"What I find funny is that these are now to be found in leather, gilt edged volumes, printed on that same onionskin paper reserved once for bibles."
I actually own exactly such a copy. A person has to look pretty closely at it to distinguish it from an actual bible. One nice touch you forgot to mention was that it also has the permanently attached ribbon / bookmark thingy also usually found on bibles.
I just couldn't resist when I saw it on the bookstore's shelf.:)
Forgive me if this is redundant. I don't have time this evening to read the huge number of comments this story generated.
I do seem to recall, however, that in order to maintain copyright, one must enforce that copyright across the board. You can not enforce it selectively. If that is, in fact, correct, then this matter needs to be pursued aggresively regardless of Corel's lack of malicious intent. (After allowing a reasonable period of time for them to correct the error voluntarily, of course.)
Now that I've remembered that story, I'd like to read the article, too.:)
Unfortunately, I didn't read it, I saw it on some news program on television. Other than the information I posted above, the only other detail that might be useful is that I seem to recall the state that this took place in being Michigan. I could be wrong on that, though.
I'll do a little checking around. If I find any relevant details, I'll post them here.
To answer your question, yes, people are doing this.
At least I am, I can't speak for everyone.
Within the last three or four months I've purchased no less than seven CDs that I would have never considered had a friend not e-mailed me the mp3 and said "Check this out."
Two of these were artists appearing on mp3.com who for some strange reason have no major label deal even though they are infinitely more talented than much of the watered-down garbage I hear on my radio every day.
This case vaguely reminds me of another case I heard about a couple years ago. I'm a littly sketchy on the details, gut the gist of it was:
An undercover cop walks into a party. Asks a teenager if he had any drugs for sale. The kid says "No, but that guy over there might." The cop proceeds to buy a large amount of, if I recall correctly, cocaine from the person the kid pointed out.
The kid is prosecuted for his "active participation" in this drug deal, and since the amount purchased crossed over some legal limit in that state, he received a mandatory life sentence with no possibility for parole.
So this is not just an Internet issue. In both cases a fairly innocent teenager was prosecuted for nothing more than passing along information.
It seems to me that the prosecution of someone who merely points out where something is available is simply one more way our society has devised of removing responsibility from where it truly belongs: with the person actually committing a crime.
What's next? Do I get a speeding ticket for telling someone "If you push that pedal on the right further down, your car will go faster."
It's been a while since I read much detail on this, but my recollection is that he is not actually buying up the art itself, but the exclusive rights for electronic distribution of the art.
Meaning that if Encyclopedia Brittanica online includes a.jpeg of the Mona Lisa, BG gets a royalty.
If anyone has more accurate info, please correct me.
How many more times are we going to have to hear about the "technology gap" between the rich and poor? Yes, technology is a powerful tool. Yes, technology can be expensive. So what?
Having grown up in a country with a market economy, I was under the impression that if I wanted to make use of something expensive, I first needed to accumulate the funds required to purchase it. I have seldom (if ever) heard this notion challenged before. What makes computers different?
Cars are also a powerful tool. The ability to travel relatively large distances quickly is very empowering. Yet I don't see teary-eyed leftists rallying to buy me that new BMW Z3 I've got my eye on. Hell, nobody's even trying to raise money to buy me a rusty, beat-up Yugo. So instead I saved up some money and bought a car myself. This, IMO, is the way it should be. Yet now that the nation's technological illiterate have gained a fascination with this neato-keeno "new" thing called the Internet, we are supposed to make sure everyone has a computer whether they can afford it or not. Bite me. (Yes, I'm aware of the inelegance of the phrase, but if accurately reflects my feelings on the matter.:)
I was not born rich, and I'm not rich now. But since graduating high school and setting out on my own I _HAVE_ improved my situation significantly. I did it by working my ass off. Why is it politically incorrect to expect anyone else to do the same?
You made the point yourself that in the sofware industry the intellectual material is 99% of the value of the software. I could argue for 100%, but it seems silly to argue over one lousy percentage point.:)
In both cases, the part of the product with value is being stolen, so the scenarios are, if not the same, very, very similar.
Another factor that you're leaving out is that if I steal StarPlay's code (or Ford's design specs) and market the resulting product in a place where the owner is not marketing, I am severely damaging their ability to market there in the future. How much success will StarPlay have marketing Alley 19 in Europe if GT has already sold the game to everyone who wants it. This is a real loss. This does actual damage to their ability to generate revenue in the future by effectively eliminating one avenue of generating said revenue. (Just look at how Microsoft uses the vaporware strategy to prevent people from buying competitors products. This is done to preserve a potential market even when they have no product to sell. If potential markets were not extremely valuable, why would they bother?) The same argument could be easily adapted to tangible product such as your Taurus clone. It is also not relevant whether StarPlay actually intended to expand to Europe. Alley 19 is their product to do with as they see fit. If GT wants to market it to Europeans then they need to obtain a proper license agreement from StarPlay and cut them in on the profits.
You make some good points. I would, however, challenge the assumption that Europeans would not have bought this game had GT not "helped".
I don't know about you, but when I'm looking for a new game I don't browse the shelves at CompUSA or Best Buy. Anyone who's purchased even one video game knows that the screenshots on the package and description of the game tell you exactly nothing about how good the game is. Instead, I look for the game online, download the demo, and if I enjoy it head out to a retailer to purchase the full version.
It took me less than a minute to find the demo of Alley 19 on HappyPuppy (cheezy name, decent site). Part of that listing was a link to StarPlay's homepage. On StarPlay's front page was a link to their online order form.
So, yes, Europeans could have easily found out about and purchased Alley 19 had they so desired. GT was not providing them with access to anything that they could not already obtain.
Oh yeah. There's also the fact that GT had no right to market the product regardless of what StarPlay was doing. What GT did was no different than if I stole cars from dealerships in the US and opened my own lot in Berlin. This is clearly wrong even if GM chose not to market their cars to Europeans.
1. Titanic - Not a very entertaining movie altogether, IMO. And Leo was not even slightly believable in his role as a street-wise world traveller. The only good thing about this movie was getting to watch Leo's frozen corpse sink into the icy Atlantic.
2. The Quick and The Dead - Actually, I sort of enjoyed this movie. I just had a tough time believing this baby-faced little punk as a gunfighter. And this was before I had any idea who Leonardo DiCaprio was, so this opinion was definitely formed with no preconceptions.
3. What's Eating Gilbert Grape - Maybe I need to try watching this one when I'm really, really drunk. I found this movie to be one of the more tedious that I've seen. Hard to even sit through. And again, Leo was not believable in his character. The guy in Something About Mary does a far superior job of portraying a mentally disable person in a believable way.
4. The Man in the Iron Mask - A classic story, and a great movie. Such a great movie, in fact, that I enjoyed it even with Leo's poor acting. In this movie in particular, he seemed to be not acting, but merely reciting memorized lines.
The problem with that is that it would (in my mind) actually be far MORE difficult to colonize the moon with any significant number of people.
The moon is basically just a hunk of rock, meaning we would have to continually ship water, food, etc... up to the moon to sustain life there. I know of no feasable way to generate an atmosphere on the moon, meaning the inhabitants would have to remain enclosed in some sort of structure, never venturing outside for a breath of fresh air. Not very appealing to me.
Mars on the other hand, has an atmosphere, water, and soil. We (oversimplified explanation follows) simply need to scatter the surface of the planet with plant seed and tree saplings, which will grow at a highly accelerated rate in the CO2 rich atmosphere. The oxygen given off by these plants will, over time, make the Mars atmosphere breathable. This atmosphere conversion process will also create a greenhouse effect, warming the planet and melting the ice to provide inhabitants with liquid water. The big obstacle at this point seems to be efficient transportation. But that is a problem worth tackling given the higher quality of life people will enjoy on Mars as opposed to the Moon.
"I think we'll need to change our population before we can let the masses fly; get some more intelligence into the general mix of things;)."
Unfortunately, the current political environment, combined with basic Darwinism, pretty much guarantess that the general population will become LESS intelligent over time, not more. (at least here in the US)
why, exactly, would the existence of a logical contradiction make a time travel scenario impossible?
consider, for a second, the possibility that the paradox does not disallow time travel, it simply means that the paradox will have to resolve itself in ways that we may or may not be able to predict. given the highly theoretical nature of any discussion on time travel, i believe that the unpredictable resolution of the paradox is just as likely the case as the paradox disallowing time travel altogether.
of course, if this theory is the correct one, time travel would then be very, very dangerous.
Yes, causality would be preserved using a warp drive since nothing is travelling faster than light. Warp drive does not increase your velocity, it decreases the distance you must travel.
When I came to work here, the "server" was just a shared directory on my predecessors Win95 workstation. Needed rebooting 3 or 4 times a day to remain visible to the rest of the network.
After a couple of days, I noticed a few old 486's gathering dust in the back room. One trip home to grab my RedHat CD and we had an IP Masquerading Internet gateway, e-mail server, a fast and reliable file server, networked printing, and a MySQL based database server which I am currently converting our Access stuff to (thinking about going with Oracle, but MySQL has been great so far). A little negotiating with our ISP and a check to the InterNIC, and the whole office had full Internet e-mail, complete with our company name as the domain name. All using my boss's $20/month dialup Internet connection (It's now $60 since I switched it to a static IP). This should be upgraded to cable-modem access this month, providing TCI sticks to their schedule. The quoted price for the cable modem will be about $2 less than we pay for the dialup accound plus the dedicated business phone line.
Not a bad range of network services for a couple hundred bucks a year. I haven't even bothered to figure out what the same services would have cost had NT based solutions been used.
I never thought I'd see the day! Reading through the comments at the end of Jesse's article, his readers are now flaming him for being, of all things, ANTI-Microsoft!
Jesse Berst anti-Microsoft? Yeah, right.
It's funny. People say that Linux advocates are fanatical, yet look at how some of these Windows freaks react when Jesse kind of hints that Linux might be, in some situations, sort of OK. I wonder how many of these people wear slip-on shoes for the sole reason that they find those string things on some shoes just a bit too complex.
(OK, maybe that last comment was a bit immature, but after reading through so much cluelessness, I really felt the need to vent.:)
Did anyone else notice that on the "Runs under" line, they list Linux _first_, before the various Windows flavors? Very cool.
I'll definitely be buying a copy. I'd even buy one if I had no intention of playing it. Hell, I once chose a particular brand of cd-rom drive just 'cuz they listed linux under the supported operating systems, even though I knew full well that any drive on the shelf would work.
First off, I'm not a lawyer. My legal credentials consist primarily of 3 credit hours of a basic business law course that I pretty much slept through.:)
Now, based on my understanding of contract law, as soon as one party violates the terms of the contract, the other party is immediately released from having to fulfill their obligations under said contract.
So it seems to me that in Igor's case, as soon as the EULA was violated by Toshiba refusing to issue a refund, he was no longer bound by the EULA.
If that is the case, why could a person not, once MS or their representatives had broken the contract, simply start burning copies of the Windows CD and handing them out on a street corner?
Could someone with more legal knowledge explain why I'm wrong, as I'm almost certain I am.
Regardless of the outcome, this scenario could really do nothing but generate bad PR for MS once their enforcement efforts and the ensuing legal battle made the news.:)
Don't most musicians, and artists in general, get into it because they enjoy it? Those of you in garage bands, how many are doing it with the expectation of getting rich?
I don't think a lack of financial incentive would deter new musicians much, if at all. What it WOULD do (and this would be good, imho) is stop musicians from producing music after it ceased being enjoyable to them. I mean, come on, how many bands are there that used to be great, but began to suck soon after they became big stars and money came into the picture?
Kiss Rolling Stones Aerosmith Van Halen Metallica the list goes on and on....
These bands should have hung it up a long time ago, but still continue to churn out crap because there's a ton of money in it. Maybe if there wasn't so much money in music, there would be more _quality_ music.
I've had digital cable for almost six months now, and all things considered, I like it. Every now and then, if you look really, really hard, you can see a compression artifact or two. I'll learn to live with that considering I wouldn't even have those stations on the old analog system (yes, the channels I had with the old system are still analog). As far as the delay when changing channels, no big deal. The on-screen program guide is a much better way to see what's on, so the only time I change channels is when I already know what I'm going to watch. Never was much of a channel-surfer anyway.
The thing to remember about technology and the "digital revolution" (hate that phrase) is that it's full of trade-offs. All things considered, I think digital cable is still a much better service than the old analog cable, flaws and all.
While it's nice that you got the reply that you did, and it would probably be enough to protect you from legal action, it would REALLY be nice if some of these companies would take a glance at their license and make sure it says what they mean before releasing code under said license.
Not meant as a flame towards Raven, releasing the code was definitely a cool thing to do. It's just that I've seen this exact scenario repeating itself lately.
The value of releasing under the GPL seems to be that any application using the data set must also be GPL'd. There is no such restriction if the data set is public domain.
As the article said, the purpose here is to encourage the development of high quality GPL'd mapping and navigation programs.
Slashdot Mirror
"What I find funny is that these are now to be found in leather, gilt edged volumes, printed on that same onionskin paper reserved once for bibles."
:)
I actually own exactly such a copy. A person has to look pretty closely at it to distinguish it from an actual bible. One nice touch you forgot to mention was that it also has the permanently attached ribbon / bookmark thingy also usually found on bibles.
I just couldn't resist when I saw it on the bookstore's shelf.
Forgive me if this is redundant. I don't have time this evening to read the huge number of comments this story generated.
I do seem to recall, however, that in order to maintain copyright, one must enforce that copyright across the board. You can not enforce it selectively. If that is, in fact, correct, then this matter needs to be pursued aggresively regardless of Corel's lack of malicious intent. (After allowing a reasonable period of time for them to correct the error voluntarily, of course.)
Now that I've remembered that story, I'd like to read the article, too. :)
Unfortunately, I didn't read it, I saw it on some news program on television. Other than the information I posted above, the only other detail that might be useful is that I seem to recall the state that this took place in being Michigan. I could be wrong on that, though.
I'll do a little checking around. If I find any relevant details, I'll post them here.
Could I then be prosecuted for having a link to Slashdot on my page? :)
To answer your question, yes, people are doing this.
At least I am, I can't speak for everyone.
Within the last three or four months I've purchased no less than seven CDs that I would have never considered had a friend not e-mailed me the mp3 and said "Check this out."
Two of these were artists appearing on mp3.com who for some strange reason have no major label deal even though they are infinitely more talented than much of the watered-down garbage I hear on my radio every day.
This case vaguely reminds me of another case I heard about a couple years ago. I'm a littly sketchy on the details, gut the gist of it was:
An undercover cop walks into a party. Asks a teenager if he had any drugs for sale. The kid says "No, but that guy over there might." The cop proceeds to buy a large amount of, if I recall correctly, cocaine from the person the kid pointed out.
The kid is prosecuted for his "active participation" in this drug deal, and since the amount purchased crossed over some legal limit in that state, he received a mandatory life sentence with no possibility for parole.
So this is not just an Internet issue. In both cases a fairly innocent teenager was prosecuted for nothing more than passing along information.
It seems to me that the prosecution of someone who merely points out where something is available is simply one more way our society has devised of removing responsibility from where it truly belongs: with the person actually committing a crime.
What's next? Do I get a speeding ticket for telling someone "If you push that pedal on the right further down, your car will go faster."
Meaning that if Encyclopedia Brittanica online includes a
If anyone has more accurate info, please correct me.
Having grown up in a country with a market economy, I was under the impression that if I wanted to make use of something expensive, I first needed to accumulate the funds required to purchase it. I have seldom (if ever) heard this notion challenged before. What makes computers different?
Cars are also a powerful tool. The ability to travel relatively large distances quickly is very empowering. Yet I don't see teary-eyed leftists rallying to buy me that new BMW Z3 I've got my eye on. Hell, nobody's even trying to raise money to buy me a rusty, beat-up Yugo. So instead I saved up some money and bought a car myself. This, IMO, is the way it should be. Yet now that the nation's technological illiterate have gained a fascination with this neato-keeno "new" thing called the Internet, we are supposed to make sure everyone has a computer whether they can afford it or not. Bite me. (Yes, I'm aware of the inelegance of the phrase, but if accurately reflects my feelings on the matter. :)
I was not born rich, and I'm not rich now. But since graduating high school and setting out on my own I _HAVE_ improved my situation significantly. I did it by working my ass off. Why is it politically incorrect to expect anyone else to do the same?
In both cases, the part of the product with value is being stolen, so the scenarios are, if not the same, very, very similar.
Another factor that you're leaving out is that if I steal StarPlay's code (or Ford's design specs) and market the resulting product in a place where the owner is not marketing, I am severely damaging their ability to market there in the future. How much success will StarPlay have marketing Alley 19 in Europe if GT has already sold the game to everyone who wants it. This is a real loss. This does actual damage to their ability to generate revenue in the future by effectively eliminating one avenue of generating said revenue. (Just look at how Microsoft uses the vaporware strategy to prevent people from buying competitors products. This is done to preserve a potential market even when they have no product to sell. If potential markets were not extremely valuable, why would they bother?) The same argument could be easily adapted to tangible product such as your Taurus clone. It is also not relevant whether StarPlay actually intended to expand to Europe. Alley 19 is their product to do with as they see fit. If GT wants to market it to Europeans then they need to obtain a proper license agreement from StarPlay and cut them in on the profits.
I don't know about you, but when I'm looking for a new game I don't browse the shelves at CompUSA or Best Buy. Anyone who's purchased even one video game knows that the screenshots on the package and description of the game tell you exactly nothing about how good the game is. Instead, I look for the game online, download the demo, and if I enjoy it head out to a retailer to purchase the full version.
It took me less than a minute to find the demo of Alley 19 on HappyPuppy (cheezy name, decent site). Part of that listing was a link to StarPlay's homepage. On StarPlay's front page was a link to their online order form.
So, yes, Europeans could have easily found out about and purchased Alley 19 had they so desired. GT was not providing them with access to anything that they could not already obtain.
Oh yeah. There's also the fact that GT had no right to market the product regardless of what StarPlay was doing. What GT did was no different than if I stole cars from dealerships in the US and opened my own lot in Berlin. This is clearly wrong even if GM chose not to market their cars to Europeans.
1. Titanic - Not a very entertaining movie altogether, IMO. And Leo was not even slightly believable in his role as a street-wise world traveller. The only good thing about this movie was getting to watch Leo's frozen corpse sink into the icy Atlantic.
2. The Quick and The Dead - Actually, I sort of enjoyed this movie. I just had a tough time believing this baby-faced little punk as a gunfighter. And this was before I had any idea who Leonardo DiCaprio was, so this opinion was definitely formed with no preconceptions.
3. What's Eating Gilbert Grape - Maybe I need to try watching this one when I'm really, really drunk. I found this movie to be one of the more tedious that I've seen. Hard to even sit through. And again, Leo was not believable in his character. The guy in Something About Mary does a far superior job of portraying a mentally disable person in a believable way.
4. The Man in the Iron Mask - A classic story, and a great movie. Such a great movie, in fact, that I enjoyed it even with Leo's poor acting. In this movie in particular, he seemed to be not acting, but merely reciting memorized lines.
The problem with that is that it would (in my mind) actually be far MORE difficult to colonize the moon with any significant number of people.
The moon is basically just a hunk of rock, meaning we would have to continually ship water, food, etc... up to the moon to sustain life there. I know of no feasable way to generate an atmosphere on the moon, meaning the inhabitants would have to remain enclosed in some sort of structure, never venturing outside for a breath of fresh air. Not very appealing to me.
Mars on the other hand, has an atmosphere, water, and soil. We (oversimplified explanation follows) simply need to scatter the surface of the planet with plant seed and tree saplings, which will grow at a highly accelerated rate in the CO2 rich atmosphere. The oxygen given off by these plants will, over time, make the Mars atmosphere breathable. This atmosphere conversion process will also create a greenhouse effect, warming the planet and melting the ice to provide inhabitants with liquid water. The big obstacle at this point seems to be efficient transportation. But that is a problem worth tackling given the higher quality of life people will enjoy on Mars as opposed to the Moon.
"I think we'll need to change our population before we can let the masses fly; get some more intelligence into the general mix of things ;)."
Unfortunately, the current political environment, combined with basic Darwinism, pretty much guarantess that the general population will become LESS intelligent over time, not more. (at least here in the US)
why, exactly, would the existence of a logical contradiction make a time travel scenario impossible?
consider, for a second, the possibility that the paradox does not disallow time travel, it simply means that the paradox will have to resolve itself in ways that we may or may not be able to predict. given the highly theoretical nature of any discussion on time travel, i believe that the unpredictable resolution of the paradox is just as likely the case as the paradox disallowing time travel altogether.
of course, if this theory is the correct one, time travel would then be very, very dangerous.
Yes, causality would be preserved using a warp drive since nothing is travelling faster than light. Warp drive does not increase your velocity, it decreases the distance you must travel.
When I came to work here, the "server" was just a shared directory on my predecessors Win95 workstation. Needed rebooting 3 or 4 times a day to remain visible to the rest of the network.
After a couple of days, I noticed a few old 486's gathering dust in the back room. One trip home to grab my RedHat CD and we had an IP Masquerading Internet gateway, e-mail server, a fast and reliable file server, networked printing, and a MySQL based database server which I am currently converting our Access stuff to (thinking about going with Oracle, but MySQL has been great so far). A little negotiating with our ISP and a check to the InterNIC, and the whole office had full Internet e-mail, complete with our company name as the domain name. All using my boss's $20/month dialup Internet connection (It's now $60 since I switched it to a static IP). This should be upgraded to cable-modem access this month, providing TCI sticks to their schedule. The quoted price for the cable modem will be about $2 less than we pay for the dialup accound plus the dedicated business phone line.
Not a bad range of network services for a couple hundred bucks a year. I haven't even bothered to figure out what the same services would have cost had NT based solutions been used.
I never thought I'd see the day! Reading through the comments at the end of Jesse's article, his readers are now flaming him for being, of all things, ANTI-Microsoft!
:)
Jesse Berst anti-Microsoft? Yeah, right.
It's funny. People say that Linux advocates are fanatical, yet look at how some of these Windows freaks react when Jesse kind of hints that Linux might be, in some situations, sort of OK. I wonder how many of these people wear slip-on shoes for the sole reason that they find those string things on some shoes just a bit too complex.
(OK, maybe that last comment was a bit immature, but after reading through so much cluelessness, I really felt the need to vent.
Did anyone else notice that on the "Runs under" line, they list Linux _first_, before the various Windows flavors? Very cool.
I'll definitely be buying a copy. I'd even buy one if I had no intention of playing it. Hell, I once chose a particular brand of cd-rom drive just 'cuz they listed linux under the supported operating systems, even though I knew full well that any drive on the shelf would work.
First off, I'm not a lawyer. My legal credentials consist primarily of 3 credit hours of a basic business law course that I pretty much slept through. :)
:)
Now, based on my understanding of contract law, as soon as one party violates the terms of the contract, the other party is immediately released from having to fulfill their obligations under said contract.
So it seems to me that in Igor's case, as soon as the EULA was violated by Toshiba refusing to issue a refund, he was no longer bound by the EULA.
If that is the case, why could a person not, once MS or their representatives had broken the contract, simply start burning copies of the Windows CD and handing them out on a street corner?
Could someone with more legal knowledge explain why I'm wrong, as I'm almost certain I am.
Regardless of the outcome, this scenario could really do nothing but generate bad PR for MS once their enforcement efforts and the ensuing legal battle made the news.
Um, I actually had to do that this summer when I got my PII 400. Hopefully the new case I just bought will do better next year. :)
Here's a random thought that popped into my head:
Don't most musicians, and artists in general, get into it because they enjoy it? Those of you in garage bands, how many are doing it with the expectation of getting rich?
I don't think a lack of financial incentive would deter new musicians much, if at all. What it WOULD do (and this would be good, imho) is stop musicians from producing music after it ceased being enjoyable to them. I mean, come on, how many bands are there that used to be great, but began to suck soon after they became big stars and money came into the picture?
Kiss
Rolling Stones
Aerosmith
Van Halen
Metallica
the list goes on and on....
These bands should have hung it up a long time ago, but still continue to churn out crap because there's a ton of money in it. Maybe if there wasn't so much money in music, there would be more _quality_ music.
I've had digital cable for almost six months now, and all things considered, I like it. Every now and then, if you look really, really hard, you can see a compression artifact or two. I'll learn to live with that considering I wouldn't even have those stations on the old analog system (yes, the channels I had with the old system are still analog). As far as the delay when changing channels, no big deal. The on-screen program guide is a much better way to see what's on, so the only time I change channels is when I already know what I'm going to watch. Never was much of a channel-surfer anyway.
The thing to remember about technology and the "digital revolution" (hate that phrase) is that it's full of trade-offs. All things considered, I think digital cable is still a much better service than the old analog cable, flaws and all.
While it's nice that you got the reply that you did, and it would probably be enough to protect you from legal action, it would REALLY be nice if some of these companies would take a glance at their license and make sure it says what they mean before releasing code under said license.
Not meant as a flame towards Raven, releasing the code was definitely a cool thing to do. It's just that I've seen this exact scenario repeating itself lately.
The value of releasing under the GPL seems to be that any application using the data set must also be GPL'd. There is no such restriction if the data set is public domain.
As the article said, the purpose here is to encourage the development of high quality GPL'd mapping and navigation programs.