It's well understood that the SCO FUD machine is trying to reach as much publicity as it possibly can. This is why it is important to let the other side of the force to get some publicity as well. One way is to make links to sites that deal with the SCO FUD from Linux users' viewpoint in order to get better rank in search engines. One of the best sites is at sco.iwethey.org.
If they can prove that Linux infringes upon those copyrights, then they will be able to charge for its use.
Yeah, if party A can prove that party B is infringing the rights of the party A, then the party B is in trouble. So far there's no trouble because there is no evidence.
Please stop helping the SCO FUD machine. They have not shown any evidence nor are they planning to.
The thing is, words related to concepts that are not part of the mainstream life will not be used by the mainstream user. How would you feel to be taught nanotechnology jargon just in case it catches on in a few years?
Naturally it wouldn't make sense to teach nanotechnology jargon to general public, at least for the moment. However it would make a lot of sense if the people who work with nanotechnology would find appropriate terms in the local languages. If it goes mainstream, the language would already have an existing live vocabulary.
Using government regulations is a very bad way to protect a language. The Right Way is to introduce native words to a local vocabulary before it goes mainstream when the technology is still being adopted.
If they had started in 1993, they would have had a chance. In 2003, it's way too late.
Suddently splitting up and asking your significant other to pick something up for you in a different part of a store warrants a crime.
The thing is, it doesn't. If they build a technical mechanism to catch shoplifters and that mechanism isn't reliable, it's not your problem. "Crime" is a concept defined by law, not technology.
Sure, they might not want to give you this impression, but it's their responsibility to prove that you are guilty of something and if their technology can't give enough proof, the technology is nothing more but a way to scare people. Picking something from a shelf may be proof in some cases, in some cases it isn't.
If you know that you've not stolen anything (which should be rather easy to know...), stand up for your rights if you're accused of something.
How is it possible for someone to patent something on a nationality-less object like the Internet?
That is kind of like asking "how is it possible that the government locks everyone with the letter 'e' in their name to prison?" Stupid things can be done. If a government agency grants a patent to such a method and other governments in the world agree and assist with enforcing it, then it is possible.
This has, of course, nothing to do with the purpose of the patent system. The purpose of patent system is to make inventors to share their inventions with the general public. In return, the general public grants the inventor an exclusive right to the method for a limited time. However, nowadays the idea of benefit to the general public has been completely lost.
The implementation described in the 2nd link does seem like a good starting point, but aren't two distinct implementations required before IETF will provide official backing?
I suggest that African and European swallow are used as reference implementations.
please stop looking at everything microsoft does as immoral - they are a company, their purpose is to make money.
Where in the article it was stated or otherwise implied that Microsoft is acting immorally? As far as I can see, it just mentioned that Microsoft got a deal while many hope that Linux would have got it. I see no references to unfair or immoral practises, just that it's unfortunate Linux wasn't chosen.
That won't happen unless Microsoft drops IE and starts shipping Mozilla.
Another possibility is if what Microsoft ships along its OS will become irrelevant. (I don't think this is likely to change soon but changes are always possible.)
if that crock, that bag-on-the-side, that mess is what we have to look forward to, I think i'll switch to BSD.
I mean, acessing owner data by travelling into a directory then backwards out of it again like: vi/directory/..owner is a big ugly crock.
Are you so sure that you would hate it? After reading the PDF, I was thinking of two things:
He suggests that files ought to be used for everything
The old wisdom: "Everything in Unix is a file"
I don't think it's any more radical than treating network sockets as files. Sure, it might feel a little weird first, but once you'd get used to it, the simplicity would overweigh the clumsiness of existing implementations.
It's also very easy to wrap together a shell script that imitates the existing implementations and put it to/bin/chown or whatever you wish to replace.
Linux is a better product and is growing like hell in both the server and client market. So... Anybody who knows anything worthwhile about computers knows about Linux, and anybody who is into computers in a heavy way uses Linux.
How about people (such as you and me) just donated a bit of their time to make the system better instead of praising it like a Borg drone programmed to repeat a message. I guess that might be too much to ask for some people, but I'm asking anyway. The constructive way is to investigate what makes people use other systems (like MS Windows, MacOS, or Solaris) and enhance free systems to comply with the needs of these people.
Most people never even heard of Linux/GNU, let alone knowing the advantages. Your grandma probably have seen Microsoft advertisement before, but try asking her what GNU is. Unless you want to keep Linux to geeks, true marketing is necessary.
You are correct that there are lots of people who have no idea what Linux or GNU are. But there are also lots of people who have no idea what Microsoft or Windows are (such as my grandma:)). If you sit these people in front of a Windows+IE computer and then in front of a Linux+Mozilla computer, they may not actually notice any difference apart from slightly different icons (which are different between different Windows versions anyway).
Also, I'm still waiting for an explanation for the idiocy to put the text of a software somewhere else than in a simple to replace text file than mix it between the code.
Err, I think the GNOME and KDE projects do it exactly in the non-idiotic way. As far as I know, they can be translated by editing a simple text file. That means that people other than the actual developers can do the translation so very little developer time is wasted on that.
By the way, translating software to your own language (if it's something else than English) is a good way to offer volunteer support for your favorite piece of software even if you didn't know how to write code. It's something non-technical people can do.
It was very nice to read this at the South Asia IT mailing list (the one linked in the main story).
So.. yep,,, there's work being done. There're also KDE and GNOME development teams in Farsi, which is very close to Dari- the langugae of Afghanistan. Pashto is also similar. There was a demo of Frasi KDE while I was in Kabul and it has also generated some interests.
Good localization is really important for the non-western world. I really respect the GNOME and KDE projects for developing open framework that allows this with reasonable effort.
One thing I've been wondering is if many of the copyright holders are afraid of competition with the public domain. Some areas, such as literature, have this competition already because there are plenty of books in the public domain. However that's not exactly the case with pop music and movies.
From my experience, many of the CD's with classical music in public domain are often only 30% of the price of a popular music CD in public domain. That's not a big problem because classical music and popular music are two separate genres so the competition isn't all that significant.
What if the copyright was only 28 years and everything before 1975 would be in public domain? That would mean that we'd have lots of pop music and movies in public domain. Pre-1975 stuff isn't exactly the latest fashion but it can certainly compete with new music and movies. Pre-1975 would certainly be shown in television, heard on radio stations, sold on CD's etc. and that is something that makes me think that even if pre-1975 doesn't create all that much of money, preventing it from entering the public domain will help by making the competition easier.
The binary distributions usually come with a way to compile your own binary packages if you wish to inspect the source code. Just download the source RPMs or use "apt-get source". The "binary distributions" are generally binary and source distributions where you can choose whether you use prepackaged binaries or compile your own.
I once stumbled across a web site that sold some rather rare Star Trek fan products. They were rather cheap, some pins or something like that, I don't recall the details. Anyway, the items cost a few dollars and I thought I can easily afford to pay it.
The website and the company were located in the USA. Well, no problem, they can send mail from USA to Finland, where I live. Indeed, they could do that, but once I received the items, I faced a rather nice surprise. The items, that could fit to one letter, cost more than $20 to ship while it still took about six weeks in delivery.
While it might feel like a small world when you can reach a website anywhere in the world in less than a second, the physical distances are still big and transportation costs money. Bits are cheap to transfer but physical items aren't.
BTW, yeah, yeah; If SCO wins, there will be an appeal. However, the damage is already done. What business is going to wait and rely on a higher court overturning the ruling?
If SCO wins, SCO has won the SCO vs. IBM case over trade secrets. No other cases exist yet. They can't win anyone else unless they sue. Also, they can't sue anyone else about those specific trade secret violations. They must come up with something else.
I believe that the best counterargument to speculation around "what if SCO is right?" is "what if SCO is right about what?" They have made so many accusations (some of which are clearly false or conflicting with each other) that it doesn't make any sense to figure out what they're really about to do.
SCO can sue Linux kernel developers. Someone else can sue Microsoft Windows developers for something. Also, BSD developers and MacOS developers can be sued too as well as Solaris and QNX developers. But until there's a real lawsuit with real evidence, there's no point in worrying.
With offshore spammers and the like, who the f#(* is going to be able to enforce that?
The core issue in spam legislation is making sending of spam illegal, not to protect the citizens living in the state or nation the legislation is passed in. If sending spam is illegal in those offshore places, there's actually some chance that it can be enforced.
Now, of course for many people Michigan is a place somewhere far away. This Michigan law might help those people in getting the far-away spammers living in Michigan to shut down. In the end this will be a benefit for all Internet users (at least I hope so).
This is free market in action. The artificial scarcity created by government regulation (copyright) is way out of touch with the reality so the free market, even when it has to operate as a black market, will take care of the customer demand.
What needs to happen is serious consideration of how the supply can be kept running under these circumstances. One solution would be to allow unlimited music distribution as long as you don't charge any money for it. If the commercial exploitation of copyrighted material would still be an exclusive right of the copyright holder, I believe there is a big market where the copyright holder can make good profit. This would pretty much legalize the current practise where individual people can trade music online freely while the commercial distributors (e.g. CD sales) would have to pay.
Exactly. If you want the newest stuff you'll need to be running unstable/testing, if you want to make absolutely certain you don't have any problems then run stable. I run unstable and the only problem I ever had was whatever that recent problem with SSH was where it would disconnect randomly every now and then. That was annoying, but really not a big deal.
My biggest complaint about Debian stable is that it tries to achieve stability through completely freezing updates, even bugfixes (except for security-related updates). I run to a rather annoying OpenSSH bug in Debian Woody a few weeks ago. I managed to fix this by using "apt-get source ssh" and building my own OpenSSH package for Debian Woody but that took quite a bit of time (since I was not familiar with the Debian way of building packages) and I'm not quite sure if my patched package conforms to all Debian guidelines. For example, if a new OpenSSH security flaw is discovered and a security update will be available at security.debian.org, I have no clue how the version number conflict is solved.
Copy protection is like the war on drugs. It doesn't work. It's been tried for at least 20 years and the problem has only gotten worse. Remeber code wheels? And then the classic "page 36, paragraph 3, line 7, word 2". It only serves to make life more difficult for the legitimate user.
I believe that one of the major reasons in introducing new copy restriction technology is to get the legal system to protect that technology. The technology itself might not be so effective but if circumventing the restriction and the software and/or tools needed to circumvent the restriction are illegal, the otherwise ineffective restriction technology is actually much stronger.
Not trying to be a troll here, but it just seems to me that if you were to take open sourced software and released it closed source, unless you did it in the US, you would be fine, right?
I can think of two scenarios for countries outside the US:
The country recognizes and enforces copyrights (e.g. Australia and most European countries). The copyright is international so open source in these countries is just like open source in the US.
The country perhaps says it regognizes copyrights but does not really care of enforce them (e.g. some Asian countries). Since the government doesn't care about enforcing copyright, people can copy and modify the software as it were in public domain. This might not be strictly open source (since no one has to provide the source code) but you could still share binaries and source if you have them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's well understood that the SCO FUD machine is trying to reach as much publicity as it possibly can. This is why it is important to let the other side of the force to get some publicity as well. One way is to make links to sites that deal with the SCO FUD from Linux users' viewpoint in order to get better rank in search engines. One of the best sites is at sco.iwethey.org.
Please consider linking.
Yeah, if party A can prove that party B is infringing the rights of the party A, then the party B is in trouble. So far there's no trouble because there is no evidence.
Please stop helping the SCO FUD machine. They have not shown any evidence nor are they planning to.
I guess this is just yet another reason to switch from plain text e-mails to more secure alternatives.
Naturally it wouldn't make sense to teach nanotechnology jargon to general public, at least for the moment. However it would make a lot of sense if the people who work with nanotechnology would find appropriate terms in the local languages. If it goes mainstream, the language would already have an existing live vocabulary.
Using government regulations is a very bad way to protect a language. The Right Way is to introduce native words to a local vocabulary before it goes mainstream when the technology is still being adopted.
If they had started in 1993, they would have had a chance. In 2003, it's way too late.
The thing is, it doesn't. If they build a technical mechanism to catch shoplifters and that mechanism isn't reliable, it's not your problem. "Crime" is a concept defined by law, not technology.
Sure, they might not want to give you this impression, but it's their responsibility to prove that you are guilty of something and if their technology can't give enough proof, the technology is nothing more but a way to scare people. Picking something from a shelf may be proof in some cases, in some cases it isn't.
If you know that you've not stolen anything (which should be rather easy to know...), stand up for your rights if you're accused of something.
That is kind of like asking "how is it possible that the government locks everyone with the letter 'e' in their name to prison?" Stupid things can be done. If a government agency grants a patent to such a method and other governments in the world agree and assist with enforcing it, then it is possible.
This has, of course, nothing to do with the purpose of the patent system. The purpose of patent system is to make inventors to share their inventions with the general public. In return, the general public grants the inventor an exclusive right to the method for a limited time. However, nowadays the idea of benefit to the general public has been completely lost.
I suggest that African and European swallow are used as reference implementations.
Where in the article it was stated or otherwise implied that Microsoft is acting immorally? As far as I can see, it just mentioned that Microsoft got a deal while many hope that Linux would have got it. I see no references to unfair or immoral practises, just that it's unfortunate Linux wasn't chosen.
Another possibility is if what Microsoft ships along its OS will become irrelevant. (I don't think this is likely to change soon but changes are always possible.)
So, how well do the MS Office document filters work with procmail and spamassassin?
Are you so sure that you would hate it? After reading the PDF, I was thinking of two things:
I don't think it's any more radical than treating network sockets as files. Sure, it might feel a little weird first, but once you'd get used to it, the simplicity would overweigh the clumsiness of existing implementations.
It's also very easy to wrap together a shell script that imitates the existing implementations and put it to /bin/chown or whatever you wish to replace.
How about people (such as you and me) just donated a bit of their time to make the system better instead of praising it like a Borg drone programmed to repeat a message. I guess that might be too much to ask for some people, but I'm asking anyway. The constructive way is to investigate what makes people use other systems (like MS Windows, MacOS, or Solaris) and enhance free systems to comply with the needs of these people.
You are correct that there are lots of people who have no idea what Linux or GNU are. But there are also lots of people who have no idea what Microsoft or Windows are (such as my grandma :)). If you sit these people in front of a Windows+IE computer and then in front of a Linux+Mozilla computer, they may not actually notice any difference apart from slightly different icons (which are different between different Windows versions anyway).
Err, I think the GNOME and KDE projects do it exactly in the non-idiotic way. As far as I know, they can be translated by editing a simple text file. That means that people other than the actual developers can do the translation so very little developer time is wasted on that.
By the way, translating software to your own language (if it's something else than English) is a good way to offer volunteer support for your favorite piece of software even if you didn't know how to write code. It's something non-technical people can do.
It was very nice to read this at the South Asia IT mailing list (the one linked in the main story).
Good localization is really important for the non-western world. I really respect the GNOME and KDE projects for developing open framework that allows this with reasonable effort.
One thing I've been wondering is if many of the copyright holders are afraid of competition with the public domain. Some areas, such as literature, have this competition already because there are plenty of books in the public domain. However that's not exactly the case with pop music and movies.
From my experience, many of the CD's with classical music in public domain are often only 30% of the price of a popular music CD in public domain. That's not a big problem because classical music and popular music are two separate genres so the competition isn't all that significant.
What if the copyright was only 28 years and everything before 1975 would be in public domain? That would mean that we'd have lots of pop music and movies in public domain. Pre-1975 stuff isn't exactly the latest fashion but it can certainly compete with new music and movies. Pre-1975 would certainly be shown in television, heard on radio stations, sold on CD's etc. and that is something that makes me think that even if pre-1975 doesn't create all that much of money, preventing it from entering the public domain will help by making the competition easier.
The binary distributions usually come with a way to compile your own binary packages if you wish to inspect the source code. Just download the source RPMs or use "apt-get source". The "binary distributions" are generally binary and source distributions where you can choose whether you use prepackaged binaries or compile your own.
I once stumbled across a web site that sold some rather rare Star Trek fan products. They were rather cheap, some pins or something like that, I don't recall the details. Anyway, the items cost a few dollars and I thought I can easily afford to pay it.
The website and the company were located in the USA. Well, no problem, they can send mail from USA to Finland, where I live. Indeed, they could do that, but once I received the items, I faced a rather nice surprise. The items, that could fit to one letter, cost more than $20 to ship while it still took about six weeks in delivery.
While it might feel like a small world when you can reach a website anywhere in the world in less than a second, the physical distances are still big and transportation costs money. Bits are cheap to transfer but physical items aren't.
If SCO wins, SCO has won the SCO vs. IBM case over trade secrets. No other cases exist yet. They can't win anyone else unless they sue. Also, they can't sue anyone else about those specific trade secret violations. They must come up with something else.
I believe that the best counterargument to speculation around "what if SCO is right?" is "what if SCO is right about what?" They have made so many accusations (some of which are clearly false or conflicting with each other) that it doesn't make any sense to figure out what they're really about to do.
SCO can sue Linux kernel developers. Someone else can sue Microsoft Windows developers for something. Also, BSD developers and MacOS developers can be sued too as well as Solaris and QNX developers. But until there's a real lawsuit with real evidence, there's no point in worrying.
The core issue in spam legislation is making sending of spam illegal, not to protect the citizens living in the state or nation the legislation is passed in. If sending spam is illegal in those offshore places, there's actually some chance that it can be enforced.
Now, of course for many people Michigan is a place somewhere far away. This Michigan law might help those people in getting the far-away spammers living in Michigan to shut down. In the end this will be a benefit for all Internet users (at least I hope so).
This is free market in action. The artificial scarcity created by government regulation (copyright) is way out of touch with the reality so the free market, even when it has to operate as a black market, will take care of the customer demand.
What needs to happen is serious consideration of how the supply can be kept running under these circumstances. One solution would be to allow unlimited music distribution as long as you don't charge any money for it. If the commercial exploitation of copyrighted material would still be an exclusive right of the copyright holder, I believe there is a big market where the copyright holder can make good profit. This would pretty much legalize the current practise where individual people can trade music online freely while the commercial distributors (e.g. CD sales) would have to pay.
My biggest complaint about Debian stable is that it tries to achieve stability through completely freezing updates, even bugfixes (except for security-related updates). I run to a rather annoying OpenSSH bug in Debian Woody a few weeks ago. I managed to fix this by using "apt-get source ssh" and building my own OpenSSH package for Debian Woody but that took quite a bit of time (since I was not familiar with the Debian way of building packages) and I'm not quite sure if my patched package conforms to all Debian guidelines. For example, if a new OpenSSH security flaw is discovered and a security update will be available at security.debian.org, I have no clue how the version number conflict is solved.
I believe that one of the major reasons in introducing new copy restriction technology is to get the legal system to protect that technology. The technology itself might not be so effective but if circumventing the restriction and the software and/or tools needed to circumvent the restriction are illegal, the otherwise ineffective restriction technology is actually much stronger.
I can think of two scenarios for countries outside the US: