I concur in many respects, but would prefer the term "respected" rather than "revered".
RMS is a lot like what the Founding Fathers of the USA must have been like twenty or thirty years after things got running. He is worthy of respect in many of his actions and intentions. He clearly had the skills, intelligence, and drive to breath life into his beliefs, many of which the majority of us have at least some level of agreement. But this doesn't mean he's perfect. We can admire Jefferson's brilliance while shaking our heads at his ownership of slaves.
Another analogy I think is useful (if I can be allowed to pigeon-hole him some more), is Sigmund Freud. Freud is respected in psychology for what he was: a brilliant man who moved things forward a great deal. And, similarly to Freud, we can look at the contributions RMS has made with gratitude without believing he is right about everything. No one today really believes that Freud's theories were totally accurate models of reality. But many of the concepts and methods he introduced still have relevance and utility today.
Finally, for those role-playing geeks out there, I have one more analogy: Gary Gygax. He deserves respect for what he did for the genre, but will fall well short of any expectations placed upon him by those experiencing the emotion of "reverence".
It is very tempting to state the RMS, or anyone, is either "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong". The reality is that he is a complex person with ideas with which not all of us agree. That doesn't mean we can't look up to him for what good he has done, but to proceed beyond this to "reverence" would be a form of hero worship that would only cloud one's ability to evaluate his statements today.
I read this as they want to be able to incorporate new drivers and features into their X servers, but that there is concern with doing this with the "official" XFree86 line. By branching, they can add as many features/drivers as they please while still preserving the stability of the mother project.
Perhaps I'm exposing myself as ignorant here, but this wasn't a troll.:)
Actually, I wasn't advocating that this occur. I was just expressing surprise that it hadn't been attempted. After all, it must be pretty tempting to be able to flex one's cracking skills for good, rather than evil. If it worked, think of the news it would make!
But you're probably right. Most steady people that have the smarts to do this wouldn't want to risk either the potential harm or the legal risks.
Create a worm that patches the vulnerability?
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LovSan Clone Let Loose
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm surprised someone doesn't write a worm to patch the vulnerability and clean the system, if already compromised. After all, if you don't mind leaving yourself open to attack by a malicious worm, how can you complain about getting repaired by one that is beneficial?
My primary home machine is a Linux box. I agree that Windows has many security bugs. However, let's not kid ourselves about the main reason it's always Windows boxes that are getting hit: Windows is by far the biggest, most hated target available.
If Windows went away, and Macs or Linux boxes took over with 70+% desktop share, you can bet we'd find out about a few more security exploits lurking in non-Microsoft code, as well. While one may boast of the quickness in finding and removing bugs in, say, RedHat 9 as compared to Windows XP, one can't really believe that Linux is not also vulnerable if someone decided to make it a target.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the software isn't getting done on time is that much of the system is written from the ground up. Perhaps it would be better to design a common, open source spacecraft platform. So many of the basic tasks that spacecraft software must perform are essentially identical. The main differences for critical spacecraft systems would be the hardware. If a general purpose OS and spacecraft toolkit were designed, then the main things that would have to written from scratch for different missions would be drivers for the hardware and various configuration settings.
I'm not sure how suitable RT Linux would be from a technical/performance standpoint, but having a highly portable open source OS would give a flexibility and availablility that would make adoption much easier.
If moving broadcast TV off of their current spectrum will free up enough space to provide fairly high-bandwidth wireless, then it would be worth it. The sooner all TV comes through a network where ANYONE can play the better. Right now, most users just don't have the bandwidth to stream high-quality video via the Internet, regardless of the quality of their content.
Cable companies have an effective monopoly in certain areas for non-network programming. This can be a free speech issue because they control, to some degree, the content. If they were regulated into providing unfiltered bandwidth only, then there wouldn't be the same free speech issue. You could choose to get your on-demand streaming video from anywhere in the world. The only restriction allowed would be QoS bandwidth limiting to ensure that all could get access.
If you're worried that this would prevent all of the really impoverished people from seeing PBS (yeah), you could make part of the regulations include a minimum level of services for Internet access, similar to current rules for telephone services. In fact, there's little use to having a telephone service as we have today if we can build out enough bandwidth, as telephony over IP (or it's successor) will outcompete POTS service.
We have people that block your access to content on broadcast TV, as well. They're called network censors. They're there because the FCC will fine the networks (and affiliates or independents) for broadcasting "objectionable" material, the same kind of material that libraries are being forced to block. If you're looking for a platform for free speech that's freer than what you can get a the public library, keep looking. You're not going to find it on broadcast television.
>> although I have been surprised at the level of anger I've heard
>I'm not. Can you really expect that other peoples are indifferent when a country,
> which ignores the U.N. and drops out of international treaties left and right, pushes military technology?
> Americans apparently shit in their pants when other countries do so much as catch up with entry level nuclear bomb technology, > maybe enough to wipe out a city, but they themselves still have enough nukes to bury us all [rest of comment snipped]
I meant American anger at the French. As you may or may not have heard, the cafe at the Capitol building was forced to use the term "Freedom Fries" for french fries. Some people here were (and still are) boycotting items manufactured in France, including French wine. I've heard people say things like, "I think that when we're done in Iraq that France should be next!" These people were only half kidding. While I've never exactly been a Francophile and didn't agree with France's position, I think this kind of reaction is ridiculous and the thing that makes America a potentially scary superpower.
I don't blame you. Especially if you're French. Okay, I'm kidding about the French bit, although I have been surprised at the level of anger I've heard. But you haven't seen anything yet. Wait until we develop robotic warfare a bit more. That's when non-Americans need to feel very nervous. Why? Because the main thing that keeps the U.S. out of wars is the refusal of the American people to lose sons and daughters for causes they don't think are important enough. Once you have made that risk small enough in the minds of Americans, it becomes almost trivial to manipulate American sentiment to support attacking or invading other countries for reasons that would seem ridiculous today. And if we come up with a way to run the robotics via satellite from the soldiers' home bases and Sergeant Daddy can come home every night to sleep his wife and play with his children? Fah-get about it. The US will be deploying droid armies left and right. Couple that with an ultra-patriotic fervor, and it makes it difficult for the more level-headed to speak out effectivly against immoral aggression.
In the interest of full disclosure, I would personally support the "liberal" use of military force. I mean that both ways, liberal in the sense of frequent, and liberal in the sense of politically liberal values. Specifically, I would probably support the use of military power to enforce basic human rights for all people. If we used our future military power to sweep all the despots and oppressive governments out of places like Africa and replaced them with benign (and democratic?) governments, then I think this would be a legitimate use of force. Unfortunately, this is more likely to be used as a shallow excuse for more selfish motivations and you will see a selective use of "liberation" in "strategic" locations. Meanwhile, people would continue to suffer at the hands of their own "leaders" in places without oil.
The good news is that the US constitution is founded on some pretty good principles that we still like to pride ourselves on. It is my hope that the principles embodied in the document can help keep us focused on not being too aggressive and selfish.
Actually, it depends on what you mean by "contact". If you mean two-way communication, I happen to agree. We'd have to get EXTREMLY lucky to be close enough in time and space to a sufficiently similar species to be able to hold an effective conversation.
However, we have a much better shot at hearing the echoes of long dead civiliations coming to us from other systems. Remember that each signal goes flying out in a sphere around the transmitter at the speed of light. Therefore, much of the statistical problems with time/space coincidence go away. We are currently being bathed in emissions from systems 4.5 light years to nearly 14 billion light-years away. That's a lot of history to be receiving at one time and there's a shot that some of those emissions will be coming from machines created by intelligent beings.
Of course, the idea of sitting in a radio observatory listening to the whispers of a race that's been dead longer than our planet has existed is a lot less exciting than coming out of hyperspace, engines audibly blazing in the vacuum as the crew realizes that "that's no moon." Still, it would be pretty exciting to me.
This law seems to be intended to make it more than just good customer service to notify Californians when someone has potentially stolen their identifying information (Name, SSN, etc.) by hacking your company's weak-ass system.
In fact, there is a provision that the law doesn't apply if you store the customer's data in an encrypted format. The clear intent of this is to provide an incentive to companies to start storing encrypted data, in the belief that if the data is "stolen" it will be useless to the thief. Of course, this seems to be a provision that is geared more to guard against physical theft of persistant storage, as it probably wouldn't help if the system is actually rooted and the decryption keys become compromised or the part of the system that is up/downstream of the crypt routines is hijacked.
In any case, this seems designed to force companies to take their (Californian) customers' personal information's security a bit more seriously than many seem to and is probably part of a more comprehensive effort to prevent identity theft in general.
In my opinion, this law (or one like it) is a Good Thing (tm).
Re:Why the emphasis on a polished desktop?
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Ximian's Back
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Because that's what people are interested in working on. News flash to everyone who complains about what "THE" Linux community is working on: THE community is just a bunch of loosly (if at all) organized individuals with the talent and motivation to write software they want to have. If most of the people had the same ideas/tastes that you do, they wouldn't be focusing on [insert thing you think is overrated] instead of [insert thing you think is being overlooked]. But, if you're complaining, it probably means that your ideas don't happen to represent the majority view. This is not a bad thing and doesn't mean you are wrong. It is, however, important to remember that not everyone has the same set of priorities that you have. Instead of complaining about other people being effective in bringing their ideas to fruition, it would be more constructive for you to follow their example and create the wonderful new [insert your idea here] you keep talking about.
DataGlyph techology is patented by the Xerox corporation. The DataGlyph toolkit is a binary only library that you must license to include with your "product". Despite the use of Python and GNU Chess in this example, I doubt very much that DataGlyphs are going to be of much use to the open source community.
I agree, in principal. But, it's probably pretty hard to do in practice. I'm kind of half-ass thinking about some day designing a gaming system along the lines of which you speak. It's even more of an issue for what I want to do because my client would be open source. However, if you consider some of the bandwidth and other issues with not letting the client software know about anything the player shouldn't see until they should, it's very difficult.
For instance, you have to have all of the ray-tracing and occlusion logic (or at least a lot of it) running on the server to know when each client would be able to see a particular object that may or may not be behind a wall AND you have to be able to tell the client everything it needs to display that object in real time, instead of just giving position. That would be hard to do in a high-framerate 1st person shooter, for instance.
Luckily enough for me, my project is not a high-framerate 1st person shooter. But still, this kind of thing can be very difficult.
When you are a company with a budget and a deadline, it just may not be worth the extra cost to eliminate the risk. After all, the reason companies are making such games today are because previous efforts (which got hacked) were successful, not failures.
First off, I was able to get in using the original number from Bruce. I had to give my full name, phone number, and company. For company, I said that I was a private citizen and had no problems getting in.
I came in a bit late, but I don't think I missed much, as the SCOSource bit wasn't discussed until later. Also, I got in on all of the questions. I was disappointed that Bruce Perens didn't get to ask a question.
From what they said in the beginning and from the answers to the questions (most of which were fairly typcial financial questions from financial analysts, btw) here is what I got out of it. Be advised that this is just one person's interpretation of what SCO is saying and that IANAL.
1. The suit against IBM doesn't depend upon IP ownership via copyright or patents, per se. It is a suit based on breach of contract between SCO and IBM. The original contract (license) between IBM and the then-owner of the rights included a stipulation against sharing this code or IP. Needless to say that any alleged releasing of this code under the GPL would qualify. SCO has the right to sue, because it purchased the license rights from Novell.
2. The language of the rights transfer from Novell to SCO seems to have been considered rather unclear by SCO about whether the actual IP ownership (copyright and patents) of UNIX(tm) had been transferred. After much research by SCO and it's counsel, they believe that they do, in fact, now own the copyrights and pertinent patents to UNIX(tm). Included in the research was discussions with lower-level contacts within Novell and with the principals of the earlier deal, many of whom no longer appear to be in power at Novell.
3. While it's true that the suit against IBM doesn't derive any legitiamcy from IP ownership (see 1), due to SCO's belief that it owns the IP of UNIX(tm) SCO believes that future lawsuits may be brought against anyone infringing on what SCO believes to be their IP, with or without a license agreement based on copyright or patent laws.
4. SCO now feels confident that a court proceeding to settle any dispute between SCO and Novell would be resolved in their favor.
My personal conclusions:
A. While Novell's stance certainly helps against SCO's activities (at least it buoys morale and adds a corporate voice against SCO), it is not the end of the IP issue. It seems that SCO is prepared to legally assert it's claims to the IP ownership, despite this morning's announcement by Novell.
B. Novell's announcement will marginally help against the FUD created by SCO's actions. However, I believe that only the most ardent and brave Linux supporters in corporate management will feel better enough to proceed if they were at all concerned. The rest will put off any decision to switch because there is still too much uncertainty and risk to their own stature and careers.
C. The FUD about Linux will continue until the alleged violations are made public enough to allow either a solid refutation or code replacement.
Do you really think that losing a second orbiter in a rescue attempt would make our space program look worse than being so afraid of the hardware that we wouldn't even dare try?
Putting up a myopic Hubble made NASA look like idiots. Fixing it made them look like studs.
One of NASA's shining moments was the recovery of the Apollo 13 astronauts. While people didn't exactly forget that it was also NASA (and contractors) that built the spacecraft in the first place, just think of what would have happened to the program if they had failed to even try a recovery.
No, if I were the one in charge and a rescue mission via a second orbiter was the most viable option, I wouldn't even hesitate. I would order Atlantis to be be prepped and sit down to choose from the dozens if not hundreds of astronauts that would volunteer to fly the mission.
Re:The GPL harms yet another business
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What if SCO is Right?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The GPL did not harm SCO. SCO management took a gamble that it could compete. It turns out that it couldn't. That's just business; it happens every day. The GPL doesn't enter into it.
As you allude, the GPL is not designed to make lots of money for the licensors. This is not a bad thing, and I'm not sure why you are so offended by this fact. If you want to make money and can make a product that can allow you or your employer to do so, go for it. If not, stop. There's no use crying because all the bad people that freely volunteer their time and energy to making software for it's own sake and for that of their peers do a good enough job to make your product irrelevant. You do not have the right to make a profit, only the right to try.
In terms of history being littered with failed companies that "attempted to deal in GPLed software", well, duh!
1. Any business niche is littered with corporate corpses. You think Linux is bad? Try opening a restaraunt!
2. If you want to succeed in business, try selling something at a price that people will pay. Let's see, do I:
A) Pay big money to tie myself to a company whose core value is to take as much of my money as it can
B) Download some software for free and hire people (who I can replace if they suck) to help me when I can't figure it out for myself?
If you there aren't enough people willing to do A.... well, you figure it out!
A better analogy is if someone set up a big screen TV outside where people on the street can see it. If you want to prevent people from seeing the TV, you need to set up some kind of privacy shield to prevent them from seeing it.
If you don't do this, then you are tacitly agreeing to allow passersby to view the content. However, if you do set up some kind of privacy (bushes, a fence), then you may become upset at people that purposely attempt to circumvent your security.
I believe that this more closely matches the spirit of the law.
It also works for the content ownership question.
For instance, imagine a pay-per-view event is shown on a TV in such public conditions. If the pay-per-view provider wanted to sue, they would have to sue the person who owned the TV, not the viewers because it was the TV owner that is misusing the content. Now, if the TV owner took steps to prevent those that didn't pay from viewing the program, the owner wouldn't be liable, even if some people managed to twart the protection.
1. The Chinese did not cause SARS. The reflex of covering up potential problem has exacerbated the issue and helped it go global sooner than it may have had they recognized it and reacted quickly. For that, many individuals in the Chinese government deserve the loss of job they suffered.
2. Covering up problems is not a uniquely Chinese attribute. It happens in the West all day, every day. You don't think that if this outbreak had started in Orlando Florida that the Mayor of Orlando and/or a Disney representative wouldn't have started out trying to down play the incident? "Hey, it's just an isolated case or two. No reason not to come and spend your vacation dollars here!"
3. Being a Westerner or being Chinese is a matter of national allegiance and geography. While it's fine to want people to act responsibly and openly about potential catastrophes so that they may be averted, this has nothing to do with nationality. The choice isn't to be a Westerner or Chinese. It's to act in a responsible way. One can be Chinese and act responsibly.
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I concur in many respects, but would prefer the term "respected" rather than "revered".
RMS is a lot like what the Founding Fathers of the USA must have been like twenty or thirty years after things got running. He is worthy of respect in many of his actions and intentions. He clearly had the skills, intelligence, and drive to breath life into his beliefs, many of which the majority of us have at least some level of agreement. But this doesn't mean he's perfect. We can admire Jefferson's brilliance while shaking our heads at his ownership of slaves.
Another analogy I think is useful (if I can be allowed to pigeon-hole him some more), is Sigmund Freud. Freud is respected in psychology for what he was: a brilliant man who moved things forward a great deal. And, similarly to Freud, we can look at the contributions RMS has made with gratitude without believing he is right about everything. No one today really believes that Freud's theories were totally accurate models of reality. But many of the concepts and methods he introduced still have relevance and utility today.
Finally, for those role-playing geeks out there, I have one more analogy: Gary Gygax. He deserves respect for what he did for the genre, but will fall well short of any expectations placed upon him by those experiencing the emotion of "reverence".
It is very tempting to state the RMS, or anyone, is either "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong". The reality is that he is a complex person with ideas with which not all of us agree. That doesn't mean we can't look up to him for what good he has done, but to proceed beyond this to "reverence" would be a form of hero worship that would only cloud one's ability to evaluate his statements today.
I read this as they want to be able to incorporate new drivers and features into their X servers, but that there is concern with doing this with the "official" XFree86 line. By branching, they can add as many features/drivers as they please while still preserving the stability of the mother project.
And, presumably, in a galaxy far far away?
Perhaps I'm exposing myself as ignorant here, but this wasn't a troll. :)
Actually, I wasn't advocating that this occur. I was just expressing surprise that it hadn't been attempted. After all, it must be pretty tempting to be able to flex one's cracking skills for good, rather than evil. If it worked, think of the news it would make!
But you're probably right. Most steady people that have the smarts to do this wouldn't want to risk either the potential harm or the legal risks.
I'm surprised someone doesn't write a worm to patch the vulnerability and clean the system, if already compromised. After all, if you don't mind leaving yourself open to attack by a malicious worm, how can you complain about getting repaired by one that is beneficial?
My primary home machine is a Linux box. I agree that Windows has many security bugs. However, let's not kid ourselves about the main reason it's always Windows boxes that are getting hit: Windows is by far the biggest, most hated target available.
If Windows went away, and Macs or Linux boxes took over with 70+% desktop share, you can bet we'd find out about a few more security exploits lurking in non-Microsoft code, as well. While one may boast of the quickness in finding and removing bugs in, say, RedHat 9 as compared to Windows XP, one can't really believe that Linux is not also vulnerable if someone decided to make it a target.
The premiere free-form online pen-and-paper style role playing tool, OpenRPG is written in Python.
I'm not sure if Dad would appreciate it much if Mom started hanging out with a bunch of Debians.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the software isn't getting done on time is that much of the system is written from the ground up. Perhaps it would be better to design a common, open source spacecraft platform. So many of the basic tasks that spacecraft software must perform are essentially identical. The main differences for critical spacecraft systems would be the hardware. If a general purpose OS and spacecraft toolkit were designed, then the main things that would have to written from scratch for different missions would be drivers for the hardware and various configuration settings.
I'm not sure how suitable RT Linux would be from a technical/performance standpoint, but having a highly portable open source OS would give a flexibility and availablility that would make adoption much easier.
This thing is a farm implement. It's a high-quality farm implement, and I admire his work ethic, but it's still a farm implement.
If you look carefully at the bottom of the image, you'll see that he's right!
If moving broadcast TV off of their current spectrum will free up enough space to provide fairly high-bandwidth wireless, then it would be worth it. The sooner all TV comes through a network where ANYONE can play the better. Right now, most users just don't have the bandwidth to stream high-quality video via the Internet, regardless of the quality of their content.
Cable companies have an effective monopoly in certain areas for non-network programming. This can be a free speech issue because they control, to some degree, the content. If they were regulated into providing unfiltered bandwidth only, then there wouldn't be the same free speech issue. You could choose to get your on-demand streaming video from anywhere in the world. The only restriction allowed would be QoS bandwidth limiting to ensure that all could get access.
If you're worried that this would prevent all of the really impoverished people from seeing PBS (yeah), you could make part of the regulations include a minimum level of services for Internet access, similar to current rules for telephone services. In fact, there's little use to having a telephone service as we have today if we can build out enough bandwidth, as telephony over IP (or it's successor) will outcompete POTS service.
We have people that block your access to content on broadcast TV, as well. They're called network censors. They're there because the FCC will fine the networks (and affiliates or independents) for broadcasting "objectionable" material, the same kind of material that libraries are being forced to block. If you're looking for a platform for free speech that's freer than what you can get a the public library, keep looking. You're not going to find it on broadcast television.
>> although I have been surprised at the level of anger I've heard
>I'm not. Can you really expect that other peoples are indifferent when a country,
> which ignores the U.N. and drops out of international treaties left and right, pushes military technology?
> Americans apparently shit in their pants when other countries do so much as catch up with entry level nuclear bomb technology,
> maybe enough to wipe out a city, but they themselves still have enough nukes to bury us all [rest of comment snipped]
I meant American anger at the French. As you may or may not have heard, the cafe at the Capitol building was forced to use the term "Freedom Fries" for french fries. Some people here were (and still are) boycotting items manufactured in France, including French wine. I've heard people say things like, "I think that when we're done in Iraq that France should be next!" These people were only half kidding. While I've never exactly been a Francophile and didn't agree with France's position, I think this kind of reaction is ridiculous and the thing that makes America a potentially scary superpower.
I don't blame you. Especially if you're French. Okay, I'm kidding about the French bit, although I have been surprised at the level of anger I've heard. But you haven't seen anything yet. Wait until we develop robotic warfare a bit more. That's when non-Americans need to feel very nervous. Why? Because the main thing that keeps the U.S. out of wars is the refusal of the American people to lose sons and daughters for causes they don't think are important enough. Once you have made that risk small enough in the minds of Americans, it becomes almost trivial to manipulate American sentiment to support attacking or invading other countries for reasons that would seem ridiculous today. And if we come up with a way to run the robotics via satellite from the soldiers' home bases and Sergeant Daddy can come home every night to sleep his wife and play with his children? Fah-get about it. The US will be deploying droid armies left and right. Couple that with an ultra-patriotic fervor, and it makes it difficult for the more level-headed to speak out effectivly against immoral aggression.
In the interest of full disclosure, I would personally support the "liberal" use of military force. I mean that both ways, liberal in the sense of frequent, and liberal in the sense of politically liberal values. Specifically, I would probably support the use of military power to enforce basic human rights for all people. If we used our future military power to sweep all the despots and oppressive governments out of places like Africa and replaced them with benign (and democratic?) governments, then I think this would be a legitimate use of force. Unfortunately, this is more likely to be used as a shallow excuse for more selfish motivations and you will see a selective use of "liberation" in "strategic" locations. Meanwhile, people would continue to suffer at the hands of their own "leaders" in places without oil.
The good news is that the US constitution is founded on some pretty good principles that we still like to pride ourselves on. It is my hope that the principles embodied in the document can help keep us focused on not being too aggressive and selfish.
Actually, it depends on what you mean by "contact". If you mean two-way communication, I happen to agree. We'd have to get EXTREMLY lucky to be close enough in time and space to a sufficiently similar species to be able to hold an effective conversation.
However, we have a much better shot at hearing the echoes of long dead civiliations coming to us from other systems. Remember that each signal goes flying out in a sphere around the transmitter at the speed of light. Therefore, much of the statistical problems with time/space coincidence go away. We are currently being bathed in emissions from systems 4.5 light years to nearly 14 billion light-years away. That's a lot of history to be receiving at one time and there's a shot that some of those emissions will be coming from machines created by intelligent beings.
Of course, the idea of sitting in a radio observatory listening to the whispers of a race that's been dead longer than our planet has existed is a lot less exciting than coming out of hyperspace, engines audibly blazing in the vacuum as the crew realizes that "that's no moon." Still, it would be pretty exciting to me.
This law seems to be intended to make it more than just good customer service to notify Californians when someone has potentially stolen their identifying information (Name, SSN, etc.) by hacking your company's weak-ass system.
In fact, there is a provision that the law doesn't apply if you store the customer's data in an encrypted format. The clear intent of this is to provide an incentive to companies to start storing encrypted data, in the belief that if the data is "stolen" it will be useless to the thief. Of course, this seems to be a provision that is geared more to guard against physical theft of persistant storage, as it probably wouldn't help if the system is actually rooted and the decryption keys become compromised or the part of the system that is up/downstream of the crypt routines is hijacked.
In any case, this seems designed to force companies to take their (Californian) customers' personal information's security a bit more seriously than many seem to and is probably part of a more comprehensive effort to prevent identity theft in general.
In my opinion, this law (or one like it) is a Good Thing (tm).
Because that's what people are interested in working on. News flash to everyone who complains about what "THE" Linux community is working on: THE community is just a bunch of loosly (if at all) organized individuals with the talent and motivation to write software they want to have. If most of the people had the same ideas/tastes that you do, they wouldn't be focusing on [insert thing you think is overrated] instead of [insert thing you think is being overlooked]. But, if you're complaining, it probably means that your ideas don't happen to represent the majority view. This is not a bad thing and doesn't mean you are wrong. It is, however, important to remember that not everyone has the same set of priorities that you have. Instead of complaining about other people being effective in bringing their ideas to fruition, it would be more constructive for you to follow their example and create the wonderful new [insert your idea here] you keep talking about.
It's funny because it's true!
DataGlyph techology is patented by the Xerox corporation. The DataGlyph toolkit is a binary only library that you must license to include with your "product". Despite the use of Python and GNU Chess in this example, I doubt very much that DataGlyphs are going to be of much use to the open source community.
I agree, in principal. But, it's probably pretty hard to do in practice. I'm kind of half-ass thinking about some day designing a gaming system along the lines of which you speak. It's even more of an issue for what I want to do because my client would be open source. However, if you consider some of the bandwidth and other issues with not letting the client software know about anything the player shouldn't see until they should, it's very difficult.
For instance, you have to have all of the ray-tracing and occlusion logic (or at least a lot of it) running on the server to know when each client would be able to see a particular object that may or may not be behind a wall AND you have to be able to tell the client everything it needs to display that object in real time, instead of just giving position. That would be hard to do in a high-framerate 1st person shooter, for instance.
Luckily enough for me, my project is not a high-framerate 1st person shooter. But still, this kind of thing can be very difficult.
When you are a company with a budget and a deadline, it just may not be worth the extra cost to eliminate the risk. After all, the reason companies are making such games today are because previous efforts (which got hacked) were successful, not failures.
First off, I was able to get in using the original number from Bruce. I had to give my full name, phone number, and company. For company, I said that I was a private citizen and had no problems getting in.
I came in a bit late, but I don't think I missed much, as the SCOSource bit wasn't discussed until later. Also, I got in on all of the questions. I was disappointed that Bruce Perens didn't get to ask a question.
From what they said in the beginning and from the answers to the questions (most of which were fairly typcial financial questions from financial analysts, btw) here is what I got out of it. Be advised that this is just one person's interpretation of what SCO is saying and that IANAL.
1. The suit against IBM doesn't depend upon IP ownership via copyright or patents, per se. It is a suit based on breach of contract between SCO and IBM. The original contract (license) between IBM and the then-owner of the rights included a stipulation against sharing this code or IP. Needless to say that any alleged releasing of this code under the GPL would qualify. SCO has the right to sue, because it purchased the license rights from Novell.
2. The language of the rights transfer from Novell to SCO seems to have been considered rather unclear by SCO about whether the actual IP ownership (copyright and patents) of UNIX(tm) had been transferred. After much research by SCO and it's counsel, they believe that they do, in fact, now own the copyrights and pertinent patents to UNIX(tm). Included in the research was discussions with lower-level contacts within Novell and with the principals of the earlier deal, many of whom no longer appear to be in power at Novell.
3. While it's true that the suit against IBM doesn't derive any legitiamcy from IP ownership (see 1), due to SCO's belief that it owns the IP of UNIX(tm) SCO believes that future lawsuits may be brought against anyone infringing on what SCO believes to be their IP, with or without a license agreement based on copyright or patent laws.
4. SCO now feels confident that a court proceeding to settle any dispute between SCO and Novell would be resolved in their favor.
My personal conclusions:
A. While Novell's stance certainly helps against SCO's activities (at least it buoys morale and adds a corporate voice against SCO), it is not the end of the IP issue. It seems that SCO is prepared to legally assert it's claims to the IP ownership, despite this morning's announcement by Novell.
B. Novell's announcement will marginally help against the FUD created by SCO's actions. However, I believe that only the most ardent and brave Linux supporters in corporate management will feel better enough to proceed if they were at all concerned. The rest will put off any decision to switch because there is still too much uncertainty and risk to their own stature and careers.
C. The FUD about Linux will continue until the alleged violations are made public enough to allow either a solid refutation or code replacement.
Do you really think that losing a second orbiter in a rescue attempt would make our space program look worse than being so afraid of the hardware that we wouldn't even dare try?
Putting up a myopic Hubble made NASA look like idiots. Fixing it made them look like studs.
One of NASA's shining moments was the recovery of the Apollo 13 astronauts. While people didn't exactly forget that it was also NASA (and contractors) that built the spacecraft in the first place, just think of what would have happened to the program if they had failed to even try a recovery.
No, if I were the one in charge and a rescue mission via a second orbiter was the most viable option, I wouldn't even hesitate. I would order Atlantis to be be prepped and sit down to choose from the dozens if not hundreds of astronauts that would volunteer to fly the mission.
The GPL did not harm SCO. SCO management took a gamble that it could compete. It turns out that it couldn't. That's just business; it happens every day. The GPL doesn't enter into it.
.... well, you figure it out!
As you allude, the GPL is not designed to make lots of money for the licensors. This is not a bad thing, and I'm not sure why you are so offended by this fact. If you want to make money and can make a product that can allow you or your employer to do so, go for it. If not, stop. There's no use crying because all the bad people that freely volunteer their time and energy to making software for it's own sake and for that of their peers do a good enough job to make your product irrelevant. You do not have the right to make a profit, only the right to try.
In terms of history being littered with failed companies that "attempted to deal in GPLed software", well, duh!
1. Any business niche is littered with corporate corpses. You think Linux is bad? Try opening a restaraunt!
2. If you want to succeed in business, try selling something at a price that people will pay. Let's see, do I:
A) Pay big money to tie myself to a company whose core value is to take as much of my money as it can
B) Download some software for free and hire people (who I can replace if they suck) to help me when I can't figure it out for myself?
If you there aren't enough people willing to do A
A better analogy is if someone set up a big screen TV outside where people on the street can see it. If you want to prevent people from seeing the TV, you need to set up some kind of privacy shield to prevent them from seeing it.
If you don't do this, then you are tacitly agreeing to allow passersby to view the content. However, if you do set up some kind of privacy (bushes, a fence), then you may become upset at people that purposely attempt to circumvent your security.
I believe that this more closely matches the spirit of the law.
It also works for the content ownership question.
For instance, imagine a pay-per-view event is shown on a TV in such public conditions. If the pay-per-view provider wanted to sue, they would have to sue the person who owned the TV, not the viewers because it was the TV owner that is misusing the content. Now, if the TV owner took steps to prevent those that didn't pay from viewing the program, the owner wouldn't be liable, even if some people managed to twart the protection.
Basically, it comes down to due diligence.
1. The Chinese did not cause SARS. The reflex of covering up potential problem has exacerbated the issue and helped it go global sooner than it may have had they recognized it and reacted quickly. For that, many individuals in the Chinese government deserve the loss of job they suffered.
2. Covering up problems is not a uniquely Chinese attribute. It happens in the West all day, every day. You don't think that if this outbreak had started in Orlando Florida that the Mayor of Orlando and/or a Disney representative wouldn't have started out trying to down play the incident? "Hey, it's just an isolated case or two. No reason not to come and spend your vacation dollars here!"
3. Being a Westerner or being Chinese is a matter of national allegiance and geography. While it's fine to want people to act responsibly and openly about potential catastrophes so that they may be averted, this has nothing to do with nationality. The choice isn't to be a Westerner or Chinese. It's to act in a responsible way. One can be Chinese and act responsibly.