I heard they even switched their own internal servers from OpenMail to Exchange, which seems to have been causing chaos within HP a couple of weeks ago.
I wonder what Micros~1 has offered HP in return for taking a competing product off the market.
Even though you're joking, you raise a serious point. This is actually a pretty common misunderstanding many people have about those who oppose intellectual monopolies.
I am personally opposed to copyright as a concept. But that doesn't mean I want to legalize plagiarism! People should be able to freely copy artistic and scientific works, but it should still be illegal to pretend that somebody else's work is your own.
I can't tell you how many times people assume that since you are opposing the right to monopolize certain ideas (or certain expressions), you are thereby automatically in favour of the freedom to falsely claim authorship of intellectual works.
And why do you think that is? Could it be because you don't have your facts straight and are posting stupid comments about the Free Software Foundation before thinking twice?
They set up conditions for a definition of "free" and insist till the end of time that software is not "free" unless it follows the GPL
Go here and check what licenses make free software according to the FSF. Then come back in shame.
Every time there is a story on Slashdot these days that even vaguely concerns the FSF, it gets flooded by a bunch of losers who feel they have to talk crap about how bad this organisation really is.
The Free Software Foundation, and Richard Stallman in particular, deserve a lot of respect. If you've got something against them, at least have the decency to come up with some real arguments.
In a free market, Prozac would never have been invented without the protection promised by the patent system.
I don't believe you. Give me some proof of that.
Do you really believe that products aren't created without government-granted monopolies to secure a fat return on your investment?
Regardless of their value to society, complex inventions typically aren't created unless they may be commercially exploited.
How would the absence of patents make commercial exploitation impossible?
Your arguments fail to convince me. I think Prozac (or something similar) would have been invented. Here's why:
The patent system not only carries a promise of a lucrative monopoly. It also carries the threat of someone else getting there just before you do, and obtaining the patent. Now your investment is completely wasted.
If, however, you know that the government isn't going to stop you from making the drug you invented just because your competitor makes something similar, you are guaranteed a return on your R&D investment. Granted, not as high a return as you would have had if you won in the first-pass-the-post patent system, but a return that fairly reflects your efficiency in production.
Your view of investment in innovation only holds water if you believe inventions happen in splendid isolation. Which they don't.
If copyright was abolished tomorrow, there would no longer be any way to enforce the GPL or any other copyleft license. The only reason you're bound by the GPL is that if you don't agree to it, you don't have permission to download the (copyrighted!) information.
Well, duh. If copyright was abandoned tomorrow we wouldn't need the GPL any more.
Anytime the subject of Intellectual Monopolies has come up on Slashdot lately you see this argument posted over and over again - and moderated up immediately as "Insightful", despite the fact that anyone who has spent any time looking at what the Free Software Movement is all about should be able to discard it as "Redundant" (or maybe "Troll"?) in 2 seconds.
I have a theory too: if we didn't have closed-source operating systems dominating the market (read: Micros~1 Windows) we wouldn't be so dependent on the x86 CPU architecture.
If could just recompile and go on a new CPU, all the stupidity from the past could be cleaned up.
And if CPU's wouldn't need all that bloat they'd use a LOT less power. And run faster, too.
So you see, if you think hard enough everything can be blamed on Micros~1.
They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity.
I think UNIX forked into so many slightly incompatible vendor-specific distributions (one of which is SunOS BTW) because the original Berkeley UNIX was licensed very liberally.
Linux is not so liberally licensed (namely, under the GPL) and that makes irreversible forking-fests like the UNIX wars less likely with Linux.
Proprietary (==non-free==closed-source) Linuxes can't happen because of the GPL. So if an incompatibly forked version is ever released, the itch that this creates can and will be scratched.
Tansparency and openess is essential to a (socially) functioning internet, and that can only be acheived if the source of all information is public record
Are you saying that a society can only function if the source of all information is public record? I think that's nonsense, I even think that "anonymous pamphleteering" can be of great value. It provides a means to express unpopular views. Expression of unpopular ideas is good.
The fact that anonymity can be abused for fraud is less important than the protection it can offer those who have unpopular, but important, things to say.
[...]
... and I might be wrong, but I think they got 'em with a domain registration...
You mean the WHOIS record for their domain listed the 'parent' companies? If they got 'em that way, they've just been stupid.
As long as our favourite non-free x86-only OS rules the planet, we'll have x86.
As soon as free OS's will gain a certain critical mass, competition between CPU instruction set designs will really take off.
And x86 will lose any fair contest to architectures like ARM or MIPS.
It's only the 'economy of scale' that's sustaining the design and production of enormous chips with huge ridiculous-looking cooling systems; if all software could easily be recompiled there would be no need for these monsters. I don't think that even 2GHz CPUs need big coolers if they have a sensible instruction set design.
So, you see, Free Software not only gives you freedom, it will also save the environment;-)
We did, in fact, bomb Pearl Harbour only yesterday. Don't you read the papers? The Slashdot thing was just a decoy, once the whole US army was distracted we snuck in there and destroyed the place!
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Soon you will all feel a strange urge to go out and buy a pair of wooden shoes and lots of cheese....
All right, another one of those stories where Slashdot turns into the American Xenophobic Society!!
Another chance to watch those who normally cry foul at the slightest threat to their own freedom turn into a bunch of zealous gatekeepers for fear of a little competition.
That's why they can copyright their code, to prevent it from being stolen.
Regardless of whether you think that it is right or wrong that an author should possess the right to forbid copying of his work, unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing.
It's a broken analogy used by those who wish to exagerrate the seriousness of the offence of unauthorized copying.
In short, copyright does nothing to hinder theft. It hinders copying.
Lawyers are smart enough to learn any concept in a few coffee breaks? I'm going to need a few very long coffee breaks before I'm convinced of that.
Also, what legal principle is violated by having specialized lawyers/judges? The Supreme Court in my country consists of several Chambers, each for a particular 'area' of the law. What exactly is principally wrong with that?
BTW, your claim that in a capitalist economy, the highest-paid people are the smartest is complete nonsense, IMHO. Why then wasn't Einstein extremely rich, and why isn't Dan Quayle homeless?
Oh, and for the untrue statement by Kaplan you requested, how about this one:
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer
systems or data storage media in which it is located.
It's on the final page (93). And utterly false. Granted, this doesn't come from technical ignorance, just from plain old bias, but you asked for an example of where he was factually wrong (legal and moral issues aside).
Personally spekaing, my folks fought in the Revolution, Civil War, WW II, etc. My folks built the roads and buildings and schools. I've earned the right to voice my opinions and propose and vote on policy.
Well, this is exactly the kind of thinking I'm protesting against. What your ancestors did earns you no rights. You've got to earn those for yourself, or you have them because you're human, just like anyone else.
I know that's not the way it works. The way it works sucks.
Most Americans agree with me. Sorry.
To give you a similar example from somewhere else: I myself am a completely native European, my ancestors have lived in and built up my country to the very high standard of living it enjoys today, and probably fought in countless wars, both just and unjust, for too many generations to count.
So what? That doesn't give me the right to live off their work and kick out anybody else.
Please stop throwing around the word freedom. Have we not the freedom to close our borders? The constitution guarentees freedom and rights to our citizens, it's scope is strictly national.
So what? I wasn't talking about any constitution.
If you're in a life-boat holding a stick you have the power to keep out people in the water. You can even call it the freedom to keep 'em out, 'cause you wrote down that it's OK on a piece of paper and you call that the 'constitution' of the life-boat.
That doesn't make it any more ethical, though.
And don't tell me the life-boat is full -- what is being said here is that you have enough people to row the boat, and that you don't want any competition for your cosy seat.
THe US has never been a meritocracy.
Again: so what? I'm not criticising the USA in particular, all countries do this (although some have formed groups within which you can freely move).
Skills are important, but so is lifting up our own poor and giving them the skills to earn a living before we start emptying Calcutta's slums.
Your own poor? I fail to see the distinction. Poor is poor, whatever country you happen to be born in.
How come people on Slashdot are all for freedom except when this subject of allowing foreigners into the US comes up?
It would be good to see to it that people are paid reasonable wages, so that competition is fair, but (IMHO) it's unethical to prevent them from doing their job because they don't have the right passport.
Their passport is a completely irrelevant document as far as their skills are concerned.
Patents grant an exclusive right to exploit an invention, in exchange for the publication of the way it works. What expires about RSA in two weeks is that exclusive right, not any form of secrecy.
So "public" is used in two ways here: the way RSA works always has been public. The right to use it hasn't been, but will now become, public.
Re:I used to host DeCSS on an Oz server...
on
DeCSS Down Under
·
· Score: 2
Sure DVDs suck. 99% of movies suck, anyway.
But that's hardly the point, is it? The point is that a successful suppression of DeCSS by the MPAA sets a couple of very nasty precedents. It is a duty we all owe to the internet to fight the MPAA on this.
I've got no DVD player. I don't want one. I don't want to use DeCSS. But I need to have the right to use it. That's why I mirror DeCSS.
It does have limitations like you say, but for a lot of small businesses it works fine.
Well, I have to use it at home too, because dialup-ISPs only give you 1 address.
Faced with that, it is a clever hack, and it works OK even if you don't use Cisco (I can't afford that, I just use Linux on an old '486:-), but it still sucks if you want to do anything 'unexpected'.
I just think that using NAT as an argument for saying that IPv4 is still OK, and, by the way, it gives you security, is wrong. It doesn't fly. NAT shouldn't be necessary, it's overhead and it breaks lots of stuff.
It is _not_ security by obscurity. As you said, there are things that the NAT boxes _can't_ do. That _is_ security - limitting the possibilities. It prevents any requests from being routed to your internal boxes.
That's not NAT, that's a firewall you're talking about. NAT is Network Address Translation - it substitutes IP-adresses n:m.
Doing that breaks a lot of stuff in previously unknown ways. That's not security.
NAT-boxen may well have some firewall functionality (like, in your example, allowing the admin to say that translation will only be one-way), but you can get that from a firewall, too.
You may also use NAT in a situation where external IP addresses aren't routable on your internal network - but again, that's not a property of NAT, you can do this in other ways.
There is no security NAT gives you that cannot be achieved in other, better, ways. Relying on your NAT software to break stuff is not very secure at all.
But, aside from all that, one thing that you keep hearing in the "NAT adds security"-talk is that it hides details of your network from the outside world because no-one will know your IP addresses. Now that *is* security by obscurity.
Use NAT. Then you've got some sort of a "firewall" at the same time.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! NO! NO! Please don't use NAT. It sucks! It sucks! Aaaaaarggggggh.
Sorry about that. Seriously, though: NAT is not a security measure. It can imply some firewall functionality because there are many things a NAT-box just can't do, but that doesn't make it any less "security by obscurity".
NAT has been causing me so many problems this last year. It's nothing more than a clever but nasty hack to keep IPv4 up and running. So is name-based virtual hosting, really.
We really need to move to IPv6 and be done with all this nonsense.
The two marketplace triumphs of open source, after all, are derivative rather than truly innovative.
A classic piece of FUD the author unfortunately hasn't managed to avoid. The standard reply would be to point to sendmail, for example.
My guess is that percentage-wise, free and non-free software have about the same amounts of truly innovative stuff.
There are many kinds of open-source licenses, but they all require contributors who modify an open-source program to make those improvements available to all members of the project.
Ouch! This is very wrong. BSD-style licenses qualify as open source, but they do not require modifications to be made available.
Actually, none of the open source licenses require exactly that "contributors who modify an open-source program make those improvements available": this requirement is only made by GPL-style ('viral') licenses only if and when the modifications are redistributed.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard they even switched their own internal servers from OpenMail to Exchange, which seems to have been causing chaos within HP a couple of weeks ago.
I wonder what Micros~1 has offered HP in return for taking a competing product off the market.
Even though you're joking, you raise a serious point. This is actually a pretty common misunderstanding many people have about those who oppose intellectual monopolies.
I am personally opposed to copyright as a concept. But that doesn't mean I want to legalize plagiarism! People should be able to freely copy artistic and scientific works, but it should still be illegal to pretend that somebody else's work is your own.
I can't tell you how many times people assume that since you are opposing the right to monopolize certain ideas (or certain expressions), you are thereby automatically in favour of the freedom to falsely claim authorship of intellectual works.
And why do you think that is? Could it be because you don't have your facts straight and are posting stupid comments about the Free Software Foundation before thinking twice?
Go here and check what licenses make free software according to the FSF. Then come back in shame.
Every time there is a story on Slashdot these days that even vaguely concerns the FSF, it gets flooded by a bunch of losers who feel they have to talk crap about how bad this organisation really is.
The Free Software Foundation, and Richard Stallman in particular, deserve a lot of respect. If you've got something against them, at least have the decency to come up with some real arguments.
All this made sense until you started calling copying "stealing".
Because no matter what you think of it, unauthorized copying is not stealing.
If you want to seem neutral on these issues, try to avoid the copyright industry's terminology.
I don't believe you. Give me some proof of that.
Do you really believe that products aren't created without government-granted monopolies to secure a fat return on your investment?
How would the absence of patents make commercial exploitation impossible?
Your arguments fail to convince me. I think Prozac (or something similar) would have been invented. Here's why:
The patent system not only carries a promise of a lucrative monopoly. It also carries the threat of someone else getting there just before you do, and obtaining the patent. Now your investment is completely wasted.
If, however, you know that the government isn't going to stop you from making the drug you invented just because your competitor makes something similar, you are guaranteed a return on your R&D investment. Granted, not as high a return as you would have had if you won in the first-pass-the-post patent system, but a return that fairly reflects your efficiency in production.
Your view of investment in innovation only holds water if you believe inventions happen in splendid isolation. Which they don't.
Well, duh. If copyright was abandoned tomorrow we wouldn't need the GPL any more.
Anytime the subject of Intellectual Monopolies has come up on Slashdot lately you see this argument posted over and over again - and moderated up immediately as "Insightful", despite the fact that anyone who has spent any time looking at what the Free Software Movement is all about should be able to discard it as "Redundant" (or maybe "Troll"?) in 2 seconds.
Jeez.. talk about far-fetched...
I have a theory too: if we didn't have closed-source operating systems dominating the market (read: Micros~1 Windows) we wouldn't be so dependent on the x86 CPU architecture.
If could just recompile and go on a new CPU, all the stupidity from the past could be cleaned up.
And if CPU's wouldn't need all that bloat they'd use a LOT less power. And run faster, too.
So you see, if you think hard enough everything can be blamed on Micros~1.
"Everybody Loves Raymond"? What's that, ESR's autobiography?
I think UNIX forked into so many slightly incompatible vendor-specific distributions (one of which is SunOS BTW) because the original Berkeley UNIX was licensed very liberally.
Linux is not so liberally licensed (namely, under the GPL) and that makes irreversible forking-fests like the UNIX wars less likely with Linux.
Proprietary (==non-free==closed-source) Linuxes can't happen because of the GPL. So if an incompatibly forked version is ever released, the itch that this creates can and will be scratched.
Are you saying that a society can only function if the source of all information is public record? I think that's nonsense, I even think that "anonymous pamphleteering" can be of great value. It provides a means to express unpopular views. Expression of unpopular ideas is good.
The fact that anonymity can be abused for fraud is less important than the protection it can offer those who have unpopular, but important, things to say.
You mean the WHOIS record for their domain listed the 'parent' companies? If they got 'em that way, they've just been stupid.
As long as our favourite non-free x86-only OS rules the planet, we'll have x86.
As soon as free OS's will gain a certain critical mass, competition between CPU instruction set designs will really take off.
And x86 will lose any fair contest to architectures like ARM or MIPS.
It's only the 'economy of scale' that's sustaining the design and production of enormous chips with huge ridiculous-looking cooling systems; if all software could easily be recompiled there would be no need for these monsters. I don't think that even 2GHz CPUs need big coolers if they have a sensible instruction set design.
So, you see, Free Software not only gives you freedom, it will also save the environment ;-)
We did, in fact, bomb Pearl Harbour only yesterday. Don't you read the papers? The Slashdot thing was just a decoy, once the whole US army was distracted we snuck in there and destroyed the place!
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Soon you will all feel a strange urge to go out and buy a pair of wooden shoes and lots of cheese....
All right, another one of those stories where Slashdot turns into the American Xenophobic Society!!
Another chance to watch those who normally cry foul at the slightest threat to their own freedom turn into a bunch of zealous gatekeepers for fear of a little competition.
Regardless of whether you think that it is right or wrong that an author should possess the right to forbid copying of his work, unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing.
It's a broken analogy used by those who wish to exagerrate the seriousness of the offence of unauthorized copying.
In short, copyright does nothing to hinder theft. It hinders copying.
Lawyers are smart enough to learn any concept in a few coffee breaks? I'm going to need a few very long coffee breaks before I'm convinced of that.
Also, what legal principle is violated by having specialized lawyers/judges? The Supreme Court in my country consists of several Chambers, each for a particular 'area' of the law. What exactly is principally wrong with that?
BTW, your claim that in a capitalist economy, the highest-paid people are the smartest is complete nonsense, IMHO. Why then wasn't Einstein extremely rich, and why isn't Dan Quayle homeless?
Oh, and for the untrue statement by Kaplan you requested, how about this one:
It's on the final page (93). And utterly false. Granted, this doesn't come from technical ignorance, just from plain old bias, but you asked for an example of where he was factually wrong (legal and moral issues aside).
I can't get used to this American definition of "liberal". Liberal means freedom-loving, not "left-wing control freak".
Also, if you believe the USA has a "Big Government" you should get out more.
Well, this is exactly the kind of thinking I'm protesting against. What your ancestors did earns you no rights. You've got to earn those for yourself, or you have them because you're human, just like anyone else.
I know that's not the way it works. The way it works sucks.
To give you a similar example from somewhere else: I myself am a completely native European, my ancestors have lived in and built up my country to the very high standard of living it enjoys today, and probably fought in countless wars, both just and unjust, for too many generations to count.
So what? That doesn't give me the right to live off their work and kick out anybody else.
So what? I wasn't talking about any constitution.
If you're in a life-boat holding a stick you have the power to keep out people in the water. You can even call it the freedom to keep 'em out, 'cause you wrote down that it's OK on a piece of paper and you call that the 'constitution' of the life-boat.
That doesn't make it any more ethical, though.
And don't tell me the life-boat is full -- what is being said here is that you have enough people to row the boat, and that you don't want any competition for your cosy seat.
Again: so what? I'm not criticising the USA in particular, all countries do this (although some have formed groups within which you can freely move).
Your own poor? I fail to see the distinction. Poor is poor, whatever country you happen to be born in.
How come people on Slashdot are all for freedom except when this subject of allowing foreigners into the US comes up?
It would be good to see to it that people are paid reasonable wages, so that competition is fair, but (IMHO) it's unethical to prevent them from doing their job because they don't have the right passport.
Their passport is a completely irrelevant document as far as their skills are concerned.
Compete on skills, not birthrights.
You seem in need of a clue...
Patents grant an exclusive right to exploit an invention, in exchange for the publication of the way it works. What expires about RSA in two weeks is that exclusive right, not any form of secrecy.
So "public" is used in two ways here: the way RSA works always has been public. The right to use it hasn't been, but will now become, public.
Sure DVDs suck. 99% of movies suck, anyway.
But that's hardly the point, is it? The point is that a successful suppression of DeCSS by the MPAA sets a couple of very nasty precedents. It is a duty we all owe to the internet to fight the MPAA on this.
I've got no DVD player. I don't want one. I don't want to use DeCSS. But I need to have the right to use it. That's why I mirror DeCSS.
It does have limitations like you say, but for a lot of small businesses it works fine.
Well, I have to use it at home too, because dialup-ISPs only give you 1 address.
Faced with that, it is a clever hack, and it works OK even if you don't use Cisco (I can't afford that, I just use Linux on an old '486 :-), but it still sucks if you want to do anything 'unexpected'.
I just think that using NAT as an argument for saying that IPv4 is still OK, and, by the way, it gives you security, is wrong. It doesn't fly. NAT shouldn't be necessary, it's overhead and it breaks lots of stuff.
It is _not_ security by obscurity. As you said, there are things that the NAT boxes _can't_ do. That _is_ security - limitting the possibilities. It prevents any requests from being routed to your internal boxes.
That's not NAT, that's a firewall you're talking about. NAT is Network Address Translation - it substitutes IP-adresses n:m.
Doing that breaks a lot of stuff in previously unknown ways. That's not security.
NAT-boxen may well have some firewall functionality (like, in your example, allowing the admin to say that translation will only be one-way), but you can get that from a firewall, too.
You may also use NAT in a situation where external IP addresses aren't routable on your internal network - but again, that's not a property of NAT, you can do this in other ways.
There is no security NAT gives you that cannot be achieved in other, better, ways. Relying on your NAT software to break stuff is not very secure at all.
But, aside from all that, one thing that you keep hearing in the "NAT adds security"-talk is that it hides details of your network from the outside world because no-one will know your IP addresses. Now that *is* security by obscurity.
Use NAT. Then you've got some sort of a "firewall" at the same time.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! NO! NO! Please don't use NAT. It sucks! It sucks! Aaaaaarggggggh.
Sorry about that. Seriously, though: NAT is not a security measure. It can imply some firewall functionality because there are many things a NAT-box just can't do, but that doesn't make it any less "security by obscurity".
NAT has been causing me so many problems this last year. It's nothing more than a clever but nasty hack to keep IPv4 up and running. So is name-based virtual hosting, really.
We really need to move to IPv6 and be done with all this nonsense.
Well written piece, but I have 2 problems:
The two marketplace triumphs of open source, after all, are derivative rather than truly innovative.
A classic piece of FUD the author unfortunately hasn't managed to avoid. The standard reply would be to point to sendmail, for example.
My guess is that percentage-wise, free and non-free software have about the same amounts of truly innovative stuff.
There are many kinds of open-source licenses, but they all require contributors who modify an open-source program to make those improvements available to all members of the project.
Ouch! This is very wrong. BSD-style licenses qualify as open source, but they do not require modifications to be made available.
Actually, none of the open source licenses require exactly that "contributors who modify an open-source program make those improvements available": this requirement is only made by GPL-style ('viral') licenses only if and when the modifications are redistributed.