensation to release a proprietary version of Linux? If the authors and contributors all got to 'shut off' their code should they have a bad beard day? If that were so, Linux would be built upon sand- lots of pieces would exist on sufferance of the original authors, and you'd have to humor them. We don't have to deal with that. And I, for one, intend to continue releasing software under the GPL- and in so doing, I make a contribution that I can't un-make. I like it that way. Whether my work's good or bad, it is part of the great hoard of free information, the collection that will always be there to be used- on its own terms. I'm never gonna use a GPL-variation that sets restrictions on the unimpeded flow of information. And that includes variations that give _me_ the ability to impede. I consider that wrong. If you're gonna write proprietary software, just do it, don't put up smokescreens.
"To me, this is spiteful and authoritarian-communist; nobody can "steal" public domain code, they are only free to use it and retain all rights to their own mods and derivatives (whereas the GPL grabs the work of others)." That's an odd perspective. I don't see anybody forcing you to use the GPL for your own work. In fact, if it's your own work you have total freedom to do anything including keeping it utterly proprietary, and nobody can stop you. Now, if you instead want to take _my_ work and modify it and release it, and my work is GPLed... well, tough. If you want total control of your code don't base it on my work. If you want it to be a secret, then don't base it on my work. You might be able to make money (probably not as many as you think- it's like the music business, what are you going to do for business plan and distribution and public relations? Are you a full-on businessman or just a programmer with an idea worth money?) However, if you're expecting to do this, you've got no right to _my_ work to do it with. Heaven forbid you should expect to make money for yourself off _my_ work!:P write your own!
...serves me right to get overpassionate about such things, I don't _do_ 'passionate' well. Anytime I find myself underlining, italicising or boldfacing too many words, I ought to not post the comment;) I think it is very strange to be compared to a Moonie for what I've said. I'm only trying to provoke consideration and understanding- I have only a limited ability to reach out the other way to make contact, and a lot of people more autistic than me have even less ability to do this. I am not lost and lonely (or school age, for that matter): I'm only trying against troublesome odds to get some people to have a bit of clue about what's going on here. There _is_ evidence to suggest that computer geekery is a singularly appropriate 'haven' for autistics and those with Asperger's. Many aspects of it help to cover for our weak points, and there are things about coding that are easier for an autistic person to keep track of. Denying this is foolish- it just is- this is hardly a great mystery. Nothing about it says that 'NT' (neurologically typical) people are less capable at computer geekery- it's simply that autistic/Asperger's people _thrive_ within computer geekery. People are still learning what autism is. (It has nothing to do with schizophrenia, BTW, though there are some similarities with being schizoid.) Just because it is not 'black and white' rigorously defined doesn't mean it's not real- there's a lot of reality behind that simple term. It matters, it requires a certain amount of effort to coexist with (on both sides!), and it is part of the computer geek scene and will continue to be. No amount of mockery, shame, pity or dismissal will change this. If you don't like it, learn to tolerate it because it's not going to be possible to cleanse computer geekery of autism and Asperger's- or desirable, no matter 'what people think' of it. So much for that. If this keeps up, Linux people are gonna need another HOWTO... interestingly, the Hacker FAQ is a very good start, and could almost be used as a handbook on how to keep an autistic person comfortable and productive in the workplace. It's not exact, but much of what it covers also applies to autism.
The deal with 3dfx is that they mean to be able to provide over _100_ fps, or 60fps with antialiasing. This is different from motion blur- for one, the antialiasing will work with all old games as it's nothing but a scaled-up screen bilinearly resampled down. Antialiasing does look good (it's widely used in raytracing) and this will indeed cause existing games to look better, as well as the future games. GeForce will not be able to do this as it is grossly fill-rate impeded compared to its competitors. GeForce is all geometry and no fill rate- the next 3dfx thing is all fill rate and no geometry- the Savage one is somewhere in the middle. The only way you'll get the antialiasing and motion blur ('cinematic' effects, kind of like how 3dfx rendering seems dirtier, more contrasty, more photographic as opposed to 'rendered') is with the 3dfx stuff as none of its competitors are willing to put that much effort into fill rate. The only way you'll get 20 times the geometry (rounded curves, 3d trees in games etc.) is if you get the GeForce and also wait to have developers write games for it, many of which could be Win-only *grumble*. My money's on 3dfx actually- I'm biased because I always think 3dfx screenshots look more 'photographic' (grain? contrast? some factor of their 22-bit internal calculations to 16-bit display?) but there's another factor- competitiveness. If you read folks like Thresh talking about what they use, it turns out that they crank everything down to look as ugly as possible and run as fast as possible. I've done this on q3test and got a solid 60fps in medium action using only a 300Mhz G3 upgrade card and a Voodoo2. It looks awful, especially when you really pull out all the stops and make things look absolutely horrible- but it's sure competitive! You can track enemies and gib them much better, even if you're not all that hot at Quake. How does this relate to the GeForce? It's the fill rate. Even on a normal AGP bus the thing can't be fed enough geometry to max it out- but the actual filling of the screen is unusually slow, and this expands rapidly with larger resolutions. The result is this- somebody trying to max out, say, q3test but run at 1600x1200 in lowest image quality will be able to see accurate (but nearly solid color!) enemies in the distance and be able to make out subtle movements. This also applies to the antialiasing- that will help as well, even at normal resolutions. The result is that the person running on something with insanely high fill rate and using that combined with very low graphics quality, will get more visual information than the other players will, and will be getting it at a frame rate that is competitive (to a Thresh, there's a difference between 100 and 150 fps- while in a crowded fight, with 'sync' turned off). By contrast, users of a geometry enhanced card will not get a competitive advantage from their form of graphical superiority. It is strictly visual eye candy and will not significantly add a competitive advantage... For that reason I'd say, DON'T write off 3dfx just yet. Their choice for technological advancement is tailor made for getting a competitive advantage, and when you start maxing out the respective techie wonderfulness, the competitive advantage of 3dfx's approach will not be subtle. Likely result- 3dfx users may not be looking at comparably pretty visuals, but can console themselves by gibbing everybody in sight;)
Uh- 'Farenheit 451' IS fiction. It doesn't really exist. You can look at the ideas of it, but you can't look where that society ended up because there was no society to look at- there's just the book. Distinguish more rigorously between reality and fiction....
"Humans are the ones who keep trying to ban good stuff like INFORMATION and even BEER." Heh- seemingly unlike you, for _me_ beer is harmful because of the alcohol content. You might say I'm allergic to the latter, simply don't tolerate it well (you know the drill- better me than you, right? OK then.) Guess what? I don't consume it. End of problem. Is there an implication that because beer is harmful to me I need to be _protected_ from knowledge that it exists? *feh* that's what this Clothoniousness is about. I find it Clothodious:)
Tain't much, but that's what it does. I wrote it because I needed it. It's a Mac program as that's what I wake up to:) hey, that means Jon could run it! Here it is: http://www.airwindows.com/s hareware/staccato/index.html It's going to be relocating fairly soon for various reasons- first, I'm doing a major site overhaul to free up some space and re-organize, and second, I'm putting it at root level because it's essentially free software, and it's kind of ludicrous to suggest voluntary shareware payment. Nobody's ever given me a dime for any of my GPLed stuff (though I have to blame lack of publicity first), and even the words 'shareware' and 'GPL' don't really go together. So Staccato is no longer going to be contained in a directory called 'Shareware'. Anyway- I use this daily. It's the equivalent of keeping a long list with date-equivalences, and then showing a MOTD every day with only those entries significant to that day, sorted by priority. I think the significance of this is in the parsing- you can do many things, but the main rule is this- date to the left of a parenthetical number, entry to the right. Like(2)this. I think that would be parsed as 'no valid date, show every day' at priority level 2, and would say 'this.'. It's a 'Clotho', but a totally unjudgemental one. It's my tool for offloading some of the stuff I need to keep track of- _it_ will keep track of that, and I can trust it to be predictable and reliable. Jon seems to want a robot to be judgemental for him. He can't have that (in any reasonable form), but he can run this anytime he wants- it's GPL but he won't even need a port as it originated on the Mac. (Actually it'd be a port to Windows (which I'm not going to do), for Linux it would be a slightly elaborate shell script, nothing more- wouldn't even require a _program_. The only suggestion I'd make is this- keep the parsing functionality the way it is, it's like that for a reason. You should only have to remember one rule, the 'date(priority)entry' rule, with no other restrictions on syntax. If anybody wants to go implement this on Linux before I get around to doing it, go get 'em- I'll probably use your conversion:)
Bruce, do some research, OK? Careful with the judgement calls. The net is a boon for the 'way of being' known as autism/Asperger's. We (I speak for myself and some others) do not cope well with disruptions of our mental 'flow'. We can lock into really hardcore degrees of concentration that lift eyebrows, but it's like jet-lag to be distracted or derailed from this pressured focus. I'm gonna ask, how many geeks work and geek out at night? How many do it so intensely that they have trouble managing normal sleep schedules and tend to consistently stay up until dawn or later? I do, and I know some of the reasons why I 'jack in' to my net data sources so intensely at night. It's because there's no other stimulus going on, and no likelihood of being distracted and derailed, and this has everything to do with my having Asperger's. That said, net data is a very _narrow_ bandwidth. It's language- Asperger's people are very _very_ good at language, so that's no trouble- it's accessible at one's own pace, and you control its flow. Now, contrast this with the social thing. I've studied enough that I can get a sense of what I'm missing here- for years it was just like I was on Mars, or _from_ Mars, and I had no idea. I'll illustrate with a next-door neighbor thing... I'm hanging out with Foo. I've always been able to do that- one on one is OK, not too much of a strain. Suddenly, Bar and Baz come over. I like Bar but not Baz, Foo likes Baz but not Bar, and I owe Baz money while Bar is trying to get me to program something for him and is being extra nice. As a side note, Foo hates people being wheedling and whiny. That's the terrain (and shockingly simplified, really.) In the next fifth of a second, Bar's eyebrows will go up as he looks at me, and Foo's mouth will tighten, while Baz's mouth will also tighten in sympathy, but not as much. Given that Bar is probably going to wheedle me while in Foo's territory, what is the likelihood of me getting yelled at, and what degree of attention and priority should I give to Foo, Bar and Baz?Discuss.;) Normal people do this all the time. It's a form of intelligence or perhaps instinct that the majority of people have very well developed. They spend huge amounts of time in social situations this complex or more so, effortlessly decoding and computing their reactions as easily as I decide to use a series of overlaying tiled heightmaps based on series of primes in a program... and to me and to other sufficiently autistic people, this is just as incomprehensible as my coding would be to them. This is what 'social' means in practice. Talking to people with language online through text is different. There is nothing that says that autistic people hate communicating- it's just that if the average social thing is _that_ hard to do, how surprising is it that autistic people can't deal with it? Also we tolerate solitude a lot better than most people- another hidden advantage. Bruce, you're great, you rule- your help with the Corel thing was terrific. Please don't take the wrong step here. You don't know the whole story, and very likely you don't have to- if you aren't autistic, trust me, you don't want it- it's too different and your life would be unrecognizably different, incomprehensibly so. However, 'we' are as much autistic as we are not- there is no requirement, but the nature of computerdom _draws_ the autistic, and those with Asperger's, because it is a mode of being in which our strengths can shine and our limitations are not so relevant. Please do not say 'we (computer geeks) are not autistic'. Without meaning the slightest harm you are walling off a whole class of people who are mostly not well equipped to speak up for their own rights. My own sporadic outbursts draw more from adeptness with written language and a lasting fascination with the subject. I suggest that if you haven't studied it as seriously, then you might be well qualified to speak on computers and geeks and open source, but you may have no particular qualifications on specifically geek autism. Being autistic is both alienating and alienated, but you have to understand that it's not a conscious pose or act of rebellion- it is the product of great difficulty in handling the horrendously overwhelming flow of nonverbal signals and balances of personality in interpersonal communications. I'll talk to my next door neighbors- on _my_ turf, where I can act from a position of ease and ability. If my neighbors had computers and AOL and wanted to come over and talk about the latest Microsoft active web technologies, I'd be just as inadequate as if they were talking hockey or Spice Girls. Their being acquainted with computers would _not_ make them a person like me, or make me able to interact on their level...
In a world where even on slashdot, at the mere mention of autism/asperger's, you get people jumping around going "That's not me! I'm greatly insulted! People like me! I'm not a retard! I'm not a loser like them! You take that back!"... Well, I have to say that I prefer the article to certain bits of the Slashdot threads:P jesus! Exactly why is it proper to publically humiliate people with a different (and sometimes troublesome) mode of being? Why is it so important to run about desperately trying to prove that 'geekdom' is no haven for us? I (not surprisingly, as I have asperger's) am not overconcerned with other people's social opinions, particularly in that grand ungraspable region called 'public image'. However, it really grates sometimes, the way people are so terrified of being 'painted' as fellow travellers. Do you really mean to 'educate' both geekdom and the outside world that, even with geeks, if you are a certain way then you're a loser and should be shunned? Is it so important to establish that asperger's is a sickness and that people shouldn't hire/work with/associate with the autistic when there are good geeks available who bridle at the suggestion that they have handicaps? Please. That's disgusting. It's a groupthink mentality that, ironically, many autistic people have a hard time grasping or relating to- a mentality of "I am of Group X. These people are also of Group X, but I must make everyone understand that they don't represent Group X, because they reflect badly on me!" Final thought for all those on all sides of this- if it did turn out that autistic/asperger's people did legitimately represent computer geeks... what would you do?
Alvin Toffler comprehensively covered this in _1970_ in 'Future Shock'. That is almost _thirty_ years ago. It might be too much to ask but could you at least _credit_ your recycled ideas properly? Toffler is not a guru and does not have a claim to ultimate truth, but he put a lot of work into his concept. Right or wrong it deserves better than to be pre-schoolised and stripped of its context by you.
Instead, they are ceasing to claim that their agreement supercedes the GPL. So, if you know somebody who has the binaries and source to the modified GPL programs, NOW, then you can get the source NOW by asking for it. Corel is not compelled to give you the binary and source. They're just compelled to give you the source _if_ you have the binary. They can restrict the binaries (to GPLed stuff) with 'beta' as much as they like, but everybody they give it to has _complete_ rights to redistribute as much as they want. It's GPLed, you know;)
Internal use does indeed count as distribution. Anyone working on a GPLed program, no matter who's hiring them to do so, by definition has complete rights to the program, including the legal right to redistribute it. I think it's possible that if someone were fired because they redistributed GPLed stuff when the company wanted it kept private, they would have a case for wrongful termination because they'd be punished for doing something explicitly allowed in the program's license agreement, and there is no reasonable expectation that just by working for a company the person would have less rights in this regard. Distribution is defined as transfer of the binary/source from one legal entity to another legal entity. As such, internal distribution is unambiguously considered distribution, and the provisions of the GPL apply. The recipient (the programmer in the next cubicle, for instance) is afforded the full and undiluted rights under the GPL, just as if they were doing the work on their own time. If the company does not like letting its employee's intellectual property become potentially public property, then they need to have that employee work on something else, because the GPL is unambiguous and makes no allowances for 'company time' or 'private releases' or any of that. Contracts mean exactly what they say, and this one (the GPL) is phrased very explicitly and bluntly in key areas- and not by accident. To address one of your points- the GPL has no provision for waiving itself in the case of an employee who has signed confidentiality agreements. For the purposes of the GPL, the company does not exist. If it conflicts with confidentiality agreements, either the confidentiality agreement breaks by necessity, or the employee ends up legally unable to work on such a program (and this begins to be a civil liberties issue. Can you forbid a person from participating in software development that gives them property rights to the software, and freedom to redistribute?)
The GPL is a legal document. If you refuse to take it seriously you're setting yourself up for a fall, because you seem to be arguing that you can win in a case of overt and egregrious contract violation, regarding a contract that is as clear as day. Since you seem to be thinking of personal grievances let's look at your questions. Any Slashdotter lawyers reading this? What if *YOU* are the copyright holder? Then you might be one of the people most interested in fixing the situation. Doesn't mean you're any more entitled than anybody else. The GPL is everybody's business, and if there's a grievance anybody can pursue it, they don't have to be the copyright holder. If you mean 'me and not the FSF', surprise! You've still released under a legal document. It's still binding. You could assign the copyright to Microsoft and the document still is binding. If the FSF doesn't attack violators, maybe people need to be signing copyright over to something that does, or simply using their names and getting together to exchange the names of lawyers who'd love a piece of the action from suing a rich company over an egregrious contract violation. Where is a Howto on GPL enforcement? Beats me, perhaps we need one. Where is a FAQ on enforcing the GPL? Beats me, perhaps we need one. What is the best way to serve and document that an offical request has been provided for a distributor to correct their business practices when distributing the GPL package? Have you considered the usual formalities, such as having the request notarized, or requiring a receipt to certify that the recipient actually got and signed for your written request? Here we're getting into the realworld legalistics, and this is orthogonal to the actual GPL. What do you do if your an individual developer and a distributor has ignored for over 2 years requests to follow the requirements listed in the GPL? Please specify exactly what failure you mean. Who is this, and what have they done? They do _not_ have a requirement to distribute to you specifically. If they gave you binaries of GPLed stuff they do have a requirement to give you the source. If they're modifying something of yours, they do not have a requirement to give you specifically their result, but if they give you the binary they have to give you the source. Also, you can get the source indirectly, as anybody who _did_ get it is fully empowered to redistribute. Exactly what happened that has you so upset, and is it genuinely a violation or not? What is a method accepted by the US Courts on putting a value on the package or a dollar amount on the "damages" due to GPL violation? That's irrelevant to the GPL, ask a lawyer. The GPL just happens to be the contract in question. What is the maxium amount of damages that can be claimed in small claims court? Beats me, ask a lawyer. How do you go about filing a GPL violation in small claims court? Beats me, I don't go around suing people (so far!;P). Ask a lawyer. Are you sure you want small claims court? Do we have any lawyer-like slashdotters willing to give some input here?
Ask any of the beta testers, or any of the Corel programmers doing the work. If they have access to the modified GPL software at all, they have full rights to redistribute under the GPL as much or as little as they like. This does not mean they have similar rights with non-GPL software, but the GPL stuff becomes their property and they are perfectly free to give you a copy if they like.
And again, the beta testers have the RIGHT under the GPL to redistribute the modifications to anybody they please. Original authors, Slashdot, Microsoft, Jesse Berst, _anybody_. In doing so they must also be willing to distribute the source modified by Corel. Nothing about this says that those testers can or must redistribute _Corel_ stuff that is not released under the GPL. That's completely different, and that's Corel's business. The only requirement we're talking about here is the nature of redistribution to beta testers as specified by Corel. The reason it's not possible to force distribution to interested parties, for instance the original author of a program, is that this might be a roadblock to development- if that person dies or is locked up or otherwise becomes impossible to communicate with, it would be impossible to legally continue developing that software. The expectation is that all interested parties would be able to get access to important modifications being made in the code. This stands up fairly well to attempts to break the flow of information- if a company wished to fork a program, and (under their GPL rights) made major changes privately and then wished to bring it into the mainstream without letting the maintainers of the original development stream get the information, they'd have three main options:
not release it, which would be ineffective at forking the development stream- that constitutes not even distributing it, and obviously, is no threat
release it to only handpicked people (beta testers). In this case they are not _forced_ to release it to anyone not a beta tester, because they do not have an obligation to distribute binaries to all- the extent to which they do that is the extent to which they are distributing, and they're not required to distribute. The trick is, each of the recipients gets full rights under the GPL- so if even _one_ of the beta testers wishes to give the information to the original author, to Slashdot, to Jesse Berst or whoever, that is their right. This means that in a situation of an attempted power play, the control of information can blow at any seam- anyone can legally be the link from the controlled environment to the outside world. It becomes very unlikely that such a power play can be carried out except under very tight wraps, which markedly diminishes its effectiveness.
release it to all, which abandons any attempts to wrest control of the development of the GPLed software from others.
This is critically important to understand- the GPL is not most significant as an UberLicense to which everybody must submit. It's not even necessary for all software to be licensed under it. The important thing is that the GPL is carefully constructed, down to the smallest detail, to cause the fullest dissemination of information under even the most hostile conditions. It is possible for people to (legally) try and control source under the GPL, because of the doctrine that binaries == source and the failure to _require_ that binaries be distributed. However, by the same token, the GPL is uncompromising in that when you _do_ redistribute, the recipients get full rights, and any of them can distribute further to anybody they choose. You can't stop them or even slow them down. You can ask them not to, but that's _it_, that's all you can do, is ask, they are entirely in the right to do so. To analyse possible risk areas further, let's consider another possibility- the distributor says, 'Please don't redistribute our Linux betas. If you do, we will drop you from the program and you won't get any more binaries _or_ source from us'. This is legitimate under the GPL! However, it's also waving a red flag- there doesn't need to be a formal contractual punishment for this, because of the inevitable backlash effect. Other beta testers would defect and redistribute. There would be new testers who'd sign on just long enough to get binaries and source and then (legally) redistribute and (legally) be dropped from the beta testing ranks. The only way to rule that out entirely would be to cease any beta testing at all- and even then, you're assuming that all the programmers working on the project internally will keep it under wraps. They get full rights to redistribute too! Thus, even in severely hostile situations, if the GPL is followed to the letter, it will tend to route information around attempts to blockade it. That's what it's for- that's the GPL's overriding purpose and goal. If it ever becomes a problem to get modifications of GPLed source out of a company, go straight to those who are working with the binaries in any context. They are formally and legally allowed to redistribute all the GPLed source they have.
I'm sorry but there is nothing about 'registered beta testers' in the GPL. It is a legal document. Legal documents are not subject to interpretations of convenience- they mean exactly what they say, no more, no less. Your claim 'If you are not a registered beta tester, you have no legal right to access the source code' is disturbingly like saying 'therefore you can't see it at all'. This is dead wrong in a very serious way. The reality is this: even _if_ 'beta testers' are found to be not distribution in the normal sense (in this case, I think even that is unreasonable), once those testers get the modifications to the GPLed code they have _every_ right to distribute it to anybody they please. Even if you cannot _force_ the original modifier to make you a 'beta tester', all you have to do is ask one of the beta testers and they have every right to redistribute the modified GPLed source, thus re-establishing the flow of information as is their right under the legal document, the GPL. Please do not ever say 'If you are not a registered beta tester, you have no legal right to access modified GPLed code'. This is at best misleading, and at worst an outright falsehood. These things are important, and a better understanding of them will help everybody including the proprietary companies. It's really not that hard or that dangerous to work with GPLed stuff and mingle it with the proprietary. You just have to put up a Berlin Wall of licensing- and anything that's derived from GPLed stuff, you completely err on the side of redistribution of information, and on giving people GPL rights. That's not that hard. As for the proprietary, just keep it entirely separate- I for one have no problem at all with Corel writing proprietary software. I have a very severe problem with the idea of their inadvertently or intentionally muddying the waters of the GPL's meaning. They have done that- they got _you_, LetterJ, to believe that if you're not a beta tester you have no right to see modified GPLed source. That's just not true. You have no right to see Corel's _proprietary_ source. Big difference. The stuff in the pool of work covered by the GPL is public, remember that...
I've got stuff out under the GPL. And you? And I was yelling bloody murder and posted about five times on the danger of forking existing development, but now I'm appeased. To be picky- I'll be appeased _when_ they release the source for the GPLed stuff that they've changed. If there's any suggestion that there's an intentional delay that's a very serious problem, even now. I don't see much evidence to suggest that they're intentionally delaying, though- just something to think about. If Microsoft used this technique to fork existing opensource projects, you'd be singin' a different tune;) to the extent that somebody _can_ get away with it, somebody eventually _will_.
Very simple. Do _nothing_ to specifically Microsoft the corporation, just hit all the _people_ running the show with serious jail time. Perjury, conspiracy to obstruct justice, etc etc. Put Gates and Ballmer and the _marketing/tactical_ brain trust of Microsoft literally behind bars, and who gives a damn how much money they have- some of the Watergate felons saw actual jail time too, and they weren't poor! _Jail_ actual people. Send a personal message of that nature. This wouldn't harm any theoretical capacity of MS to innovate, wouldn't mess up the industry with largely hypothetical troubles of government code auditing and checking, but there are two major positive reactions:
it would be a real wake-up call to these morons who figure that corporations get to be as sociopathic as they like, because nobody is accountable
Microsoft is already suffering rot, and would collapse at the loss of its main sparkplugs.
A company has a personality, which is similar to the personality of its leaders. Microsoft's leaders are criminals, so Microsoft's personality is criminal. Remove the leaders and leave everything else, and eventually there might be leaders there who actually care more about producing products than they do about killing competition. The same programmers, artists, writers and possibly middle managers would be perfectly at home with the new personality. Never mind fussy legal corporate sanctions, which everyone is terrified about anyhow (a terror, mind you, orchestrated by Microsoft itself, and likely not worth the hysteria it gets). Instead, just nail the _people_ and send specific guilty-as-hell _people_ to jail. I think it is certainly likely that they can be reasonably charged with obstruction of justice due to their blatant attempts to subvert, lie to, and 'hack' the US judicial system....
The most important consideration isn't about whether end users can copy all of the Corel dist freely. That's important, but the most important consideration is whether Corel programmers are forking pre-existing opensource packages into new and modified versions that are allowed to be kept under wraps until final release. Again, that's forking, and that's a straight power play. Assuming they have good enough programmers, they could target any particular software, take it and start to establish a radically different and revised codebase, kick butt and make a substantially improved version, widely distribute it with the advertising and marketing and distribution resources of Corel, and then never permit anyone else a glimpse of their 'current snapshot', only the code of the final releases. Then anyone wanting to make alterations is told, "Sorry- your revision doesn't work with our current development snapshot" and the end result is that Corel entirely controls and conceals the active development of a fork of some major Open Source software, which competes with the 'bazaar model' one, but has more advertising resources, a brand name, and potentially the ability to suppress interim releases and the buggier revisions, giving it a tactical as well as strategic advantage. There's no way we can allow that to happen. There must be no 'beta exemption' for developers of public open source software. They can hide their own stuff- they can't 'fork' the stuff we have already. Show us the code!!!! There was something about how 'changes to other GPLed software' would be released with the final dist. That's forking. Let's see it NOW.
If I had a GPLed program which I wrote in Debian's distribution, and Corel took it and assigned a team of salaried commercial programmers to FORK MY CODE into my version and their version (which people only get to see final versions of) thereby taking control of my own program away from me and also commercially distributing and advertising their version on a huge scale, you are damned right I'd be furious. Consider yourself refuted completely. This is nothing but a mechanism to fork GPLed code into public and privately controlled codebases. That can't be allowed, not even a tiny bit. They can keep their _own_ code under wraps. They can't keep mine under wraps, fork it, and take it over from me. From the announcements, there are GPLed projects which are already being forked and taken over in this manner.
Slashdot Mirror
If cracking is a crime at all (much less a very serious one), then a computer is property which can be trespassed on. The data I have on it is my property. I have no real problem with this as long as it is consistent.
However, if this is the case, then if I have a PC with Linux and Microsoft's OS install formats my disk, I can sue them and win because they destroyed my property. If I'm on Windows and I install Quicktime or MS Media Player, and it grabs control of all my image files, I can sue because it is disrupting my property in ways I didn't ask for or desire. In short, if cracking is a crime at all, then the computer industry are criminals, because so much of what they do invades your computer's 'space' and changes stuff around as if they owned it- sometimes causing data loss and other types of damage.
There's no way around this- even if the current situation isn't this clearcut, the trend toward smart updates and remote-disable copy protection completely goes into the same areas crackers go. In a situation where Microsoft wants to be able to block and withhold your computer use when _they_ think you've done something wrong, where is the difference? It obliterates the concept of computer data as property- and if computers are not property but a public resource you don't actually own, then there is no argument that crackers shouldn't be allowed to access them.
If computer data is property, then the computer industry is working very hard to make it effectively not be property anymore.
Isn't that the root of the problem?
Free Software: denotes a form of licensing (the 'GPL') that places the availability and flow of information above all other concerns, including the self-interest of the software authors. Free Software (as opposed to Open Source) can be considered 'information sharing at all costs'.
How's that?
I, too, would like to see ESR back off from the griping about RMS, and the GPL. I _like_ the GPL, and I like the way it obsessively and unbreakably protects code from ever being withheld or taken away from the community. It's about maintaining flow of information, nothing more, nothing less. That's important- it's strategically important.
If commercial vendors don't want to give information to the community (which they can participate in with impunity, all they like, under the rules of the community), then they _should_ be writing proprietary software, instead of jumping on bandwagons they do not understand. There's sure to be many commercial vendors who _will_ give information permanently to the community (under the GPL, for instance) for reasons of their own, such as wanting to take a mindshare lead, or companies whose strength is support and services, or companies who distribute software so big that it's unappealing to try and download all of it, or companies which can legitimately claim to be releasing an 'engine' and selling an 'artwork' that runs on the engine and is copyright as if it were a novel or painting.
I don't know if ESR ever _will_ see things this way, but I greatly desire him to lay off RMS and the GPL. To some, this license and its colorful inventor are extremely important, irreplacable. Quit dissing on it.
Absolutely. I totally agree with 'scumdamn' on this one. Linux itself, built on code licensed under the GPL, is an example of what can happen when a bit of the 'what's best for society' gets a word in edgewise. You have to be willing to put a little effort in for the community. Community isn't _built_ by selfishness, it is eroded.
You can have both selfishness and community- they do balance out and you can have both- but you can't have community by using only selfishness.
I'm sorry, but I am unhappy seeing yet another 'open source' license turn up that undercuts what the GPL's about. It's this simple- the GPL is primarily, blinderedly, obsessively about causing the flow of information to continue and be unblockable. That's it! That is the primary goal.
The GPL is brilliant in its singleminded pursuit of this goal. There isn't a situation that couldn't be dealt with under the GPL. Every detail is perfectly realized in fulfilling this goal. For instance, there's no requirement to get consent of previous authors- so a piece of software, once GPLed, is guaranteed to live as long as it's needed, even if the original author wants to kill it! The doctrine that source follows binaries provides the opportunity to safely _use_ such software or privately develop it with no conditions on the development- and the use of 'distribution' is on a personal level that applies even to one person getting a GPLed software project from his boss at work- that person under the GPL _owns_ the software and has rights to redistribute under the GPL, any way he pleases so long as the source accompanies it. It's amazing that RMS saw all this- perhaps he didn't, perhaps it's simply the logical consequence of his passion for unhindered flow of information. The important thing is, it's here, it's available, and in fact Linux (at least big chunks of it) are licensed through the GPL, making Linux a form of information that cannot be effectively blocked or confined.
It's distressing but probably shouldn't be surprising to see these continued efforts- efforts that can only be to 'make a license that seems free/open but still allows the originator to block or withhold their information for the sake of profit'. Now, profit's dandy- wish I had more of it- lots of ways to get it, too. Freedom's dandy too- highflown words, pontificating, all very fun. However, the point at which the seeking of profit starts to undercut the safeguards of the GPL that keep information un-blockable- is the point at which my sympathy runs out.
The mere fact that this is granting extra benefits to the writer of the software isn't enough to impress me, either. Such a person is perfectly free to write proprietary software, nothing is stopping them, an entire legal edifice built around intellectual property is ready to defend their rights to do so.
People writing open source software ought to consider what they are writing it for. What is Linux for, when you think about it? What good is it? There are commercial Unices that are arguably as good technically, even better (depending on your particular requirements). What's so special about Linux?
Linux cannot be taken away.
Not even Linus can- if he threw a fit and decided never to share anything again, the license he chose, the GPL, would ensure that the work would continue, and would be available to all who wanted to get involved. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Even if Linus himself tried furiously to block any further development, along with the whole bunch of top-level maintainers. Linux _cannot_, legally, be taken away- that would be quite blatant contract breach, and nothing that is GPL can be withheld from you, no matter what anyone thinks, even if the original author gets nasty and wants to totally starve you of information.
Now, would that be the case if Linus was granted the special dispensation to release a proprietary version of Linux? If the authors and contributors all got to 'shut off' their code should they have a bad beard day? If that were so, Linux would be built upon sand- lots of pieces would exist on sufferance of the original authors, and you'd have to humor them.
We don't have to deal with that.
And I, for one, intend to continue releasing software under the GPL- and in so doing, I make a contribution that I can't un-make. I like it that way. Whether my work's good or bad, it is part of the great hoard of free information, the collection that will always be there to be used- on its own terms.
I'm never gonna use a GPL-variation that sets restrictions on the unimpeded flow of information. And that includes variations that give _me_ the ability to impede. I consider that wrong. If you're gonna write proprietary software, just do it, don't put up smokescreens.
"To me, this is spiteful and authoritarian-communist; nobody can "steal" public domain code, they are only free to use it and retain all rights to their own mods and derivatives (whereas the GPL grabs the work of others)." :P write your own!
That's an odd perspective. I don't see anybody forcing you to use the GPL for your own work. In fact, if it's your own work you have total freedom to do anything including keeping it utterly proprietary, and nobody can stop you.
Now, if you instead want to take _my_ work and modify it and release it, and my work is GPLed... well, tough. If you want total control of your code don't base it on my work. If you want it to be a secret, then don't base it on my work. You might be able to make money (probably not as many as you think- it's like the music business, what are you going to do for business plan and distribution and public relations? Are you a full-on businessman or just a programmer with an idea worth money?) However, if you're expecting to do this, you've got no right to _my_ work to do it with. Heaven forbid you should expect to make money for yourself off _my_ work!
...serves me right to get overpassionate about such things, I don't _do_ 'passionate' well. Anytime I find myself underlining, italicising or boldfacing too many words, I ought to not post the comment ;)
I think it is very strange to be compared to a Moonie for what I've said. I'm only trying to provoke consideration and understanding- I have only a limited ability to reach out the other way to make contact, and a lot of people more autistic than me have even less ability to do this.
I am not lost and lonely (or school age, for that matter): I'm only trying against troublesome odds to get some people to have a bit of clue about what's going on here. There _is_ evidence to suggest that computer geekery is a singularly appropriate 'haven' for autistics and those with Asperger's. Many aspects of it help to cover for our weak points, and there are things about coding that are easier for an autistic person to keep track of. Denying this is foolish- it just is- this is hardly a great mystery. Nothing about it says that 'NT' (neurologically typical) people are less capable at computer geekery- it's simply that autistic/Asperger's people _thrive_ within computer geekery.
People are still learning what autism is. (It has nothing to do with schizophrenia, BTW, though there are some similarities with being schizoid.) Just because it is not 'black and white' rigorously defined doesn't mean it's not real- there's a lot of reality behind that simple term. It matters, it requires a certain amount of effort to coexist with (on both sides!), and it is part of the computer geek scene and will continue to be. No amount of mockery, shame, pity or dismissal will change this. If you don't like it, learn to tolerate it because it's not going to be possible to cleanse computer geekery of autism and Asperger's- or desirable, no matter 'what people think' of it.
So much for that. If this keeps up, Linux people are gonna need another HOWTO... interestingly, the Hacker FAQ is a very good start, and could almost be used as a handbook on how to keep an autistic person comfortable and productive in the workplace. It's not exact, but much of what it covers also applies to autism.
The deal with 3dfx is that they mean to be able to provide over _100_ fps, or 60fps with antialiasing. This is different from motion blur- for one, the antialiasing will work with all old games as it's nothing but a scaled-up screen bilinearly resampled down. Antialiasing does look good (it's widely used in raytracing) and this will indeed cause existing games to look better, as well as the future games. ;)
GeForce will not be able to do this as it is grossly fill-rate impeded compared to its competitors. GeForce is all geometry and no fill rate- the next 3dfx thing is all fill rate and no geometry- the Savage one is somewhere in the middle.
The only way you'll get the antialiasing and motion blur ('cinematic' effects, kind of like how 3dfx rendering seems dirtier, more contrasty, more photographic as opposed to 'rendered') is with the 3dfx stuff as none of its competitors are willing to put that much effort into fill rate. The only way you'll get 20 times the geometry (rounded curves, 3d trees in games etc.) is if you get the GeForce and also wait to have developers write games for it, many of which could be Win-only *grumble*. My money's on 3dfx actually- I'm biased because I always think 3dfx screenshots look more 'photographic' (grain? contrast? some factor of their 22-bit internal calculations to 16-bit display?) but there's another factor- competitiveness.
If you read folks like Thresh talking about what they use, it turns out that they crank everything down to look as ugly as possible and run as fast as possible. I've done this on q3test and got a solid 60fps in medium action using only a 300Mhz G3 upgrade card and a Voodoo2. It looks awful, especially when you really pull out all the stops and make things look absolutely horrible- but it's sure competitive! You can track enemies and gib them much better, even if you're not all that hot at Quake.
How does this relate to the GeForce? It's the fill rate. Even on a normal AGP bus the thing can't be fed enough geometry to max it out- but the actual filling of the screen is unusually slow, and this expands rapidly with larger resolutions.
The result is this- somebody trying to max out, say, q3test but run at 1600x1200 in lowest image quality will be able to see accurate (but nearly solid color!) enemies in the distance and be able to make out subtle movements. This also applies to the antialiasing- that will help as well, even at normal resolutions. The result is that the person running on something with insanely high fill rate and using that combined with very low graphics quality, will get more visual information than the other players will, and will be getting it at a frame rate that is competitive (to a Thresh, there's a difference between 100 and 150 fps- while in a crowded fight, with 'sync' turned off).
By contrast, users of a geometry enhanced card will not get a competitive advantage from their form of graphical superiority. It is strictly visual eye candy and will not significantly add a competitive advantage...
For that reason I'd say, DON'T write off 3dfx just yet. Their choice for technological advancement is tailor made for getting a competitive advantage, and when you start maxing out the respective techie wonderfulness, the competitive advantage of 3dfx's approach will not be subtle. Likely result- 3dfx users may not be looking at comparably pretty visuals, but can console themselves by gibbing everybody in sight
Uh- 'Farenheit 451' IS fiction. It doesn't really exist. You can look at the ideas of it, but you can't look where that society ended up because there was no society to look at- there's just the book.
Distinguish more rigorously between reality and fiction....
"Humans are the ones who keep trying to ban good stuff like INFORMATION and even BEER." :)
Heh- seemingly unlike you, for _me_ beer is harmful because of the alcohol content. You might say I'm allergic to the latter, simply don't tolerate it well (you know the drill- better me than you, right? OK then.)
Guess what? I don't consume it. End of problem.
Is there an implication that because beer is harmful to me I need to be _protected_ from knowledge that it exists? *feh* that's what this Clothoniousness is about. I find it Clothodious
Tain't much, but that's what it does. I wrote it because I needed it. It's a Mac program as that's what I wake up to :) hey, that means Jon could run it! Here it is: :)
http://www.airwindows.com/s hareware/staccato/index.html
It's going to be relocating fairly soon for various reasons- first, I'm doing a major site overhaul to free up some space and re-organize, and second, I'm putting it at root level because it's essentially free software, and it's kind of ludicrous to suggest voluntary shareware payment. Nobody's ever given me a dime for any of my GPLed stuff (though I have to blame lack of publicity first), and even the words 'shareware' and 'GPL' don't really go together. So Staccato is no longer going to be contained in a directory called 'Shareware'.
Anyway- I use this daily. It's the equivalent of keeping a long list with date-equivalences, and then showing a MOTD every day with only those entries significant to that day, sorted by priority. I think the significance of this is in the parsing- you can do many things, but the main rule is this- date to the left of a parenthetical number, entry to the right. Like(2)this. I think that would be parsed as 'no valid date, show every day' at priority level 2, and would say 'this.'.
It's a 'Clotho', but a totally unjudgemental one. It's my tool for offloading some of the stuff I need to keep track of- _it_ will keep track of that, and I can trust it to be predictable and reliable. Jon seems to want a robot to be judgemental for him. He can't have that (in any reasonable form), but he can run this anytime he wants- it's GPL but he won't even need a port as it originated on the Mac. (Actually it'd be a port to Windows (which I'm not going to do), for Linux it would be a slightly elaborate shell script, nothing more- wouldn't even require a _program_. The only suggestion I'd make is this- keep the parsing functionality the way it is, it's like that for a reason. You should only have to remember one rule, the 'date(priority)entry' rule, with no other restrictions on syntax.
If anybody wants to go implement this on Linux before I get around to doing it, go get 'em- I'll probably use your conversion
Bruce, do some research, OK? Careful with the judgement calls. ;)
The net is a boon for the 'way of being' known as autism/Asperger's. We (I speak for myself and some others) do not cope well with disruptions of our mental 'flow'. We can lock into really hardcore degrees of concentration that lift eyebrows, but it's like jet-lag to be distracted or derailed from this pressured focus.
I'm gonna ask, how many geeks work and geek out at night? How many do it so intensely that they have trouble managing normal sleep schedules and tend to consistently stay up until dawn or later?
I do, and I know some of the reasons why I 'jack in' to my net data sources so intensely at night. It's because there's no other stimulus going on, and no likelihood of being distracted and derailed, and this has everything to do with my having Asperger's.
That said, net data is a very _narrow_ bandwidth. It's language- Asperger's people are very _very_ good at language, so that's no trouble- it's accessible at one's own pace, and you control its flow.
Now, contrast this with the social thing. I've studied enough that I can get a sense of what I'm missing here- for years it was just like I was on Mars, or _from_ Mars, and I had no idea. I'll illustrate with a next-door neighbor thing...
I'm hanging out with Foo. I've always been able to do that- one on one is OK, not too much of a strain. Suddenly, Bar and Baz come over. I like Bar but not Baz, Foo likes Baz but not Bar, and I owe Baz money while Bar is trying to get me to program something for him and is being extra nice. As a side note, Foo hates people being wheedling and whiny. That's the terrain (and shockingly simplified, really.)
In the next fifth of a second, Bar's eyebrows will go up as he looks at me, and Foo's mouth will tighten, while Baz's mouth will also tighten in sympathy, but not as much. Given that Bar is probably going to wheedle me while in Foo's territory, what is the likelihood of me getting yelled at, and what degree of attention and priority should I give to Foo, Bar and Baz?Discuss.
Normal people do this all the time. It's a form of intelligence or perhaps instinct that the majority of people have very well developed. They spend huge amounts of time in social situations this complex or more so, effortlessly decoding and computing their reactions as easily as I decide to use a series of overlaying tiled heightmaps based on series of primes in a program... and to me and to other sufficiently autistic people, this is just as incomprehensible as my coding would be to them.
This is what 'social' means in practice. Talking to people with language online through text is different. There is nothing that says that autistic people hate communicating- it's just that if the average social thing is _that_ hard to do, how surprising is it that autistic people can't deal with it? Also we tolerate solitude a lot better than most people- another hidden advantage.
Bruce, you're great, you rule- your help with the Corel thing was terrific. Please don't take the wrong step here. You don't know the whole story, and very likely you don't have to- if you aren't autistic, trust me, you don't want it- it's too different and your life would be unrecognizably different, incomprehensibly so. However, 'we' are as much autistic as we are not- there is no requirement, but the nature of computerdom _draws_ the autistic, and those with Asperger's, because it is a mode of being in which our strengths can shine and our limitations are not so relevant.
Please do not say 'we (computer geeks) are not autistic'. Without meaning the slightest harm you are walling off a whole class of people who are mostly not well equipped to speak up for their own rights. My own sporadic outbursts draw more from adeptness with written language and a lasting fascination with the subject. I suggest that if you haven't studied it as seriously, then you might be well qualified to speak on computers and geeks and open source, but you may have no particular qualifications on specifically geek autism.
Being autistic is both alienating and alienated, but you have to understand that it's not a conscious pose or act of rebellion- it is the product of great difficulty in handling the horrendously overwhelming flow of nonverbal signals and balances of personality in interpersonal communications.
I'll talk to my next door neighbors- on _my_ turf, where I can act from a position of ease and ability. If my neighbors had computers and AOL and wanted to come over and talk about the latest Microsoft active web technologies, I'd be just as inadequate as if they were talking hockey or Spice Girls. Their being acquainted with computers would _not_ make them a person like me, or make me able to interact on their level...
In a world where even on slashdot, at the mere mention of autism/asperger's, you get people jumping around going "That's not me! I'm greatly insulted! People like me! I'm not a retard! I'm not a loser like them! You take that back!"... :P jesus! Exactly why is it proper to publically humiliate people with a different (and sometimes troublesome) mode of being? Why is it so important to run about desperately trying to prove that 'geekdom' is no haven for us?
Well, I have to say that I prefer the article to certain bits of the Slashdot threads
I (not surprisingly, as I have asperger's) am not overconcerned with other people's social opinions, particularly in that grand ungraspable region called 'public image'. However, it really grates sometimes, the way people are so terrified of being 'painted' as fellow travellers. Do you really mean to 'educate' both geekdom and the outside world that, even with geeks, if you are a certain way then you're a loser and should be shunned? Is it so important to establish that asperger's is a sickness and that people shouldn't hire/work with/associate with the autistic when there are good geeks available who bridle at the suggestion that they have handicaps?
Please. That's disgusting. It's a groupthink mentality that, ironically, many autistic people have a hard time grasping or relating to- a mentality of "I am of Group X. These people are also of Group X, but I must make everyone understand that they don't represent Group X, because they reflect badly on me!" Final thought for all those on all sides of this- if it did turn out that autistic/asperger's people did legitimately represent computer geeks... what would you do?
Alvin Toffler comprehensively covered this in _1970_ in 'Future Shock'. That is almost _thirty_ years ago.
It might be too much to ask but could you at least _credit_ your recycled ideas properly? Toffler is not a guru and does not have a claim to ultimate truth, but he put a lot of work into his concept. Right or wrong it deserves better than to be pre-schoolised and stripped of its context by you.
"Help, my taxi crashed!"
Instead, they are ceasing to claim that their agreement supercedes the GPL. ;)
So, if you know somebody who has the binaries and source to the modified GPL programs, NOW, then you can get the source NOW by asking for it.
Corel is not compelled to give you the binary and source. They're just compelled to give you the source _if_ you have the binary. They can restrict the binaries (to GPLed stuff) with 'beta' as much as they like, but everybody they give it to has _complete_ rights to redistribute as much as they want. It's GPLed, you know
Internal use does indeed count as distribution. Anyone working on a GPLed program, no matter who's hiring them to do so, by definition has complete rights to the program, including the legal right to redistribute it. I think it's possible that if someone were fired because they redistributed GPLed stuff when the company wanted it kept private, they would have a case for wrongful termination because they'd be punished for doing something explicitly allowed in the program's license agreement, and there is no reasonable expectation that just by working for a company the person would have less rights in this regard.
Distribution is defined as transfer of the binary/source from one legal entity to another legal entity. As such, internal distribution is unambiguously considered distribution, and the provisions of the GPL apply. The recipient (the programmer in the next cubicle, for instance) is afforded the full and undiluted rights under the GPL, just as if they were doing the work on their own time. If the company does not like letting its employee's intellectual property become potentially public property, then they need to have that employee work on something else, because the GPL is unambiguous and makes no allowances for 'company time' or 'private releases' or any of that. Contracts mean exactly what they say, and this one (the GPL) is phrased very explicitly and bluntly in key areas- and not by accident.
To address one of your points- the GPL has no provision for waiving itself in the case of an employee who has signed confidentiality agreements. For the purposes of the GPL, the company does not exist. If it conflicts with confidentiality agreements, either the confidentiality agreement breaks by necessity, or the employee ends up legally unable to work on such a program (and this begins to be a civil liberties issue. Can you forbid a person from participating in software development that gives them property rights to the software, and freedom to redistribute?)
The GPL is a legal document. If you refuse to take it seriously you're setting yourself up for a fall, because you seem to be arguing that you can win in a case of overt and egregrious contract violation, regarding a contract that is as clear as day. ;P). Ask a lawyer. Are you sure you want small claims court?
Since you seem to be thinking of personal grievances let's look at your questions. Any Slashdotter lawyers reading this?
What if *YOU* are the copyright holder?
Then you might be one of the people most interested in fixing the situation. Doesn't mean you're any more entitled than anybody else. The GPL is everybody's business, and if there's a grievance anybody can pursue it, they don't have to be the copyright holder.
If you mean 'me and not the FSF', surprise! You've still released under a legal document. It's still binding. You could assign the copyright to Microsoft and the document still is binding. If the FSF doesn't attack violators, maybe people need to be signing copyright over to something that does, or simply using their names and getting together to exchange the names of lawyers who'd love a piece of the action from suing a rich company over an egregrious contract violation.
Where is a Howto on GPL enforcement?
Beats me, perhaps we need one.
Where is a FAQ on enforcing the GPL?
Beats me, perhaps we need one.
What is the best way to serve and document that an offical request has been provided for a distributor to correct their business practices when distributing the GPL package?
Have you considered the usual formalities, such as having the request notarized, or requiring a receipt to certify that the recipient actually got and signed for your written request? Here we're getting into the realworld legalistics, and this is orthogonal to the actual GPL.
What do you do if your an individual developer and a distributor has ignored for over 2 years requests to follow the requirements listed in the GPL?
Please specify exactly what failure you mean. Who is this, and what have they done? They do _not_ have a requirement to distribute to you specifically. If they gave you binaries of GPLed stuff they do have a requirement to give you the source. If they're modifying something of yours, they do not have a requirement to give you specifically their result, but if they give you the binary they have to give you the source. Also, you can get the source indirectly, as anybody who _did_ get it is fully empowered to redistribute. Exactly what happened that has you so upset, and is it genuinely a violation or not?
What is a method accepted by the US Courts on putting a value on the package or a dollar amount on the "damages" due to GPL violation?
That's irrelevant to the GPL, ask a lawyer. The GPL just happens to be the contract in question.
What is the maxium amount of damages that can be claimed in small claims court?
Beats me, ask a lawyer.
How do you go about filing a GPL violation in small claims court?
Beats me, I don't go around suing people (so far!
Do we have any lawyer-like slashdotters willing to give some input here?
Ask any of the beta testers, or any of the Corel programmers doing the work. If they have access to the modified GPL software at all, they have full rights to redistribute under the GPL as much or as little as they like. This does not mean they have similar rights with non-GPL software, but the GPL stuff becomes their property and they are perfectly free to give you a copy if they like.
Nothing about this says that those testers can or must redistribute _Corel_ stuff that is not released under the GPL. That's completely different, and that's Corel's business. The only requirement we're talking about here is the nature of redistribution to beta testers as specified by Corel.
The reason it's not possible to force distribution to interested parties, for instance the original author of a program, is that this might be a roadblock to development- if that person dies or is locked up or otherwise becomes impossible to communicate with, it would be impossible to legally continue developing that software. The expectation is that all interested parties would be able to get access to important modifications being made in the code. This stands up fairly well to attempts to break the flow of information- if a company wished to fork a program, and (under their GPL rights) made major changes privately and then wished to bring it into the mainstream without letting the maintainers of the original development stream get the information, they'd have three main options:
- not release it, which would be ineffective at forking the development stream- that constitutes not even distributing it, and obviously, is no threat
- release it to only handpicked people (beta testers). In this case they are not _forced_ to release it to anyone not a beta tester, because they do not have an obligation to distribute binaries to all- the extent to which they do that is the extent to which they are distributing, and they're not required to distribute. The trick is, each of the recipients gets full rights under the GPL- so if even _one_ of the beta testers wishes to give the information to the original author, to Slashdot, to Jesse Berst or whoever, that is their right. This means that in a situation of an attempted power play, the control of information can blow at any seam- anyone can legally be the link from the controlled environment to the outside world. It becomes very unlikely that such a power play can be carried out except under very tight wraps, which markedly diminishes its effectiveness.
- release it to all, which abandons any attempts to wrest control of the development of the GPLed software from others.
This is critically important to understand- the GPL is not most significant as an UberLicense to which everybody must submit. It's not even necessary for all software to be licensed under it. The important thing is that the GPL is carefully constructed, down to the smallest detail, to cause the fullest dissemination of information under even the most hostile conditions. It is possible for people to (legally) try and control source under the GPL, because of the doctrine that binaries == source and the failure to _require_ that binaries be distributed. However, by the same token, the GPL is uncompromising in that when you _do_ redistribute, the recipients get full rights, and any of them can distribute further to anybody they choose. You can't stop them or even slow them down. You can ask them not to, but that's _it_, that's all you can do, is ask, they are entirely in the right to do so.To analyse possible risk areas further, let's consider another possibility- the distributor says, 'Please don't redistribute our Linux betas. If you do, we will drop you from the program and you won't get any more binaries _or_ source from us'. This is legitimate under the GPL! However, it's also waving a red flag- there doesn't need to be a formal contractual punishment for this, because of the inevitable backlash effect. Other beta testers would defect and redistribute. There would be new testers who'd sign on just long enough to get binaries and source and then (legally) redistribute and (legally) be dropped from the beta testing ranks. The only way to rule that out entirely would be to cease any beta testing at all- and even then, you're assuming that all the programmers working on the project internally will keep it under wraps. They get full rights to redistribute too!
Thus, even in severely hostile situations, if the GPL is followed to the letter, it will tend to route information around attempts to blockade it. That's what it's for- that's the GPL's overriding purpose and goal.
If it ever becomes a problem to get modifications of GPLed source out of a company, go straight to those who are working with the binaries in any context. They are formally and legally allowed to redistribute all the GPLed source they have.
I'm sorry but there is nothing about 'registered beta testers' in the GPL. It is a legal document. Legal documents are not subject to interpretations of convenience- they mean exactly what they say, no more, no less.
Your claim 'If you are not a registered beta tester, you have no legal right to access the source code' is disturbingly like saying 'therefore you can't see it at all'.
This is dead wrong in a very serious way.
The reality is this: even _if_ 'beta testers' are found to be not distribution in the normal sense (in this case, I think even that is unreasonable), once those testers get the modifications to the GPLed code they have _every_ right to distribute it to anybody they please. Even if you cannot _force_ the original modifier to make you a 'beta tester', all you have to do is ask one of the beta testers and they have every right to redistribute the modified GPLed source, thus re-establishing the flow of information as is their right under the legal document, the GPL.
Please do not ever say 'If you are not a registered beta tester, you have no legal right to access modified GPLed code'. This is at best misleading, and at worst an outright falsehood.
These things are important, and a better understanding of them will help everybody including the proprietary companies. It's really not that hard or that dangerous to work with GPLed stuff and mingle it with the proprietary. You just have to put up a Berlin Wall of licensing- and anything that's derived from GPLed stuff, you completely err on the side of redistribution of information, and on giving people GPL rights. That's not that hard. As for the proprietary, just keep it entirely separate- I for one have no problem at all with Corel writing proprietary software. I have a very severe problem with the idea of their inadvertently or intentionally muddying the waters of the GPL's meaning. They have done that- they got _you_, LetterJ, to believe that if you're not a beta tester you have no right to see modified GPLed source. That's just not true. You have no right to see Corel's _proprietary_ source. Big difference. The stuff in the pool of work covered by the GPL is public, remember that...
I've got stuff out under the GPL. And you? ;) to the extent that somebody _can_ get away with it, somebody eventually _will_.
And I was yelling bloody murder and posted about five times on the danger of forking existing development, but now I'm appeased.
To be picky- I'll be appeased _when_ they release the source for the GPLed stuff that they've changed. If there's any suggestion that there's an intentional delay that's a very serious problem, even now. I don't see much evidence to suggest that they're intentionally delaying, though- just something to think about.
If Microsoft used this technique to fork existing opensource projects, you'd be singin' a different tune
_Jail_ actual people. Send a personal message of that nature. This wouldn't harm any theoretical capacity of MS to innovate, wouldn't mess up the industry with largely hypothetical troubles of government code auditing and checking, but there are two major positive reactions:
- it would be a real wake-up call to these morons who figure that corporations get to be as sociopathic as they like, because nobody is accountable
- Microsoft is already suffering rot, and would collapse at the loss of its main sparkplugs.
A company has a personality, which is similar to the personality of its leaders. Microsoft's leaders are criminals, so Microsoft's personality is criminal. Remove the leaders and leave everything else, and eventually there might be leaders there who actually care more about producing products than they do about killing competition. The same programmers, artists, writers and possibly middle managers would be perfectly at home with the new personality. Never mind fussy legal corporate sanctions, which everyone is terrified about anyhow (a terror, mind you, orchestrated by Microsoft itself, and likely not worth the hysteria it gets). Instead, just nail the _people_ and send specific guilty-as-hell _people_ to jail. I think it is certainly likely that they can be reasonably charged with obstruction of justice due to their blatant attempts to subvert, lie to, and 'hack' the US judicial system....The most important consideration isn't about whether end users can copy all of the Corel dist freely. That's important, but the most important consideration is whether Corel programmers are forking pre-existing opensource packages into new and modified versions that are allowed to be kept under wraps until final release. Again, that's forking, and that's a straight power play. Assuming they have good enough programmers, they could target any particular software, take it and start to establish a radically different and revised codebase, kick butt and make a substantially improved version, widely distribute it with the advertising and marketing and distribution resources of Corel, and then never permit anyone else a glimpse of their 'current snapshot', only the code of the final releases. Then anyone wanting to make alterations is told, "Sorry- your revision doesn't work with our current development snapshot" and the end result is that Corel entirely controls and conceals the active development of a fork of some major Open Source software, which competes with the 'bazaar model' one, but has more advertising resources, a brand name, and potentially the ability to suppress interim releases and the buggier revisions, giving it a tactical as well as strategic advantage.
There's no way we can allow that to happen. There must be no 'beta exemption' for developers of public open source software. They can hide their own stuff- they can't 'fork' the stuff we have already. Show us the code!!!! There was something about how 'changes to other GPLed software' would be released with the final dist. That's forking. Let's see it NOW.
If I had a GPLed program which I wrote in Debian's distribution, and Corel took it and assigned a team of salaried commercial programmers to FORK MY CODE into my version and their version (which people only get to see final versions of) thereby taking control of my own program away from me and also commercially distributing and advertising their version on a huge scale, you are damned right I'd be furious.
Consider yourself refuted completely. This is nothing but a mechanism to fork GPLed code into public and privately controlled codebases. That can't be allowed, not even a tiny bit. They can keep their _own_ code under wraps. They can't keep mine under wraps, fork it, and take it over from me. From the announcements, there are GPLed projects which are already being forked and taken over in this manner.