It's called Abobe Livemotion and it was Adobes stillborn entry into the Flash-Creation market. They took it all the way to v2.0 then dropped it like a rock. The uproar was great because it really was a far superior tool for creating flash animations (although the action script support was a little lacking). Well maybe now they own flash they can try and put some of the great features in Livemotion into Flash.. I live in hope
It's always fascinating to read discussions on this particular case here on Slashdot, simply to observe the inner struggle certain US/. readers face when approaching this issue.
On the one hand there is the geek soul who cannot ever stand behind the evil empire that is Microsoft, on the other the patriotic american who can't get over the fact that a foreign entity is meddling in the affairs of an american company and by that scratching on the veneer of US freemarket values.
Fact is, of course there are politics involved, of course EU politicians are trying to score points and in some ways "picking" on a US company is a lot less risky than going after some of the local heroes (Siemens, for instance, is awful as far as holding monopolies is concerned and although I have no evidence I have this nagging feeling they use more than just quality and price to influence decision making in matters such as municipal contracts for traffic lights etc.)
All that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft is now a convicted monopolist in the EU and that a judiciary system has decided it should be punished for untoward activities in its field of business.
Even though I don't know the exact details of the judgement, the ruling to unbundle WMP is meant to open up competition in this area without crippling the core functionality of the operating system Windows. I don't see it as being forced to put up with a crippled version of Windows because the product I am being sold is an operating system, be it one with a wealth of extra functionality in-the-box. Now, if it were dificult to come by alternatives for WMP, then yes, the EU would be placing a barrier to my use of my computer but it's not as if there aren't plenty of alternatives out there, hell I can even just jump onto the Microsoft site and pick up WMP post-install. So the removal of WMP is actually opening up a wealth of choices and as such fostering competition in the area of media players for the desktop. Is the EU hoping that a european company might turn a profit thanks to this ruling? Hell yeah! But they aren't forcing a local alternative down Microsofts throat, so in fact they really do want the market to decide.
As for the opening of source code, the spirit of the ruling, as far as I understand it, is for competitors to be allowed to more easily interoperate with Windows. Noone is asking MS to slap a GPL on their whole OS, just the pieces needed to interoperate a software with it. Could this be politically motivated? It sure could, helping a european software manufacturer integrate their product with Windows could give that company an edge in the marketplace. Here again, the motive doesn't necessarily undermine the possible outcome, which could end up giving the european market a product which can serve as a basis for innovation and competition.
The sad thing is, Microsoft doesn't see the potential here, opening up some source to foster interoperability could actually make the windows platform more attractive, development shops/projects could suddenly turn to Windows and say "We have an option to go with it as our base OS because we can build our product completely within a open source enviroment without stepping on Microsofts toes.
At the end of the day (and I may be drowning my karma in a sea of fire here) we need to face the facts on both sides of the divide. Americans get over yourself and drop the whole paranoia about the EU wanting to make you jump through hoops and prove how superior europeans are. Fact is, in this global economy, there is enough american lobbying clout in the EU for there to be some semblance of balance in these kind of decisions. Europeans, please don't kid yourself that the EU is some kind of white-vested champion of justice who is trying to reform the unbalanced, US-centric world one draconian beurocratic ruling at a time. They aren't, there is plenty of selfinterest and this is without a doubt supposed to score political points both with EU corporations and to a lesser degree with european voters.
And Microsoft did it.. in the study.. with the candlestick...
As Benjamin Disraeli would say if he was around today "There are four kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, statistics and the crap IT marketing puts out there." (Although if Disreali would use the word crap is another question)
It's not like corporations are just big evil moneymaking machines. In fact thats what they are although the "evil" is a very subjective criteria. Modern corporate culture dictates that a corporation shall do anything within its power and within the law to make money for themselves and their shareholders. Of course we have reached the point where within the law has become a very flexible criteria as corporations discover how relatively easy it is to bend and adjust laws to suit their motives. As long as there is no social conscience in modern corporate culture we will continue to be on a collision course.
They are run by people just like any other business, and those people have needs and desires. These needs and desires tend to be unjustly high compared to the average persons needs and desires. In fact there is no reasonable explanation why CEOs earn such a huge multiple of the average salary.
How very noble of him. I'm sure he was feeling the pain of only getting 2.3 million... I heard recently that the average "westerner" earns about 1 million in his whole damn working life.
What is so horrid about the idea that a customer might avoid having to spend five minutes faffing around looking for a particular movie?
Because you are a criminal at heart, we all are. First chance you get you are going to take that digital copy and make it available on Teh eBil 1n74n37... Only the people they let into those swish Hollywood parties are honest, the rest of us are thiefs and vagabonds, who would sooner shoot a "poor" filmstar/studio exec in the eye than pay for DVDs/CDs.
I think something is being missed in all this "unlimited burn" Thinkspeak.. There are quite a fe countries who have a levy on blank CD media, which is passed onto the recording industry. So by burning it onto a CD you are in fact, paying an additional fee to RIAA et all. Apple and RIAAs recipe is simple but effective.
1. Sell Music for "only" 99 cents a track (a fraction below the per track price of a normal CD)
2. Profit
3. Give them freedoms (with a hidden charge attached)
3. PROFIT+
I don't care if they (Armadillo) win, the news posts, their page and the pictures are an instant winner with me.
Somewhere between extreme professionalism and tongue in cheek science.... add to that the disintegrating shed and the sight of geeks arc welding and you have a winner.
I'll gladly wait for Doom 3 a little longer, this may be more entertaining in the long run.
Re:One weakness of both articles: free always wins
on
Economics of File-Sharing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the solution has to be a system of checks and balances where on the one hand I, as the consumer/principal, feel I am getting my moneys worth or if not have some avenue of redress and on the other hand I know that if I abuse my end of the bargain I may end up paying a multiple of what I would have paid, had I played fair.
This reminds me a lot of how public transport works here in Austria where I am living at the moment. There are no entry or exit "barriers" so its pretty easy to just walk onto a subway train or a tram and not pay for a ticket. Of course there are plain-clothes controllers who will check your ticket and getting caught without leads to a hefty fine. The price of a ticket itself is reasonable, so even though a percentage of people "run the gauntlet" of not paying, most just shell out the small amount of money necessary to have the comfort and security of not having to worry about being caught. And in general you never feel you've been ripped off, because the service is pretty reliable.
Then again all that being said, hell will hit 0 Kelvin before record company execs start thinking of it in similar terms. I strongly believe that they think of themselves more as "legal drugdealers" who control supply and demand completely and can freely dictate what, where, how much and at what price we will consume their product. And to all extents and purposes it has been so for a long time. I think the only party who has any power to change that is government but they are being "bought off" as hard as possible.... Dire times for music fans.
Nobody forced the artists to sign the contracts that send all the money to the middlemen.
If you don't like how it works, create your own record company. There's no law saying that the existing record companies are the only ones who can sell music
Bzzzzzzt, sorry that's WRONG, because the record labels control all the distribution channels. Try peddling your independant CD at your local MegaHMV, your feet won't touch the ground on your way out the door. Same goes for radio/music television airplay and even getting decent concert venues will be next to impossible (see Ticketmaster vs. Pearl Jam).
And now, at last, they control the "legal" internet channels as well. Somewhere, in a swimming pool filled with cocaine, nowhere near YOU, a record company exec is smiling a devastatingly evil smile...
One of the few times I really wish I had been around and active enough to have earned some modpoints to spend.
Where is this sudden shift of thinking from which seems to have swept/. recently. Or is it just the other side of the coin which happens to have been dominating these (in this case off-topic) discussions lately?
We go from "DRM is the end of freedom" to "Copyrightholders have every right to castrate all you dirty rotten thieves" within 5 or 6 weeks? In fact all this anal potholing of RIAA, music-industry execs et al is becoming even more of a bore to read than the original tinfoilhat rants.
And thats the next point, every time someone even dares to try and argue for personal freedoms he is instantly drawn as being a paranoid loon watching for the next CIA/MOSSAD/KGB hitman thirsting for his blood. You know what, just because someone doesn't share your particular form of bovine acceptance level, doesn't mean they are stark raving mad. If noone did any worrying for you, you would have been turned into GoldenArches(C) Hamburgers by now.
I can't help shaking the feeling this site should be renamed Sheepdot to accurately reflect the level of "follow that bundle of wool" being shown here.
In addition to extending the length of the Windows Desktop Product Life-Cycle phases (Mainstream and Extended) online self-help support information (including Windows Update) will be available for a minimum of eight years from the date of a product's general availability. During the last year of online self-help support Windows Update will not support auto-updating and will not be updated with new fixes.
I count 7 years of "bugfix" support meaning that MS will continue to put out fixes till 2008. Now how much is fixed and how much is broken, is another matter entirely...
I'm not sure I caught any of the FUD, after about the first 3 paragraphs I gave up reading the words and just looked at the pweddy pictures...
Horrid stuff even if he doesn't get paid over at THG, sending him to China (or should I say letting him come back) is too much of a reward for that piece of drivel.
Notice the bubble wrap that is used to protect Ken Stallman from readers throwing their old cases at him
What will happen is that SCO, IBM, and (apparently now) SGI will subpoena expert witnesses to support or refute the claim that something is a "minor amendment" to the kernel code, but the jury will be dazed as it tries to figure out who is telling the truth on something that the juror has no knowledge. The professors at Carnegie-Mellon University will earn a small bundle of money in serving as expert witnesses in the geek equivalent of the "trial of the century". The court itself will need to hire computer-science professors to explain the intricate details of how an OS works.
Even if all of the above comes to fruition, I don't think it will be the deciding factor in a trial. I think the real questions at the heart of the trial will be which pieces of code SCO actually owns (and hasn't released into the public domain) and what exactly represents a breach of copyright when applied to sourcecode. Unless there are actually passages of code in the Linux kernel which are a direct 1to1 copy and paste of SysV code, the parties will spend a long time trying to establish the intricacies of coding, how coders develop code and how coders would go about obfuscating someone elses code to hide the fact it was "stolen".
Even though natural languages are an infinitely more complex beast than programming languages it would probably be easier to determine if someone had ripped off the works of an author of fiction than determining if a contributing coder(s) may have copy and pasted SysV code (unless SCO can produce incriminating witnesses; "I saw 'im do it, yer 'onor, 'onest"). For one, with programming languages having fairly rigid structures, there may only be slight variations possible to achieve a certain result and so any hacker trying to achieve a certain subset of functionality is forced to go a similar route. On the other hand how is SCO thinking of establishing some form of intent on the part of the infringer? Of course they may have been some form of intent, when we want to duplicate something useful we generally will "copy" some of the functionality we see. The real question is then all about methodology, how did we get to where we were going. These will probably end up being the points which will take months to decide and end up with a host of fairly ridiculous claims and counter-claims.
Anyway, not being a lawyer, I don't have an authoritative insight into how a courtbattle could map out, I just feel that the law, being in many ways just as rigid as a programming language will have to find it's own "algorithms" for settling the argument of how code gets into kernels. The answer could not just be fundamental in this case but shape the direction if IT for decades to come.
Think LucasArts, think Indiana Jones (the 3rd) and think ADVENTURE... seriously it wasn't Monkey Island 1&2 but I still spent all of 3 14 hour nights at my cousins, hogging his 286.
Theres a novell concept isnt it? People inovating, researching, working and furthering their innovation. And of course NOONE except Darl McBride is making money off Open Source. Period.
You Sir have been smoking too much crack whilst developing your algorithm which cures cancer and makes wonderful espresso at the same time.
have any of you actually bothered reading Symandicks Virus Advisory on this?
Welchias (if it actually was Welchia) one and only purpose in life is to propagate from machine to machine, killing MSBlast and updating the RPC service to the newest "vulnerability-safe" version.
This is basically windozeupdate taken to the extreme, including the function that has the virus deleting itself if the date is 2004.
I cant shake the feeling that the author of this beauty is sitting somewhere in his starspangled-banner-wallpapered room screaming righteous indignation for getting slandered while actually saving the US from the big, bad foreign terrorist threat.
Sorry, as much as FUD may be a motor of this as far as HP is concerned I have to wham you with a big, fat RTFA(s).
The HP piece clearly lays out the extent of indemnity HP is giving its (hopefully) valued customers, I really doubt they would be slipshod or stupid enough to "fineprint" their customers into a lawsuit. They would probably just rely on the OSS community rectifying any violating code as soon as it is shown to them.
The piece on SCO not sueing is full to the brim of hypocritical statements by SCO execs and lawyers which show that they may or may not sue, probably depending on how many of gullible Companies fall for their $699 invoice.
Unfortunately, Europe has spent the last 10 years in a haze of envy, seeing the dotcom bubble grow and burst and wishing its companies could get into the fray. Which means that even if sound minds here in Europe still get more of a say-so, politicians are bending over faster than prisoners at a soap-dropping contest to try and close the gap to the states.
Turbocapitalism is coming to Europe and guess who is bringing it? If you check through any of the lists of already existing software patents the european patent office has already (illegally) issued youll find mainly large US IT companies as the patentees.
In that you have to give these US companies credit for being very smart about lobbying the tender sweeties over in Brussels; they use the local subsidiary to present themselves as "more of a local company" which has "little to do with its US parent" and use the usual arguments of increased jobs and economic upturn mixed into a style of personal lobbying which is much different from that found in the States -campaign financing is a much more touchy subjecgt here in Europe, so you often get companies making donations in form of goods and services, see for instance the scandal about Air Miles in Germany last year-.
It all leaves a shallow, bitter taste in the mouths of voters in Europe who are especially fed up of Neosocialism which at times tries to "out-capitalism" traditional consevative politivs. Without a doubt the UK is the breakaway example for this, a country whos soil I will try my best to avoid ever touching again because my former patriotism has been replaced with deep despair.
The question we in Europe are staring to ask ourselves is: Where to run to once the US Corporate Invasion (tm)(c)(r) has taken place. I for one may well be welcoming my new Sino Overlords.
Consumers always go for the short/medium term solution.
Only if it doesn't add unnecessary layers of complication. The first time Joe Normal inserts the CD he has been leant by a friend into his CD player and gets no response, he will start asking about different solutions.
And as Word-of-Mouth is still the most powerful form on the planet you can bet somewhere at the end of the line he will get a tech-savvy geek explaining why DRM is bad for him in the simplest possible terms.
At least in my circle of friends you can whittle the actual buyers of PC Equipment down to a handful, simply because they spend much to much of their spare time lurking around here.
The only model which *might* work is if the said Intels and Sonys adopted the "Gillette Razor/Cellphone" Model of giving away the actual Hardware and making a profit off the content we view. Fat chance you'll see the Members of RIAA sharing their spoils with an Intel. Thats a catfight worth looking forward to.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called Abobe Livemotion and it was Adobes stillborn entry into the Flash-Creation market. They took it all the way to v2.0 then dropped it like a rock. The uproar was great because it really was a far superior tool for creating flash animations (although the action script support was a little lacking).
Well maybe now they own flash they can try and put some of the great features in Livemotion into Flash.. I live in hope
On the one hand there is the geek soul who cannot ever stand behind the evil empire that is Microsoft, on the other the patriotic american who can't get over the fact that a foreign entity is meddling in the affairs of an american company and by that scratching on the veneer of US freemarket values.
Fact is, of course there are politics involved, of course EU politicians are trying to score points and in some ways "picking" on a US company is a lot less risky than going after some of the local heroes (Siemens, for instance, is awful as far as holding monopolies is concerned and although I have no evidence I have this nagging feeling they use more than just quality and price to influence decision making in matters such as municipal contracts for traffic lights etc.)
All that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft is now a convicted monopolist in the EU and that a judiciary system has decided it should be punished for untoward activities in its field of business.
Even though I don't know the exact details of the judgement, the ruling to unbundle WMP is meant to open up competition in this area without crippling the core functionality of the operating system Windows. I don't see it as being forced to put up with a crippled version of Windows because the product I am being sold is an operating system, be it one with a wealth of extra functionality in-the-box. Now, if it were dificult to come by alternatives for WMP, then yes, the EU would be placing a barrier to my use of my computer but it's not as if there aren't plenty of alternatives out there, hell I can even just jump onto the Microsoft site and pick up WMP post-install. So the removal of WMP is actually opening up a wealth of choices and as such fostering competition in the area of media players for the desktop. Is the EU hoping that a european company might turn a profit thanks to this ruling? Hell yeah! But they aren't forcing a local alternative down Microsofts throat, so in fact they really do want the market to decide.
As for the opening of source code, the spirit of the ruling, as far as I understand it, is for competitors to be allowed to more easily interoperate with Windows. Noone is asking MS to slap a GPL on their whole OS, just the pieces needed to interoperate a software with it. Could this be politically motivated? It sure could, helping a european software manufacturer integrate their product with Windows could give that company an edge in the marketplace. Here again, the motive doesn't necessarily undermine the possible outcome, which could end up giving the european market a product which can serve as a basis for innovation and competition.
The sad thing is, Microsoft doesn't see the potential here, opening up some source to foster interoperability could actually make the windows platform more attractive, development shops/projects could suddenly turn to Windows and say "We have an option to go with it as our base OS because we can build our product completely within a open source enviroment without stepping on Microsofts toes.
At the end of the day (and I may be drowning my karma in a sea of fire here) we need to face the facts on both sides of the divide. Americans get over yourself and drop the whole paranoia about the EU wanting to make you jump through hoops and prove how superior europeans are. Fact is, in this global economy, there is enough american lobbying clout in the EU for there to be some semblance of balance in these kind of decisions. Europeans, please don't kid yourself that the EU is some kind of white-vested champion of justice who is trying to reform the unbalanced, US-centric world one draconian beurocratic ruling at a time. They aren't, there is plenty of selfinterest and this is without a doubt supposed to score political points both with EU corporations and to a lesser degree with european voters.
And Microsoft did it.. in the study.. with the candlestick...
As Benjamin Disraeli would say if he was around today "There are four kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, statistics and the crap IT marketing puts out there."
(Although if Disreali would use the word crap is another question)
Oh god, ok, I bite...
It's not like corporations are just big evil moneymaking machines.
In fact thats what they are although the "evil" is a very subjective criteria. Modern corporate culture dictates that a corporation shall do anything within its power and within the law to make money for themselves and their shareholders. Of course we have reached the point where within the law has become a very flexible criteria as corporations discover how relatively easy it is to bend and adjust laws to suit their motives. As long as there is no social conscience in modern corporate culture we will continue to be on a collision course.
They are run by people just like any other business, and those people have needs and desires.
These needs and desires tend to be unjustly high compared to the average persons needs and desires. In fact there is no reasonable explanation why CEOs earn such a huge multiple of the average salary.
How very noble of him. I'm sure he was feeling the pain of only getting 2.3 million...
I heard recently that the average "westerner" earns about 1 million in his whole damn working life.
What is so horrid about the idea that a customer might avoid having to spend five minutes faffing around looking for a particular movie?
Because you are a criminal at heart, we all are. First chance you get you are going to take that digital copy and make it available on Teh eBil 1n74n37...
Only the people they let into those swish Hollywood parties are honest, the rest of us are thiefs and vagabonds, who would sooner shoot a "poor" filmstar/studio exec in the eye than pay for DVDs/CDs.
you insensitive clod....
I think something is being missed in all this "unlimited burn" Thinkspeak.. There are quite a fe countries who have a levy on blank CD media, which is passed onto the recording industry.
So by burning it onto a CD you are in fact, paying an additional fee to RIAA et all. Apple and RIAAs recipe is simple but effective.
1. Sell Music for "only" 99 cents a track (a fraction below the per track price of a normal CD)
2. Profit
3. Give them freedoms (with a hidden charge attached)
3. PROFIT+
I don't care if they (Armadillo) win, the news posts, their page and the pictures are an instant winner with me.
Somewhere between extreme professionalism and tongue in cheek science.... add to that the disintegrating shed and the sight of geeks arc welding and you have a winner.
I'll gladly wait for Doom 3 a little longer, this may be more entertaining in the long run.
I think the solution has to be a system of checks and balances where on the one hand I, as the consumer/principal, feel I am getting my moneys worth or if not have some avenue of redress and on the other hand I know that if I abuse my end of the bargain I may end up paying a multiple of what I would have paid, had I played fair.
This reminds me a lot of how public transport works here in Austria where I am living at the moment. There are no entry or exit "barriers" so its pretty easy to just walk onto a subway train or a tram and not pay for a ticket. Of course there are plain-clothes controllers who will check your ticket and getting caught without leads to a hefty fine. The price of a ticket itself is reasonable, so even though a percentage of people "run the gauntlet" of not paying, most just shell out the small amount of money necessary to have the comfort and security of not having to worry about being caught. And in general you never feel you've been ripped off, because the service is pretty reliable.
Then again all that being said, hell will hit 0 Kelvin before record company execs start thinking of it in similar terms. I strongly believe that they think of themselves more as "legal drugdealers" who control supply and demand completely and can freely dictate what, where, how much and at what price we will consume their product. And to all extents and purposes it has been so for a long time. I think the only party who has any power to change that is government but they are being "bought off" as hard as possible.... Dire times for music fans.
Nobody forced the artists to sign the contracts that send all the money to the middlemen.
If you don't like how it works, create your own record company. There's no law saying that the existing record companies are the only ones who can sell music
Bzzzzzzt, sorry that's WRONG, because the record labels control all the distribution channels. Try peddling your independant CD at your local MegaHMV, your feet won't touch the ground on your way out the door. Same goes for radio/music television airplay and even getting decent concert venues will be next to impossible (see Ticketmaster vs. Pearl Jam).
And now, at last, they control the "legal" internet channels as well. Somewhere, in a swimming pool filled with cocaine, nowhere near YOU, a record company exec is smiling a devastatingly evil smile...
Please KEEP them there.. ;)
One of the few times I really wish I had been around and active enough to have earned some modpoints to spend.
/. recently. Or is it just the other side of the coin which happens to have been dominating these (in this case off-topic) discussions lately?
Where is this sudden shift of thinking from which seems to have swept
We go from "DRM is the end of freedom" to "Copyrightholders have every right to castrate all you dirty rotten thieves" within 5 or 6 weeks? In fact all this anal potholing of RIAA, music-industry execs et al is becoming even more of a bore to read than the original tinfoilhat rants.
And thats the next point, every time someone even dares to try and argue for personal freedoms he is instantly drawn as being a paranoid loon watching for the next CIA/MOSSAD/KGB hitman thirsting for his blood. You know what, just because someone doesn't share your particular form of bovine acceptance level, doesn't mean they are stark raving mad. If noone did any worrying for you, you would have been turned into GoldenArches(C) Hamburgers by now.
I can't help shaking the feeling this site should be renamed Sheepdot to accurately reflect the level of "follow that bundle of wool" being shown here.
In addition to extending the length of the Windows Desktop Product Life-Cycle phases (Mainstream and Extended) online self-help support information (including Windows Update) will be available for a minimum of eight years from the date of a product's general availability. During the last year of online self-help support Windows Update will not support auto-updating and will not be updated with new fixes.
I count 7 years of "bugfix" support meaning that MS will continue to put out fixes till 2008. Now how much is fixed and how much is broken, is another matter entirely...
http://www.robosaurus.com/travelmode.html
:D daddy I WANT ONE!!!
omg!
I'm not sure I caught any of the FUD, after about the first 3 paragraphs I gave up reading the words and just looked at the pweddy pictures... Horrid stuff even if he doesn't get paid over at THG, sending him to China (or should I say letting him come back) is too much of a reward for that piece of drivel.
Notice the bubble wrap that is used to protect Ken Stallman from readers throwing their old cases at him
What will happen is that SCO, IBM, and (apparently now) SGI will subpoena expert witnesses to support or refute the claim that something is a "minor amendment" to the kernel code, but the jury will be dazed as it tries to figure out who is telling the truth on something that the juror has no knowledge. The professors at Carnegie-Mellon University will earn a small bundle of money in serving as expert witnesses in the geek equivalent of the "trial of the century". The court itself will need to hire computer-science professors to explain the intricate details of how an OS works.
Even if all of the above comes to fruition, I don't think it will be the deciding factor in a trial.
I think the real questions at the heart of the trial will be which pieces of code SCO actually owns (and hasn't released into the public domain) and what exactly represents a breach of copyright when applied to sourcecode.
Unless there are actually passages of code in the Linux kernel which are a direct 1to1 copy and paste of SysV code, the parties will spend a long time trying to establish the intricacies of coding, how coders develop code and how coders would go about obfuscating someone elses code to hide the fact it was "stolen".
Even though natural languages are an infinitely more complex beast than programming languages it would probably be easier to determine if someone had ripped off the works of an author of fiction than determining if a contributing coder(s) may have copy and pasted SysV code (unless SCO can produce incriminating witnesses; "I saw 'im do it, yer 'onor, 'onest"). For one, with programming languages having fairly rigid structures, there may only be slight variations possible to achieve a certain result and so any hacker trying to achieve a certain subset of functionality is forced to go a similar route.
On the other hand how is SCO thinking of establishing some form of intent on the part of the infringer? Of course they may have been some form of intent, when we want to duplicate something useful we generally will "copy" some of the functionality we see. The real question is then all about methodology, how did we get to where we were going. These will probably end up being the points which will take months to decide and end up with a host of fairly ridiculous claims and counter-claims.
Anyway, not being a lawyer, I don't have an authoritative insight into how a courtbattle could map out, I just feel that the law, being in many ways just as rigid as a programming language will have to find it's own "algorithms" for settling the argument of how code gets into kernels. The answer could not just be fundamental in this case but shape the direction if IT for decades to come.
Think LucasArts, think Indiana Jones (the 3rd) and think ADVENTURE... seriously it wasn't Monkey Island 1&2 but I still spent all of 3 14 hour nights at my cousins, hogging his 286.
Sounds like the South Central Linux User Group is rumbling in the jungle...
tatoo GPL on your forehead?
Theres a novell concept isnt it? People inovating, researching, working and furthering their innovation. And of course NOONE except Darl McBride is making money off Open Source. Period.
You Sir have been smoking too much crack whilst developing your algorithm which cures cancer and makes wonderful espresso at the same time.
have any of you actually bothered reading Symandicks Virus Advisory on this?
Welchias (if it actually was Welchia) one and only purpose in life is to propagate from machine to machine, killing MSBlast and updating the RPC service to the newest "vulnerability-safe" version.
This is basically windozeupdate taken to the extreme, including the function that has the virus deleting itself if the date is 2004.
I cant shake the feeling that the author of this beauty is sitting somewhere in his starspangled-banner-wallpapered room screaming righteous indignation for getting slandered while actually saving the US from the big, bad foreign terrorist threat.
The HP piece clearly lays out the extent of indemnity HP is giving its (hopefully) valued customers, I really doubt they would be slipshod or stupid enough to "fineprint" their customers into a lawsuit. They would probably just rely on the OSS community rectifying any violating code as soon as it is shown to them.
The piece on SCO not sueing is full to the brim of hypocritical statements by SCO execs and lawyers which show that they may or may not sue, probably depending on how many of gullible Companies fall for their $699 invoice.
Unfortunately, Europe has spent the last 10 years in a haze of envy, seeing the dotcom bubble grow and burst and wishing its companies could get into the fray. Which means that even if sound minds here in Europe still get more of a say-so, politicians are bending over faster than prisoners at a soap-dropping contest to try and close the gap to the states. Turbocapitalism is coming to Europe and guess who is bringing it? If you check through any of the lists of already existing software patents the european patent office has already (illegally) issued youll find mainly large US IT companies as the patentees. In that you have to give these US companies credit for being very smart about lobbying the tender sweeties over in Brussels; they use the local subsidiary to present themselves as "more of a local company" which has "little to do with its US parent" and use the usual arguments of increased jobs and economic upturn mixed into a style of personal lobbying which is much different from that found in the States -campaign financing is a much more touchy subjecgt here in Europe, so you often get companies making donations in form of goods and services, see for instance the scandal about Air Miles in Germany last year-. It all leaves a shallow, bitter taste in the mouths of voters in Europe who are especially fed up of Neosocialism which at times tries to "out-capitalism" traditional consevative politivs. Without a doubt the UK is the breakaway example for this, a country whos soil I will try my best to avoid ever touching again because my former patriotism has been replaced with deep despair. The question we in Europe are staring to ask ourselves is: Where to run to once the US Corporate Invasion (tm)(c)(r) has taken place. I for one may well be welcoming my new Sino Overlords.
Consumers always go for the short/medium term solution.
Only if it doesn't add unnecessary layers of complication. The first time Joe Normal inserts the CD he has been leant by a friend into his CD player and gets no response, he will start asking about different solutions.
And as Word-of-Mouth is still the most powerful form on the planet you can bet somewhere at the end of the line he will get a tech-savvy geek explaining why DRM is bad for him in the simplest possible terms.
At least in my circle of friends you can whittle the actual buyers of PC Equipment down to a handful, simply because they spend much to much of their spare time lurking around here.
The only model which *might* work is if the said Intels and Sonys adopted the "Gillette Razor/Cellphone" Model of giving away the actual Hardware and making a profit off the content we view. Fat chance you'll see the Members of RIAA sharing their spoils with an Intel. Thats a catfight worth looking forward to.