[R]ights that you would not normally have under copyright law
And that's the important bit. In the days when licence agreements try to pretend they are giving you permission to do things {and, sometimes, withholding permission to do things} that the Law of the Land already says you can do, it's easy to forget this, but: copying a legitimately-acquired program into a computer's RAM for the purpose of running it has already been held to constitute Fair Use. Modification of legitimately-acquired software is also Fair Use {but extraordinarily difficult without source code}. You would only breach copyright by distributing copies {modified or not} to third parties without prior permission.
It's good that the FSF don't care about you making private modifications so long as you keep them private, because they couldn't stop you anyway, even if they did care. You have a statutory right to do that, so long as you keep your modified version to yourself. Basically, they insist for you to release to everybody under the same terms, or nobody under any terms. What could be fairer than that?
[T]here may be a big difference between using a video camera in your home and the use of surveillance cameras in public spaces, for example, but the basic technology is the same.
Which is why I think it's wrong in general to legislate against a specific technology. All technology is just applied science. The laws of Nature are neither good nor bad: they just are, and it's not much use disagreeing with them anyway. What I think is better is to legislate against specific ends, and then you avoid the risk that someone will figure out a different means to accomplish the same effect as what you tried to ban.
So I think this draft of the GPL v3 is a little badly-worded, because it mentions DRM -- a specific technology for restricting what users can do with their own computers. But it is not the final document, so there is a chance to make it clearer that the end is what counts, and restricting what can be done with a computer is what is not on. In the specific case of a personal computer, the User and Administrator are the same person; shared machines, particularly where there is a customer-supplier relationship, are in practice a different case. However, I don't doubt that, with careful wording, the situation can be got around: just making reference to a user of a computer and not the User is a start. The administrator is by definition a user; so the rule just needs to be as long as a user can perform certain acts. Then, as long as the Administrator can perform those acts {which, in a given situation, might not be appropriate for ordinary Users to be allowed to perform -- such as reading other people's e-mail on a shared server}, the requirement is satisfied. Is that weaselling out? Maybe, but that's the purpose of releasing a draft for comment.
You also have to remember that Stallman is a man of very high ideals: men and women with a similarly-fanatical devotion to God to RMS's devotion to Free Software go on to become monks and nuns. He would not compromise his own ideals directly by making it easy for administrators to restrict users' use of a computer; but so strong was his belief in Freedom that he allowed any of us to change his work to do the very thing he opposed.
And the statements use of of the word "user" is unhelpful too: I'm a user on an email system, but I can't turn off the good DRM that stops me from reading everyone else's mail. If user is really meant to mean "owner or administrator", why did Stallman deliberately leave out support for the 'wheel' group in the GNU implementation of su?
There is a well-understood difference between private places into which members of the public are invited, such as a shop or a restaurant; and private places into which members of the public are not invited, such as someone's home. Your e-mail server is analogous to the former. Your PC, and mine, are analogous to the latter. At any rate, if you take the view that those parties most likely to be affected by the consequences of a decision should have the greatest say in the process of making that decision, whether or your ISP trusts you with root access on their e-mail server is a matter between you, them and their other customers. If there is value in a service, someone will provide it -- that's the nature of a free market.
RMS understood {or guessed incredibly luckily, but I'm a shameless romantic} that a freely-available OS would inevitably be used in the future on inexpensive hardware: eventually, small groups of enthusiasts -- or even individual home users such as you or me -- would be in a position to make use of GNU on cheaply-acquired hardware. In such an environment, the "wheel" group would be less important anyway; all users ideally would be both sufficiently technically competent and sufficiently respectful of one another's rights to be trusted with the power of the root account.
And, precisely because GNU su is free software, there is nothing at all stopping someone from re-creating the functionality of requiring a user to be a member of a particular group before acquiring root privileges, if they so desire {nor stopping someone else disabling that functionality again}. At the end of the day, you have to pick a default for any behaviour that can be changed -- even if the default is to force the user to choose, one option will be listed first, or otherwise have some greater but irrational appeal as compared to the other{s}. RMS just decided to choose the default behaviour of allowing any user to become root, which certainly fits in with the GNU political agenda of empowering individual users.
In a society where all are free to keep slaves, the "mean freedom per capita" is likely to be rather less -- especially amongst the poorest members of that society -- that in a society where slavery is forbidden, even although the "freedom" to keep slaves has been infringed across the board.
The GPL is designed to preserve users' freedoms. Closed-source software and obnoxious DRM are basically electronic forms of enslavement. RMS gets this, and says the Four Freedoms of users are more important than the false freedom of developers to dictate terms for the use of their programs. Exactly the way that my freedom to walk down the streets of Britain and know that nobody is carrying a live firearm that could be used against me is more important than some gun nut's freedom to keep lethal weapons just in case civilisation happens to break down. {If and when that ever happens, I know how to make a gun anyway; but it's unlikely enough that I'm not worried about it.}
If you, the user, did not have the separate private key, then you would not have the complete source code; since the key would be something necessary for building the application which renders the content. If you have the private key but are not allowed to pass it on, then you cannot obey the terms of the GPL and must refrain from distributing the application.
The only ways this would be able to work, would be (1) if the key were required to be distributed along with the encrypted content rather than as part of the decryption application; or (2) if the content were to be encrypted to a public key supplied by the intended recipient of the content {who retains the private key}.
Either way, the content recipient has the decryption key and can decrypt the content ad libidem.
Well, that would be one of the things I would clarify. Once PD, forever PD.
And your example of a theme tune is a bad one BTW: there are separate copyrights in a song itself, a printed sheet music arrangement of that song and a recording of a performance of the song.
But the Age of Scarcity ended with the First Industrial Revolution, and we are now in the Age of Plenty. Many resources simply are not scarce.
The end of Slavery was not brought about by black people refusing to work, nor by white people changing their minds and deciding to be nice. It was not brought about by politicians arguing, nor people in blue fighting people in grey with cannons. The end of slavery was brought about by the steam engine and the electric motor; and if you think any different, you're deeper in denial than a drowning Egyptian.
Similarly, the end of Closed Source Software will not be brought about by a new software licence. It will be brought about by the advent of decompilers. The abstract mathematics that lie behind the problem of decompilation are exactly the same as the abstract maths that lie behind facial recognition.
Which is why I like the idea of five-year copyrights: your work, unless it is a derivative of a work already in the Public Domain, is protected by a BSD-style copyright {or, upon payment of a hefty fee, a more restrictive copyright} for five years from the day you receive your first royalty payment, or five years from the day you released it if you don't receive any royalty payments. After which it becomes Public Domain. Derivative works of PD works are PD by definition.
At the same time, I would make it law that every legitimate user of a computer program has the right to view the source code of that program.
I can think of a test that distinguished "good" DRM from "bad" DRM.
"Good" DRM is where the rightful administrator of a computer is in full control of what happens on that computer.
"Bad" DRM is where someone who is not the rightful administrator of a computer attempts to restrict what happens on that computer without informed consent from, or in a manner that cannot be overridden by, the rightful administrator.
{I'm purposely restricting my comments to the administrator, and not mentioning users here. Whatever power struggles are going on between administrators and users are a matter for them to sort out between themselves. In the case of a Personal Computer, the administrator is the user anyway.}
chmod(1) and friends are good, because the administrator is in full control. The administrator who chmod'ed a file can always un-chmod it back again. A hammer isn't just used for putting nails in: it can be used for taking them out as well.
iTunes is bad, because someone other than the administrator {Apple} seeks to prevent the administrator from doing something in a way that the administrator cannot override. If you want to, say, transcode your files from AAC to OGG Vorbis, even for some legitimate purpose {for instance, I have permission from the band Ocean Colour Scene to make unlimited copies of their back catalogue and future work, in any medium now known or to be invented, for personal listening}, Apple won't let you do it.
Well, tough break, pal. I know just how you feel. The sewage company don't pay me money for the shit I flush down my toilet. The people I walk past in the street don't pay me money for smiling at them.
What I'm trying to say is, you knew the risks before you took on the job. The instinct that makes you want to get paid is the exact same instinct that makes other people not want to pay you. So, don't think of it as exceptionally bad when someone reads your work without paying for it; instead, think of it as exceptionally good when someone reads your work and does pay you for it.
Furthermore, in the days when the US Constitution was drafted, there were still plenty of fields, forests and open spaces. Two people could go out for a walk somewhere quiet and be confident of not being seen inadvertently, let alone spied upon deliberately. If you were really paranoid, you might poke the undergrowth with a stick before you opened your mouth, but it was a fair bet that if you were alone, you were unobserved -- and it was a foregone conclusion that anyone could place themself beyond observation. Why should they waste words explicitly stating a right to something so glaringly obvious? It's only since then that urban areas have sprung up, so diminishing the amount of open space {and increasing the proportion of open space overlooked from somewhere}, and things such as binoculars, microphones, cameras and telephoto lenses have been invented, so making remote observation easier. Standards of living have improved so much that an inventory of someone's possessions, or a list of their habits, has gained intrinsic value. And it's all happened so gradually that nobody noticed the effect it was having until it was too late.
Even if they were not on the payroll of the multinational corporations, governments cannot be trusted to protect our privacy anymore either; especially now we are all suspected terrorists and child abusers, guilty until -- or even despite -- proven innocent. The initiative has got to come up from beneath.
UK copyright law has the concept of "fair dealing", but exactly what constitutes fair dealing is not delimited in the statute books: it is for the courts to decide what is fair dealing and what is taking (liberties|advantage|the piss). And breach of copyright is a criminal offence in the UK.
If anybody was ever up in court for, say, taping an album to listen in the car, they would almost certainly be acquitted. How many members of the jury do you suppose have never done that? If they were convicted, it would give every copper in the land yet another reason to harass motorists. And of course, nobody would be allowed out of the court car park until every vehicle had been checked for illegal recordings. The situation would spiral rapidly out of control, until eventually an amnesty would have to be declared.
The UK has lots of unenforced laws, which are retained mainly for historical interest -- and also so the Old Bill can have some obscure reason to start fishing for more evidence against a suspect.
I never understood the point of the "Intel Inside" logo anyway. If you're making a PC with second-rate parts, surely you would want to hide the fact, not announce it to the world. Imagine seeing on a restaurant menu, "Chili Con Carne made with Tesco Value Brand Minced Beef"..... it's not exactly going to sell well, is it?
I had the idea for patenting personal injuries {"Method for dislocating the knee by inadvertent impact with a fire extinguisher"}. Then the next time someone hurts themself the same way that you did, you can claim royalty payments from them. I was also going to patent a certain form of crime, but arrange the patent claim in such a way that it would be the victim who was infringing the patent {"Method for achieving poverty by handing over money under duress to another party"}. You don't always catch the perpetrator, but the victim is right there and insured. I probably also would have to file a claim on "Method for apparently reducing crime statistics by allowing crimes to go unrecorded" in case people do not report crimes in order to avoid paying royalties.
Sorry, but the telco already owns the rights to your number. Or maybe the publisher of the phone book -- which is not necessarily the same entity anymore since deregulation, privatisation and Local Loop Unbundling. At least you knew where you were when BT was all there was. Nowadays you have a choice of different phone companies who will put you on hold, charge you for it and make you repeat yourself at least three times to people whom you have to wonder how the f**k they made it into work that day. Actually I'm surprised they aren't paying Dorling-Kindersley to print the privatised phone books for them. They could have huge, glossy colour photographs of every subscriber -- and absolutely no useful information whatsoever.
Well, obviously not all the sheeple who are satisfied with eating McDonalds and watching Reality TV -- the modern day panem et circenses -- as they sleepwalk towards a police state.
Maybe they don't want a proper full-fledged Relational Database Server. Has it not occurred to you that they might simply be looking for a simple, lightweight Array Persistence Abstraction Layer?
MySQL is perfectly adequate for many intranet applications and some internet applications. There's no point buying a tank if all you want to do is drop off the kids at school, then go shopping for a few more pairs of shoes and get your hair done. Just don't expect a Vauxhall Corsa to cope too well in a war zone, if you should encounter one on your travels.
But I agree with the basic premise that it probably would work out cheaper in the long run to pay for their own support staff, rather than pay for support from MySQL AB. I mean..... there's so little to go wrong with MySQL anyway!
The simplest solution in this case is to specify 127.0.0.1 for your SMTP server, and run your own sendmail {or a sendmail replacement such as exim}. You can then switch the MTA configuration whenever you switch connections, as easily as recreating a symlink. NB. Don't forget to send a SIGHUP immediately after doing this, to force it to reread its configuration.
The GPL doesn't tell you anything about what you may not do: it is a licence in the true sense of the word, in that it gives you permission to do things above and beyond what the Law of the Land ordinarily gives you permission to do.
Copyright law is what tells you what you may not do. It varies from country to country, but generally you need permission from the copyright holder to make copies of a copyrighted work unless the copy is only a small portion {e.g. a passage from a book quoted in a review}, the making of the copy is a necessary step in the course of doing something you are already entitled to do {e.g. making a copy of a computer program in memory for the purpose of using the program}, or certain other acts as determined by the courts {e.g. recording a television broadcast that you are entitled to watch for later viewing; in some countries, making a copy of a CD or LP which you own on another kind of medium for listening elsewhere}.
The GPL grants you permission to make copies of a computer program on certain conditions: principally, the obligation to make the source code available. If you do not agree to the conditions, then this permission is withdrawn and any copy you make may infringe copyright.
In some countries copyright is purely a civil matter and only the copyright holder can bring suit against an infringer; in others, breach of copyright is a criminal offence and the police can be involved. In still other countries, copyright is considered civil up to a certain limit whereafter it becomes criminal.
If there is a criminal copyright law in Korea then the police can be asked to investigate. However, if Korean copyright law is purely civil then only a copyright holder could initiate proceedings.
Note that if there were a country somewhere in the world where the law granted every citizen the right to make unlimited copies of computer programs but did not oblige them to supply the source code {à la BSD}, the GPL would be meaningless there: the Law of the Land has already granted unconditional permission to copy the object code, and nothing can take away a statutory right. Of course the typical MS EULA also would be meaningless there. {I know of no such country; but if anybody really wants to set up an Independent Sovereign State, then they could pass such a law.}
Whatever copy-prevention technology the DVD may be using, it can be bypassed using a standard television set. You will find clean RGB video signals on the CRT's grid drives -- they just need a little signal conditioning -- and the timing information is recoverable from the scan coils.
There is only ONE way to ensure a world which is TOTALLY free of Malware. That is to enshrine into the Law of the Land, the principle that the administrator of a computer, being King and God of all that happens to that computer, has the right -- personally or vicariously -- to view the source code of ANY application running on that computer. {From there,'tis but a short step indeed towards enshrining in law the rights of users of software to ENJOY, STUDY, SHARE and ADAPT that software; but we'll not jump the gun just now.}
If vendors don't want to release the source code for their applications, then probably nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million, it's precisely because there is something in there that would make you decide not to use that software if you knew about it.
Why is that the case? When I buy food, it tells me not only the ingredients, but also the amount of carbohydrates, fats and proteins in every 100 grammes. Food manufacturers are not exempt from the requirement to disclose what is in their products, why the hell should software manufacturers be?
Even in the Open Source community, users outnumber developers. So something that sounds bad for developers {they won't necessarily get paid just for cranking out a shitty little closed source program, boo hoo} but is good for users should be supported.
{You might get away with replacing general-purpose computers with computationally-incomplete appliances, but that would be a backward step.}
$ony holds a patent on the CD, and gets a royalty payment for every single CD sold out there. Is that any better?
Held. Got.
I bought my first CD player longer ago than the lifetime of a patent -- and even then, they'd already been out for just long enough to descend out of the realms of three-figure prices.
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It's good that the FSF don't care about you making private modifications so long as you keep them private, because they couldn't stop you anyway, even if they did care. You have a statutory right to do that, so long as you keep your modified version to yourself. Basically, they insist for you to release to everybody under the same terms, or nobody under any terms. What could be fairer than that?
So I think this draft of the GPL v3 is a little badly-worded, because it mentions DRM -- a specific technology for restricting what users can do with their own computers. But it is not the final document, so there is a chance to make it clearer that the end is what counts, and restricting what can be done with a computer is what is not on. In the specific case of a personal computer, the User and Administrator are the same person; shared machines, particularly where there is a customer-supplier relationship, are in practice a different case. However, I don't doubt that, with careful wording, the situation can be got around: just making reference to a user of a computer and not the User is a start. The administrator is by definition a user; so the rule just needs to be as long as a user can perform certain acts. Then, as long as the Administrator can perform those acts {which, in a given situation, might not be appropriate for ordinary Users to be allowed to perform -- such as reading other people's e-mail on a shared server}, the requirement is satisfied. Is that weaselling out? Maybe, but that's the purpose of releasing a draft for comment.
You also have to remember that Stallman is a man of very high ideals: men and women with a similarly-fanatical devotion to God to RMS's devotion to Free Software go on to become monks and nuns. He would not compromise his own ideals directly by making it easy for administrators to restrict users' use of a computer; but so strong was his belief in Freedom that he allowed any of us to change his work to do the very thing he opposed.
RMS understood {or guessed incredibly luckily, but I'm a shameless romantic} that a freely-available OS would inevitably be used in the future on inexpensive hardware: eventually, small groups of enthusiasts -- or even individual home users such as you or me -- would be in a position to make use of GNU on cheaply-acquired hardware. In such an environment, the "wheel" group would be less important anyway; all users ideally would be both sufficiently technically competent and sufficiently respectful of one another's rights to be trusted with the power of the root account.
And, precisely because GNU su is free software, there is nothing at all stopping someone from re-creating the functionality of requiring a user to be a member of a particular group before acquiring root privileges, if they so desire {nor stopping someone else disabling that functionality again}. At the end of the day, you have to pick a default for any behaviour that can be changed -- even if the default is to force the user to choose, one option will be listed first, or otherwise have some greater but irrational appeal as compared to the other{s}. RMS just decided to choose the default behaviour of allowing any user to become root, which certainly fits in with the GNU political agenda of empowering individual users.
In a society where all are free to keep slaves, the "mean freedom per capita" is likely to be rather less -- especially amongst the poorest members of that society -- that in a society where slavery is forbidden, even although the "freedom" to keep slaves has been infringed across the board.
The GPL is designed to preserve users' freedoms. Closed-source software and obnoxious DRM are basically electronic forms of enslavement. RMS gets this, and says the Four Freedoms of users are more important than the false freedom of developers to dictate terms for the use of their programs. Exactly the way that my freedom to walk down the streets of Britain and know that nobody is carrying a live firearm that could be used against me is more important than some gun nut's freedom to keep lethal weapons just in case civilisation happens to break down. {If and when that ever happens, I know how to make a gun anyway; but it's unlikely enough that I'm not worried about it.}
If you, the user, did not have the separate private key, then you would not have the complete source code; since the key would be something necessary for building the application which renders the content. If you have the private key but are not allowed to pass it on, then you cannot obey the terms of the GPL and must refrain from distributing the application.
The only ways this would be able to work, would be (1) if the key were required to be distributed along with the encrypted content rather than as part of the decryption application; or (2) if the content were to be encrypted to a public key supplied by the intended recipient of the content {who retains the private key}.
Either way, the content recipient has the decryption key and can decrypt the content ad libidem.
Well, that would be one of the things I would clarify. Once PD, forever PD.
And your example of a theme tune is a bad one BTW: there are separate copyrights in a song itself, a printed sheet music arrangement of that song and a recording of a performance of the song.
But the Age of Scarcity ended with the First Industrial Revolution, and we are now in the Age of Plenty. Many resources simply are not scarce.
The end of Slavery was not brought about by black people refusing to work, nor by white people changing their minds and deciding to be nice. It was not brought about by politicians arguing, nor people in blue fighting people in grey with cannons. The end of slavery was brought about by the steam engine and the electric motor; and if you think any different, you're deeper in denial than a drowning Egyptian.
Similarly, the end of Closed Source Software will not be brought about by a new software licence. It will be brought about by the advent of decompilers. The abstract mathematics that lie behind the problem of decompilation are exactly the same as the abstract maths that lie behind facial recognition.
I have created a new Open Source licence which I think will satisfy everyone. No legalese; it even almost scans as a Haiku:
If you did not get
The Source Code for this software
Use Reas'nable Force.
Maybe I should call it the Poetic Licence. Especially with that apostrophe.
Which is why I like the idea of five-year copyrights: your work, unless it is a derivative of a work already in the Public Domain, is protected by a BSD-style copyright {or, upon payment of a hefty fee, a more restrictive copyright} for five years from the day you receive your first royalty payment, or five years from the day you released it if you don't receive any royalty payments. After which it becomes Public Domain. Derivative works of PD works are PD by definition.
At the same time, I would make it law that every legitimate user of a computer program has the right to view the source code of that program.
I can think of a test that distinguished "good" DRM from "bad" DRM.
"Good" DRM is where the rightful administrator of a computer is in full control of what happens on that computer.
"Bad" DRM is where someone who is not the rightful administrator of a computer attempts to restrict what happens on that computer without informed consent from, or in a manner that cannot be overridden by, the rightful administrator.
{I'm purposely restricting my comments to the administrator, and not mentioning users here. Whatever power struggles are going on between administrators and users are a matter for them to sort out between themselves. In the case of a Personal Computer, the administrator is the user anyway.}
chmod(1) and friends are good, because the administrator is in full control. The administrator who chmod'ed a file can always un-chmod it back again. A hammer isn't just used for putting nails in: it can be used for taking them out as well.
iTunes is bad, because someone other than the administrator {Apple} seeks to prevent the administrator from doing something in a way that the administrator cannot override. If you want to, say, transcode your files from AAC to OGG Vorbis, even for some legitimate purpose {for instance, I have permission from the band Ocean Colour Scene to make unlimited copies of their back catalogue and future work, in any medium now known or to be invented, for personal listening}, Apple won't let you do it.
That's the difference.
Well, tough break, pal. I know just how you feel. The sewage company don't pay me money for the shit I flush down my toilet. The people I walk past in the street don't pay me money for smiling at them.
What I'm trying to say is, you knew the risks before you took on the job. The instinct that makes you want to get paid is the exact same instinct that makes other people not want to pay you. So, don't think of it as exceptionally bad when someone reads your work without paying for it; instead, think of it as exceptionally good when someone reads your work and does pay you for it.
Furthermore, in the days when the US Constitution was drafted, there were still plenty of fields, forests and open spaces. Two people could go out for a walk somewhere quiet and be confident of not being seen inadvertently, let alone spied upon deliberately. If you were really paranoid, you might poke the undergrowth with a stick before you opened your mouth, but it was a fair bet that if you were alone, you were unobserved -- and it was a foregone conclusion that anyone could place themself beyond observation. Why should they waste words explicitly stating a right to something so glaringly obvious? It's only since then that urban areas have sprung up, so diminishing the amount of open space {and increasing the proportion of open space overlooked from somewhere}, and things such as binoculars, microphones, cameras and telephoto lenses have been invented, so making remote observation easier. Standards of living have improved so much that an inventory of someone's possessions, or a list of their habits, has gained intrinsic value. And it's all happened so gradually that nobody noticed the effect it was having until it was too late.
Even if they were not on the payroll of the multinational corporations, governments cannot be trusted to protect our privacy anymore either; especially now we are all suspected terrorists and child abusers, guilty until -- or even despite -- proven innocent. The initiative has got to come up from beneath.
UK copyright law has the concept of "fair dealing", but exactly what constitutes fair dealing is not delimited in the statute books: it is for the courts to decide what is fair dealing and what is taking (liberties|advantage|the piss). And breach of copyright is a criminal offence in the UK.
If anybody was ever up in court for, say, taping an album to listen in the car, they would almost certainly be acquitted. How many members of the jury do you suppose have never done that? If they were convicted, it would give every copper in the land yet another reason to harass motorists. And of course, nobody would be allowed out of the court car park until every vehicle had been checked for illegal recordings. The situation would spiral rapidly out of control, until eventually an amnesty would have to be declared.
The UK has lots of unenforced laws, which are retained mainly for historical interest -- and also so the Old Bill can have some obscure reason to start fishing for more evidence against a suspect.
I never understood the point of the "Intel Inside" logo anyway. If you're making a PC with second-rate parts, surely you would want to hide the fact, not announce it to the world. Imagine seeing on a restaurant menu, "Chili Con Carne made with Tesco Value Brand Minced Beef" ..... it's not exactly going to sell well, is it?
I had the idea for patenting personal injuries {"Method for dislocating the knee by inadvertent impact with a fire extinguisher"}. Then the next time someone hurts themself the same way that you did, you can claim royalty payments from them. I was also going to patent a certain form of crime, but arrange the patent claim in such a way that it would be the victim who was infringing the patent {"Method for achieving poverty by handing over money under duress to another party"}. You don't always catch the perpetrator, but the victim is right there and insured. I probably also would have to file a claim on "Method for apparently reducing crime statistics by allowing crimes to go unrecorded" in case people do not report crimes in order to avoid paying royalties.
Sorry, but the telco already owns the rights to your number. Or maybe the publisher of the phone book -- which is not necessarily the same entity anymore since deregulation, privatisation and Local Loop Unbundling. At least you knew where you were when BT was all there was. Nowadays you have a choice of different phone companies who will put you on hold, charge you for it and make you repeat yourself at least three times to people whom you have to wonder how the f**k they made it into work that day. Actually I'm surprised they aren't paying Dorling-Kindersley to print the privatised phone books for them. They could have huge, glossy colour photographs of every subscriber -- and absolutely no useful information whatsoever.
Well, obviously not all the sheeple who are satisfied with eating McDonalds and watching Reality TV -- the modern day panem et circenses -- as they sleepwalk towards a police state.
Maybe they don't want a proper full-fledged Relational Database Server. Has it not occurred to you that they might simply be looking for a simple, lightweight Array Persistence Abstraction Layer?
..... there's so little to go wrong with MySQL anyway!
MySQL is perfectly adequate for many intranet applications and some internet applications. There's no point buying a tank if all you want to do is drop off the kids at school, then go shopping for a few more pairs of shoes and get your hair done. Just don't expect a Vauxhall Corsa to cope too well in a war zone, if you should encounter one on your travels.
But I agree with the basic premise that it probably would work out cheaper in the long run to pay for their own support staff, rather than pay for support from MySQL AB. I mean
The simplest solution in this case is to specify 127.0.0.1 for your SMTP server, and run your own sendmail {or a sendmail replacement such as exim}. You can then switch the MTA configuration whenever you switch connections, as easily as recreating a symlink. NB. Don't forget to send a SIGHUP immediately after doing this, to force it to reread its configuration.
Why are Slashdot readers concerned about bird flu? It's not like Slashdot readers ever shag any birds .....
I'm not convinced. How exactly is Mozilla Thunderbird any better than KMail, which I am currently using?
The GPL does not get enforced at all!
The GPL doesn't tell you anything about what you may not do: it is a licence in the true sense of the word, in that it gives you permission to do things above and beyond what the Law of the Land ordinarily gives you permission to do.
Copyright law is what tells you what you may not do. It varies from country to country, but generally you need permission from the copyright holder to make copies of a copyrighted work unless the copy is only a small portion {e.g. a passage from a book quoted in a review}, the making of the copy is a necessary step in the course of doing something you are already entitled to do {e.g. making a copy of a computer program in memory for the purpose of using the program}, or certain other acts as determined by the courts {e.g. recording a television broadcast that you are entitled to watch for later viewing; in some countries, making a copy of a CD or LP which you own on another kind of medium for listening elsewhere}.
The GPL grants you permission to make copies of a computer program on certain conditions: principally, the obligation to make the source code available. If you do not agree to the conditions, then this permission is withdrawn and any copy you make may infringe copyright.
In some countries copyright is purely a civil matter and only the copyright holder can bring suit against an infringer; in others, breach of copyright is a criminal offence and the police can be involved. In still other countries, copyright is considered civil up to a certain limit whereafter it becomes criminal.
If there is a criminal copyright law in Korea then the police can be asked to investigate. However, if Korean copyright law is purely civil then only a copyright holder could initiate proceedings.
Note that if there were a country somewhere in the world where the law granted every citizen the right to make unlimited copies of computer programs but did not oblige them to supply the source code {à la BSD}, the GPL would be meaningless there: the Law of the Land has already granted unconditional permission to copy the object code, and nothing can take away a statutory right. Of course the typical MS EULA also would be meaningless there. {I know of no such country; but if anybody really wants to set up an Independent Sovereign State, then they could pass such a law.}
Whatever copy-prevention technology the DVD may be using, it can be bypassed using a standard television set. You will find clean RGB video signals on the CRT's grid drives -- they just need a little signal conditioning -- and the timing information is recoverable from the scan coils.
There is only ONE way to ensure a world which is TOTALLY free of Malware. That is to enshrine into the Law of the Land, the principle that the administrator of a computer, being King and God of all that happens to that computer, has the right -- personally or vicariously -- to view the source code of ANY application running on that computer. {From there,'tis but a short step indeed towards enshrining in law the rights of users of software to ENJOY, STUDY, SHARE and ADAPT that software; but we'll not jump the gun just now.}
If vendors don't want to release the source code for their applications, then probably nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million, it's precisely because there is something in there that would make you decide not to use that software if you knew about it.
Why is that the case? When I buy food, it tells me not only the ingredients, but also the amount of carbohydrates, fats and proteins in every 100 grammes. Food manufacturers are not exempt from the requirement to disclose what is in their products, why the hell should software manufacturers be?
Even in the Open Source community, users outnumber developers. So something that sounds bad for developers {they won't necessarily get paid just for cranking out a shitty little closed source program, boo hoo} but is good for users should be supported.
{You might get away with replacing general-purpose computers with computationally-incomplete appliances, but that would be a backward step.}
I bought my first CD player longer ago than the lifetime of a patent -- and even then, they'd already been out for just long enough to descend out of the realms of three-figure prices.