Have you done this? Also, somebody with prominent webspace should initiate a search for wget mirrors of sco.com. Archive.org doesn't have any recent stuff. I hope there's more left of their allegations than Google caches.
People are perfectly willing to pay for software if it does something they need, even people using Linux. Examples would be office software, servers, databases, desktop integration, and games. This is becoming even more true as companies and non-geeks use Linux more.
But hardware companies aren't selling software, they're selling hardware! The software is only provided to make the hardware work so people will buy it. And while an open source driver will be maintained and supported by the community, may be put in the vanilla tree, and will make the community like you, a closed source driver is a support nightmare, it's very difficult to deploy use, and it's only slightly better than nothing at all.
Of course, the most important thing is completely open standards, without which any third party drivers are bound to suck, if they work at all.
And why not, anyway? I've heard two reasons.
First, for "Win-" hardware, like controllerless modems and printers, companies are afraid if their driver was open-source, it would be simple for their competitors to use, reducing their software development costs. Two solutions: one, the company could GPL it, so at least they'd get any improvements. Or (more likely), someone should make a GPL driver core, which could be attached to similar dumb hardware, even of different brands. Then, with open specs, it would be easy to bind the hardware to the core to the kernel, and the company may even find it cheaper to adapt the open version for all OSs. (Aside: would Microsoft sign drivers with GPL cores?)
The other problem is that companies fear open-source drivers won't honor the evil bit, for example, WiFi cards with hacked drivers operating on forbidden frequencies, or video cards not honoring MacroVision signals. For starters, it's almost as easy to hack binary drivers, so it's no protection. Another solution is to make the hardware only accept register sets signed by the manufacturer's private key. This was proposed for WiFi cards, is better protection anyway, and can be used by open-source projects.
Well, that's what the law is for. Just like you can get sued on EBay for fraud or for not holding up your end of the deal, if you don't return the books and don't pay for them, you'll probably end up in small claims court.
Well, there's the legal problem that you can't implement a digital library without copying. But the realspace varient is plenty for copying music, you can just rip the CD (like you already can from a library). The difference here is that as long as the lender doesn't think you'll copy it, he's not liable at all, only you are. Also, it has the advantage of getting you out of the house.
So, you're saying that filtering spam helps spammers? I don't buy it. For one, it makes it much easier to complain, if you're so incined. Filtering spam doesn't legitimize it any more than locking your house legitimizes stealing. Spam filtering also has the effect of minimizing the unbridled rage spam causes, which will cut down on reactionary legislation. I think that's a good thing, because governments in general don't understand the Internet but aren't afraid to meddle with it.
I use POPFile, and I really like it, but it's not quite ideal. It's very best feature is it's configurable buckets, which aren't just limited to ham and spam. I have buckets for "personal," "mailing list," "automatic," and "spam." One could get even more creative, with something like an "interesting" bucket.
What I really want is something with a more generic interface. POPFile's POP3 proxy and webserver interface mostly limits it to email. I'm thinking of starting a project to make a generic text-classifier in Ruby. A standard class interface, with "message" and "bucket" abstractions, whose functions could be used from a command line filter, as a plugin, and yes, as a POP3 proxy. In other words, following the unix philosophies of doing one thing well and being modular. But it could include black- and white-listing, neural nets, or any other way to decide which bucket a token string belongs in. (And of course the tokenizer would be similarly modular.) Sound interesting?
It could just be uninformed investors. For example, look at the Yahoo Finance SCO company news. We Slashdotters know SCO has been eaten alive since then, but there's no new news there since last Tuesday, and the news that is there has positive-sounding headlines. Hmm.
With the sheer volume of electronic and dead-tree mail SCO must be getting, I don't think they could respond to a DMCA claim in less than a few years. The only way to communicate with SCO is to issue a press release, which they'll read when they notice a decline in the stock. If the ISP didn't issue a press release, SCO will think they're irrelevant.
welovemcbride.com isn't taken! C'mon, lets donate that to this site. And we should all pester ThinkGeek for a deck of cards (does SCO even employ 52 people?). And don't forget dyndns.org, I now have mcbride.kicks-ass.net and sco.kicks-ass.org, but with no server to associate it with.
This is one factor that has always bothered me about the news. Every time a group of people dies, they say how many Americans have died. "A suicide bomber has killed 42 people, 2 of which were Americans!" Now, I'm an American, but I fail to see why an American's death should be more newsworthy than anyone else's. C'mon, we're all people.
Couldn't agree more. Remember, Slashdotters, the squeakiest wheel gets the oil. Consider this public domain, but please at least paraphrase:
Hello,
Recently WIPO was considering a meeting to discuss the place of open source in
the intellectual property landscape, but it has since decided to let the
issue go unresolved. I have read that one factor in this decision was the
USPTO's belief that open source runs counter to WIPO's goals. I am deeply
disappointed by this.
You were quoted as saying, "To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to
disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of
WIPO." But on its website, WIPO claims it is "dedicated to helping to ensure
that the rights of creators and owners of intellectual property are protected
worldwide and that inventors and authors are, thus, recognized and rewarded
for their ingenuity." Open source developers are indeed creators and owners
of IP, and they too deserve protection.
Open source developers do not want to waive or disclaim the IP rights of
others, and they often depend on strong IP laws to ensure their creations are
not misused. In the software industry, there are many important questions
that must be answered. I would like to see a more concrete definition of
what constitutes a derivative work. I want it to be easier for individuals
to defend against unfair patent claims, so they aren't forced to give up
their software in a premature settlement. I think it should be easier for
individual academic developers to get patents and be recognized for their
innovations. These goals do not disclaim anybody's rights.
Again from their website, "Among WIPO's key goals is the inclusion of all
interested parties in dialogue." The open source and academic communities
are very interested in IP, and they should not be excluded from discussion
concerning laws that affect them so greatly. Please don't ignore us before
you've heard what we have to say.
This would be a fun case and I would encourage them to sue. So many frivolous lawsuits floating around - this one would actually have some merit.
I disagree. Netgear is obviously liable, but just because they could be sued doesn't mean they should be. There's a fine line between excercising your rights over others and being an ass, one that I think is crossed way too often. In this case, as you say, the actual damages (bandwidth) are vague. More importantly, Netgear and UWisc got together and are fixing the problem. Considering that this is (now) a very public story, Netgear won't want to further damage it's reputation, and I'm sure they'll donate and hardware and bandwidth necessary to fix the problem. If they had just ignored it, a suit would be justified, but at this point, litigation won't solve anything. It'll just make Netgear look bad, which will make them angry, and start a conflict that only lawyers will benefit from.
Sure Slashdot can be Slashdotted, it just takes a little social engineering.
I know this is OT, but don't you think it's funny that McBride was just busted by the Department of Justice? SCO's been delisted and is in accelerated bankruptcy. Also, a court has ordered Microsoft to pay $299 to each Linux user to make up for SCO's actions. Remember to keep refreshing, it'll be a minute before non-subscribers can view it.
Remember email? As a home user, to attract your business, your ISP runs an email server, and you can email anybody. Don't like the ISP's server? If you have a domain name, you can run your own. Using an intranet? Run your own, for your users only. But the best part is that you never have to put up with crap like this, you aren't at the mercy of one company, who can change protocols, dictate acceptable clients, charge you, etc. Email is decentralized, MSN and AIM aren't.
So why aren't we, who understand the importance of decentralized systems and open protocols, using Jabber?
I see I'm not the only one in favor of metric time. But we need to go further. 10 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The names should probably be changed. I'm dead serious. (Of course I'm an American, and we haven't done metric anything yet.) This stupid 60:60:12-24 system has wasted far too much of my time.
Ah, but remember that according SCO, their products are under a viral license, and anything they touch also belongs to SCO, and if it touches other things, then those belong to SCO...
Yes, so typically you could either change the permissions of the device file, or if that isn't enough (it usually is), make a small suid root program to open the necessary resources and then drop privelages. At the worst, have a small, easily understood program running as root and using pipes, IPC or networking communicating with more complex programs.
This is an easy mistake to make; all it takes is having multiple people need to share the same information, and a lack of money to provide dedicated physical layers for each function and proper gateways between the layers.
Which brings the blame back to deregulation. Competent system administration costs money, and since management doesn't see the benefit, not enough money is spent. It's perfectly understandable that because of lack of funding and experience, a $15 hub may be used when you actually need many different segments and gateways designed to provide exactly what access is needed, and no more. But understandable or not, this shouldn't happen to the safety systems at a nuclear power plant! We're very lucky there were analog backups, and the plant wasn't live.
Setting up a firewall to enforce restrictions like you did is a much better then installing restricted clients, anyway. Although the clients are yours and the employees can be fired for tampering with them, they are still on the employee's desks, and they will fiddle with them. Don't trust your client computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you done this? Also, somebody with prominent webspace should initiate a search for wget mirrors of sco.com. Archive.org doesn't have any recent stuff. I hope there's more left of their allegations than Google caches.
But hardware companies aren't selling software, they're selling hardware! The software is only provided to make the hardware work so people will buy it. And while an open source driver will be maintained and supported by the community, may be put in the vanilla tree, and will make the community like you, a closed source driver is a support nightmare, it's very difficult to deploy use, and it's only slightly better than nothing at all.
First, for "Win-" hardware, like controllerless modems and printers, companies are afraid if their driver was open-source, it would be simple for their competitors to use, reducing their software development costs. Two solutions: one, the company could GPL it, so at least they'd get any improvements. Or (more likely), someone should make a GPL driver core, which could be attached to similar dumb hardware, even of different brands. Then, with open specs, it would be easy to bind the hardware to the core to the kernel, and the company may even find it cheaper to adapt the open version for all OSs. (Aside: would Microsoft sign drivers with GPL cores?)
The other problem is that companies fear open-source drivers won't honor the evil bit, for example, WiFi cards with hacked drivers operating on forbidden frequencies, or video cards not honoring MacroVision signals. For starters, it's almost as easy to hack binary drivers, so it's no protection. Another solution is to make the hardware only accept register sets signed by the manufacturer's private key. This was proposed for WiFi cards, is better protection anyway, and can be used by open-source projects.
Well, that's what the law is for. Just like you can get sued on EBay for fraud or for not holding up your end of the deal, if you don't return the books and don't pay for them, you'll probably end up in small claims court.
So, you're saying that filtering spam helps spammers? I don't buy it. For one, it makes it much easier to complain, if you're so incined. Filtering spam doesn't legitimize it any more than locking your house legitimizes stealing. Spam filtering also has the effect of minimizing the unbridled rage spam causes, which will cut down on reactionary legislation. I think that's a good thing, because governments in general don't understand the Internet but aren't afraid to meddle with it.
What I really want is something with a more generic interface. POPFile's POP3 proxy and webserver interface mostly limits it to email. I'm thinking of starting a project to make a generic text-classifier in Ruby. A standard class interface, with "message" and "bucket" abstractions, whose functions could be used from a command line filter, as a plugin, and yes, as a POP3 proxy. In other words, following the unix philosophies of doing one thing well and being modular. But it could include black- and white-listing, neural nets, or any other way to decide which bucket a token string belongs in. (And of course the tokenizer would be similarly modular.) Sound interesting?
I predict than in the next 6 hours, Linux usage among ham radio operators will jump to 75%.
Below is a relative term, because people browse with different settings. Which message?
It could just be uninformed investors. For example, look at the Yahoo Finance SCO company news. We Slashdotters know SCO has been eaten alive since then, but there's no new news there since last Tuesday, and the news that is there has positive-sounding headlines. Hmm.
With the sheer volume of electronic and dead-tree mail SCO must be getting, I don't think they could respond to a DMCA claim in less than a few years. The only way to communicate with SCO is to issue a press release, which they'll read when they notice a decline in the stock. If the ISP didn't issue a press release, SCO will think they're irrelevant.
welovemcbride.com isn't taken! C'mon, lets donate that to this site. And we should all pester ThinkGeek for a deck of cards (does SCO even employ 52 people?). And don't forget dyndns.org, I now have mcbride.kicks-ass.net and sco.kicks-ass.org, but with no server to associate it with.
Note to self: bring lead underwear on future trips to Utah.
This is one factor that has always bothered me about the news. Every time a group of people dies, they say how many Americans have died. "A suicide bomber has killed 42 people, 2 of which were Americans!" Now, I'm an American, but I fail to see why an American's death should be more newsworthy than anyone else's. C'mon, we're all people.
Yeah, me too, it may even be default. That helps people to understand the joke, though.
I disagree. Netgear is obviously liable, but just because they could be sued doesn't mean they should be. There's a fine line between excercising your rights over others and being an ass, one that I think is crossed way too often. In this case, as you say, the actual damages (bandwidth) are vague. More importantly, Netgear and UWisc got together and are fixing the problem. Considering that this is (now) a very public story, Netgear won't want to further damage it's reputation, and I'm sure they'll donate and hardware and bandwidth necessary to fix the problem. If they had just ignored it, a suit would be justified, but at this point, litigation won't solve anything. It'll just make Netgear look bad, which will make them angry, and start a conflict that only lawyers will benefit from.
I know this is OT, but don't you think it's funny that McBride was just busted by the Department of Justice? SCO's been delisted and is in accelerated bankruptcy. Also, a court has ordered Microsoft to pay $299 to each Linux user to make up for SCO's actions. Remember to keep refreshing, it'll be a minute before non-subscribers can view it.
So why aren't we, who understand the importance of decentralized systems and open protocols, using Jabber?
I see I'm not the only one in favor of metric time. But we need to go further. 10 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The names should probably be changed. I'm dead serious. (Of course I'm an American, and we haven't done metric anything yet.) This stupid 60:60:12-24 system has wasted far too much of my time.
Ah, but remember that according SCO, their products are under a viral license, and anything they touch also belongs to SCO, and if it touches other things, then those belong to SCO...
Yes, so typically you could either change the permissions of the device file, or if that isn't enough (it usually is), make a small suid root program to open the necessary resources and then drop privelages. At the worst, have a small, easily understood program running as root and using pipes, IPC or networking communicating with more complex programs.
Which brings the blame back to deregulation. Competent system administration costs money, and since management doesn't see the benefit, not enough money is spent. It's perfectly understandable that because of lack of funding and experience, a $15 hub may be used when you actually need many different segments and gateways designed to provide exactly what access is needed, and no more. But understandable or not, this shouldn't happen to the safety systems at a nuclear power plant! We're very lucky there were analog backups, and the plant wasn't live.
Setting up a firewall to enforce restrictions like you did is a much better then installing restricted clients, anyway. Although the clients are yours and the employees can be fired for tampering with them, they are still on the employee's desks, and they will fiddle with them. Don't trust your client computers.
Don't you trust RedHat and their Open Source Now fund?