Re:GPL leaves the definition of "aggregate" vague
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In-Depth With Qt 4.4
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By that logic, many dynamically-linked libraries shouldn't be covered by the GPL, because you can just drop in any other library that implements the same API.
I kind of feel like the GPL should be compatible with most CC licenses for artwork, but it doesn't look that way. And IANAL anyway.
Yes but you can only do that at the whim of Steam. At any point they can flip the switch and you loose the ability to do all of the above. A CD with no phone home will never have that happen. Very true, and for many things, I would care very passionately.
But honestly... I've played through Portal some 5-10 times now, and the game cost, what, $20? Less, as part of Orange Box. So if Steam completely disappeared tomorrow, I'd be annoyed, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and I'd pretty much feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of it.
That, and Steam basically provides all the same kinds of features as Xbox Live, for which many people actually pay a subscription fee. I only pay for new games, and then only for the ones that aren't free mods for a game I already have.
Contrast this to something like Bioshock. You get three installs, period -- AND that's assuming their servers are still up to register each time. And those three installs are arbitrary -- they might change it to two later on. If you need more than three, you call them up, and again, it's entirely their choice whether you actually own the game you do.
You see the difference? Steam actually adds value with their service. True, the service doesn't actually depend on DRM, but it makes the DRM so painless and incidental it's like bitching that WoW has a monthly fee.
Look at the various Microsoft DRMed music that people are loosing the ability to listen to. It's a broken business model and I refuse to encourage them by giving them money. Bioshock, DivX, and Microsoft DRM'd music pretty much all subtract value with their DRM, by preventing you from doing things you really should be able to. In fact, I will tolerate a lot less DRM on media, simply because media should be portable -- if it's in a reasonably standard codec, I should be able to play it anywhere, and Microsoft DRM means I can play it on a PC and a Zune.
But with software, like Steam -- I can only play the game I bought on one computer at a time, so it hardly matters that I can only be logged in once. I'm already forced into running Windows on x86 due to the game being closed source and written for that platform. The only real effect of the DRM there is the need to be online occasionally (I almost always am), and the potential for Very Bad Things to happen much later. (Even here, Bioshock is worse, as that's pretty much a certainty that I'll have more than three reinstalls.)
Oh, by the way: I don't think "business model" means what you think it does. Microsoft DRM'd music has some actual relation to a business model. DRM has absolutely zero relation to Steam's business model.
In defense of inaction, it's probably because you really can't trust that an app that claimed to provide MSVCRT version x actually provided a real compatible version x, so it's easier to just bundle the damn dependencies instead. This does not seem like a particularly hard problem. Just sign the damned things, so that if something really does provide MSVCRT version x, it has either been vetted by the people responsible for MSVCRT, or it's been deliberately overridden by the user.
Or, absolute worst case, simply depend on a specific set of files, by some hash. If the hash doesn't match, download/install your own.
I would say, don't deploy on Windows, but of course, the rest of you have to live in the real world...
And I would say, you can fake this pretty well. Windows does keep track of all MSIs currently installed, and it should be possible to query that. So it'd be as simple as, in your installer (in whatever format it comes in), detect Qt if it's there, and download it if it isn't.
Of course, the standard Windows solution seems to be to statically link everything, which will make each app smaller, but since they can no longer share, it makes the aggregate bigger.
And the OS X solution is, if you're feeling especially kind, distribute separate Intel and PPC versions. Otherwise, force everyone to download three times the size of the app in libraries, multiplied by four architectures -- mostly, I think, so that you can distribute one universal CD, and so that people who've bought some proprietary app can drag the bundle between machines. These are nice features to have, but to me, are not worth the insane waste.
Actually, no, The Bible is what makes me question God's motives, if that one exists.
And that's enough to get rid of the Jehovah's Witnesses (yes, they're still around) fast enough that I don't often think too much more deeply about it.
"Did you know that your god condones rape, genocide, prostitution, and killing your whole family for not believing? Yeah, it's all right there in the Bible. Your book, not mine."
That's probably the single item that religious people seem least able to argue about. Even if they can convince me there is a God, now they have to convince me that it's a good God.
It is - it's not distributed, but they direct you to type 'wine iexplore', which opens up a download/install thing. I actually see the download/install thing when an app first needs it.
No, I mean, how about we actually incorporate it into Wine, as in, have it included in the Wine distribution? Not some shiny wrapper that's going to waste bandwidth while I download it yet again, because I like to have multiple WINEPREFIXes.
Both have simple schemes that work. none of this stupid crap like this or that crappy "steam" that valve tries to shovel out. and all of those after 1 year release a official patch that gets rid of the CD requirement and other DRM stupidity. Or, on Linux, there was never a CD requirement. The worst was Quake4, which would phone home, but would work perfectly fine if you cut off its auth server with a host file entry.
Although id kind of is dying, and Quake 4 wasn't their game anyway -- it was done by Raven.
I have to say, though, Steam is absolutely my favorite DRM scheme, if I had to have one. It's simple, it pretty much always works, and I can re-download all my games anywhere I remember my password.
I very much doubt there are any games for which this would work. Someone else already posted -- all it takes is a little decent crypto, and this would be pointless without truly absurd measures in place -- like a virtual machine which could run exactly the same operations the game did, in exactly the same order, pretending to be exactly the same time of day, etc.
It's easier to just disassemble it -- which means neither one is going to be available to Joe User.
The only way I see this working is if the game is designed to operate in some sort of offline mode, in which case, editing the host file is probably the simplest way to block traffic, to make the game think it's offline when it isn't. In other words, almost as easy to just unplug the Ethernet cable from the back of your machine.
Well gee, I suppose you want your old NES games to run on a Wii? The irony here is, many old NES games do, in fact, run on a Wii. You just have to buy them again.
I'm just nitpicking here -- you make a good point, but some of your facts aren't entirely right.
Then there's Blizzard, who actively fucked over [linux.com] people making local-type servers for games like Warcraft and Starcraft. Yes, bnetd is dead... long live pvpgn.
The new legal hack is, you make a system which is supposedly a "generic system" that just happens to be very compatible with some commercial product. You include no copyrighted anything in the actual distribution. This lets development proceed more or less as any other open source project.
In fact, pvpgn is even in Ubuntu's "universe" repository. As I understand it, Universe is stuff that they wouldn't mind distributing with Ubuntu itself, but they don't feel like supporting, so it's maintained by the community instead. Contrast this with "restricted" (proprietary) or "multiverse" (questionable legality in some countries).
And, of course, there are places where you can get all the materials needed to turn a pvpgn server into a pretty-much compatible Battle.net server. For something like pvpgn, that's probably really all contained on the actual game discs -- kind of like Quake3's code is open, but the actual Quake3 maps must be pulled off a CD.
There are even open source "Generic MMO servers" which just happen to be exactly the same model as WoW -- give it some data from a WoW install, and some server-side data as a database dump from completely separate projects, and you've got a private WoW server. (It amazes and irritates me how many man-years go into making the perfect WoW server clone, instead of building a better game from scratch.)
DRM alone doesn't cause this either - a lot of earlier (Directx 4-5-6ish) games have a TON of problems getting set up on modern systems, or glitch horribly when you try to run them. I'm not entirely sure, but I bet some of these would actually work pretty well under Wine -- although at DirectX 4, you're actually getting into territory where it might make sense to just put Windows 98 in a VM.
There are also a few titles you can't even install because they try to access the hard drive directly and don't understand the FAT32 and NTFS formats. DOSBox. Problem solved.
Unless, of course, there's DRM, which makes the problem doubly hard -- they might be something stupid enough to require the exact original media, so you may not even have all the data necessary to play the game -- or it might not even have been possible to copy it to your hard drive at all.
And consider the following ironic thought: what are the chances that, 10 years from now on your (10th? 15th? 25th?) anniversary, you'll be able to find a working VHS player to watch your wedding video? Well, they make standalone VHS->DVD converters. And if it was really 10 years from now on my 10th anniversary, what are the chances I have it in VHS format at all?
Let them try this shit, someone will fix it for them. Problem solved. Two problems with this:
First, you're still paying them to do this shit. I realize it's a no-win situation -- if sales go up, they claim people don't mind DRM. If sales go down, they claim they need more DRM to stop those filthy pirates.
But it might be nice if we could actually generate some meaningful statistics, and actually vote with our wallets. Tricky, though, because we're short on options -- maybe because we didn't vote with our wallets?
Second, how many resources have to be wasted building and cracking DRM? BR isn't "fixed", by the way -- both HD-DVD and BR are only really meaningfully cracked by a commercial product, and only as long as their servers stay up. iTunes was "fixed" for awhile now; I think it's broken again. (Oh, and iTunes does have alternatives, though it requires you seeking out bands who are done dealing with the record labels.)
Unfortunately, aside from DVD, the only truly permanent fix is piracy. I can't be sure, if I buy a BR movie, whether I'll be able to rip it -- I can be reasonably sure, but never absolutely sure. The only way to be absolutely sure is to skip buying it and download the 4 gig mkv.
Equally sad is watching the steady decline of a formerly excellent game company... like id software. Not so much, once you realize they're no longer a game company. They're a game engine company.
Honest gamers like me have securom installed by their purchased games because people like you will pirate them at the first opportunity. You know, there is another option -- buy it and crack it the second you get home.
But if you're going to go to the trouble of cracking it anyway, I can see rationalizing that you deserve to get it for free.
Anything that stops leechers pirating games is fine with me. Can you say "Godwinbait"?
That's not going to work unless the patch exists before they go out of business. Is anyone really going to stay on a single day past the death of the company to do that?
And if it's created before the death of the company, there's always the chance it'll be leaked.
I have to wonder if that contributed to the recovery. A modern drive, with a thousand times as much data, would probably have a lot more of the data damaged.
OpenID, so that people actually care about their identity, no matter who they choose to be -- while still allowing somewhat anonymous cowards.
Then, block IP addresses and OpenID providers.
Honestly, if the entire Department of Energy is behind one gigantic NAT, that's a retarded design. It doesn't have to be permanent, and I suspect the number of readers you'd lose by requiring driver's licenses is far greater than the number of readers you'd lose by blocking a rather large NAT.
One more thing: This guy should read Slashdot, if only to see how it works when it's done reasonably well.
Trackers only track what the client tells it about - they periodically tell it how much they've uploaded and downloaded. Interesting. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to simply do some double-entry accounting on this, though -- you can't suddenly decide to "upload" a few gigs to nobody; someone else would have to report downloading an equivalent amount.
I think the big issue though is that the Scene (at least, as I understand it) is a bunch of very small, closed communities (where a "community" is probably a single FTP server and the people who have access to it), with tightly controlled conduits between them. While you see this is as being inefficient It's not so much the community/cell structure that I see as innefficient, it's that even in a community of that size, I see FTP as the absolute rock-bottom last choice I'd ever use. And BT can work on that small a scale.
Another problem is that BT is largely a "pull" system - you publish a torrent and people can go get it. Most of the Scene operates as a "push" system, with people uploading new content in order to get credit. People upload that new content to one central server.
So the only problem here is if nobody wants to download that content -- in which case, should you still get credit for it?
I think another difference between the BitTorrent communities and the "Scene" is that BT communities reward people for continuing to upload content someone else provided in the first place, whereas the Scene specifically only rewards people for contributing new content. Yet obviously, someone has to pay the bills of that single server. (In fact, from what I understand, there are membership fees which go towards paying that bill.)
So it makes sense to have at least some sort of a credit system for contributing bandwidth, which goes towards eliminating the need for a central server with tons of bandwidth and storage.
Oh -- it also seems like a good place to do Waste, though I'm not entirely sure. I know a lot more about BitTorrent than I do about Waste, and that's not saying much.
Yeah, that's so deep. Certainly nobody has thought on that before./sarcasm That's why I have the signature I do.
Seriously, you would have had to be completely daft to have not thought of things like that when you were a teenager. Maybe it's not a fair assertion -- after all, I saw The Matrix when I was 12.
But no, I honestly don't think I'd have come up with it on my own. The closest I came was wondering if I might be dreaming, somehow -- but I never managed to actually deconstruct it to where it was a coherent argument that I didn't know.
Now, I did read a bit of Heidegger, but after that point, I was completely spoiled for this experiment.
Seriously, what your average teenage guy is thinking about is sex, drugs, sex, rock & roll, sex, rebelling against parents, sex, and oh yeah, sex. I don't pretend to really know what any female is thinking, but I suspect it could be summed up similarly -- popularity, guys, popularity, shopping, popularity, and oh god, I'm so fat. (Seems like 99% of American females think they're fat, no matter how hot they are.)
The point is not that this stuff is impressively deep. The point is that it's impressively deep when you're twelve, because twelve-year-olds are not that deep yet.
On Windows, at least, it's possible to include things like an icon in the executable.
On Linux, this is a non-issue, as icons are generally kept separately, and you never actually click on an executable -- you click on an icon, somewhere, which is a file which refers to the binary and the image by name.
On OS X, I don't actually know, but I suspect that the icon is in the.app bundle, which isn't technically linking.
But on Windows, I can see this being a problem.
Oh, and there's the whole issue of not all programs being available under GPL-compatible licenses. Doesn't affect me much, as I mostly work with interpreted languages, and Trolltech has said that python-qt only requires Python to be GPL'd (it is), and not any programs interpreted by Python.
It's not usually a huge issue, as if you're writing a new app from the ground up, you can always choose to GPL3 it, or if it's commercial, you can probably afford to license Qt. But it's still a selling point for gtk.
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By that logic, many dynamically-linked libraries shouldn't be covered by the GPL, because you can just drop in any other library that implements the same API.
I kind of feel like the GPL should be compatible with most CC licenses for artwork, but it doesn't look that way. And IANAL anyway.
But honestly... I've played through Portal some 5-10 times now, and the game cost, what, $20? Less, as part of Orange Box. So if Steam completely disappeared tomorrow, I'd be annoyed, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and I'd pretty much feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of it.
That, and Steam basically provides all the same kinds of features as Xbox Live, for which many people actually pay a subscription fee. I only pay for new games, and then only for the ones that aren't free mods for a game I already have.
Contrast this to something like Bioshock. You get three installs, period -- AND that's assuming their servers are still up to register each time. And those three installs are arbitrary -- they might change it to two later on. If you need more than three, you call them up, and again, it's entirely their choice whether you actually own the game you do.
You see the difference? Steam actually adds value with their service. True, the service doesn't actually depend on DRM, but it makes the DRM so painless and incidental it's like bitching that WoW has a monthly fee. Look at the various Microsoft DRMed music that people are loosing the ability to listen to. It's a broken business model and I refuse to encourage them by giving them money. Bioshock, DivX, and Microsoft DRM'd music pretty much all subtract value with their DRM, by preventing you from doing things you really should be able to. In fact, I will tolerate a lot less DRM on media, simply because media should be portable -- if it's in a reasonably standard codec, I should be able to play it anywhere, and Microsoft DRM means I can play it on a PC and a Zune.
But with software, like Steam -- I can only play the game I bought on one computer at a time, so it hardly matters that I can only be logged in once. I'm already forced into running Windows on x86 due to the game being closed source and written for that platform. The only real effect of the DRM there is the need to be online occasionally (I almost always am), and the potential for Very Bad Things to happen much later. (Even here, Bioshock is worse, as that's pretty much a certainty that I'll have more than three reinstalls.)
Oh, by the way: I don't think "business model" means what you think it does. Microsoft DRM'd music has some actual relation to a business model. DRM has absolutely zero relation to Steam's business model.
No moreso than the Christian god or the Jewish god.
Or, absolute worst case, simply depend on a specific set of files, by some hash. If the hash doesn't match, download/install your own.
I would say, don't deploy on Windows, but of course, the rest of you have to live in the real world...
And I would say, you can fake this pretty well. Windows does keep track of all MSIs currently installed, and it should be possible to query that. So it'd be as simple as, in your installer (in whatever format it comes in), detect Qt if it's there, and download it if it isn't.
Of course, the standard Windows solution seems to be to statically link everything, which will make each app smaller, but since they can no longer share, it makes the aggregate bigger.
And the OS X solution is, if you're feeling especially kind, distribute separate Intel and PPC versions. Otherwise, force everyone to download three times the size of the app in libraries, multiplied by four architectures -- mostly, I think, so that you can distribute one universal CD, and so that people who've bought some proprietary app can drag the bundle between machines. These are nice features to have, but to me, are not worth the insane waste.
Actually, no, The Bible is what makes me question God's motives, if that one exists.
And that's enough to get rid of the Jehovah's Witnesses (yes, they're still around) fast enough that I don't often think too much more deeply about it.
"Did you know that your god condones rape, genocide, prostitution, and killing your whole family for not believing? Yeah, it's all right there in the Bible. Your book, not mine."
Conversation fucking over. I win.
Maybe there's an insane God?
That's probably the single item that religious people seem least able to argue about. Even if they can convince me there is a God, now they have to convince me that it's a good God.
No, I mean, how about we actually incorporate it into Wine, as in, have it included in the Wine distribution? Not some shiny wrapper that's going to waste bandwidth while I download it yet again, because I like to have multiple WINEPREFIXes.
Although id kind of is dying, and Quake 4 wasn't their game anyway -- it was done by Raven.
I have to say, though, Steam is absolutely my favorite DRM scheme, if I had to have one. It's simple, it pretty much always works, and I can re-download all my games anywhere I remember my password.
For some reason, everyone seems to hate Steam. This is one feature I like about it.
I can buy a game online, and then I can download it anywhere I have that username/password. No questions asked. (Unless it's Bioshock. Fuckers.)
I very much doubt there are any games for which this would work. Someone else already posted -- all it takes is a little decent crypto, and this would be pointless without truly absurd measures in place -- like a virtual machine which could run exactly the same operations the game did, in exactly the same order, pretending to be exactly the same time of day, etc.
It's easier to just disassemble it -- which means neither one is going to be available to Joe User.
The only way I see this working is if the game is designed to operate in some sort of offline mode, in which case, editing the host file is probably the simplest way to block traffic, to make the game think it's offline when it isn't. In other words, almost as easy to just unplug the Ethernet cable from the back of your machine.
No, in this one, they give you the key separately from the lock. It's still there.
Why is it that you think signing is better than other kinds of DRM? Tell me that, and I'll get back to you and explain why you're wrong.
The new legal hack is, you make a system which is supposedly a "generic system" that just happens to be very compatible with some commercial product. You include no copyrighted anything in the actual distribution. This lets development proceed more or less as any other open source project.
In fact, pvpgn is even in Ubuntu's "universe" repository. As I understand it, Universe is stuff that they wouldn't mind distributing with Ubuntu itself, but they don't feel like supporting, so it's maintained by the community instead. Contrast this with "restricted" (proprietary) or "multiverse" (questionable legality in some countries).
And, of course, there are places where you can get all the materials needed to turn a pvpgn server into a pretty-much compatible Battle.net server. For something like pvpgn, that's probably really all contained on the actual game discs -- kind of like Quake3's code is open, but the actual Quake3 maps must be pulled off a CD.
There are even open source "Generic MMO servers" which just happen to be exactly the same model as WoW -- give it some data from a WoW install, and some server-side data as a database dump from completely separate projects, and you've got a private WoW server. (It amazes and irritates me how many man-years go into making the perfect WoW server clone, instead of building a better game from scratch.) DRM alone doesn't cause this either - a lot of earlier (Directx 4-5-6ish) games have a TON of problems getting set up on modern systems, or glitch horribly when you try to run them. I'm not entirely sure, but I bet some of these would actually work pretty well under Wine -- although at DirectX 4, you're actually getting into territory where it might make sense to just put Windows 98 in a VM. There are also a few titles you can't even install because they try to access the hard drive directly and don't understand the FAT32 and NTFS formats. DOSBox. Problem solved.
Unless, of course, there's DRM, which makes the problem doubly hard -- they might be something stupid enough to require the exact original media, so you may not even have all the data necessary to play the game -- or it might not even have been possible to copy it to your hard drive at all. And consider the following ironic thought: what are the chances that, 10 years from now on your (10th? 15th? 25th?) anniversary, you'll be able to find a working VHS player to watch your wedding video? Well, they make standalone VHS->DVD converters. And if it was really 10 years from now on my 10th anniversary, what are the chances I have it in VHS format at all?
First, you're still paying them to do this shit. I realize it's a no-win situation -- if sales go up, they claim people don't mind DRM. If sales go down, they claim they need more DRM to stop those filthy pirates.
But it might be nice if we could actually generate some meaningful statistics, and actually vote with our wallets. Tricky, though, because we're short on options -- maybe because we didn't vote with our wallets?
Second, how many resources have to be wasted building and cracking DRM? BR isn't "fixed", by the way -- both HD-DVD and BR are only really meaningfully cracked by a commercial product, and only as long as their servers stay up. iTunes was "fixed" for awhile now; I think it's broken again. (Oh, and iTunes does have alternatives, though it requires you seeking out bands who are done dealing with the record labels.)
Unfortunately, aside from DVD, the only truly permanent fix is piracy. I can't be sure, if I buy a BR movie, whether I'll be able to rip it -- I can be reasonably sure, but never absolutely sure. The only way to be absolutely sure is to skip buying it and download the 4 gig mkv.
But if you're going to go to the trouble of cracking it anyway, I can see rationalizing that you deserve to get it for free. Anything that stops leechers pirating games is fine with me. Can you say "Godwinbait"?
That's not going to work unless the patch exists before they go out of business. Is anyone really going to stay on a single day past the death of the company to do that?
And if it's created before the death of the company, there's always the chance it'll be leaked.
I have to wonder if that contributed to the recovery. A modern drive, with a thousand times as much data, would probably have a lot more of the data damaged.
WTF? ColdFusion and Java? To serve a single static page?
And is it just me, or is that a SELECT statement without a WHERE clause?
Why should we have to change? It was our word first, damnit!
You're probably right, though...
OpenID, so that people actually care about their identity, no matter who they choose to be -- while still allowing somewhat anonymous cowards.
Then, block IP addresses and OpenID providers.
Honestly, if the entire Department of Energy is behind one gigantic NAT, that's a retarded design. It doesn't have to be permanent, and I suspect the number of readers you'd lose by requiring driver's licenses is far greater than the number of readers you'd lose by blocking a rather large NAT.
One more thing: This guy should read Slashdot, if only to see how it works when it's done reasonably well.
So the only problem here is if nobody wants to download that content -- in which case, should you still get credit for it? I think another difference between the BitTorrent communities and the "Scene" is that BT communities reward people for continuing to upload content someone else provided in the first place, whereas the Scene specifically only rewards people for contributing new content. Yet obviously, someone has to pay the bills of that single server. (In fact, from what I understand, there are membership fees which go towards paying that bill.)
So it makes sense to have at least some sort of a credit system for contributing bandwidth, which goes towards eliminating the need for a central server with tons of bandwidth and storage.
Oh -- it also seems like a good place to do Waste, though I'm not entirely sure. I know a lot more about BitTorrent than I do about Waste, and that's not saying much.
But no, I honestly don't think I'd have come up with it on my own. The closest I came was wondering if I might be dreaming, somehow -- but I never managed to actually deconstruct it to where it was a coherent argument that I didn't know.
Now, I did read a bit of Heidegger, but after that point, I was completely spoiled for this experiment.
Seriously, what your average teenage guy is thinking about is sex, drugs, sex, rock & roll, sex, rebelling against parents, sex, and oh yeah, sex. I don't pretend to really know what any female is thinking, but I suspect it could be summed up similarly -- popularity, guys, popularity, shopping, popularity, and oh god, I'm so fat. (Seems like 99% of American females think they're fat, no matter how hot they are.)
The point is not that this stuff is impressively deep. The point is that it's impressively deep when you're twelve, because twelve-year-olds are not that deep yet.
On Windows, at least, it's possible to include things like an icon in the executable.
.app bundle, which isn't technically linking.
On Linux, this is a non-issue, as icons are generally kept separately, and you never actually click on an executable -- you click on an icon, somewhere, which is a file which refers to the binary and the image by name.
On OS X, I don't actually know, but I suspect that the icon is in the
But on Windows, I can see this being a problem.
Oh, and there's the whole issue of not all programs being available under GPL-compatible licenses. Doesn't affect me much, as I mostly work with interpreted languages, and Trolltech has said that python-qt only requires Python to be GPL'd (it is), and not any programs interpreted by Python.
It's not usually a huge issue, as if you're writing a new app from the ground up, you can always choose to GPL3 it, or if it's commercial, you can probably afford to license Qt. But it's still a selling point for gtk.