It might be a good idea to add a little bit to the GPL regarding the "death penalty" provision.
Specifically, I would propose that use of GPL software be conditioned on legal stipulation of the proposition that continued violation of the terms of the GPL after notification is "irreparable injury" because it is theft of intellectual property.
Similarly, you should have to stipulate that the "balance of harms" of a violation is completely in favor of the author, and that this applies regardless of any business interest that exists as a result of the exploitation of the licence. The author offered a zero-cost good faith licence to use and extend their IP subject only to the condition that IP extentions be returned to the commons on demand. In many cases the GPL'ing author makes this deal believing that it will produce more value than retaining tight proprietary interest and selling the software for its market value. If someone else builds a business by skirting the extremely minimal requirements of the IP barter arrangement, then any revenue stream that results should be viewed by stipulation of the licence as being misappropriated and unjustly earned. Indeed pirated or stolen.
Thirdly, I would propose that the section 4 "death penalty" provision be made substantially more blunt. In particular, a "take down" process should be invoked (somewhat like the DMCA provision) that says if you recieve a letter of noncompliance from an author that your rights cannot be restored other than by a written order of the author, an arbitrator (see below), or a judge. Some people have noted that if you receive another copy that the licence can be read to re-grant a new and separate licence. All such weasle room should be removed by stating that this doesn't apply if you're licence was revoked for noncompliance.
Fourthly, I would propose that the licence should designate that any disputes be settled by arbitration by the FSF or by the EFF if the FSF is a party with the loser to bear all reasonable costs incurred by both sides.
NuSphere is purposefully trying to confuse the issue with their code linking argument. The copyright in source code is completely separate from the copyright in object code. That is old hat.
Even if the source code is not "integrated", when the result of compiling is an indivisible executable object code, the result is a derivitive work. If I write a library and you use it, the resulting object code is a derivitive of both source files. The GPL specifically mentions and includes this case. The LGPL is offered as an alternative when the harsh consequences of the GPL are not what the author desires. End of story.
The judge seemed to weigh that putting NuSphere out of business was a big deal in the "balance of harms" and didn't see clearly what the "irreperable injury" the other way was. As Jack Valenti would say, if Nusphere has based their business model on piracy, then they should be imprisoned, not just slapped with an injunction.
The GPL is not a gift. It is a barter offer: I allow certain carefully constrained uses of my IP and in return you offer any intellectual property you create some as a result of my good will back to "the pot". In software development, time is a critical element: if one competitor can benefit from the IP of the other and mix in its own IP without disclosure, then the cheater has gained an unfair advantage. If its cheating is part of a business venture, then its entire profit stream is usurped from the good faith party as a direct result of its bad faith dealings.
For this reason the GPL essentially says "if you ever cheat, you get the death penalty". Without this clause, freeloaders could perpetually use gamesmanship and delaying tactics to obtain competitive advantage in the bartering of "hot" IP. To assure that bad faith cannot usurp the original author's valuable IP contributions, the GPL revokes all rights for the smallest infraction in order to assure that any "negotiation" will occur with the position of strength emphatically given to the original author.
The irreparable harm inflicted by not issuing an injunction is that NuSphere can continue to profit from a business model that is based on outright theft of intellectual property. The moment they were notified of GPL noncompliance, section 4 of the GPL revoked their licence. They are distributing and indeed modifying a copyrighted work in direct defiance of the authority of the copyright holder with the intent to profit. That is not only irreperable harm, it is stealing, and it is CRIMINAL if it is done willfully (17 USC 504).
That article was written in 1992, so it's very out of date. In the case of a warrentee disclaimer, a different set of notification laws apply. "Service sold separately" is a completely reasonable point of view, given proper notification. Most EULAs attempt to use "notification" as an excuse to take away the user's rights. Only a contract can do that.
It's important to know that all of the caselaw on this subject makes it very important to look at the exact circumstances. For example, if you are installing from one disk onto more than one computer, then you DO need a licence and in that case it is sort of like the GPL: if you don't accept the EULA then nothing else grants you multiple machine use. The "nothing else" part fails in the case of single machine use because there is something else: 17 USC 117, which is not subject to approval by the vendor.
Even though Softman v Adobe didn't reach the matter of shrinkwrap licences, it all but decides it.
When you walk into the store or whatever and hand over cash for the cardboard box, you get a little piece of paper called a receipt, which lawyers will call a "contract of sale" because it specifies item, quantity, and price. At that point you are the owner.
Since the software vendor probably wasn't even a party to the contract of sale, they cannot even claim that it is the "completion" of the sale by "acceptance of goods". That undercuts the only theory that any court has employed to hold any type of shrinkwrap licence enforcable.
In fact, I don't even think the shrinkwrap should count as an "offer" even if it did purport to offer you something in consideration, because its method of acceptance produces no manifestation of assent outside of your own property. I call this attack by offer. It goes something like this: "Microsoft, I make you the following offer: if you would like to grant me a worldwide licence to all of your intellectual property in exchange for an unqualified option to have my old socks, then simply have one of your executives turn his or her monitor off and on in the next day".
It doesn't work because the fact that you are claiming that an otherwise legitimate use of their property is acceptance does not allow you to attach a meaning to that use. The fact that they did it may simply indicate that they believe you are irrelevent. You have the right to install and use the software by 17 USC 117. The fact that it purports to offer you an "accept" option does not mean that you cannot click your mouse on the YES button as you please. Similarly, the MS executives can turn their monitors off and on as they please without assenting to your offer.
Jython is very similar to Python. VB.NET is a much bigger alteration to VB that Jython is to Python.
Any since we're on the topic, I think Jython and JRuby deserve a lot more interest. The ability to leverage the huge class libraries of Java with the elegence of object oriented scripting is a tremendous enabler for both Java and Ruby/Python.
Of course, the bonehead article doesn't seem to even acknowledge the increasing importance of scripting languages. How this bozo could not even mention perl, let alone python or ruby is insane.
The internet is "disruptive technology". Previously publishers added economic value to the stream of commerce that flows from authors and artists to consumers. Suddenly, nearly all creative works can be represented in a digital form (usually with higher quality to boot), reproduced at virtually no cost, and distributed at virtually no cost.
The entire business model of most publishers is now non-value added waste. The market knows it, the people know it, and the publishers even know it.
Unfortunately, our form of government is not geared to be responsive to the public or the market. Free markets and the public demand the elimination of waste, but our form of government is optimized to achieve a different goal: to create a regulatory paradigm where Congress grants regulatory favors to those who are able to contribute the funds needed to assure the reelection of the people in the system.
Our legislators have gone through a vigorous natural selection process that ensures they truly believe it is important to ignore the wishes of the people, indeed even the rights of the people, so as to perpetuate the unnatural power base of a cartel created not by competition, but by regulation even after the very service that it provides can be accomplished on demand by any 10 year old with no out of pocket expense.
The internet was designed precisely to acheive what it does acheive: a radically better way to distribute files. People should see this for what it is and also dispel any feelings of guilt they have for using it to its fullest capabilities to destroy those industries that survive only by misuse of government to protect revenue streams based on turning waste into value based on corrupt regulation.
In fact, EVEN IF a few poor starving millionare artists have to suffer unfairly to achieve it, I recommend that people feel no guilt about sharing files instead of feeding the cartels. It is far better to kill a little skin burning off the leach than to allow it to feed off of you unchecked.
Are you refering to the Marilyn Patel who was THE FIRST judge to rule that source code is speech (in Bernstein v DOJ) or the one that has given the RIAA three weeks to prove that they actually own the copyrights they claim to own? She is actually taking the misuse of copyright claims seriously, which is exactly correct. Napster isn't promoting "fair use", its promoting a popular uprising aimed at bucking an overbearing cartel.
Judge Patel is in fact one of the sharpest judges around on tech matters. If you don't believe it, go back and read her opinion in Bernstein.
The only fair criticism I can see against Patel is that her recent orders in Napster were too slow in coming. In the long run, that doesn't matter at all, and it hardly surprises anybody that our judicial system moves slowly sometimes.
Enforceability of the GPL is problematic at best. It's no more legal than any other software license, and consider how many objections the average/.er raises to (say) Microsoft's clickwrap licenses. Those same objections apply to the GPL, but even more strongly.
Totally wrong.
My objection to Microsoft's clickwrap licence is that it only purports to grant me a licence to "use" the software on a single machine, which I already have by 17 USC 117, since I am the "owner of a copy". Since their contract does not give me anything I don't already have, it is unenforcable because there is no "consideration".
The GPL is a unilateral grant to do something that you cannot otherwise do without violating 17 USC 106. It is not a contract at all, but a unilateral grant. If the GPL is unenforcable then NuSphere is commiting copyright infringement by distributing a derivitive work.
The open source community needs to release a GPL version of Java. There are innumerable projects out there all of which have struggled independently to get to partial JDK 1.1 capability.
Until there is a highly competitive GPL java compiler with a full set of foundation classes, nobody should be happy about using Java because it is essentially proprietary technology.
Between GNU Classpath, gcj, jikes, KOPI, Kaffe, Japhar, and a dozen others, its amazing that Sun is so far ahead of what you can do with pure GPL.
This is crazy. It's like asking coca cola to realease their recipe.
Crazy? No. Like asking Coke, yes, which is exactly why it is routine. If the coke recipe was an issue in a case it would absolutely be fair game. It is extremely frightening that ANYBODY actually believes the argument that IP stops the judicial branch from gathering evidence.
MS should submit the code without modification from its native format, including the build instructions that produce the bit for bit output that they sell. Anything less should be viewed as contempt of court.
Do people understand that evidence can be admitted under seal? This is not the same thing as ordering MS to make their code open for inspection by general members of the public. The doom-and-gloom scenarios about the impact of allowing the states to see the code are completely disingenuous since MS already licences third parties to see their source code via their "Shared Source" program.
As I posted when Slashdot ran this story on 28-Nov-2001 (which was four weeks late, as the opinion was available 1-Nov-2001 it happened)...
From my submissions page:
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
* 2001-11-01 22:36:46 Federal Court rules Software Sold, not merely Licenced (yro,news) (rejected)
WTF. News should be, well, new. My rejected submission was made the day after the opinion was published. I'm glad this very important decision is getting the attention it deserves, but I have to wonder how Slashdot could justify rejecting it when it was timely, then running it twice when it wasn't.
Arriba used Kelly's original work and displayed it on an Arriba site.
No, images are displayed by the browser, not the "site".
All that Arriba did was construct an HTML command to request that Kelly's webserver give the image to the end user's browser. Kelly's webserver said "yes" to the request with the full knowledge of the refering page. The fact that Kelly doesn't check the refering html page or use some other programmatic control means that Kelly has placed his image in a format where the HTML standard allows framing. The court today said essentially that these acts mean nothing. That's crap -- if Kelly didn't want to expose his image to the full capabilities of HTML, he should have used some other technology.
These judges just completely botch the inline linking part of their decision. Arriba simply isn't displaying anything.
It shouldn't be a "fair use" case at all, but rather a question of whether permission is given for the use. Arriba use of an inline link is nothing more that a REQUEST to use the images. The result is that a http GET command is sent to kelly's website. Kelly is the one who chose to put his files in the web server. Kelly controls the programmatic response of that web server. When Kelly's web server responds by sending the image, it is Kelly that is authorizing display on the end user's machine.
The fact that such an image can be framed is a flexibility directly supported by the browser paradigm and HTML standard. When Kelly puts his images in a web server, he is de facto authorizing their use in the HTTP/HTML/browser context. The court doesn't even ponder this.
It is completely absurd to say that Arriba is "displaying" their images unless Arriba puts full sized copies on their own web server. Instead it is more appropriate to say that Arriba is providing the end user with a request form (HTML) to display. That isn't "use" at all.
That is definately a risk. It is often possible to harm overall system performance by upgrading an RDBMS that includes optimizer improvements. Any changes to an optimizer will change execution plans. Hopefully most of them get better, but a few get worse, often dramatically worse. Finding the ones that get worse and tuning them is an important activity. Bad SQL plans are often the biggest impact tuning activity, so it is very important to understand what will happen to your specific application before you make changes that affect how your SQL-statements are implemented.
This is one area in which Oracle shows its power over the open source databases. (It's also a big oportunity because Oracle can be improved on). Oracle can actually tap into continuous statistics gathering on a per SQL level by using oracle's v$sqlarea dictionary view. If you need high-powered scrutiny on a particular activity, you can trace the session to logs and see the row statistics at every step of the exectution plan. Oracle has more optimizer hints, and has a facility to "pin" an execution plan, so that it won't be reevaluated if optimizer behavior changes. Oracle is working toward server-side SQL tuning, where you can ID bad SQL's and "intercept" them at runtime by adding hints on the server side. That will be an absolutely huge feature, since often SQL hits your system that you can't directly control but can predict.
The founders of the mozilla project in their original development roadmap If you expected something different, then that's your fault. They were very clear about the original project scope and have stuck to it since 26-Oct-1998. If you think they set out to merely develop something like Konqueror, then no wonder you are cynical, confused, and bitter.
As for their homepage "lying", you are insane. The sentence you quoted out of context concerns the "browser project" (read the previous sentence) and is given on the "at a glace" page. If you follow the link immediately above it to theMozilla Mission Page you can get a less cursory understanding of mozilla:
Now, we intend to use the name Mozilla as the generic term referring to internet client software developed through our open source project.
and
So, Mozilla is a set of technologies, but not a specific (in biologic terms, Mozilla is a genus; a particular product is a species).
What "set" of "technologies" are they refering to? I don't think it gets any clearer than the Mozilla Development Roadmap
The original roadmap recorded the momentous decision in October 1998 to reset the Mozilla project around the new layout engine (now called Gecko), a cross-platform front end (XPFE), now several XP Apps built on an XP Toolkit), and a scriptable components architecture (XPCOM and XPConnect).
I just wonder if you happen to realize that all of the toolbars, menus, popups, tabs, dialogues, etc... in the mozilla browser are XML files rendered by gecko. If you think about that long enough, you might just "get it".
Mozilla is not a browser project. It is a cross platform component project, which happens to include the gecko rendering engine. If all you want is a browser, use galeon on linux or kmeleon on win32.
The real goal of Mozilla is to create XUL and XPCOM and offer a truly cross platfrom network component environment. It is 100% reasonable to expect that the major network applications IRC, email, usenet, and a browser should be provided as reference apps.
Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything.
The crap that really turns me off about Mozilla is the arm chair quarterbacks who mouth off without a clue. You obviously didn't even read the freaking bug report.
You might be particularly interested in the attachment to comment 23 which is an email from the author of Aspell/Pspell which gives a gap analysis of the various open source spell checkers.
In fact, it appears that Mozilla and Abiword have some alignment in goals for making a library based spell checker, so far from the picture of "reinventing everything" that you paint, this is actually an example of synergy between diverse projects that exemplifies open source development code sharing.
The law allows for "inventions" to be patented, but you cannot patent a "discovery".
Thus if you find that a particular gene exists in the human body, you have not "invented" anything. One the other hand, if you take a piece of DNA and use it in a particlar process that is not naturally occuring, then you can patent the novel aspects of the process. DNA is just a chemical , and it is protected in exactly the same way as less complex chemicals.
This is exactly the same as patents for chemical reagents. You cannot patent phosphorus, but if you find a novel way to combine it with other elements to make something new, then you can patent that. For example, if you combine it with a piece of DNA that allows you to "mark" the DNA in certain ways, then you can patent that process if nobody has done it before.
If that happens to be the only way to diagnose a human disease, then you can and should reap a big financial reward from your patent.
Now, it very well be that the PTO is granting patents that aren't legally valid. We knew that already and it has nothing to do with the biological arena, it has a lot to do with complete incompetence and a political process that is broken.
The DOJ and the states sue MS to stop and to remedy harms to the general public (consumers). AOL will sue MS to stop and to remedy harms to them specifically. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sun sue MS over Java again, by the way. Federal law calls for triple (3X) actual damages as a remedy.
The interesting question is whether they will seek to prove additional anticompetitive behavior in the web browser arena, or if they will simply try to cash in on what has already been decided in DOJ v MS.
But law firms do go through the ups and downs of the economy, and many have had layoffs recently. Some types of law correlate with the economy, but some run backwards to what everybody else is doing.
During recessions, corporate law departments get decimated (many fewer start-ups), bankruptcy departments surge, criminal law goes up some (the unemployed are restless), employment law departements do well (planning layoffs and the lawsuits they cause) and litigation goes down (less total investment in companies means fewer disputes, and companies in the red aren't as eager to sue other companies).
It actually would be a good time to buy now, because the economy has bottomed out so "buy low, sell high" means to buy now.
Ah ah. Here's the big lie. Technology increases the freedom of those who have significant resources to aquire it.
... and the people they hire to help them, and the people who can now afford (where before they couldn't) the new cheaper products and services as a result of them being able to be created more efficiently (or people these producers, in turn, hire to help them), etc...
Put 10 people on an island micro-society, give them equal resources. Now give one of them technology that gives them an advantage creating one of the basic necessities. Question: what happens to the standard of living of the others? Answer: It goes up. Why: trade -- the individual with the advantage can benefit himself most only by offering the others something better than they already have, so that he can specialize on what he can do efficiently all the time. The result is a change that improves the position of each participant, at the cost of tolerating "inequality".
They are what they are. The point of open sourse is that all the facts are available -- nothing is hidden or kept secret from you. You don't need to rely on "supposed".
I expect buggy "stable" software from Microsoft, but not from the Open Source community.
Expectations are the root of all disappointment. You have a "Zero Defects" mentality. That went out of style in the '80's, when Demming showed people that to get fewer defects they had to stop trying to magically be perfect and instead had to actually and continually improve their processes. The worst quality is always produced by people who think they are perfect, because they are blind and don't seek to continually improve. Quality is a process, not a feature.
Open source is an improvement over traditional proprietary process because it identifies and fixes bugs more quickly. Sorry to disappoint your "expectations", but that doesn't make it perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be a good idea to add a little bit to the GPL regarding the "death penalty" provision.
Specifically, I would propose that use of GPL software be conditioned on legal stipulation of the proposition that continued violation of the terms of the GPL after notification is "irreparable injury" because it is theft of intellectual property.
Similarly, you should have to stipulate that the "balance of harms" of a violation is completely in favor of the author, and that this applies regardless of any business interest that exists as a result of the exploitation of the licence. The author offered a zero-cost good faith licence to use and extend their IP subject only to the condition that IP extentions be returned to the commons on demand. In many cases the GPL'ing author makes this deal believing that it will produce more value than retaining tight proprietary interest and selling the software for its market value. If someone else builds a business by skirting the extremely minimal requirements of the IP barter arrangement, then any revenue stream that results should be viewed by stipulation of the licence as being misappropriated and unjustly earned. Indeed pirated or stolen.
Thirdly, I would propose that the section 4 "death penalty" provision be made substantially more blunt. In particular, a "take down" process should be invoked (somewhat like the DMCA provision) that says if you recieve a letter of noncompliance from an author that your rights cannot be restored other than by a written order of the author, an arbitrator (see below), or a judge. Some people have noted that if you receive another copy that the licence can be read to re-grant a new and separate licence. All such weasle room should be removed by stating that this doesn't apply if you're licence was revoked for noncompliance.
Fourthly, I would propose that the licence should designate that any disputes be settled by arbitration by the FSF or by the EFF if the FSF is a party with the loser to bear all reasonable costs incurred by both sides.
NuSphere is purposefully trying to confuse the issue with their code linking argument. The copyright in source code is completely separate from the copyright in object code. That is old hat.
Even if the source code is not "integrated", when the result of compiling is an indivisible executable object code, the result is a derivitive work. If I write a library and you use it, the resulting object code is a derivitive of both source files. The GPL specifically mentions and includes this case. The LGPL is offered as an alternative when the harsh consequences of the GPL are not what the author desires. End of story.
The judge seemed to weigh that putting NuSphere out of business was a big deal in the "balance of harms" and didn't see clearly what the "irreperable injury" the other way was. As Jack Valenti would say, if Nusphere has based their business model on piracy, then they should be imprisoned, not just slapped with an injunction.
The GPL is not a gift. It is a barter offer: I allow certain carefully constrained uses of my IP and in return you offer any intellectual property you create some as a result of my good will back to "the pot". In software development, time is a critical element: if one competitor can benefit from the IP of the other and mix in its own IP without disclosure, then the cheater has gained an unfair advantage. If its cheating is part of a business venture, then its entire profit stream is usurped from the good faith party as a direct result of its bad faith dealings.
For this reason the GPL essentially says "if you ever cheat, you get the death penalty". Without this clause, freeloaders could perpetually use gamesmanship and delaying tactics to obtain competitive advantage in the bartering of "hot" IP. To assure that bad faith cannot usurp the original author's valuable IP contributions, the GPL revokes all rights for the smallest infraction in order to assure that any "negotiation" will occur with the position of strength emphatically given to the original author.
The irreparable harm inflicted by not issuing an injunction is that NuSphere can continue to profit from a business model that is based on outright theft of intellectual property. The moment they were notified of GPL noncompliance, section 4 of the GPL revoked their licence. They are distributing and indeed modifying a copyrighted work in direct defiance of the authority of the copyright holder with the intent to profit. That is not only irreperable harm, it is stealing, and it is CRIMINAL if it is done willfully (17 USC 504).
That article was written in 1992, so it's very out of date. In the case of a warrentee disclaimer, a different set of notification laws apply. "Service sold separately" is a completely reasonable point of view, given proper notification. Most EULAs attempt to use "notification" as an excuse to take away the user's rights. Only a contract can do that.
It's important to know that all of the caselaw on this subject makes it very important to look at the exact circumstances. For example, if you are installing from one disk onto more than one computer, then you DO need a licence and in that case it is sort of like the GPL: if you don't accept the EULA then nothing else grants you multiple machine use. The "nothing else" part fails in the case of single machine use because there is something else: 17 USC 117, which is not subject to approval by the vendor.
Exactly.
Even though Softman v Adobe didn't reach the matter of shrinkwrap licences, it all but decides it.
When you walk into the store or whatever and hand over cash for the cardboard box, you get a little piece of paper called a receipt, which lawyers will call a "contract of sale" because it specifies item, quantity, and price. At that point you are the owner.
Since the software vendor probably wasn't even a party to the contract of sale, they cannot even claim that it is the "completion" of the sale by "acceptance of goods". That undercuts the only theory that any court has employed to hold any type of shrinkwrap licence enforcable.
In fact, I don't even think the shrinkwrap should count as an "offer" even if it did purport to offer you something in consideration, because its method of acceptance produces no manifestation of assent outside of your own property. I call this attack by offer. It goes something like this: "Microsoft, I make you the following offer: if you would like to grant me a worldwide licence to all of your intellectual property in exchange for an unqualified option to have my old socks, then simply have one of your executives turn his or her monitor off and on in the next day".
It doesn't work because the fact that you are claiming that an otherwise legitimate use of their property is acceptance does not allow you to attach a meaning to that use. The fact that they did it may simply indicate that they believe you are irrelevent. You have the right to install and use the software by 17 USC 117. The fact that it purports to offer you an "accept" option does not mean that you cannot click your mouse on the YES button as you please. Similarly, the MS executives can turn their monitors off and on as they please without assenting to your offer.
Jython is very similar to Python. VB.NET is a much bigger alteration to VB that Jython is to Python.
Any since we're on the topic, I think Jython and JRuby deserve a lot more interest. The ability to leverage the huge class libraries of Java with the elegence of object oriented scripting is a tremendous enabler for both Java and Ruby/Python.
Of course, the bonehead article doesn't seem to even acknowledge the increasing importance of scripting languages. How this bozo could not even mention perl, let alone python or ruby is insane.
Is The Net At Fault For Illegal Filesharing?
In a word: YES!
The internet is "disruptive technology". Previously publishers added economic value to the stream of commerce that flows from authors and artists to consumers. Suddenly, nearly all creative works can be represented in a digital form (usually with higher quality to boot), reproduced at virtually no cost, and distributed at virtually no cost.
The entire business model of most publishers is now non-value added waste. The market knows it, the people know it, and the publishers even know it.
Unfortunately, our form of government is not geared to be responsive to the public or the market. Free markets and the public demand the elimination of waste, but our form of government is optimized to achieve a different goal: to create a regulatory paradigm where Congress grants regulatory favors to those who are able to contribute the funds needed to assure the reelection of the people in the system.
Our legislators have gone through a vigorous natural selection process that ensures they truly believe it is important to ignore the wishes of the people, indeed even the rights of the people, so as to perpetuate the unnatural power base of a cartel created not by competition, but by regulation even after the very service that it provides can be accomplished on demand by any 10 year old with no out of pocket expense.
The internet was designed precisely to acheive what it does acheive: a radically better way to distribute files. People should see this for what it is and also dispel any feelings of guilt they have for using it to its fullest capabilities to destroy those industries that survive only by misuse of government to protect revenue streams based on turning waste into value based on corrupt regulation.
In fact, EVEN IF a few poor starving millionare artists have to suffer unfairly to achieve it, I recommend that people feel no guilt about sharing files instead of feeding the cartels. It is far better to kill a little skin burning off the leach than to allow it to feed off of you unchecked.
Are you refering to the Marilyn Patel who was THE FIRST judge to rule that source code is speech (in Bernstein v DOJ) or the one that has given the RIAA three weeks to prove that they actually own the copyrights they claim to own? She is actually taking the misuse of copyright claims seriously, which is exactly correct. Napster isn't promoting "fair use", its promoting a popular uprising aimed at bucking an overbearing cartel.
Judge Patel is in fact one of the sharpest judges around on tech matters. If you don't believe it, go back and read her opinion in Bernstein.
The only fair criticism I can see against Patel is that her recent orders in Napster were too slow in coming. In the long run, that doesn't matter at all, and it hardly surprises anybody that our judicial system moves slowly sometimes.
Enforceability of the GPL is problematic at best. It's no more legal than any other software license, and consider how many objections the average /.er raises to (say) Microsoft's clickwrap licenses. Those same objections apply to the GPL, but even more strongly.
Totally wrong.
My objection to Microsoft's clickwrap licence is that it only purports to grant me a licence to "use" the software on a single machine, which I already have by 17 USC 117, since I am the "owner of a copy". Since their contract does not give me anything I don't already have, it is unenforcable because there is no "consideration".
The GPL is a unilateral grant to do something that you cannot otherwise do without violating 17 USC 106. It is not a contract at all, but a unilateral grant. If the GPL is unenforcable then NuSphere is commiting copyright infringement by distributing a derivitive work.
The open source community needs to release a GPL version of Java. There are innumerable projects out there all of which have struggled independently to get to partial JDK 1.1 capability.
Until there is a highly competitive GPL java compiler with a full set of foundation classes, nobody should be happy about using Java because it is essentially proprietary technology.
Between GNU Classpath, gcj, jikes, KOPI, Kaffe, Japhar, and a dozen others, its amazing that Sun is so far ahead of what you can do with pure GPL.
This is crazy. It's like asking coca cola to realease their recipe.
Crazy? No. Like asking Coke, yes, which is exactly why it is routine. If the coke recipe was an issue in a case it would absolutely be fair game. It is extremely frightening that ANYBODY actually believes the argument that IP stops the judicial branch from gathering evidence.
MS should submit the code without modification from its native format, including the build instructions that produce the bit for bit output that they sell. Anything less should be viewed as contempt of court.
Do people understand that evidence can be admitted under seal? This is not the same thing as ordering MS to make their code open for inspection by general members of the public. The doom-and-gloom scenarios about the impact of allowing the states to see the code are completely disingenuous since MS already licences third parties to see their source code via their "Shared Source" program.
As I posted when Slashdot ran this story on 28-Nov-2001 (which was four weeks late, as the opinion was available 1-Nov-2001 it happened)...
From my submissions page:
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
* 2001-11-01 22:36:46 Federal Court rules Software Sold, not merely Licenced (yro,news) (rejected)
WTF. News should be, well, new. My rejected submission was made the day after the opinion was published. I'm glad this very important decision is getting the attention it deserves, but I have to wonder how Slashdot could justify rejecting it when it was timely, then running it twice when it wasn't.
Arriba used Kelly's original work and displayed it on an Arriba site.
No, images are displayed by the browser, not the "site".
All that Arriba did was construct an HTML command to request that Kelly's webserver give the image to the end user's browser. Kelly's webserver said "yes" to the request with the full knowledge of the refering page. The fact that Kelly doesn't check the refering html page or use some other programmatic control means that Kelly has placed his image in a format where the HTML standard allows framing. The court today said essentially that these acts mean nothing. That's crap -- if Kelly didn't want to expose his image to the full capabilities of HTML, he should have used some other technology.
These judges just completely botch the inline linking part of their decision. Arriba simply isn't displaying anything.
It shouldn't be a "fair use" case at all, but rather a question of whether permission is given for the use. Arriba use of an inline link is nothing more that a REQUEST to use the images. The result is that a http GET command is sent to kelly's website. Kelly is the one who chose to put his files in the web server. Kelly controls the programmatic response of that web server. When Kelly's web server responds by sending the image, it is Kelly that is authorizing display on the end user's machine.
The fact that such an image can be framed is a flexibility directly supported by the browser paradigm and HTML standard. When Kelly puts his images in a web server, he is de facto authorizing their use in the HTTP/HTML/browser context. The court doesn't even ponder this.
It is completely absurd to say that Arriba is "displaying" their images unless Arriba puts full sized copies on their own web server. Instead it is more appropriate to say that Arriba is providing the end user with a request form (HTML) to display. That isn't "use" at all.
Here's my Postgres wish list:
1. Point in time recovery
2. Reconstruct SQL from write ahead log
3. Function based indexes with SQL rewrite
4. Materialized views with SQL rewrite
5. Analogue to Oracle's v$sqlarea
6. Wait statistics
7. Tablespaces
8. Inline views (from clause subselects)
9. Parallel query capability
10. Partioned tables
11. Bitmap indexes
12. IO monitoring (read/write per object)
13. Dynamic sort and hash area allocation
14. Detailed SQL tracing (rows per plan step)
15. Multiplexed WAL writes
16. SQL optimizer hints
That is definately a risk. It is often possible to harm overall system performance by upgrading an RDBMS that includes optimizer improvements. Any changes to an optimizer will change execution plans. Hopefully most of them get better, but a few get worse, often dramatically worse. Finding the ones that get worse and tuning them is an important activity. Bad SQL plans are often the biggest impact tuning activity, so it is very important to understand what will happen to your specific application before you make changes that affect how your SQL-statements are implemented.
This is one area in which Oracle shows its power over the open source databases. (It's also a big oportunity because Oracle can be improved on). Oracle can actually tap into continuous statistics gathering on a per SQL level by using oracle's v$sqlarea dictionary view. If you need high-powered scrutiny on a particular activity, you can trace the session to logs and see the row statistics at every step of the exectution plan. Oracle has more optimizer hints, and has a facility to "pin" an execution plan, so that it won't be reevaluated if optimizer behavior changes. Oracle is working toward server-side SQL tuning, where you can ID bad SQL's and "intercept" them at runtime by adding hints on the server side. That will be an absolutely huge feature, since often SQL hits your system that you can't directly control but can predict.
See my reply to the original post.
The founders of the mozilla project in their original development roadmap If you expected something different, then that's your fault. They were very clear about the original project scope and have stuck to it since 26-Oct-1998. If you think they set out to merely develop something like Konqueror, then no wonder you are cynical, confused, and bitter.
As for their homepage "lying", you are insane. The sentence you quoted out of context concerns the "browser project" (read the previous sentence) and is given on the "at a glace" page. If you follow the link immediately above it to theMozilla Mission Page you can get a less cursory understanding of mozilla: and
What "set" of "technologies" are they refering to? I don't think it gets any clearer than the Mozilla Development Roadmap
I just wonder if you happen to realize that all of the toolbars, menus, popups, tabs, dialogues, etc... in the mozilla browser are XML files rendered by gecko. If you think about that long enough, you might just "get it".
Mozilla is not a browser project. It is a cross platform component project, which happens to include the gecko rendering engine. If all you want is a browser, use galeon on linux or kmeleon on win32.
The real goal of Mozilla is to create XUL and XPCOM and offer a truly cross platfrom network component environment. It is 100% reasonable to expect that the major network applications IRC, email, usenet, and a browser should be provided as reference apps.
Gahhh this is the crap that really turns me off from Mozilla. It seems like the project is dead set on reinventing everything.
The crap that really turns me off about Mozilla is the arm chair quarterbacks who mouth off without a clue. You obviously didn't even read the freaking bug report.
You might be particularly interested in the attachment to comment 23 which is an email from the author of Aspell/Pspell which gives a gap analysis of the various open source spell checkers.
In fact, it appears that Mozilla and Abiword have some alignment in goals for making a library based spell checker, so far from the picture of "reinventing everything" that you paint, this is actually an example of synergy between diverse projects that exemplifies open source development code sharing.
The law allows for "inventions" to be patented, but you cannot patent a "discovery".
Thus if you find that a particular gene exists in the human body, you have not "invented" anything. One the other hand, if you take a piece of DNA and use it in a particlar process that is not naturally occuring, then you can patent the novel aspects of the process. DNA is just a chemical , and it is protected in exactly the same way as less complex chemicals.
This is exactly the same as patents for chemical reagents. You cannot patent phosphorus, but if you find a novel way to combine it with other elements to make something new, then you can patent that. For example, if you combine it with a piece of DNA that allows you to "mark" the DNA in certain ways, then you can patent that process if nobody has done it before.
If that happens to be the only way to diagnose a human disease, then you can and should reap a big financial reward from your patent.
Now, it very well be that the PTO is granting patents that aren't legally valid. We knew that already and it has nothing to do with the biological arena, it has a lot to do with complete incompetence and a political process that is broken.
The DOJ and the states sue MS to stop and to remedy harms to the general public (consumers). AOL will sue MS to stop and to remedy harms to them specifically. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sun sue MS over Java again, by the way. Federal law calls for triple (3X) actual damages as a remedy.
The interesting question is whether they will seek to prove additional anticompetitive behavior in the web browser arena, or if they will simply try to cash in on what has already been decided in DOJ v MS.
Alas, tt is illegal for law firms to sell stock.
But law firms do go through the ups and downs of the economy, and many have had layoffs recently. Some types of law correlate with the economy, but some run backwards to what everybody else is doing.
During recessions, corporate law departments get decimated (many fewer start-ups), bankruptcy departments surge, criminal law goes up some (the unemployed are restless), employment law departements do well (planning layoffs and the lawsuits they cause) and litigation goes down (less total investment in companies means fewer disputes, and companies in the red aren't as eager to sue other companies).
It actually would be a good time to buy now, because the economy has bottomed out so "buy low, sell high" means to buy now.
Ah ah. Here's the big lie. Technology increases the freedom of those who have significant resources to aquire it.
... and the people they hire to help them, and the people who can now afford (where before they couldn't) the new cheaper products and services as a result of them being able to be created more efficiently (or people these producers, in turn, hire to help them), etc...
Put 10 people on an island micro-society, give them equal resources. Now give one of them technology that gives them an advantage creating one of the basic necessities. Question: what happens to the standard of living of the others? Answer: It goes up. Why: trade -- the individual with the advantage can benefit himself most only by offering the others something better than they already have, so that he can specialize on what he can do efficiently all the time. The result is a change that improves the position of each participant, at the cost of tolerating "inequality".
These are supposed to be stable kernels.
They are what they are. The point of open sourse is that all the facts are available -- nothing is hidden or kept secret from you. You don't need to rely on "supposed".
I expect buggy "stable" software from Microsoft, but not from the Open Source community.
Expectations are the root of all disappointment. You have a "Zero Defects" mentality. That went out of style in the '80's, when Demming showed people that to get fewer defects they had to stop trying to magically be perfect and instead had to actually and continually improve their processes. The worst quality is always produced by people who think they are perfect, because they are blind and don't seek to continually improve. Quality is a process, not a feature.
Open source is an improvement over traditional proprietary process because it identifies and fixes bugs more quickly. Sorry to disappoint your "expectations", but that doesn't make it perfect.