I would seriously probably run it.... unless of course it were shoved down my friggin throat. Really bad idea to mandate any default screensaver, splash screen bash prompt, etc. in a "free" license. I mean that's just about the best example of an oxymoron I could think of.
Re:I love going to this!
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Hamvention
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Ok "giving back" cash to pay prop developers I can almost go down that road with you and I hadn't thought of it that way before.
Is the source to Microsoft's version of kerberos, their version of BSD's tcp/ip stack of even traceroute available for me to see without paying extra or being someone big and important? Answer no, Microsoft's derivative works of BSD stuff is licensed differently and I get nothing back except for one instance of use of any "enhancements" they've done. I think this is unfair to the people who worked on the original versions of these packages. Apparently they don't and so I say more power to them.
Let's say I write a web based accouting/invoicing system in.... say PHP with a mysql backend. I want to share this with the world not necesarily because I'm a super guy, I want some people smarter than me to help polish it up. I will not ever choose to license something like this under the BSDL simply beacuse I don't want Intuit creating a deriviative and getting even richer based on my (and other's) work. Once they release their version let's say it's called WebBooks they can close the source, screw with the data structures and make their version incompatable with mine. Why in the world would anyone do this? If I released it GPL they could jump on the bandwagon, still get rich off of my work but I would have of their work available back to me (unless I do as you say and pay them for one instance of useing their derivative work) and aside from a few billion dollars and a heckuva marketing dept, I could still compete. This makes much more sense to me.
Microsoft EULA They rent you parts of a book. You agree to not allow anyone else to look at the book. If you stop paying you get to keep the book parts but can never open them again. Microsoft can change what the book says whenever they want. You cannot sell your book parts even when you're finished with them. You cannot change the words in the book even to fix spelling/punctuation errors. Microsoft can change the terms of the agreement whenever they like... you cannot. The BSA goons can walk in with their government law enforcement lapdogs and make you drop your pants for an audit whenever they like. Don't loose those receipts!
Regular Proprietary software "They" sell you a copy of a book. You can read the book for as long as you want. You may not let anyone else read the book unless you agree to stop reading the book. Sometimes you may edit the book but you cannot ever allow anyone to read the edited version. The BSA goons can walk in with their government law enforcement lapdogs and make you drop your pants for an audit whenever they like. Don't loose those receipts!
GPL You own a copy of the book. You can make as many copies as you want. You can sell or give away as many copies as you want. You can completely rewrite the book, however If you edit the book and give it away or sell it you must include your edits and you must pass these same rules along to anyone who gets your copy of the book. You must also give credit to the original author(s) of the book. The original author(s) of the book can change the agreement at any time but you can refuse to accept any changes in the agreement with your edition of the book. The BSA can go to hell and you can burn any receipts you may or may not have aquired.
BSD You own the book. You an do whatever you like with the book except remove the credit of the original author(s) but so can everyone else. The BSA can go to hell.
Public Domain You own the book and the idea behind the book but so does everyone else. You can claim it as your own and can do whatever you like but so can everyone else. The BSA can go to hell.
The GPL is the only license (mentioned here) that requires you to give something back if you distribute the software. In my opinion that's why it's the most morally correct. The GPL is why I'm a Linux fan even though I feel the BSD's are still superior in most ways. Microsoft's perversion of Kerebos would not have been legal under the GPL.
They're renting cpu time, drive space, backup tapes, techs to keep everything running and reasonably secure, bandwidth, physical security, hardware wear and tear and so on. I run Apache, Mysql, PHP, on Linux box and I host web and email. Do you think I have to give everyone who hosts a website or an email account with me the source code to every GPLed piece of software they use that's installed on my machine? Maybe you also think I should send them a copy of every copyleft howto I've read to figure out how to make it all go?
Quick answer No Long answer Nope
It's real simple.... I provide a service and they pay me every month for that service.
I love going to this!
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Hamvention
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Seriously talk about a bunch of extreme geeks... Guys? runnning around with 12' wips attached to their tinfoil covered army helmets talking to their buddies one aisle overwith a handheld while simultaneously talking to their mom on a cell while pecking away at their Palm. It's a real hoot to just walk around and watch some of these people. The have computer stuff there too.
Back in the day I used to go to buy exotic, hard to find stuff like RJ-45 crimpers and cheap, used drives, cpu fans etc. Now you can pickup a pair of crimpers at Lowes and computer parts are so cheap and easy to order off the net the desire to go has dimished for me some.
I was thinking... you could blow air into the bottom of a barrel of water, let it bubble up to the top and put it back into the room. I know from a really reliable source that water bongs get much of the nasty stuff out of pot and make the smoke much smoother. Of course I've never actually tried to clean the air in a room with one but it seems like it might work.
Re:Singing a Different Tune
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Linus on DRM
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Yes I will, while simultaneously directing my hate mail to those assholes who wrote shit that requires the stock signed kernel and compiling my own custom kernel and thereby "missing" out on those "features".
You're probably one of those people who bitch at mozilla because their browser won't work on some IE only websites.
Re:Some people seem to miss the point.
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Linus on DRM
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No.... this thought is not accurate, think of ssh... the source is there but it's still damned hard (but aaparently not as difficult as it used to be) to figure out somebody's passphrase and ssh into their stuff.
I mean.... you crap all over your good, old established customers in order to attract new ones... seems to me the old customers should get the preferential treatment and the new ones should get to sit and spin for awhile. Whatever happened to loyalty?
The deadline for C-Corps was March 31. IANAA but I am the IT guy at a CPA firm and I must say they do know their stuff and are worth every penny. You should get an accountant for at least the first few years... later on when you understand what has to be filed and how they should look you might be ok doing it yourself. Same with sales tax payroll etc... none of it is all that difficult unless you've got bookoo bucks and need to find the loopholes.
There aren't many loopholes (probably none) that will be able to be used for the common person or small business. H&R Block, your bank etc. are not the way to go, BTW. Go to a CPA firm, heck you'd have a better chance getting decent work done at Fred's Accounting than at any of the fly-by we do taxes only places. Your bank and regular tax places have one lowly person sitting in the office for 9 months out of the year... when tax season hits they get temps, college kids studying accounting and anyone else they can find to crank out taxes. Most accounting firms are fully staffed all year with competent people and they might hire a temp or two to help out with the phones or do filing etc.
Not filing and not filing on time will get you massive penalties so don't screw around, call a CPA right after April 15. Ask the CPA if any penalties you might have already incurred will outweigh the value of your corp. You may be able to abandon the corp and just start over.
While I'm on the subject.... the urban myth says if you have an inc., you're personal stuff is protected, Incorporating doesn't do squat for your personal risk until it is able to establish it's own credit rating, many years down the road. No bank will lend a newly formed, poor corp. any money without a personal guarantee the loan will be paid off.... i.e. your house as collateral. There are other disadvantages like paying tax on your inventory etc that make a C-corp less attractive, especially at the start.
Oh sheesh.. you live in what world? I create temporary email addresses for myself, use one to buy a book from Amazon and within two months that account is hammered with spam. Much of which comes directly from Amazon. Go dowload Diskeeper Lite and see what I mean. Ive had my email address since before most of you ever heard of the Internet and I can tell you if I weren't whitelisting I'd be so flooded with spam. Why don't you use your email address to register a domain sometime.. You must be trolling.
I once took the platters off of a 500 meg WD (bad motor) and transplanted them onto another. It worked... I copied the client's data off with the cover off of the drive. Once I was sure their data was safe on their new computer I fired the drive back and played with it for more hours before it started getting CRC errors. My house had hardword floors and the dirt from the living space was constantly seeping through the cracks in the hardword and dusting everything in the basement plus I was smoking.
Note I've tried this twice since (in better conditions I might add) and failed miserably both times.
In my town, back in the day, we had a total of 2 local ISPs whose nocs were less than a block apart. I worked at one and a friend at the other. we tried like hell to get the 2 companies to string some cat5 between the 2 buildings and ease the load on each of our T1's. They wouldn't do it, wouldn't even talk about it. So whenever I sent an email to one of my friends who subscribed to the other ISP, it got to travel out our T1, halfway across the country and back, and down their T1. Stupid.
They don't allow vpns so they can correct spelling errors (resedential) on the flyat the packet level, in an effort to make their customers seem halfway intelligent.
but for the wrong reasons. As has been pointed out here quite a few times a c:\ does not indicate dos is the underlying operating system. I've got a c:\ prompt on my linux dos and I doubt anyone (well no one intelligent) would try to claim my Linux box is running on top of dos. There is an operating system down there somewhere though and it doesn't require clicking to make it go.
All those flashy clicking things in Windows are not part of the operating system. They're not built into the kernel, nor do they talk to the hardware directly. They are part of a windows manager running on top of an operating system. In this, I agree with Cringly's conclusion. Windows is not only a winodws manager, it's also a giant visual basic interpreter that is designed to let even the most clueless vb weenies crank out shitware. This is why windows has done so well financially and so poorly in the areas of security and stability.
Microsoft's biggest problem is backward compatibility. They cannot afford to break the cycle of backward compatibility like Apple did. Sure some things break here and there but it's pretty amazing to me that I can fire up some old program from the early 90's and it usually runs. This is their downfall. All this old cruft has to be dragged on and on to each new version of windows.
It would not be a simple task to make the clicky flashy thing called windows run on top of Linux and keep all those old 16 bit apps working. In order to pull this off they'd have to translate windows system calls to linux systems calls. In other words, they'd have to write Wine. Now they could certainly have an easier time of it than our current wine team since they have that source code and could legally use it.
Should they do it? Hell yeah they should... they're losing the battle and it will get worse and worse for them unless they can take over even more of the government and make the GPL illegal. If they fail to get the mindless sheep of the world to sign up for the Digital rights crap they'll need a plan B. They could roll out their own version of wine, support only the most modern 32bit or even 64 bit apps with a smaller, cleaner API and start doing it right. They could continue to milk their dos/windows until it runs out. This could get them out of the lukewarm water they're in with the DOJ and give them a real product that might even be worth buying.
Of course they won't do this since the GPL "should" put a stop on their embrace and extend tactics. Plus I doubt they'd let themselves be at the mercy of the Linux kernel guys.... imagine Microsoft having to play catch-up with changes in the underlying APIs.... not likely. Now how about BSD though? The BSD license would give them the control that they would require but BSD (The os) doesn't have the name that Linux does. By name, I mean name recognition. I don't wish to start a BSD/Linux flame war. A BSD/GPL flame war on the other hand might be worth another look.
I'm a... for lack of a better term, professional computer guy. I have a client who had a gorgeous website designed by a local printer. Problem was the designer didn't like arial or any of the common fonts and every bit of text on the site was a gif without an alt tags. The site had no meta tags either. The typical "I'm a designer so I'll start designing websites" mentality (as opposed to the "I'm a computer guy so I'll design websites mentality").
The client asked me why her site didn't show up in any search engines. She had this outfit redo the site with real live text and eventually was able to find herself on web.
Some database driven sites have the computer guy designing website problem. The site is chalked full of usefull information but you have to fill out some form to query the database to get the info out, thereby locking Google etc. out. Imagine another search engine indexing Google.... they wouldn't find many useful terms since they can't perform a search and press the button. Granted there are ways around that but not any that a search engine would probably try. Search King should still crawl back under a rock.
Is to make it a crime to send email from a bogus account. I'm thinking this crime would be called.. oh I dunno maybe fraud. If I have a real email address then I can request to be removed and am not, then it should be just like telemarketing and I could sue for $500.
As long as you spam me from a legitmate email address I can request that the ISP delete your account. If the ISP chooses not to do so, then I can block the whole damn domain guilt-free. If the ISP has a decent EULA they could sue their subscriber for breaking the terms of their agreement and use that money to pay their various postmasters to take care of spam complaints.
The scenario wouldn't be Ford Donating anything to Chevy. The scenario would be like you signing a paper that says by driving this ford for free (the EULA doesn't apply to the purchased ver AFAIK) you agree to never use it to drive to work at a Chevy plant. Taken a bit further, you may not drive the car to work at a garage that works on anything but Chevy vehicles since everyone knows used car sales compete with new cars sales.
Also you may never re-sell the car to anyone who would drive it to work at a Chevy plant.
Or to go a little further down that road.... you can never use the Ford to get parts for the homebrew car you're building out in that garage that you plan to donate to Sally Struthers.
You may not use that car to drive to work at the golf cart factory since golf carts could conceivebly compete with cars. Same with scooters, bikes motorcycles, planes, trains, helicopters... you get the idea. This sounds absurd but not nearly as crazy as some of the lawsuits we've heard about in the last few years.
RMS posted his comments to the wrong list and should apologize to the list (but not on the list). But he's still right. Your comment missed the mark a bit, but is excusable, heat of the moment and all, the insightful moderation however was just nuts.
Now it's the kernel hackers right to do what they will... it's Stallman's right to bitch about it, (but not on the dev list), it's your right to make a bad post and my right to try to get you to think about Stallman's message and life's work in your own terms and it's Slashdot's right to give us a place to have this discussion.
It is also most certainly BitKeeper's right to make whatever EULA they like, however that right has nothing to do with anyone donating hamburgers or cars between companies.
Imagine this... I write the ultimate BitKeeper replacement.. I take the linux kernel, some gnu stuff and create a distro entitled Byte Arranger. It's a totally gpl'd bootablle ISO. You stick it in your PC and voila you're arranging Bytes/keeping bits, so to speak. Does this mean that any of the kernel hackers that continue to use the free version of bitkeeper have now violated the EULA because their work has gone into a system that competes with bitkeeper?
I agree a linux kernel has nothing todo with a userland app that keeps bits, but it'd be a good enough argument to drag a few developers to court.
Once we come to accept this type of license because it's free, we are then another step closer to accepting even stronger versions of this type of license on stuff we pay for. Imagine the EULA of a Windows product first saying
"By installing this software you must agree to never use this software to contribute to Linux."
Version2 states "By installing this software you must agree to never contribute to gpl'ed software." Seems kinda the same at first glance but NOT the same.
I've been waiting on this one for awhile. It has to drive them nuts to have a firewall like the zone alarm reporting all the behind the scenes discussions the print spooler subsystem etc are. having with someone on the net. They'll probably include some lite version of their zone alarm for free and a pro version for money... think defrag... Of course neither version will tell us anything about any of their covert communications with our computers.
And think of all the money they're losing out on to McAfee and Norton for antivirus software. If I were a conspiracy theorist...oh wait... I am, I might think they've purposely not cleaned up outlook just to create a market that they can swoop in and take over like they're known to do. bastards
Oh my god.... what a brainwashed fool. I suppose you think that 4 out of dentists really do prefer X too huh? If I'm paying for the roads, taxes on my new car, fucking insurance, paying the group that has brainwashed you, then it's not a priveledge to utilize these things I've paid for, it's my right. If they want it to be my priveldge then they need to make the part of my taxes that goes toward road construction and government safety testing agencies and the brainwashing agencies that got their hooks into you optional.
I'm actually serious.... I was in the same situation and people kept lapsing back into their old habits. I had tried all the tricks, move My Documents, setup roaming profiles, gave everyone a P: drive (personal) but there were a few older applications that made it difficult to save their datafiles somewhere besides the locations apparently hard coded in.
I pleaded and swore and I posted a big memo about about it and waited. On the second night after everyone had left I replaced one of the more irritating higher ups machine with a faster one. I put the old one on the bench and completely tore it apart. Since we had roaming profiles he had most of his stuff working but he had lost data. I restored his files a few hours later after feigning concern that I might not be able to and making him look foolish for saving files on his local drive. He was seriously pissed, but unable to do anything about it since he got the new computer and had been recently warned about local data.
Now I occasionally play musical computers with the 18 systems in my office just to keep them on their toes.
The prob I still have is getting people to shut down all their apps and log out every night. I've tried those auto logout scripts but they shut things dpown too hard sometimes and people often work late here so they're kinda rude.
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I would seriously probably run it.... unless of course it were shoved down my friggin throat. Really bad idea to mandate any default screensaver, splash screen bash prompt, etc. in a "free" license. I mean that's just about the best example of an oxymoron I could think of.
I wasn't rying to troll.... really.
Ok "giving back" cash to pay prop developers I can almost go down that road with you and I hadn't thought of it that way before.
Is the source to Microsoft's version of kerberos, their version of BSD's tcp/ip stack of even traceroute available for me to see without paying extra or being someone big and important? Answer no, Microsoft's derivative works of BSD stuff is licensed differently and I get nothing back except for one instance of use of any "enhancements" they've done. I think this is unfair to the people who worked on the original versions of these packages. Apparently they don't and so I say more power to them.
Let's say I write a web based accouting/invoicing system in.... say PHP with a mysql backend. I want to share this with the world not necesarily because I'm a super guy, I want some people smarter than me to help polish it up. I will not ever choose to license something like this under the BSDL simply beacuse I don't want Intuit creating a deriviative and getting even richer based on my (and other's) work. Once they release their version let's say it's called WebBooks they can close the source, screw with the data structures and make their version incompatable with mine. Why in the world would anyone do this? If I released it GPL they could jump on the bandwagon, still get rich off of my work but I would have of their work available back to me (unless I do as you say and pay them for one instance of useing their derivative work) and aside from a few billion dollars and a heckuva marketing dept, I could still compete. This makes much more sense to me.
Microsoft EULA
They rent you parts of a book. You agree to not allow anyone else to look at the book. If you stop paying you get to keep the book parts but can never open them again. Microsoft can change what the book says whenever they want. You cannot sell your book parts even when you're finished with them. You cannot change the words in the book even to fix spelling/punctuation errors. Microsoft can change the terms of the agreement whenever they like... you cannot. The BSA goons can walk in with their government law enforcement lapdogs and make you drop your pants for an audit whenever they like. Don't loose those receipts!
Regular Proprietary software
"They" sell you a copy of a book. You can read the book for as long as you want. You may not let anyone else read the book unless you agree to stop reading the book. Sometimes you may edit the book but you cannot ever allow anyone to read the edited version. The BSA goons can walk in with their government law enforcement lapdogs and make you drop your pants for an audit whenever they like. Don't loose those receipts!
GPL
You own a copy of the book. You can make as many copies as you want. You can sell or give away as many copies as you want. You can completely rewrite the book, however If you edit the book and give it away or sell it you must include your edits and you must pass these same rules along to anyone who gets your copy of the book. You must also give credit to the original author(s) of the book. The original author(s) of the book can change the agreement at any time but you can refuse to accept any changes in the agreement with your edition of the book. The BSA can go to hell and you can burn any receipts you may or may not have aquired.
BSD
You own the book. You an do whatever you like with the book except remove the credit of the original author(s) but so can everyone else. The BSA can go to hell.
Public Domain
You own the book and the idea behind the book but so does everyone else. You can claim it as your own and can do whatever you like but so can everyone else. The BSA can go to hell.
The GPL is the only license (mentioned here) that requires you to give something back if you distribute the software. In my opinion that's why it's the most morally correct. The GPL is why I'm a Linux fan even though I feel the BSD's are still superior in most ways. Microsoft's perversion of Kerebos would not have been legal under the GPL.
G
They're renting cpu time, drive space, backup tapes, techs to keep everything running and reasonably secure, bandwidth, physical security, hardware wear and tear and so on. I run Apache, Mysql, PHP, on Linux box and I host web and email. Do you think I have to give everyone who hosts a website or an email account with me the source code to every GPLed piece of software they use that's installed on my machine? Maybe you also think I should send them a copy of every copyleft howto I've read to figure out how to make it all go?
Quick answer No
Long answer Nope
It's real simple.... I provide a service and they pay me every month for that service.
Seriously talk about a bunch of extreme geeks... Guys? runnning around with 12' wips attached to their tinfoil covered army helmets talking to their buddies one aisle overwith a handheld while simultaneously talking to their mom on a cell while pecking away at their Palm. It's a real hoot to just walk around and watch some of these people. The have computer stuff there too.
Back in the day I used to go to buy exotic, hard to find stuff like RJ-45 crimpers and cheap, used drives, cpu fans etc. Now you can pickup a pair of crimpers at Lowes and computer parts are so cheap and easy to order off the net the desire to go has dimished for me some.
I was thinking... you could blow air into the bottom of a barrel of water, let it bubble up to the top and put it back into the room. I know from a really reliable source that water bongs get much of the nasty stuff out of pot and make the smoke much smoother. Of course I've never actually tried to clean the air in a room with one but it seems like it might work.
Yes I will, while simultaneously directing my hate mail to those assholes who wrote shit that requires the stock signed kernel and compiling my own custom kernel and thereby "missing" out on those "features".
You're probably one of those people who bitch at mozilla because their browser won't work on some IE only websites.
No.... this thought is not accurate, think of ssh... the source is there but it's still damned hard (but aaparently not as difficult as it used to be) to figure out somebody's passphrase and ssh into their stuff.
I mean.... you crap all over your good, old established customers in order to attract new ones... seems to me the old customers should get the preferential treatment and the new ones should get to sit and spin for awhile. Whatever happened to loyalty?
The deadline for C-Corps was March 31. IANAA but I am the IT guy at a CPA firm and I must say they do know their stuff and are worth every penny. You should get an accountant for at least the first few years... later on when you understand what has to be filed and how they should look you might be ok doing it yourself. Same with sales tax payroll etc... none of it is all that difficult unless you've got bookoo bucks and need to find the loopholes.
There aren't many loopholes (probably none) that will be able to be used for the common person or small business. H&R Block, your bank etc. are not the way to go, BTW. Go to a CPA firm, heck you'd have a better chance getting decent work done at Fred's Accounting than at any of the fly-by we do taxes only places. Your bank and regular tax places have one lowly person sitting in the office for 9 months out of the year... when tax season hits they get temps, college kids studying accounting and anyone else they can find to crank out taxes. Most accounting firms are fully staffed all year with competent people and they might hire a temp or two to help out with the phones or do filing etc.
Not filing and not filing on time will get you massive penalties so don't screw around, call a CPA right after April 15. Ask the CPA if any penalties you might have already incurred will outweigh the value of your corp. You may be able to abandon the corp and just start over.
While I'm on the subject.... the urban myth says if you have an inc., you're personal stuff is protected, Incorporating doesn't do squat for your personal risk until it is able to establish it's own credit rating, many years down the road. No bank will lend a newly formed, poor corp. any money without a personal guarantee the loan will be paid off.... i.e. your house as collateral. There are other disadvantages like paying tax on your inventory etc that make a C-corp less attractive, especially at the start.
Of course I could be wrong about everything.
G
Oh sheesh.. you live in what world? I create temporary email addresses for myself, use one to buy a book from Amazon and within two months that account is hammered with spam. Much of which comes directly from Amazon. Go dowload Diskeeper Lite and see what I mean. Ive had my email address since before most of you ever heard of the Internet and I can tell you if I weren't whitelisting I'd be so flooded with spam. Why don't you use your email address to register a domain sometime.. You must be trolling.
I once took the platters off of a 500 meg WD (bad motor) and transplanted them onto another. It worked... I copied the client's data off with the cover off of the drive. Once I was sure their data was safe on their new computer I fired the drive back and played with it for more hours before it started getting CRC errors. My house had hardword floors and the dirt from the living space was constantly seeping through the cracks in the hardword and dusting everything in the basement plus I was smoking.
Note I've tried this twice since (in better conditions I might add) and failed miserably both times.
Because no one wants to write code for no dollars that could end up in Windows.
Ummmm couldn't the National Enquirer be considered a magazine? Cool! I gotta find that two headed monkey girl.
In my town, back in the day, we had a total of 2 local ISPs whose nocs were less than a block apart. I worked at one and a friend at the other. we tried like hell to get the 2 companies to string some cat5 between the 2 buildings and ease the load on each of our T1's. They wouldn't do it, wouldn't even talk about it. So whenever I sent an email to one of my friends who subscribed to the other ISP, it got to travel out our T1, halfway across the country and back, and down their T1. Stupid.
G
They don't allow vpns so they can correct spelling errors (resedential) on the flyat the packet level, in an effort to make their customers seem halfway intelligent.
but for the wrong reasons. As has been pointed out here quite a few times a c:\ does not indicate dos is the underlying operating system. I've got a c:\ prompt on my linux dos and I doubt anyone (well no one intelligent) would try to claim my Linux box is running on top of dos. There is an operating system down there somewhere though and it doesn't require clicking to make it go.
All those flashy clicking things in Windows are not part of the operating system. They're not built into the kernel, nor do they talk to the hardware directly. They are part of a windows manager running on top of an operating system. In this, I agree with Cringly's conclusion. Windows is not only a winodws manager, it's also a giant visual basic interpreter that is designed to let even the most clueless vb weenies crank out shitware. This is why windows has done so well financially and so poorly in the areas of security and stability.
Microsoft's biggest problem is backward compatibility. They cannot afford to break the cycle of backward compatibility like Apple did. Sure some things break here and there but it's pretty amazing to me that I can fire up some old program from the early 90's and it usually runs. This is their downfall. All this old cruft has to be dragged on and on to each new version of windows.
It would not be a simple task to make the clicky flashy thing called windows run on top of Linux and keep all those old 16 bit apps working. In order to pull this off they'd have to translate windows system calls to linux systems calls. In other words, they'd have to write Wine. Now they could certainly have an easier time of it than our current wine team since they have that source code and could legally use it.
Should they do it? Hell yeah they should... they're losing the battle and it will get worse and worse for them unless they can take over even more of the government and make the GPL illegal. If they fail to get the mindless sheep of the world to sign up for the Digital rights crap they'll need a plan B. They could roll out their own version of wine, support only the most modern 32bit or even 64 bit apps with a smaller, cleaner API and start doing it right. They could continue to milk their dos/windows until it runs out. This could get them out of the lukewarm water they're in with the DOJ and give them a real product that might even be worth buying.
Of course they won't do this since the GPL "should" put a stop on their embrace and extend tactics. Plus I doubt they'd let themselves be at the mercy of the Linux kernel guys.... imagine Microsoft having to play catch-up with changes in the underlying APIs.... not likely. Now how about BSD though? The BSD license would give them the control that they would require but BSD (The os) doesn't have the name that Linux does. By name, I mean name recognition. I don't wish to start a BSD/Linux flame war. A BSD/GPL flame war on the other hand might be worth another look.
G
I'm a... for lack of a better term, professional computer guy. I have a client who had a gorgeous website designed by a local printer. Problem was the designer didn't like arial or any of the common fonts and every bit of text on the site was a gif without an alt tags. The site had no meta tags either. The typical "I'm a designer so I'll start designing websites" mentality (as opposed to the "I'm a computer guy so I'll design websites mentality").
The client asked me why her site didn't show up in any search engines. She had this outfit redo the site with real live text and eventually was able to find herself on web.
Some database driven sites have the computer guy designing website problem. The site is chalked full of usefull information but you have to fill out some form to query the database to get the info out, thereby locking Google etc. out. Imagine another search engine indexing Google.... they wouldn't find many useful terms since they can't perform a search and press the button. Granted there are ways around that but not any that a search engine would probably try. Search King should still crawl back under a rock.
G
Is to make it a crime to send email from a bogus account. I'm thinking this crime would be called.. oh I dunno maybe fraud. If I have a real email address then I can request to be removed and am not, then it should be just like telemarketing and I could sue for $500.
As long as you spam me from a legitmate email address I can request that the ISP delete your account. If the ISP chooses not to do so, then I can block the whole damn domain guilt-free. If the ISP has a decent EULA they could sue their subscriber for breaking the terms of their agreement and use that money to pay their various postmasters to take care of spam complaints.
Trust me, you don't want me to be an artist...
The scenario wouldn't be Ford Donating anything to Chevy. The scenario would be like you signing a paper that says by driving this ford for free (the EULA doesn't apply to the purchased ver AFAIK) you agree to never use it to drive to work at a Chevy plant. Taken a bit further, you may not drive the car to work at a garage that works on anything but Chevy vehicles since everyone knows used car sales compete with new cars sales.
Also you may never re-sell the car to anyone who would drive it to work at a Chevy plant.
Or to go a little further down that road.... you can never use the Ford to get parts for the homebrew car you're building out in that garage that you plan to donate to Sally Struthers.
You may not use that car to drive to work at the golf cart factory since golf carts could conceivebly compete with cars. Same with scooters, bikes motorcycles, planes, trains, helicopters... you get the idea. This sounds absurd but not nearly as crazy as some of the lawsuits we've heard about in the last few years.
RMS posted his comments to the wrong list and should apologize to the list (but not on the list). But he's still right. Your comment missed the mark a bit, but is excusable, heat of the moment and all, the insightful moderation however was just nuts.
Now it's the kernel hackers right to do what they will... it's Stallman's right to bitch about it, (but not on the dev list), it's your right to make a bad post and my right to try to get you to think about Stallman's message and life's work in your own terms and it's Slashdot's right to give us a place to have this discussion.
It is also most certainly BitKeeper's right to make whatever EULA they like, however that right has nothing to do with anyone donating hamburgers or cars between companies.
Imagine this... I write the ultimate BitKeeper replacement.. I take the linux kernel, some gnu stuff and create a distro entitled Byte Arranger. It's a totally gpl'd bootablle ISO. You stick it in your PC and voila you're arranging Bytes/keeping bits, so to speak. Does this mean that any of the kernel hackers that continue to use the free version of bitkeeper have now violated the EULA because their work has gone into a system that competes with bitkeeper?
I agree a linux kernel has nothing todo with a userland app that keeps bits, but it'd be a good enough argument to drag a few developers to court.
Once we come to accept this type of license because it's free, we are then another step closer to accepting even stronger versions of this type of license on stuff we pay for. Imagine the EULA of a Windows product first saying
"By installing this software you must agree to never use this software to contribute to Linux."
Version2 states "By installing this software you must agree to never contribute to gpl'ed software." Seems kinda the same at first glance but NOT the same.
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I've been waiting on this one for awhile. It has to drive them nuts to have a firewall like the zone alarm reporting all the behind the scenes discussions the print spooler subsystem etc are. having with someone on the net. They'll probably include some lite version of their zone alarm for free and a pro version for money... think defrag... Of course neither version will tell us anything about any of their covert communications with our computers.
And think of all the money they're losing out on to McAfee and Norton for antivirus software. If I were a conspiracy theorist...oh wait... I am, I might think they've purposely not cleaned up outlook just to create a market that they can swoop in and take over like they're known to do. bastards
Oh my god.... what a brainwashed fool. I suppose you think that 4 out of dentists really do prefer X too huh? If I'm paying for the roads, taxes on my new car, fucking insurance, paying the group that has brainwashed you, then it's not a priveledge to utilize these things I've paid for, it's my right. If they want it to be my priveldge then they need to make the part of my taxes that goes toward road construction and government safety testing agencies and the brainwashing agencies that got their hooks into you optional.
sheesh
I'm actually serious.... I was in the same situation and people kept lapsing back into their old habits. I had tried all the tricks, move My Documents, setup roaming profiles, gave everyone a P: drive (personal) but there were a few older applications that made it difficult to save their datafiles somewhere besides the locations apparently hard coded in.
I pleaded and swore and I posted a big memo about about it and waited. On the second night after everyone had left I replaced one of the more irritating higher ups machine with a faster one. I put the old one on the bench and completely tore it apart. Since we had roaming profiles he had most of his stuff working but he had lost data. I restored his files a few hours later after feigning concern that I might not be able to and making him look foolish for saving files on his local drive. He was seriously pissed, but unable to do anything about it since he got the new computer and had been recently warned about local data.
Now I occasionally play musical computers with the 18 systems in my office just to keep them on their toes.
The prob I still have is getting people to shut down all their apps and log out every night. I've tried those auto logout scripts but they shut things dpown too hard sometimes and people often work late here so they're kinda rude.