Can somebody who has been following this a bit closer explain this? It's getting quite hard to tell who is friend or foe any more
SCO are trying to assert legal ownership of key IP in the Linux system, and in Linux as a whole. They're sued IBM as a way of establishing this right, and for their pains they are currently being slowly flayed by IBM in the courts.
Novell bought SUSE, one of the big commercial distros. If SCO succeed in their suit, Novell has to buy a licence from SCO or stop distributing Linux. Additionally, Novell reckon that if there is any proprietary IP in Linux, they've got a better claim to it than SCO, and they can prove it. So in the case of SCO, Novell are on our side.
At the same time, Novell have entered into a deal with Microsoft. Most of it seems to be smoke and mirrors, but what it appears to boil down to is that in return for Novell paying a royalty to MS, MS will help their competitive position with respect to the other distros by threatening to sue rival distributors, developers... almost anybody really. Even SUSE users aren't safe, since MS can cancel the agreement with anyone, any time and for any reason. So it's pretty much a promise not to sue unless they really feel like it. Reassuring, huh? Novell also agreed not to use their patent arsenal to defend Linux against MS, and in return, they get a big pot of cash.
In this case, it's rather harder to approve of Novell's actions. The deal may not have any legal implications for linux users anywhere, but the patent agreement is going back on a promise they made earlier to the Linux community. On top of that, it's just not a friendly act towards the rest of the community. Other objections have been raised, such attempting to circumvent the PLL, but I can't see how that works, and neither can Mogen Eblen, so I think the whole thing's a combination marketing-and-barratry-deal.
There are some reservations still as to what else may have been agreed upon. A lot of people are concerned that Novell may try and inject code that clearly violate MS patents into one or more open source packages. Mono and the new OpenOffice fork are particularly worrying in that regard.
So to sum up:
Bad Guys:Microsoft, SCO.
Self-Serving Opportunists:Novell
Good Guys:Linux devs, distributors other than Novell and SCO, users
Caught In The Crossfire:SUSE devs
So what, we can use scripts that will download source code and compile it for us, that is legal.
Hard to say before the final draft of GPLv3, but that seems the most likely scenario. The GPL has never had a problem with people compiling and running software for personal use. It's just when they distribute that the GPL comes into play.
Of course, you could argue that distributing such a download-compile-and-link program would be an attempt to violate the intent of the new licence, but I still think that's unlikely. The main point of GPLv3 seems to be aimed at hardware locked down against modification. If the user can compile the two lots of source together, I don't think GPLv3 has a problem. It's when you want to mod a GPLv3 program distributed with hardware, and the hardware won't let you run the result that you hit problems. Think "Tivo".
Also, most GPL2 projects will simply relicense.
Ones with the "...or later" boilerplate at the top won't need to, although I think some will explicitly re-licence as GPLv2 only. Not so many as I would have expected before recent shady dealings between MS and Novel, but some will. If nothing else, there are a lot of prominent FOSS devs being paid by large corporations. It's got to be difficult not to let something like that influence your thinking.
The interesting question is which projects will prosper and which not, post GPLv3. Which will attract developers, which will be bundled, and which wil fal by the wayside. Interesting days ahead, I feel
You have to love the spin on this article. Vista as a product isn't suitable for the needs of Corporate America,
so suddenly that's Corporate America's fault? I thought it was the vendor's responsibility to create a product customers needed to buy, not the responsibility of the potential customers to create a need for the product.
Never mind, I'm sure the usual mixture of blackmail and bribery will see vista deployed in some high profile corporate site before too long.
Yeah, and 'welch' is an archaic spelling of 'welsh'.
I'll have to take your word for it.
It most likely originated as a slur of some kind.
Well, clearly it's not a nice thing to say. I still think it's a bit of a stretch to say it was intended to apply to the entire population of the Principality of Wales. Personally I think that if you dug deep enough, you probably find out it commemmorates Joshia Welch of 1900s early New York, famous for never repaying a debt. Or something like that, since I just made that up by way of example.
In any case, you don't hear this usage much in Wales
You don't hear it much in England either, in my experience. Which is odd, because if it was a slur against the Welsh, then England is where I'd expect to find it most used. If only because I don't think many other nations have strong feelings for the Welsh one way or another, let alone particularly any particular dislike of them. My impression is that it seems to be a US idiom, which is why I think it's probably the surname of some early settler.
Of course. the surname probably originally meant "from Wales", so I suppose if you were desperate to take offence you could do. It still seems a bit overly PC to me.
Is "welsh" an ethnic slur? On people from Wales? Sorry. I didn't know.
I think it's more of a spelling mistake. In the way you're using word. I'd have spelt it as "welch". But a quick check on Google will show support for both spellings.
Maybe it's one of those UK/US spelling differences. I still wouldn't have thought it a slur
Riiight, gotcha. So the repository is named seamonkey after the old codename and not because it's only for the Seamonkey project.
My mistake then. I should know better than to post after I've had a few drinks
The SeaMonkey specific code is in the/suite and/xpfe directories underneath that starting dir, same as Firefox has it under/browser and thunderbird under/mail (and then both under/toolkit) - pretty much everything else there is core code used by all projects.
Then why not link to the correct repository? Then there's no doubt. As it is we have to wonder about motivation.
Firefox was not "recoded from scratch" - it got a slightly simplified and cleaned up UI-library (toolkit) and lots of general overhaul of the UI - but it's 90% same code.
mmmm.... the UI was recoded from scratch - it was redefined in terms of XUL which meant the entire interface was rendered by Gecko. Gecko wasn't rewritten from scratch of course. Apologies for any imprecision. Of course, if the OP had linked to Firefox/Gecko I'd have taken more care.
As for corporate players helping with the revival of SeaMonkey.
Don't think I said "helping". I just remember a lot of complaints at the time along the lines of "my company has a lot of apps that depend on the Mozilla suite and we need security updates at the very least". It's a little disappointing to learn that none of them have followed that up with any sponsorship.
Here, allow me to post a short summary of the article to save you some time:
If you're going summarise, you might include the question of third party cookies and how the option to block them as disappeared from the configuration screens. That's great news for doubleclick and for Mozilla Corp's friends at Google, but it does strike a dischordant note among those of us who've been using Firefox as the browser you can trust. I don't think you can really dismiss such a basic privacy related feature not implementing a feature the way the author wants it. IHMO he raises a valid concern.
I also don't see where he said the new theme was ugly. Just in passing,
Point is, while Firefox 2.0 was never pitched as the last version of Firefox that we'll ever need as a result of its attaining perfection.
Fair comment. That said, are we not allowed to be concerned about the direction Firefox development is taking? My personal impression is that the FF devs have been moving steadily away from the basic idea of a minimal framework with lots of plugins, and toward a heavyweight browser with a large preset feature set that can be overriden with difficulty.
I think I liked it best about 0.7. They've done some good stuff, and some needed stuff since, but I think I liked the browser best about then.
We hear that reasoning a lot from open source advocates. But when it comes to Firefox and Mozilla in general, it just isn't a case. Their code is a mess, regardless of whether it's C++ code, or whether it's JavaScript code. Look for yourself: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/.
It's not entirely fair to compare SeaMonkey with Firefox. One of the drivers factors behind the foundation of Firefox (then Phoenix) was that the Mozilla inherited from Netscape was borked beyond redemption, and recoding from scratch was the only way forward.
SeaMonkey, whose repository you linked to. is a continuation of the old Mozilla codebase. It was brought back from the dead after the mozilla project decided to junk it. Part of the reason for that was that a few old fossils like myself have a certain affection for the mozilla suite, but mainly it happened because a ot of corporate players had a significant investment in the old Mozilla package, and since this is open source they don't have to migrate if they don't want to.
The tone you take in your post leads me to suppose that you should have known all this already. I'll just add that if you want people to take you seriously (as opposed to just another AC astroturfing for Microsoft) then you should at least link to the correct repository. Don't you think?
I have no idea if patents are treated similar to copyright law but in my limited understanding, intellectual property owners have a responsibility to defend their rights when they know of infringing activity. If they neglect to defend their rights then they may end up forfeiting those rights.
Alas, no, At least I don't think so. Patents differ from Copyright in a number of respects (which is one of the reasons Stallman objects to lumping them together under the term "IP" and one of those differences is that you do not have to enforce them.
This is why the great GIF patent stick-em-up was possible. The holders left the patents unenforced until the format was almost ubiquitous across the web, and then started enforcing right left and centre. There are sites that still won't use GIFs and ones that probably never will again.
You quote this, then go on to add, "However if you want to actually use it, to say nothing of modify and distribute, for that you need to accept the licence offered by the copyright holder - in this case the GPL." It seems you just magicly add the word "use" as though "of course that must almost be covered" without any support.
Fair enough. Again, from the GPL:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted
So, as you see, the GPL specifically grants the right to run the program. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't have the right to run a GPLed work without that specific grant, but I believe most copyright lawyers equate the right to run a program with performance rights for other creative works, which would mean permission was required. I can't support that at all - it's purely an impression formed, so you'll need a qualified legal opinion if you want an authoritative answer. However I think it's safe to say that the reason modification and distribution are emphasised is that it's possible to tell when someone distributes a program, but generally rather harder if they just run it.
Was there a follow on point you wished to make? I didn't think my argument really depended upon the right to run a program being conveyed by the GPL
The GPL gives you that permission but there are no pre-arranged terms, no promises of goods or services delivered for money paid and no penalties for violation since its not a contract.
But surely the terms of the GPL are pre-arranged terms, at least in so far as they exist prior to acceptance of the agreement? The goods or services delivered are the rigths granted by the GPL. There's no money changing hands, but I was under the impression that money wasn't a necessary component of a valid contract. The key concept is consideration and that's covered by the rights granted under the licence.
Just what I've picked up lurking on Groklaw, so I may have the wrong end of the stick
As I understand US law, a licence is contract. A specialised form of contract, but a contract nevertheless.
If I receive the software from you and you receive the software from the licenser, then you might have a contract with the licenser, but I don't. If the licenser wasn't making an exclusive agreement with you and gave you redistribution rights
That's not how the GPL licence works:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
See? I might give you a copy of someone else's GPLed work, but I'm not relicencing to you. All I'm doing is distributing it, in accordance with the rights grated me under the GPL. However if you want to actually use it, to say nothing of modify and distribute, for that you need to accept the licence offered by the copyright holder - in this case the GPL.
Now if you want to take out a support contract with me, that's fine and I'll take your money. However all you're buying is support. I'm not re-licencing the software because I don't have that right, neither under the GPL, nor under copyright law.
The copyright remains with the holder, and since the licence is a separate agreement, it remains between you and the copyright holder.
Perhaps some Microsoft patents? But that is of course, speculation
Oooh, very good! Nice evil genius phraseology there. You may be FUDding, but you're FUDding with style! A minor nitpick - you could use some more elipses and... exaggerated ssssylbants. Apart from that, wonderful!
I don't want to imply anything... except that whenever mono comes up, there is always talk of patents.
And Microsoft has so many lovely patents, my preciousss.... Whoa! That meme's infectious!
These might be legit concerns, or not... I don't really know. But the fact that this always comes up might be considered bad enough by some
Are you wearing fingerless black gloves when you type this stuff. I think there's a law requiring you to wear fingerless gloves if you write stuff like this. And you have to dry wash your hands a lot. Or maybe this is the one where you have to own a white cat. I don't know which is correct (IANAL) but the fact that it's always like that on the TV might be considered bad enough by some. (Nice line, by the way. Seriously.)
Oh, and I put my comment in evil-comment tags, but./ erased that... so don't take it too seriously...
Oh, I see! Yes, ha-ha, very good. You really had me going for a minute there.
[evil]
next time might I urge upon you the use of phpBB style tags? It might lead fewer of your readers to dismiss your ponderings as... flamebait
[/evil]
Well, if a temporary slow down in Linux adoption is as high as they were setting their sights, then I guess they can claim success. Balanced against that, the exercise has left the Linux codebase in rather a stronger position than before, and has exposed MS to
possible legal consequences, either in the form of fresh anti-trust prosecutions, or civil action from IBM. And the show ain't over yet, and IBM are only just starting their counter attack. If you look at some of the court documents (recent Groklaw articles are working
through them in detail) it seems clear that IBM are carefully building the paper trail they need to drag MS into the case, like it or not.
I'd hardly call that "spectacular" success. Break even perhaps. But only if they set their sights very low.
That was a success? Wow. I guess break-even would have to involve MS going bankrupt.
Presumably the failure case involves crucifying Bill and Steve upside down in front of One Microsoft Way, and then detonating a nuke over Redmond, Seattle just to be on the safe side.
That book assumes that the physical limitations that make AI impossible don't apply everywhere
mmm... it still assumes AI is possible. I guess it's a half full/half empty sort of distinction.
there initially is a huge region where AI is possible but the good guys destroy it in order to defeat an evil intelligence
Not quite. The second book is a prequel, of sorts. The AI damping effect gets stronger as you approach the center of the galaxy, with a certain threshold being enough to suppress machine self-awareness, FTL, and related effects.
From that viewpoint, I read the anti-AI pontifications of some the characters in Deepness in the Sky as a bit of subtle mockery of the anti-AI crowd, at least given we knew about the "true" state of affairs. A bit like the way the locals in Fire Upon The Deep were so amused by Pham Nuwen's faith in dual key encryption given a world of "gods" who could trivially brute force anything sort of a one time pad.
Vinge's problem is that he makes too much of the famous failures of AI, and has fallen in with the camp that believes that software will never be able to compete with wetware.
That doesn't sound much like the Vinge novels I've read. In fact the companion novel to A Deepness In The Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep operates from the assumption that true AI is godlike in comparison to any biological intelligence.
Yeah, but once a load of small/local bands find they can't upload their own tracks and quit the site in anger, I expect MySpace wouldn't be seen as cool anymore.
Can't argue with that. Just have have difficulty imagining that News International "gets" MySpace enough to understand that. But even they do - Yahoo! hasn't been cool since the early 90s, but it still makes a ton of money. I think they'd be willing to trade coolness (which tends to be pretty fleeting in most cases) for a chance to impose some extra Terms and Conditions on all that potential budding talent.
I don't approve, but I'd be surprised if someone wasn't thinking along those lines, somewhere.
(Especially if they do so loudly and publicly - and what do you think would happen?)
Realistically? I think that after the initial wave of defections, there's still going to be about a gazillion angsty teenage bloggers clicking randomly around the domain and very receptive to the right sort of band. I think a lot of them will stay there just to pick up those angsty teens. And as time goes on, a lot of those teens are going to turn into bored blogging housewives who will probably stick with MySpace after it stops being cool, because it's what they know, and they have a history there. And then bands targeting that demographic will start arriving.
But I don't think that angle is going to bother the money men. I'll bet they're thinking "bums on seats" rather than "coolness".
One way around that would be to increase the tolerance to distortion until the filter matches everything from white noise to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
They'd have to add a whitelisting mechanism to allow legitimate music through, but I don't suppose News International will see a problem with tighter control what content they allow on MySpace. All in the interests of protecting their users, obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO are trying to assert legal ownership of key IP in the Linux system, and in Linux as a whole. They're sued IBM as a way of establishing this right, and for their pains they are currently being slowly flayed by IBM in the courts.
Novell bought SUSE, one of the big commercial distros. If SCO succeed in their suit, Novell has to buy a licence from SCO or stop distributing Linux. Additionally, Novell reckon that if there is any proprietary IP in Linux, they've got a better claim to it than SCO, and they can prove it. So in the case of SCO, Novell are on our side.
At the same time, Novell have entered into a deal with Microsoft. Most of it seems to be smoke and mirrors, but what it appears to boil down to is that in return for Novell paying a royalty to MS, MS will help their competitive position with respect to the other distros by threatening to sue rival distributors, developers... almost anybody really. Even SUSE users aren't safe, since MS can cancel the agreement with anyone, any time and for any reason. So it's pretty much a promise not to sue unless they really feel like it. Reassuring, huh? Novell also agreed not to use their patent arsenal to defend Linux against MS, and in return, they get a big pot of cash.
In this case, it's rather harder to approve of Novell's actions. The deal may not have any legal implications for linux users anywhere, but the patent agreement is going back on a promise they made earlier to the Linux community. On top of that, it's just not a friendly act towards the rest of the community. Other objections have been raised, such attempting to circumvent the PLL, but I can't see how that works, and neither can Mogen Eblen, so I think the whole thing's a combination marketing-and-barratry-deal.
There are some reservations still as to what else may have been agreed upon. A lot of people are concerned that Novell may try and inject code that clearly violate MS patents into one or more open source packages. Mono and the new OpenOffice fork are particularly worrying in that regard.
So to sum up:
Bad Guys:Microsoft, SCO.
Self-Serving Opportunists:Novell
Good Guys:Linux devs, distributors other than Novell and SCO, users
Caught In The Crossfire:SUSE devs
Hope that helps. Have a nice day.
Of course, you could argue that distributing such a download-compile-and-link program would be an attempt to violate the intent of the new licence, but I still think that's unlikely. The main point of GPLv3 seems to be aimed at hardware locked down against modification. If the user can compile the two lots of source together, I don't think GPLv3 has a problem. It's when you want to mod a GPLv3 program distributed with hardware, and the hardware won't let you run the result that you hit problems. Think "Tivo".
Ones with the "...or later" boilerplate at the top won't need to, although I think some will explicitly re-licence as GPLv2 only. Not so many as I would have expected before recent shady dealings between MS and Novel, but some will. If nothing else, there are a lot of prominent FOSS devs being paid by large corporations. It's got to be difficult not to let something like that influence your thinking.
The interesting question is which projects will prosper and which not, post GPLv3. Which will attract developers, which will be bundled, and which wil fal by the wayside. Interesting days ahead, I feel
Never mind, I'm sure the usual mixture of blackmail and bribery will see vista deployed in some high profile corporate site before too long.
OK, conceded :) I've never seen that written down before, so I've always assumed it was spelt "Welsh"
I'll have to take your word for it.
Well, clearly it's not a nice thing to say. I still think it's a bit of a stretch to say it was intended to apply to the entire population of the Principality of Wales. Personally I think that if you dug deep enough, you probably find out it commemmorates Joshia Welch of 1900s early New York, famous for never repaying a debt. Or something like that, since I just made that up by way of example.
You don't hear it much in England either, in my experience. Which is odd, because if it was a slur against the Welsh, then England is where I'd expect to find it most used. If only because I don't think many other nations have strong feelings for the Welsh one way or another, let alone particularly any particular dislike of them. My impression is that it seems to be a US idiom, which is why I think it's probably the surname of some early settler.
Of course. the surname probably originally meant "from Wales", so I suppose if you were desperate to take offence you could do. It still seems a bit overly PC to me.
Maybe it's one of those UK/US spelling differences. I still wouldn't have thought it a slur
Yeah, I got that, but I found the comment helpful anyway.
How fortunate we are that Slashdot has such remarkable intellects as your own to exemplify the opposite extreme.
That's right, get it out of your system. You'll feel better for it afterwards.
My mistake then. I should know better than to post after I've had a few drinks
Then why not link to the correct repository? Then there's no doubt. As it is we have to wonder about motivation.
mmmm.... the UI was recoded from scratch - it was redefined in terms of XUL which meant the entire interface was rendered by Gecko. Gecko wasn't rewritten from scratch of course. Apologies for any imprecision. Of course, if the OP had linked to Firefox/Gecko I'd have taken more care.
Don't think I said "helping". I just remember a lot of complaints at the time along the lines of "my company has a lot of apps that depend on the Mozilla suite and we need security updates at the very least". It's a little disappointing to learn that none of them have followed that up with any sponsorship.If you're going summarise, you might include the question of third party cookies and how the option to block them as disappeared from the configuration screens. That's great news for doubleclick and for Mozilla Corp's friends at Google, but it does strike a dischordant note among those of us who've been using Firefox as the browser you can trust. I don't think you can really dismiss such a basic privacy related feature not implementing a feature the way the author wants it. IHMO he raises a valid concern.
I also don't see where he said the new theme was ugly. Just in passing,
Fair comment. That said, are we not allowed to be concerned about the direction Firefox development is taking? My personal impression is that the FF devs have been moving steadily away from the basic idea of a minimal framework with lots of plugins, and toward a heavyweight browser with a large preset feature set that can be overriden with difficulty.I think I liked it best about 0.7. They've done some good stuff, and some needed stuff since, but I think I liked the browser best about then.
SeaMonkey, whose repository you linked to. is a continuation of the old Mozilla codebase. It was brought back from the dead after the mozilla project decided to junk it. Part of the reason for that was that a few old fossils like myself have a certain affection for the mozilla suite, but mainly it happened because a ot of corporate players had a significant investment in the old Mozilla package, and since this is open source they don't have to migrate if they don't want to.
The tone you take in your post leads me to suppose that you should have known all this already. I'll just add that if you want people to take you seriously (as opposed to just another AC astroturfing for Microsoft) then you should at least link to the correct repository. Don't you think?
This is why the great GIF patent stick-em-up was possible. The holders left the patents unenforced until the format was almost ubiquitous across the web, and then started enforcing right left and centre. There are sites that still won't use GIFs and ones that probably never will again.
ObDisclaimer: IANAL
Was there a follow on point you wished to make? I didn't think my argument really depended upon the right to run a program being conveyed by the GPL
Just what I've picked up lurking on Groklaw, so I may have the wrong end of the stick
Now if you want to take out a support contract with me, that's fine and I'll take your money. However all you're buying is support. I'm not re-licencing the software because I don't have that right, neither under the GPL, nor under copyright law. The copyright remains with the holder, and since the licence is a separate agreement, it remains between you and the copyright holder.
Hope that helps.
Oh, I see! Yes, ha-ha, very good. You really had me going for a minute there.
[evil] next time might I urge upon you the use of phpBB style tags? It might lead fewer of your readers to dismiss your ponderings as ... flamebait
[/evil]
Well, if a temporary slow down in Linux adoption is as high as they were setting their sights, then I guess they can claim success. Balanced against that, the exercise has left the Linux codebase in rather a stronger position than before, and has exposed MS to possible legal consequences, either in the form of fresh anti-trust prosecutions, or civil action from IBM. And the show ain't over yet, and IBM are only just starting their counter attack. If you look at some of the court documents (recent Groklaw articles are working through them in detail) it seems clear that IBM are carefully building the paper trail they need to drag MS into the case, like it or not.
I'd hardly call that "spectacular" success. Break even perhaps. But only if they set their sights very low.
Presumably the failure case involves crucifying Bill and Steve upside down in front of One Microsoft Way, and then detonating a nuke over Redmond, Seattle just to be on the safe side.
mmm... it still assumes AI is possible. I guess it's a half full/half empty sort of distinction.
Not quite. The second book is a prequel, of sorts. The AI damping effect gets stronger as you approach the center of the galaxy, with a certain threshold being enough to suppress machine self-awareness, FTL, and related effects.
From that viewpoint, I read the anti-AI pontifications of some the characters in Deepness in the Sky as a bit of subtle mockery of the anti-AI crowd, at least given we knew about the "true" state of affairs. A bit like the way the locals in Fire Upon The Deep were so amused by Pham Nuwen's faith in dual key encryption given a world of "gods" who could trivially brute force anything sort of a one time pad.
Can't argue with that. Just have have difficulty imagining that News International "gets" MySpace enough to understand that. But even they do - Yahoo! hasn't been cool since the early 90s, but it still makes a ton of money. I think they'd be willing to trade coolness (which tends to be pretty fleeting in most cases) for a chance to impose some extra Terms and Conditions on all that potential budding talent.
I don't approve, but I'd be surprised if someone wasn't thinking along those lines, somewhere.
Realistically? I think that after the initial wave of defections, there's still going to be about a gazillion angsty teenage bloggers clicking randomly around the domain and very receptive to the right sort of band. I think a lot of them will stay there just to pick up those angsty teens. And as time goes on, a lot of those teens are going to turn into bored blogging housewives who will probably stick with MySpace after it stops being cool, because it's what they know, and they have a history there. And then bands targeting that demographic will start arriving.
But I don't think that angle is going to bother the money men. I'll bet they're thinking "bums on seats" rather than "coolness".
They'd have to add a whitelisting mechanism to allow legitimate music through, but I don't suppose News International will see a problem with tighter control what content they allow on MySpace. All in the interests of protecting their users, obviously.
yeah yeah. The GP pointed ot that they stopped asking for credit crad numbers from tourists in June or so. Just after I looked at it.