Stores have the right to restrict whether you can or cannot take pictures on their premises: if they see you taking a picture, they can ask you to leave, or they can prohibit cameras on their premises altogether.
But that's all they can do. Being able to keep you from taking pictures doesn't mean that the act of taking pictures itself would be illegal. In fact, the article itself states that it is not.
This basically means that stores have a choice: disgruntle their customers or live with it. It doesn't sound like a big problem to me.
Yet the shelter project faltered: the city's bureaucracy imposed such expensive remodeling requirements on the buildings that the shelter plans were scrapped.
Building codes are there to protect the health and safety of occupants. If nobody managed to raise the money to bring the buildings up to code, then it is perfectly reasonable that the plans to convert them into shelters were scrapped.
Granted, it was the only computer on the market that could do speech recognition thanks to a builtin DSP,
You've got to be kidding. The 660AV came out in 1993. People were doing speech recognition on PCs then (both with and without DSP add-on cards), the NeXT (including its 56000 DSP) was nearly a decade old, and UNIX workstations had also been used for speech recognition for at least a decade.
This is one of the strongest features of the GPL: it only gives you additional rights.
Not quite. There is the bit about "no warranty". If the recipient doesn't understand that, the author could be in trouble. Furthermore, given the way the software is distributed, a court could conclude that a reasonable person, in the absence of a comprehensible contract, would assume that the software was public domain.
And while that may be the intent of the GPL, who is going to stop them? If what I've read is true - I believe that SCO are still distributing Linux from their web site
Not only does SCO have to stop redistributing Linux, so do RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and IBM.
However, the situation hasn't arisen yet: while SCO has made a lot of noise in the PR area, they haven't yet actually demanded licensing fees or made any specific IP claims. So, so far, SCO can continue to distribute Linux, as can anybody else.
Who would sue? Any contributor to the Linux kernel can. I'm sure the FSF would be happy to support a lawsuit once it gets to that point. And I suspect the FSF would be happy to support a lawsuit even against RedHat should RedHat be foolish enough to try to pay SCO for a license.
The paper makes an interesting point: the only official version of the GPL is in English, but contracts in Germany generally need to be in German in order to be enforceable.
That may not matter for US projects put under the GPL and downloaded from US sites, where US law might apply even to German users. But it does matter for GPL'ed software re-distributed within Germany, and in particular for GPL'ed software created inside Germany (KDE?).
VSI intended this study to be a vehicle for putting down free and open source software. But the money they spent on it (it probably wasn't cheap) may actually help German free software efforts sharpening up any legal loose ends. Maybe one should get the BSA and Microsoft to invest in a similar effort in the US--it saves legal expenses for organizations like the FSF.
I don't know what SCO's position on the GPL is now, but according to an article today, it does sound like they want to be paid licenses by companies using GPL software (Linux), even if they didn't get it from SCO:
This, of course, means that they don't understand the GPL. Nobody can redistribute GPL'ed software unless it is free and clear of non-GPL'ed intellectual property. The purpose of that clause is exactly to stop this kind of situation, where a company like SCO "latches onto" a successful open source project.
So, SCO might theoretically be able to kill Linux, they might even be able to extort a little money from some current Linux users, but they can't make money from it through licensing fees in the long term.
Really europe makes some extremely dence laws, netherlands introduced a.5 to 1 euro tax on dvd recordables, but opensource here is pretty hot. Well compared to the us goverment. Anything to stick it to the yanks!
It's not clear to me that there is that much of a difference. The US has the DMCA and COPA, plus police confiscations of computer equipment without a trial. German courts stopped SCO's slander with a restraining order. And European antitrust efforts seem a bit more on the ball. On the other hand, Europeans are more tax happy and restrict speech a bit more.
If we can get the best of the US and Europe, we would be a lot better off. If the bad habits of the US spill over to Europe and vice versa, we are really in trouble.
This makes software under GPL in no way different than any commercial software you buy in Germany from a liability point of view.
If there is no contract between the author and the end user, how can the author be liable at all for the performance of the software?
And even if there were some kind of implicit liability, what would it be for? Open source software generally doesn't promise that it will perform any function in particular, so if it destroys someone's computer or data, well, that's just too bad.
Actually, I believe SCO is under a restraining order in Germany that prohibits them from making the kinds of outrageous claims about Linux that they have been making in the US.
The article says that even minor contributors to an open source software project might incur substantial liability if the software doesn't perform correctly, employers might be liable if they permit their employees to develop open source software, and yet users of open source software might not be able to get much protection if the software malfunctions. The whole thing sounds like scare tactics to me.
This is not surprising, since the study was commissioned by the VSI, an alliance of closed source software development companies, whose members are the usual suspects: Microsoft, Sun, Autodesk, and others. I suspect that if the BSA commissioned something similar in the US, they could find a "legal expert" giving the same kind of opinion.
In any case, if this really is the legal situation in Germany (or any other nation), the logical next step is to fix the laws. There is no reason to leave any legal uncertainty around BSD or GPL-like licenses: they are clearly one valuable and valid way of licensing software, and they are an important component of a free market in software.
Perhaps you'd care to name a nation that spends more on aid to other nations and their poeple than the USA does?
As percentage of GNP, US foreign aid is the lowest of any industrialized nation in the world. And except for last year, Japan was actually a larger donor in absolute terms than the US. In different words, the US is rather stingy when it comes to foreign aid. And much of US foreign aid comes with lots of strings attached.
The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah. Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value.
I'm sorry, I don't quite get what you are saying. Could you explain what your interpretation is of US actions like unilaterally invading Iraq or withdrawing from the Kyoto treaty because "it would be bad for American businesses"?
An incredible amount of technology that we take for granted exists today because DARPA spent money on it and people complained about the size of the US defense budget (he says while sending his comment of the *internet*).
If the intent were peaceful, why give the money to the military? Why not finance non-military research?
As for the trade deficit, let me see, we send them pieces of paper, they send us cars. I like it.
Those pieces of paper ultimately stand for tangible US assets: real estate, factories, etc.
Really, it would be in the world's interest to emulate the US.
The rest of the world doesn't have that luxury: some countries need to produce the surpluses that the US consumes.
Look at it like this: Europe couldn't organize [...]
Yeah, right. And despite all of those horrible failures, the quality of life, education, healthcare, life expectancy, infant mortality, and all that are still better in many of the nations of Europe and Japan than in the US. Maybe those nations know something Americans don't know.
I'd just like to hear what your resolution would have been for Iraq?
There was nothing to "resolve". Iraq wasn't an imminent threat, they hadn't declared war, they weren't responsible for terrorism, and the UN weapons inspectors seemed to be better at finding WMDs in Iraq than the US military is.
How exactally do you negotiate with a dictator that abuses his people,
What was there to "negotiate" about? Iraq was a badly run nation, but it was an autonomous nation.
and doesn't even bother to veil his hatred for you and your beliefs?
Why should he have "veiled his hatred"? Is the choice we give the world now "profess that you like America or get bombed"?
IRAQ could have been completely dealt with in 6 hours.. Simply carpet bomb the entire country and finish it with a few well placed nukes. kill every man/woman/child in the country and you win. It's very simple.
That is just not an option. Europe, Russia, and the Asian nations barely tolerated US action in Iraq as it was If the US did what you suggested, the US would be in deep trouble as most nations would break economic and diplomatic ties with the US.
You may think the US can act unilaterally and autonomously, but it really can't; beyond police action and fireworks in one or the other third world country, America's hands are bound.
Ah, well, that is of course a "good reason": instead of actually trying to comply with the spirit of the disarmament agreements that we have signed, let's try to find some legal loopholes, like building "reusable ICBMs" and calling them "hypersonic bombers".
In the long run, the good-will of the rest of the world is much more important to the security of the US than any weapons, and actions and attitudes like these seem hell-bent on destroying that good-will.
A small contingent of these weapons would allow limited airstrikes on specific and high priority targets. A larger number would allow a massive projection of power at a moments notice.
Yes, but the rest of the world is starting to ask itself: projection of force against whom? Why should the world let the US build this sort of thing? And the rest of the world is paying for these things, after all, given that the annual net influx of money into the US corresponds roughly to the US defense budget.
Mozilla's use of a single file for all bookmarks is probably one of the reasons why Mozilla has such a hard time dealing with running multiple instances of Mozilla for the same user.
One-file-per-bookmark is a simple and nice solution to that problem. It also makes merging bookmarks easier. Mozilla should really adopt it.
That's funny, bandwidth didn't become prevalent until private corporations became interested.
What does "bandwidth" have to do with it? We were talking about innovation: the basic technologies underlying the Internet, not the engineering and investment required to bring it to the unwashed masses.
Please guess again, and try harder this time.
What's the point? You obviously have trouble distinguishing "innovation" and "engineering".
profit is what this country's all about, and it's a GREAT motivator for innovation.
Very little true innovation has been motivated by profit. Most of the fundamental breakthroughs have been made by publicly paid researchers who really don't give much about profit.
But that's just fine: I wouldn't view manned space travel as significant "innovation" anyway, so we might as well leave its development to the profit motive.
if the only people who're going to be travelling into space are wealthy millionaires, we'd be much slower in space-travel development than we are at current.
Yeah, and if the only people buying race cars are wealthy millionaires, we'd be so much slower in the development of race cars as well. So what?
Manned space travel is of no compelling interest to governments, science, or the daily lives of anybody on this planet. It's a luxury, a dream, an adventure. If it takes a little longer to develop, that's just fine.
Governments should concentrate on driving science and technology, and that can be done more cheaply and much more effectively by having unmanned space programs.
Slashdot Mirror
Stores have the right to restrict whether you can or cannot take pictures on their premises: if they see you taking a picture, they can ask you to leave, or they can prohibit cameras on their premises altogether.
But that's all they can do. Being able to keep you from taking pictures doesn't mean that the act of taking pictures itself would be illegal. In fact, the article itself states that it is not.
This basically means that stores have a choice: disgruntle their customers or live with it. It doesn't sound like a big problem to me.
Yet the shelter project faltered: the city's bureaucracy imposed such expensive remodeling requirements on the buildings that the shelter plans were scrapped.
Building codes are there to protect the health and safety of occupants. If nobody managed to raise the money to bring the buildings up to code, then it is perfectly reasonable that the plans to convert them into shelters were scrapped.
Granted, it was the only computer on the market that could do speech recognition thanks to a builtin DSP,
You've got to be kidding. The 660AV came out in 1993. People were doing speech recognition on PCs then (both with and without DSP add-on cards), the NeXT (including its 56000 DSP) was nearly a decade old, and UNIX workstations had also been used for speech recognition for at least a decade.
This is one of the strongest features of the GPL: it only gives you additional rights.
Not quite. There is the bit about "no warranty". If the recipient doesn't understand that, the author could be in trouble. Furthermore, given the way the software is distributed, a court could conclude that a reasonable person, in the absence of a comprehensible contract, would assume that the software was public domain.
And while that may be the intent of the GPL, who is going to stop them? If what I've read is true - I believe that SCO are still distributing Linux from their web site
Not only does SCO have to stop redistributing Linux, so do RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and IBM.
However, the situation hasn't arisen yet: while SCO has made a lot of noise in the PR area, they haven't yet actually demanded licensing fees or made any specific IP claims. So, so far, SCO can continue to distribute Linux, as can anybody else.
Who would sue? Any contributor to the Linux kernel can. I'm sure the FSF would be happy to support a lawsuit once it gets to that point. And I suspect the FSF would be happy to support a lawsuit even against RedHat should RedHat be foolish enough to try to pay SCO for a license.
sharpening up any legal loose ends
:-)
Talk about mixed metaphors. I hope they'll tighten them up; sharpened loose ends sound even more dangerous than ordinary loose ends
The paper makes an interesting point: the only official version of the GPL is in English, but contracts in Germany generally need to be in German in order to be enforceable.
That may not matter for US projects put under the GPL and downloaded from US sites, where US law might apply even to German users. But it does matter for GPL'ed software re-distributed within Germany, and in particular for GPL'ed software created inside Germany (KDE?).
VSI intended this study to be a vehicle for putting down free and open source software. But the money they spent on it (it probably wasn't cheap) may actually help German free software efforts sharpening up any legal loose ends. Maybe one should get the BSA and Microsoft to invest in a similar effort in the US--it saves legal expenses for organizations like the FSF.
I don't know what SCO's position on the GPL is now, but according to an article today, it does sound like they want to be paid licenses by companies using GPL software (Linux), even if they didn't get it from SCO:
This, of course, means that they don't understand the GPL. Nobody can redistribute GPL'ed software unless it is free and clear of non-GPL'ed intellectual property. The purpose of that clause is exactly to stop this kind of situation, where a company like SCO "latches onto" a successful open source project.
So, SCO might theoretically be able to kill Linux, they might even be able to extort a little money from some current Linux users, but they can't make money from it through licensing fees in the long term.
Really europe makes some extremely dence laws, netherlands introduced a .5 to 1 euro tax on dvd recordables, but opensource here is pretty hot. Well compared to the us goverment. Anything to stick it to the yanks!
It's not clear to me that there is that much of a difference. The US has the DMCA and COPA, plus police confiscations of computer equipment without a trial. German courts stopped SCO's slander with a restraining order. And European antitrust efforts seem a bit more on the ball. On the other hand, Europeans are more tax happy and restrict speech a bit more.
If we can get the best of the US and Europe, we would be a lot better off. If the bad habits of the US spill over to Europe and vice versa, we are really in trouble.
This makes software under GPL in no way different than any commercial software you buy in Germany from a liability point of view.
If there is no contract between the author and the end user, how can the author be liable at all for the performance of the software?
And even if there were some kind of implicit liability, what would it be for? Open source software generally doesn't promise that it will perform any function in particular, so if it destroys someone's computer or data, well, that's just too bad.
Actually, I believe SCO is under a restraining order in Germany that prohibits them from making the kinds of outrageous claims about Linux that they have been making in the US.
The article says that even minor contributors to an open source software project might incur substantial liability if the software doesn't perform correctly, employers might be liable if they permit their employees to develop open source software, and yet users of open source software might not be able to get much protection if the software malfunctions. The whole thing sounds like scare tactics to me.
This is not surprising, since the study was commissioned by the VSI, an alliance of closed source software development companies, whose members are the usual suspects: Microsoft, Sun, Autodesk, and others. I suspect that if the BSA commissioned something similar in the US, they could find a "legal expert" giving the same kind of opinion.
In any case, if this really is the legal situation in Germany (or any other nation), the logical next step is to fix the laws. There is no reason to leave any legal uncertainty around BSD or GPL-like licenses: they are clearly one valuable and valid way of licensing software, and they are an important component of a free market in software.
Perhaps you'd care to name a nation that spends more on aid to other nations and their poeple than the USA does?
As percentage of GNP, US foreign aid is the lowest of any industrialized nation in the world. And except for last year, Japan was actually a larger donor in absolute terms than the US. In different words, the US is rather stingy when it comes to foreign aid. And much of US foreign aid comes with lots of strings attached.
(See here.)
The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah. Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value.
I'm sorry, I don't quite get what you are saying. Could you explain what your interpretation is of US actions like unilaterally invading Iraq or withdrawing from the Kyoto treaty because "it would be bad for American businesses"?
An incredible amount of technology that we take for granted exists today because DARPA spent money on it and people complained about the size of the US defense budget (he says while sending his comment of the *internet*).
If the intent were peaceful, why give the money to the military? Why not finance non-military research?
As for the trade deficit, let me see, we send them pieces of paper, they send us cars. I like it.
Those pieces of paper ultimately stand for tangible US assets: real estate, factories, etc.
Really, it would be in the world's interest to emulate the US.
The rest of the world doesn't have that luxury: some countries need to produce the surpluses that the US consumes.
Look at it like this: Europe couldn't organize [...]
Yeah, right. And despite all of those horrible failures, the quality of life, education, healthcare, life expectancy, infant mortality, and all that are still better in many of the nations of Europe and Japan than in the US. Maybe those nations know something Americans don't know.
I'd just like to hear what your resolution would have been for Iraq?
There was nothing to "resolve". Iraq wasn't an imminent threat, they hadn't declared war, they weren't responsible for terrorism, and the UN weapons inspectors seemed to be better at finding WMDs in Iraq than the US military is.
How exactally do you negotiate with a dictator that abuses his people,
What was there to "negotiate" about? Iraq was a badly run nation, but it was an autonomous nation.
and doesn't even bother to veil his hatred for you and your beliefs?
Why should he have "veiled his hatred"? Is the choice we give the world now "profess that you like America or get bombed"?
IRAQ could have been completely dealt with in 6 hours.. Simply carpet bomb the entire country and finish it with a few well placed nukes. kill every man/woman/child in the country and you win. It's very simple.
That is just not an option. Europe, Russia, and the Asian nations barely tolerated US action in Iraq as it was If the US did what you suggested, the US would be in deep trouble as most nations would break economic and diplomatic ties with the US.
You may think the US can act unilaterally and autonomously, but it really can't; beyond police action and fireworks in one or the other third world country, America's hands are bound.
Ah, well, that is of course a "good reason": instead of actually trying to comply with the spirit of the disarmament agreements that we have signed, let's try to find some legal loopholes, like building "reusable ICBMs" and calling them "hypersonic bombers".
In the long run, the good-will of the rest of the world is much more important to the security of the US than any weapons, and actions and attitudes like these seem hell-bent on destroying that good-will.
A small contingent of these weapons would allow limited airstrikes on specific and high priority targets. A larger number would allow a massive projection of power at a moments notice.
Yes, but the rest of the world is starting to ask itself: projection of force against whom? Why should the world let the US build this sort of thing? And the rest of the world is paying for these things, after all, given that the annual net influx of money into the US corresponds roughly to the US defense budget.
Mozilla's use of a single file for all bookmarks is probably one of the reasons why Mozilla has such a hard time dealing with running multiple instances of Mozilla for the same user.
One-file-per-bookmark is a simple and nice solution to that problem. It also makes merging bookmarks easier. Mozilla should really adopt it.
That's funny, bandwidth didn't become prevalent until private corporations became interested.
What does "bandwidth" have to do with it? We were talking about innovation: the basic technologies underlying the Internet, not the engineering and investment required to bring it to the unwashed masses.
Please guess again, and try harder this time.
What's the point? You obviously have trouble distinguishing "innovation" and "engineering".
So no, an ISP can't exactly blanket a large area in WiFi, because they'd need far too many devices all over the place to make it all work.
Bingo: that's exactly what will happen if every ISP and cell phone company starts deploying these things.
Care to back up your claims about public researchers doing the most good? I don't think you can do it.
Sure: the Internet. Developed and deployed almost entirely by academia and government grants.
profit is what this country's all about, and it's a GREAT motivator for innovation.
Very little true innovation has been motivated by profit. Most of the fundamental breakthroughs have been made by publicly paid researchers who really don't give much about profit.
But that's just fine: I wouldn't view manned space travel as significant "innovation" anyway, so we might as well leave its development to the profit motive.
if the only people who're going to be travelling into space are wealthy millionaires, we'd be much slower in space-travel development than we are at current.
Yeah, and if the only people buying race cars are wealthy millionaires, we'd be so much slower in the development of race cars as well. So what?
Manned space travel is of no compelling interest to governments, science, or the daily lives of anybody on this planet. It's a luxury, a dream, an adventure. If it takes a little longer to develop, that's just fine.
Governments should concentrate on driving science and technology, and that can be done more cheaply and much more effectively by having unmanned space programs.