Ah, there's the rub! I checked about half an hour ago (as I was writing that post) to see if Slashdot keeps a record of unsuccessful article submission. Sadly not. One moment though, I shall check elsewhere...
I can't find it yet, but there's some interesting stuff by the same author: search for Guadamuz on Google Scholar. There's entries on Internet IP and the like. I'll go have another look for that paper...
Ok, I'm one step closer now. This is the author's university page with reference to all his published works. I still can't seem to find a link to the PDF though. The paper I originally submitted was "Viral contracts...", the second on the list. You might be able to find it by name on Google. Good luck!
My other submission (only tried twice, to my mind) was supposedly accepted but they didn't use it: someone else submitted essentially the same thing at the same time and their post was used. Pipped at the post!:)
The GPL was written by US lawyers with US law in mind and - unlike the Creative Commons licences - doesn't appear to have "localised" versions. If the GPL in some way does not conform to the law of your land then it would be possible to use the code without abiding by the licence's terms.
That is what was new and relevant about this article - whether or not the it is worthwhile for UK hackers to licence their code under the GPL as-is, or whether action is required to make a localised version.
The conclusions, for anyone who is interested, were "probably legal". Again, it's not been ratified by anyone other than an academic; things could very well change if it was ever contested in court (likewise, but doubtful, with the 'US' GPL).
I would further add that, if it really had been "covered over and over" it probably wouldn't need to be published in a journal!
Last time I tried to submit something (analysis of the validity of the GPL in the UK for a law journal, by an IP lawyer) it was rejected. I watched the submissions which made it through at the same time and wondered to myself, "why??".
No, you wouldn't be able to copyright the idea. But if you challenged the source of their algorithm saying "I have work that looks very much like that, with datestamps going back two years, what have you got?" they'd have to either show you your research back (which becomes a matter of copyright) or show no work whatsoever, which is mightily suspicious indeed. One doesn't have O(n.logn) equations dropping out of the sky every day of the week (unfortunately).
I realise what his point was. I was merely attempting to prove that technical precautions are neither relevant nor usable. If they really want to be a productive company they can't stop programmers having access to code. It's as simple as that. If they have a problem with code theft there are laws in most countries (ie, copyright) which provide recourse.
Any attempts to prevent leakage will ultimately fail. Use the laws provided; that's why they exist.
But copyright is on your side. You have two years of research and intimate knowledge of the subject to prove you did it (plus, no doubt, grant applications and research statements). The university will have regular offsite backups going back quite a while, all showing what you were doing, which will be fairly hard to forge. The thief has only your results.
This kind of thing has been tried before; and failed.
But the whole point of its openness is that you should be able to adapt and improve on it, even if they abandon it/die/get taken to prison/sacrificed to the gods.
Given requirement (1), why bother use an open licence at all? If you can't fork, why bother opening in the first place? If I can't improve it without your say-so, it's not really open.
So if it's a matter of the contract, it's really up to the courts to decide. The courts who are perfectly capable of making null any terms in a contract which they deem as being unseemly. If the don't-make-another-SCM clause is still in there I don't think any sensible court would wait a second before excising it. But hey, that's just my opinion!
If you wanted a free SCM to compete with BitKeeper, why didn't you guys write a new one yourselves?
*coughs apologetically*
Pardon me, but wasn't what just happened here the first step on the way to doing that? Before you move to a completely Free system, you want to start Freeing up bits of the current system. Thus, the Free BK client. Then you have Free access to (supposedly) Free code.
Hey, it's the easy way to summarise! It can also be automated. Summariser v2.0 also stripes out spaces and punctuation to reduce article size even further! Coming soon from a/dev/urandom near you!
Well, I think you'll note that one of the over-riding themes here is inter-operability. If he creates YASCM how does that get around the problems that Arch/SVK/Darcs etc don't currently inter-operate with BK?
They don't. Short of making Linus change SCM, there was only one way to provide inter-operability: create a compatible client. So what did he do? Oh yeah, created a compatible client! Whaddaya know!
Quite... if McVoy really thinks reverse-engineering a 100% compatible substitute is "free-loading" I'd hate to see what he regards as "hard work". Maybe programming directly in machine code by hovering a very accurate magnet over the HD by hand?:)
Regression testing is testing for regression... as a subset of general unit testing. It's the way you make sure that bugs you fixed yesterday don't reappear as a result of today's bigfixes. To ensure that you're always moving forwards, that you don't regress.
I think the alarm bells would start ringing as soon as you see the word "brown"... I think that was last used as any form of racial description in the 1920s (despite it being technically more accurate than "black"). It makes me think of the character from The Murder on the Orient Express who looked after "ze little brown babies". People don't speak like that. It would only ever be used to make it *very* obvious the writer was attempting to distance himself from the opinion... something a lot of people failed to pick up on.
Then there's the phrasing "them [...] over there". The giver has no idea where "over there" might be or who "them" are. They are fulfilling a role (of the rich philanthropist) which they have no interest in.
This impression is further strengthened by the fielding calls bit - using charity as a form of self-promotion and absolving (perceived) sins rather than any inner desire to do good.
This is obviously all the opinion of the author (which I am mostly in agreement with, but that's beside the point). It's just rather shocking how few people, who seem to have an otherwise decent grasp of the English language, failed to pick up on these fairly obvious signs. Didn't anyone do literature analysis at school? "What was the author trying to say here?"
Your failure to spot satire writ large is unfortunate, but nothing compared to the claims you make about the OSS community's "bad reputation"... I don't even know what that reputation is. This whole article is about their *good* reputation - their ability to get things done without meaningless corporate nonsense getting in the way.
What are *you* contributing that's so useful, besides your knee-jerk reactions and inability to read not-so-subtle sarcastic statements?
I think you missed his point: the shooting or the shouting is irrelevant. It's the result of the action that is relevant. There is no law against shouting "fire" in a theatre because that would do absurd things like preclude playwrights from making characters shout "fire!" during the course of a drama.
The difference, as always, is the effect. A character shouting fire onstage is understood by the audience to be acting out a role divorced from reality; the guy at the back of the hall with the fire extinguisher and the panicked look is very much married to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
See elsewhere in this thread (up a couple of replies).
I can't find it yet, but there's some interesting stuff by the same author: search for Guadamuz on Google Scholar. There's entries on Internet IP and the like. I'll go have another look for that paper...
Ok, I'm one step closer now. This is the author's university page with reference to all his published works. I still can't seem to find a link to the PDF though. The paper I originally submitted was "Viral contracts...", the second on the list. You might be able to find it by name on Google. Good luck!
My other submission (only tried twice, to my mind) was supposedly accepted but they didn't use it: someone else submitted essentially the same thing at the same time and their post was used. Pipped at the post! :)
That is what was new and relevant about this article - whether or not the it is worthwhile for UK hackers to licence their code under the GPL as-is, or whether action is required to make a localised version.
The conclusions, for anyone who is interested, were "probably legal". Again, it's not been ratified by anyone other than an academic; things could very well change if it was ever contested in court (likewise, but doubtful, with the 'US' GPL).
I would further add that, if it really had been "covered over and over" it probably wouldn't need to be published in a journal!
Last time I tried to submit something (analysis of the validity of the GPL in the UK for a law journal, by an IP lawyer) it was rejected. I watched the submissions which made it through at the same time and wondered to myself, "why??".
No, you wouldn't be able to copyright the idea. But if you challenged the source of their algorithm saying "I have work that looks very much like that, with datestamps going back two years, what have you got?" they'd have to either show you your research back (which becomes a matter of copyright) or show no work whatsoever, which is mightily suspicious indeed. One doesn't have O(n.logn) equations dropping out of the sky every day of the week (unfortunately).
Any attempts to prevent leakage will ultimately fail. Use the laws provided; that's why they exist.
And you obviously don't know how the humour system works. You did remember to turn it on when you compiled your kernel?
This kind of thing has been tried before; and failed.
Ah, but to patent it you have to tell people how it works ... how confusing :)
And once you've worked out the cost, you gotta worry about the *currency*.
But the whole point of its openness is that you should be able to adapt and improve on it, even if they abandon it/die/get taken to prison/sacrificed to the gods.
Given requirement (1), why bother use an open licence at all? If you can't fork, why bother opening in the first place? If I can't improve it without your say-so, it's not really open.
All three of the licences you list are compatible with the GPL.
So if it's a matter of the contract, it's really up to the courts to decide. The courts who are perfectly capable of making null any terms in a contract which they deem as being unseemly. If the don't-make-another-SCM clause is still in there I don't think any sensible court would wait a second before excising it. But hey, that's just my opinion!
Pardon me, but wasn't what just happened here the first step on the way to doing that? Before you move to a completely Free system, you want to start Freeing up bits of the current system. Thus, the Free BK client. Then you have Free access to (supposedly) Free code.
Hey, it's the easy way to summarise! It can also be automated. Summariser v2.0 also stripes out spaces and punctuation to reduce article size even further! Coming soon from a /dev/urandom near you!
They don't. Short of making Linus change SCM, there was only one way to provide inter-operability: create a compatible client. So what did he do? Oh yeah, created a compatible client! Whaddaya know!
Quite... if McVoy really thinks reverse-engineering a 100% compatible substitute is "free-loading" I'd hate to see what he regards as "hard work". Maybe programming directly in machine code by hovering a very accurate magnet over the HD by hand? :)
Regression testing is testing for regression... as a subset of general unit testing. It's the way you make sure that bugs you fixed yesterday don't reappear as a result of today's bigfixes. To ensure that you're always moving forwards, that you don't regress.
Yeah, cos naming a Linux distro after a penguin was just an absurd and outlandish suggestion, wasn't it?
Define: 0wn3d
I think the alarm bells would start ringing as soon as you see the word "brown"... I think that was last used as any form of racial description in the 1920s (despite it being technically more accurate than "black"). It makes me think of the character from The Murder on the Orient Express who looked after "ze little brown babies". People don't speak like that. It would only ever be used to make it *very* obvious the writer was attempting to distance himself from the opinion... something a lot of people failed to pick up on.
Then there's the phrasing "them [...] over there". The giver has no idea where "over there" might be or who "them" are. They are fulfilling a role (of the rich philanthropist) which they have no interest in.
This impression is further strengthened by the fielding calls bit - using charity as a form of self-promotion and absolving (perceived) sins rather than any inner desire to do good.
This is obviously all the opinion of the author (which I am mostly in agreement with, but that's beside the point). It's just rather shocking how few people, who seem to have an otherwise decent grasp of the English language, failed to pick up on these fairly obvious signs. Didn't anyone do literature analysis at school? "What was the author trying to say here?"
What are *you* contributing that's so useful, besides your knee-jerk reactions and inability to read not-so-subtle sarcastic statements?
The difference, as always, is the effect. A character shouting fire onstage is understood by the audience to be acting out a role divorced from reality; the guy at the back of the hall with the fire extinguisher and the panicked look is very much married to reality.