like so much Cringley writes, is ignorant, egotistical, and, in his tepid way, "inflammatory," carelessly crafted for the single purpose of generating hype and controversy about... Cringley.
Seldom is such a "well regarded" technology journalist as consistently irrelevant as Cringley. He's a blowhard. Try reading his column on a regular basis - I know, it's painful, but try. You will see what I mean quickly.
Here's my prediction:
SCO is embarrased legally, although the perpetrators of the fraud (the SCO executive corps) stand a good chance of being protected from criminal prosecution by their large allies (who might find it awkward if their complicity came out). The aggrieved parties' (IBM, Redhat, many OS developers, etc) civil actions, however, have far more merit, and they sue the remnants of the company into a smoking crater. SCO executives will quickly declare bankruptcy when they see the end coming and attempt to shield their assets (their "personal" gains from the scheme), and it will be entertaining to see what lengths they will go to to do it (will the cash, or the people, leave the country?), and whether they will get away with it. I guarantee you Gates doesn't care if Darl McBride ends up broke or in prison - in fact, he would probably get a kick out of it.
Some will claim it's only a matter of time until "the next SCO." Others will rightly note that such IP and legal shenanigans can and do happen to everybody sufficiently threatening to their wealthy and unscrupulous competitors, and are far more likely to happen, let alone succeed, at a closed-source shop than an open source project. In fact, all it has demonstrated is that, contrary to some people's theories, a large open source project is surprisingly resillient and well equipped to defend itself against this kind of threat.
Haters will happily declare that a cloud has been cast over Linux and Open Source regardless, meanwhile, back in the real world, it will continue its inevitable treadmilling over products and companies that can't or won't outperform hobbyists.
In the very long haul, I suspect that the inevitable momentum of success will force more and more people to realize that collaborative software engineering, of many different kinds but loosely described as "Open Source," is the most productive and reliable method we have for doing many kinds of development, and this recognition will solidify in academic theory and accepted conventional wisdom. We will see more and more acceptance of sharing and openness in engineering in the mainstream, for infrastructure tasks like operating systems and compilers, for major applications, commodity code, middleware, and anywhere else we have problems with specific solutions sufficiently amenable to collective, decentralized effort.
Many more large organizations, especially foreign, and/or governmental, educational, and military, will continue the trend of consciously adopting open source for both political, economic, and practical reasons. There will be dissatisfaction, growing pains, and struggle, but also massive new contributions and growing credibility. In the end, journalists who made a living by obfuscating and belittling collaboration in engineering are going to look dated, and then silly, well within our lifetimes.
I'm guessing the continued growth of open source will ultimately help, rather than hurt, "proprietary" software as a whole, by making smarter engineers, giving them better tools and platforms, and clarifying the problems that are better solved in a proprietary way.
I'm actually pleased to read your response, and I think your cynicism is well warranted. I have these discussions with other friends and often it is I who have to play the devil's advocate.
I don't know if the DMCA and PATRIOT comparison is valid. The vanishing point of encryption and obfuscation techniques, and thus secure peer to peer networks, is that a choice is forced about whether or not encryption and/or privacy in general is allowed. DMCA and PATRIOT each had qualifying themes, but ultimately, good engineering can force the rulemakers to eliminate the qualifiers and choose between either:
*) outlawing encryption and/or privacy in general *) making data communications prohibitively expensive, and/or illegal
The former will be more politically difficult than DMCA or PATRIOT - not that it hasn't been done in other nations! The latter will have economic consequences that may be too difficult even for our sad little government to ignore.
I often raise the same point about wireless - that it is under the stifling control of one of the most pandering of federal agencies. Others have argued to me that there will be ways to deal even with hostile regulatory regimes, but this is outside my area of expertise, and I believe we should confront our present threats as though, in losing, we would lose everything.
Even outside the analgesic dream of democracy, tyrants derive their power from cowardice. I wonder what you would have predicted as the future of our nation 150 or 100 or 50 years ago, as blights many times more menacing must have seemed far more impenetrable to the generations that eventually overcame them... I say this not out of complacency, but to point out that resignation seems silly.
I was thinking of a more subtle approach to DRM on their part than you might be.
You may well be right, but I will lay out a few brief ideas in response.
What if Napster didn't take actions to drive its users away? I think the first step is merely eavesdropping and watermarking. Very, very cheap pricing ($20 all you can eat? 50 songs for $5?), very simple payment systems (co-billing deals with ISPs is the big dream, but that would take a long time to get going). You can up the price later as you gain momentum. Raise the specter of being caught rather than futilely try to secure things. The basic idea is to create a system where you can at least determine whether a song is owned by the user.
You negotiate aggressively with every P2P network you can cut a deal with, but you want to avoid driving them under. Make an example of one only if it's small. Primarily, you want to threaten, not to act. It would have been more than enough - Napster would have done anything the music companies asked, at the end. And then, for your companies, universities, and everywhere else you can, you start to market a "compliance system." Consider it similar to the BSA audit process. "You want to be legit? Just put these rules in place and pay a modest settlement. Otherwise bend over for a good old fashioned lawsuit."
Companies and universities roll over in a heartbeat. We see that everywhere, all over the country. Those are actually the few places you can really make strides. The new rules might only let you access the network if you install their compliance package - and that's what shuts off your ability to play things you haven't paid for.
Of course, once again, you don't get greedy. A student wants to dual boot Linux, but there's no Linux compliance package? Well, if we give them the CD, they sign the "acceptable use" policy, and install it on Windows, good enough. The point is to stay on top of the majority (in this example, it would be 99%). The point is, to make it just a little more difficult to break the rules. Yeah, lots of people will break them, just as lots of people have always copied games from their friends, but it's the majority you're after. It's a proven business model (hello, video game industry).
Home users, and anyone else on a free system, will still be able to do what they like. But their veneer of legitimacy is gone. And eventually you advocate that the government mandate conformance software of some kind... but even if they don't... the point is establishing a new cultural norm. We may be able to cheat relatively easily (as we do with many rules), but we do pay for content online.
And of course, DRM has to fail well. We're not talking encrypted files that you can't put in your Rio or your car. And I would even suggest that you must be able to "manually" share your files with others in a trivial way - perhaps when conformance is enforced, they merely expire after a week or two.
This is all off the top of my head, of course. I'm not saying it's the best approach, only trying to speculate about what could have happened. I'm not sure how viable this approach would still be. The whole point is to, very gradually, very slowly, boil the frog. You can't turn the heat up too fast. But if you ease them in, by the end they'll think DRM is just as American as apple pie.
Just to come up with one example, they might have considered violating users' privacy rather than their fair use rights, by watermarking or at least fingerprinting the files, to raise the specter that violation of the terms of use, while possible, is more likely to get you caught than before.
There are many gradual, careful approaches that consumers might not resist in sufficient numbers.
Right now the industry approach to DRM is laughable. It is good, too, because if they were more sophisticated about it they might have a chance of success. The problem is the full-court press that is apparently coming from Microsoft, even though I believe they are bigger than (for instance) the entire music industry in size, and stand to lose billions and indeed threaten their dominant position with such a move. They are apparently embracing DRM for other reasons - to use the DMCA to shut out open source software that attempts to interoperate with their new, "secure" platform, and perhaps to create a new revenue stream as an electronic commerce middleman.
I am praying that they be their old selves and fuck it up, thereby driving another nail in the DRM coffin and really helping out Apple and Linux - but these days they can't always be counted on to fuck things up.
Although I don't count out centralized or corporate solutions purely on principle, I tend to agree. And I certainly agree that all of these decentralized P2P technologies would have been developed to some extent, eventually, regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA did.
I would only suggest that you are by far the exception, and without the RIAA's impetus, such systems would be a long, long time in coming, and would perhaps never reach the level of sophistication that they are now approaching.
...or rather, an attorney from a major music company (hint: one of the top 3). It's a larger group of friends, but of course, I'm the software engineer, and he/she's one of the IP lawyers who works "The List," so someone inevitably brings up the "who will win" question.
I hate that question. But it's true, I have an answer - my best guess is that ultimately the peer to peer networks will win, if the fight continues as it has, unless the Internet itself is radically changed (although "destroyed" would perhaps be a better word). And I've said as much many times. Keep in mind that I am not entirely unconcerned about the prospect of the Internet being radically changed to stop piracy, either.
Meanwhile, the attorney has remained confident that between "public education," lawsuits, and "governmental relations," they will prevail within a few years. So who is right?
I know they have very sharp techincal people. But those people are not the ones making decisions. This attorney has heard of Freenet, but doesn't actually understand how it works.
So I try my best to explain the evolution of the "threat" of being able to share information economically.
"You had your chance at the outset. Napster was centralized. They were the easiest to use. They were a ripe target - American, and sitting out in plain sight. You could have cut a deal with them, started slipping DRM and payment systems into the mix slowly enough and carefully enough that users wouldn't reject them en masse.
"But this is like fighting disease, in that when you come down hard on top of it, it might seem like you win, but you never quite kill it all. And what's left is what evolved.
"No one would have bothered with Fasttrack or Gnutella if Napster had lived - they are inferior from a user's point of view. But they are more decentralized. Their foreign. They're encrypted (at least, Fasttrack is). And they saw what you did to the first guy. So they're sitting in a bunker in Vanuatu.
"But of course, they're not completely beyond reach. Fasttrack is the best one, and it's commercial. So maybe, if you're very, very good, you can nab them. And then, you can always infiltrate their network, and go after their users. And that's exactly what you're doing. Trying to wipe it out again.
"Say you succeed and Fasttrack and Gnutella become a thing of the past - you shut down the networks, poison them, scare the users away by getting nastier and nastier with them. Maybe you finally lock someone in jail for sharing a song. What comes next? What's left over?
"Freenet, and its various workalikes, are almost entirely decentralized, and what's more, they not only use "real" encryption, but the developers understand traffic pattern analysis. They can build a model that will make it near impossible for you to even determine who got what with certainty.
"Oh, right now there's only a few of these guys. They toil in obscurity, their user interface is a joke, their network is slow... but when you kill Fasttrack, guess what is first in line for the attention and love of hundreds of millions of internet users, and hundreds of thousands of engineers, who until then had no reason to bother? The next step in our evolution.
"And it's a nasty one. You'll have made the 'disease' so resistant that the FBI won't be able to track child pornographers who use it, and the CIA won't be able to track terrorists who use it. And you guys, the RIAA, forget it. You'll be history. You'll go down in the history books for finally achieving copyright anarchy. Or rather, copyright voluntarism, which is what will really happen.
"Ian Clarke has pointed out that the choice between communication safe from anyone's observation and control is more important than the RIAA, the MPAA, and even the theoretical benefit of law enforcement's dream of eavesdropping on everything, everywhere.
"He is right. For saying this, many will damn me. But why is that a controvertial statement: that I should
"Oh yes, this will pay off big, after you're dead."
Re:I have a theory about why this is not happening
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· Score: 1
Pretty astute, except for the notion of Java being killed or dead. You might mean Java Applets.
Java itself is more successful and widely deployed than.Net by orders of magnitude - in addition to the fact that it targets many markets.Net does not, or not meaningfully (embedded, phone, etc).
Java has in many cases replaced C++ as the language taught in universities around the world. At that milestone, it is unlikely to be "killed" in our lifetimes.
I have a theory about why this is not happening
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Sentient Data Access
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's simple: There are not many good reasons for it to happen, to any greater extent that it already is.
Frankly, this just stinks of that old chestnut about interconnected toasters and refrigerators and power drills sharing data seamlessly on a home network. I was never quite able to get thrilled about this kind of thinking when I first heard it, and it rings more hollow every time I've heard it since, which is about a million times, over decades.
I think the big problem here is that there isn't much of a problem to solve. I'm sure that, when we have even more portable and ubiquitous computers and communication all around us, we'll just be deluged with new applications for it that we just can't quite think of right now, but we don't yet. And you can't chalk it all up to "technology isn't ready yet." No, I think it's related to demand, more than supply.
As far as I can tell, there aren't many killer apps that fall well under this umbrella, and those few that there are can't begin to justify the expense of the hardware and software involved, now, or probably for another decade or two.
One thing that always gets me about this line of thinking is that even the examples they lead with tend to be uninspiring and ridiculous: ATMs and grocery store checkouts sharing programming languages and databases? Complicating the "workplace" with converged, general-purpose computing solutions by littering it with specialized information tools? Come on, guys, this is freakin stupid. Does standardizing on a sigle end-all-be-all computer language, OS, or database sound like a good idea to anyone? Or particularly original? What about "un-converging" to any greater extent than we already are? Or is there some new information tool that will change everything?
I'm sure as soon as someone actually has a real idea that's plausible enough for science fiction, we'll all get excited about being the first to make it happen.
The article does hint at a few more interesting things; that hierarchical filesystems may be overrated and due for reexamination as the bedrock of computing (although truthfully this is already well in progress - PalmOS? Newton?), that we might see more kiosk or application-specific computers... more "specialized devices" solving problems out in the world... now selling tickets, now portable computerized maps giving directions, perhaps more active displays "everywhere," primarily driven by advertising, but perhaps justified by various underlying civic duties, and location-based computing is undoubtedly going to be more important, as it finally becomes cheap enough to be a factor...
But these are all just hints. Barely that.
But overall I find this to be just another valueless futurist rant, devoid of real ideas, coasting on buzzwords and hype, and basically irrelevant to anyone seriously thinking about the future... or at least, nothing you haven't heard before a million times.
Disclosure: I'm a long-time developer. I have often worn both hats. I have also in the distant past been an administrator.
I read this guy's article, and I feel his pain. He is clearly suffering in a bad corporate environment.
What he has done is scapegoat administrators, when what is happening is not a problem with administration, but with senior management.
When there are too many administrators, when they are not doing their jobs well, when they are deploying bad tools, when they are poor communicators or worse, obnoxious... when, overall, policy is bad, and the work environment is imperilled, look up, my freinds, to the head office. The fish rots from the head.
The idea that administrators might be a "problem" is novel just because normally in a bad shop with failing senior management you just get bad developers... bad everybody. Because hiring standards are shit, because bad behavior and bad performance doesn't get anyone fired.
I actually do see specialization as a problem - but as an unavoidable one. As our work has grown in complexity over the years, specialization was inevitable, and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. But let me speak from the vantage point of a relatively well-managed shop. Here is what work is like for me.
We do have an IT group that "runs the desktops," making sure email gets delivered and wrangling windows and fileservers and so forth. They lock down the machines of quite a few people, but they are flexible and friendly - and developers (and anyone else who has a need) get full privileges on their own machines, and even on development servers if necessary.
Our backups run, consistently, on time, and well.
We have a Unix ops team (that encompasses our DBA) that is 2nd to none in my experience. They will ride your ass hard for anything you want to do in production - as they should. It's their ass if those machines go down, and that 2nd set of eyes has caught many a terrible thing before it escaped our development and staging environments. When we are testing something for scalability, they are in there with us, unleashing Solaris or Oracle wizardry, literally coaching better code out of developers, and generally making magic happen.
That in itself is a good snapshot of specialization working as it should - not insular, but aware of what's on the boundaries of what you own, and working as a team.
We have a complex security architecture that simply works. They don't make semi-montly changes to it, because they did it right the first time. DBA staff is a collaborator in your database design - my god, I can't imagine these people holding _us_ up. Its almost always them waiting for us to carry our leg of the relay race.
Our long-suffering QA department is strikingly overqualified and polite to a fault when we destroy their schedule and then ask ridiculous feats of endurance from them. Even when they catch some pretty dumb stuff on our part, which they do quite often.
We use good tools, often open source, but not out of doctrine - our choices won on their merits. Management is ready to throw out anything if it doesn't work. We are platform and vendor agnostic - advocates and zealots get put in their place.
We are very productive, and although we are far from perfect and are not all of us dream-team members, we do extremely good work. Our company is so spoiled, and I think many who are relatively new have no idea how lucky they are.
And why is all this? One simple reason. We have a good CTO, and he's hired and promoted middle-management who are good engineers. And that, pretty much, is all it takes.
The trouble in big companies is that you have absentee management who pick senior technology leadership without any sense of how to gauge talent, and pay no attention to their performance, almost literally until (sometimes even after) it has burned the company down. The old white men are by and large still prime representatives of the previous generation in terms of their ignorance of technology, and every generation's aristocracy has the same habit of being in flight over the Swiss Alps while the house is on fire.
All the talk lately has been about how Sun is on the fast-track to irrelevance, getting creamed from below by Windows and Linux, and from above by IBM. They splashed onto the scene years ago by being "faster, cheaper, and better" than DEC etc., and now that they are no longer any of those three, it's unclear what they offer - other than Java, which, while interesting, isn't part of their core "mid-to-high-range" server business. A lot of idiotic hot air about thin clients and network computing hasn't helped matters.
So are they going to go the way of DEC? Perhaps soon Gateway or Dell will be interested in an acquisition? Who knows. There are some things that look like signs of life, though.
One is dealing with AMD. This is very smart for both companies. Sun will package their excellent new chip in well-reputed new lavender-and-white boxes, and customers will run "Linux or Solaris." If they can do this cheaply enough, this could finally be a competitive angle for new business, on the low end...
But the "Linux or Solaris" is the interesting point. Right now Sun seems to make its money selling hardware and software (read: Solaris). Traditionally Linux - which is surely eating their breakfast, lunch, and dinner - has been Sun Enemy #2 (right behind Mr. Bill). And yet Linux may be exactly what they need - an open platform upon which to build a Sun-branded infrastructure that is "better, faster, and cheaper" than the competition.
And you get the feeling that some inside Sun, at least, know this. But clearly others do not. And the fight goes on, and on... and you get things like this:
The net result seems likely to be that Sun will promote Solaris ahead of Linux ("cheaper and better") except to customers who already have a large Linux installed base or they specifically want Linux solutions. For Sun customers with SPARC servers, using the same operating system across all servers would make life simpler as well - less complexity means lower TCO. By the end of the year, Sun also plans to publish benchmarks showing Solaris x86 matching, and in some cases beating, Linux on identical hardware.
This is an article detailing a strong feature-offensive against Linux - trying to make Solaris into a superiour solution that people will pay a premium for.
But I am wondering if this is such a good idea. Why not adopt Linux, and contribute this work to it, rather than try to compete with it?
The scenario with the sparc chip and the Opteron is perhaps an object lesson. It takes billions to keep your hand in the chip game. Sun is perhaps not in a very good position to continue to spend that money. The AMD move looks like the first step in a viable exit strategy. Partner with a chipmaker - a "cheaper, better, and faster" one like AMD - since the economics of trying to beat them all don't look as good.
Take Sun's software shop. While well-honed for its common uses, any given little piece of Sun's proprietary Unix fork is generally sub-par - from their SSH implementation (just found a bug in that the other day) to their shell. Clearly it is not Sun's highest priority to deal with all these little Unix details. So most people pile on open-source solutions to make it livable. But then where is the support? Yes, the world still tolerates this state of affairs while tending to their Apache and Oracle servers... but for how much longer?
Could Sun become a "services company" in the mold of IBM and Redhat, "building solutions" with AMD and Linux for the server market that are cheaper and better than competitors? Isn't there money to be made "just making these things work" for all segments of the server market - building and supporting? Wouldn't they be well positioned to do it?
In a sense this seems like a hedge. They will try to do both - package Linux and support their Solaris business. They may be waiting to see which one will thrive; they may think it's better to be in both games. But does that make sense, even now? They are hemorrhaging ca
I would love it if you could give some references for these processes. My understanding is that, while we could recycle more, there are none that ultimately solve the problem of generating tons of materials (be the medium or low or lower grade waste) that will be radioactive for a "long, long" time.
Yeah, they gave us some great exceptions to the DMCA, too. They love doing this. It's like winking at us. They probably chuckle to themselves about these "exemptions" all the time.
We were supposed to have interoperability, but lo and behold, when anyone tries to make DVDs play on Linux, they get the daylights sued out of them anyway. Is it for interoperability? Or for piracy? Who knows? That's the evil beauty of it.
So step right up, kid. Take your exemption, as long as you have a few million dollars for lawyers (because they'll be suing you for years), lots of free time, and you have confidence you'll get a judge who can properly make that difficult, politically sensitive judgement (odds? about 20 to 1, and I'm being generous).
You have to be pretty ignorant to be cheered up by these "exemptions." They're a giant "fuck you" from the media trust - the coup de gras of their act of legislative piracy.
"Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?"
A high-school educated adult can actually ask this question in seriousness?
Man the rockets. It's time to abandon the planet.
--
As an aside, I am desperately trying to find any sources not employed or otherwise funded by a voting machine company - think respected professors, prominent scientists, engineers, heads of standards bodies or trade groups - who will go on record saying that it's OK to skip per-vote paper records.
I have been searching off and on; I can't find a single credible expert who will say electronic voting without paper records is a good idea. Not one. In fact, even slashdot trolls devil-advocating the issue are rare. All I have found so far, from Harvard, Princeton and M.I.T., to the ACM, to acquiantances with the appropriate background, is 100% uniform agreement that per-vote paper records are absolutely necessary for the system to be trusted.
Do they even have a single person to trot out, to give them even a thin film of legitimacy? Or is actually true that every relevant expert is uniformly condemning these paperless systems? Are states across the nation actually adopting voting systems in opposition to every known academic standard?
You know, once upon a time, quite a long, long time ago now, in a very different age, people put their faith in things BECAUSE THEY WERE ACTUALLY SECURE.
I _think_, if you accept that ignorance and non-involvement is not an excuse, SCO violated the GPL regardless. If SCO did it accidentally, it wouldn't matter. The bottom line; they distributed linux with proprietary code, and later demanded money from linux users.
The linux users had no idea they were infringing! SCO had no idea they were violating the GPL! It's a great big ignorance party. But you can't have it both ways, can you?
Linux is free software, that everyone participates in making, and then gets to use for free.
SCO distributed Linux itself, until very recently. It was also selling its own "competing" product at the same time.
Now SCO is claiming that some of their "valuable" property was incorporated into Linux - without their knowledge. They're demanding everyone who uses Linux pay them for it (at a price they've just determined) - or face lawsuits.
They're refusing to reveal what was "stolen." (More accurately, they will only show evidence to those who sign an unacceptably onerous non-disclosure agreement.) Not the actions of a company with a good case, but let us assume, since it is certainly possible, that some work of SCO's appears identical to some work inside Linux.
It is first of all not exactly obvious who copied whom. In the most similar case of years past, exactly such confusion resulted in a major legal reversal for one of Unix's past copyright holders. But let us even assume that someone secretly put some stolen SCO work inside Linux, since that is certainly also possible.
One of two things is true, then:
1) If you are a Linux user (who unwittingly received a bit of SCO's property), you have to pay whatever SCO asks, even if you didn't know (and had no way of knowing) you were using "stolen code"!
This means that SCO is in massive trouble, since they violated the licenses of all the Linux contributors _themselves_, by distributing Linux with their proprietary code incorporated into it. This is forbidden by the GPL (Linux's license), which (basically) forces participants to contribute their work for free or not at all. (That's the whole point of the affair, really.) And as we just established, ignorance is not an excuse. The fact that SCO might not have known they were breaking this rule wouldn't save them.
Result? Several thousand Linux contributors (a group which includes some very large, wealthy businesses) sue SCO for violating _their_ licenses, which specifically forbade this in the first place. SCO goes bankrupt.
-- OR --
2) If you are a Linux user (who unwittingly received a bit of SCO's property), it's _not_ your problem, because you didn't _know_ there was a problem, and once you found out, you replaced the "stolen code" - by downloading a patch, most likely. Right after SCO gets around to telling people what was stolen, that is. (Which they will do eventually?)
If ignorance is SCO's excuse, it's everyone's excuse. It means THERE IS NO DANGER TO ANY LINUX USER from SCO, because nobody was knowingly involved in these affairs, except potentially IBM (who stands accused of having actually done the deed). If there was any improper copying, it's IBM's problem - which is as it should be (although apparently even that part of SCO's story is questionable).
Result? SCO's threats to sue Linux users are actually a nasty and libelous publicity stunt, and a number of affected business (IBM, Redhat, Dell, Suse, etc) sue them as a result. SCO goes bankrupt.
I can't figure out how SCO's threats to "license Linux users" to the tune of hundreds or even thousands a CPU is anything other than the business world's equivalent of an April Fool's joke.
You can make specious legal threats about any product - open source or closed source. The fact that Linux is a target this time is only a sign of its continually increasing importance.
If you want my take on it, some people sitting in big offices (picture Microsoft and Sun logos on the walls) saw the recent spate of articles about high-profile defections from their own products to Linux, and pushed the "panic button." They encouraged and financed a proxy (SCO) in the advertisement of an elaborate legal fiction in hopes of slowing the hemorrhaging. It's clever, good old-fashioned American business strategy at its finest (no holds barred competition in anything but quality or price). I don't think it will save them, either. And I _think_ it's going to leave a smoking crater where the proxy used to be.
As I tried to warn you, lying about immediately previous posts is a fool's game, my friend.
He said he created the internet. Period.
Look how you continue to lie ("weasel," if you will) about what he actually said, while complaining about weaseling (LOL) no less... and all I do talk about what actually happened.
And of course you still don't site your source. I wonder if we can go 20 posts with you still refusing to hand it over.
I have not heard these terms since the Soviet Union fell.
As long as you guys keep the party spirit alive, the terms will never go away.
I am referring only to what Gore actually said.
You mean you are lying about what gore actually said. In a "well-known" way.
You blew off the challenge before
To cite your source for you.
As for the "Gore Act", was there any controlling legal authority?
I know, reading about what actually happened is tough. Don't worry. Ask all you want. For everyone who is interested in things other than lies, you can look it up easily... As I suggested...
I confess that your point about custom compilers is too subtle for me; we'd need a very smart attorney to answer that one. But something tells me that ruse won't work.
I don't think the cost of distributing the source is substantial. You needn't do anything that you can't ask reimbursement for. Also, I wonder if distributing just a patch file would meet your obligations?
Interesting. I hadn't thought this, and I can't find it in the text, but IANAL, and one other person raised the same issue. The problem is that I don't think it matters. Read more here.
But you are quite wrong! And I would say so because of the the subtle implications of the word "viral" - from "virus" - which is something you catch without your knowledge or consent.
You are choosing to use GPL'd code in your project, or not. That is not comparable to catching a disease.
How bad can we feel for you, honestly, that you could't take the work others had done for free, incorporate it into some of your proprietary code, and then not share with others as they had shared with you? It was the only thing that was asked in return.
Your own example illustrates the point most beautifully. In this case, there were others who placed even fewer restrictions on their work, and that's great! In other cases, there may not be. But there is no need, no obligation, to use GPL'd code. Clean rooms are more viral than this.
And once the source is out, others can compile it, and use (and distribute) the binaries and sources without "buying" (although I still do not believe that is the correct or legal term) yours.
So in effect, if this were allowed, you would only be selling your compilation services. It doesn't make sense.
As you very wisely point out, this is still not a barrier to using GPL work in commercial projects, since you have the option of separating your proprietary work through "public interfaces" and by not linking it, or you can use the body of work covered under the LGPL.
As I continue to discuss this I am struck by a growing sense of how assinine the Forbes article really is. GPL and LGPL work is simply one of the most significant bodies of software engineering possessed by humankind. It is everywhere, unassuming, and apparently unnoticed. Without it, huge swaths of all software development, engineering, computer science, and all the disciplines affected by those fields (use your imagination) would be set back by decades. As a minor example I venture to guess that the internet as we know it would largely not exist.
All we did we elect to cooperate and share our work, like the scientists we were trained to be. A few big players would rather be lazy, and then play dirty than get with the program. And it triggers this guy's McCarthy reflex because collaboration isn't in the Forbes mental playbook, apparently.
The net effect is that once you redistribute, you must release your source. I am not aware of the stipulation that you may only release it to the redistributee (or you would argue "buyer"); I may have missed this in my readings of the GPL. Can you try to help me find where this is stipulated in the GPL?
Regardless, once the source is released to anyone, they cannot be stopped from themselves redistributing it. At that point, after the first redistribution, the sources are "out" (or more technically, they cannot be kept "in" except by the whim of all involved parties). When the sources are out, anyone can compile them, and anyone can redistribute the resulting binaries for free.
And so, I am not clear on what, exactly, you are selling. Your compilation services?
I am aware that you are not required to do anything if you do not redistribute. The redistribution was obvious and assumed in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
like so much Cringley writes, is ignorant, egotistical, and, in his tepid way, "inflammatory," carelessly crafted for the single purpose of generating hype and controversy about... Cringley.
Seldom is such a "well regarded" technology journalist as consistently irrelevant as Cringley. He's a blowhard. Try reading his column on a regular basis - I know, it's painful, but try. You will see what I mean quickly.
Here's my prediction:
SCO is embarrased legally, although the perpetrators of the fraud (the SCO executive corps) stand a good chance of being protected from criminal prosecution by their large allies (who might find it awkward if their complicity came out). The aggrieved parties' (IBM, Redhat, many OS developers, etc) civil actions, however, have far more merit, and they sue the remnants of the company into a smoking crater. SCO executives will quickly declare bankruptcy when they see the end coming and attempt to shield their assets (their "personal" gains from the scheme), and it will be entertaining to see what lengths they will go to to do it (will the cash, or the people, leave the country?), and whether they will get away with it. I guarantee you Gates doesn't care if Darl McBride ends up broke or in prison - in fact, he would probably get a kick out of it.
Some will claim it's only a matter of time until "the next SCO." Others will rightly note that such IP and legal shenanigans can and do happen to everybody sufficiently threatening to their wealthy and unscrupulous competitors, and are far more likely to happen, let alone succeed, at a closed-source shop than an open source project. In fact, all it has demonstrated is that, contrary to some people's theories, a large open source project is surprisingly resillient and well equipped to defend itself against this kind of threat.
Haters will happily declare that a cloud has been cast over Linux and Open Source regardless, meanwhile, back in the real world, it will continue its inevitable treadmilling over products and companies that can't or won't outperform hobbyists.
In the very long haul, I suspect that the inevitable momentum of success will force more and more people to realize that collaborative software engineering, of many different kinds but loosely described as "Open Source," is the most productive and reliable method we have for doing many kinds of development, and this recognition will solidify in academic theory and accepted conventional wisdom. We will see more and more acceptance of sharing and openness in engineering in the mainstream, for infrastructure tasks like operating systems and compilers, for major applications, commodity code, middleware, and anywhere else we have problems with specific solutions sufficiently amenable to collective, decentralized effort.
Many more large organizations, especially foreign, and/or governmental, educational, and military, will continue the trend of consciously adopting open source for both political, economic, and practical reasons. There will be dissatisfaction, growing pains, and struggle, but also massive new contributions and growing credibility. In the end, journalists who made a living by obfuscating and belittling collaboration in engineering are going to look dated, and then silly, well within our lifetimes.
I'm guessing the continued growth of open source will ultimately help, rather than hurt, "proprietary" software as a whole, by making smarter engineers, giving them better tools and platforms, and clarifying the problems that are better solved in a proprietary way.
For reference: this is the link.
I note that both significant actors (Hunt and Dawes) from that thread are on this thread.
I'm actually pleased to read your response, and I think your cynicism is well warranted. I have these discussions with other friends and often it is I who have to play the devil's advocate.
I don't know if the DMCA and PATRIOT comparison is valid. The vanishing point of encryption and obfuscation techniques, and thus secure peer to peer networks, is that a choice is forced about whether or not encryption and/or privacy in general is allowed. DMCA and PATRIOT each had qualifying themes, but ultimately, good engineering can force the rulemakers to eliminate the qualifiers and choose between either:
*) outlawing encryption and/or privacy in general
*) making data communications prohibitively expensive, and/or illegal
The former will be more politically difficult than DMCA or PATRIOT - not that it hasn't been done in other nations! The latter will have economic consequences that may be too difficult even for our sad little government to ignore.
I often raise the same point about wireless - that it is under the stifling control of one of the most pandering of federal agencies. Others have argued to me that there will be ways to deal even with hostile regulatory regimes, but this is outside my area of expertise, and I believe we should confront our present threats as though, in losing, we would lose everything.
Even outside the analgesic dream of democracy, tyrants derive their power from cowardice. I wonder what you would have predicted as the future of our nation 150 or 100 or 50 years ago, as blights many times more menacing must have seemed far more impenetrable to the generations that eventually overcame them... I say this not out of complacency, but to point out that resignation seems silly.
I was thinking of a more subtle approach to DRM on their part than you might be.
You may well be right, but I will lay out a few brief ideas in response.
What if Napster didn't take actions to drive its users away? I think the first step is merely eavesdropping and watermarking. Very, very cheap pricing ($20 all you can eat? 50 songs for $5?), very simple payment systems (co-billing deals with ISPs is the big dream, but that would take a long time to get going). You can up the price later as you gain momentum. Raise the specter of being caught rather than futilely try to secure things. The basic idea is to create a system where you can at least determine whether a song is owned by the user.
You negotiate aggressively with every P2P network you can cut a deal with, but you want to avoid driving them under. Make an example of one only if it's small. Primarily, you want to threaten, not to act. It would have been more than enough - Napster would have done anything the music companies asked, at the end. And then, for your companies, universities, and everywhere else you can, you start to market a "compliance system." Consider it similar to the BSA audit process. "You want to be legit? Just put these rules in place and pay a modest settlement. Otherwise bend over for a good old fashioned lawsuit."
Companies and universities roll over in a heartbeat. We see that everywhere, all over the country. Those are actually the few places you can really make strides. The new rules might only let you access the network if you install their compliance package - and that's what shuts off your ability to play things you haven't paid for.
Of course, once again, you don't get greedy. A student wants to dual boot Linux, but there's no Linux compliance package? Well, if we give them the CD, they sign the "acceptable use" policy, and install it on Windows, good enough. The point is to stay on top of the majority (in this example, it would be 99%). The point is, to make it just a little more difficult to break the rules. Yeah, lots of people will break them, just as lots of people have always copied games from their friends, but it's the majority you're after. It's a proven business model (hello, video game industry).
Home users, and anyone else on a free system, will still be able to do what they like. But their veneer of legitimacy is gone. And eventually you advocate that the government mandate conformance software of some kind... but even if they don't... the point is establishing a new cultural norm. We may be able to cheat relatively easily (as we do with many rules), but we do pay for content online.
And of course, DRM has to fail well. We're not talking encrypted files that you can't put in your Rio or your car. And I would even suggest that you must be able to "manually" share your files with others in a trivial way - perhaps when conformance is enforced, they merely expire after a week or two.
This is all off the top of my head, of course. I'm not saying it's the best approach, only trying to speculate about what could have happened. I'm not sure how viable this approach would still be. The whole point is to, very gradually, very slowly, boil the frog. You can't turn the heat up too fast. But if you ease them in, by the end they'll think DRM is just as American as apple pie.
They would have to be extremely subtle about it.
Just to come up with one example, they might have considered violating users' privacy rather than their fair use rights, by watermarking or at least fingerprinting the files, to raise the specter that violation of the terms of use, while possible, is more likely to get you caught than before.
There are many gradual, careful approaches that consumers might not resist in sufficient numbers.
Right now the industry approach to DRM is laughable. It is good, too, because if they were more sophisticated about it they might have a chance of success. The problem is the full-court press that is apparently coming from Microsoft, even though I believe they are bigger than (for instance) the entire music industry in size, and stand to lose billions and indeed threaten their dominant position with such a move. They are apparently embracing DRM for other reasons - to use the DMCA to shut out open source software that attempts to interoperate with their new, "secure" platform, and perhaps to create a new revenue stream as an electronic commerce middleman.
I am praying that they be their old selves and fuck it up, thereby driving another nail in the DRM coffin and really helping out Apple and Linux - but these days they can't always be counted on to fuck things up.
Although I don't count out centralized or corporate solutions purely on principle, I tend to agree. And I certainly agree that all of these decentralized P2P technologies would have been developed to some extent, eventually, regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA did.
I would only suggest that you are by far the exception, and without the RIAA's impetus, such systems would be a long, long time in coming, and would perhaps never reach the level of sophistication that they are now approaching.
...or rather, an attorney from a major music company (hint: one of the top 3). It's a larger group of friends, but of course, I'm the software engineer, and he/she's one of the IP lawyers who works "The List," so someone inevitably brings up the "who will win" question.
I hate that question. But it's true, I have an answer - my best guess is that ultimately the peer to peer networks will win, if the fight continues as it has, unless the Internet itself is radically changed (although "destroyed" would perhaps be a better word). And I've said as much many times. Keep in mind that I am not entirely unconcerned about the prospect of the Internet being radically changed to stop piracy, either.
Meanwhile, the attorney has remained confident that between "public education," lawsuits, and "governmental relations," they will prevail within a few years. So who is right?
I know they have very sharp techincal people. But those people are not the ones making decisions. This attorney has heard of Freenet, but doesn't actually understand how it works.
So I try my best to explain the evolution of the "threat" of being able to share information economically.
"You had your chance at the outset. Napster was centralized. They were the easiest to use. They were a ripe target - American, and sitting out in plain sight. You could have cut a deal with them, started slipping DRM and payment systems into the mix slowly enough and carefully enough that users wouldn't reject them en masse.
"But this is like fighting disease, in that when you come down hard on top of it, it might seem like you win, but you never quite kill it all. And what's left is what evolved.
"No one would have bothered with Fasttrack or Gnutella if Napster had lived - they are inferior from a user's point of view. But they are more decentralized. Their foreign. They're encrypted (at least, Fasttrack is). And they saw what you did to the first guy. So they're sitting in a bunker in Vanuatu.
"But of course, they're not completely beyond reach. Fasttrack is the best one, and it's commercial. So maybe, if you're very, very good, you can nab them. And then, you can always infiltrate their network, and go after their users. And that's exactly what you're doing. Trying to wipe it out again.
"Say you succeed and Fasttrack and Gnutella become a thing of the past - you shut down the networks, poison them, scare the users away by getting nastier and nastier with them. Maybe you finally lock someone in jail for sharing a song. What comes next? What's left over?
"Freenet, and its various workalikes, are almost entirely decentralized, and what's more, they not only use "real" encryption, but the developers understand traffic pattern analysis. They can build a model that will make it near impossible for you to even determine who got what with certainty.
"Oh, right now there's only a few of these guys. They toil in obscurity, their user interface is a joke, their network is slow... but when you kill Fasttrack, guess what is first in line for the attention and love of hundreds of millions of internet users, and hundreds of thousands of engineers, who until then had no reason to bother? The next step in our evolution.
"And it's a nasty one. You'll have made the 'disease' so resistant that the FBI won't be able to track child pornographers who use it, and the CIA won't be able to track terrorists who use it. And you guys, the RIAA, forget it. You'll be history. You'll go down in the history books for finally achieving copyright anarchy. Or rather, copyright voluntarism, which is what will really happen.
"Ian Clarke has pointed out that the choice between communication safe from anyone's observation and control is more important than the RIAA, the MPAA, and even the theoretical benefit of law enforcement's dream of eavesdropping on everything, everywhere.
"He is right. For saying this, many will damn me. But why is that a controvertial statement: that I should
I couldn't have said it better myself.
"Oh yes, this will pay off big, after you're dead."
Pretty astute, except for the notion of Java being killed or dead. You might mean Java Applets.
.Net by orders of magnitude - in addition to the fact that it targets many markets .Net does not, or not meaningfully (embedded, phone, etc).
Java itself is more successful and widely deployed than
Java has in many cases replaced C++ as the language taught in universities around the world. At that milestone, it is unlikely to be "killed" in our lifetimes.
It's simple: There are not many good reasons for it to happen, to any greater extent that it already is.
Frankly, this just stinks of that old chestnut about interconnected toasters and refrigerators and power drills sharing data seamlessly on a home network. I was never quite able to get thrilled about this kind of thinking when I first heard it, and it rings more hollow every time I've heard it since, which is about a million times, over decades.
I think the big problem here is that there isn't much of a problem to solve. I'm sure that, when we have even more portable and ubiquitous computers and communication all around us, we'll just be deluged with new applications for it that we just can't quite think of right now, but we don't yet. And you can't chalk it all up to "technology isn't ready yet." No, I think it's related to demand, more than supply.
As far as I can tell, there aren't many killer apps that fall well under this umbrella, and those few that there are can't begin to justify the expense of the hardware and software involved, now, or probably for another decade or two.
One thing that always gets me about this line of thinking is that even the examples they lead with tend to be uninspiring and ridiculous: ATMs and grocery store checkouts sharing programming languages and databases? Complicating the "workplace" with converged, general-purpose computing solutions by littering it with specialized information tools? Come on, guys, this is freakin stupid. Does standardizing on a sigle end-all-be-all computer language, OS, or database sound like a good idea to anyone? Or particularly original? What about "un-converging" to any greater extent than we already are? Or is there some new information tool that will change everything?
I'm sure as soon as someone actually has a real idea that's plausible enough for science fiction, we'll all get excited about being the first to make it happen.
The article does hint at a few more interesting things; that hierarchical filesystems may be overrated and due for reexamination as the bedrock of computing (although truthfully this is already well in progress - PalmOS? Newton?), that we might see more kiosk or application-specific computers... more "specialized devices" solving problems out in the world... now selling tickets, now portable computerized maps giving directions, perhaps more active displays "everywhere," primarily driven by advertising, but perhaps justified by various underlying civic duties, and location-based computing is undoubtedly going to be more important, as it finally becomes cheap enough to be a factor...
But these are all just hints. Barely that.
But overall I find this to be just another valueless futurist rant, devoid of real ideas, coasting on buzzwords and hype, and basically irrelevant to anyone seriously thinking about the future... or at least, nothing you haven't heard before a million times.
Disclosure: I'm a long-time developer. I have often worn both hats. I have also in the distant past been an administrator.
I read this guy's article, and I feel his pain. He is clearly suffering in a bad corporate environment.
What he has done is scapegoat administrators, when what is happening is not a problem with administration, but with senior management.
When there are too many administrators, when they are not doing their jobs well, when they are deploying bad tools, when they are poor communicators or worse, obnoxious... when, overall, policy is bad, and the work environment is imperilled, look up, my freinds, to the head office. The fish rots from the head.
The idea that administrators might be a "problem" is novel just because normally in a bad shop with failing senior management you just get bad developers... bad everybody. Because hiring standards are shit, because bad behavior and bad performance doesn't get anyone fired.
I actually do see specialization as a problem - but as an unavoidable one. As our work has grown in complexity over the years, specialization was inevitable, and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. But let me speak from the vantage point of a relatively well-managed shop. Here is what work is like for me.
We do have an IT group that "runs the desktops," making sure email gets delivered and wrangling windows and fileservers and so forth. They lock down the machines of quite a few people, but they are flexible and friendly - and developers (and anyone else who has a need) get full privileges on their own machines, and even on development servers if necessary.
Our backups run, consistently, on time, and well.
We have a Unix ops team (that encompasses our DBA) that is 2nd to none in my experience. They will ride your ass hard for anything you want to do in production - as they should. It's their ass if those machines go down, and that 2nd set of eyes has caught many a terrible thing before it escaped our development and staging environments. When we are testing something for scalability, they are in there with us, unleashing Solaris or Oracle wizardry, literally coaching better code out of developers, and generally making magic happen.
That in itself is a good snapshot of specialization working as it should - not insular, but aware of what's on the boundaries of what you own, and working as a team.
We have a complex security architecture that simply works. They don't make semi-montly changes to it, because they did it right the first time. DBA staff is a collaborator in your database design - my god, I can't imagine these people holding _us_ up. Its almost always them waiting for us to carry our leg of the relay race.
Our long-suffering QA department is strikingly overqualified and polite to a fault when we destroy their schedule and then ask ridiculous feats of endurance from them. Even when they catch some pretty dumb stuff on our part, which they do quite often.
We use good tools, often open source, but not out of doctrine - our choices won on their merits. Management is ready to throw out anything if it doesn't work. We are platform and vendor agnostic - advocates and zealots get put in their place.
We are very productive, and although we are far from perfect and are not all of us dream-team members, we do extremely good work. Our company is so spoiled, and I think many who are relatively new have no idea how lucky they are.
And why is all this? One simple reason. We have a good CTO, and he's hired and promoted middle-management who are good engineers. And that, pretty much, is all it takes.
The trouble in big companies is that you have absentee management who pick senior technology leadership without any sense of how to gauge talent, and pay no attention to their performance, almost literally until (sometimes even after) it has burned the company down. The old white men are by and large still prime representatives of the previous generation in terms of their ignorance of technology, and every generation's aristocracy has the same habit of being in flight over the Swiss Alps while the house is on fire.
One man's opinion.
All the talk lately has been about how Sun is on the fast-track to irrelevance, getting creamed from below by Windows and Linux, and from above by IBM. They splashed onto the scene years ago by being "faster, cheaper, and better" than DEC etc., and now that they are no longer any of those three, it's unclear what they offer - other than Java, which, while interesting, isn't part of their core "mid-to-high-range" server business. A lot of idiotic hot air about thin clients and network computing hasn't helped matters.
So are they going to go the way of DEC? Perhaps soon Gateway or Dell will be interested in an acquisition? Who knows. There are some things that look like signs of life, though.
One is dealing with AMD. This is very smart for both companies. Sun will package their excellent new chip in well-reputed new lavender-and-white boxes, and customers will run "Linux or Solaris." If they can do this cheaply enough, this could finally be a competitive angle for new business, on the low end...
But the "Linux or Solaris" is the interesting point. Right now Sun seems to make its money selling hardware and software (read: Solaris). Traditionally Linux - which is surely eating their breakfast, lunch, and dinner - has been Sun Enemy #2 (right behind Mr. Bill). And yet Linux may be exactly what they need - an open platform upon which to build a Sun-branded infrastructure that is "better, faster, and cheaper" than the competition.
And you get the feeling that some inside Sun, at least, know this. But clearly others do not. And the fight goes on, and on... and you get things like this:
The net result seems likely to be that Sun will promote Solaris ahead of Linux ("cheaper and better") except to customers who already have a large Linux installed base or they specifically want Linux solutions. For Sun customers with SPARC servers, using the same operating system across all servers would make life simpler as well - less complexity means lower TCO. By the end of the year, Sun also plans to publish benchmarks showing Solaris x86 matching, and in some cases beating, Linux on identical hardware.
This is an article detailing a strong feature-offensive against Linux - trying to make Solaris into a superiour solution that people will pay a premium for.
But I am wondering if this is such a good idea. Why not adopt Linux, and contribute this work to it, rather than try to compete with it?
The scenario with the sparc chip and the Opteron is perhaps an object lesson. It takes billions to keep your hand in the chip game. Sun is perhaps not in a very good position to continue to spend that money. The AMD move looks like the first step in a viable exit strategy. Partner with a chipmaker - a "cheaper, better, and faster" one like AMD - since the economics of trying to beat them all don't look as good.
Take Sun's software shop. While well-honed for its common uses, any given little piece of Sun's proprietary Unix fork is generally sub-par - from their SSH implementation (just found a bug in that the other day) to their shell. Clearly it is not Sun's highest priority to deal with all these little Unix details. So most people pile on open-source solutions to make it livable. But then where is the support? Yes, the world still tolerates this state of affairs while tending to their Apache and Oracle servers... but for how much longer?
Could Sun become a "services company" in the mold of IBM and Redhat, "building solutions" with AMD and Linux for the server market that are cheaper and better than competitors? Isn't there money to be made "just making these things work" for all segments of the server market - building and supporting? Wouldn't they be well positioned to do it?
In a sense this seems like a hedge. They will try to do both - package Linux and support their Solaris business. They may be waiting to see which one will thrive; they may think it's better to be in both games. But does that make sense, even now? They are hemorrhaging ca
I would love it if you could give some references for these processes. My understanding is that, while we could recycle more, there are none that ultimately solve the problem of generating tons of materials (be the medium or low or lower grade waste) that will be radioactive for a "long, long" time.
Yeah, they gave us some great exceptions to the DMCA, too. They love doing this. It's like winking at us. They probably chuckle to themselves about these "exemptions" all the time.
We were supposed to have interoperability, but lo and behold, when anyone tries to make DVDs play on Linux, they get the daylights sued out of them anyway. Is it for interoperability? Or for piracy? Who knows? That's the evil beauty of it.
So step right up, kid. Take your exemption, as long as you have a few million dollars for lawyers (because they'll be suing you for years), lots of free time, and you have confidence you'll get a judge who can properly make that difficult, politically sensitive judgement (odds? about 20 to 1, and I'm being generous).
You have to be pretty ignorant to be cheered up by these "exemptions." They're a giant "fuck you" from the media trust - the coup de gras of their act of legislative piracy.
"Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?"
A high-school educated adult can actually ask this question in seriousness?
Man the rockets. It's time to abandon the planet.
--
As an aside, I am desperately trying to find any sources not employed or otherwise funded by a voting machine company - think respected professors, prominent scientists, engineers, heads of standards bodies or trade groups - who will go on record saying that it's OK to skip per-vote paper records.
I have been searching off and on; I can't find a single credible expert who will say electronic voting without paper records is a good idea. Not one. In fact, even slashdot trolls devil-advocating the issue are rare. All I have found so far, from Harvard, Princeton and M.I.T., to the ACM, to acquiantances with the appropriate background, is 100% uniform agreement that per-vote paper records are absolutely necessary for the system to be trusted.
Do they even have a single person to trot out, to give them even a thin film of legitimacy? Or is actually true that every relevant expert is uniformly condemning these paperless systems? Are states across the nation actually adopting voting systems in opposition to every known academic standard?
You know, once upon a time, quite a long, long time ago now, in a very different age, people put their faith in things BECAUSE THEY WERE ACTUALLY SECURE.
I _think_, if you accept that ignorance and non-involvement is not an excuse, SCO violated the GPL regardless. If SCO did it accidentally, it wouldn't matter. The bottom line; they distributed linux with proprietary code, and later demanded money from linux users.
The linux users had no idea they were infringing! SCO had no idea they were violating the GPL! It's a great big ignorance party. But you can't have it both ways, can you?
Let's see if I have this right.
Linux is free software, that everyone participates in making, and then gets to use for free.
SCO distributed Linux itself, until very recently. It was also selling its own "competing" product at the same time.
Now SCO is claiming that some of their "valuable" property was incorporated into Linux - without their knowledge. They're demanding everyone who uses Linux pay them for it (at a price they've just determined) - or face lawsuits.
They're refusing to reveal what was "stolen." (More accurately, they will only show evidence to those who sign an unacceptably onerous non-disclosure agreement.) Not the actions of a company with a good case, but let us assume, since it is certainly possible, that some work of SCO's appears identical to some work inside Linux.
It is first of all not exactly obvious who copied whom. In the most similar case of years past, exactly such confusion resulted in a major legal reversal for one of Unix's past copyright holders. But let us even assume that someone secretly put some stolen SCO work inside Linux, since that is certainly also possible.
One of two things is true, then:
1) If you are a Linux user (who unwittingly received a bit of SCO's property), you have to pay whatever SCO asks, even if you didn't know (and had no way of knowing) you were using "stolen code"!
This means that SCO is in massive trouble, since they violated the licenses of all the Linux contributors _themselves_, by distributing Linux with their proprietary code incorporated into it. This is forbidden by the GPL (Linux's license), which (basically) forces participants to contribute their work for free or not at all. (That's the whole point of the affair, really.) And as we just established, ignorance is not an excuse. The fact that SCO might not have known they were breaking this rule wouldn't save them.
Result? Several thousand Linux contributors (a group which includes some very large, wealthy businesses) sue SCO for violating _their_ licenses, which specifically forbade this in the first place. SCO goes bankrupt.
-- OR --
2) If you are a Linux user (who unwittingly received a bit of SCO's property), it's _not_ your problem, because you didn't _know_ there was a problem, and once you found out, you replaced the "stolen code" - by downloading a patch, most likely. Right after SCO gets around to telling people what was stolen, that is. (Which they will do eventually?)
If ignorance is SCO's excuse, it's everyone's excuse. It means THERE IS NO DANGER TO ANY LINUX USER from SCO, because nobody was knowingly involved in these affairs, except potentially IBM (who stands accused of having actually done the deed). If there was any improper copying, it's IBM's problem - which is as it should be (although apparently even that part of SCO's story is questionable).
Result? SCO's threats to sue Linux users are actually a nasty and libelous publicity stunt, and a number of affected business (IBM, Redhat, Dell, Suse, etc) sue them as a result. SCO goes bankrupt.
I can't figure out how SCO's threats to "license Linux users" to the tune of hundreds or even thousands a CPU is anything other than the business world's equivalent of an April Fool's joke.
You can make specious legal threats about any product - open source or closed source. The fact that Linux is a target this time is only a sign of its continually increasing importance.
If you want my take on it, some people sitting in big offices (picture Microsoft and Sun logos on the walls) saw the recent spate of articles about high-profile defections from their own products to Linux, and pushed the "panic button." They encouraged and financed a proxy (SCO) in the advertisement of an elaborate legal fiction in hopes of slowing the hemorrhaging. It's clever, good old-fashioned American business strategy at its finest (no holds barred competition in anything but quality or price). I don't think it will save them, either. And I _think_ it's going to leave a smoking crater where the proxy used to be.
Heh. "No. Maybe."
Why is it that Bush won't deny he used cocaine before a certain date?
I think the crowd knows how to take your "Maybe."
Not like you arguing to defend a Gore statement that you did not even know.
Hah. You mean the one that you misquoted twice, and then immediately started to misquote again.
That you continue to lie about the meaning of.
Where you still refuse to cite your source, providing a link to the whole transcript.
Well, if it walks like a liar, and talks like a liar... huh.
You can't get his name right. He's not a Jr. Check into it. Albert W. Gore is a Jr, however.
LOL.
No, that was your claim
As I tried to warn you, lying about immediately previous posts is a fool's game, my friend.
He said he created the internet. Period.
Look how you continue to lie ("weasel," if you will) about what he actually said, while complaining about weaseling (LOL) no less... and all I do talk about what actually happened.
And of course you still don't site your source. I wonder if we can go 20 posts with you still refusing to hand it over.
I have not heard these terms since the Soviet Union fell.
As long as you guys keep the party spirit alive, the terms will never go away.
I am referring only to what Gore actually said.
You mean you are lying about what gore actually said. In a "well-known" way.
You blew off the challenge before
To cite your source for you.
As for the "Gore Act", was there any controlling legal authority?
I know, reading about what actually happened is tough. Don't worry. Ask all you want. For everyone who is interested in things other than lies, you can look it up easily... As I suggested...
It seems like we are in agreement. :)
I confess that your point about custom compilers is too subtle for me; we'd need a very smart attorney to answer that one. But something tells me that ruse won't work.
I don't think the cost of distributing the source is substantial. You needn't do anything that you can't ask reimbursement for. Also, I wonder if distributing just a patch file would meet your obligations?
Interesting. I hadn't thought this, and I can't find it in the text, but IANAL, and one other person raised the same issue. The problem is that I don't think it matters. Read more here.
But you are quite wrong! And I would say so because of the the subtle implications of the word "viral" - from "virus" - which is something you catch without your knowledge or consent.
You are choosing to use GPL'd code in your project, or not. That is not comparable to catching a disease.
How bad can we feel for you, honestly, that you could't take the work others had done for free, incorporate it into some of your proprietary code, and then not share with others as they had shared with you? It was the only thing that was asked in return.
Your own example illustrates the point most beautifully. In this case, there were others who placed even fewer restrictions on their work, and that's great! In other cases, there may not be. But there is no need, no obligation, to use GPL'd code. Clean rooms are more viral than this.
Exactly.
And once the source is out, others can compile it, and use (and distribute) the binaries and sources without "buying" (although I still do not believe that is the correct or legal term) yours.
So in effect, if this were allowed, you would only be selling your compilation services. It doesn't make sense.
As you very wisely point out, this is still not a barrier to using GPL work in commercial projects, since you have the option of separating your proprietary work through "public interfaces" and by not linking it, or you can use the body of work covered under the LGPL.
As I continue to discuss this I am struck by a growing sense of how assinine the Forbes article really is. GPL and LGPL work is simply one of the most significant bodies of software engineering possessed by humankind. It is everywhere, unassuming, and apparently unnoticed. Without it, huge swaths of all software development, engineering, computer science, and all the disciplines affected by those fields (use your imagination) would be set back by decades. As a minor example I venture to guess that the internet as we know it would largely not exist.
All we did we elect to cooperate and share our work, like the scientists we were trained to be. A few big players would rather be lazy, and then play dirty than get with the program. And it triggers this guy's McCarthy reflex because collaboration isn't in the Forbes mental playbook, apparently.
The net effect is that once you redistribute, you must release your source. I am not aware of the stipulation that you may only release it to the redistributee (or you would argue "buyer"); I may have missed this in my readings of the GPL. Can you try to help me find where this is stipulated in the GPL?
Regardless, once the source is released to anyone, they cannot be stopped from themselves redistributing it. At that point, after the first redistribution, the sources are "out" (or more technically, they cannot be kept "in" except by the whim of all involved parties). When the sources are out, anyone can compile them, and anyone can redistribute the resulting binaries for free.
And so, I am not clear on what, exactly, you are selling. Your compilation services?
I am aware that you are not required to do anything if you do not redistribute. The redistribution was obvious and assumed in this case.
This doesn't make sense to me. You can "sell" the GPL work or your derivative, but you must give away the sources?
What are you selling; your compilation services?
I am aware that you are not required to do anything as long as you don't distribute. Clearly, in this case the distribution is obvious and assumed.