They've claimed that they like BSD, just not Linux's GPL... Soooo... why don't they just use the BSD License?
It seems to me that the new shared source code license is a viral license. At least I can't think of any other way to interpret the third condition.
3. That if you distribute the Software in source code form you do so only under this license (i.e. you must include a complete copy of this license with your distribution), and if you distribute the Software solely in object form you only do so under a license that complies with this license.
It seems that Microsoft likes BSD license only in one-directional way: BSD license is good when others write code but not when they write it. That's kind of like the one-directional way most people like taxes: it's bad when you have to pay them but great if other people's tax money covers your own expenses.
SuSE seems stable as all hell, and it's hardware detection is second to none. I'm suprised nobody else has something like suse's little hwscan program (or do they). I just pop in a USB device (like a cdrw or a floppy drive) and it's configured, and appears on my KDE desktop. It's automagical.
As far as I understand, many tools SuSE has developed for their own distribution are not available under GPL or some other free software license. The tools Mandrake and Red Hat develop can usually be used in other distributions while SuSE tools, especially YaST, can't be.
i think its the worst kind of spam possible. no other spam msg has made me feel so helpless and so angry. The fact is only hotmail itself could spam its users in this manner...they have a system where the "this is junk mail", "block sender" buttons etc, do not even appear when u view the msg.
I haven't read Hotmail terms of use and I don't feel like reading that legal stuff either, but at least in theory it would be completely acceptable to run a free public e-mail service that gets its income from sending advertisements to the users. Spam is, by definition, always unsolicited. If you have registered a free e-mail address and you've agreed the terms of use that give the provider the right to send you advertisements, then you have opted in.
I thought you could send an email to a machine at your cell phone service provider and this would then be sent to your phone as an SMS message. If this is true how can SMS be traced anybetter than email?
I doubt there are any machines that accept unlimited number of SMS messages to be relayed for free from untrusted sources. This naturally excludes cracking but as far as I am aware, the telecommunication networks don't have as major problems as the Internet has with all the misconfigured relays and proxies. Because the telecommunication networks generally put the costs of the connection to the sender, the ability to trace the sender is also a technical requirement.
Disclaimer: I am not very familiar with the way the SMS messages are relayed so this comment is just common sense logic applied to the situation.
...they're planning to enforce this how? Not that I don't appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think saying "don't spam" is going to mean much to the Nigerians who keep promising me untold riches. Still, I suppose you have to start somewhere.
I assume you are thinking of e-mail instead of SMS messages to cell phones. The SMS messages can be traced accurately enough and thus whatever punishments laws or regulations set, they can be enforced.
Maybethe university administrators have more important things to do (like, say, running a university) than hunting down students dling mp3's.
Recently there was a story about spammers using students as relays. If it was up to me, I'd say that the university administrators should spend time hunting the spammers.
The biggest problem, from the perspective of law, is that no one but very few people care about illegal filesharing. If I start sharing files illegally from my home computer, it's not like anyone would care (with the exception of a few companies the media giants fund). If I started sending spam, I'd be having hard time trying to keep my connection to the net because there are people who would immediately try to trace and report my actions. Illegal filesharing is not frowned upon like most other crimes are. That's a fundamental problem that all the anti-p2p measures have failed to address. If they are serious about fighting illegal filesharing, they need to get the support of netizens and so far "they" have done nothing but stomp on our rights and values.
Ok. I'm a Linux, more specifically a Unix "expert" and I can see nothing wrong with Mandrake:
One problem is that currently Mandrake is only for x86 hardware. If I recall correctly, they had PPC port earlier but they have dropped it. This problem naturally doesn't bother people with only IA32 architechture but it means that for people with different hardware, Mandrake is not a possible solution.
MS is, in my view, breaking new ground with this; some people may not like what they are doing, but you have to admit that nobody else is putting this stuff into their OS (when there is clearly a need for it).
The problem with MS software is that after all these years it still has elemental flaws in its software. Before talking about things like confidential e-mail, they should consider supporting plaintext ASCII messages in their e-mail software. MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express choked (maybe they still do?) on messages that start with the word "begin" followed by two spaces. Their fix? You should use the word "commence" instead.
Given the nature of the BSD license (w/o the advertising clause), I fail to see how modifying the copyright notices is copyright infringement. The same for GPL, as long as the new code is still GPL.
I admit that I don't know how the copyright issues go here. But one thing that I'm wondering is if they have been close to committing a simple fraud.
If I'm selling a CD that has free software source code I haven't written and I claim that I've written all the source, isn't that like selling oranges when I'm saying I'm selling apples? I've not seen the MicroBSD project selling any CD's but sooner or later issues like this might have become a problem.
I know that there are lots of jokes with "In Soviet Russia..." but this has happened for real.
My grandparents were visiting the Soviet Union about 25 years ago as tourists. When entering the country, they had not only their passports checked but also all their luggage and whatever they had brought along checked throughoutly. My grandmother had a women's magazine that she read while traveling. The magazine had an article about nursing babies and it had a picture of a naked baby in one page. It certainly wasn't offensive to the ordinary people who read such magazines and it had no sexual or violent content whatsoever. But the officers considered it as child pornography and didn't allow it to enter the Soviet Union. If I recall correctly, my grandmother simply threw the magazine away in frustration due the delay.
So what was the problem? The problem was that both the legislators and the people who observe the law were entirely incompetent. It's entirely wrong to put ISP techies to watch the content. How are they supposed to know what constitutes as child pornography? Surely there are some standards for that but shouldn't it be up to the police and courts to interpret the standards? Well, obviously that would mean that the government would practise censorship which is definitely out of line. So the clever trick is to pass a censorship law but make private companies to implement it. That way it might look better but it's still exactly the same issue.
Why did they test only one free software kernel while testing four proprietary ones? I'm not saying that if, say, a *BSD kernel was used, the results would necessarily be something else, but making general statements of open code by examining only one open project is certainly not very accurate. Although I suspect that these inaccurate conclusions are more in the Slashdot side than in the study.
http://www.antispews.org/ the SPEWS fansite (not!)
Heh, this antispews.org money-making scam is a rather funny one. Strangely enough the Hostway Corporation started hosting the site three days after t3marketing lost their lawsuit against Joe McNicol. The Hostway Corporation is behind the t3marketing and many other "direct marketing" buggers. So it's no wonder that they are listed in SPEWS and using every possible way - sue spamfighters, spread FUD, etc. - to help them to continue poison our mailboxes.
That being said, I'm not sure if the SPEWS way of doing things is such a good idea but the antispews.org site is still run by spammers and should be treated as such.
Additionally translations might generate practical limitations. If a text was written in ancient Greece and translated to English or some other language in the 20th century, the translation might not be public domain even when the original work is. Of course you are free to read the original text or make a new translation. Anyway even if a piece of literature was public domain, the translation to your native language might not be.
Signed agreements? Is this really open? I don't remember signing anything before being able to look at RedHat source...
It's not "open source" or "free software" in any, even remote meaning, of the concepts. But I don't think that's the point. The point is that non-US governments use systems in places where there are big financial factors and even national security might be involved.
For example, it would be very bad for Russia if solitaire.exe sent classified military data to a foreign country. Or if computers in Brussels sent classified EU documents. One can naturally ask that who would ever use a Microsoft OS in an environment where security is an issue. Well, IMO, that's what Microsoft seems to be concerned about.
There's European Digital Rights (EDRI) that is supposed to help the national European digital rights organizations to work together. Unfortunately most of the activity is still in national level while most of the new directives threatening freedom are planned in the European Union bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
An anonymous writer at kerneltrap.org provided this link for a working exploit:
http://isec.pl/cliph/isec-ptrace-kmod-exploit.c
It seems to me that the new shared source code license is a viral license. At least I can't think of any other way to interpret the third condition.
It seems that Microsoft likes BSD license only in one-directional way: BSD license is good when others write code but not when they write it. That's kind of like the one-directional way most people like taxes: it's bad when you have to pay them but great if other people's tax money covers your own expenses.
As far as I understand, many tools SuSE has developed for their own distribution are not available under GPL or some other free software license. The tools Mandrake and Red Hat develop can usually be used in other distributions while SuSE tools, especially YaST, can't be.
I haven't read Hotmail terms of use and I don't feel like reading that legal stuff either, but at least in theory it would be completely acceptable to run a free public e-mail service that gets its income from sending advertisements to the users. Spam is, by definition, always unsolicited. If you have registered a free e-mail address and you've agreed the terms of use that give the provider the right to send you advertisements, then you have opted in.
I doubt there are any machines that accept unlimited number of SMS messages to be relayed for free from untrusted sources. This naturally excludes cracking but as far as I am aware, the telecommunication networks don't have as major problems as the Internet has with all the misconfigured relays and proxies. Because the telecommunication networks generally put the costs of the connection to the sender, the ability to trace the sender is also a technical requirement.
Disclaimer: I am not very familiar with the way the SMS messages are relayed so this comment is just common sense logic applied to the situation.
I assume you are thinking of e-mail instead of SMS messages to cell phones. The SMS messages can be traced accurately enough and thus whatever punishments laws or regulations set, they can be enforced.
Recently there was a story about spammers using students as relays. If it was up to me, I'd say that the university administrators should spend time hunting the spammers.
The biggest problem, from the perspective of law, is that no one but very few people care about illegal filesharing. If I start sharing files illegally from my home computer, it's not like anyone would care (with the exception of a few companies the media giants fund). If I started sending spam, I'd be having hard time trying to keep my connection to the net because there are people who would immediately try to trace and report my actions. Illegal filesharing is not frowned upon like most other crimes are. That's a fundamental problem that all the anti-p2p measures have failed to address. If they are serious about fighting illegal filesharing, they need to get the support of netizens and so far "they" have done nothing but stomp on our rights and values.
One problem is that currently Mandrake is only for x86 hardware. If I recall correctly, they had PPC port earlier but they have dropped it. This problem naturally doesn't bother people with only IA32 architechture but it means that for people with different hardware, Mandrake is not a possible solution.
The problem with MS software is that after all these years it still has elemental flaws in its software. Before talking about things like confidential e-mail, they should consider supporting plaintext ASCII messages in their e-mail software. MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express choked (maybe they still do?) on messages that start with the word "begin" followed by two spaces. Their fix? You should use the word "commence" instead.
I admit that I don't know how the copyright issues go here. But one thing that I'm wondering is if they have been close to committing a simple fraud.
If I'm selling a CD that has free software source code I haven't written and I claim that I've written all the source, isn't that like selling oranges when I'm saying I'm selling apples? I've not seen the MicroBSD project selling any CD's but sooner or later issues like this might have become a problem.
I know that there are lots of jokes with "In Soviet Russia..." but this has happened for real.
My grandparents were visiting the Soviet Union about 25 years ago as tourists. When entering the country, they had not only their passports checked but also all their luggage and whatever they had brought along checked throughoutly. My grandmother had a women's magazine that she read while traveling. The magazine had an article about nursing babies and it had a picture of a naked baby in one page. It certainly wasn't offensive to the ordinary people who read such magazines and it had no sexual or violent content whatsoever. But the officers considered it as child pornography and didn't allow it to enter the Soviet Union. If I recall correctly, my grandmother simply threw the magazine away in frustration due the delay.
So what was the problem? The problem was that both the legislators and the people who observe the law were entirely incompetent. It's entirely wrong to put ISP techies to watch the content. How are they supposed to know what constitutes as child pornography? Surely there are some standards for that but shouldn't it be up to the police and courts to interpret the standards? Well, obviously that would mean that the government would practise censorship which is definitely out of line. So the clever trick is to pass a censorship law but make private companies to implement it. That way it might look better but it's still exactly the same issue.
Why did they test only one free software kernel while testing four proprietary ones? I'm not saying that if, say, a *BSD kernel was used, the results would necessarily be something else, but making general statements of open code by examining only one open project is certainly not very accurate. Although I suspect that these inaccurate conclusions are more in the Slashdot side than in the study.
...and it gets to the Slashdot frontpage.
Heh, this antispews.org money-making scam is a rather funny one. Strangely enough the Hostway Corporation started hosting the site three days after t3marketing lost their lawsuit against Joe McNicol. The Hostway Corporation is behind the t3marketing and many other "direct marketing" buggers. So it's no wonder that they are listed in SPEWS and using every possible way - sue spamfighters, spread FUD, etc. - to help them to continue poison our mailboxes.
That being said, I'm not sure if the SPEWS way of doing things is such a good idea but the antispews.org site is still run by spammers and should be treated as such.
Additionally translations might generate practical limitations. If a text was written in ancient Greece and translated to English or some other language in the 20th century, the translation might not be public domain even when the original work is. Of course you are free to read the original text or make a new translation. Anyway even if a piece of literature was public domain, the translation to your native language might not be.
It's not "open source" or "free software" in any, even remote meaning, of the concepts. But I don't think that's the point. The point is that non-US governments use systems in places where there are big financial factors and even national security might be involved.
For example, it would be very bad for Russia if solitaire.exe sent classified military data to a foreign country. Or if computers in Brussels sent classified EU documents. One can naturally ask that who would ever use a Microsoft OS in an environment where security is an issue. Well, IMO, that's what Microsoft seems to be concerned about.
There's European Digital Rights (EDRI) that is supposed to help the national European digital rights organizations to work together. Unfortunately most of the activity is still in national level while most of the new directives threatening freedom are planned in the European Union bodies.