The problem is that in some jurisdictions, the Public Domain isn't forever. What that means is that you can take a work in the Public Domain, make a tiny change (which might be as subtle as changing the author's name to yours) and copyright the derivative work. But there's more: you can then go after anyone using the original PD work, claiming they violated your copyright.
The BSD licence is worded in such a way that it looks as though you can remain in compliance even while withholding the Source Code (though I have used a modified form of the BSD licence -- only permitting distribution in Source Code form -- for some scripts I wrote; seeing as they were written in an interpreted language, there was no binary anyway, but I wanted to make quite sure that nobody was going to rewrite them in a compiled language and withhold the Source Code).
The GPL does not limit freedom: it limits power (explanation). Withholding Source Code from users is an exercise of power; I would even go so far as to say it is a form of violence.
It's difficult to believe that a telephone battery could store enough energy to do that much damage. They tend to get hot, then the plastic softens and releases the pressure. Ask anyone who blows up batteries for kicks:)
It's much more plausible -- especially in a quarry, where there tend to be things like explosives, heavy plant and big lumps of rock -- that some other accident broke his ribs and spine, and did for his mobe at the same time.
In some jurisdictions, derivative works of works already released into the Public Domain are automatically in the Public Domain and cannot be copyrighted. In other jurisdictions, derivative works of works already released into the Public Domain are copyrightable.
Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, you'll see that the two statements -- assertion of copyright under GPL and release to PD -- apply to separate pieces of code.
Are you telling me that the license file could be incorrect, and that to know for sure I would need to manually inspect every last line of source code to see if a different license file is specified?
Not necessarily. You could always just take the easy way out, and release the Source Code with proven build instructions.
The problem with that line of thinking is that linking a closed-source application to a GPL library on your own computer constitutes Fair Dealing. It certainly creates a derivative work based upon two copyrighted works, distribution of which requires the consent of both copyright holders; but so long as the creation of that derivative work is a necessary intermediate step in the course of using the software for its Rightful Purpose, then it is Fair Dealing and not copyright infringement.
You already have a right to do some reverse engineering under the Law of the Land; and nothing, not even a contract signed in blood, can take away that right.
That depends. If "Intellectual Property" can be forfeited just like real property, then yes, it's possible. However, I do not know of any real-life test cases which would indicate one way or the other.
Don't forget also that OLPC is basically an open design; so it should be possible eventually to build facilities in the third world for manufacturing OLPC machines -- clean, modern factories providing well-paying jobs and keeping money within an economy. They won't be competing with the existing OLPC supply chain, because that was only ever jury-rigged to kickstart a third world computer factory programme -- but they'd be competing with anything Intel and Microsoft, whose established businesses are assuredly not temporary, could offer.
Beware those who talk of "teaching a man to fish", while selling expensive proprietary bait and tackle for a living.
Does the Netherlands have a law forbidding the import of goods manufactured under conditions that would not be acceptable locally? (I know for a fact that the USA has no such law.) If so, then that might be your answer.
I'm selling toaster-sized boxes pre-loaded with some standard, Open Source software and some Perl scripts of my own making for use as mail servers. You plug in a keyboard and screen to run a simple commissioning script as root, just once; and from then on, everything is configurable through a web browser. If your broadband service has a static IP address (and it should, if you're running a business), you can simply forward port 25 on your router and point an MX record at it; otherwise, I'm reselling an e-mail service which adds the all-important "Envelope-to" header and you can retrieve mail from there by POP3. You can send an e-mail across the office, without it ever leaving the office -- that's got to be good from the privacy angle. And the HDD on these boxes is deliberately small: not only to keep costs down, but also to ensure that old messages get overwritten promptly.
Once a few people get burned by outsourced e-mail services, the world won't be able to get enough local mail servers. And with a simple pricing system (no per-user licencing; you pay just once and have done with it. No danger that you'll be prevented from expanding your business simply because you can't afford to add extra users to your e-mail system) these ones will go like hot cakes.
QWERTY is a holdover from the early days of mechanical typewriters, meant to slow typists down.
That is a blatant lie. The QWERTY layout wasn't meant to slow typists down -- quite the opposite. It was meant to ensure you could type as fast as possible, by separating commonly-paired letters. In order to type a word, every type-bar had to move through the same place -- creating a potential for jamming up the machine if the next one arrives before the last one has left. The further apart any two type-bars were, the more likely the type-bar for the first letter would have fallen out of the way before the type-bar for the second letter moved into place.
Unfortunately, they mucked up. The word lists used to arrange the keys were all in the present tense, and so "e" ended up next to "d".
If it's a Microsoft data centre, it'll most probably be running Windows -- in which case, the only "engineering" work to be done will be occasionally to power-cycle one of the machines when it misbehaves. There are businesses in the Third World where they have trained monkeys to do that, but I'm sure Microsoft will be able to afford a shiny GUI-based "virtual fusebox" application, allowing the power to any socket to be cut and restored from anywhere in the world.
Alternatively, if they're machines Microsoft wants to use for anything far too important to trust to Windows, they'll be running FreeBSD -- in which case, the only "engineering" work to be done will be occasionally replacing truly-dead machines with new ones.
At least in the UK, the business model for television is moving to subscription eor advertisements.
If you subscribe to Sky Television and get only the basic box, then you have to pay a subscription and you get advertisements interrupting everything except BBC.
If you subscribe to Sky Plus (or Sky HD -- the HD box includes Sky Plus functionality), you get a "recording" box. This allows you to pause and rewind (as far as the last channel change) live TV. If you change channels on time for the beginning of a programme, leave it for ten minutes or so (= the total length of all advert breaks in the programme) and then rewind to the beginning, you can simply fast-forward through the advert breaks. The box even has twin receivers, so you can watch one channel while recording another (the polarisation issue is dealt with in the crudest yet most effective way possible, i.e. the Sky Plus box requires an LNB with two independent outputs) or even record two channels while watching one of them.
Advert-free viewing is the reason to get Sky Plus.
The problem is not just applications; it is also hardware drivers. Drivers do not come for free because not all manufacturers of PC hardware cooperate with the free software community. Often, someone switching from Windows to Linux outside of a planned hardware upgrade has to repurchase much of the hardware in a PC in order to have hardware for which a freely available driver exists.
Write to your Elected Representatives and demand a law that would oblige hardware manufacturers to release sufficient details that would allow a competent programmer to create a driver -- or if any such law exists already, that it be enforced.
You don't know for sure that Skype does encrypt anything, at least non-trivially (e.g. EOR with a PRNG stream: it looks secure, but all you really need to know in order to break it is the initial seed for the PRNG), because they won't show you the Source Code. In fact, they seem to put in an extraordinary amount of effort just to keep you from seeing the Source Code.
IAX over a secure tunnel is another matter, however.....
And your "random"-number generator, unless based on a proven algorithm, might well have vulnerabilities of its own to worry about. If you keep the source code secret, no serious security person is going to touch it with a barge pole; and if you show the source code, then your extra layer is largely irrelevant since the sequence only depends on a seed supplied by Microsoft's PRNG.
The nub of the problem is that a deterministic state machine can never produce random behaviour. The long term solution would be an entropy generator on the motherboard. (Actually, many machines have one already: a sound card with an unconnected high-impedance input picking up static is a good entropy source.)
Yes, but they don't have to provide the Source gratis to anyone who hasn't already got a binary from them -- they could legitimately demand to see your purchase receipt before they gave you the Source Code. Or the £5000 could be for a disc (or set of discs) containing the binary and the Source.
What they can't do is charge £5000 for the binary and then another £5000 for the source -- additional charges for the Source Code are limited to covering cost of media and delivery.
Yes; but if some big company is selling a piece of GPL software for £5000 a copy, there's nothing stopping me and 999 other people each stumping up a Lady Godiva and buying one copy between us all. The licence, which comes from the author and not the vendor, allows all 1000 of us to make as many unaltered copies as we want of that software; so we can quite legally install it 1000 times. And then each of us can install it on five other people's computers, charge them a quid and recoup our initial outlay:)
The volt is definitely metric. It's the potential difference across a resistance dissipating one watt (indisputably a metric unit: one joule of energy per second), as a current of one ampere flows through it.
I concur. You crazy Americans should not be measuring your electricity in volts or amperes, since these are strictly metric units. You can start measuring electrical potential in Daniells and current in HP/Dan or BTU/Dan-sec (we'll let you keep seconds). You shouldn't be measuring your chemicals in moles, either: Avogadro's Number for Americans is now 1.7072e+25, the number of atoms in 12 ounces of C-12.
Well, that's pretty much what European law says: if you buy a phone, you can choose your own carrier; and if you sell phones, they have to accept any SIM, not just your favourite carrier's. (European law also forbids region-locking of DVD players -- every DVD player sold on the Continent is multi-region -- and sooner or later will forbid lockout chips in games consoles, requiring them to accept third-party games and accessories. Recall that third-party games were what rescued the Atari 2600 from oblivion; Atari's own offerings had become dire before the likes of Imagic and Activision brothe new life into the console with games that didn't suck donkey bollocks.)
Note that the UK has a history of opting-out of the most working-person-friendly parts of EU law, and probably will be expelled in disgrace from the EU within 10 to 15 years' time. In the UK, DVD players are still sold locked to Region 2 (though all except Sony can be unlocked simply by typing a not-very-secret code on the remote) and it's legal to bundle a phone with a service contract -- as long as the phone can be made to work with another carrier's SIM after the contract is up.
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I can imagine qmail, if it still has that brain-dead insistence on a \r before every \n, would be good in an all-Microsoft shop.
But I'm biased. I've used exim since whatever version shipped with Debian Potato.
The problem is that in some jurisdictions, the Public Domain isn't forever. What that means is that you can take a work in the Public Domain, make a tiny change (which might be as subtle as changing the author's name to yours) and copyright the derivative work. But there's more: you can then go after anyone using the original PD work, claiming they violated your copyright.
The BSD licence is worded in such a way that it looks as though you can remain in compliance even while withholding the Source Code (though I have used a modified form of the BSD licence -- only permitting distribution in Source Code form -- for some scripts I wrote; seeing as they were written in an interpreted language, there was no binary anyway, but I wanted to make quite sure that nobody was going to rewrite them in a compiled language and withhold the Source Code).
The GPL does not limit freedom: it limits power (explanation). Withholding Source Code from users is an exercise of power; I would even go so far as to say it is a form of violence.
Whereas, Windows is obviously for people who enjoy (or don't even realise they are) being shafted up the "asstunnel".
It's difficult to believe that a telephone battery could store enough energy to do that much damage. They tend to get hot, then the plastic softens and releases the pressure. Ask anyone who blows up batteries for kicks :)
It's much more plausible -- especially in a quarry, where there tend to be things like explosives, heavy plant and big lumps of rock -- that some other accident broke his ribs and spine, and did for his mobe at the same time.
In some jurisdictions, derivative works of works already released into the Public Domain are automatically in the Public Domain and cannot be copyrighted. In other jurisdictions, derivative works of works already released into the Public Domain are copyrightable.
Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, you'll see that the two statements -- assertion of copyright under GPL and release to PD -- apply to separate pieces of code.
The problem with that line of thinking is that linking a closed-source application to a GPL library on your own computer constitutes Fair Dealing. It certainly creates a derivative work based upon two copyrighted works, distribution of which requires the consent of both copyright holders; but so long as the creation of that derivative work is a necessary intermediate step in the course of using the software for its Rightful Purpose, then it is Fair Dealing and not copyright infringement.
You already have a right to do some reverse engineering under the Law of the Land; and nothing, not even a contract signed in blood, can take away that right.
That depends. If "Intellectual Property" can be forfeited just like real property, then yes, it's possible. However, I do not know of any real-life test cases which would indicate one way or the other.
Don't forget also that OLPC is basically an open design; so it should be possible eventually to build facilities in the third world for manufacturing OLPC machines -- clean, modern factories providing well-paying jobs and keeping money within an economy. They won't be competing with the existing OLPC supply chain, because that was only ever jury-rigged to kickstart a third world computer factory programme -- but they'd be competing with anything Intel and Microsoft, whose established businesses are assuredly not temporary, could offer.
Beware those who talk of "teaching a man to fish", while selling expensive proprietary bait and tackle for a living.
Does the Netherlands have a law forbidding the import of goods manufactured under conditions that would not be acceptable locally? (I know for a fact that the USA has no such law.) If so, then that might be your answer.
It's going to be good for me.
I'm selling toaster-sized boxes pre-loaded with some standard, Open Source software and some Perl scripts of my own making for use as mail servers. You plug in a keyboard and screen to run a simple commissioning script as root, just once; and from then on, everything is configurable through a web browser. If your broadband service has a static IP address (and it should, if you're running a business), you can simply forward port 25 on your router and point an MX record at it; otherwise, I'm reselling an e-mail service which adds the all-important "Envelope-to" header and you can retrieve mail from there by POP3. You can send an e-mail across the office, without it ever leaving the office -- that's got to be good from the privacy angle. And the HDD on these boxes is deliberately small: not only to keep costs down, but also to ensure that old messages get overwritten promptly.
Once a few people get burned by outsourced e-mail services, the world won't be able to get enough local mail servers. And with a simple pricing system (no per-user licencing; you pay just once and have done with it. No danger that you'll be prevented from expanding your business simply because you can't afford to add extra users to your e-mail system) these ones will go like hot cakes.
..... if only because without MySQL there would be no Slashdot, and therefore IT people would be doing something useful instead of posting here.
Unfortunately, they mucked up. The word lists used to arrange the keys were all in the present tense, and so "e" ended up next to "d".
If it's a Microsoft data centre, it'll most probably be running Windows -- in which case, the only "engineering" work to be done will be occasionally to power-cycle one of the machines when it misbehaves. There are businesses in the Third World where they have trained monkeys to do that, but I'm sure Microsoft will be able to afford a shiny GUI-based "virtual fusebox" application, allowing the power to any socket to be cut and restored from anywhere in the world.
Alternatively, if they're machines Microsoft wants to use for anything far too important to trust to Windows, they'll be running FreeBSD -- in which case, the only "engineering" work to be done will be occasionally replacing truly-dead machines with new ones.
At least in the UK, the business model for television is moving to subscription eor advertisements. If you subscribe to Sky Television and get only the basic box, then you have to pay a subscription and you get advertisements interrupting everything except BBC.
If you subscribe to Sky Plus (or Sky HD -- the HD box includes Sky Plus functionality), you get a "recording" box. This allows you to pause and rewind (as far as the last channel change) live TV. If you change channels on time for the beginning of a programme, leave it for ten minutes or so (= the total length of all advert breaks in the programme) and then rewind to the beginning, you can simply fast-forward through the advert breaks. The box even has twin receivers, so you can watch one channel while recording another (the polarisation issue is dealt with in the crudest yet most effective way possible, i.e. the Sky Plus box requires an LNB with two independent outputs) or even record two channels while watching one of them.
Advert-free viewing is the reason to get Sky Plus.
You don't know for sure that Skype does encrypt anything, at least non-trivially (e.g. EOR with a PRNG stream: it looks secure, but all you really need to know in order to break it is the initial seed for the PRNG), because they won't show you the Source Code. In fact, they seem to put in an extraordinary amount of effort just to keep you from seeing the Source Code.
.....
IAX over a secure tunnel is another matter, however
And your "random"-number generator, unless based on a proven algorithm, might well have vulnerabilities of its own to worry about. If you keep the source code secret, no serious security person is going to touch it with a barge pole; and if you show the source code, then your extra layer is largely irrelevant since the sequence only depends on a seed supplied by Microsoft's PRNG.
The nub of the problem is that a deterministic state machine can never produce random behaviour. The long term solution would be an entropy generator on the motherboard. (Actually, many machines have one already: a sound card with an unconnected high-impedance input picking up static is a good entropy source.)
Yes, but they don't have to provide the Source gratis to anyone who hasn't already got a binary from them -- they could legitimately demand to see your purchase receipt before they gave you the Source Code. Or the £5000 could be for a disc (or set of discs) containing the binary and the Source.
What they can't do is charge £5000 for the binary and then another £5000 for the source -- additional charges for the Source Code are limited to covering cost of media and delivery.
Yes; but if some big company is selling a piece of GPL software for £5000 a copy, there's nothing stopping me and 999 other people each stumping up a Lady Godiva and buying one copy between us all. The licence, which comes from the author and not the vendor, allows all 1000 of us to make as many unaltered copies as we want of that software; so we can quite legally install it 1000 times. And then each of us can install it on five other people's computers, charge them a quid and recoup our initial outlay :)
The volt is definitely metric. It's the potential difference across a resistance dissipating one watt (indisputably a metric unit: one joule of energy per second), as a current of one ampere flows through it.
I concur. You crazy Americans should not be measuring your electricity in volts or amperes, since these are strictly metric units. You can start measuring electrical potential in Daniells and current in HP/Dan or BTU/Dan-sec (we'll let you keep seconds). You shouldn't be measuring your chemicals in moles, either: Avogadro's Number for Americans is now 1.7072e+25, the number of atoms in 12 ounces of C-12.
Well, that's pretty much what European law says: if you buy a phone, you can choose your own carrier; and if you sell phones, they have to accept any SIM, not just your favourite carrier's. (European law also forbids region-locking of DVD players -- every DVD player sold on the Continent is multi-region -- and sooner or later will forbid lockout chips in games consoles, requiring them to accept third-party games and accessories. Recall that third-party games were what rescued the Atari 2600 from oblivion; Atari's own offerings had become dire before the likes of Imagic and Activision brothe new life into the console with games that didn't suck donkey bollocks.)
Note that the UK has a history of opting-out of the most working-person-friendly parts of EU law, and probably will be expelled in disgrace from the EU within 10 to 15 years' time. In the UK, DVD players are still sold locked to Region 2 (though all except Sony can be unlocked simply by typing a not-very-secret code on the remote) and it's legal to bundle a phone with a service contract -- as long as the phone can be made to work with another carrier's SIM after the contract is up.