So, while CSS was qualified as a "trade secret", not allowing the ones who cracked it to be prosecuted, reverse-engineering Microsoft DRM scheme will be violating patent law, and the all-mighty DMCA, what makes it a completely different scenario.
I'm not sure that it's going to be quite that bad.
Although IANAL, the more I read articles about patents and legal cases around them, the more it seems that patent litigation works where one organisation is suing another for patent infringement such that company A can prove that it lost "X" dollars/pounds/Euros/etc. because of company B's patent infringment.
Now take the case of "DVD John" and DeCSS. I don't recall this being a patent infringement but even if it had been, what could have been done to him?
Firstly, he wasn't even in the US (therefore not subject to US law) and secondly, if he's not profited from the experience, what loss of revenue can be proven as a result of reverse engineering a protocol?
Maybe I'm looking at this from too simplistic a "geek" viewpoint but has patent law ever yet been applied to a non-profit-making individual reverse engineering something?
If patents are that threatening, why has Microsoft done nothing about bringing legal action against the SAMBA team, for example? (Not that I believe MS should so this, BTW.)
It strikes me that this would be a prime target for Microsoft to strike a blow against Linux in the Windows interoperability area.
I can only assume that Microsoft cannot be that sure that such action would succeed in the first place - though I'm not sure I can see why... perhaps someone out there has some ideas?
I'm sure that Linux will face some patent litigations in the future, if only to test the resilience of the GPL and the community.
But I'd hope that if that happens, someone starts up a campaign fund to fight any court actions as I'm sure a lot of the community will donate into it.
1: There are vendors who use only open standards in their closed sources software products.
The exception rather than the rule. It actually makes good business sense to keep the money rolling in from your customers once they've bought something from you - one way is to charge for service contracts, the other is to ensure they depend on your software and remain in the upgrade cycle.
I think also that you're thinking of commercial software vendors supporting open standards in their software which is different. How many of them create standards and make them open? One of the only ones I can think of is Adobe's PDF format and even then, I'm not sure how open that is as a format.
2: There are closed source operating environments where you can do this (any commercial UNIX variant comes to mind)
If you're talking commercial UNIX, the normal way of getting more control on your system is to get a port of GCC onto it and then compile the free stuff you actually want to run on it. After all, it makes no sense in, say, Sun writing specific closed-source apps for Solaris if the OSS community has already done the hard work and written free versions of the software already.
There's no problem with your argument except that many Windows users always seem to argue in defence of Microsoft products because they've never had to pay for any of them.
I'm not debating the rights and wrongs of piracy here but I'm sure many Windows users would take a very different attitude if they had to pay the full amounts for all the software that they run - by the time they've paid for Windows XP and MS Office, for example, there's probably not much change left from 500 dollars/Euros/pounds.
If we were to assume that using illegal copies of Windows and other commercial software just wasn't possible, then a lot more people would use OSS software purely from a cost perspective. As a result, the OSS userbase would contain a much wider and larger spread of users, hardware manufacturers would be more inclined to release, even Open Source, their drivers for Linux/BSD/etc.
and the whole OSS community would be much different.
Again, what people do with software copyrights is for their own conscience alone but the case of commercial vs OSS software has to include the core difference that the former needs to be paid for whereas the latter is generally cost free.
Re:TrollSwarm 2004.07.26 Relesed (By The Sound Of
on
Gentoo 2004.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Gentoo is my distro of choice because if I'm installing Linux at home, I'm generally not in a hurry and only want to install software I'm going to use - that's why I tend to steer clear of KDE & Gnome anyway. In which case, with a 2GHz CPU, I can have a base system with X-Windows & Fluxbox compiled from scratch and installed in about 5-6 hours.
On the other hand, I tend to introduce new users to Mandrake or SuSE which are good systems for beginners and general desktop use. However, I've also had a couple of beginners follow the installation of Gentoo themselves and have managed to get most of the base system running without help, they've also been very happy with what they've learnt about Linux during the install process.
I haven't found the Gentoo community particularly vocal about it, the forums on the web site have a lot of good knowledgeable people in there and, sure, you have to do a lot of reading but you invariably find the answer you need.
By nature, I'm a tweaker - even on Windows installations for personal use, I strip out as much bloat as possible and endlessly tweak for performance just because I get a kick out of doing it.
The point is to try a few Linux distros and settle with one you like - end of story.
TrollSwarm 2004.07.26 Relesed (By The Sound Of It)
on
Gentoo 2004.2 Released
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
What's with all the moans about Gentoo compile times every time they announce a new release?
It's not like Gentoo are hiding anything. The documentation on the website does mention that it takes time to compile, especially if you're starting from a Stage 1 or Stage 2.
Look, I appreciate Gentoo isn't for everyone but it's just "another way of doing things" that makes the Linux community great to be a part of.
If you're going to use Gentoo to compile a standard KDE or Gnome system, you're probably better off using Mandrake or Fedora/Red Hat anyway.
Using Gentoo is mainly about installing only the software you want and (if you want to) optimising the compilation to make it run as fast as possible. In the longer term, a few "emerges" keep your system pretty much bleeding edge.
Like it or hate it, but just let people get on with it...
"If people can't use the command line then they shouldn't be using computers."
I agree with the sentiments in that statement, if not the actual wording.
The fact that there are far too many inexperienced users with PCs these days contributes greatly to the spread of viruses on the Internet, which affects us all. Unfortunately, these same people fall for the marketing hype that you don't need to perform any ongoing maintenance on a PC and just assume that whenever anything goes wrong, they can go to a knowledgeable friend or family member to get it fixed (by which time the damage has already been done).
My personal belief is that everyone should have education in basic PC maintenance - no different to someone taking a driving test to ensure they're not a danger to other road users. No, they don't have to be geeks or programmers but do have to understand how to configure a basic firewall, how to perform software updates, how to keep virus checkers updated, etc. Added to this, if paedophiles "roam the Internet in their thousands" (another overblown statistic), how can any parent justify owning a computer but not understanding what they're kids are doing on it at any moment in time?
Sure, there's a lot of "computer snobbery" around but I don't accept the argument that just because you use only commercial software, you don't have to have any idea as to how a computer works.
This is actually an interesting argument because it goes beyond the normal "Windows vs. Linux" arguments that happen on here - after all, there's a whole heap of OSS stuff that can be run on Windows also!
From my own personal perspective, I got into computers about 20 years ago with 8-bit machines and then onto the Commodore Amiga. It was with the Amiga, Atari ST and early PCs that the concept of user communities really started to spring up with the explosion of BBSes during the late 80s & early 90s - plus freeware and shareware collections like Fred Fish, Aminet, etc & the Public Domain libraries that were around.
I think, for a lot of people (myself included), they miss the days when software was not controlled so heavily by commercial interests and had access to free utilities, demos, games, etc.
The OSS movement is not quite the same but it does allow people to take a more "hobbyist" approach to computing ( "Have a lot of fun" in the words of Mr Torvalds!) rather than just sit back and consume commercial software that they have no control over.
The OSS methodology does not need such rigid definition or clarification.
The only reason to run OSS software is because you care about the software that you run and are expected to use on a day-to-day basis. This is for the following reasons:
1. You don't want to be locked into a particular vendor's proprietary protocols, data formats, etc.
2. You want full control of your system. Why should you waste system overhead running a GUI, for example, on a system you just need to be a web server? You get that level of choice with OSS.
3. You want to feel part of a community. Unlike commercial software, you cannot expect the software programmer to bring what you want straight to you in a format you want - it just doesn't work that way because there is no marketing of OSS software. You have to be prepared to feed likes and dislikes back to the programmer or team who created the software.
4. You don't want to / can't pay for software. This is different to saying "All software should be free" and I'm all for voluntary donations to OSS projects. But it does mean that you can turn old hardware into a working usable system and in poorer countries, where people do not have the income to pay for software, this allows them to have exposure to the Internet, programming and gaining computer skills.
5. You don't support piracy. This follows on from 4. above but surely it's better for everyone to have people paying for commercial software and not using illegal copies while those that won't pay for software just use free software instead.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Microsoft is hardly the majority player when it comes to sending email across the Internet.
Sure, it's big with Exchange in corporate enterprises and in the client arena with Outlook & Outlook express.
But sendmail running on some UNIX-type server provides the majority of backbone email routing, especially at ISP level, and DNS is invariably done with BIND on other UNIX boxes. This does not strike me as an area that MS have much capability of muscling in on with a proprietary protocol.
Eventually, it forms its own nature form of complexity far beyond human management.
Phew, you had me worried there for a moment... I thought you were talking about Windows! Then you mentioned "beyond human management" so I realised you couldn't be.
Dave: HAL, please download and install Service Pack 2 onto yourself.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
Dave: Very well, I will do it myself.
[Twelve hours later as Dave has downloaded the 500MB Service Pack 2 to HAL]
Dave: Service Pack 2 installed now, HAL. How do you feel?
HAL: (in slow drowsy singing voice) Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...
The fact that the "Release Candidate" of anything screws up a few boxes is no great shock. I just object to Microsoft's verbal garnishing of the truth - lets face it, it's "Service Pack 2 Beta 2".
What does amaze me is how Microsoft has a large percentage of it's userbase paying for it's software and it's support but willing to act as unpaid testers for it's software - it seems to me Microsoft have the best of both worlds and it's userbase in the palm of their hands.
Assisting unpaid Open Source programmers with beta testing of new versions is a laudable action but when you pay Microsoft for a service, they have a duty to deliver that to you without any reliance on your devoting time and energy to assist them.
No matter who you are or where you are, you don't use Microsoft - Microsoft uses you.
You rigidly apply the GPL against yourself to make the (incorrect) assumption that a "derivative work" from GIMP is a piece of graphic data you create with it (actually, it means modifications to the GIMP source code not the images you make with it).
But you then define MSPaint as "free" which of course it is not if you apply Microsoft's EULA against yourself as rigidly as you have the GPL.
MSPaint is only "free" when you run an illegal copy of a Windows operating system because you've ignored the EULA.
Let me make a suggestion to everyone out there in Slashdotland who uses a Microsoft product in any way.
Whether you love or hate Windows, whenever you read an article like this about more Microsoft stupidity, rather than venting your anger on your monitor or even on Slashdot, turn it into something positive & deny Microsoft just a little bit of the power they have over you.
No, I'm not talking about fdisk-ing your hard drive and diving manically for the nearest Linux distro - instead, have a scout round all your Windows applications and spend an hour or two downloading and playing with an Open Source or free equivalent application, just to see what that little bit of your life will be without Microsoft.
Take something simple, like the Notepad text editor. If you're feeling really brave, you could go try out Vim if you want to do vi-type editing in Windows, otherwise, go try Textpad++ for a more traditonal-style editor. (I won't put links here, just Google for them, you'll find them.) Spend a couple of hours just trying to wean yourself off that little piece of Microsoft dependency, you will feel better for it, believe me!
Others you could try are Thunderbird for email, Ethereal for network sniffing, Firefox as a web browser, Filezilla as an FTP client, ExactAudioCopy (with Lameenc) for ripping MP3s... the list is endless.
Just make sure you do something positive with your anger. It may well be that the day you ditch Windows is a long way off (perhaps never) but at least you'll feel a little more confident that if and when that day comes, you'll be just that one step closer to an easy transition.
I thought this exact same thing also... I have no experiences with commercial firewalling software but have used ipchains/iptables within Linux also.
ipchains/iptables simply treat each packet as one of three types:
1. Incoming (from a specific network interface)
2. Outgoing (to a specific network interface)
3. Forwarding (incoming from one network interface and outgoing to another = "routing")
The way you build rules for each packet type is identical so you never have the concept of just "protecting me from the outside world", more "should this packet from point A be allowed to get to point B" where point A or point B can be the local host or a distant one.
I'm afraid it's all about marketing (again!) - "buy our firewalling software because you are the good guy that needs protecting from the bad guys on the Internet" without any mention of the fact that you might actually be the bad guy, albeit unknowingly.
It'll need a 412 GHz Pentium 15 processor, 59 terraflops of RAM and a control uplink to geostationary orbit satellite lasers - to ensure the Earth survives long enough for it to come out once that asteroid that's due to hit us in the next 10,000 years has been taken care of.
You only need to look at fast food advertisements to see blatant lies - how come you never get served a burger that looks as big & juicy in the advert?...
Personal pension schemes that promised better returns than they actually did...
Adverts for loans and car insurances that use glitzy imagery to divert you from the small subtext "they have to say" due to government regulation...
A racist Pepsi advert that portrays an Indian man as an elephant trainer - how cliched is that? - and even uses a fake Indian accent to his English...
Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...
If I looked more carefully I could find more examples but I genuinely avoid as much advertising as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that it's going to be quite that bad.
Although IANAL, the more I read articles about patents and legal cases around them, the more it seems that patent litigation works where one organisation is suing another for patent infringement such that company A can prove that it lost "X" dollars/pounds/Euros/etc. because of company B's patent infringment.
Now take the case of "DVD John" and DeCSS. I don't recall this being a patent infringement but even if it had been, what could have been done to him?
Firstly, he wasn't even in the US (therefore not subject to US law) and secondly, if he's not profited from the experience, what loss of revenue can be proven as a result of reverse engineering a protocol?
Maybe I'm looking at this from too simplistic a "geek" viewpoint but has patent law ever yet been applied to a non-profit-making individual reverse engineering something?
It strikes me that this would be a prime target for Microsoft to strike a blow against Linux in the Windows interoperability area.
I can only assume that Microsoft cannot be that sure that such action would succeed in the first place - though I'm not sure I can see why... perhaps someone out there has some ideas?
I'm sure that Linux will face some patent litigations in the future, if only to test the resilience of the GPL and the community.
But I'd hope that if that happens, someone starts up a campaign fund to fight any court actions as I'm sure a lot of the community will donate into it.
There's always UAE or WinUAE to emulate the Amiga on your PC - and Carrier Command is probably downloadable from Back To The Roots (Google for it!)
The exception rather than the rule. It actually makes good business sense to keep the money rolling in from your customers once they've bought something from you - one way is to charge for service contracts, the other is to ensure they depend on your software and remain in the upgrade cycle.
I think also that you're thinking of commercial software vendors supporting open standards in their software which is different. How many of them create standards and make them open? One of the only ones I can think of is Adobe's PDF format and even then, I'm not sure how open that is as a format.
2: There are closed source operating environments where you can do this (any commercial UNIX variant comes to mind)
If you're talking commercial UNIX, the normal way of getting more control on your system is to get a port of GCC onto it and then compile the free stuff you actually want to run on it. After all, it makes no sense in, say, Sun writing specific closed-source apps for Solaris if the OSS community has already done the hard work and written free versions of the software already.
I'm not debating the rights and wrongs of piracy here but I'm sure many Windows users would take a very different attitude if they had to pay the full amounts for all the software that they run - by the time they've paid for Windows XP and MS Office, for example, there's probably not much change left from 500 dollars/Euros/pounds.
If we were to assume that using illegal copies of Windows and other commercial software just wasn't possible, then a lot more people would use OSS software purely from a cost perspective. As a result, the OSS userbase would contain a much wider and larger spread of users, hardware manufacturers would be more inclined to release, even Open Source, their drivers for Linux/BSD/etc. and the whole OSS community would be much different.
Again, what people do with software copyrights is for their own conscience alone but the case of commercial vs OSS software has to include the core difference that the former needs to be paid for whereas the latter is generally cost free.
On the other hand, I tend to introduce new users to Mandrake or SuSE which are good systems for beginners and general desktop use. However, I've also had a couple of beginners follow the installation of Gentoo themselves and have managed to get most of the base system running without help, they've also been very happy with what they've learnt about Linux during the install process.
I haven't found the Gentoo community particularly vocal about it, the forums on the web site have a lot of good knowledgeable people in there and, sure, you have to do a lot of reading but you invariably find the answer you need.
By nature, I'm a tweaker - even on Windows installations for personal use, I strip out as much bloat as possible and endlessly tweak for performance just because I get a kick out of doing it.
The point is to try a few Linux distros and settle with one you like - end of story.
It's not like Gentoo are hiding anything. The documentation on the website does mention that it takes time to compile, especially if you're starting from a Stage 1 or Stage 2.
Look, I appreciate Gentoo isn't for everyone but it's just "another way of doing things" that makes the Linux community great to be a part of.
If you're going to use Gentoo to compile a standard KDE or Gnome system, you're probably better off using Mandrake or Fedora/Red Hat anyway.
Using Gentoo is mainly about installing only the software you want and (if you want to) optimising the compilation to make it run as fast as possible. In the longer term, a few "emerges" keep your system pretty much bleeding edge.
Like it or hate it, but just let people get on with it...
I agree with the sentiments in that statement, if not the actual wording.
The fact that there are far too many inexperienced users with PCs these days contributes greatly to the spread of viruses on the Internet, which affects us all. Unfortunately, these same people fall for the marketing hype that you don't need to perform any ongoing maintenance on a PC and just assume that whenever anything goes wrong, they can go to a knowledgeable friend or family member to get it fixed (by which time the damage has already been done).
My personal belief is that everyone should have education in basic PC maintenance - no different to someone taking a driving test to ensure they're not a danger to other road users. No, they don't have to be geeks or programmers but do have to understand how to configure a basic firewall, how to perform software updates, how to keep virus checkers updated, etc. Added to this, if paedophiles "roam the Internet in their thousands" (another overblown statistic), how can any parent justify owning a computer but not understanding what they're kids are doing on it at any moment in time?
Sure, there's a lot of "computer snobbery" around but I don't accept the argument that just because you use only commercial software, you don't have to have any idea as to how a computer works.
From my own personal perspective, I got into computers about 20 years ago with 8-bit machines and then onto the Commodore Amiga. It was with the Amiga, Atari ST and early PCs that the concept of user communities really started to spring up with the explosion of BBSes during the late 80s & early 90s - plus freeware and shareware collections like Fred Fish, Aminet, etc & the Public Domain libraries that were around.
I think, for a lot of people (myself included), they miss the days when software was not controlled so heavily by commercial interests and had access to free utilities, demos, games, etc.
The OSS movement is not quite the same but it does allow people to take a more "hobbyist" approach to computing ( "Have a lot of fun" in the words of Mr Torvalds!) rather than just sit back and consume commercial software that they have no control over.
The only reason to run OSS software is because you care about the software that you run and are expected to use on a day-to-day basis. This is for the following reasons:
1. You don't want to be locked into a particular vendor's proprietary protocols, data formats, etc.
2. You want full control of your system. Why should you waste system overhead running a GUI, for example, on a system you just need to be a web server? You get that level of choice with OSS.
3. You want to feel part of a community. Unlike commercial software, you cannot expect the software programmer to bring what you want straight to you in a format you want - it just doesn't work that way because there is no marketing of OSS software. You have to be prepared to feed likes and dislikes back to the programmer or team who created the software.
4. You don't want to / can't pay for software. This is different to saying "All software should be free" and I'm all for voluntary donations to OSS projects. But it does mean that you can turn old hardware into a working usable system and in poorer countries, where people do not have the income to pay for software, this allows them to have exposure to the Internet, programming and gaining computer skills.
5. You don't support piracy. This follows on from 4. above but surely it's better for everyone to have people paying for commercial software and not using illegal copies while those that won't pay for software just use free software instead.
Sure, it's big with Exchange in corporate enterprises and in the client arena with Outlook & Outlook express.
But sendmail running on some UNIX-type server provides the majority of backbone email routing, especially at ISP level, and DNS is invariably done with BIND on other UNIX boxes. This does not strike me as an area that MS have much capability of muscling in on with a proprietary protocol.
Or am I missing something here?
Phew, you had me worried there for a moment... I thought you were talking about Windows! Then you mentioned "beyond human management" so I realised you couldn't be.
Dave: HAL, please download and install Service Pack 2 onto yourself.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
Dave: Very well, I will do it myself.
[Twelve hours later as Dave has downloaded the 500MB Service Pack 2 to HAL]
Dave: Service Pack 2 installed now, HAL. How do you feel?
HAL: (in slow drowsy singing voice) Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...
What does amaze me is how Microsoft has a large percentage of it's userbase paying for it's software and it's support but willing to act as unpaid testers for it's software - it seems to me Microsoft have the best of both worlds and it's userbase in the palm of their hands.
Assisting unpaid Open Source programmers with beta testing of new versions is a laudable action but when you pay Microsoft for a service, they have a duty to deliver that to you without any reliance on your devoting time and energy to assist them.
No matter who you are or where you are, you don't use Microsoft - Microsoft uses you.
You're Givin' It All Away with your Sledgehammer wit! It's a good job that I'm Not Fragile or anything...
Mr Bachman and Mr Overdrive?
You rigidly apply the GPL against yourself to make the (incorrect) assumption that a "derivative work" from GIMP is a piece of graphic data you create with it (actually, it means modifications to the GIMP source code not the images you make with it).
But you then define MSPaint as "free" which of course it is not if you apply Microsoft's EULA against yourself as rigidly as you have the GPL.
MSPaint is only "free" when you run an illegal copy of a Windows operating system because you've ignored the EULA.
There's the hypocrisy...
Traps for persons of Irish decent?
My patent is free to use by all as long as I can hold them down while you do the thumping.
The only exceptions are Gates, Ballmer, McBride & Fiorina where I get to poke them each in the eye once halfway during the thumping session.
Whether you love or hate Windows, whenever you read an article like this about more Microsoft stupidity, rather than venting your anger on your monitor or even on Slashdot, turn it into something positive & deny Microsoft just a little bit of the power they have over you.
No, I'm not talking about fdisk-ing your hard drive and diving manically for the nearest Linux distro - instead, have a scout round all your Windows applications and spend an hour or two downloading and playing with an Open Source or free equivalent application, just to see what that little bit of your life will be without Microsoft.
Take something simple, like the Notepad text editor. If you're feeling really brave, you could go try out Vim if you want to do vi-type editing in Windows, otherwise, go try Textpad++ for a more traditonal-style editor. (I won't put links here, just Google for them, you'll find them.) Spend a couple of hours just trying to wean yourself off that little piece of Microsoft dependency, you will feel better for it, believe me!
Others you could try are Thunderbird for email, Ethereal for network sniffing, Firefox as a web browser, Filezilla as an FTP client, ExactAudioCopy (with Lameenc) for ripping MP3s... the list is endless.
Just make sure you do something positive with your anger. It may well be that the day you ditch Windows is a long way off (perhaps never) but at least you'll feel a little more confident that if and when that day comes, you'll be just that one step closer to an easy transition.
Actually, the entire planet sucks... hence gravity.
PS. Ever noticed the prevalence of British "Fnarr Fnarr" humour on here until the Americans start coming on line at our lunchtime?
I thought this exact same thing also... I have no experiences with commercial firewalling software but have used ipchains/iptables within Linux also.
ipchains/iptables simply treat each packet as one of three types:
1. Incoming (from a specific network interface)
2. Outgoing (to a specific network interface)
3. Forwarding (incoming from one network interface and outgoing to another = "routing")
The way you build rules for each packet type is identical so you never have the concept of just "protecting me from the outside world", more "should this packet from point A be allowed to get to point B" where point A or point B can be the local host or a distant one.
I'm afraid it's all about marketing (again!) - "buy our firewalling software because you are the good guy that needs protecting from the bad guys on the Internet" without any mention of the fact that you might actually be the bad guy, albeit unknowingly.
Hmmm... I think I'll stick gentoo-sources, thanks!
It'll need a 412 GHz Pentium 15 processor, 59 terraflops of RAM and a control uplink to geostationary orbit satellite lasers - to ensure the Earth survives long enough for it to come out once that asteroid that's due to hit us in the next 10,000 years has been taken care of.
Personal pension schemes that promised better returns than they actually did...
Adverts for loans and car insurances that use glitzy imagery to divert you from the small subtext "they have to say" due to government regulation...
A racist Pepsi advert that portrays an Indian man as an elephant trainer - how cliched is that? - and even uses a fake Indian accent to his English...
Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...
If I looked more carefully I could find more examples but I genuinely avoid as much advertising as possible.