Microsoft is browbeating eBay into stopping the sale of legitimate merchandise which Microsoft doesn't want sold. (Not that eBay is blameless in this either.)
Would the company have advised its users that they might have weak keys that should be revoked? Or would they fix the flaw silently and keep their customers in the dark?
Open source has other advantages for the consumer.
If you send an unsigned message, then ANYONE can corrupt it, alter it, or trunctuate it.
The idea of message signing is to PREVENT such things. If you don't sign your message, why are you expecting PGP to protect you against attacks which only message-signing would prevent?
There are two rules with PGP:
1. If you don't want anyone without the correct key reading the message, encrypt it.
2. If you don't want anyone to undetectably alter the message, SIGN IT.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
This is my observation, it is not my moral judgement on either side of the issue.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
Music and all forms of artistic work are changing, as copyright is becoming harder to enforce or protect. The entertainment industry that depends on it might hold back the tide and keep a repressive status quo. They might not.
We might have 1/10 the number of band's in 20 years. We might have 10x the number. Nobody knows the mid-term or long-term consequences of letting the clock tick. We DO know that the industry as it is now will be radically changed. But, we can make some guesses (with DMCA, UCITA, Sony Bono copyright act, or WIPO) as to what will happen if the clock gets stopped.
The only people guarenteed to win are those who have a product that other people want and are willing to voluntarily pay for.
You have a claim that there was a benefit in forcing OEM's to install the `free' IE 3.0 into Win95. Just because it has benefits isn't enough. There are lots of benefits in bundling (say) a free version of Visual Studio, or a free version of Office into every install of Win98/Win2k. Why didn't they (then) pay netscape and bundle a free copy with every install of 95, instead of spending billions on their own web browser?
Why does Microsoft not do the first two bundlings? Because it would be anticompetetive and be the death-knell for every other office suite manufacturer, and applications development platform? Or do they not do it because they would make less money? Or do they not do it because they realize that this argument is a slippery slope. If they slide down too far within this 'bundling' idea, they'll be within range of the DoJ alligator and get bitten in half?
Software is software and so unlike the physical world because it is infinitely malleable. It is obvious that it's a stupid idea for your power company to 'bundle' a TV with their service. or for the grocery store to 'bundle' automobiles.
With malleable software and OS's, it's hard to divide between 'core system software' and applications. It doesn't sound nonsensical to 'tie' office into Win2k, or to 'tie' outlook or the web browser into it.
There are several GOOD reason's for tying office into Win2k. Finer integration, If it would benefit consumers,
I visit pages that have content I want. I bookmark and revisit pages that lead me to content I want. If Palm's website doesn't link to palmgear or their development section doesn't bookmark to the GCC cross compiler tools. I won't visit them.
I still remember the HP48 websites circa 4 years ago.. 95% of them were crap, just links to another site that was full of links to other crap sites.. Had ONE of those sites had a catagorized set of links, I would have bookmarked it in an instant. ``links to development software sites'' ``links to fan sites'' ``links to shareware sites'' ``links to math sites''....
Why not do the obvious thing? Make each page one giant GIF or JPEG image. You can use an imagemap to let people navigate.
Why don't you do THIS for your customers? It gives them exactly what they want, they can get pixel-level control of how their site looks. They can even digitize paper brochures and do it that way. And by ignoring all of the cruft with crappy HTML 4 different browsers on 5 different platforms, you can probably do the site cheaper and easier this way too.
HTML and pixel-accurate renderings are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. HTML isn't, wasn't and should NOT be designed for that. If you want something better, either design it yourself, or piggyback it on something which works and can be done today. JPEG or GIF or PNG.
If your customers want to look like idiots on the web, then I'm sure they'll like this. Not only this, you should ADVERTISE this advantage. ``The only web design company who's sites look EXACTLY how you want, on every browser on every OS.''
Had the US invaded, they would have to expect losses of well over a million men. They also expected that they'd have to kill off approximately one THIRD of the population of Japan to make them surrender.
Which is worse? Two nukes and a bluff, killing a hundred thousand people, or killing a MILLION american's, and a full third of the japenese?
Had the US invaded, they would have to expect losses of well over a million men. They also expected that they'd have to kill off approximately one THIRD of the population of Japan to make them surrender.
Which is worse? Two nukes and a bluff, killing a hundred thousand people, or killing a MILLION american's, and a full third of the japenese?
This sounds almost religious. You claim that those who have studied it have been 'brainwashed' by the heathens. You claim that the [religious] public can never be wrong. Yes, it is right to burn heathens at the stake. It couldn't be that we're ill-informed; It must be THEIR fault.
How many times has the public been wrong on some religious craze.. From power lines cause cancer (300 million spent, on a rumor), to breast implants (billions in lawsuits, and no evidence), to expelling students for wearing smelly aftershave. (Yes, this happened a couple of weeks ago.) These are such critical dangers that we must be protected from. The public can't be wrong in protecting us from smelly aftershave!
Here's a clue: EVERYTHING is dangerous. It's just a matter of degree.. Burning coal for electicity puts more radioactivity into the air than nuclear power does. Oil tankers can run aground. Refineries can blow up. Flying cross-country once a week give you the equivalent radiation of 10 whole-body X-rays a year.
You can't religiously claim that forbidding the use of fire is right, just because it could accidently burn down your neighborhood.
Nuclear energy is just another kind of fire, the fire of the burning atom trying to turn itself into iron.
They're liars, vandel's and thieves. They're willing to make our children starve to avoid contaminating the 'purity of nature' that is the world's farm.
I want nothing to do with them. Personally, just as they claimed that it was 'just' to lawn-mow those crops, I think it's just to burn down their headquarters.
That is the question after all. Is distributing it in two tarballs (One with the GPL libraries, the other with a closed-source program) a derivative work? If it is than this is in violation of copyright law, as you do not have permission to redistribute the GPL code (unless you distribute code for your own applications). If it is not than the GPL has lost most of its teeth.
Personally, I feel that it is. Your code depends on the GPL library and cannot function without it. In addition, when the closed-source program is run, it will be linked with the GPL library.
Thus, what you're talking about is a trivial workaround to try to get around the letter of the law and I *hope* that a court would see it as that.
Just as a thought experiment. Say I sold a collection of numbered and colored tiles and a sheet of paper with a numbered grid. The tiles are are all monochrome, but different colors. No copyright law has been violated. Now, say that someone bought the package and followed the instructions. They assemble the tiles by following the sheet of paper. What results is a giant picture of Mickey Mouse.
Yes, copyright is an implicit agreement.. It is a contract between the public and the copyright holder.
Can you explain to me why its fair to RETROACTIVELY change it? After all, Disney, by publicizing Mickey Mouse in the 20's did after all agree to the (28 years maximum) copyright term at that time. But, they seem to keep on buying lawmakers and getting them to change that agreement retroactively. How does retroactively changing the contract encourage people who origionally made their music under the old contract. If a 28 year copyright term was long enough for Disney to release Mickey Mouse in the 20's, then why does extending it retroactively encourage them to produce more?
I'll make a promise to any copyright holder that if they set the copyright term to the origional fixed term of 20 years that I won't duplicate anything. If they want to change the contract after they agreed to it, well, I see no moral reason to keep me from doing the same.
Can you imagine a copyright of 28 years? What things would be public domain? In only 7 years, we could freely use characters and films like the origional Star Wars. People could build collages of stills taken from I Love Lucy. Can you imagine what us fans of Doctor Who could do if we could rearrange and distribute the origional films and be free to make our derivative works? How about the Dragonriders of Pern?
With current laws, my kids might see StarWars or Doctor Who leave copyright. They wouldn't have a chance of seeing Dilbert leave copyright.
Our culture is being locked up by THEM retroactively changing their side of the bargain. StarWars, Star Trek, Dragonriders of Pern, I Love Lucy, Mickey Mouse, 2001: A space Oddysee, Ringworld, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Cinderella (the disney movie).
Thomas Nast, the creator of Santa Clause, died in 1902. If the copyright term was as long then as it is now, Santa wouldn't have entered the public domain until 1977, the year I was born. If you're over 30 years old, can you imagine a childhood without Santa Clause? Having to pay the `Estate of Thomas Nast' everytime your school had a play. Or sitting on Santa's lap. You couldn't even paint Santa Clause and sell the painting! All this from a guy who's would have been DEAD for 60 years.
See: http://www.public.asu.edu/~dkarjala/what.html as a resource for the history and status in hostory.
Simcity for linux since 1995!?!
on
Motif's Not Dead
·
· Score: 2
According to the link given and looking up Dux Software, there SimCity for linux. The tarball for it has a datestamp of 1995!!!
They sell it nodelocked (WTF!?!?!), and at a price that makes you wince:
Single NodeLocked: $49.95 NodeLocked Multi Player: $69.95 Floating Single: $89.95 Floating Multi Player: $99.95
But its been out there for 5 years! Does this make it the first commercial game for Linux?
Only problem (other than the price) is that it needs either a 1-bit or 8-bit display.. I guess you can't have everything.
First, the information in their file is a trade secret. If they give it to you in a fashion whereby you can distribut it, the information is no longer trade secret. (Much like if Microsoft accidently some internal API docs, they can't claim trade secret protections.)
Since that keeps us from being under contract, we aren't obliged to keep the material confidential.
But!! There's a second part to this. While the information on it may no longer be confidential, the document itself is copyrighted. So while you do have the right to start sending the information within the document out to the world, I don't see where you have a right to send the document itself out into the world.
Rewrite the document into your own words, then you can make your version public domain. You cannot make Microsoft's version public domain as they have not assigned you the copyright.
What wilderness has been destroyed? Of the land in the US, only 2-3% is covered with cities and houses.
Wilderness has been *increasing* If I remember right, it has gone up over 40% in the last century. How and why? The reason is pretty simple. While our cities are growing slowly, the number of acres of farmland has been dropping precipitiously for decades. Farmland has always required many times the land of cities. We're growing more food with less land by fewer people for less money than ever before in history.
The percentage of the US covered in forests hasn't been higher than in centuries. At the rate we're going, in 50 years, there may be more trees in the US than there have been anytime in the last thousand years.
If this isn't good enough news, there's a lot more. The percentage of rivers and lakes in the US it is safe to fish and swim in has DOUBLED over the last 30 years. Air pollution has dropped by 2/3 over the same time period. And lead has been cleansed from our skies.
In many industrialized nations, the fertility rate has dropped below 2.0. Populations are still increasing though, because old people are living longer. But in a couple of decades there will begin to be a population decline.
There is so much great news to hear, but few people want to say it.
GPL is NOT shrinkwrap! Why won't people understand
on
Fighting UCITA
·
· Score: 2
GPL does not depend on shrinkwrap licenses at all. It does not restrict how one may 'use' or even copy an (unmodified) program. So thus, it does not depend on the pseudolegal idea of shrinkwrap contracts, unlike most commercial software.
A program distributed under the GPL gives you additional rights in COPYING that are normally forbidden by copyright law. It lets one distribute a program distributed under the GPL in an unmodified form.
The GPL does not take 'ownership' of any patches. If you patch a GPL program, the patches are yours. What you cannot do is to distribute the patched program. IE: you can license your patches under whatever license you want, but you cannot distribute the PATCHED program (the one that includes code you did NOT write.) without conforming to the terms of the GPL.
If you think about this, this is like an artist who says ``you can take my paintings and do anything you want, except to modify them. If you want to distribute modified copies, you can't remove my name from it and you have to send me $10 and a free sample.'' Here, the artist grants the explicit right to copy, but reserves the right to distribute modified version. This is all under copyright law. UCITA doesn't affect this transaction.
So, the GPL is something [that when applied to source code] grants you additional rights you would not otherwise have had. Shrinkwrap 'contracts', on the other hand, take away rights that are normally granted by law.
UCITA does not alter or affect GPL license in any fashion, other than potentially make it illegal to reverse-engineer code to see if it is illegally including GPL software.
Who is more valuable to society? The person who works on a farm, or the person who makes farming more productive.
If I worked on a farm, I could grow enough food to feed (say) 2 people. Say I create a new strain of corn so that each farmer can now grow food to feed 3 people. If there are a hundred farmers, I've increased the food produced by 50%, instead of the 2% from my own labor.
I am also in computer science. I am valuable to society not because I do manual labor, but by creating software and ideas that make other people more productive in their jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is browbeating eBay into stopping the sale of legitimate merchandise which Microsoft doesn't want sold. (Not that eBay is blameless in this either.)
Is this restraint of trade?
If this bug happened in proprietary software.....
Would it have ever been found?
Would the company have advised its users that they might have weak keys that should be revoked? Or would they fix the flaw silently and keep their customers in the dark?
Open source has other advantages for the consumer.
If you send an unsigned message, then ANYONE can corrupt it, alter it, or trunctuate it.
The idea of message signing is to PREVENT such things. If you don't sign your message, why are you expecting PGP to protect you against attacks which only message-signing would prevent?
There are two rules with PGP:
1. If you don't want anyone without the correct key reading the message, encrypt it.
2. If you don't want anyone to undetectably alter the message, SIGN IT.
The two are orthogonal considerations.
Funky! Check out their history . They started with wines and branched to owning DuPont, and bought up MCA (Universal Studio's) 4 years ago.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
This is my observation, it is not my moral judgement on either side of the issue.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
A master can say it better than me:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
Music and all forms of artistic work are changing, as copyright is becoming harder to enforce or protect. The entertainment industry that depends on it might hold back the tide and keep a repressive status quo. They might not.
We might have 1/10 the number of band's in 20 years. We might have 10x the number. Nobody knows the mid-term or long-term consequences of letting the clock tick. We DO know that the industry as it is now will be radically changed. But, we can make some guesses (with DMCA, UCITA, Sony Bono copyright act, or WIPO) as to what will happen if the clock gets stopped.
The only people guarenteed to win are those who have a product that other people want and are willing to voluntarily pay for.
You cannot integrate without bundling.
You have a claim that there was a benefit in forcing OEM's to install the `free' IE 3.0 into Win95. Just because it has benefits isn't enough. There are lots of benefits in bundling (say) a free version of Visual Studio, or a free version of Office into every install of Win98/Win2k. Why didn't they (then) pay netscape and bundle a free copy with every install of 95, instead of spending billions on their own web browser?
Why does Microsoft not do the first two bundlings? Because it would be anticompetetive and be the death-knell for every other office suite manufacturer, and applications development platform? Or do they not do it because they would make less money? Or do they not do it because they realize that this argument is a slippery slope. If they slide down too far within this 'bundling' idea, they'll be within range of the DoJ alligator and get bitten in half?
Software is software and so unlike the physical world because it is infinitely malleable. It is obvious that it's a stupid idea for your power company to 'bundle' a TV with their service. or for the grocery store to 'bundle' automobiles.
With malleable software and OS's, it's hard to divide between 'core system software' and applications. It doesn't sound nonsensical to 'tie' office into Win2k, or to 'tie' outlook or the web browser into it.
There are several GOOD reason's for tying office into Win2k. Finer integration, If it would benefit consumers,
I visit pages that have content I want. I bookmark and revisit pages that lead me to content I want. If Palm's website doesn't link to palmgear or their development section doesn't bookmark to the GCC cross compiler tools. I won't visit them.
....
I still remember the HP48 websites circa 4 years ago.. 95% of them were crap, just links to another
site that was full of links to other crap sites.. Had ONE of those sites had a catagorized set of links, I would have bookmarked it in an instant. ``links to development software sites'' ``links to fan sites'' ``links to shareware sites'' ``links to math sites''
Why not do the obvious thing? Make each page one giant GIF or JPEG image. You can use an imagemap to let people navigate.
Why don't you do THIS for your customers? It gives them exactly what they want, they can get pixel-level control of how their site looks. They can even digitize paper brochures and do it that way. And by ignoring all of the cruft with crappy HTML 4 different browsers on 5 different platforms, you can probably do the site cheaper and easier this way too.
HTML and pixel-accurate renderings are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. HTML isn't, wasn't and should NOT be designed for that. If you want something better, either design it yourself, or piggyback it on something which works and can be done today. JPEG or GIF or PNG.
If your customers want to look like idiots on the web, then I'm sure they'll like this. Not only this, you should ADVERTISE this advantage. ``The only web design company who's sites look EXACTLY how you want, on every browser on every OS.''
Had the US invaded, they would have to expect losses of well over a million men. They also expected that they'd have to kill off approximately one THIRD of the population of Japan to make them surrender.
Which is worse? Two nukes and a bluff, killing a hundred thousand people, or killing a MILLION american's, and a full third of the japenese?
Life sucks... Which would you reccomend?
Had the US invaded, they would have to expect losses of well over a million men. They also expected that they'd have to kill off approximately one THIRD of the population of Japan to make them surrender.
Which is worse? Two nukes and a bluff, killing a hundred thousand people, or killing a MILLION american's, and a full third of the japenese?
Which would you reccomend?
This sounds almost religious. You claim that those who have studied it have been 'brainwashed' by the heathens. You claim that the [religious] public can never be wrong. Yes, it is right to burn heathens at the stake. It couldn't be that we're ill-informed; It must be THEIR fault.
How many times has the public been wrong on some religious craze.. From power lines cause cancer (300 million spent, on a rumor), to breast implants (billions in lawsuits, and no evidence), to expelling students for wearing smelly aftershave. (Yes, this happened a couple of weeks ago.) These are such critical dangers that we must be protected from. The public can't be wrong in protecting us from smelly aftershave!
Here's a clue: EVERYTHING is dangerous. It's just a matter of degree.. Burning coal for electicity puts more radioactivity into the air than nuclear power does. Oil tankers can run aground. Refineries can blow up. Flying cross-country once a week give you the equivalent radiation of 10 whole-body X-rays a year.
You can't religiously claim that forbidding the use of fire is right, just because it could accidently burn down your neighborhood.
Nuclear energy is just another kind of fire, the fire of the burning atom trying to turn itself into iron.
They're liars, vandel's and thieves. They're willing to make our children starve to avoid contaminating the 'purity of nature' that is the world's farm.
I want nothing to do with them. Personally, just as they claimed that it was 'just' to lawn-mow those crops, I think it's just to burn down their headquarters.
Doesn't that remind you of UCITA?
DMCA
That is the question after all. Is distributing it in two tarballs (One with the GPL libraries, the other with a closed-source program) a derivative work? If it is than this is in violation of copyright law, as you do not have permission to redistribute the GPL code (unless you distribute code for your own applications). If it is not than the GPL has lost most of its teeth.
Personally, I feel that it is. Your code depends on the GPL library and cannot function without it. In addition, when the closed-source program is run, it will be linked with the GPL library.
Thus, what you're talking about is a trivial workaround to try to get around the letter of the law and I *hope* that a court would see it as that.
Just as a thought experiment. Say I sold a collection of numbered and colored tiles and a sheet of paper with a numbered grid. The tiles are are all monochrome, but different colors. No copyright law has been violated. Now, say that someone bought the package and followed the instructions. They assemble the tiles by following the sheet of paper. What results is a giant picture of Mickey Mouse.
Would that be a violation of copyright law?
Yes, copyright is an implicit agreement.. It is a contract between the public and the copyright holder.
Can you explain to me why its fair to RETROACTIVELY change it? After all, Disney, by publicizing Mickey Mouse in the 20's did after all agree to the (28 years maximum) copyright term at that time. But, they seem to keep on buying lawmakers and getting them to change that agreement retroactively. How does retroactively changing the contract encourage people who origionally made their music under the old contract. If a 28 year copyright term was long enough for Disney to release Mickey Mouse in the 20's, then why does extending it retroactively encourage them to produce more?
I'll make a promise to any copyright holder that if they set the copyright term to the origional fixed term of 20 years that I won't duplicate anything. If they want to change the contract after they agreed to it, well, I see no moral reason to keep me from doing the same.
Can you imagine a copyright of 28 years? What things would be public domain? In only 7 years, we could freely use characters and films like the origional Star Wars. People could build collages of stills taken from I Love Lucy. Can you imagine what us fans of Doctor Who could do if we could rearrange and distribute the origional films and be free to make our derivative works? How about the Dragonriders of Pern?
With current laws, my kids might see StarWars or Doctor Who leave copyright. They wouldn't have a chance of seeing Dilbert leave copyright.
Our culture is being locked up by THEM retroactively changing their side of the bargain. StarWars, Star Trek, Dragonriders of Pern, I Love Lucy, Mickey Mouse, 2001: A space Oddysee, Ringworld, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Cinderella (the disney movie).
Thomas Nast, the creator of Santa Clause, died in 1902. If the copyright term was as long then as it is now, Santa wouldn't have entered the public domain until 1977, the year I was born. If you're over 30 years old, can you imagine a childhood without Santa Clause? Having to pay the `Estate of Thomas Nast' everytime your school had a play. Or sitting on Santa's lap. You couldn't even paint Santa Clause and sell the painting! All this from a guy who's would have been DEAD for 60 years.
See: http://www.public.asu.edu/~dkarjala/what.html
as a resource for the history and status in hostory.
According to the link given and looking up Dux Software, there SimCity for linux. The tarball for it has a datestamp of 1995!!!
They sell it nodelocked (WTF!?!?!), and at a price that makes you wince:
Single NodeLocked: $49.95
NodeLocked Multi Player: $69.95
Floating Single: $89.95
Floating Multi Player: $99.95
But its been out there for 5 years! Does this make it the first commercial game for Linux?
Only problem (other than the price) is that it needs either a 1-bit or 8-bit display.. I guess you can't have everything.
So get it today, www.dux.com!
There's two parts to this:
First, the information in their file is a trade secret. If they give it to you in a fashion whereby you can distribut it, the information is no longer trade secret. (Much like if Microsoft accidently some internal API docs, they can't claim trade secret protections.)
Since that keeps us from being under contract, we aren't obliged to keep the material confidential.
But!! There's a second part to this. While the information on it may no longer be confidential, the document itself is copyrighted. So while you do have the right to start sending the information within the document out to the world, I don't see where you have a right to send the document itself out into the world.
Rewrite the document into your own words, then you can make your version public domain. You cannot make Microsoft's version public domain as they have not assigned you the copyright.
IANAL (of course)
The GPL lets you make derivative works based on a shared library. It just doesn't let you DISTRIBUTE those derivative works.
Just like I might make a picture and say ``its free for you to use on webpages, but you can't sell t-shirts with it.'', the GPL is the same way.
That's not taking away any rights you otherwise might have had. You're just bitching because its not giving you the rights you want.
Scott
What wilderness has been destroyed? Of the land in the US, only 2-3% is covered with cities and houses.
Wilderness has been *increasing* If I remember right, it has gone up over 40% in the last century. How and why? The reason is pretty simple. While our cities are growing slowly, the number of acres of farmland has been dropping precipitiously for decades. Farmland has always required many times the land of cities. We're growing more food with less land by fewer people for less money than ever before in history.
The percentage of the US covered in forests hasn't been higher than in centuries. At the rate we're going, in 50 years, there may be more trees in the US than there have been anytime in the last thousand years.
If this isn't good enough news, there's a lot more. The percentage of rivers and lakes in the US it is safe to fish and swim in has DOUBLED over the last 30 years. Air pollution has dropped by 2/3 over the same time period. And lead has been cleansed from our skies.
In many industrialized nations, the fertility rate has dropped below 2.0. Populations are still increasing though, because old people are living longer. But in a couple of decades there will begin to be a population decline.
There is so much great news to hear, but few people want to say it.
GPL does not depend on shrinkwrap licenses at all. It does not restrict how one may 'use' or even copy an (unmodified) program. So thus, it does not depend on the pseudolegal idea of shrinkwrap contracts, unlike most commercial software.
A program distributed under the GPL gives you additional rights in COPYING that are normally forbidden by copyright law. It lets one distribute a program distributed under the GPL in an unmodified form.
The GPL does not take 'ownership' of any patches. If you patch a GPL program, the patches are yours. What you cannot do is to distribute the patched program. IE: you can license your patches under whatever license you want, but you cannot distribute the PATCHED program (the one that includes code you did NOT write.) without conforming to the terms of the GPL.
If you think about this, this is like an artist who says ``you can take my paintings and do anything you want, except to modify them. If you want to distribute modified copies, you can't remove my name from it and you have to send me $10 and a free sample.'' Here, the artist grants the explicit right to copy, but reserves the right to distribute modified version. This is all under copyright law. UCITA doesn't affect this transaction.
So, the GPL is something [that when applied to source code] grants you additional rights you would not otherwise have had. Shrinkwrap 'contracts', on the other hand, take away rights that are normally granted by law.
UCITA does not alter or affect GPL license in any fashion, other than potentially make it illegal to reverse-engineer code to see if it is illegally including GPL software.
Who is more valuable to society? The person who works on a farm, or the person who makes farming more productive.
If I worked on a farm, I could grow enough food to feed (say) 2 people. Say I create a new strain of corn so that each farmer can now grow food to feed 3 people. If there are a hundred farmers, I've increased the food produced by 50%, instead of the 2% from my own labor.
I am also in computer science. I am valuable to society not because I do manual labor, but by creating software and ideas that make other people more productive in their jobs.