Re:I believe you mean freedom # -1
on
A Year of GPLv3
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Putting it in bold doesn't make it so.
There is no practical difference between "you may not distribute this on hardware with misfeature X" and "you may only distribute this on hardware with misfeature X if you make make misfeature X completely ineffective".
Re:A problem with the GPLv3
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If I'm wrong about this--please correct me; I'd love to know that the GPLv3 doesn't prevent us from doing this!
Our company uses x264 in commercial products and abides by the GPL. One thing we are considering is creating an FPGA-based addon card using a low-cost FPGA to accelerate the motion search. The code for this FPGA would be released as GPL also. However, there is no open source driver to load code onto the card--in fact, one requires the developer kit in order to modify the code on the FPGA. We would be selling these boards individually, without the developer kit (an extra $1000 purchase or similar). Therefore, its a closed platform... but we can't do anything about it. GPLv3 would, in my understanding, prevent us from distributing such boards.
So we're sticking to GPLv2.
"...this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code..."
Ask your legal department about whether that line might help, and also about whether "buy a dev kit" is valid as part of the installation information. And find out whether a dev kit is really required, or just a JTAG cable and appropriate compiler.
Re:I believe you mean freedom # -1
on
A Year of GPLv3
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· Score: 1
It restricts what hardware you may distribute the software on
No it doesn't, it prevents you from creating hardware which will only run approved binaries and distributing approved free software binaries for it.
"If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred..."
No, that's perfectly OK as long as the software is sold (or provided for free download) separately.
Being able to improve the software doesn't mean shit if you can't run your improved version in a useful way.
What, you expect them to have rewritten it in a device-specific assembly language or something so it can't be made to run on other hardware?
Re:Anyone see much of a difference?
on
A Year of GPLv3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I see one big difference: the GPL is a distribution license, but the AGPL is a EULA.
No, AGPL is still purely a grant of rights that are normally reserved to the copyright holder.
Very funny. Even if you somehow could get a judge to agree with that, you still haven't managed to keep your modifications to yourself.
If you really wanted to keep the source away from the users, I'd think you'd want to look into mechanisms that don't rely on making changes to the software. Something like putting it behind an apache instance with mod_rewrite to redirect the download URL to an error page, or an intelligent firewall that drops the connection when it sees the "fetch source" command, or something similar so that all of your copyright-license-required modifications very clearly follow the license.
Re:I've seen an effect
on
A Year of GPLv3
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'd guess that the primary effect is notification of whose code it is, since the copyright notice has to be included in the code or documentation. It probably also provides better protection against someone else claiming copyright on it, since in the public domain case there is no real copyright holder to sue them and make them stop.
Re:I believe you mean freedom # -1
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
What you're thinking about is freedom -1: The freedom to take someone else's work for free, modify it, and put onerous restrictions on everyone further along the distribution change.
But see, that not what that section does. It restricts what hardware you may distribute the software on. The particular (mis)features of the hardware do not put "onerous restrictions" on the people buying it, they just make it somewhat less useful than it could be (but clearly still more useful than not having it at all, since people are willing to actually buy it).
Re:Anyone see much of a difference?
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1, Troll
It protects your work from being used in a tivo, but not creating a tivo. If the kernel went GPLv3 on the other hand, you'd have a big problem making any kind of tivo as
...the tivo makers would switch to using BSD, or something else with a license that doesn't infringe freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute).
Yeah, because all we *really* need is a CS guy who can't program running our software engineering projects.
They'll have a better understanding of what's going on than a MBA person, and you won't be pulling a good programmer away from programming. What's not to like?
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
The only exception I can see is for the people actually interested in doing chemical analysis of the painting. But that shouldn't really be a concern for people looking for something to hang in their room/mansion/compound.
I think a lot of the "value" of these art pieces is in their scarcity; people don't want them because they're nice to look at, people want them because nobody else has them. Or in other cases, people (most likely, people with an interest in history) want them because of the "story" that comes with them, and of course the story is only any good if the item that it came with really was a witness to the events it tells about.
It used to be the case that "obvious" was considered to mean "somebody did it or talked about it already" instead of meaning, well, "obvious". Before this was corrected (fairly recently, I believe there were a couple of articles here), what you're saying would have been correct. Now, they can argue about obviousness and probably win. But there's a second requirement where you can't patent something that someone else invented long enough previously. Determining this is much more clear-cut that determining whether something would be "obvious" to someone in the distant past who knows way more than you (or the judge) in that field, so it's a much safer argument to use.
(All I know, I learned from reading "IANAL" posts on Slashdot.)
Isn't this just what alt.binaries was doing for the ISPs? Local caching?
And they just got rid of those. Only if they actually had subscribers who collectively downloaded everything in alt.binaries.
If you use standard shaders for these pre-render calculations you can avoid excluding support for half the graphics hardware available on market, possibly a license fee aswell. And why would NVIDIA want to forgo a chance at forcing customer lock-in like that? (Well, unless they thought they might be considered a monopoly, making such harmful anti-social behavior also illegal...)
They all have at least one good point though: what do we do with the waste? Reprocess it and use it instead of throwing it out. The reason it's dangerous is that it still has enough energy in it to be useful. Supposedly reprocessing is dangerous because someone might steal it, but I suspect that this risk is vastly overstated, and the risks of waste being stolen or just leaking away over time are similarly understated. Is it easier to guard something for a year, or a few centuries?
What I did was divide everything up radially and see that 1 in 4*9^2 pieces have something at 6000 C on the other end, and apply the blackbody law to that 1/(4*9^2). Which will actually work just fine when everything really is spherical, but that's a very silly thing to accidentally assume and especially so when the more flexible proper calculations aren't any more complicated.
The spacecraft's most prominent feature is the Thermal Protection System (TPS), comprising a large 2.7-m diameter carbon-carbon conical primary shield with a low-conductivity, low-density secondary shield attached to its base.
So the shield is actually a cone instead of flat like the article shows. And it just randomly happens to have the right proportions to make my numbers look right.
I'm looking at the Runner up entries in the the 2007 contest. In these they use an "Xor" Swap trick, which is a way of swapping two bytes in place without having to create a temporary storage element:
#define SWAP(x,y) do { x^=y; y^=x; x^=y; } while (0)
The terse explnantion says this some how poisons the RC4 encryption.
I don't get it. Is the Swap doing something else besides swapping? when does it fail? I'm not getting it It is called as SWAP(A[<stuff>], A[<other stuff>]);. What will it do when "stuff" == "other stuff", ie &x == &y?
First, why does the U.S. Constitution apply to foreign nationals captured and held in places that are not the U.S.? Usually when America tries to apply its laws abroad ("Screw your national sovereignty, you're following _our_ IP laws now") people complain, but in this case it's a good thing? It's a bad thing when we try to tell other people what to do. It's a good thing when our government is told what not to do.
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
makes absolutely no mention of people OR citizenship, it just states that it cannot be suspended, except during rebellion or invasion.
We invaded Iraq, and seriously pissed off a lot of people. Does that count?
On a more serious note, would you happen to know how sending people to trial would interfere with public safety? Is it that there'd just be so many that it wouldn't be possible to schedule a trial for everyone within the allowed time limit?
Open-source developers targeting the mobile space need to learn business rules including digital rights management, Nokia's software chief has claimed.
"In this industry, we don't care about our customers. If you want to work with us, you'll have to respect that."
Speaking at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.
"Our business models are very fragile. Please don't break them."
Jaaksi, Nokia's vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer's open-source operations, said: "We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."
"Our business is based on customer lock-in, rather than customer satisfaction. Don't interfere."
Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these "go against the open-source philosophy", but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry. "Why do we need closed vehicles? We do," he said. "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too."
"We accept that we have problems, and that if we followed your rules we wouldn't have these problems. But instead, we want you to follow our rules and enjoy our problems with us."
Nokia's primary play in the open-source sphere thus far has been Maemo, the Linux-based operating system that runs on its N800-series tablet devices. These devices are popular among developers in the Maemo developer community but, being something of a testbed, have not yet seen much traction in the mass market.
Ok.
In his speech, Jaaksi detailed some of the lessons Nokia had learned in its work with the Maemo developer community, primarily the need to avoid 'forking' code. He said: "Don't make your own version. The original mistake we made was to take the code to our labs, change it and then release it at the last minute. The community had already gone in a different direction than [us], and no-one was pushing it other than [us]. Everybody wants to make their own version and keep it too close to their chest but that leads to fragmentation."
A common fear about BSD-style licenses is that people will make closed forks. If the project is active, this fear is very likely overblown.
The manufacturer has one other significant investment in open source, however: the software maker Trolltech, Nokia's purchase of which finally went through in the last few days. Trolltech makes Qt, a graphical toolkit that is used in the KDE Linux desktop environment and in much commercial software and is an apparently non-participatory member in the LiMo Foundation.
Ok.
LiMo is an industry consortium that is creating a common middleware layer to help Linux-based software make it onto handsets from a variety of manufacturers. However, neither LiMo nor Maemo use Qt or KDE, opting instead for the GTK+ toolkit and a Gnome-based desktop environment. This has led to a level of industry speculation that Nokia may withdraw Trolltech from LiMo, to use it for other purposes. Nokia statedâ"when it announced it was to buy Trolltechâ"that the purchase was to help it move into the applications market.
Some people think that Nokia wants to go play by itself.
Speaking to silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk after his presentation, Jaaksi said Nokia was "only now" able
The mission is 7 years long. In that time, wouldn't the heat shield reach thermal equilibrium, and become extremely hot itself, if not melt? Sure. At a distance of 9 solar radii (closest approach, per article) the sun covers (area of circle) / (surface of sphere 9x as big) = 1/(4*9^2) of the sky. For radiative equilibrium, the relative temperature will be the fourth root of that, or about.236 of the temperature of the sun (6000 C). That comes to 1416 C, which is remarkably close to the 1400 C the article says the heat shield will have to withstand.
Since the corona isn't dense enough for the heat to be a problem, all they have to worry about is the radiation. Since that's all coming from the same direction, they can just hide behind something (the thing labeled "thermal shield" in the picture).
I know the surface is like 6000C or so, but I thought the corona was in the millions of degrees. I don't see how they'd get anything close enough to it before the corona vapourised it.
So wouldn't that tend to prevent anything man made from getting near the sun, much less its "surface" / chromosphere?
RS
From your own link: Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.
I have no sympathy for people who sign contracts without reading them, nor for banks that associate with such shady sources. Companies and individuals that purposely do not investigate the risk of such endeavors will fall. It is not our responsibility to provide a safety net for bad practices - doing so brings the whole system down, because everyone starts thinking they can make mistakes and someone will protect them from the consequences (for free at that!)
We should also let ordinary (non-contract-based) con men run free, since only idiots fall for their tricks and dishonesty.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting it in bold doesn't make it so.
There is no practical difference between "you may not distribute this on hardware with misfeature X" and "you may only distribute this on hardware with misfeature X if you make make misfeature X completely ineffective".
If I'm wrong about this--please correct me; I'd love to know that the GPLv3 doesn't prevent us from doing this! Our company uses x264 in commercial products and abides by the GPL. One thing we are considering is creating an FPGA-based addon card using a low-cost FPGA to accelerate the motion search. The code for this FPGA would be released as GPL also. However, there is no open source driver to load code onto the card--in fact, one requires the developer kit in order to modify the code on the FPGA. We would be selling these boards individually, without the developer kit (an extra $1000 purchase or similar). Therefore, its a closed platform... but we can't do anything about it. GPLv3 would, in my understanding, prevent us from distributing such boards. So we're sticking to GPLv2.
"...this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code..."
Ask your legal department about whether that line might help, and also about whether "buy a dev kit" is valid as part of the installation information. And find out whether a dev kit is really required, or just a JTAG cable and appropriate compiler.
No it doesn't, it prevents you from creating hardware which will only run approved binaries and distributing approved free software binaries for it.
"If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred..."
No, that's perfectly OK as long as the software is sold (or provided for free download) separately.
Being able to improve the software doesn't mean shit if you can't run your improved version in a useful way.
What, you expect them to have rewritten it in a device-specific assembly language or something so it can't be made to run on other hardware?
I see one big difference: the GPL is a distribution license, but the AGPL is a EULA.
No, AGPL is still purely a grant of rights that are normally reserved to the copyright holder.
The best I can say for it is that it may not be enforceable.
Very funny. Even if you somehow could get a judge to agree with that, you still haven't managed to keep your modifications to yourself.
If you really wanted to keep the source away from the users, I'd think you'd want to look into mechanisms that don't rely on making changes to the software. Something like putting it behind an apache instance with mod_rewrite to redirect the download URL to an error page, or an intelligent firewall that drops the connection when it sees the "fetch source" command, or something similar so that all of your copyright-license-required modifications very clearly follow the license.
I'd guess that the primary effect is notification of whose code it is, since the copyright notice has to be included in the code or documentation. It probably also provides better protection against someone else claiming copyright on it, since in the public domain case there is no real copyright holder to sue them and make them stop.
What you're thinking about is freedom -1: The freedom to take someone else's work for free, modify it, and put onerous restrictions on everyone further along the distribution change.
But see, that not what that section does. It restricts what hardware you may distribute the software on. The particular (mis)features of the hardware do not put "onerous restrictions" on the people buying it, they just make it somewhat less useful than it could be (but clearly still more useful than not having it at all, since people are willing to actually buy it).
It protects your work from being used in a tivo, but not creating a tivo. If the kernel went GPLv3 on the other hand, you'd have a big problem making any kind of tivo as
...the tivo makers would switch to using BSD, or something else with a license that doesn't infringe freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute).
Yeah, because all we *really* need is a CS guy who can't program running our software engineering projects.
They'll have a better understanding of what's going on than a MBA person, and you won't be pulling a good programmer away from programming. What's not to like?
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
The only exception I can see is for the people actually interested in doing chemical analysis of the painting. But that shouldn't really be a concern for people looking for something to hang in their room/mansion/compound.
I think a lot of the "value" of these art pieces is in their scarcity; people don't want them because they're nice to look at, people want them because nobody else has them. Or in other cases, people (most likely, people with an interest in history) want them because of the "story" that comes with them, and of course the story is only any good if the item that it came with really was a witness to the events it tells about.
It used to be the case that "obvious" was considered to mean "somebody did it or talked about it already" instead of meaning, well, "obvious". Before this was corrected (fairly recently, I believe there were a couple of articles here), what you're saying would have been correct. Now, they can argue about obviousness and probably win. But there's a second requirement where you can't patent something that someone else invented long enough previously. Determining this is much more clear-cut that determining whether something would be "obvious" to someone in the distant past who knows way more than you (or the judge) in that field, so it's a much safer argument to use.
(All I know, I learned from reading "IANAL" posts on Slashdot.)
What I did was divide everything up radially and see that 1 in 4*9^2 pieces have something at 6000 C on the other end, and apply the blackbody law to that 1/(4*9^2). Which will actually work just fine when everything really is spherical, but that's a very silly thing to accidentally assume and especially so when the more flexible proper calculations aren't any more complicated.
Hm, I actually derived that completely wrong and had the wrong result for a flat shield, so why did my numbers match up...
http://solarprobe.gsfc.nasa.gov/solarprobe_spacecraft.htm:
So the shield is actually a cone instead of flat like the article shows. And it just randomly happens to have the right proportions to make my numbers look right.
We invaded Iraq, and seriously pissed off a lot of people. Does that count?
On a more serious note, would you happen to know how sending people to trial would interfere with public safety? Is it that there'd just be so many that it wouldn't be possible to schedule a trial for everyone within the allowed time limit?
"In this industry, we don't care about our customers. If you want to work with us, you'll have to respect that."
"Our business models are very fragile. Please don't break them."
"Our business is based on customer lock-in, rather than customer satisfaction. Don't interfere."
"We accept that we have problems, and that if we followed your rules we wouldn't have these problems. But instead, we want you to follow our rules and enjoy our problems with us."
Ok.
A common fear about BSD-style licenses is that people will make closed forks. If the project is active, this fear is very likely overblown.
Ok.
Some people think that Nokia wants to go play by itself.
Cthulhu 2008
Why vote for the
lesser evil?
hmm... what would it take to get people to (repeatedly) switch to a new character after they get to the highest level?
Since the corona isn't dense enough for the heat to be a problem, all they have to worry about is the radiation. Since that's all coming from the same direction, they can just hide behind something (the thing labeled "thermal shield" in the picture).
If you go here
[snip]So wouldn't that tend to prevent anything man made from getting near the sun, much less its "surface" / chromosphere?
RS
From your own link: Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.
"5. Number of houses lost to predatory lenders."
I have no sympathy for people who sign contracts without reading them, nor for banks that associate with such shady sources. Companies and individuals that purposely do not investigate the risk of such endeavors will fall. It is not our responsibility to provide a safety net for bad practices - doing so brings the whole system down, because everyone starts thinking they can make mistakes and someone will protect them from the consequences (for free at that!)
We should also let ordinary (non-contract-based) con men run free, since only idiots fall for their tricks and dishonesty.