The other parts, if they are approved as standards, will be non-patentable.
Not necessarily true. Many standards bodies will allow standardization of patented implementations so long as non-discriminatory licenses are offered. IOW, the patent holder will give a license to anybody who wants one at the same price they charge everyone else.
Also, as for the whole hindsight-is-no-problem thing. I think what your saying is that if someone else independently (although as stated above, not all that independent when you give someone the patent) can come up with a 'comparable' idea (whatever that is) w/in those 20 years, the patent should be thrown out.
Nothing of the sort. You said that in two years the state of the art can advance such that what wasn't obvious two years ago is now. What I was saying is that if that is true, for any period up to the length of the patent, then a patent is a net loss for society. I also said nothing about comparable ideas; since ideas are not patentable, they aren't relevant to this discussion.
The question is basically this: if I invent something new, how long will it take for others to figure out how to do it? If that is a substantial amount of time, then society benefits from giving me an incentive to disclose how I did it (implementation, not idea!). If it's not a substantial amount of time, then giving me a monopoly on the invention benefits me to the detriment of everyone else.
If I invent something and don't patent it, but neither do I disclose it, and two years later somebody else independently invents the same thing, society has won by 18 years... they still had my invention for that initial two year period, but they didn't have to wait 18 years for my monopoly on it to expire to benefit from competition. However, if I'm granted a 20-year monopoly on that invention in a field where the average time to duplicate it is two years... how has society benefited?
In any field, the utility of a patent-granting mechanism to society is a direct function of how long you can expect it to take for someone else in that field to independently come up with the same invention. That period is currently set at 20 years for all patents, despite the fact that it's almost a dead certainty that 20 years is far beyond what it would take to duplicate an invention in almost any field these days. Certainly when it comes to software, that time can frequently be measured in weeks or months.
Note that none of this gets into the actual operation of the patent system these days, which makes the situation much, much worse than it would already be on its own.
You threw up some nice straw men... let's see if I can set a couple on fire.
Who are these "dozen people in the field" and why would they want to help out in examining patents?
Why would any participant in a peer-review system want to do so? Prestige, the ability to make sure a system they benefit from continues to work, or maybe just a simple desire to, yes, help out (oh my God, you mean some human beings actually do that?). Out in the real world, there are countless examples of peer-review systems, and very few of them have any trouble finding participants.
As you and many others have said, technology is moving very fast, something that seems incredibly obvious now might not have been obvious at all 2 years prior. Maybe because of your new system it won't take 2 years, but at what point does this lapse become ok?
Twenty years. Why? Because that's the current length of a patent in the U.S. And let's take a quick stroll back through history and remember that a patent's purpose is not to make the inventor rich, but to get him to divulge how he did something in sufficient detail that others can duplicate and learn from it. If we're granting him a 20 year monopoly, yet it can be reasonably expected that someone else will come up with the same thing in less than 20 years, then it makes no sense whatsoever to grant the monopoly. It benefits nobody but the inventor, and despite what you and people like you seem to believe, that was not the patent system's purpose (I'll grant it has effectively evolved into that).
I love you babe. But seriously, have a sandwich or something; body fat above 2% is a good thing, you know?
So who the hell wrote that article? The knee-jerk totally uninformed spew driven by complete ignorance which shows up in my son's high school newspaper is less sensationalist and pejorative (as well as more fact-based) than that crap. Based purely on the language used I'd have to rate its veracity at just below OJ's intent to find the real killer.
Is this really what it's come to? Quote people out of context, paraphrase them in a manner which completely changes the actual meaning of what they said, all to drive an agenda which seems to consist entirely of a desire to make yourself seem important by disagreeing with people who actually have triple digit IQs... it's true, isn't it? We have to avoid learning about ourselves by studying chimpanzees not because it's an offense against God, but because we look so bad by comparison.
Of course, those who are paying attention will know that there was a big push in the early 20th century to outlaw many drugs which were legal but which were causing major social problems (complicated by the fact that technically speaking, Congress doesn't have the authority to regulate such things. Which is why Timothy Leary actually succeeded in making marijuana legal in the late 60s; but I digress).
The guy who was in charge of such things, the nation's first drug czar, didn't want to bother with marijuana because he was after drugs which actually caused serious problems, and the ganja just didn't happen to be one of them. However, we were in a depression, and California and Arizona (Texas and New Mexico also threw in) were looking for a way to get rid of their plentiful and cheap Mexican labor. It turns out that marijuana was heavily used in the Mexican laborer population, and the only other identifiable group which used it was black musicians in New Orleans, and really, who the hell cared what they thought? So marijuana became a regulated substance basically in order to get rid of cheap foreign labor so unemployed Americans could be exploited within an inch of their lives instead.
Which really seems to me to be at least as good as your conspiracy theory, with the added benefit of actually being true.
Re:the true power of opensource
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Also without entire classes of capabilities. Yes, I know, you vehemently disagree, but perhaps you should learn something of what you spout about before you do so. I was getting paid handsomely years ago for deliverables which worked fabulously in IE and Mozilla which Opera would blow sky.
A browser's features and capabilities aren't limited to whether or not it renders your favorite porn site.
* the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option)
* any later version.
This is on my software. If I dont like GPL 3.0, and dont want my software distributed under it, I'm already screwed.
Then you should have used a different license, or amended the GPL as you applied it to your software to omit that phrase. Both are easy and legally acceptable ways to have dealt with it. Blaming someone else because you didn't spend any time thinking through the implications of what you were doing is like blowing your nose in your shirt: you could, but why bother?
The word Nazi would be stricken from the record if Germany got their way. We'd never know about what really happened in World War II because their so ashamed of their history.
Has Germany changed that much since I lived there? I keep seeing comments like this, and I can't figure out if they're the typical spew the small-minded large-mouthed ignoramuses all too common on/. are so fond of, or if Germany really has changed their policy on this.
When I lived there, there were restrictions (you couldn't display the swastika, for instance) but the attitude towards the holocaust could be best described as "never forget, never repeat." Finding information on what happened was far easier than it is in the U.S. Has that really changed, or are people here just feeding their prejudices without bothering to gather any actual knowledge of the situation?
Of course, everybody thinks they're one of those really smart ones. Did you see that study by the APA which showed that the more convinced you were of your own intelligence, the more likely you were to be wrong? Those jokers really annoy those of us who are at the top.
but the web standards are moving much too quickly.
You're right. It's only been seven years since CSS2 became a recommendation; they clearly need more time. Since you seem to have such a good handle on this, just how much time would be appropriate? A couple of decades, perhaps?
Hmmm... the ask/. question first laid out the problem in some detail, noted specifically that the current process was time consuming and error prone, then asked three questions.
noahbagels' post laid out the process which is followed where he works, which addressed both the time consuming and error prone aspects as well as answering the first question. In noting specifically how they've gone about doing it, he answered the second question.
You, of course, have tried (unsuccessfully I might add) to show yourself to be clever by noting that he didn't answer the third question. Even if that were so (which it is not), noahbagels' post would be quite relevant to the overall question as posted. However, he addressed the third question as well. Here, let me help you:
Question:How do you test features that are
easy for humans to observe, but not as easy for software to detect (ie,
the light came on, the GUI updated when I pressed the external input,
etc)?
Answer:Given the complex and ever changing data we operate with, we can't test everything that only a human eyeball can spot.
It may not be the answer you wanted to hear, but it was most assuredly relevant. So while it does appear that there's an idiot among us, it isn't noahbagels.
So what you are actually saying is that it is better for companies to spend more writing and maintaining multiple toolsets than to get together and write one between them.
No, what he's actually saying is that at most companies somebody will say "could this possibly benefit our competition?" and at that point, the idea will die.
Whether or not there is an opposing viewpoint, and whether or not it is correct, is immaterial. In most companies, if the people in decision making capacities think that there is any chance that open sourcing something they've written could help their competition (yes, even if it increases their own benefit as well), they just flat won't do it.
I can understand having strong opinions on subjects but how can you make false statements of a factual nature and mask them under a "IMHO" shield0. ... As for your empty comparison of mod_pythion and php, even if php is running cgi mode the chances that in the real world python is faster than php is almost impossible.
Interesting that you'd make both those statements. Have you done any benchmarks? No, of course not, or you'd know that your second statement is totally wrong. Here's a clue for ya based on actual testing rather than ill-informed opinions:
PHP is slow. It starts up slow, and it runs slow. Perl is a speed demon on startup, and Python, while significantly slower than Perl on startup, still beats the pants off PHP. For those who wonder why startup time matters, remember that we're talking about CGI here so you're spending that time for every page load.
For a given task, Perl and Python will always beat PHP on runtime, and usually by quite a bit. Which of Perl or Python is faster seems to depend on what you're doing, but they both generally kill PHP. Now, I've not looked at the source for any of these languages' interpreters, I've just done some testing of them, so I don't know why PHP is so slow, I just know that it is. Maybe the fact that Zend makes a lot of money selling add-ons to make PHP faster has something to do with it. Or, maybe (and there's a fair amount of evidence for this one, I think) PHP is just a lot more poorly written than the other two.
Having said all that, I use PHP for most of my web development, and one of the reasons is speed. How can that be? It comes from the fact that whatever extensions you need in PHP you compile in, whereas in Perl and Python they're dynamically loaded. This turns out to have huge implications. I've got some fairly complex PHP scripts which start up, run, and finish in less time than it takes to for Perl to load CGI.pm. So you have the strange situation where the language which is slower in just about every individual aspect is actually faster for the whole job.
Note that this situation changes radically when you bring mod_python into the mix (I've not tested with mod_perl, as I'm more a Python kinda guy). In this situation, where you can load the modules once when you start Apache, Python's superior speed shows bigtime. Mod_python vs. mod_php isn't even close to being a contest; Python flat spanks the pants off PHP. I'd expect the situation for mod_perl to be similar.
I know this won't sit well with all the PHP fanboys out there who think it's God's gift, but so be it. PHP is a genuinely useful language, moreso than many want to admit. It's also kludgy, hackish, and slow, and no amount of wishful thinking or rabid ranting is going to change that.
because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music
All of them.
Shit, somebody better call Stevie Wonder and give him the bad news... and I wonder how many people who put in the time and effort needed to perform Concierto de Aranjuez realize it wasn't written by a musician?
They have given up their right to sue people who use.NET or make.NET compatible implementations
Christ man, quit sniffing glue before you hurt yourself. RAND doesn't mean they give up the IP; it means they agree to license it to all parties who wish to license it, and that all parties will pay the same rate.
I used to work for a company who got their heavily patented IP accepted as a standard. It has since become ubiquitous it its field. It was accepted as a standard under the same type of RAND terms which are being discussed here.
The numbers have likely changed since then, but when I worked there if you wished to implement it, you had to pay a $25,000 up front fee and a $70 fee per shipping unit. If you implemented without paying those fees?
Hint: their lawyers would be up your ass with a flamethrower before you had time to blink.
If I write a program utilizing a GPL'd binary lib, the above lines state that I've just written a GPL'd program.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!!! How the fuck do people manage to screw this up so completely and so consistently?
If you write a program utilizing GPLed code, and you distribute said program, you must release it under the GPL in order for that distribution to be legal. Should you fail to do this and get caught, you basically have three options:
Release your program under the GPL
Quit distributing the program until the GPLed code is removed
Contact the original author and get him/her to let you use the code under a different license
Under no circumstances does your program automatically become GPL; copyright law doesn't allow for it, and the GPL doesn't try to do it. It simply says that if you wish to use GPLed code, you can do it under certain conditions. If those conditions aren't acceptable, then you may not use the code. Should you do so anyway, all they can do is make you stop using that code! They cannot make you change the license on yours. Is that clear enough?
Which means basically that if the FSF had licensed a GPL Unix to IBM, they would right now be taking the reciprocal (but logically identical) position as SCO is with respect to license requirements.
Ummm, no. If the FSF had licensed a GPL Unix to IBM, and IBM contributed some in-house code to it, they would still be free to use that code anywhere else they wanted. They couldn't stop the FSF from distributing it under the GPL, but neither could the FSF stop them from contributing it elsewhere under whatever license they chose (and this exact type of situation occurs fairly frequently, in fact).
SCO's position is that once IBM contributes code to any UNIX, SCO has full rights to that code and IBM has none; IOW, IBM is no longer free to use that code elsewhere. Which, of course, is not even close to anything the GPL says.
While I agree that this is nowhere near the slam-dunk that the linked article makes out, there is a possibly important point here that people seem to be missing. If the amendment states that copyright is transferred only insofar as SCO needs it to fulfill the original contract (which basically allows them exclusively to sell that version of Unix), it still leaves SCO with a few problems:
The original agreement could be fulfilled by only granting copyright on the binaries (as a derivative work), not the source. SCO would need copyright on the source to sell it outright, but not to license it or create derivative works, which it appears possible is all the original agreement allows them to do.
They don't need exclusive copyright to do any of the things which the original agreements give them the rights to; shared copyright is enough (and contrary to what most people seem to think, nothing in copyright law requires it to be exclusive). While it may be possible (if doubtful) for them to claim that they need full rights in order to be able to license Unix, it would be hard to interpret things in a manner which shows that they would need exclusive rights. Even if SCO won this part of the argument, Novell would have an argument that the amendment's granting of rights to SCO does not remove them from Novell.
The original agreement grants SCO exclusive rights to license Unix; it does not guarantee they will do so profitably. Many arguments in favor of SCO's amendment two interpretation come down to "they won't make money if it's interpreted otherwise." Whether or not SCO manages to make money from it is immaterial. All that matters is whether or not they can license it, and even if you take Novell's interpretation as gospel, they can still do that.
As you note, there's a lot of wiggle room here, but in terms of their assault on Linux I'd say most of it is not on SCO's side of the argument.
Nothing in the world changes the fact that people are signing over their hard work for no compensation.
No compensation? Really? You mean Linus could have brought the Linux kernel to this point by himself? Perhaps Spencer and Peter working alone would have gotten Gimp as featureful as it is today?
Of course, the answer is no in both cases. The compensation people get is the use of a product that works well, isn't subject to the whims of quarterly profit statements, that they never could have accomplished by themselves. Not to mention the personal satisfaction of contributing to such a project.
I've noticed that those who think free software authors receive no compensation for their work tend to be the same people who have an overinflated sense of their own value though they accomplish jack squat. You don't get it and/or have nothing to contribute? Fine, but please stay out of the way of those who do, 'k? Thanks.
I certainly took no offense, and I hope you take no offense when I say I can't believe anyone would pass up a contract just because of a lack of source control...
I think you need to look at his comments from the standpoint of someone who has gotten used to using source/version control. It may be hard to believe if you never have, but it really can make that much difference.
I used to do things the way you do, and tried CVS mostly out of curiosity. I couldn't go back. There are just too many benefits, most of which are things I hadn't thought of before using it.
If things work well for you, no sense in rocking the boat I suppose, but don't blithely assume using CVS would have no benefits; you're wrong. They may not be compelling enough for you to change, but they most assuredly exist.
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The other parts, if they are approved as standards, will be non-patentable.
Not necessarily true. Many standards bodies will allow standardization of patented implementations so long as non-discriminatory licenses are offered. IOW, the patent holder will give a license to anybody who wants one at the same price they charge everyone else.
Also, as for the whole hindsight-is-no-problem thing. I think what your saying is that if someone else independently (although as stated above, not all that independent when you give someone the patent) can come up with a 'comparable' idea (whatever that is) w/in those 20 years, the patent should be thrown out.
Nothing of the sort. You said that in two years the state of the art can advance such that what wasn't obvious two years ago is now. What I was saying is that if that is true, for any period up to the length of the patent, then a patent is a net loss for society. I also said nothing about comparable ideas; since ideas are not patentable, they aren't relevant to this discussion.
The question is basically this: if I invent something new, how long will it take for others to figure out how to do it? If that is a substantial amount of time, then society benefits from giving me an incentive to disclose how I did it (implementation, not idea!). If it's not a substantial amount of time, then giving me a monopoly on the invention benefits me to the detriment of everyone else.
If I invent something and don't patent it, but neither do I disclose it, and two years later somebody else independently invents the same thing, society has won by 18 years... they still had my invention for that initial two year period, but they didn't have to wait 18 years for my monopoly on it to expire to benefit from competition. However, if I'm granted a 20-year monopoly on that invention in a field where the average time to duplicate it is two years... how has society benefited?
In any field, the utility of a patent-granting mechanism to society is a direct function of how long you can expect it to take for someone else in that field to independently come up with the same invention. That period is currently set at 20 years for all patents, despite the fact that it's almost a dead certainty that 20 years is far beyond what it would take to duplicate an invention in almost any field these days. Certainly when it comes to software, that time can frequently be measured in weeks or months.
Note that none of this gets into the actual operation of the patent system these days, which makes the situation much, much worse than it would already be on its own.
You threw up some nice straw men... let's see if I can set a couple on fire.
Who are these "dozen people in the field" and why would they want to help out in examining patents?
Why would any participant in a peer-review system want to do so? Prestige, the ability to make sure a system they benefit from continues to work, or maybe just a simple desire to, yes, help out (oh my God, you mean some human beings actually do that?). Out in the real world, there are countless examples of peer-review systems, and very few of them have any trouble finding participants.
As you and many others have said, technology is moving very fast, something that seems incredibly obvious now might not have been obvious at all 2 years prior. Maybe because of your new system it won't take 2 years, but at what point does this lapse become ok?
Twenty years. Why? Because that's the current length of a patent in the U.S. And let's take a quick stroll back through history and remember that a patent's purpose is not to make the inventor rich, but to get him to divulge how he did something in sufficient detail that others can duplicate and learn from it. If we're granting him a 20 year monopoly, yet it can be reasonably expected that someone else will come up with the same thing in less than 20 years, then it makes no sense whatsoever to grant the monopoly. It benefits nobody but the inventor, and despite what you and people like you seem to believe, that was not the patent system's purpose (I'll grant it has effectively evolved into that).
I love you babe. But seriously, have a sandwich or something; body fat above 2% is a good thing, you know?
So who the hell wrote that article? The knee-jerk totally uninformed spew driven by complete ignorance which shows up in my son's high school newspaper is less sensationalist and pejorative (as well as more fact-based) than that crap. Based purely on the language used I'd have to rate its veracity at just below OJ's intent to find the real killer.
Is this really what it's come to? Quote people out of context, paraphrase them in a manner which completely changes the actual meaning of what they said, all to drive an agenda which seems to consist entirely of a desire to make yourself seem important by disagreeing with people who actually have triple digit IQs... it's true, isn't it? We have to avoid learning about ourselves by studying chimpanzees not because it's an offense against God, but because we look so bad by comparison.
I so seriously fear for this country.
Of course, those who are paying attention will know that there was a big push in the early 20th century to outlaw many drugs which were legal but which were causing major social problems (complicated by the fact that technically speaking, Congress doesn't have the authority to regulate such things. Which is why Timothy Leary actually succeeded in making marijuana legal in the late 60s; but I digress).
The guy who was in charge of such things, the nation's first drug czar, didn't want to bother with marijuana because he was after drugs which actually caused serious problems, and the ganja just didn't happen to be one of them. However, we were in a depression, and California and Arizona (Texas and New Mexico also threw in) were looking for a way to get rid of their plentiful and cheap Mexican labor. It turns out that marijuana was heavily used in the Mexican laborer population, and the only other identifiable group which used it was black musicians in New Orleans, and really, who the hell cared what they thought? So marijuana became a regulated substance basically in order to get rid of cheap foreign labor so unemployed Americans could be exploited within an inch of their lives instead.
Which really seems to me to be at least as good as your conspiracy theory, with the added benefit of actually being true.
Also without entire classes of capabilities. Yes, I know, you vehemently disagree, but perhaps you should learn something of what you spout about before you do so. I was getting paid handsomely years ago for deliverables which worked fabulously in IE and Mozilla which Opera would blow sky. A browser's features and capabilities aren't limited to whether or not it renders your favorite porn site.
Excellent... now look up "pedant."
* any later version.
This is on my software. If I dont like GPL 3.0, and dont want my software distributed under it, I'm already screwed.
Then you should have used a different license, or amended the GPL as you applied it to your software to omit that phrase. Both are easy and legally acceptable ways to have dealt with it. Blaming someone else because you didn't spend any time thinking through the implications of what you were doing is like blowing your nose in your shirt: you could, but why bother?
Has Germany changed that much since I lived there? I keep seeing comments like this, and I can't figure out if they're the typical spew the small-minded large-mouthed ignoramuses all too common on /. are so fond of, or if Germany really has changed their policy on this.
When I lived there, there were restrictions (you couldn't display the swastika, for instance) but the attitude towards the holocaust could be best described as "never forget, never repeat." Finding information on what happened was far easier than it is in the U.S. Has that really changed, or are people here just feeding their prejudices without bothering to gather any actual knowledge of the situation?
Of course, everybody thinks they're one of those really smart ones. Did you see that study by the APA which showed that the more convinced you were of your own intelligence, the more likely you were to be wrong? Those jokers really annoy those of us who are at the top.
Crap...
You're right. It's only been seven years since CSS2 became a recommendation; they clearly need more time. Since you seem to have such a good handle on this, just how much time would be appropriate? A couple of decades, perhaps?
noahbagels' post laid out the process which is followed where he works, which addressed both the time consuming and error prone aspects as well as answering the first question. In noting specifically how they've gone about doing it, he answered the second question.
You, of course, have tried (unsuccessfully I might add) to show yourself to be clever by noting that he didn't answer the third question. Even if that were so (which it is not), noahbagels' post would be quite relevant to the overall question as posted. However, he addressed the third question as well. Here, let me help you:
Question: How do you test features that are easy for humans to observe, but not as easy for software to detect (ie, the light came on, the GUI updated when I pressed the external input, etc)?
Answer: Given the complex and ever changing data we operate with, we can't test everything that only a human eyeball can spot.
It may not be the answer you wanted to hear, but it was most assuredly relevant. So while it does appear that there's an idiot among us, it isn't noahbagels.
No, what he's actually saying is that at most companies somebody will say "could this possibly benefit our competition?" and at that point, the idea will die.
Whether or not there is an opposing viewpoint, and whether or not it is correct, is immaterial. In most companies, if the people in decision making capacities think that there is any chance that open sourcing something they've written could help their competition (yes, even if it increases their own benefit as well), they just flat won't do it.
As for your empty comparison of mod_pythion and php, even if php is running cgi mode the chances that in the real world python is faster than php is almost impossible.
Interesting that you'd make both those statements. Have you done any benchmarks? No, of course not, or you'd know that your second statement is totally wrong. Here's a clue for ya based on actual testing rather than ill-informed opinions:
PHP is slow. It starts up slow, and it runs slow. Perl is a speed demon on startup, and Python, while significantly slower than Perl on startup, still beats the pants off PHP. For those who wonder why startup time matters, remember that we're talking about CGI here so you're spending that time for every page load.
For a given task, Perl and Python will always beat PHP on runtime, and usually by quite a bit. Which of Perl or Python is faster seems to depend on what you're doing, but they both generally kill PHP. Now, I've not looked at the source for any of these languages' interpreters, I've just done some testing of them, so I don't know why PHP is so slow, I just know that it is. Maybe the fact that Zend makes a lot of money selling add-ons to make PHP faster has something to do with it. Or, maybe (and there's a fair amount of evidence for this one, I think) PHP is just a lot more poorly written than the other two.
Having said all that, I use PHP for most of my web development, and one of the reasons is speed. How can that be? It comes from the fact that whatever extensions you need in PHP you compile in, whereas in Perl and Python they're dynamically loaded. This turns out to have huge implications. I've got some fairly complex PHP scripts which start up, run, and finish in less time than it takes to for Perl to load CGI.pm. So you have the strange situation where the language which is slower in just about every individual aspect is actually faster for the whole job.
Note that this situation changes radically when you bring mod_python into the mix (I've not tested with mod_perl, as I'm more a Python kinda guy). In this situation, where you can load the modules once when you start Apache, Python's superior speed shows bigtime. Mod_python vs. mod_php isn't even close to being a contest; Python flat spanks the pants off PHP. I'd expect the situation for mod_perl to be similar.
I know this won't sit well with all the PHP fanboys out there who think it's God's gift, but so be it. PHP is a genuinely useful language, moreso than many want to admit. It's also kludgy, hackish, and slow, and no amount of wishful thinking or rabid ranting is going to change that.
All of them.
Shit, somebody better call Stevie Wonder and give him the bad news... and I wonder how many people who put in the time and effort needed to perform Concierto de Aranjuez realize it wasn't written by a musician?
Dipstick.
Christ man, quit sniffing glue before you hurt yourself. RAND doesn't mean they give up the IP; it means they agree to license it to all parties who wish to license it, and that all parties will pay the same rate.
I used to work for a company who got their heavily patented IP accepted as a standard. It has since become ubiquitous it its field. It was accepted as a standard under the same type of RAND terms which are being discussed here.
The numbers have likely changed since then, but when I worked there if you wished to implement it, you had to pay a $25,000 up front fee and a $70 fee per shipping unit. If you implemented without paying those fees?
Hint: their lawyers would be up your ass with a flamethrower before you had time to blink.
- Select a circle.
- Stroke selection.
Gee, how is it done in Photoshop?- Select a circle.
- Stroke selection.
Got news for ya bunky: the fact that you're a fucking moron says nothing about the quality of the programs you can or cannot use.Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!!! How the fuck do people manage to screw this up so completely and so consistently?
If you write a program utilizing GPLed code, and you distribute said program, you must release it under the GPL in order for that distribution to be legal. Should you fail to do this and get caught, you basically have three options:
- Release your program under the GPL
- Quit distributing the program until the GPLed code is removed
- Contact the original author and get him/her to let you use the code under a different license
Under no circumstances does your program automatically become GPL; copyright law doesn't allow for it, and the GPL doesn't try to do it. It simply says that if you wish to use GPLed code, you can do it under certain conditions. If those conditions aren't acceptable, then you may not use the code. Should you do so anyway, all they can do is make you stop using that code! They cannot make you change the license on yours. Is that clear enough?body { background: #000000; ... }
Hmmm, just tried it in Firebird 0.7 and Moz 1.3; works fine in both. *shrug*
Ummm, no. If the FSF had licensed a GPL Unix to IBM, and IBM contributed some in-house code to it, they would still be free to use that code anywhere else they wanted. They couldn't stop the FSF from distributing it under the GPL, but neither could the FSF stop them from contributing it elsewhere under whatever license they chose (and this exact type of situation occurs fairly frequently, in fact).
SCO's position is that once IBM contributes code to any UNIX, SCO has full rights to that code and IBM has none; IOW, IBM is no longer free to use that code elsewhere. Which, of course, is not even close to anything the GPL says.
- The original agreement could be fulfilled by only granting copyright on the binaries (as a derivative work), not the source. SCO would need copyright on the source to sell it outright, but not to license it or create derivative works, which it appears possible is all the original agreement allows them to do.
- They don't need exclusive copyright to do any of the things which the original agreements give them the rights to; shared copyright is enough (and contrary to what most people seem to think, nothing in copyright law requires it to be exclusive). While it may be possible (if doubtful) for them to claim that they need full rights in order to be able to license Unix, it would be hard to interpret things in a manner which shows that they would need exclusive rights. Even if SCO won this part of the argument, Novell would have an argument that the amendment's granting of rights to SCO does not remove them from Novell.
- The original agreement grants SCO exclusive rights to license Unix; it does not guarantee they will do so profitably. Many arguments in favor of SCO's amendment two interpretation come down to "they won't make money if it's interpreted otherwise." Whether or not SCO manages to make money from it is immaterial. All that matters is whether or not they can license it, and even if you take Novell's interpretation as gospel, they can still do that.
As you note, there's a lot of wiggle room here, but in terms of their assault on Linux I'd say most of it is not on SCO's side of the argument.No compensation? Really? You mean Linus could have brought the Linux kernel to this point by himself? Perhaps Spencer and Peter working alone would have gotten Gimp as featureful as it is today?
Of course, the answer is no in both cases. The compensation people get is the use of a product that works well, isn't subject to the whims of quarterly profit statements, that they never could have accomplished by themselves. Not to mention the personal satisfaction of contributing to such a project.
I've noticed that those who think free software authors receive no compensation for their work tend to be the same people who have an overinflated sense of their own value though they accomplish jack squat. You don't get it and/or have nothing to contribute? Fine, but please stay out of the way of those who do, 'k? Thanks.
I think you need to look at his comments from the standpoint of someone who has gotten used to using source/version control. It may be hard to believe if you never have, but it really can make that much difference.
I used to do things the way you do, and tried CVS mostly out of curiosity. I couldn't go back. There are just too many benefits, most of which are things I hadn't thought of before using it.
If things work well for you, no sense in rocking the boat I suppose, but don't blithely assume using CVS would have no benefits; you're wrong. They may not be compelling enough for you to change, but they most assuredly exist.
Too many Bass Ales...
Probably not, because that would essentially boil down to Mormons suing Mormons, and baby, that is definitely not faith promoting.