There's a couple of things that you clearly should not allow the possessor to duplicate; 'dollar bills', and 'theater tickets'. From there on, things get less clear.
Bands can (if they are good) make a living playing concerts; and there's no reason why the 'traditional' copyright laws should fail to hold. DRM (and criminalisation such as the DMCA) strengthens the position of the rights-holders to the detriment of everybody else; to the point where I can't reasonably allow DRM material in the house, in case I commit a crime with it.
It's like 'how do you certify a new drug'. Taxol is an extract from yew trees; in principle an 'open-source' pharmaceutical, you discover it growing, rather than synthesise it from first principles. It's rumoured to be useful in treating some forms of human cancer.
It doesn't save everyone; but it does extend the lives of some.
If you go through the steps of how that got FDA approval, then you'll understand a credible way of arranging approval for "open source code where you cannot control the origin"
Also, if you're depending on "other people's closed-source code", there will be a service end date beyond which you cannot count on using it. Service End Date for Windows98 has just passed; if you have medical equipment with Windows98 built in, now would be a good time to re-engineer it.
The deal used to be that Lenovo wouldn't supply you with 3rd-party GPL software; but if you supplied Lenovo with the software you wanted (e.g. SuSE Linux) then they would cheerfully install it for you. Looks like this has changed.
I don't know whether it has to do with the 'NO WARRANTY'... Lenovo presumably like offering warranties... or the requirement to make source code available, or something else about the 'aggressively free' GPL.
Well, no, but apparently there is a right for all to be equal before the law. And if they make a criminal offence of 'distribution without permission' (which seems a pretty stupid criminal offence, to me, but then I'm not french), then the punishment looks like it has to be a function of how many you distributed, but not how much money you got paid.
Is 'imprisonment for copyright infringement' something the state does on its own account, or is it something that some private individual or corporation asks to happen ?
Would Sam Palmisano now be in fear of time in Sing-Sing if SCO won their case, if this kind of law held in the USA ?
I think it's a combination of 'home entertainment' being done better on the games consoles (surely XBox360 must be a growth market), and 'corporate' users figuring that a long-life PC (with parts replacement) is more environmentally friendly, does not fill up and pollute landfill space so quickly. Should a corporate PC now have a lifespan of 10 years rather than 3 years ? If Microsoft won't supply a software maintenance service at competitive prices, that leaves doors open for the likes of RedHat and Novell who certainly will.
From what I can see of Microsoft Windows Vista, it's aimed at the games market.
Corporate/professional use just doesn't get anything more out of Vista than XP; it's not as if a new version of Microsoft Word will help you think and express yourself more clearly than the old one does.
If you want to create and sell a derivative work (i.e. an edited versiion), you are supposed to come to a (financial) agreement with the copyright holder first.
btw, it's 'Infringe', not 'Violate'. The damage can be easily undone with an appropriate agreement, and we can transform this from an illegitimate business to one with a perfectly respectable mother-and-father with a little money changing hands.
I thought that US patents and copyrights were 'private' rights; i.e. could be held by individuals and corporations. But not by parts of the US Government. Last I saw, the US Navy wasn't in private hands.
So how do you go about licensing a patent held by the Navy ?
Just becuase you have a valid licence, that's no guarantee the software will be useful to you.
Same as buying glue; I'm sure the shop has every right to sell you that tube of glue, but they don't guarantee that it will stick anything. You're making that leap of faith yourself.
To get a 'stick it' guarantee, you have to pay extra for a 'glue application service'.
That broadband Internet cable, it's like a hypodermic needle. Used right and with the correct stuff in the syringe, it will enhance the quality of life. But you'd better hope that someone knows what they are doing !
I thought the network was supposed to facilitate business and personal communication. One configured like this looks more like 'walking through a minefield'. How do you ever get a distributed application (think funds transfer between banks) working ? Cash on a motorcycle ?
Sometimes, differential pricing for services is the only way to turn a profit while doing something socially desirable. Think of a doctor; he/she should save the life of a rich person for a high price, and save the life of a poor person for a low price (or for nothing). Two lives saved, and the doctor's family fed.
Airlines are the same; they need to offer 'first class' and 'economy' fares. A seat still available 30 seconds before the door closes is worth more than a seat that you promise to occupy 6 months ahead; higher risk to the airline, though, because if no-one buys the seat by the time the door closes, it's not worth anything.
Microsoft seen to have used 'differential pricing' to induce dependency; but I can still use pencil, paper, and crayons. I am not dependent on them. I can write software, too.
If all you get for the licence fee is a promise that the Microsoft lawyers won't sue you, then no, they are not good value. You would be better off with pencil and paper.
IBM doesn't advocate software patents. IBM notices that the US has chosen a law that says that software patents exist, and decides that if that law is on the books, then to defend its commercial freedom it needs to have a large pile of them.
IBM did not make the law. IBM did not donate to any political party for the law to be made; IBM never does.
When we put together multiple-redundant systems with a view to achieving high availability, we tended to find failure modes which we called 'sympathy sickness'. One of the pair would fail for an unanticipated reason, and then that would induce a new failure mode in the second; and you'd have to diagnose a more complex failure situation by hand to get things going again.
I've got this suspicion that having a list of 200000 'problem cases' to look for will just ensure that you don't find any of these 200000 problems. We have 'elephant dust' in our pockets; it is very successful at keeping elephants away, I have never seen one in my street at all ever...
That's what the section title says in my Yellow Pages, and roughly corresponds to what my employer sells. The related services are...
Use of hardware to run it on.
Tailoring of the software to make it do exactly what a client business wants.
A warranty that it will be fixed if it is found to be broken.
People to keep the whole supporting the client's business.
Consultancy to advise a client business on how to best go about achieving what it is constituted to do; whether 'software' is a part of the solution at all, and if so what kind of software.
Sometimes he sells the software, which is a bit like selling a copy of a textbook.
And sometimes the software is free; that's more like an exercise book.
It's usually the warranty; the proposition that my employer will move heaven and earth to keep a client up and running, if he has paid the insurance premium; that's the valuable part.
I think they've been checked by many eyes, tracked back to their origins, and believed to be legal. After all, anyone can design or improve a font and open-source their own work; it's like taking a holiday snap of the Eiffel Tower, compared with a commercial professional all-rights-reserved photo of the Eiffel Tower in a travel guide. Both ways of getting a photo can legitimately happen, they can look quite similar, and there are vastly more holiday snaps in the world.
Also, if you have reason to believe that any of the fonts supplied with OOo is not legitimately free, do please feed back that information to the OOo team. They really do not wish to infringe anyone's private rights, and some of them would cheerfully delete the offending font and design their own 'free' one to replace it.
If client wants a commercial font, and publishing house doesn't have a licence to the commercial font, then the contract between client and publishing house needs to specify who pays for the font licence and who owns the font licence when the print job is complete. Can you rent fonts, like you can rent cars ? You might only need it for one print job; or you might need to own the licence like you own a car, to use every day for years and years. Presumably you can sell on a 'second-hand' font licence, like you can sell on the right to use pretty much any kind of intellectual property ?
It's his right to do as he pleases. But donating to the Bill and Melinda show puts rather a lot of financial muscle in one place; with that kind of money he could have established his own foundation, for an independent view of things.
Is the Bill and Melinda Foundation able to act in ways which might be other than in the interest of Microsoft ? For example, how would a funding request from Free Software Foundation, or Electronic Freedom Foundation, go down ?
Games consoles for playing games. Linux-based servers for 'domestic infrastructure'. Networked DVD players running whatever the DVDCCA want to play DVDs. Wireless 'Joe 90' glasses with projection keyboards for expressing themseleves creatively at work.
No Windows in the vista. All of those that are going to be sold, have been sold. Microsoft should stick to xBoxes.
Isn't it sort-of a private matter for the shareholders of the 2 companies to figure whehter they want to do it ? And then the monopoly regulators ?
This monopoly of commercial operating systems for personal computers, and monopoly of commercial word processors for personal computers, is proving somewhat a millstone round the neck of Microsoft. Are they about to sell off these businesses so that they can move on ? Games consoles, search services, etc.
I expect if the price was right, IBM would take Windows and/or Word off their hands. It's only money.
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There's a couple of things that you clearly should not allow the possessor to duplicate; 'dollar bills', and 'theater tickets'. From there on, things get less clear. Bands can (if they are good) make a living playing concerts; and there's no reason why the 'traditional' copyright laws should fail to hold. DRM (and criminalisation such as the DMCA) strengthens the position of the rights-holders to the detriment of everybody else; to the point where I can't reasonably allow DRM material in the house, in case I commit a crime with it.
It's like 'how do you certify a new drug'. Taxol is an extract from yew trees; in principle an 'open-source' pharmaceutical, you discover it growing, rather than synthesise it from first principles. It's rumoured to be useful in treating some forms of human cancer.
It doesn't save everyone; but it does extend the lives of some.
If you go through the steps of how that got FDA approval, then you'll understand a credible way of arranging approval for "open source code where you cannot control the origin"
Also, if you're depending on "other people's closed-source code", there will be a service end date beyond which you cannot count on using it. Service End Date for Windows98 has just passed; if you have medical equipment with Windows98 built in, now would be a good time to re-engineer it.
You say to the corporation 'Mail server broke after only 5 million emails ? How fragile. Get a proper mail service provider'.
I don't know whether it has to do with the 'NO WARRANTY' ... Lenovo presumably like offering warranties ... or the requirement to make source code available, or something else about the 'aggressively free' GPL.
Well, no, but apparently there is a right for all to be equal before the law. And if they make a criminal offence of 'distribution without permission' (which seems a pretty stupid criminal offence, to me, but then I'm not french), then the punishment looks like it has to be a function of how many you distributed, but not how much money you got paid.
Would Sam Palmisano now be in fear of time in Sing-Sing if SCO won their case, if this kind of law held in the USA ?
I think it's a combination of 'home entertainment' being done better on the games consoles (surely XBox360 must be a growth market), and 'corporate' users figuring that a long-life PC (with parts replacement) is more environmentally friendly, does not fill up and pollute landfill space so quickly. Should a corporate PC now have a lifespan of 10 years rather than 3 years ? If Microsoft won't supply a software maintenance service at competitive prices, that leaves doors open for the likes of RedHat and Novell who certainly will.
From what I can see of Microsoft Windows Vista, it's aimed at the games market.
Corporate/professional use just doesn't get anything more out of Vista than XP; it's not as if a new version of Microsoft Word will help you think and express yourself more clearly than the old one does.
btw, it's 'Infringe', not 'Violate'. The damage can be easily undone with an appropriate agreement, and we can transform this from an illegitimate business to one with a perfectly respectable mother-and-father with a little money changing hands.
I thought that US patents and copyrights were 'private' rights; i.e. could be held by individuals and corporations. But not by parts of the US Government. Last I saw, the US Navy wasn't in private hands.
So how do you go about licensing a patent held by the Navy ?
Just becuase you have a valid licence, that's no guarantee the software will be useful to you. Same as buying glue; I'm sure the shop has every right to sell you that tube of glue, but they don't guarantee that it will stick anything. You're making that leap of faith yourself. To get a 'stick it' guarantee, you have to pay extra for a 'glue application service'.
That broadband Internet cable, it's like a hypodermic needle. Used right and with the correct stuff in the syringe, it will enhance the quality of life. But you'd better hope that someone knows what they are doing !
I thought the network was supposed to facilitate business and personal communication. One configured like this looks more like 'walking through a minefield'. How do you ever get a distributed application (think funds transfer between banks) working ? Cash on a motorcycle ?
Airlines are the same; they need to offer 'first class' and 'economy' fares. A seat still available 30 seconds before the door closes is worth more than a seat that you promise to occupy 6 months ahead; higher risk to the airline, though, because if no-one buys the seat by the time the door closes, it's not worth anything.
Microsoft seen to have used 'differential pricing' to induce dependency; but I can still use pencil, paper, and crayons. I am not dependent on them. I can write software, too.
If all you get for the licence fee is a promise that the Microsoft lawyers won't sue you, then no, they are not good value. You would be better off with pencil and paper.
IBM did not make the law. IBM did not donate to any political party for the law to be made; IBM never does.
When we put together multiple-redundant systems with a view to achieving high availability, we tended to find failure modes which we called 'sympathy sickness'. One of the pair would fail for an unanticipated reason, and then that would induce a new failure mode in the second; and you'd have to diagnose a more complex failure situation by hand to get things going again. I've got this suspicion that having a list of 200000 'problem cases' to look for will just ensure that you don't find any of these 200000 problems. We have 'elephant dust' in our pockets; it is very successful at keeping elephants away, I have never seen one in my street at all ever ...
Sometimes he sells the software, which is a bit like selling a copy of a textbook.
And sometimes the software is free; that's more like an exercise book.
It's usually the warranty; the proposition that my employer will move heaven and earth to keep a client up and running, if he has paid the insurance premium; that's the valuable part.
Also, if you have reason to believe that any of the fonts supplied with OOo is not legitimately free, do please feed back that information to the OOo team. They really do not wish to infringe anyone's private rights, and some of them would cheerfully delete the offending font and design their own 'free' one to replace it.
If client wants a commercial font, and publishing house doesn't have a licence to the commercial font, then the contract between client and publishing house needs to specify who pays for the font licence and who owns the font licence when the print job is complete.
Can you rent fonts, like you can rent cars ? You might only need it for one print job; or you might need to own the licence like you own a car, to use every day for years and years.
Presumably you can sell on a 'second-hand' font licence, like you can sell on the right to use pretty much any kind of intellectual property ?
It's his right to do as he pleases. But donating to the Bill and Melinda show puts rather a lot of financial muscle in one place; with that kind of money he could have established his own foundation, for an independent view of things. Is the Bill and Melinda Foundation able to act in ways which might be other than in the interest of Microsoft ? For example, how would a funding request from Free Software Foundation, or Electronic Freedom Foundation, go down ?
No Windows in the vista. All of those that are going to be sold, have been sold. Microsoft should stick to xBoxes.
This monopoly of commercial operating systems for personal computers, and monopoly of commercial word processors for personal computers, is proving somewhat a millstone round the neck of Microsoft. Are they about to sell off these businesses so that they can move on ? Games consoles, search services, etc.
I expect if the price was right, IBM would take Windows and/or Word off their hands. It's only money.
I can still program in PLAN (its assembler), and CES-Basic. And FORTRAN.
You can get Linux a screensaver for Windows here
SuSE 10.1, nothing but the newest.
Windows for home entertainment, Linux for business !