DRM is quicker and easier than lobbying Congress for another extension.
And also has the benefit of being technically impossible. This is not a limitation of present-day technology, it is a limitation of mathematics. If something can be perceived by a human being, it can be recorded by a machine. It may perform some tests to determine whether or not a recording machine is being used, but those tests will always be ultimately defeatable {since the fact of performing the test will unavoidably reveal information needed to defeat the test}.
I can see DRM being phased out in a few years' time anyway as one or more of the following scenarios come to pass:
Content providers wise up to the fundamental impossibility of DRM.
DRM technology companies get greedy, and the cost of DRM outstrips the value of the content being "protected" -- to the point where it would be cheaper just to let folk rip it off.
A spate of false positives lead to a consumer backlash, as disgruntled viewers object to technology limiting their right to enjoy material they believe they have purchased the right to view.
A pro-consumer government bans some or all types of DRM as anti-competitive and/or a breach of consumers' fair use rights.
As long as there are people like Jon Lech Johansen, with a quiver full of Perl and Python scripts and a band of merrie hackers living in Sherwood Forest^W^W^W the Internet, we are safe..... kind of funny really that his name, too, will almost certainly pass into legend..... in the Public Domain, of course!
Copyleft only exists because present copyright laws do not properly protect the Public Domain. In an ideal world, it would be enforcible -- with exactly the same penalties as copyright infringement -- that every Derivative Work based upon a Work already in the Public Domain should be in the Public Domain. Under such circumstances, there would be no need for the GPL, since it would be all but enshrined in law.
The problem with the BSD licence is that if I write a piece of software and release it under the standard three-clause BSD licence, somebody else could take that software -- the result of my hard work and the rightful property of all humanity -- add a feature which would make for one-way compatibility, make it closed-source but gratis, distribute it widely and effectively subvert my efforts. Even worse, they might later claim that my attempt to replicate their feature in a piece of software I originally wrote was somehow violating their IP.
And the GPL is enormous. For stuff like web scripts, it is overkill..... I don't like to finish eating my dinner before someone else has even started theirs, and I don't like the licence to be longer than the software it refers to.
I find this a little disturbing. What are Xandros and Mepis doing with a closed source Qt? Won't their applications compile just fine against the GPL Qt libs?
Well, you're not that far off the mark really. All the networky bits of XP -- the big improvement over 3.11/9X -- were lifted lock, stock and barrel from FreeBSD. Not that there was anything wrong with that, since the BSD guys don't mind having their code looted and pillaged..... otherwise they'd have used the GPL, wouldn't they?
The more BSD code Microsoft lift, the better Windows will become..... until it is just FreeBSD with some proprietary extensions.
The problem is that the file linked to is pre-compiled for a Windows system -- which is something I haven't got and should not need to have. This means I really need the source code -- so I can compile it for one of my boxes. Every Unix-like system {Linux, BSD, Solaris and some others I'm not running on any of my boxes} includes a C compiler. If the source code is properly presented, and if you're supplying source code the last thing you want is people making nasty comments about it, the compilation process is usually as simple as typing "make install".
As a matter of general principle I insist to inspect, or have someone else inspect, the source code of every piece of software I run, to make sure that it will not do anything I would rather it did not. In the light of what happens when people run untrusted software to run on their machines, I do not believe that this measure is in the slightest unreasonable.
If, however, I cannot obtain the source code, I believe the least unsafe way to run untrusted code might be to do so in a totally quarantined environment -- i.e., a machine with no connection to the outside world {network card} and no persistent storage {hard disk drive}. But this will still require a bootstrap loader with a minimal Windows environment.
Thank you. Now please show me a link to the source code, in order that I can subject it to independent scrutiny before compiling it for one of my own machines; or at the very least, show me a suitable bootstrap loader which I can burn, along with Word documents I wish to view, to a CD-RW and be able to launch the application on one of my AMD-based machines {it should be safe to run unaudited software with no hard disk and no network connection}.
Once upon a time, the record companies had something that the general public did not: the ability to manufacture records. Thanks to this, it was possible for a few people to get rich selling records -- and some of the people who actually performed on the records even got a tiny cut of the money.
Today, anyone can make their own CDs. The record companies are no longer the only ones with this ability, and they aren't happy about it. And they have the gall to hide behind artists not being compensated..... as though the record companies weren't the ones who got the lion's share of the price of a CD and made their fortune off the back of other people's talent.
The well has run dry. People in the past put up with paying money for 78s, because that was all there was; and later, LPs, because although by that time there were such things as tape recorders they were either awkward {open reel} or limited fidelity {cassettes} and so LP was still better. When the Compact Disc came out, people not only bought new CDs; they even spent money buying CDs of the exact same material they already owned on LPs. {Of course, the LP replacement market is finite -- and probably has already run its course by now}.
The only certain way to prevent people from copying CDs is for there not to be any CDs to copy. So this is what I'm suggesting: it is time for the music industry to pack its tent away and go home. I am not going to deny for a second that it was good fun while it lasted, but everything has to come to an end sometime. People were making music before there was a recording industry. What reason is there to suppose that they will not continue making it long after the recording industry is gone?
The quantity of music available might decrease {no more manufactured boy bands, yeaay!}, but the quality should improve if all musicians are doing it just for the love of making music. Bands might even do better without the record companies: anyone {at least, anyone who doesn't work for Sony Music} will tell you that touring, not album sales, is the real money earner.
Anyone who makes music today with the expectation and intention of getting compensated for it is a prat. We are all grown ups and we all know exactly what goes on. For crying out loud, it's the exact same instinct that makes you want to get paid, that makes people not want to pay you! So if you, as a musician, really can't stand the idea of people listening to your music without paying you for it then don't make music in the first place. Find another way to feed your family. It's as simple as that.
If I'm the only person who figures out how to get the bananas from the top of the tree that knowledge has value. I have access to harvest more bananas, less competition, etc. If I share that knowledge, everybody will have access to those bananas. The effect of that knowledge is dimished for me as an individual, because now I'm competing with others to get bananas again. However, for the group as a whole the effect is multiplied as the amount of accessible resources is increased.
If you do not share the knowledge of how to get those bananas, then you are guilty of Stealing By Default. Everyone has a right to the bananas. As long as nobody knows how to get them, then that right is irrelevant and it's pointless debating it. But the minute someone figures out how to get at them, if they don't share that knowledge with everyone then they are committing Theft By Default. What if someone dies of malnutrition because they didn't have enough bananas? If you knew how to get enough bananas but you chose not to anyway, then you as good as killed that person. Walking by a person in distress when you could have done something to help them is every bit as bad as causing that person's distress in the first place, without diminishing the guilt of the original perpetrator.
That's where IP law comes in, to give incentive for the individual to share knowledge so the community can benefit. Basically everybody agreeing for a limited time to not pick the bananas from the top of the tree if you tell them how you did it. Trade short term personal gain for long term community gain.
Although that may have been the original intention -- and I can't dispute that it sounds a noble one -- IP laws have long since been subverted beyond belief {basically, the "short term personal gain" bit has been severely over-emphasised at the expense of the "long term community gain" bit}.
Money and recognition are limited resources. If I simply allow you to take credit for something I created, sure it doesn't dimish the creation, but it does dimish the returns I receive.
Now hold on a minute. I never said anything about taking the credit for other people's inventions. In fact, I believe that to have your name associated, for as long as living memory persists, with an invention of yours that you shared with the world is the only right you have over it. Picking bananas from the top of the tree the way you did is not the same thing as pretending it was me that discovered how to do that.
And anyway, it's not really about the returns you receive. It's about the benefits that all of Society receives. Returns are nice, but nobody owes you anything. If you think that you are the only one who could ever have determined how to reach the higher-up bananas, you are in denial. Someone else would work it out eventually if you didn't. {And if you did, but you kept it to yourself, then I think the person who rediscovered and shared the method is the one who deserves the credit}.
Finally, I must take issue with you over your assertion that money is a limited resource. Money is manifestly not a limited resource, since governments have the ability to print as much of it as they want. Intrinsic value is limited {at any one time; though the sum total of intrinsic value in the world is not necessarily constant over time} but {and this is what capitalism has failed to grasp}: money is not the only thing that has intrinsic value. It is merely an artificial aid that was originally created to help measure and compare the intrinsic value of other things. As with so many other things, the near-exclusive use of a particular means {money} in the pursuit of an end {value comparison} has caused the means apparently to overtake the end.
The only natural law is the law of the strongest, i.e. if you harvest a banana and a thug comes by and beats you up that's now his banana. Society is a way of enforcing rules the majority saw as useful (such as "the banana belongs to the guy who harvested it").
When someone else takes a banana I harvested, I no longer have that banana. When I tell someone else an idea I had, I still have a perfect copy of that idea in my head. That is an important difference: knowledge can be shared without being diminished by the act of sharing. Similarly, if you light a candle from the flame of mine, my room does not get darker.
And I'm sure you don't want an "open thought police" to go around and interrogate people if they had any worthwile ideas and incarcerate anyone for thoughtcrime when they don't share an idea.
No. I would not like that any more than I like the idea of a "closed thought police" who go around and interrogate people if they are doing things that other people thought of first and incarcerate anyone for intellectual property violations when they do share an idea.
If you want to have ideas and keep them to yourself, that's just fine and dandy. But I do believe that the instant you share an idea with even one other person, you should share it with everyone.
Do you think everybody should have access to potentially dangerous information?
Let me put that another way. Do you think that trying to hide "potentially dangerous information" from people actually accomplishes anything? The laws of nature can be discovered by experiment alone. If someone really wants a nuclear weapon, they could learn to build one from scratch and nothing anybody could do would be able to stop them. Every penny spent on trying to keep "potentially dangerous" ideas secret is a penny that could have been spent on improving the quality of life for the rest of humanity. I believe that every person has the right to know every true fact, and if that includes "potentially dangerous information" then so be it.
When you pull a bell-rope, it stretches slightly. Then the stretched bit shrinks back to how it was and a higher-up bit of the rope is stretched. The stretched bit works its way up the rope to the wheel, which only moves when the last bit of rope snaps back. All this happens far too fast for you to see, but it does happen. {You might be able to see it in a Slinky spring loosely stretched out, especially if you have a camcorder that can do slow motion playback}. Due to the physical properties of the rope and the mechanism at the bell end, there is a small but finite delay between pulling the rope and the bell ringing.
The same thing happens with electrical signals. They do not travel along wires instantaneously. There is an entire subdiscipline of electrical engineering dedicated to the study of transmission lines, but here are some of the points relevant to this discussion.
Every conductor carrying a current radiates a magnetic field. If you could have two wires absolutely coincident and carrying the same current in opposite directions, then the fields they radiate will cancel out exactly and thus not interfere with anything. Obviously you can't get them absolutely coincident, because real matter takes up space. But it turns out that intimate proximity is good enough for real world applications. So, we twist the wires to keep them together..... this way we don't have to have a huge bulky insulation jacket forcing them together, and can fit more wires into the same space. We can help matters by ensuring that the load on the far end is perfectly resistive: i.e. that every bit of energy put into it actually does work {or just gets turned into heat} rather than getting stored and released.
Now, any wire that is not absolutely straight looks like a coil. Electrons travelling along a coil behave as though they have inertia {due to energy being stored as a magnetic field and then released} and the faster they are moving, the harder it is to persuade them to change direction. If you have a coil with many turns and a socking great lump of steel up the middle, it takes awhile to build up a current from a battery because energy is being stored in magnetising the steel. {Water flow analogy: imagine a turbine in the pipe with a heavy flywheel. It takes an effort to get it up to speed, and it wants to keep turning -- and trying to shove water along -- even after the water stops.} When there are no more molecules to line up with the field, the core is saturated and the coil behaves as a simple resistor until the current changes. Disconnect the battery, and the electrons will actually take some time to come to a halt. That's why you often see a diode -- and maybe a resistor in series with the diode, if it's a really monstrously inductive load like a railway train motor* -- across a relay or motor switched by a transistor. The diode gives the current a path to flow through without having to arc across {a pure current source without a resistor in parallel with itself behaves as an infinite voltage source; most things become good conductors if you apply a high enough voltage}. Air obviously cannot store as much energy in the form of magnetism as steel; but at a high enough frequency, the current will have changed direction before magnetic saturation occurs. Which is why VHF inductances usually have only a few turns on a piddly little ferrite core, and UHF inductances often are literally just bent bits of wire. {Of course, these can even be printed}.
Twisting two wires together actually forms a transformer. It's not a brilliant one, but it will work as one at high frequencies. Each wire induces a current in the other. The induced currents should cancel one another out perfectly. But of course two wires twisted together also form a capacitor. So your twisted pair cable is actually this huge inductive, capacitive, resistive nightmare of a thing.
A cable also has a characteristic impedance. When you put a battery to one end, a pulse current flow
I'm pissed off that the sewage company don't pay me for the shit that I flush down my toilet. Creating that shit took a lot of hard work. I had to heave and strain and nearly fetched a pile down. And I had to pay for the food in the first place, and the gas to cook it, too! If I buy a meal in a restaurant for £15.00, then surely the turd I will eventually shit out of my arse must be worth at least £75. If I cook the same meal using £2.50 of ingredients and £0.50 of gas, then I can create £75.00 of shit for £3.00, which is an extra £12.00 of profit for me and certainly not £12.00 that I have stolen from the restaurant at all, no way daddy-oh.
After all, I created my shit and I have a divine right to profit from it. Why should the sewage company get it for free?
There is no such thing as an "intangible asset". It is a legal fiction intended to prop up a failed business model. So much of US Capitalism now relies on these outmoded artificial concepts that it is becoming necessary to invent increasingly bizarre laws to deal with it.
Look, just because you had an idea, wrote a song, made a film, painted a picture or whatever, doesn't mean anything. All the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all humanity. The songs you write, the films you make, the programs you write, the inventions you invent, the clever little logos you create -- they are all ours and you can't take any of them off us. And if you don't like that, I suggest you stop having ideas.
The real irony is that a fake Nike T-shirt almost certainly was made out of better quality materials, and by better-treated workers, than a "real" one.
Beside which, if Nike want me to wear what basically constitutes an advertisement for them, then they should be paying me, not the other way around.
I think you missed out "mount all filesystems under target filesystem" and "chroot into target filesystem". But unless you're installing Gentoo Stage One {and thus either know what you are doing, or are keen to learn}, the installer on the CD will do all of the above for you.
Have you ever installed Windows -- any version -- on a box you built from scratch? You'll know it goes something like this if you're lucky:
Install Windows
Boot up machine in 16-colour, 640x480 mode.
LCD monitor protests that sync rate is out of range. Find tube monitor.
Install drivers for motherboard chipset {including, inter alia, the CD-ROM drive from which it has just been reading and the HDD to which it has just been writing}.
Reboot machine.
Install drivers for graphics card.
Reboot machine.
Find a graphics mode that can be displayed on tube monitor and LCD {this will take several cable swaps, be careful not to bend pins in monitor plug}.
Replace tube monitor with LCD.
Disabuse computer of notion that it has found new hardware.
Select correct graphics mode you really want.
Install sound card drivers.
Reboot machine.
Install network card drivers.
Reboot machine.
Correct other settings which have mysteriously changed themselves.
Reboot machine.
Install anti-virus and firewall software. Ignore protests that machine does not appear to be connected to a network.
Reboot machine.
Plug in network cable. Machine is now networked. Download latest updates for Windows, drivers and security software.
Reboot machine.
Virus checker protests that system is infected and needs to be repaired. Find Windows CD and follow prompts.
Reboot machine.
You now have a system with no applications {except anti-virus and firewall}. Installing each application will involve at least one reboot. If you're unlucky the process will go les Roberts vers le haut as they say in Paris, and you'll have to start again.
BTW, if you ever want to install Windows on a PC that has had Linux on it, you'll need to use Linux's own fdisk to change all the Linux partitions to FAT ones, then run it again to delete them. This is because the fdisk supplied with Windows is totally christian and cannot even delete any other kind of partition than FAT {or maybe NTFS}, let alone create them
There is nothing in copyright law that states you cannot licence the same work under multiple licences. {The only exception is Public Domain: any Derivative Work of a Work already in the Public Domain is automatically deemed to be in the Public Domain.} Remember, copyright law tells you what you may not do; and a licence says what you may do in addition to what the law does not tell you not to do.
If you want to licence your work under the GPL but you also want to allow commercial use as long as you will get paid for such commercial use, then use the GPL but also offer an alternative, non-Free/usage-only licence. {Of course, not every combination of licences is sensible: for instance, GPL and BSD won't work [why not?]}. If somebody makes a Derivative Work from the GPL version, then they must release it under the GPL; but if they make a Derivative Work from the commercial version, then they have to pay you. That's the way MySQL and Qt are licenced. TTBOMK nobody buys commercial licences for MySQL or Qt though..... they just use the GPL versions,
Bonus points if you don't make this clear to the commercial licensee: There's a very good chance that if you ripped off just the changes they made {which will in themselves constitute only a small percentage of the Derived Work, based on an Original Work on which you hold the copyright}, then it might well fall within your Fair Use rights and you might be able to reincorporate the mods into the GPL version!
Any software written in unsafe languages (like C and C++) is bound to contain exploitable vulnerabilities.
C is not an unsafe language. It is a language which allows you to do things which might be potentially unsafe under certain circumstances. Riding a motorcycle wearing only a bathing costume and no crash helmet is not unsafe if you do it at low speeds on a soft surface. C is not unsafe if you do some simple checks or you know for certain you won't have to do those checks. Not everybody checks everything, of course..... but that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with C. Garden light often use a low voltage -- 6V or 12V -- which will certainly be safe if someone touches it. That doesn't necessarily mean that 230 volt mains is always dangerous, just that you have to take special care around it. In a shower heater, you have 230 volts and running water, which sounds like a highly dangerous combination! But you need the volts to get the kilowatts: heating just one litre of water per minute requires 69 watts for each degree hotter you want to make it. The safety comes from the carefully-designed heat exchanger and the earth leakage cutout.
Any system that allows the user to run software that they bring to it is susceptible to trojans.
And any system that doesn't allow the user to run software that they bring to it is at best computationally incomplete and at worse useless.
As a compromise we could have a panel of experts reviewing the source code of all software to determine how safe it is. Just like they do at your favourite Linux distribution, for instance.
AFAIK, no current operating system is both usable and provides adequate protection mechanisms against viruses. A fine-grained permission system might help, though.
A permission system that is too fine-grained {viz. the one in Windows NT which is even more complicated than the one in VAX/VMS} suffers from about the same problem as a pay toilet in a forest. In fact, make that a pay toilet with a dress code in a forest.
Allow the MP3 player's software access to your music directory, but nothing else. Allow the word processor access to your documents directory, but nothing else.
Well, that's not a bad start. You can do it already with commonly available and household materials.
I wrote a utility called chrootexec that allows you to run a program in a chroot jail (it cannot access files outside that directory). It's basically the same as the chroot command, except that you don't need to be root to use it (but it does have to be installed suid root to work).
Logically you shouldn't need to be root to run chroot {except that it's in/usr/sbin/, and therefore outside a mortal's path, on my Debian machines}. However, there's probably something I haven't thought through fully; otherwise OpenBSD or someone like that would make every userland process run in a chroot.
However, some programs (file managers come to mind) need access to many directories to be useful. These will still be exploitable.
They will only be exploitable so long as the program's operation has not been verified {I am assuming this means by reading the source code: I genuinely do not know of an alternative means to achieve this end, though this by no means constitutes proof that there is none} and users have not taken appropriate action.
We hear this all the time from the Windows apologists {and if it were true in the general case, there should be more attempted attacks against the web server with twice the market share of its next competitor, but there quite clearly aren't}; but the fact remains that Unix-like systems -- and that includes Linux -- are by design more secure than Windows, and Open Source systems in general are by design more secure than closed-source systems. Linux supports privilege separation and hardware abstraction by default, and it forces you to use them.
Also, the only applications which could be a viable vector for virus propagation are closed-source ones. The open source ones are being looked at by the good guys as well as the bad guys, and the former outnumber the latter.
Yes, but the whole point of a download is that it doesn't need to be returned. If I have a real book which belongs to the library in my house then nobody else can borrow that book from the library until I take it back. But downloading an audiobook does not stop other people from downloading it.
Anyway, most libraries have a "fines amnesty" every so often; so it's sometimes worth hanging onto books you haven't returned. Depends how many library memberships {in different names} you have, I suppose!
Qu'est-ce-que tu fumes? The cost of developing a Linux solution from scratch is the same as the cost of developing a Windows solution from scratch. The cost of developing a Linux solution decreases with every similarity between an existing Linux solution and the one you are developing, whereas the vendors of Windows solutions will charge you the same for changing one line as for developing from scratch.
What happens to the copy you make on a Walkman cassette, with a simple "3.5mm stereo jack plug to 2 audio plugs" cable available from any electronics store?
And what happens if, as a strict Opensourcetarian (tm) you cannot run Microsoft's media player?
Anyway, we pay for libraries with our council tax. The library aren't losing anything physical if people keep the downloads. Nor are they losing money, since borrowing books is free. I can smell an ulterior motive somewhere, for sure.
My guess is that this is just the beginning of a wider restriction in licensing of closed-source software on open-source operating systems.
And this is why we need to resist closed-source software as being a bad thing in and of itself.
First stop: drivers. Yes, you, Nvidia and ATI. Write to your MP and ask for a new law which will oblige all computer hardware to be accompanied by sufficient information to allow the rightful owner to make full use of what they have purchased without kowtowing to a monopoly. That means full disclosure even if to do so would expose mendacious claims in advertising {I'm thinking specifically of so-called 6MPx digital cameras with 3MPx image sensors that produce 3MPx "raw" files which are then interpolated up to 6MPx by the camera's firmware and the closed-source photoshop plugin, or so-calles 2400dpi printers which actually print at 300dpi using a closed-source driver}. As a "step zero", we maybe should call for a law clarifying that even if exposing such a claim involved doing something the vendors were trying to {mis-}use the force of law to prevent, the vendors could still be prosecuted for false advertising {in the UK, evidence obtained unlawfully may still be admissible in a court of law; but the law is so full of repetitions and contradictions, one more will not hurt}. It might help that the spin on this {everything in modern politics has to have a spin} is towards protecting gullible consumers from unscrupulous vendors.
Slowly it won't just be "device-targetted versions" of the OS that aren't allowed, but any version of the OS that is not provided from an approved list of vendors (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake) who have made it clear that their operating systems are not just tarballs of code (Debian) but rather are specifically designed for target platforms.
We are already seeing this, and we need to fight it. The most obvious thing to do IMHO is get involved with the GPL Flash project {even if it's just to create a fork} and get developing a viable alternative to the closed-source Flash player. After all, we already have several GPL alternatives to Adobe Acrobat.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly do you propose to get a quart of water {= 40 fluid ounces, x 0.0284 = 1.136 litres} into a one litre bottle?
I can see DRM being phased out in a few years' time anyway as one or more of the following scenarios come to pass:
- Content providers wise up to the fundamental impossibility of DRM.
- DRM technology companies get greedy, and the cost of DRM outstrips the value of the content being "protected" -- to the point where it would be cheaper just to let folk rip it off.
- A spate of false positives lead to a consumer backlash, as disgruntled viewers object to technology limiting their right to enjoy material they believe they have purchased the right to view.
- A pro-consumer government bans some or all types of DRM as anti-competitive and/or a breach of consumers' fair use rights.
As long as there are people like Jon Lech Johansen, with a quiver full of Perl and Python scripts and a band of merrie hackers living in Sherwood Forest^W^W^W the Internet, we are safeCopyleft only exists because present copyright laws do not properly protect the Public Domain. In an ideal world, it would be enforcible -- with exactly the same penalties as copyright infringement -- that every Derivative Work based upon a Work already in the Public Domain should be in the Public Domain. Under such circumstances, there would be no need for the GPL, since it would be all but enshrined in law.
..... I don't like to finish eating my dinner before someone else has even started theirs, and I don't like the licence to be longer than the software it refers to.
The problem with the BSD licence is that if I write a piece of software and release it under the standard three-clause BSD licence, somebody else could take that software -- the result of my hard work and the rightful property of all humanity -- add a feature which would make for one-way compatibility, make it closed-source but gratis, distribute it widely and effectively subvert my efforts. Even worse, they might later claim that my attempt to replicate their feature in a piece of software I originally wrote was somehow violating their IP.
And the GPL is enormous. For stuff like web scripts, it is overkill
I find this a little disturbing. What are Xandros and Mepis doing with a closed source Qt? Won't their applications compile just fine against the GPL Qt libs?
Well, you're not that far off the mark really. All the networky bits of XP -- the big improvement over 3.11/9X -- were lifted lock, stock and barrel from FreeBSD. Not that there was anything wrong with that, since the BSD guys don't mind having their code looted and pillaged ..... otherwise they'd have used the GPL, wouldn't they?
..... until it is just FreeBSD with some proprietary extensions.
The more BSD code Microsoft lift, the better Windows will become
The problem is that the file linked to is pre-compiled for a Windows system -- which is something I haven't got and should not need to have. This means I really need the source code -- so I can compile it for one of my boxes. Every Unix-like system {Linux, BSD, Solaris and some others I'm not running on any of my boxes} includes a C compiler. If the source code is properly presented, and if you're supplying source code the last thing you want is people making nasty comments about it, the compilation process is usually as simple as typing "make install".
As a matter of general principle I insist to inspect, or have someone else inspect, the source code of every piece of software I run, to make sure that it will not do anything I would rather it did not. In the light of what happens when people run untrusted software to run on their machines, I do not believe that this measure is in the slightest unreasonable.
If, however, I cannot obtain the source code, I believe the least unsafe way to run untrusted code might be to do so in a totally quarantined environment -- i.e., a machine with no connection to the outside world {network card} and no persistent storage {hard disk drive}. But this will still require a bootstrap loader with a minimal Windows environment.
Thank you. Now please show me a link to the source code, in order that I can subject it to independent scrutiny before compiling it for one of my own machines; or at the very least, show me a suitable bootstrap loader which I can burn, along with Word documents I wish to view, to a CD-RW and be able to launch the application on one of my AMD-based machines {it should be safe to run unaudited software with no hard disk and no network connection}.
Screenshots would be nice too.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Once upon a time, the record companies had something that the general public did not: the ability to manufacture records. Thanks to this, it was possible for a few people to get rich selling records -- and some of the people who actually performed on the records even got a tiny cut of the money.
..... as though the record companies weren't the ones who got the lion's share of the price of a CD and made their fortune off the back of other people's talent.
Today, anyone can make their own CDs. The record companies are no longer the only ones with this ability, and they aren't happy about it. And they have the gall to hide behind artists not being compensated
The well has run dry. People in the past put up with paying money for 78s, because that was all there was; and later, LPs, because although by that time there were such things as tape recorders they were either awkward {open reel} or limited fidelity {cassettes} and so LP was still better. When the Compact Disc came out, people not only bought new CDs; they even spent money buying CDs of the exact same material they already owned on LPs. {Of course, the LP replacement market is finite -- and probably has already run its course by now}.
The only certain way to prevent people from copying CDs is for there not to be any CDs to copy. So this is what I'm suggesting: it is time for the music industry to pack its tent away and go home. I am not going to deny for a second that it was good fun while it lasted, but everything has to come to an end sometime. People were making music before there was a recording industry. What reason is there to suppose that they will not continue making it long after the recording industry is gone?
The quantity of music available might decrease {no more manufactured boy bands, yeaay!}, but the quality should improve if all musicians are doing it just for the love of making music. Bands might even do better without the record companies: anyone {at least, anyone who doesn't work for Sony Music} will tell you that touring, not album sales, is the real money earner.
Anyone who makes music today with the expectation and intention of getting compensated for it is a prat. We are all grown ups and we all know exactly what goes on. For crying out loud, it's the exact same instinct that makes you want to get paid, that makes people not want to pay you! So if you, as a musician, really can't stand the idea of people listening to your music without paying you for it then don't make music in the first place. Find another way to feed your family. It's as simple as that.
And anyway, it's not really about the returns you receive. It's about the benefits that all of Society receives. Returns are nice, but nobody owes you anything. If you think that you are the only one who could ever have determined how to reach the higher-up bananas, you are in denial. Someone else would work it out eventually if you didn't. {And if you did, but you kept it to yourself, then I think the person who rediscovered and shared the method is the one who deserves the credit}.
Finally, I must take issue with you over your assertion that money is a limited resource. Money is manifestly not a limited resource, since governments have the ability to print as much of it as they want. Intrinsic value is limited {at any one time; though the sum total of intrinsic value in the world is not necessarily constant over time} but {and this is what capitalism has failed to grasp}: money is not the only thing that has intrinsic value. It is merely an artificial aid that was originally created to help measure and compare the intrinsic value of other things. As with so many other things, the near-exclusive use of a particular means {money} in the pursuit of an end {value comparison} has caused the means apparently to overtake the end.
If you want to have ideas and keep them to yourself, that's just fine and dandy. But I do believe that the instant you share an idea with even one other person, you should share it with everyone. Let me put that another way. Do you think that trying to hide "potentially dangerous information" from people actually accomplishes anything? The laws of nature can be discovered by experiment alone. If someone really wants a nuclear weapon, they could learn to build one from scratch and nothing anybody could do would be able to stop them. Every penny spent on trying to keep "potentially dangerous" ideas secret is a penny that could have been spent on improving the quality of life for the rest of humanity. I believe that every person has the right to know every true fact, and if that includes "potentially dangerous information" then so be it.
When you pull a bell-rope, it stretches slightly. Then the stretched bit shrinks back to how it was and a higher-up bit of the rope is stretched. The stretched bit works its way up the rope to the wheel, which only moves when the last bit of rope snaps back. All this happens far too fast for you to see, but it does happen. {You might be able to see it in a Slinky spring loosely stretched out, especially if you have a camcorder that can do slow motion playback}. Due to the physical properties of the rope and the mechanism at the bell end, there is a small but finite delay between pulling the rope and the bell ringing.
..... this way we don't have to have a huge bulky insulation jacket forcing them together, and can fit more wires into the same space. We can help matters by ensuring that the load on the far end is perfectly resistive: i.e. that every bit of energy put into it actually does work {or just gets turned into heat} rather than getting stored and released.
The same thing happens with electrical signals. They do not travel along wires instantaneously. There is an entire subdiscipline of electrical engineering dedicated to the study of transmission lines, but here are some of the points relevant to this discussion.
Every conductor carrying a current radiates a magnetic field. If you could have two wires absolutely coincident and carrying the same current in opposite directions, then the fields they radiate will cancel out exactly and thus not interfere with anything. Obviously you can't get them absolutely coincident, because real matter takes up space. But it turns out that intimate proximity is good enough for real world applications. So, we twist the wires to keep them together
Now, any wire that is not absolutely straight looks like a coil. Electrons travelling along a coil behave as though they have inertia {due to energy being stored as a magnetic field and then released} and the faster they are moving, the harder it is to persuade them to change direction. If you have a coil with many turns and a socking great lump of steel up the middle, it takes awhile to build up a current from a battery because energy is being stored in magnetising the steel. {Water flow analogy: imagine a turbine in the pipe with a heavy flywheel. It takes an effort to get it up to speed, and it wants to keep turning -- and trying to shove water along -- even after the water stops.} When there are no more molecules to line up with the field, the core is saturated and the coil behaves as a simple resistor until the current changes. Disconnect the battery, and the electrons will actually take some time to come to a halt. That's why you often see a diode -- and maybe a resistor in series with the diode, if it's a really monstrously inductive load like a railway train motor* -- across a relay or motor switched by a transistor. The diode gives the current a path to flow through without having to arc across {a pure current source without a resistor in parallel with itself behaves as an infinite voltage source; most things become good conductors if you apply a high enough voltage}. Air obviously cannot store as much energy in the form of magnetism as steel; but at a high enough frequency, the current will have changed direction before magnetic saturation occurs. Which is why VHF inductances usually have only a few turns on a piddly little ferrite core, and UHF inductances often are literally just bent bits of wire. {Of course, these can even be printed}.
Twisting two wires together actually forms a transformer. It's not a brilliant one, but it will work as one at high frequencies. Each wire induces a current in the other. The induced currents should cancel one another out perfectly. But of course two wires twisted together also form a capacitor. So your twisted pair cable is actually this huge inductive, capacitive, resistive nightmare of a thing.
A cable also has a characteristic impedance. When you put a battery to one end, a pulse current flow
I'm pissed off that the sewage company don't pay me for the shit that I flush down my toilet. Creating that shit took a lot of hard work. I had to heave and strain and nearly fetched a pile down. And I had to pay for the food in the first place, and the gas to cook it, too! If I buy a meal in a restaurant for £15.00, then surely the turd I will eventually shit out of my arse must be worth at least £75. If I cook the same meal using £2.50 of ingredients and £0.50 of gas, then I can create £75.00 of shit for £3.00, which is an extra £12.00 of profit for me and certainly not £12.00 that I have stolen from the restaurant at all, no way daddy-oh.
After all, I created my shit and I have a divine right to profit from it. Why should the sewage company get it for free?
There is no such thing as an "intangible asset". It is a legal fiction intended to prop up a failed business model. So much of US Capitalism now relies on these outmoded artificial concepts that it is becoming necessary to invent increasingly bizarre laws to deal with it.
Look, just because you had an idea, wrote a song, made a film, painted a picture or whatever, doesn't mean anything. All the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all humanity. The songs you write, the films you make, the programs you write, the inventions you invent, the clever little logos you create -- they are all ours and you can't take any of them off us. And if you don't like that, I suggest you stop having ideas.
The real irony is that a fake Nike T-shirt almost certainly was made out of better quality materials, and by better-treated workers, than a "real" one.
Beside which, if Nike want me to wear what basically constitutes an advertisement for them, then they should be paying me, not the other way around.
Have you ever installed Windows -- any version -- on a box you built from scratch? You'll know it goes something like this if you're lucky:
- Install Windows
- Boot up machine in 16-colour, 640x480 mode.
- LCD monitor protests that sync rate is out of range. Find tube monitor.
- Install drivers for motherboard chipset {including, inter alia, the CD-ROM drive from which it has just been reading and the HDD to which it has just been writing}.
- Reboot machine.
- Install drivers for graphics card.
- Reboot machine.
- Find a graphics mode that can be displayed on tube monitor and LCD {this will take several cable swaps, be careful not to bend pins in monitor plug}.
- Replace tube monitor with LCD.
- Disabuse computer of notion that it has found new hardware.
- Select correct graphics mode you really want.
- Install sound card drivers.
- Reboot machine.
- Install network card drivers.
- Reboot machine.
- Correct other settings which have mysteriously changed themselves.
- Reboot machine.
- Install anti-virus and firewall software. Ignore protests that machine does not appear to be connected to a network.
- Reboot machine.
- Plug in network cable. Machine is now networked. Download latest updates for Windows, drivers and security software.
- Reboot machine.
- Virus checker protests that system is infected and needs to be repaired. Find Windows CD and follow prompts.
- Reboot machine.
You now have a system with no applications {except anti-virus and firewall}. Installing each application will involve at least one reboot. If you're unlucky the process will go les Roberts vers le haut as they say in Paris, and you'll have to start again.BTW, if you ever want to install Windows on a PC that has had Linux on it, you'll need to use Linux's own fdisk to change all the Linux partitions to FAT ones, then run it again to delete them. This is because the fdisk supplied with Windows is totally christian and cannot even delete any other kind of partition than FAT {or maybe NTFS}, let alone create them
There is nothing in copyright law that states you cannot licence the same work under multiple licences. {The only exception is Public Domain: any Derivative Work of a Work already in the Public Domain is automatically deemed to be in the Public Domain.} Remember, copyright law tells you what you may not do; and a licence says what you may do in addition to what the law does not tell you not to do.
..... they just use the GPL versions,
If you want to licence your work under the GPL but you also want to allow commercial use as long as you will get paid for such commercial use, then use the GPL but also offer an alternative, non-Free/usage-only licence. {Of course, not every combination of licences is sensible: for instance, GPL and BSD won't work [why not?]}. If somebody makes a Derivative Work from the GPL version, then they must release it under the GPL; but if they make a Derivative Work from the commercial version, then they have to pay you. That's the way MySQL and Qt are licenced. TTBOMK nobody buys commercial licences for MySQL or Qt though
Bonus points if you don't make this clear to the commercial licensee: There's a very good chance that if you ripped off just the changes they made {which will in themselves constitute only a small percentage of the Derived Work, based on an Original Work on which you hold the copyright}, then it might well fall within your Fair Use rights and you might be able to reincorporate the mods into the GPL version!
As a compromise we could have a panel of experts reviewing the source code of all software to determine how safe it is. Just like they do at your favourite Linux distribution, for instance. A permission system that is too fine-grained {viz. the one in Windows NT which is even more complicated than the one in VAX/VMS} suffers from about the same problem as a pay toilet in a forest. In fact, make that a pay toilet with a dress code in a forest. Well, that's not a bad start. You can do it already with commonly available and household materials. Logically you shouldn't need to be root to run chroot {except that it's in
We hear this all the time from the Windows apologists {and if it were true in the general case, there should be more attempted attacks against the web server with twice the market share of its next competitor, but there quite clearly aren't}; but the fact remains that Unix-like systems -- and that includes Linux -- are by design more secure than Windows, and Open Source systems in general are by design more secure than closed-source systems. Linux supports privilege separation and hardware abstraction by default, and it forces you to use them.
Also, the only applications which could be a viable vector for virus propagation are closed-source ones. The open source ones are being looked at by the good guys as well as the bad guys, and the former outnumber the latter.
Yes, but the whole point of a download is that it doesn't need to be returned. If I have a real book which belongs to the library in my house then nobody else can borrow that book from the library until I take it back. But downloading an audiobook does not stop other people from downloading it.
Anyway, most libraries have a "fines amnesty" every so often; so it's sometimes worth hanging onto books you haven't returned. Depends how many library memberships {in different names} you have, I suppose!
Qu'est-ce-que tu fumes? The cost of developing a Linux solution from scratch is the same as the cost of developing a Windows solution from scratch. The cost of developing a Linux solution decreases with every similarity between an existing Linux solution and the one you are developing, whereas the vendors of Windows solutions will charge you the same for changing one line as for developing from scratch.
Scrawny man in PE kit, about to lift a small weight: "Will this affect me?"
Muscular man, lifting two larger weight with each hand: "Look at the effect it had on me!"
From a poster in the Remedial Studies unit at my secondary school.
What happens to the copy you make on a Walkman cassette, with a simple "3.5mm stereo jack plug to 2 audio plugs" cable available from any electronics store?
And what happens if, as a strict Opensourcetarian (tm) you cannot run Microsoft's media player?
Anyway, we pay for libraries with our council tax. The library aren't losing anything physical if people keep the downloads. Nor are they losing money, since borrowing books is free. I can smell an ulterior motive somewhere, for sure.
First stop: drivers. Yes, you, Nvidia and ATI. Write to your MP and ask for a new law which will oblige all computer hardware to be accompanied by sufficient information to allow the rightful owner to make full use of what they have purchased without kowtowing to a monopoly. That means full disclosure even if to do so would expose mendacious claims in advertising {I'm thinking specifically of so-called 6MPx digital cameras with 3MPx image sensors that produce 3MPx "raw" files which are then interpolated up to 6MPx by the camera's firmware and the closed-source photoshop plugin, or so-calles 2400dpi printers which actually print at 300dpi using a closed-source driver}. As a "step zero", we maybe should call for a law clarifying that even if exposing such a claim involved doing something the vendors were trying to {mis-}use the force of law to prevent, the vendors could still be prosecuted for false advertising {in the UK, evidence obtained unlawfully may still be admissible in a court of law; but the law is so full of repetitions and contradictions, one more will not hurt}. It might help that the spin on this {everything in modern politics has to have a spin} is towards protecting gullible consumers from unscrupulous vendors. We are already seeing this, and we need to fight it. The most obvious thing to do IMHO is get involved with the GPL Flash project {even if it's just to create a fork} and get developing a viable alternative to the closed-source Flash player. After all, we already have several GPL alternatives to Adobe Acrobat.
But you will only have to pay their legal fees if they actually win .....