Unless I missed something, Microsoft only publicly said that they would not sue Mono over patents. They didn't say IP, because they did not want to implicitly grant Mono the use of.NET-related trademarks. They did not license the copyright on any.NET things to the Mono project either because, prior to this, a clean-room reimplementation did not require a copyright license.
Not just WINE. The Open Group, for example, would be able to charge royalties for any UNIX-like system implementing the APIs described in POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. AT&T might still own copyrights on the original UNIX and C library APIs (since they were not thought to be copyrightable, they would probably not have been transferred, but if they were then Novell may own them), so everyone who implements basic C stuff like printf() would be liable.
It actually gets worse than even that. If an API is copyrightable, then all of the law related to derived works also applies. That means that whoever copyrighted the first interface for an ordered collection can count any subsequent API that appears to be inspired by it as a derived work. Do you use subscripting for array indexing? Do you have an API for storing a key-value pair in an keyed collection? You probably owe someone money...
These things tend to go in bursts. People think of things to do with bandwidth, which drives demand, and eventually technology reaches it. There was a little peak in the '90s between 56K modems and Napster where internet connections where fast enough, then people started streaming music and they became too slow. For any reasonable quality, you needed at least a 100MHz Pentium to be able to listen to the music in real time. ADSL and cable modems took us past that, and 1Mb/s was fine up until people started streaming video, which again required faster processors. Now, iPlayer HD is 3.6Kb/s, and the quality is fine - noticeably better than DVD. Higher quality video isn't really that interesting and 8.4Mb/s is enough for two concurrent streams for a household.
I suspect for most users now the bottleneck is upstream, not downstream speed. Uploading photos and video clips is still pretty painful because most consumer ISPs are set up assuming that consumers are... consumers.
Suspected terrorist does not usually mean 'guy who looks a bit shifty' it means 'person against whom there is other evidence pointing at terrorism'. Evidence in a criminal case is not taken in isolation. If you have blood on your hands and are found standing next to a dead body, that's more suspicious than if you're in a butcher's shop. If you have a recently fired gun, then that won't mean the same thing if you're in a firing range as if you're in a bank during an armed robbery...
How do you know Microsoft Office respects your privacy, do you have access to the source?
You don't need it. It runs on your local machine, so you can check every network connection that it makes and, more importantly, you can trivially prevent it from making any network connections.
From what I've heard Microsoft at the very least keeps track of the hardware on which you run its software.
And the reason you know this (it's related to Windows Update, not MS Office specifically) is that people did intercept the data sent to Microsoft from Windows Update and found out exactly what was being sent.
On x86, at least, the basic drivers for getting things like interrupt and DMA controllers up and getting a VESA frame buffer and access to common HIDs (USB and PS/2 keyboards and mice, for example) are all open source. You may not be able to use the snazziest features of your hardware with open drivers, but you can at least use it. In contrast, most Android phones have blobs for the touchscreen, meaning you can't even use the standard input and output device with an open source build. The network (WiFi and cellular) drivers are also often blobs, and the sound drivers fairly often are. On a lot of pre-Cortex A9 devices, even the DMA and interrupt controllers use blobs. This means that you can't even get part way through the boot process with a completely open source build.
Perhaps it's just me, but I see a pretty big difference between 'can't get full performance from the 3D hardware without a blob driver' and 'can't boot without a blob driver'.
Interestingly enough; it seems to me that this is exactly the situation where the GPL shines through
Not at all. This is precisely the situation where the GPL is in decline. A lot of companies (Apple is the most prominent example, but since they're the tech company with the largest market cap, they're the most prominent example of a lot of things) are happy to open source everything that is not part of their core business, but not everything. Apple, for example, does not want to open source their IDE, but they do want to use the same parser in their IDE as in their compiler. GCC is GPL'd, so they can't do this. Older versions of XCode had to license EDG to parse C/C++ and had a custom Objective-C parser for syntax highlighting and autocompletion. With clang, Apple gets to use the code anywhere they want, so do Google and Adobe, and so do all other contributors, including me.
Now, in an ideal world, Apple would open source their IDE as well as their compiler, and that's the idea behind the GPL. Unfortunately, that's not how things tend to work in the real world. Given the choice between using some GPL'd code and open sourcing their own stuff and just writing a proprietary replacement, most companies will pick option 2: it's simpler and has less potential for hidden liability.
In theory, Apple could now take a fork of LLVM and Clang proprietary, but given the speed at which the internal APIs change they'd spend a massive amount of effort keeping it in sync with the mainline. In fact, we've seen some companies do exactly that with their OpenCL stack. Over the past year, almost all of them have given up, ditched their proprietary version, and started contributing to the mainline. If Apple started a proprietary fork, then the other contributors would just ignore it and it would quickly become the crappy Apple version, where anyone who really cared would get the mainline version.
Choose one under the GPL; then you know that your contributions and the fixes people make to them will come back to you.
Nope, only the fixes that people intend to distribute, and there's the other major problem: 90% of all software developers are employed writing code that is never distributed, it is just used in house. A lot of companies are willing to use a BSD licensed library in their in-house software and contribute back changes, but they're nervous about the GPL. Even though it doesn't require them to give anything back (see the GoogleFS in Linux. Or, rather, not in Linux, just in Google's in-house version of Linux), there is a perception that it requires them to open source everything it touches. So they either won't touch it at all, or they'll keep their use of it secret for fear of liability and not contribute anything back.
I work on a number of permissively licensed projects and a very common reaction to patches is to look at the company name of the sender and think 'WTF do you use this stuff for?' You'd be surprised where a lot of code ends up and who is willing to give things back without any fanfare...
Whenever we have this discussion it gets pointed out repeatedly that Apple must love F/OSS because they use so much of it
No, its pointed out that Apple must love F/OSS because they contribute to so much of it. Take a look at LLVM, WebKit, CUPS, and a number of other projects and see how many contributions are funded by Apple. They contribute to F/OSS for exactly the right reason: If two or more companies need the same thing, it's cheaper if they cooperate on implementing the same thing than if they each implement their own (incompatible) ones and keeping them private. Apple has ridiculous amounts of money, enough to easily fund developing their own compiler suite and HTML rendering engine, but if they contribute to LLVM and WebKit then the same amount of effort is added to the work by Google and others and the result is even better.
I called from Skype - the only time I've ever used Skype was to make free calls to 1-800 numbers in the USA before I got an account with a SIP provider that also offered that.
Of course SaaS providers would object to the GPLv3, it eliminated the ability for them to exploit GPL software
No it doesn't. The AGPL does, the GPLv3 still allows, for example, Google to use GPLv3 software on their servers for everything and not release any of the source code.
I have done a study on this, and I can now publish my findings, exclusively on Slashdot, for the first time:
Since this time last year, instances of the GPL in Slashdot dupes are now up by 300%, while instances of the Apache and BSD licenses remain at a constant level.
Flamewars about the merits of the GPL vs the BSDL are at an all-time high. In February, for the first time since 2010, they passed the number of Android vs iOS flamewars, and are currently recorded at over 11 on the vi vs emacs scale.
Comparisons between the FSF and the Nazis are up by 20%, but still significantly lower than any major tech company or political party. Apple, Microsoft and Google are all at record high levels on the Godwin scale, but Oracle has passed all three, with a stunning 400% increase after the takeover of Sun. IBM's record from the '80s is still unsurpassed.
IIRC, more than half of Foxconn's production is iStuff, all the other brands are under 10% each. So yeah, Apple has more say in that than Dell, Samsung, Amazon, Toshiba, and...
If I remember correctly, you just make stuff up. But since neither of us has a citation, let's move on...
Foxconn apparently makes 40% of the world's electronics and its customers include Amazon, Apple, Dell, HP, and numerous others. If Apple is really selling 20% of the world's electronics, then the company is doing a lot better than anyone thought...
Yup, nowhere except America manages to so completely miss the point of unions. In most of the world, unions work like this:
A group of people are elected to represent the workers. If there are unreconcilable difference of opinion between groups of workers, then you get two or more unions. Each can negotiate with the employers on behalf of their members, and can pretty much guarantee that the deal that they reach will be agreed to by most of their members because they actually represent their members. If you disagree with all of the unions, you are not forced to join any of them. Any deal negotiated by the unions is open to all workers, irrespective of union membership.
Meanwhile, in the USA, they work like this:
To get the job, you must be a member of the union. If you are not, then you must join immediately. There is only one union that represents people in your position. Only employees can be union officials, and anyone who gets elected without being open to bribes finds that they no longer have a job and must therefore resign. You must accept the deal negotiated between the company and their, sorry, your representative or you lose your job.
Probably, but not in the way you'd expect. Last I saw, 95% of all traffic to the root servers was caused by people making typos in domains. This makes sense, because most DNS caches will cache things like.com,.org,.relevant.ccTLD, and a few others. They'll also cache any new TLDs that people actually use. However, an increase in the number of TLDs means that there is now a much greater chance of making a typo. This is particularly true on mobile devices: most on-screen keyboards have a.com button, but require you to actually type other TLDs, and will autocorrect things randomly if you're not careful...
Corporate donations are spent on election publicity. The bribes (mostly) don't go into a personal fund for the politician, they go to getting that politician reelected. The only reason that corporations have so much influence over politicians is that the politicians know that if their campaign funding is reduced then they will lose the next election. And this is only true because voters are voting for the person who advertises the most, irrespective of their actual policies, opinions, and track record. Take a look at the last 30 years of presidential elections: in every case, the candidate who spent the most won.
If you want to reduce the influence of money from US elections, you need to educate voters so that they'll vote for the candidate that actually represents their interests and beliefs, not the one with the most flashy soundbite.
The more efficient a government is, the more power it accumulates. If it is more efficient than private enterprise, then companies (small or large) have no chance of competing. There are some things that private companies suck at (for example, providing healthcare and long-term research), where your only options are to have the government do it or have no one do it well. The more efficient a government is, the more things fall into this category. This has a few seriously negative side effects. The first is that it gives the government more control over the lives of the individual (at extremes, cases like Soviet Russia, where the state provides everything so the state gets to tell you exactly how to live your life). The second is that is makes more complex systems homogeneous and therefore difficult to adapt. If there are lots of competing options, it's easy for the bad ones to die off and the good ones to succeed. If there is just one - and it is backed by the force of law - then it may suffer long-term problems through lack of adaptability. Finally, there is the concentration of power. The government may be elected, but the high ranking civil servants are usually not, and are not directly accountable. The more you put in the hands of the government, the more power you give to these individuals. Good luck finding some who won't be corrupted by this...
No one who never wrote a book before is going to be able to write a decent one on their own the first time they try.
The only changes the editors made to my first book were fixing a few grammatical errors and typos (an average of about two per page), it got good reviews - they've just translated it into Korean (there are already Chinese and Japanese translations). Sure, the editor had some useful input, but nowhere near the amount that would be required to turn Mein Kampf into something other than a rambling mess (i.e. a complete rewrite).
Let's be clear, it's not just "thinking" that started religion, it's uninformed, ignorant thinking that started religion in the first place, and willfully arrogant, uninformed, ignorant thinking that kept it going for so long.
I think that's doing a gross injustice to early natural philosophers and their forerunners. Religion is the best explanation for a number of natural phenomena when you have little evidence other than 'light comes from the sky and cause fire'. The problem is not creating these explanations in the first place, it's refusing to abandon them when more evidence is presented.
How did I know, as I wrote that, people would fixate on the Apple part of my post, and not think of any other examples? That was the first that came to my mind, but there are hundreds of others.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you mean your CV doesn't list 1,500 years experience with J2EE?
Unless I missed something, Microsoft only publicly said that they would not sue Mono over patents. They didn't say IP, because they did not want to implicitly grant Mono the use of .NET-related trademarks. They did not license the copyright on any .NET things to the Mono project either because, prior to this, a clean-room reimplementation did not require a copyright license.
Not just WINE. The Open Group, for example, would be able to charge royalties for any UNIX-like system implementing the APIs described in POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. AT&T might still own copyrights on the original UNIX and C library APIs (since they were not thought to be copyrightable, they would probably not have been transferred, but if they were then Novell may own them), so everyone who implements basic C stuff like printf() would be liable.
It actually gets worse than even that. If an API is copyrightable, then all of the law related to derived works also applies. That means that whoever copyrighted the first interface for an ordered collection can count any subsequent API that appears to be inspired by it as a derived work. Do you use subscripting for array indexing? Do you have an API for storing a key-value pair in an keyed collection? You probably owe someone money...
These things tend to go in bursts. People think of things to do with bandwidth, which drives demand, and eventually technology reaches it. There was a little peak in the '90s between 56K modems and Napster where internet connections where fast enough, then people started streaming music and they became too slow. For any reasonable quality, you needed at least a 100MHz Pentium to be able to listen to the music in real time. ADSL and cable modems took us past that, and 1Mb/s was fine up until people started streaming video, which again required faster processors. Now, iPlayer HD is 3.6Kb/s, and the quality is fine - noticeably better than DVD. Higher quality video isn't really that interesting and 8.4Mb/s is enough for two concurrent streams for a household.
I suspect for most users now the bottleneck is upstream, not downstream speed. Uploading photos and video clips is still pretty painful because most consumer ISPs are set up assuming that consumers are... consumers.
Nah, his UID is too low. Everyone with a UID over two million is a shill. Everyone with a UID under two million is a troll.
Suspected terrorist does not usually mean 'guy who looks a bit shifty' it means 'person against whom there is other evidence pointing at terrorism'. Evidence in a criminal case is not taken in isolation. If you have blood on your hands and are found standing next to a dead body, that's more suspicious than if you're in a butcher's shop. If you have a recently fired gun, then that won't mean the same thing if you're in a firing range as if you're in a bank during an armed robbery...
In a somewhat strange twist, New Jersey now also dominates the top 5 list of fastest broadband cities
This is correct. Cities in New Jersey have three of the spots (2, 3 and 5) on the top 5 list.
It's just a matter of time til everyone knows twitter is for suckers that want to read a bunch of really short astroturf
About minus four years?
How do you know Microsoft Office respects your privacy, do you have access to the source?
You don't need it. It runs on your local machine, so you can check every network connection that it makes and, more importantly, you can trivially prevent it from making any network connections.
From what I've heard Microsoft at the very least keeps track of the hardware on which you run its software.
And the reason you know this (it's related to Windows Update, not MS Office specifically) is that people did intercept the data sent to Microsoft from Windows Update and found out exactly what was being sent.
On x86, at least, the basic drivers for getting things like interrupt and DMA controllers up and getting a VESA frame buffer and access to common HIDs (USB and PS/2 keyboards and mice, for example) are all open source. You may not be able to use the snazziest features of your hardware with open drivers, but you can at least use it. In contrast, most Android phones have blobs for the touchscreen, meaning you can't even use the standard input and output device with an open source build. The network (WiFi and cellular) drivers are also often blobs, and the sound drivers fairly often are. On a lot of pre-Cortex A9 devices, even the DMA and interrupt controllers use blobs. This means that you can't even get part way through the boot process with a completely open source build.
Perhaps it's just me, but I see a pretty big difference between 'can't get full performance from the 3D hardware without a blob driver' and 'can't boot without a blob driver'.
Interestingly enough; it seems to me that this is exactly the situation where the GPL shines through
Not at all. This is precisely the situation where the GPL is in decline. A lot of companies (Apple is the most prominent example, but since they're the tech company with the largest market cap, they're the most prominent example of a lot of things) are happy to open source everything that is not part of their core business, but not everything. Apple, for example, does not want to open source their IDE, but they do want to use the same parser in their IDE as in their compiler. GCC is GPL'd, so they can't do this. Older versions of XCode had to license EDG to parse C/C++ and had a custom Objective-C parser for syntax highlighting and autocompletion. With clang, Apple gets to use the code anywhere they want, so do Google and Adobe, and so do all other contributors, including me.
Now, in an ideal world, Apple would open source their IDE as well as their compiler, and that's the idea behind the GPL. Unfortunately, that's not how things tend to work in the real world. Given the choice between using some GPL'd code and open sourcing their own stuff and just writing a proprietary replacement, most companies will pick option 2: it's simpler and has less potential for hidden liability.
In theory, Apple could now take a fork of LLVM and Clang proprietary, but given the speed at which the internal APIs change they'd spend a massive amount of effort keeping it in sync with the mainline. In fact, we've seen some companies do exactly that with their OpenCL stack. Over the past year, almost all of them have given up, ditched their proprietary version, and started contributing to the mainline. If Apple started a proprietary fork, then the other contributors would just ignore it and it would quickly become the crappy Apple version, where anyone who really cared would get the mainline version.
Choose one under the GPL; then you know that your contributions and the fixes people make to them will come back to you.
Nope, only the fixes that people intend to distribute, and there's the other major problem: 90% of all software developers are employed writing code that is never distributed, it is just used in house. A lot of companies are willing to use a BSD licensed library in their in-house software and contribute back changes, but they're nervous about the GPL. Even though it doesn't require them to give anything back (see the GoogleFS in Linux. Or, rather, not in Linux, just in Google's in-house version of Linux), there is a perception that it requires them to open source everything it touches. So they either won't touch it at all, or they'll keep their use of it secret for fear of liability and not contribute anything back.
I work on a number of permissively licensed projects and a very common reaction to patches is to look at the company name of the sender and think 'WTF do you use this stuff for?' You'd be surprised where a lot of code ends up and who is willing to give things back without any fanfare...
Well, unless you count any of the drivers required to actually use Android on any shipping phone...
Whenever we have this discussion it gets pointed out repeatedly that Apple must love F/OSS because they use so much of it
No, its pointed out that Apple must love F/OSS because they contribute to so much of it. Take a look at LLVM, WebKit, CUPS, and a number of other projects and see how many contributions are funded by Apple. They contribute to F/OSS for exactly the right reason: If two or more companies need the same thing, it's cheaper if they cooperate on implementing the same thing than if they each implement their own (incompatible) ones and keeping them private. Apple has ridiculous amounts of money, enough to easily fund developing their own compiler suite and HTML rendering engine, but if they contribute to LLVM and WebKit then the same amount of effort is added to the work by Google and others and the result is even better.
I called from Skype - the only time I've ever used Skype was to make free calls to 1-800 numbers in the USA before I got an account with a SIP provider that also offered that.
Of course SaaS providers would object to the GPLv3, it eliminated the ability for them to exploit GPL software
No it doesn't. The AGPL does, the GPLv3 still allows, for example, Google to use GPLv3 software on their servers for everything and not release any of the source code.
I have done a study on this, and I can now publish my findings, exclusively on Slashdot, for the first time:
Since this time last year, instances of the GPL in Slashdot dupes are now up by 300%, while instances of the Apache and BSD licenses remain at a constant level.
Flamewars about the merits of the GPL vs the BSDL are at an all-time high. In February, for the first time since 2010, they passed the number of Android vs iOS flamewars, and are currently recorded at over 11 on the vi vs emacs scale.
Comparisons between the FSF and the Nazis are up by 20%, but still significantly lower than any major tech company or political party. Apple, Microsoft and Google are all at record high levels on the Godwin scale, but Oracle has passed all three, with a stunning 400% increase after the takeover of Sun. IBM's record from the '80s is still unsurpassed.
Yes, get this geeky crap of Slashdot, we want more stories about Ron Paul and the TSA!
IIRC, more than half of Foxconn's production is iStuff, all the other brands are under 10% each. So yeah, Apple has more say in that than Dell, Samsung, Amazon, Toshiba, and ...
If I remember correctly, you just make stuff up. But since neither of us has a citation, let's move on...
Foxconn apparently makes 40% of the world's electronics and its customers include Amazon, Apple, Dell, HP, and numerous others. If Apple is really selling 20% of the world's electronics, then the company is doing a lot better than anyone thought...
Yup, nowhere except America manages to so completely miss the point of unions. In most of the world, unions work like this:
A group of people are elected to represent the workers. If there are unreconcilable difference of opinion between groups of workers, then you get two or more unions. Each can negotiate with the employers on behalf of their members, and can pretty much guarantee that the deal that they reach will be agreed to by most of their members because they actually represent their members. If you disagree with all of the unions, you are not forced to join any of them. Any deal negotiated by the unions is open to all workers, irrespective of union membership.
Meanwhile, in the USA, they work like this:
To get the job, you must be a member of the union. If you are not, then you must join immediately. There is only one union that represents people in your position. Only employees can be union officials, and anyone who gets elected without being open to bribes finds that they no longer have a job and must therefore resign. You must accept the deal negotiated between the company and their, sorry, your representative or you lose your job.
Probably, but not in the way you'd expect. Last I saw, 95% of all traffic to the root servers was caused by people making typos in domains. This makes sense, because most DNS caches will cache things like .com, .org, .relevant.ccTLD, and a few others. They'll also cache any new TLDs that people actually use. However, an increase in the number of TLDs means that there is now a much greater chance of making a typo. This is particularly true on mobile devices: most on-screen keyboards have a .com button, but require you to actually type other TLDs, and will autocorrect things randomly if you're not careful...
Corporate donations are spent on election publicity. The bribes (mostly) don't go into a personal fund for the politician, they go to getting that politician reelected. The only reason that corporations have so much influence over politicians is that the politicians know that if their campaign funding is reduced then they will lose the next election. And this is only true because voters are voting for the person who advertises the most, irrespective of their actual policies, opinions, and track record. Take a look at the last 30 years of presidential elections: in every case, the candidate who spent the most won.
If you want to reduce the influence of money from US elections, you need to educate voters so that they'll vote for the candidate that actually represents their interests and beliefs, not the one with the most flashy soundbite.
The more efficient a government is, the more power it accumulates. If it is more efficient than private enterprise, then companies (small or large) have no chance of competing. There are some things that private companies suck at (for example, providing healthcare and long-term research), where your only options are to have the government do it or have no one do it well. The more efficient a government is, the more things fall into this category. This has a few seriously negative side effects. The first is that it gives the government more control over the lives of the individual (at extremes, cases like Soviet Russia, where the state provides everything so the state gets to tell you exactly how to live your life). The second is that is makes more complex systems homogeneous and therefore difficult to adapt. If there are lots of competing options, it's easy for the bad ones to die off and the good ones to succeed. If there is just one - and it is backed by the force of law - then it may suffer long-term problems through lack of adaptability. Finally, there is the concentration of power. The government may be elected, but the high ranking civil servants are usually not, and are not directly accountable. The more you put in the hands of the government, the more power you give to these individuals. Good luck finding some who won't be corrupted by this...
No one who never wrote a book before is going to be able to write a decent one on their own the first time they try.
The only changes the editors made to my first book were fixing a few grammatical errors and typos (an average of about two per page), it got good reviews - they've just translated it into Korean (there are already Chinese and Japanese translations). Sure, the editor had some useful input, but nowhere near the amount that would be required to turn Mein Kampf into something other than a rambling mess (i.e. a complete rewrite).
Let's be clear, it's not just "thinking" that started religion, it's uninformed, ignorant thinking that started religion in the first place, and willfully arrogant, uninformed, ignorant thinking that kept it going for so long.
I think that's doing a gross injustice to early natural philosophers and their forerunners. Religion is the best explanation for a number of natural phenomena when you have little evidence other than 'light comes from the sky and cause fire'. The problem is not creating these explanations in the first place, it's refusing to abandon them when more evidence is presented.
How did I know, as I wrote that, people would fixate on the Apple part of my post, and not think of any other examples? That was the first that came to my mind, but there are hundreds of others.