1. Does Oracle need InnoDB? Would Oracle gain features or capabilities they don't already have by incorporating it into their database?
Oracle has all the database technology they could want. I don't think they need any share of a market worth approximately $0. I can only think of a single reason for Oracle to buy InnoDB: MySQL has been encroaching, and they need to slow it down.
They don't really describe it on their web site, but they DO say NTSC/PAL compatible... So I'll just wildly guess that they divide the 1280x720 video frames into 640x360 tiles and output them sequentially as NTSC or PAL, so that they can be recorded with regular video recorders, with the expectation that the full-res frames (at a rather-substandard 15FPS) will be reconstructed by some device upon playback.
Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail.
Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail.
Well I seem to recall that the whole POINT of the GPL is that you CAN CHANGE the software you receive, to fix it or enhance it - not merely to study it and copy it. Now they add this clause to make this particular thing impossible.
This is a big loophole in the GPL that I hope they address in GPL V3. You can get some device which contains some GPLed firmware, and though you might even get the full source for the software, it's impossible to replace the firmware because (a) it's technically impossible to replace (masked ROM), (b) because some non-GPLed watchdog is checksumming the GPLed part to make sure it doesn't actually change, (c) the protocol for flashing new firmware is wrapped in a cryptographic signature thingy (d) whatever else might make it tecnically impossible to actually MAKE CHANGES to the code...
Interesting to note that all of the world's human populations, even those that had been separated by oceans for thousands of years (before getting mostly re-accquainted by the 16th century) have some form of religion. I have to wonder if this tendency is a positive survival characteristic.
Consider: once an animal becomes as intelligent as a human, it may occur to it that certain behaviors, though absolutely essential to the survival of the population, are personally very risky and/or expensive. Take reproduction; why become a mother? Why take the risk and expend the energy to produce and support a child, when it's not necessary for her personal survival? There's a good deal of instinct at work there, but humans are known to be able to suppress instinctive behaviors given training and/or a good reason. And why would a man fight to (re-)gain the resources his community needs from his neighbors when the fight might kill him? Even if the campaign is ultimately victorious and his community prospers, he's personally dead!
It seems to me that such unselfish deeds of individuals strengthen the population at the expense of the individual - give rather than receive, trade fairly rather than kill and steal, etc. And in a Darwinian sense, it's the survival of the population that matters, and much less so the particular individual.
So how do you convince a reasoning person to adopt selfless behaviors? One way is by plausibly promising a reward for good behavior. Do these "unselfish" things, and we'll give you these rewards. The spiritual person is generally promised an "eternal" reward - when your life is done, you get to live in heaven/valhalla/etc.
The alternative is negative reinforcement. If you don't act unselfishly, we'll punish you. The effectiveness of this depends on the plausibility of the threat - "if I don't get caught, I don't get the punishment."
So the "Theist" (spiritually-minded individual) is optimistically looking forward to a good reward. The Atheist is trying to avoid punishment. The Theist could be expected to give to the community beyond what the community could ever repay - even sacrificing his life. The Atheist will work for pay, so long as the work is low-risk.
Even if the Atheist is right, I'm not sure it's a better choice for a population.
..is engineer a player that can read both types of physical media, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They can work on common data formats too if they want (it would probably be nice), but that's just software. A common player is what's REALLY needed.
Once consumers are assured their player can play whatever they buy, there can be two types of media on the market and it's okay. Publishers can use the cheaper or better media; consumers can choose the cheaper titles, or the higher-resolution / higher-bitrate / fewer-compression-artifacts / longer-playing titles (can you guess my favorite? Yep, Blu-Ray).
within a few years a system will exist which will allow the streaming of any movie ever made via broadband instantly. Why would you want to bother keeping an anachronistic collection of shiny discs, when you could have anything you want, instantly
Because you won't get to OWN it. Streaming-online-media will be PAY-PER-VIEW.
My understanding is that reverse engineering for interoperability is legally fine.
Reverse-engineering for interoperability is legally fine, unless you're bound by a license not to do it. Those who've accepted the free BitKeeper client (or who bought BitKeeper) are subject to just such a license.
If Tridgell never acceted the BitKeeper license, then he's not bound by it, and there's nothing illegal about what he did. But you know, you don't have to do something illegal to piss people off.:-(
McVoy got pissed that someone did what he didn't want anyone to do, so he decided to stop maintaining the free BK client. (He's also trying to say that Tridgell should have been subject to the BitKeeper license, since he happens to be a contractor doing some work for a company that had accepted the BK license. I don't buy that one.)
Torvalds got mad that something somebody got McVoy mad, so that now his choice source control tool isn't freely available anymore. He ranted against Tridgell, but that's misplaced, I think. Torvalds isn't fully into the "Free Software" philosophy (despite his use of the GPL for Linux), and so doesn't see any value in Tridgell's work and calls it "evil."
They should send Spirit and/or Opportunity to find Beagle2 *and* Mars Polar Lander.
(Okay, okay. Assuming a route to even get there can be found, they're slow, so they probably won't live long enough to get there; and in the case of MPL, there's probably not enough sublight that near the pole.)
"The GPL requires that users be able to recompile their Linux kernel,"
No, it just requires that the source code changes are made available....see tivo.com/linux.
Okay, I just read thru the GPL, and this looks like a loophole.
It does say that recipients of GPLed programs must also receive full source and any components, scripts, etc. necessary to build the program - so what I said is strictly true, TiVo users must be offered complete code for compiling their Linux kernel.
What I didn't exactly find was the part that explicitly says it must be possible to load that user-compiled program onto a suitable hardware platform.
So, GPL says I must be allowed to compile my exact TiVo linux kernel; but there need not be a way to RUN that kernel in my TiVo box?
TiVos (up until now at least) have been somewhat hacker-friendly, and can be viewed as a regular old PowerPC Linux box, even able to run other user-compiled apps. Could, then, an adequately-skilled programmer write an app that, running on their new CableCard-equipped HD TiVo unit, tunes and decrypts their cable TV provider's stream using this TiVo's CableCard API, then saves that HD video transport stream to, oh, I dunno, some Samba share?
As delightful as this sounds, getting a CableCard license requires that any device you sell be unable to do just this. But with TiVo's being Linux powered, I wonder how they can do this. The GPL requires that users be able to recompile their Linux kernel, whch would require some means of access into the TiVo to do so.
I wonder if TiVo is a kernel besides Linux on these new boxes?
Sigh. My wish is to be able to capture ANY HD content and play it back ANY number of times at ANY future date. I don't feel a need to be able to make any except backup copies, and possibly transfers to new types of media (HD-DVD).
So, here we have Digital Cable, whose content is likely encrypted; and whose premium content is even MORE likely encrypted.
BUT we also have the OpenCable spec, and the "CableCard," by which any DTV device can display encrypted cable content.
Now, the CableCard spec itself is protected to the extent that it's likely no one will create an "open" CableCard interface, i.e. there will NEVER be a PCI-slot DTV tuner card which has a CableCard slot. (I could be wrong about this; someone could reverse-engineer the interface to CableCard, which looks susiciously like a regular PCMCIA/PC Card. However, the DMCA makes any such device illegal in the USA.)
It looks like that spells the end of HD MythTV.:-(
But, I wonder about one last possibility: Could a person save the encrypted content, and then serve it up later to a CableCard-equipped TV? Either by re-modulating a QAM signal, or perhaps over FireWire (if the encryption is compatible)? Does anyone know enough about CableCard to say whether that would work?
(And then - I wonder how hard it would be to add FireWire as a video output device in MythTV?)
Assuming that there will NEVER be an OpenCable compliant CableCard slot in a Linux PC...
What's the likelihood that a PCI-based HDTV capture card could *record* encrypted content, then play it back over FireWire to a CableCard-equipped TV?
As I said earlier, dual-licensing is central to MySQL's business model. So under what circumstances must you license MySQL? There's a "nice guy" answer that's fairly clear, and a formal legal answer that's considerably murkier.
The nice guy answer is (I believe I am quoting Monty Widenius directly here): "If you distribute MySQL for free, you get it for free, but if you charge money for it you give us money."
Now, I think he meant to simplify, but that's such an oversimplification that it's just wrong (and it's wrong in such a way that, by misunderstanding, he would stand to profit).
Anyone can choose to license MySQL using the GPL, which grants the freedom to earn as much money using or distributing MySQL as you like (so long as the other license provisions are followed).
You only need to pay for a license if you want to do something that the GPL doesn't allow, like "distribute without offering source".
If SCO rejects the GPL or is successful in having it overturned, they don't magically get all that copyrighted code.
That's why the SCO intends to prove that GPL'd software is really Public Domain software. If the GPL is invalid as they say (it's not), then the only legal definition matching "offering original works for uncompensated distribution" is "Public Domain." As Public Domain, SCO would be as entitled as anyone to redistribute the Linux code base.
(BTW IMHO this is why they subpoenaed Torvalds and Stallman, to get them to testify that they intended free distribution without remuneration. The GPL intends "you must GPL your changes" as "consideration", but SCO hopes to get the court to agree that there's only one kind of "consideration" that matters, and that's money. Heck, read that "Open Letter" again; it mostly says that the GPL is anti-business, and on another occasion I recall Darl said the GPL is about "destroying value." Even if that's so, Buisiness isn't All That There Is, and "promoting public welfare" as the constitutional copyright clause intends doesn't always necessarily mean "profit.")
Well, I'm just trying to figure out what SCO might be trying to prove.
Certainly, SCO would hear Linus say "I absolutely did write this code myself, and I absolutely had no access to Unix sources when I did so," and Linus never worked at IBM. There's no evidence of copying here - the opposite, in fact. All Linus could show is that he planned to clone Unix. And in fact, that's just what they'd hear from Stallman too - he wrote it himself, and his intent was to clone Unix.
Is such cloning illegal? The AT&T/BSDI precedent pretty much proves that it's not. So SCO's barking up the wrong tree here.
What if this is part of an attempt to declare GPL'ed works "public domain?" Stallman would certainly refute that, but Stallman and Torvalds would both testify that they intend their GPLed work to be freely copyable. Maybe SCO will argue that allowing recipients to freely copy without "consideration" can only mean "public domain" ("consideration" basically means "getting something in return" and apparently licenses/ contracts without "consideration" can sometimes be nullified).
(BTW, still not a lawyer, so I could be off base)
And further - this could be an aggravation attack. "Do you contribute to Open Source/Free Software? You might get your butt hauled into court too!"
(IANAL)
I'd guess they intend to get Stallman and Torvalds both to admit that the GNU and Linux projects have always been about duplicating Unix, which is, frankly, true. From this I'll guess they hope to get the court to declare that GNU/Linux is an illegal derivative of Unix, and therefore is the property of SCO. Nah, that'll never work...
Maybe they intend to show that Richard and Linus consipred to destroy the commercial value of Unix. But I don't believe that's even illegal, unless you are a monopoly.
I read the PDF, and it provides space for "the" CPU, and defines the surrounding cooling space... and so seems to leave dual-CPUs out in the cold.
So what version of what motherboard spec provides for dual CPUs?
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Oracle has all the database technology they could want. I don't think they need any share of a market worth approximately $0. I can only think of a single reason for Oracle to buy InnoDB: MySQL has been encroaching, and they need to slow it down.
It's also the robbers who are responsible for costing us $trillions for locks, security systems, and maintaining a police force.
And they're been doing that for millenia, with no signs of stopping.
Sigh.
They don't really describe it on their web site, but they DO say NTSC/PAL compatible... So I'll just wildly guess that they divide the 1280x720 video frames into 640x360 tiles and output them sequentially as NTSC or PAL, so that they can be recorded with regular video recorders, with the expectation that the full-res frames (at a rather-substandard 15FPS) will be reconstructed by some device upon playback.
Still not exactly CHEAP, but $600 is at least getting there...
Well I seem to recall that the whole POINT of the GPL is that you CAN CHANGE the software you receive, to fix it or enhance it - not merely to study it and copy it. Now they add this clause to make this particular thing impossible.
This is a big loophole in the GPL that I hope they address in GPL V3. You can get some device which contains some GPLed firmware, and though you might even get the full source for the software, it's impossible to replace the firmware because (a) it's technically impossible to replace (masked ROM), (b) because some non-GPLed watchdog is checksumming the GPLed part to make sure it doesn't actually change, (c) the protocol for flashing new firmware is wrapped in a cryptographic signature thingy (d) whatever else might make it tecnically impossible to actually MAKE CHANGES to the code...
Consider: once an animal becomes as intelligent as a human, it may occur to it that certain behaviors, though absolutely essential to the survival of the population, are personally very risky and/or expensive. Take reproduction; why become a mother? Why take the risk and expend the energy to produce and support a child, when it's not necessary for her personal survival? There's a good deal of instinct at work there, but humans are known to be able to suppress instinctive behaviors given training and/or a good reason. And why would a man fight to (re-)gain the resources his community needs from his neighbors when the fight might kill him? Even if the campaign is ultimately victorious and his community prospers, he's personally dead!
It seems to me that such unselfish deeds of individuals strengthen the population at the expense of the individual - give rather than receive, trade fairly rather than kill and steal, etc. And in a Darwinian sense, it's the survival of the population that matters, and much less so the particular individual.
So how do you convince a reasoning person to adopt selfless behaviors? One way is by plausibly promising a reward for good behavior. Do these "unselfish" things, and we'll give you these rewards. The spiritual person is generally promised an "eternal" reward - when your life is done, you get to live in heaven/valhalla/etc.
The alternative is negative reinforcement. If you don't act unselfishly, we'll punish you. The effectiveness of this depends on the plausibility of the threat - "if I don't get caught, I don't get the punishment."
So the "Theist" (spiritually-minded individual) is optimistically looking forward to a good reward. The Atheist is trying to avoid punishment. The Theist could be expected to give to the community beyond what the community could ever repay - even sacrificing his life. The Atheist will work for pay, so long as the work is low-risk.
Even if the Atheist is right, I'm not sure it's a better choice for a population.
..is engineer a player that can read both types of physical media, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They can work on common data formats too if they want (it would probably be nice), but that's just software. A common player is what's REALLY needed.
Once consumers are assured their player can play whatever they buy, there can be two types of media on the market and it's okay. Publishers can use the cheaper or better media; consumers can choose the cheaper titles, or the higher-resolution / higher-bitrate / fewer-compression-artifacts / longer-playing titles (can you guess my favorite? Yep, Blu-Ray).
Because you won't get to OWN it. Streaming-online-media will be PAY-PER-VIEW.
Reverse-engineering for interoperability is legally fine, unless you're bound by a license not to do it. Those who've accepted the free BitKeeper client (or who bought BitKeeper) are subject to just such a license.
If Tridgell never acceted the BitKeeper license, then he's not bound by it, and there's nothing illegal about what he did. But you know, you don't have to do something illegal to piss people off. :-(
McVoy got pissed that someone did what he didn't want anyone to do, so he decided to stop maintaining the free BK client. (He's also trying to say that Tridgell should have been subject to the BitKeeper license, since he happens to be a contractor doing some work for a company that had accepted the BK license. I don't buy that one.)
Torvalds got mad that something somebody got McVoy mad, so that now his choice source control tool isn't freely available anymore. He ranted against Tridgell, but that's misplaced, I think. Torvalds isn't fully into the "Free Software" philosophy (despite his use of the GPL for Linux), and so doesn't see any value in Tridgell's work and calls it "evil."
They should send Spirit and/or Opportunity to find Beagle2 *and* Mars Polar Lander.
(Okay, okay. Assuming a route to even get there can be found, they're slow, so they probably won't live long enough to get there; and in the case of MPL, there's probably not enough sublight that near the pole.)
Okay, I just read thru the GPL, and this looks like a loophole.
It does say that recipients of GPLed programs must also receive full source and any components, scripts, etc. necessary to build the program - so what I said is strictly true, TiVo users must be offered complete code for compiling their Linux kernel.
What I didn't exactly find was the part that explicitly says it must be possible to load that user-compiled program onto a suitable hardware platform.
So, GPL says I must be allowed to compile my exact TiVo linux kernel; but there need not be a way to RUN that kernel in my TiVo box?
TiVos (up until now at least) have been somewhat hacker-friendly, and can be viewed as a regular old PowerPC Linux box, even able to run other user-compiled apps. Could, then, an adequately-skilled programmer write an app that, running on their new CableCard-equipped HD TiVo unit, tunes and decrypts their cable TV provider's stream using this TiVo's CableCard API, then saves that HD video transport stream to, oh, I dunno, some Samba share?
As delightful as this sounds, getting a CableCard license requires that any device you sell be unable to do just this. But with TiVo's being Linux powered, I wonder how they can do this. The GPL requires that users be able to recompile their Linux kernel, whch would require some means of access into the TiVo to do so.
I wonder if TiVo is a kernel besides Linux on these new boxes?
Microsoft would have crowed happily about how MS' own server-side scripting language (ASP) wasn't vulnerable to the worm, and left it to propogate.
Sigh. My wish is to be able to capture ANY HD content and play it back ANY number of times at ANY future date. I don't feel a need to be able to make any except backup copies, and possibly transfers to new types of media (HD-DVD).
So, here we have Digital Cable, whose content is likely encrypted; and whose premium content is even MORE likely encrypted.
BUT we also have the OpenCable spec, and the "CableCard," by which any DTV device can display encrypted cable content.
Now, the CableCard spec itself is protected to the extent that it's likely no one will create an "open" CableCard interface, i.e. there will NEVER be a PCI-slot DTV tuner card which has a CableCard slot. (I could be wrong about this; someone could reverse-engineer the interface to CableCard, which looks susiciously like a regular PCMCIA/PC Card. However, the DMCA makes any such device illegal in the USA.)
It looks like that spells the end of HD MythTV. :-(
But, I wonder about one last possibility: Could a person save the encrypted content, and then serve it up later to a CableCard-equipped TV? Either by re-modulating a QAM signal, or perhaps over FireWire (if the encryption is compatible)? Does anyone know enough about CableCard to say whether that would work?
(And then - I wonder how hard it would be to add FireWire as a video output device in MythTV?)
Assuming that there will NEVER be an OpenCable compliant CableCard slot in a Linux PC... What's the likelihood that a PCI-based HDTV capture card could *record* encrypted content, then play it back over FireWire to a CableCard-equipped TV?
Now, I think he meant to simplify, but that's such an oversimplification that it's just wrong (and it's wrong in such a way that, by misunderstanding, he would stand to profit).
Anyone can choose to license MySQL using the GPL, which grants the freedom to earn as much money using or distributing MySQL as you like (so long as the other license provisions are followed).
You only need to pay for a license if you want to do something that the GPL doesn't allow, like "distribute without offering source".
That's why the SCO intends to prove that GPL'd software is really Public Domain software. If the GPL is invalid as they say (it's not), then the only legal definition matching "offering original works for uncompensated distribution" is "Public Domain." As Public Domain, SCO would be as entitled as anyone to redistribute the Linux code base.
(BTW IMHO this is why they subpoenaed Torvalds and Stallman, to get them to testify that they intended free distribution without remuneration. The GPL intends "you must GPL your changes" as "consideration", but SCO hopes to get the court to agree that there's only one kind of "consideration" that matters, and that's money. Heck, read that "Open Letter" again; it mostly says that the GPL is anti-business, and on another occasion I recall Darl said the GPL is about "destroying value." Even if that's so, Buisiness isn't All That There Is, and "promoting public welfare" as the constitutional copyright clause intends doesn't always necessarily mean "profit.")
Well, I'm just trying to figure out what SCO might be trying to prove.
Certainly, SCO would hear Linus say "I absolutely did write this code myself, and I absolutely had no access to Unix sources when I did so," and Linus never worked at IBM. There's no evidence of copying here - the opposite, in fact. All Linus could show is that he planned to clone Unix. And in fact, that's just what they'd hear from Stallman too - he wrote it himself, and his intent was to clone Unix.
Is such cloning illegal? The AT&T/BSDI precedent pretty much proves that it's not. So SCO's barking up the wrong tree here.
What if this is part of an attempt to declare GPL'ed works "public domain?" Stallman would certainly refute that, but Stallman and Torvalds would both testify that they intend their GPLed work to be freely copyable. Maybe SCO will argue that allowing recipients to freely copy without "consideration" can only mean "public domain" ("consideration" basically means "getting something in return" and apparently licenses/ contracts without "consideration" can sometimes be nullified).
(BTW, still not a lawyer, so I could be off base)
And further - this could be an aggravation attack. "Do you contribute to Open Source/Free Software? You might get your butt hauled into court too!"
(IANAL) I'd guess they intend to get Stallman and Torvalds both to admit that the GNU and Linux projects have always been about duplicating Unix, which is, frankly, true. From this I'll guess they hope to get the court to declare that GNU/Linux is an illegal derivative of Unix, and therefore is the property of SCO. Nah, that'll never work... Maybe they intend to show that Richard and Linus consipred to destroy the commercial value of Unix. But I don't believe that's even illegal, unless you are a monopoly.
I read the PDF, and it provides space for "the" CPU, and defines the surrounding cooling space... and so seems to leave dual-CPUs out in the cold. So what version of what motherboard spec provides for dual CPUs?