They might have stolen some GPL code because they have no rights to it (regardless of whatever contract he signed with them), but they didn't steal his code, because he happily gave them whatever code he owned, or at least all rights to it.
You can ask the lawyer to write you an opinion all you want, but... do you like your job?
The question here -- and I haven't seen a clear answer to this from what you wrote -- is: What are you trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to help your company stay out of trouble?
If so, you should write your boss and in-house counsel (if one exists) about this issue and note that you believe based on the GPL, based on your use of GPL software, and based on your understanding of contract law that the company is in violation if it proceeds down this road, and urge them to reconsider. If they choose not to, that's OK -- you can't make anyone do anything smart, you can just give them the information.
Are you trying to stay out of trouble yourself?
Frankly, I think you're not in trouble at all. You haven't broken the GPL. You haven't distributed any GPL-derived code under a different license.
Are you trying to make sure these guys don't break the GPL?
Then submit an anonymous tip, report these guys, try to get them sued, etc.
Your courses of action will differ depending on your desired outcome.
It's remarkably simple (though, true to OSS principles, it's also remarkably non-obvious if you don't pore through documentation). You need two things in your.muttrc: A) Specify what addresses might be valid addreses for you, using 'alternates'. e.g.: alternates user@dom.ain.com alternates otheruser@other.domain.com alternates @myspecial.domain.com The last line is the one that says that any mail address @myspecial.domain.com is a valid address for you; B) set reverse_name=yes
That tells mutt that, if you get an email that's to one of your addresses (see A above), even if the current machine name is not that address, it should formulate the 'From:' address based on the recipient address, rather than the local machine name.
There are actually valid reasons for some of us to not use gmail for general-purpose emailing.
Aside from the obvious privacy issues -- any company who has its people put company information on another company's systems is a little nuts -- there's also the power and flexibility of running your own MUA/MTA pair.
For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me. In addition, my MUA (mutt) is configured to automatically make my replies come from the address to which the email had been sent. I consider this useful to me, and a way to give out specific addresses so as to see how spam ends up getting to me.
gmail actually takes a step in that direction -- they let you use '+' notation (eg 'user+whatever@gmail.com'), but they don't do the next step -- making it so you can automatically respond as 'user+whatever' to emails sent to 'user+whatever'.
And, frankly, it's just _faster_ for me to use my own CLI MUA to go through a bunch of emails, and more convenient and familiar.
On the flip side, my dad recently decided he finally wanted to get an email account, so I created a new domain for him and had all mail sent to this domain forwarded to an account I set up for him at gmail. So he'll be using gmail for mail. I really do like gmail -- I use it for some specialized purposes -- but it's not the one-size-fits-all-so-everyone-should-use-it-alread y that you seem to be thinking it is.
Umm, that won't work so well. Bastards will just refill you. These days, I get refilled to 50 within about a day of giving out an invite and having it used.
Face it -- we're stuck with having 50+ gmail invites until they finally open up the service.:)
Am I REALLY The First Person To Say This?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I tried not to be redundant and all, but...
TFA talks about women's participation in IT as a percentage of the IT workforce, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not women are fleeing IT. Try this as an experiment:
Time 0: 100 IT positions. 40 are women. Time X: 1000 IT positions, 350 are women.
We've gone from 40% women to 35% women. Have women fled the field? HELL NO.
We need absolute numbers to figure out whether or not there are less women in IT than there used to be, but TFA doesn't seem to have them (or I missed them -- I did R it, of course).
How is it a violation of the law to allow for reasonably limited fair use and personal copying?
I fail to see how "I can record shows using my VCR" is any less legitimate than "I can record shows using my VCR and transfer them to my PC, then delete them from my VCR." timeshifting is timeshifting, no?
Are you sure? I was pretty sure they were their own continent. I mean, England's just an island -- I'd say it's more correct that England's broken off of Australia.
But realistically, since they're so far away from each other, I have doubts as to whether they were _ever_ connected.
It's interesting how vitriolic some of the responses to this post have been.
I didn't read parent's post as a complaint about OSS/FS testing, but rather as the parent verbalizing a perception -- that stuff that isn't sexy is often done with less vigour than the stuff that either scratches an itch or looks cool. Testing _is_ less sexy than development (and as someone who wears a software testing hat, among others, I have some perspective on the matter), and it tends to get the short shrift in many organizations and projects.
OSS/FS in some respects has it easier, because they've chosen to make bug submission more open (typically) and recruit their users to test and submit bugs. So, IMHO, it's sort of analogous to companies outsourcing testing to India -- they outsource to India, and "we" outsource to the users. It means the users need to be more tolerant of bugs (at least in the versions that are pre 1.0), but I do think that there is a wider audience for pre-1.0 OSS/FS software than there is for, say, pre-1.0 Windows XP, so we tend to do quite well. And in the end, because we do have more user involvement in the pre-1.0 versions, I'd tend to argue that 1.0 OSS/FS software tends to be pretty rock-solid compared to 1.0 closed software, where typically the vast majority of users only start playing with it at the 1.0 stage.
Patiently awaiting "Open Software and Free Software are entirely different things and you can't just use them interchangeably, you insensitive clod!" flames...
Yeah. I mean, it's only by encouraging OSS development of their platform that they'll finally, one day in the far distant future, be able to say that they've got a rock-solid OS that someone chooses to, say, deploy a large enterprise CRM or OLTP project. I mean, really, right now who the heck uses Solaris anyway? Just a bunch of amateurs in their basements.
Some of these features seem a little silly to me, truth be told, but cheer up! If you've got any of the last three generations of ReplayTVs (5[0135]xx or 4xxx), you can, today, copy shows to your PC (running pretty much your choice of OS -- forget this Windows dependency crap). Not to mention once they're on your PC, you can stream them to your RTV and watch them there.
Redmond has significant credibility within the sector that actually gives purchasing approval (rather than, perhaps, purchasing recommendations). When they come up with something like "look, we only released 15 patches instead of Linux's 1028426," that's a very simple message that many people will have problems seeing through. These people will go away from reading this story believing, simply, that Microsoft is right. Sadly, some of them will likely be influenced by their unwillingness to believe a company representative would utter such a bald faced lie (and of course, in some respects he's not lying. Linux has had a ton of patches; WS2003 has not. Those are the facts. What they mean, of course, is exactly the opposite from what he claims they mean).
Worst of all, though, is that if Information Week or any other "I'm an important IT person and I read industry publications" magazine carries a story on the front page that says "Microsoft Security Chief: Windows More Secure Than Windows," than 3-4 days after they saw the story (and maybe not even read it), your average PHB will just remember the "You know, I seem to remember recently that someone came out and said Windows was more secure than Linux. I don't remember how they proved it or where I saw it, but I distinctly remember it..."
Which is why I do think there's value in a vigorous response and a careful analysis of the claims in an effort to make sure we're ready to vehemently argue against this insanity.
"just so people like them" isn't some sort of abstract thing -- there are marketing advantages to being perceived as the Good Guys, and in fact there are accounting methods you can use to charge off expenses to "good will."
Nonetheless, I don't really think Google's doing this as part of some sort of "make us look better" effort -- I suspect it's far more likely that someone like Page or Brin just went "that'd be a good thing to do, and we've got a surplus anyway."
Except that that's not going to happen here. I very seriously doubt they're going to _stop_ packets, inspect them, and if they're OK send them on their way -- it would pretty much kill TCP streams.
What they're much more likely to do -- and if you think about it, that's what snoopers do anyway -- is just grab a copy of the packet and inspect it. If it's 'evil', they can move forward from there (what's the source/destination IP, etc?).
So you're not going to get your intercepted packet back -- and you wouldn't want it, of course, because that would also be annoying to TCP (though TCP will happily deal with duplicate packets arriving -- it'll just discard the duplicate. But it _is_ more traffic to go through your connection, and since TCP's going to drop it before any presentation layer that can see that it's been inspected (because they added to payload or something -- and hopefully re-calculated checksums), you're never going to see it anyway.
I remember seeing something like this on some... page... let's see if I can find it... God damnit, why is it so hard to find these pages when I'm in a hurry ?! I hate my laptop, I hate my keyboard, and I HATE MY LIFE!!! ARGH!!
It's good that you're modded insightful -- you're spot-on.
My old Sony TV, which was approximately seven years old, was finally replaced not because it broke (it didn't), but because I found something better (27" to 36" and standard 480i to 1080i/480p);
My Yamaha RX-V995 that I've had for nigh on six years is going to be replaced this month or next with an RX-V1500 not because there are any problems with it (there aren't), but because the new model gives me significant improvements (component input/output, signal upconversion, automatic sound adjustment, etc).
Of course the flip side of that is that I'm not sure it's sustainable -- in what ways will what my receiver needs to do be changed dramatically in the next 3-5 years? I don't know yet, but nothing obvious comes to mind.
Hey, I'm glad she's gone too (thought not because she's a woman), but I'd say Carly brought quite a bit of parity into the CEO world from a gender perspective. She showed female CEOs can suck just as badly as male CEOs:)
Word. Others will address why this would never happen in traditional broadcast (they count on the crap getting in on the backs of the good stuff), but I'd totally go for something like this. I'd definitely pay around $50 at least for a season of Battlestar Galactica, for example, commercial-free.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, no they didn't.
They might have stolen some GPL code because they have no rights to it (regardless of whatever contract he signed with them), but they didn't steal his code, because he happily gave them whatever code he owned, or at least all rights to it.
But not when talking about the way RDBMS do transactions :)
You can ask the lawyer to write you an opinion all you want, but ... do you like your job?
The question here -- and I haven't seen a clear answer to this from what you wrote -- is: What are you trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to help your company stay out of trouble?
If so, you should write your boss and in-house counsel (if one exists) about this issue and note that you believe based on the GPL, based on your use of GPL software, and based on your understanding of contract law that the company is in violation if it proceeds down this road, and urge them to reconsider. If they choose not to, that's OK -- you can't make anyone do anything smart, you can just give them the information.
Are you trying to stay out of trouble yourself?
Frankly, I think you're not in trouble at all. You haven't broken the GPL. You haven't distributed any GPL-derived code under a different license.
Are you trying to make sure these guys don't break the GPL?
Then submit an anonymous tip, report these guys, try to get them sued, etc.
Your courses of action will differ depending on your desired outcome.
Yeah, that makes sense. Living in San Francisco, I know there is, in fact, only one 28 year old woman in the 94118 area code.
(At least, I assume there's only one, because I'd rather that be the case than consider the possibility of multiple women not dating me).
It's remarkably simple (though, true to OSS principles, it's also remarkably non-obvious if you don't pore through documentation). You need two things in your .muttrc:
...
A) Specify what addresses might be valid addreses for you, using 'alternates'. e.g.:
alternates user@dom.ain.com
alternates otheruser@other.domain.com
alternates @myspecial.domain.com
The last line is the one that says that any mail address @myspecial.domain.com is a valid address for you;
B) set reverse_name=yes
That tells mutt that, if you get an email that's to one of your addresses (see A above), even if the current machine name is not that address, it should formulate the 'From:' address based on the recipient address, rather than the local machine name.
That should be all you need.
Eagerly awaiting my Offtopic moderation
There are actually valid reasons for some of us to not use gmail for general-purpose emailing.
d y that you seem to be thinking it is.
Aside from the obvious privacy issues -- any company who has its people put company information on another company's systems is a little nuts -- there's also the power and flexibility of running your own MUA/MTA pair.
For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me. In addition, my MUA (mutt) is configured to automatically make my replies come from the address to which the email had been sent. I consider this useful to me, and a way to give out specific addresses so as to see how spam ends up getting to me.
gmail actually takes a step in that direction -- they let you use '+' notation (eg 'user+whatever@gmail.com'), but they don't do the next step -- making it so you can automatically respond as 'user+whatever' to emails sent to 'user+whatever'.
And, frankly, it's just _faster_ for me to use my own CLI MUA to go through a bunch of emails, and more convenient and familiar.
On the flip side, my dad recently decided he finally wanted to get an email account, so I created a new domain for him and had all mail sent to this domain forwarded to an account I set up for him at gmail. So he'll be using gmail for mail. I really do like gmail -- I use it for some specialized purposes -- but it's not the one-size-fits-all-so-everyone-should-use-it-alrea
Umm, that won't work so well. Bastards will just refill you. These days, I get refilled to 50 within about a day of giving out an invite and having it used.
:)
Face it -- we're stuck with having 50+ gmail invites until they finally open up the service.
I tried not to be redundant and all, but ...
TFA talks about women's participation in IT as a percentage of the IT workforce, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not women are fleeing IT. Try this as an experiment:
Time 0: 100 IT positions. 40 are women.
Time X: 1000 IT positions, 350 are women.
We've gone from 40% women to 35% women. Have women fled the field? HELL NO.
We need absolute numbers to figure out whether or not there are less women in IT than there used to be, but TFA doesn't seem to have them (or I missed them -- I did R it, of course).
How is it a violation of the law to allow for reasonably limited fair use and personal copying?
I fail to see how "I can record shows using my VCR" is any less legitimate than "I can record shows using my VCR and transfer them to my PC, then delete them from my VCR." timeshifting is timeshifting, no?
Are you sure? I was pretty sure they were their own continent. I mean, England's just an island -- I'd say it's more correct that England's broken off of Australia.
But realistically, since they're so far away from each other, I have doubts as to whether they were _ever_ connected.
Umm.
I'd buy a phone with a deathray, as long as it wasn't too much larger and had decent range (~50m or so against human opponents).
I'm not a huge fan of device convergence but *that* I could go for.
It's interesting how vitriolic some of the responses to this post have been.
I didn't read parent's post as a complaint about OSS/FS testing, but rather as the parent verbalizing a perception -- that stuff that isn't sexy is often done with less vigour than the stuff that either scratches an itch or looks cool. Testing _is_ less sexy than development (and as someone who wears a software testing hat, among others, I have some perspective on the matter), and it tends to get the short shrift in many organizations and projects.
OSS/FS in some respects has it easier, because they've chosen to make bug submission more open (typically) and recruit their users to test and submit bugs. So, IMHO, it's sort of analogous to companies outsourcing testing to India -- they outsource to India, and "we" outsource to the users. It means the users need to be more tolerant of bugs (at least in the versions that are pre 1.0), but I do think that there is a wider audience for pre-1.0 OSS/FS software than there is for, say, pre-1.0 Windows XP, so we tend to do quite well. And in the end, because we do have more user involvement in the pre-1.0 versions, I'd tend to argue that 1.0 OSS/FS software tends to be pretty rock-solid compared to 1.0 closed software, where typically the vast majority of users only start playing with it at the 1.0 stage.
Patiently awaiting "Open Software and Free Software are entirely different things and you can't just use them interchangeably, you insensitive clod!" flames...
read the reviews -- sure, with the phone off you get 30 hours of music playback, but at really, really, really low volume.
Most Excellent!
Yeah. I mean, it's only by encouraging OSS development of their platform that they'll finally, one day in the far distant future, be able to say that they've got a rock-solid OS that someone chooses to, say, deploy a large enterprise CRM or OLTP project. I mean, really, right now who the heck uses Solaris anyway? Just a bunch of amateurs in their basements.
Some of these features seem a little silly to me, truth be told, but cheer up! If you've got any of the last three generations of ReplayTVs (5[0135]xx or 4xxx), you can, today, copy shows to your PC (running pretty much your choice of OS -- forget this Windows dependency crap). Not to mention once they're on your PC, you can stream them to your RTV and watch them there.
:)
And you can use drives bigger than 127Gb.
Redmond has significant credibility within the sector that actually gives purchasing approval (rather than, perhaps, purchasing recommendations). When they come up with something like "look, we only released 15 patches instead of Linux's 1028426," that's a very simple message that many people will have problems seeing through. These people will go away from reading this story believing, simply, that Microsoft is right. Sadly, some of them will likely be influenced by their unwillingness to believe a company representative would utter such a bald faced lie (and of course, in some respects he's not lying. Linux has had a ton of patches; WS2003 has not. Those are the facts. What they mean, of course, is exactly the opposite from what he claims they mean).
Worst of all, though, is that if Information Week or any other "I'm an important IT person and I read industry publications" magazine carries a story on the front page that says "Microsoft Security Chief: Windows More Secure Than Windows," than 3-4 days after they saw the story (and maybe not even read it), your average PHB will just remember the "You know, I seem to remember recently that someone came out and said Windows was more secure than Linux. I don't remember how they proved it or where I saw it, but I distinctly remember it..."
Which is why I do think there's value in a vigorous response and a careful analysis of the claims in an effort to make sure we're ready to vehemently argue against this insanity.
"just so people like them" isn't some sort of abstract thing -- there are marketing advantages to being perceived as the Good Guys, and in fact there are accounting methods you can use to charge off expenses to "good will."
Nonetheless, I don't really think Google's doing this as part of some sort of "make us look better" effort -- I suspect it's far more likely that someone like Page or Brin just went "that'd be a good thing to do, and we've got a surplus anyway."
Except that that's not going to happen here. I very seriously doubt they're going to _stop_ packets, inspect them, and if they're OK send them on their way -- it would pretty much kill TCP streams.
What they're much more likely to do -- and if you think about it, that's what snoopers do anyway -- is just grab a copy of the packet and inspect it. If it's 'evil', they can move forward from there (what's the source/destination IP, etc?).
So you're not going to get your intercepted packet back -- and you wouldn't want it, of course, because that would also be annoying to TCP (though TCP will happily deal with duplicate packets arriving -- it'll just discard the duplicate. But it _is_ more traffic to go through your connection, and since TCP's going to drop it before any presentation layer that can see that it's been inspected (because they added to payload or something -- and hopefully re-calculated checksums), you're never going to see it anyway.
I remember seeing something like this on some ... page ... let's see if I can find it ... God damnit, why is it so hard to find these pages when I'm in a hurry ?! I hate my laptop, I hate my keyboard, and I HATE MY LIFE!!! ARGH!!
It's good that you're modded insightful -- you're spot-on.
My old Sony TV, which was approximately seven years old, was finally replaced not because it broke (it didn't), but because I found something better (27" to 36" and standard 480i to 1080i/480p);
My Yamaha RX-V995 that I've had for nigh on six years is going to be replaced this month or next with an RX-V1500 not because there are any problems with it (there aren't), but because the new model gives me significant improvements (component input/output, signal upconversion, automatic sound adjustment, etc).
Of course the flip side of that is that I'm not sure it's sustainable -- in what ways will what my receiver needs to do be changed dramatically in the next 3-5 years? I don't know yet, but nothing obvious comes to mind.
Probably.
Hey, I'm glad she's gone too (thought not because she's a woman), but I'd say Carly brought quite a bit of parity into the CEO world from a gender perspective. She showed female CEOs can suck just as badly as male CEOs :)
I don't think I could afford that without going to the ATM Machine and using my PIN Number to withdraw more money!
Word. Others will address why this would never happen in traditional broadcast (they count on the crap getting in on the backs of the good stuff), but I'd totally go for something like this. I'd definitely pay around $50 at least for a season of Battlestar Galactica, for example, commercial-free.