Something changed in GPL3, where code becomes almost secondary to how the code is used. It no longer cares about the code, or changes to it. It cares more about who, how, and what it is being used for.
As another comment further up the thread pointed out, the GPLv3 is not about how the code is used, per se -- it's about guaranteeing freedom of the code for modification, redistribution, *and use*. As put more succinctly by Mr2001:
The agenda of the GPL was, and is, to give end users the freedom to modify the software, redistribute their changed versions, and put those changed versions to effective use. The changes in the GPLv3 are there because some companies figured out a way to sneak around that last one.
You note:
No matter if you agree with the changes or not, you have to admit that the changes have nothing to do with improving the code, because GPL2 already handled this perfectly fine.
As best as I understand it, you'd be perfectly correct here. The update to GPLv3 is *not* about improving the code, it is about ensuring that users can still use the code after it's been changed, i.e. guaranteeing freedom to use.
I think people are being way too slow to jump the sinking ship here - if I were a YHOO shareholder, I'd have dumped as soon as the offer hit the table and the stock hit $30. Why on earth would you hold out for $31?
Well, since you asked why:
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one higher, isn't it? It's not $30. You see, most blokes, you know, will be selling at $30. You're on $30 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on $30 in your portfolio. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Hold out for $31.
Nigel Tufnel: 31. Exactly. One higher.
There are a number of cases at district court levels that have backed EULAs and a few appellate court cases too.
My impression was that the case law remains somewhat patchy, with still-substantial room for interpretation. Is this incorrect? And are you (or is anyone else) able to expand on EULA legality / enforceability in other places, such as Canada or the EU?
By "imperiled", I meant from the point of view of the end user, mostly regarding fair use. I should have made that explicit.
Whining about not getting a free ride just makes people look like wankers. Whine, whine, whinge. Meh.
While I'm sure there are some that would like to commercially exploit the work of others, this is NOT the usual posture in which most companies encounter GPL/OSS. It's usually because some 3rd party contractor used it in a package the company intended to commercially sell or because an employee decided it would make their life easier. Then the problems become VERY acute.
Interesting. Does this suggest then that the main threat to corporations is more from any management failure in due diligence in controlling a company's code assets?
The article provides a nice explanation. Free is Freedom , but not for users (or second party developers), but for Software. The software is free to be developed without restrictions. <... snip... >
BSD is a free license in the sense that its users are free to do what they want
There appears to be a goodly bit of confusion in this discussion about how the word "users" is employed. Some posts include the word to indicate end users, generally the consumers that purchase the end products and use the software included. Other posts seem to include the word to indicate anyone making use of the software, mostly intimating the developers who would leverage the software as part of producing the end product.
The lack of proper distinction here is causing a real absence of clarity in what people mean. AFAICT, there is as-yet little legal precedent in the US backing up any sort of EULA-type "agreement" that restricts how end users can actually use the end products. Corporations are increasingly trying to dictate various limits, but so far I'm not sure that case law really backs this up. As such, *all* end users are essentially free to do what they want with software under *any* license, within the (admittedly obfuscated, and currently imperiled) bounds of copyright.
Meanwhile, for intermediate users such as developers, there are much more cut-and-dried legal definitions for how and what folks can do. I think TFA is dealing mostly with this aspect (though I haven't completely RTFA). Just in terms of basic ethics, which might well be very foreign territory both for the author of TFA and the PHB target audience, most folks can agree that, if you're essentially selling something that belongs to someone else, that someone else has a say in how you go about doing so.
-----
The assumption that anyone can own what are essentially ideas (i.e. book plots, computer code, artistic designs, etc.) is the foundation of the whole concept of intellectual property. If we accept that such ideas can be owned, then we must accept all the rest of the baggage of ownership that goes with this position -- including the stipulation that selling someone else's things as your own, without proper permission, is in violation of property rights.
The GPL in all its various forms simply attempts to define that proper permission. If folks don't like what such permission entails, fine -- bloody well don't use GPL-covered code. They're still completely free to develop their own code that does what they need it to (note that I'm totally ignoring the whole issue of patents, which is plenty of grist for another mill or twenty). Whining about not getting a free ride just makes people look like wankers. Whine, whine, whinge. Meh.
Do the people that run these large corporations not understand Internet history??
Let me rephrase that for you:
Do the people that pay these large corporations not understand history??
There, I think that about does it.
So long as the consumer base is a bunch of uneducated and apathetic maroons, the execs will happily econo-rape them into poverty at any opportunity. I'm not the least bit surprised that tiered pricing and caps are coming back -- corporate behaviour is actually a bit like how the 17-year locust evolved, to where the cycles are just long enough for folks to forget about them before they come back.
The GP makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that capitalism is somehow freeing, and intimates that all participants are on an equal footing:
Capitalism/Democracy == Emergent economy, and bottom up determinacy of government.
This is patently false, as anyone paying attention to the development of the US economy and US politics should be aware.
Meanwhile, the parent has correctly recognized that capitalism works on the principle of capital concentration, meaning that very few participants actually have the wherewithal to engage in a meaningful way:
This is in contrast to capitalism, in which the economy is ostensibly managed by nobody, and in practice managed by those who control the lions share of money or resources. This commonly leads to a small number of successful capitalists gaining effective centralized control of the economy.
What the hell are you two talking about? Every free-trade Republican I know also wants (relatively) unrestricted immigration. It's the so-called "paleo-conservatives" that are against immigration, largely on cultural grounds.
Interesting, thank you for making the distinction. My guess was based in large part on people I've known (including several I'm related to) who talk about free trade but tight immigration, and tend to identify themselves as Republicans. From what you're saying then, it would seem they are not the mainstream of "free-trade Republicanism"?
Well, the government gets to say if something is an emergency,
Yes, but at what level? I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. Is this a congressional designation, or something the president pulls out of his hat? I seem to recall governors declaring states of emergency after disasters like Katrina or bad tornado storms, making me think this designation is an executive function?
so it is a matter of the fox guarding the hen house.
Very much so. Which leads me back to my second question, how do we put saner limits on who institutes a "state of emergency", and also on what exactly constitutes one?
And as a PS, I'm baffled as to why your initial post was modded flamebait -- it sure seems more like normal "question authority" and "examined life" commentary than anything inflammatory. Besides which, I bet if we actually checked, we would see that the U.S. has been in a state of emergency for decades might be slightly hyperbolic, but it is not that far from the way things have actually been functioning for some time now.
Last I checked we were in a war, which is a state of emergency. I bet if we actually checked, we would see that the U.S. has been in a state of emergency for decades.
Which brings up the broader issue, how do we define "state of emergency", and how do we put saner limits on who gets to say?
I think we might be talking past each other. My initial post was not meant to convey what I think corporations should do, but rather what I think corporations will do -- much as you note in your preceding post. Thus, it appears that we might each be saying the same thing, but in sufficiently different ways that we've each missed the other's message.
Also, the views of executives should inform our expectations about how corporations *will* behave, not our expectations about how corporations *should* behave.
Please note that my initial post says absolutely nothing about "should".
What does an unethical MBA program or unethical MBA holder have to do with defining what corporate responsibility should be?
Most corporate executives seem to have MBAs. Therefore, most can be presumed to have actually gone through MBA programs, with said programs likely having at least some impact on how such executives view their own responsibilities within the corporation and the responsibilities of the corporation as a whole.
Ergo, if enough executives are trained to view the law as an impediment that is to be surmounted whenever possible, this viewpoint, in the aggregate, will have a significant impact on how corporations behave. QED.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, boards tend to draw the line at violating the articles of incorporation, as their own stakes - their own interests - live and die with the corporation. You'll usually see those guilty of such actions readily served up by the company - witness Ken Lay, the Rigas', and many others.
I'm not familiar with the Rigas, but as far as Ken Lay is concerned, one could probably argue that the board didn't abandon him until it was far too late to do anything productive beyond throwing a scapegoat out the door. The kinds of power supply shell games that Enron's teams had dreamed up are patent fraud just in common sense terms, let alone the various definitions for exactly why and how what they did was illegal. I must surmise either that the board was wholly ignorant, and therefore something close to criminally negligent regarding proper corporate governance, or that the board had at least some idea of what was going on, and was copacetic, and therefore complicit, until the law came calling. Either way, Enron doesn't appear to be a good example for how corporate articles are supposed to govern company behaviour and inform the board of directors' and other management decisions, inasmuch as the company was taken down not for violating its own articles, but rather for widespread and highly disruptive fraud. Then again, perhaps I'm missing a salient point?
Corporations have only two responsibilities: Maximize profits, and follow the law.
I don't have a link handy, I'm afraid, but I've heard from friends and read elsewhere that numerous MBA programs (at least in the US) actively advocate getting away with as much as possible in pursuit of profits. "Oh yeah, and don't break the law, kids (wink wink, nudge nudge)." It's not necessarily about following the law, instead it's about getting away with it when you don't.
Those "charters" still exist, except in the US we call them articles of incorporation. Violating these articles can lead to penalties up to and including dissolution of the corporation.
Forgive my ignorance, but has any corporation in recent history actually been penalized for any such violation? Has any been dissolved for same?
Now cue new prophets going on about the impending arrival of the Great Homer, whereupon our entire universe will be rendered into bite-size chunks and slowly masticated into elementary particles of deep-fried pastry goodness.
You DO realize that there are cases where people have been murdered, which did not net as much jail time as we are talking about this?
And there, methinks, you've found your answer. If murder results in less cost (i.e. prison time) than copyright infringement, then we have a clear economic imbalance in terms of costs and incentives, which most perversely incentivizes murder (in relative terms, for course).
Amidst such absurd circumstances, it comes as zero surprise that American society is increasingly screwed up.
I have never heard anyone miss the h sound in herb, unless they were superlatively drunk...
Apparently you 'aven't spent a lot of time talking to Merkans lately.:) Back in the '80s, there was an advertising campaign run by Burger King about some guy named "Herb", which is notable because that's the only case in Usia where the "H" is pronounced. The word for tasty plants is "H"-less when spoken.
First off, 99% of all polls are bullshit. They are not scientifically created and are almost always written to get the response the poller is looking for.
And we were told this sort of bug could NEVER happen in an open source operating system. Seriously, this is a major cockup.
First off, we were not told any such thing -- or at least I've never run across any such claims myself. Secondly, this would actually seem to substantiate the many-eyes theory, as the bug was found and summarily corrected, rather than never found, or found and swept under the rug, or found first by black-hats and exploited, all of which seem quite common in the proprietary software world.
The many-eyes model does not guarantee zero bugs, nor does it guarantee speedy bug hunting. However, it would seem to guarantee that bugs will be found eventually, and also that they will be dealt with in some productive way once they are found. This model aims for the opposite of security through obscurity, that hoary old chestnut of proprietary development, by instead ensuring security by knowing exactly what things do. That also means that folks need to go through all changes -- i.e., many eyes actually need to go over the code. Open source ensures that this is possible, but actual people still need to put in the time and effort.
If some coder did this at a company at least I'm pretty confident they'd get their ass fired, but with open source it's basically "whoops, my bad."
I, on the other hand, strongly suspect that any similar mistake at a major software corporation would in all probability be quietly ignored, if it were even noticed at all -- and if it were instead deemed enough of a public relations risk to warrant dealing with, the company would likely just silently push an update to correct the problem for future users, leaving anyone using extant keys with their arses hanging in the breeze.
FWIW, I assume the PTO is run by pretty clever people who do the best they can, given the general difficulty with predicting the future, and who have a pretty decent -- albeit not perfect -- track record over the past 200 years, and who would normally see right through any such transparently bogus scam...
Here's an oldie-but-goodie to refute your operating assumption: Patent 4022227.
United States Patent 4,022,227
Smith , et al. May 10, 1977
Method of concealing partial baldness
Abstract
A method of styling hair to cover partial baldness using only the hair on a person's head. The hair styling requires dividing a person's hair into three sections and carefully folding one section over another.
This leads me to wonder what happens once those huge volumes of oil are replaced with CO2. Given that a gas is compressible while a liquid isn't, and given what another poster has noted about the possibility of pressurized CO2 + H2O to form carbonic acid, might such underground CO2 pumping eventually lead to serious erosion deep underground, possibly causing some pretty outrageous sinkholes / blowholes / maybe even lahars (mud volcanoes like we've seen recently in Indonesia)?
Slashdot Mirror
As another comment further up the thread pointed out, the GPLv3 is not about how the code is used, per se -- it's about guaranteeing freedom of the code for modification, redistribution, *and use*. As put more succinctly by Mr2001:
You note:
As best as I understand it, you'd be perfectly correct here. The update to GPLv3 is *not* about improving the code, it is about ensuring that users can still use the code after it's been changed, i.e. guaranteeing freedom to use.
Cheers,
Well, since you asked why:
Maybe not too far off the mark...
Cheers,
My impression was that the case law remains somewhat patchy, with still-substantial room for interpretation. Is this incorrect? And are you (or is anyone else) able to expand on EULA legality / enforceability in other places, such as Canada or the EU?
By "imperiled", I meant from the point of view of the end user, mostly regarding fair use. I should have made that explicit.
Interesting. Does this suggest then that the main threat to corporations is more from any management failure in due diligence in controlling a company's code assets?
Cheers,
There appears to be a goodly bit of confusion in this discussion about how the word "users" is employed. Some posts include the word to indicate end users, generally the consumers that purchase the end products and use the software included. Other posts seem to include the word to indicate anyone making use of the software, mostly intimating the developers who would leverage the software as part of producing the end product.
The lack of proper distinction here is causing a real absence of clarity in what people mean. AFAICT, there is as-yet little legal precedent in the US backing up any sort of EULA-type "agreement" that restricts how end users can actually use the end products. Corporations are increasingly trying to dictate various limits, but so far I'm not sure that case law really backs this up. As such, *all* end users are essentially free to do what they want with software under *any* license, within the (admittedly obfuscated, and currently imperiled) bounds of copyright.
Meanwhile, for intermediate users such as developers, there are much more cut-and-dried legal definitions for how and what folks can do. I think TFA is dealing mostly with this aspect (though I haven't completely RTFA). Just in terms of basic ethics, which might well be very foreign territory both for the author of TFA and the PHB target audience, most folks can agree that, if you're essentially selling something that belongs to someone else, that someone else has a say in how you go about doing so.
-----
The assumption that anyone can own what are essentially ideas (i.e. book plots, computer code, artistic designs, etc.) is the foundation of the whole concept of intellectual property. If we accept that such ideas can be owned, then we must accept all the rest of the baggage of ownership that goes with this position -- including the stipulation that selling someone else's things as your own, without proper permission, is in violation of property rights.
The GPL in all its various forms simply attempts to define that proper permission. If folks don't like what such permission entails, fine -- bloody well don't use GPL-covered code. They're still completely free to develop their own code that does what they need it to (note that I'm totally ignoring the whole issue of patents, which is plenty of grist for another mill or twenty). Whining about not getting a free ride just makes people look like wankers. Whine, whine, whinge. Meh.
Cheers,
Let me rephrase that for you:
There, I think that about does it.
So long as the consumer base is a bunch of uneducated and apathetic maroons, the execs will happily econo-rape them into poverty at any opportunity. I'm not the least bit surprised that tiered pricing and caps are coming back -- corporate behaviour is actually a bit like how the 17-year locust evolved, to where the cycles are just long enough for folks to forget about them before they come back.
Cheers,
The GP makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that capitalism is somehow freeing, and intimates that all participants are on an equal footing:
This is patently false, as anyone paying attention to the development of the US economy and US politics should be aware.
Meanwhile, the parent has correctly recognized that capitalism works on the principle of capital concentration, meaning that very few participants actually have the wherewithal to engage in a meaningful way:
Capitalism and democracy are actually not complementary systems. Those honestly interested in exploring this might wish to read Bowles & Gintis' book, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought.
Cheers,
Interesting, thank you for making the distinction. My guess was based in large part on people I've known (including several I'm related to) who talk about free trade but tight immigration, and tend to identify themselves as Republicans. From what you're saying then, it would seem they are not the mainstream of "free-trade Republicanism"?
Cheers,
Yes, but at what level? I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. Is this a congressional designation, or something the president pulls out of his hat? I seem to recall governors declaring states of emergency after disasters like Katrina or bad tornado storms, making me think this designation is an executive function?
Very much so. Which leads me back to my second question, how do we put saner limits on who institutes a "state of emergency", and also on what exactly constitutes one?
And as a PS, I'm baffled as to why your initial post was modded flamebait -- it sure seems more like normal "question authority" and "examined life" commentary than anything inflammatory. Besides which, I bet if we actually checked, we would see that the U.S. has been in a state of emergency for decades might be slightly hyperbolic, but it is not that far from the way things have actually been functioning for some time now.
Cheers,
Which brings up the broader issue, how do we define "state of emergency", and how do we put saner limits on who gets to say?
Cheers,
Let me guess:
I want your money, and I want your goods, but you can keep your sorry non-white ass out of my country.
Is this roughly what you're hinting at?
It might appear that I'm trolling, but I'm very much not -- I'm honestly interested if this is what 0xdeadbeef means.
Cheers,
I think we might be talking past each other. My initial post was not meant to convey what I think corporations should do, but rather what I think corporations will do -- much as you note in your preceding post. Thus, it appears that we might each be saying the same thing, but in sufficiently different ways that we've each missed the other's message.
Cheers,
Please note that my initial post says absolutely nothing about "should".
Cheers,
Most corporate executives seem to have MBAs. Therefore, most can be presumed to have actually gone through MBA programs, with said programs likely having at least some impact on how such executives view their own responsibilities within the corporation and the responsibilities of the corporation as a whole.
Ergo, if enough executives are trained to view the law as an impediment that is to be surmounted whenever possible, this viewpoint, in the aggregate, will have a significant impact on how corporations behave. QED.
Cheers,
I'm not up on MBA text authors by any means, but as far as Wikipedia is concerned, Lerach was a lawyer focusing on class-action suits. Is this the same person?
Cheers,
Interesting, thank you.
I'm not familiar with the Rigas, but as far as Ken Lay is concerned, one could probably argue that the board didn't abandon him until it was far too late to do anything productive beyond throwing a scapegoat out the door. The kinds of power supply shell games that Enron's teams had dreamed up are patent fraud just in common sense terms, let alone the various definitions for exactly why and how what they did was illegal. I must surmise either that the board was wholly ignorant, and therefore something close to criminally negligent regarding proper corporate governance, or that the board had at least some idea of what was going on, and was copacetic, and therefore complicit, until the law came calling. Either way, Enron doesn't appear to be a good example for how corporate articles are supposed to govern company behaviour and inform the board of directors' and other management decisions, inasmuch as the company was taken down not for violating its own articles, but rather for widespread and highly disruptive fraud. Then again, perhaps I'm missing a salient point?
Cheers,
I don't have a link handy, I'm afraid, but I've heard from friends and read elsewhere that numerous MBA programs (at least in the US) actively advocate getting away with as much as possible in pursuit of profits. "Oh yeah, and don't break the law, kids (wink wink, nudge nudge)." It's not necessarily about following the law, instead it's about getting away with it when you don't.
Cheers,
Forgive my ignorance, but has any corporation in recent history actually been penalized for any such violation? Has any been dissolved for same?
Curious,
Mmm, doughnuts...
Now cue new prophets going on about the impending arrival of the Great Homer, whereupon our entire universe will be rendered into bite-size chunks and slowly masticated into elementary particles of deep-fried pastry goodness.
Cheers,
And there, methinks, you've found your answer. If murder results in less cost (i.e. prison time) than copyright infringement, then we have a clear economic imbalance in terms of costs and incentives, which most perversely incentivizes murder (in relative terms, for course).
Amidst such absurd circumstances, it comes as zero surprise that American society is increasingly screwed up.
Cheers,
Apparently you 'aven't spent a lot of time talking to Merkans lately. :) Back in the '80s, there was an advertising campaign run by Burger King about some guy named "Herb", which is notable because that's the only case in Usia where the "H" is pronounced. The word for tasty plants is "H"-less when spoken.
Cheers,
Scott Adams said it best: http://www.dilbert.com/2008-05-08/
Cheers,
First off, we were not told any such thing -- or at least I've never run across any such claims myself. Secondly, this would actually seem to substantiate the many-eyes theory, as the bug was found and summarily corrected, rather than never found, or found and swept under the rug, or found first by black-hats and exploited, all of which seem quite common in the proprietary software world.
The many-eyes model does not guarantee zero bugs, nor does it guarantee speedy bug hunting. However, it would seem to guarantee that bugs will be found eventually, and also that they will be dealt with in some productive way once they are found. This model aims for the opposite of security through obscurity, that hoary old chestnut of proprietary development, by instead ensuring security by knowing exactly what things do. That also means that folks need to go through all changes -- i.e., many eyes actually need to go over the code. Open source ensures that this is possible, but actual people still need to put in the time and effort.
Cheers,
I, on the other hand, strongly suspect that any similar mistake at a major software corporation would in all probability be quietly ignored, if it were even noticed at all -- and if it were instead deemed enough of a public relations risk to warrant dealing with, the company would likely just silently push an update to correct the problem for future users, leaving anyone using extant keys with their arses hanging in the breeze.
But maybe I'm just being overly cynical. :-\
Cheers,
Here's an oldie-but-goodie to refute your operating assumption: Patent 4022227.
Need I really say more?
Cheers,
This leads me to wonder what happens once those huge volumes of oil are replaced with CO2. Given that a gas is compressible while a liquid isn't, and given what another poster has noted about the possibility of pressurized CO2 + H2O to form carbonic acid, might such underground CO2 pumping eventually lead to serious erosion deep underground, possibly causing some pretty outrageous sinkholes / blowholes / maybe even lahars (mud volcanoes like we've seen recently in Indonesia)?
Just curious. Cheers,