It sounds more like they are trying to track how the leaks are getting propigated after they get out. Here's the quote from the article that caught my attention:
A Microsoft spokesman said the company was investigating reports of pirated Whistler builds, but would make no further comment.
It is certainly possible they leaked a copy deliberately to see where it was going and try to shut down the distribution of it.
I certainly hope that the license terms are the same as for the original Qt, but I wasn't able to verify that either from the announcement or from Trolltech's own web site. I would imagine that they wouldn't intend to change course, but it would be nice to see that confirmed. If there's anyone from Trolltech reading this, an official statement on your web site would be a good thing.
Instead, what we will see is a series of gradual changes. Genetically superior humans won't appear overnight. Instead, humans will be slowly made superior, genetically. Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
Ask yourself what freedoms you are willing to give up to have the advances that cybernetic enhancements may provide. And ask it in the context of the rights that UCITA confers. Would you be willing to have something implanted in your body that:
1) Can be monitored without your consent? 2) Can be deactivated by the manufacturer? 3) You are not allowed to reverse engineer? 4) You are not permitted to publically criticism? 5) When it fails and permanently disables you, the manufacturer can disclaim all liability?
Thank you for playing. I want to be able to do my own security patches. I want to be able to compile out features that I don't trust.
Sure, they are still making money for them, but how can a modem compete with DSL or Cable, or whatever new broadband service that is going to be showing up soon. It can't.
Modems can travel to wherever you have a phone line that isn't too noisy. Certainly, for my home system I'm using a faster connection. But when I'm travelling a laptop and a modem can still get me connected from virtually anywhere.
Can we get him for a Slashdot Interview? Project Gutenberg comes up here from time to time. While I don't know whether there is general interest among Slashdot readers, I think Project Gutenberg qualifies as one of the earliest pioneers in free, online distribution.
The distributions have been forked for quite some time. This may be an issue for end users who don't ever want to have to compile a kernel or install upgrades to libraries. But the underlying source has not forked. In fact, with the remerging of egcs and gcc, one of the biggest potential forks has disappeared.
For developers, as long as the kernel, compiler and libraries don't fork, does it matter if the distributions release at different times with different versions? Does it matter that they focus on different audiences? Not really. I'd probably have trouble finding a program compiled for one Linux distro that I can't make run on another one. I might have to get different versions of libraries and recompile the kernel, but would it be impossible to make it run? Probably not.
So, is there anything wrong with Corel, Redhat, Mandrake, Caldera and others fighting it out for desktop market share? If they are perceived as incompatible, it may slow acceptances of Linux among end users. And it will hurt their individual market shares. But to developers, it isn't going to slow the progress of development on the tools that brought us to free software in the first place.
The GNU Manifesto declared the right of Richard Stallman and the people willing to work with him on it to share a body of what has become some of the most politically controversial software ever written. PGP attacked the idea that the masses should not have strong encryption by simply handing it to them as free software. Apache undermined proprietary web protocols.
If we want to be heard, there is an avenue for those willing to stand up and be counted. Write the code and put it out there. Embody the philosophy of freedom in working software. Use the copyleft and other free licenses to prevent anyone from locking up the code. And as a couple of people have been advocating, start patenting intellectual property embodied in free software and make plans to use those patents to enforce its freedom.
Okay, this doesn't answer the question of how to protect the designated victims from taking the heat at temperatures often comparable to conventional fusion. I don't have that answer.
We are trying new things and breaking new ground in terms of models of collaboration. Stallman was quick to point out that free software was free as in speech. But that statement is true in more ways than simply pointing out that it can be sold as well as given away. It is about freely communicating code. And it is part of a larger issue of maintaining our freedom to speak our minds. It is as deeply political as any issue today.
The Open Content web site contains a brief article that discusses one of the problems faced by open source documentation that is not faced by open source software. There are barriers to collaboration in writing that are not present in coding. Corrections of typos and updating command syntax is one thing, but there are issues of style for which there is no single right answer. So my question is, have you found any ways to increase the level of collaboration in order to lift the burden of completing each large documentation project from the shoulders of a single writer?
I suppose you consider translation important to Open Source projects... but do you have a lot of translators that volunteer for that thankless task? And what would you advise me to do in order to have enough time to have a regular job and do my part to bring Open Source to as many people as possible?
I would like to see an answer to this as well, for all of the same reasons. One of the problems with translations of Open Source documentation is that the current audience is rather small in some cases. The reason is that English is the lingua franca of software. Thus, the translations are being done in many cases for a hypothetical future audience. The people currently using open source are frequently capable of reading the English documentation. And yet relying on that limits the future spread of open source beyond native English speakers and fluent non-natives.
As for finding translators, I'll plug the Free Translation Project as I always do when this subject comes up. There is nothing wrong with starting another project, but the people involved in this one are a good source of ideas and volunteers. Don't ever forget to talk to us. We want to hear about free software internationalization and localization efforts.
They're even porting things in house and ditching AIX, It's good to see real commitment and not just a fly by token "Yeah we support Linux also". I beleive they really get it and see the industial strength value.
Yes, this looks promising. In particular, IBM got burned once, long ago, on abandoning old product lines. That led them to make a long-term commitment to the IBM 360 and its descendants. As a company I doubt that they would consider a strategy that did not provide a credible migration plan for their existing customers. And one of the things that Linux has been extremely good at over the years has been to get the last useful value out of existing hardware. Being able to sell a migration plan that includes telling customers that the old hardware can continue to be used for web and file servers until the customer finds it cost effective to get rid of it is a good thing.
From the article:
Yet IBM's strategy can succeed only if Linux, which is distributed free, does become a genuine alternative to Windows or Solaris, thereby putting real pressure on their prices. And Linux has a long way to go. Today, it is used mainly for simpler tasks, like serving up Web pages, instead of for industrial-strength computing chores like financial transaction systems that must handle complex tasks, 24 hours a day, without crashing. Even IBM, which plans eventually to use Linux as its unifying Unix platform (shelving AIX), says Linux's true ascendance may not come for five years or so -- until Linux is built up to become more powerful and reliable.
IBM migrating some of its software onto Linux will certainly bring certain high-end customers to Linux. And it has the potential to let IBM provide an even more scaled-down entry level platform for them than it ever could before. High-end PC servers are not the same beasts as some of IBM's hardware. But they can handle enough RAM and disk to run the same applications, just for a smaller number of concurrent users.
Security by obscurity has been debunked so many times, and yet there are still people who cling to it. The real reason is simple. Their job security depends on the flaws in their code not being made public because they aren't bright enough to avoid them or even fix them.
Here's Bruce Schneier's commentary on open source and cryptography, an obviously security related subject on which he can reasonably be considered an expert:
As a cryptography and computer security expert, I have never understood the current fuss about the open source software movement. In the cryptography world, we consider open source necessary for good security; we have for decades. Public security is always more secure than proprietary security. It's true for cryptographic algorithms, security protocols, and security source code. For us, open source isn't just a business model; it's smart engineering practice.
There is more detailed commentary in the newsletter that I have quoted. The people who believe FUD respect recognized authorities. Use him as a good one to counter this particular piece of FUD.
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster. It will be quite interesting.
The novel Earthweb by Marc Stiegler explores some of the possible ramifications of that idea. Baen Books has a web page for the book containing some sample chapters to whet your appetite. The author also has a page for it with links to information about some of the technologies that he discusses. He is really exploring the possible results of pervasive net access with persistent, verifiable, but anonymous identities.
the pages are small and load very quickly -- very few images at all
Yes. I ran a couple of test searches through it. Even with the Slashdot Effect hitting it, it was returning searches at least as fast as the other search engines. I even tried some odd ones that it would not be likely to have cached. I'll certainly be bookmarking them. Of course their privacy policy is excellent. They put a link right on the main page to it. Go read it. It'll bring a tear of joy to your eye.
Microsoft Corp. is contemplating giving Windows CE to some developers for free.
The keyword is "some". And by developers, they mean the developers they recognize as developers. That is, friends. There is nothing wrong about doing it. Nor is there anything new about it.
Microsoft's revenue comes, instead, on development tools and maintenance contracts, sources said.
The open source OSs, Linux, *BSD, and Hurd, come with all of the development tools bundled. You can get them from the same sources that you got the OS and all of the applications from. If you have the program, you can get the source and the tools to compile it. Every user is a potential developer, or more to the point, every potential developer can become an actual developer for the cost of downloading and installing the tools.
For now, developers say, Microsoft isn't contemplating going so far as to turn Windows CE into an open-source project, which would allow developers to make changes to the source code and share their work with Microsoft and others in the development community.
So they are not creating any potential developers.
Why now? Microsoft is considering the move to stave off competitive embedded Linux products.
The bottom line is that Linux is more portable. For embedded systems, having a portable OS means that your code can outlive the hardware it originally ran on. Oh wait, that is true of any kind of code. It also means that your choice of hardware is not limited by the OS as much. I'd say that constitutes substantial pressure.
Now, why could this help them anyway? Is there anyone inside Microsoft or out who believes that the open source community is Microsoft's friend? Okay, there are many people in open source who also use Microsoft products and are happy with them. But alienating the open source community is not exactly something Microsoft loses sleep over. This gesture doesn't mean much, but the people it is meant to impress are people who have heard the words "Linux" and "Open Source" only in connection with business news about the Redhat and VA Linux IPOs. They haven't read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and they don't know what makes open source work.
That's pretty much what I'm trying to promote with the Open Patent License at www.openpatents.org.
Mark, I believe we've exchanged these comments before, the last time patents came up. Since I like to post links to relevant sites, I have bookmarked yours this time to have them handy in the future. Obviously, you have put a great deal more thought into your proposal than I did into my off the cuff remarks, although I believe that our intentions are quite similar. I want to recommend to anyone who is interested in the idea of open source patents to check out Mark's www.openpatents.org web site and specifically his Open Patent License.
Request to moderators. Moderate up the comment I am replying to rather than my. His ideas are worthy of a wider audience.
The king is dead! Long live the king!
on
The End of Unix?
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· Score: 2
I use Linux these days. It is hardly the same Unix that I learned on in the mid-80's. And that wasn't the same Unix that was developed in the 70's. And it doesn't matter. I will switch OS's again. I don't know when. But as long as there are enough people who want what the Unix view of the world provides, irrespective of the name of the particular implementation, it will continue to exist.
I can run the same scripts under Linux, AIX or FreeBSD for the most part with very little portability problems. For me, Unix is a set of tools and a lot of leverage. It is the idea that I should be able to carry my tools and data with me until they are no longer necessary rather than making the programs that process them artificially obsolete.
The stated purpose of intellectual property law is:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
This should look vaguely familiar to the US readers of Slashdot because I am quoting the Constitution of the United States of America. I submit that granting the exclusive right to a discovery to the first person or corporation to file a patent application without regard to a prior use of that discovery is a violation of this simple statement. Let me be blunt. The letter of this clause should invalidate patents when prior art can be demonstrated. To the extent that that does not happen, the intent "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is violated.
The people applying for such patents may be legitimately unaware of the prior art. It is a big world and people are doing a lot of interesting things. Furthermore, even if the US Patent Office dedicated a man-year to each application, some cases of prior art would get missed. I don't have a problem with that. And I don't have a problem with limiting the amount of time that is spent reviewing individual patent applications, although 8 hours seems meager at best. But when prior art is clearly demonstrated, the patent should be invalidated, or its scope reduced.
With the goal of stream-lining the patent process the Patent Office has created a necessity to file for patents. Anyone who doesn't runs the risk that their discoveries, no matter how obvious or trivial, will be patented, and they will be denied free use of them. The patent system in this country today would allow someone to rediscover today something that I am already doing, get a patent, and demand royalties from me. And proving prior art doesn't work as a defense. Why? It is expensive and unreliable. What does? Cross-licensing of patent portfolios. The costs are predictable and the results are exactly what is desired: a quid pro quo license of patents after inadvertent violation has been discovered.
I agree with Richard Stallman about the Amazon patent, but unlike him I don't place the blame on Amazon. They have done what is necessary to survive in the current legal climate. The law, and its implementation, need changing. Patents should be restricted to their original purpose.
It is high time for the free software community to try an experiment with a Free Patent. It will be licensed for free to all end-users. For free software projects the only requirement to license it is to file a notice that you are using it with the patent holder and include some boilerplate text acknowledging the patent in your license. Commercial use requires the same notices and a small fee on a per program rather than per unit basis, plus some additional terms concerning licensing of that company's patent portfolio for use in free software. This could create a system in which defensive patents are used only defensively, to prevent anyone else from patenting an idea and using the patent against you. That sounds utterly absurd.
You beat me to one of the issues: books. He referred to Andrew Carnegie and libraries in the original article. A university is going to need textbooks for classes and a library. While it is all well and good to say that lecturers will do it for recognition and posterity, there is no way to stock a library with an up-to-date, complete collection of relevant material for free. Some items can be obtained that way. An online university could mirror Project Gutenberg. I also heard yesterday that the Oxford English Dictionary is going online and that they are looking for institutions (such as libraries) to subscribe and then provide access to communities. He could make them an offer to pay to put them online for everyone.
Then there is the issue of up-to-date technical references and textbooks. There are going to be people willing to write material for free for a good cause. But making it complete, getting it reviewed for technical accuracy and keeping it up-to-date are a different issue. A good start might be to seek out good material that is already on the net on various subjects and offer the authors a permanent, stable home for it. That alone, with a really good index and search engine could be a fantastic asset.
Another idea that might attract some good free material would be to offer a service like Source Forge to people interested in creating free content. Give them free web space, backups, CVS trees, mailing lists, etc. for the project. Host mirrors for some of the open text formatting tools: (La)TeX, texinfo, DocBook, etc. and encourage authors to use one of them and link to the mirror so that users can download the software they need easily.
And, I second the motion to interview him. Maybe we can help him set the initial direction on some of this by asking some good questions. Whether his free online university succeeds or fails in the end, it is worth the effort. It will help answer the questions about what an online school can offer and what it needs to do to offer it.
Some good reasons for the demand
on
King's New eBook
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· Score: 1
As anyone who reads what I post here on Slashdot can easily figure out, I read a lot of information online. I have made references to an enormous number of online articles and books. And there are more that I haven't mentioned here. (Did anyone else mourn the passing of Redfrog?) And I thought I would stir the pot a bit to get the discussion going about the real advantages of print vs. electronic text. Given the state of each on, I feel they each have a role.
I prefer electronic texts for certain uses:
Documents that I frequently quote small pieces of.
Documents that I refer other people to.
Documents that I have to provide comments on, because I can cut and paste the sections I want to comment on and append the comments.
But books are easier to read in a wider variety of physical settings. If I spill my drink on a paperback over lunch, I may lose several dollars worth of paperback, but I don't lose valuable hardware.
Honestly, it's a federal offence to go around your neighborhood and put anything (flyers, etc.) into your neighbor's mailboxes... You're supposed to go the normal route and pay way too much so that the USPS can lose it. SPAM'ers should be required to live by rules, too - forging IP's and routes and failing to tag with "ADV:" should be capital offences.
So, why don't we treat using someone else's IP address, hostname or e-mail address as a crime similar to forgery or impersonation? I don't object to a legitimate business contacting me by e-mail. If I can't reply to the message, they aren't legitimate.
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Consider it a list of questions that you should have answers to.
First, unless there were specific provisions in the original license that would allow it, you won't be able to impose a new license on existing users. The obvious choice is to grandfather them, allowing them to continue to use the version they have under the old license.
Second, you will need the agreement of the authors in some form. The FSF handles it by getting copyright assignments from contributors. As the copyright holder, they can then act alone. For small changes in the license, especially those that would make a free software project freer, you may have little problem.
Finally, if the copyright holders are okay with it, you can offer the user a choice of multiple licenses. Perl, for example, can be used under either the GPL or the Artistic License.
First of all, I will say that I am heavily biased toward the laissez faire side of the argument. But there is a fundamental problem with a resource that can be accessed from anywhere and whose value can easily be diminished by someone willing to despoil it (jamming). If it were possible for everyone who wanted to be heard to do so, without cost to anyone else, that would certainly be a desirable goal. But there isn't nearly enough bandwidth for that.
How should we decide who gets it? Does it belong to the highest bidder? And for how long. Can the first person to apply for bandwidth get it? We would have frequency squatting. How can we decide on the value of new uses vs. older established ones? Do we push out marginal radio stations to make room for stations that will pay more for the frequency? I certainly don't have all of the answers to these questions.
However, moving towards a market where the people who have the frequencies can sell the bandwidth is a partial solution. An excellent, and lengthy, discussion about the complexities of allocating property rights can be found here in David Friedman's forthcoming book Law's Order: An Economic Account. Perhaps the most enlightening point, is that from the point of view of economic efficiency it doesn't matter who the property rights are awarded to (assuming it isn't a stubborn codger who won't deal with anyone no matter how much it may hurt him). You will get the same outcome, with the only difference being the profit that the guy who originally holds the property rights makes. If the FCC sells that to the highest bidder, that money goes to the FCC. No worse that any other solution since they regulated the right into existance.
Take RealNetworks. The issue there occurred outside the scope of the current TRUSTe program. Yes, Real Networks is a TRUSTe licensee, but this particular issue had nothing to do with the collection of personal information on the Web site; it had to do with the collection of user information using software servers. Now, within a week, even though it was outside the program, we announced the formation of a pilot to evolve our program to handle those situations. I defy any government agency to do that.
He made one important point about the flexibility of a private sector solution to the problem. Another one that he is unlikely to make is the one that xant just made. Private sector solutions are open to competition. And perhaps the best form of competition initially is an organization that offers a small number of simple privacy statements and requires that you adhere to one in order to be certified. They could be:
Total Privacy: The site collects no personal information. Web server logs are wiped at regular intervals not exceeding some maximum. Those logs are not publically accessible.
High Privacy: The site allows the user to optionally customize his access to the site and provide optional information to identify himself by when using the site. The information is not shared with any other company. This is a rough restatement of the Slashdot pivacy policy
Voluntary Medium Privacy: In order to access some features (such as purchasing from the site), certain specified information must be divulged. It is not shared with other parties.
The principal advantage to this approach is that it would limit the number of privacy statements that a person would have to read and understand. And it would limit the frequency of changes to them.
Certainly there is in-fighting. Nearly everyone involved in open source software is involved in a labor of love. But when it does work, and more often than not it does, we have a strength that is incredible. Open source projects are usually based on certain fundamental assumptions:
The originator of the project has been able to explain it well enough to attract users and fellow developers. In spite of disagreements and misunderstandings, there is common ground generated by the fact that everyone involved invested the effort to find the project.
The developers and users are rarely located together. Communication in person, or even by phone is unusual. Since online means of communication are assumed, we set them up quickly, and rely on them heavily. I have seen this work well even for teams that work in the same city. A trail of e-mail is often the best way to reconstruct a side discussion from weeks ago. This also makes it easy for people to join the project from anywhere.
Because of that lack of geographic proximity, we don't build social structures that depend as heavily on coinciding work hours either. Time zone isn't as much of an issue. It may mean that there is a lag when working with certain people. There is also a lag when working with people who can only devote a couple of evenings a week to a project.
Often people have better written fluency in English than they do spoken fluency. And can also take the time to consult a dictionary if necessary. Personally, I think this lowers the barrier for non-native speakers. In particular, it increases the likelihood that they will be heard.
As for the disputes, I have found that participation in open source mailing lists has led me to be more polite, and more deliberate in what I say. I try not to give offense, even while I am opinionated. Based on what I have seen, there are a lot of people who act the same way. We are trying to exchange ideas and we are willing to put in the effort to make it work.
Slashdot Mirror
It is certainly possible they leaked a copy deliberately to see where it was going and try to shut down the distribution of it.
I certainly hope that the license terms are the same as for the original Qt, but I wasn't able to verify that either from the announcement or from Trolltech's own web site. I would imagine that they wouldn't intend to change course, but it would be nice to see that confirmed. If there's anyone from Trolltech reading this, an official statement on your web site would be a good thing.
Ask yourself what freedoms you are willing to give up to have the advances that cybernetic enhancements may provide. And ask it in the context of the rights that UCITA confers. Would you be willing to have something implanted in your body that:
1) Can be monitored without your consent?
2) Can be deactivated by the manufacturer?
3) You are not allowed to reverse engineer?
4) You are not permitted to publically criticism?
5) When it fails and permanently disables you, the manufacturer can disclaim all liability?
Thank you for playing. I want to be able to do my own security patches. I want to be able to compile out features that I don't trust.
Modems can travel to wherever you have a phone line that isn't too noisy. Certainly, for my home system I'm using a faster connection. But when I'm travelling a laptop and a modem can still get me connected from virtually anywhere.
Can we get him for a Slashdot Interview? Project Gutenberg comes up here from time to time. While I don't know whether there is general interest among Slashdot readers, I think Project Gutenberg qualifies as one of the earliest pioneers in free, online distribution.
The distributions have been forked for quite some time. This may be an issue for end users who don't ever want to have to compile a kernel or install upgrades to libraries. But the underlying source has not forked. In fact, with the remerging of egcs and gcc, one of the biggest potential forks has disappeared.
For developers, as long as the kernel, compiler and libraries don't fork, does it matter if the distributions release at different times with different versions? Does it matter that they focus on different audiences? Not really. I'd probably have trouble finding a program compiled for one Linux distro that I can't make run on another one. I might have to get different versions of libraries and recompile the kernel, but would it be impossible to make it run? Probably not.
So, is there anything wrong with Corel, Redhat, Mandrake, Caldera and others fighting it out for desktop market share? If they are perceived as incompatible, it may slow acceptances of Linux among end users. And it will hurt their individual market shares. But to developers, it isn't going to slow the progress of development on the tools that brought us to free software in the first place.
The GNU Manifesto declared the right of Richard Stallman and the people willing to work with him on it to share a body of what has become some of the most politically controversial software ever written. PGP attacked the idea that the masses should not have strong encryption by simply handing it to them as free software. Apache undermined proprietary web protocols.
If we want to be heard, there is an avenue for those willing to stand up and be counted. Write the code and put it out there. Embody the philosophy of freedom in working software. Use the copyleft and other free licenses to prevent anyone from locking up the code. And as a couple of people have been advocating, start patenting intellectual property embodied in free software and make plans to use those patents to enforce its freedom.
Okay, this doesn't answer the question of how to protect the designated victims from taking the heat at temperatures often comparable to conventional fusion. I don't have that answer.
We are trying new things and breaking new ground in terms of models of collaboration. Stallman was quick to point out that free software was free as in speech. But that statement is true in more ways than simply pointing out that it can be sold as well as given away. It is about freely communicating code. And it is part of a larger issue of maintaining our freedom to speak our minds. It is as deeply political as any issue today.
The Open Content web site contains a brief article that discusses one of the problems faced by open source documentation that is not faced by open source software. There are barriers to collaboration in writing that are not present in coding. Corrections of typos and updating command syntax is one thing, but there are issues of style for which there is no single right answer. So my question is, have you found any ways to increase the level of collaboration in order to lift the burden of completing each large documentation project from the shoulders of a single writer?
I would like to see an answer to this as well, for all of the same reasons. One of the problems with translations of Open Source documentation is that the current audience is rather small in some cases. The reason is that English is the lingua franca of software. Thus, the translations are being done in many cases for a hypothetical future audience. The people currently using open source are frequently capable of reading the English documentation. And yet relying on that limits the future spread of open source beyond native English speakers and fluent non-natives.
As for finding translators, I'll plug the Free Translation Project as I always do when this subject comes up. There is nothing wrong with starting another project, but the people involved in this one are a good source of ideas and volunteers. Don't ever forget to talk to us. We want to hear about free software internationalization and localization efforts.
Yes, this looks promising. In particular, IBM got burned once, long ago, on abandoning old product lines. That led them to make a long-term commitment to the IBM 360 and its descendants. As a company I doubt that they would consider a strategy that did not provide a credible migration plan for their existing customers. And one of the things that Linux has been extremely good at over the years has been to get the last useful value out of existing hardware. Being able to sell a migration plan that includes telling customers that the old hardware can continue to be used for web and file servers until the customer finds it cost effective to get rid of it is a good thing.
From the article:
IBM migrating some of its software onto Linux will certainly bring certain high-end customers to Linux. And it has the potential to let IBM provide an even more scaled-down entry level platform for them than it ever could before. High-end PC servers are not the same beasts as some of IBM's hardware. But they can handle enough RAM and disk to run the same applications, just for a smaller number of concurrent users.
Here's Bruce Schneier's commentary on open source and cryptography, an obviously security related subject on which he can reasonably be considered an expert:
There is more detailed commentary in the newsletter that I have quoted. The people who believe FUD respect recognized authorities. Use him as a good one to counter this particular piece of FUD.
The novel Earthweb by Marc Stiegler explores some of the possible ramifications of that idea. Baen Books has a web page for the book containing some sample chapters to whet your appetite. The author also has a page for it with links to information about some of the technologies that he discusses. He is really exploring the possible results of pervasive net access with persistent, verifiable, but anonymous identities.
Yes. I ran a couple of test searches through it. Even with the Slashdot Effect hitting it, it was returning searches at least as fast as the other search engines. I even tried some odd ones that it would not be likely to have cached. I'll certainly be bookmarking them. Of course their privacy policy is excellent. They put a link right on the main page to it. Go read it. It'll bring a tear of joy to your eye.
Here's a point-by-point dissection:
Microsoft Corp. is contemplating giving Windows CE to some developers for free.
The keyword is "some". And by developers, they mean the developers they recognize as developers. That is, friends. There is nothing wrong about doing it. Nor is there anything new about it.
Microsoft's revenue comes, instead, on development tools and maintenance contracts, sources said.
The open source OSs, Linux, *BSD, and Hurd, come with all of the development tools bundled. You can get them from the same sources that you got the OS and all of the applications from. If you have the program, you can get the source and the tools to compile it. Every user is a potential developer, or more to the point, every potential developer can become an actual developer for the cost of downloading and installing the tools.
For now, developers say, Microsoft isn't contemplating going so far as to turn Windows CE into an open-source project, which would allow developers to make changes to the source code and share their work with Microsoft and others in the development community.
So they are not creating any potential developers.
Why now? Microsoft is considering the move to stave off competitive embedded Linux products.
The bottom line is that Linux is more portable. For embedded systems, having a portable OS means that your code can outlive the hardware it originally ran on. Oh wait, that is true of any kind of code. It also means that your choice of hardware is not limited by the OS as much. I'd say that constitutes substantial pressure.
Now, why could this help them anyway? Is there anyone inside Microsoft or out who believes that the open source community is Microsoft's friend? Okay, there are many people in open source who also use Microsoft products and are happy with them. But alienating the open source community is not exactly something Microsoft loses sleep over. This gesture doesn't mean much, but the people it is meant to impress are people who have heard the words "Linux" and "Open Source" only in connection with business news about the Redhat and VA Linux IPOs. They haven't read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and they don't know what makes open source work.
The correct URL for your proposal is actually http://home.tampabay.rr.com/werdna/r eform.html. It looks like you cut and pasted too much.
Mark, I believe we've exchanged these comments before, the last time patents came up. Since I like to post links to relevant sites, I have bookmarked yours this time to have them handy in the future. Obviously, you have put a great deal more thought into your proposal than I did into my off the cuff remarks, although I believe that our intentions are quite similar. I want to recommend to anyone who is interested in the idea of open source patents to check out Mark's www.openpatents.org web site and specifically his Open Patent License.
Request to moderators. Moderate up the comment I am replying to rather than my. His ideas are worthy of a wider audience.
I use Linux these days. It is hardly the same Unix that I learned on in the mid-80's. And that wasn't the same Unix that was developed in the 70's. And it doesn't matter. I will switch OS's again. I don't know when. But as long as there are enough people who want what the Unix view of the world provides, irrespective of the name of the particular implementation, it will continue to exist.
I can run the same scripts under Linux, AIX or FreeBSD for the most part with very little portability problems. For me, Unix is a set of tools and a lot of leverage. It is the idea that I should be able to carry my tools and data with me until they are no longer necessary rather than making the programs that process them artificially obsolete.
This should look vaguely familiar to the US readers of Slashdot because I am quoting the Constitution of the United States of America. I submit that granting the exclusive right to a discovery to the first person or corporation to file a patent application without regard to a prior use of that discovery is a violation of this simple statement. Let me be blunt. The letter of this clause should invalidate patents when prior art can be demonstrated. To the extent that that does not happen, the intent "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is violated.
The people applying for such patents may be legitimately unaware of the prior art. It is a big world and people are doing a lot of interesting things. Furthermore, even if the US Patent Office dedicated a man-year to each application, some cases of prior art would get missed. I don't have a problem with that. And I don't have a problem with limiting the amount of time that is spent reviewing individual patent applications, although 8 hours seems meager at best. But when prior art is clearly demonstrated, the patent should be invalidated, or its scope reduced.
With the goal of stream-lining the patent process the Patent Office has created a necessity to file for patents. Anyone who doesn't runs the risk that their discoveries, no matter how obvious or trivial, will be patented, and they will be denied free use of them. The patent system in this country today would allow someone to rediscover today something that I am already doing, get a patent, and demand royalties from me. And proving prior art doesn't work as a defense. Why? It is expensive and unreliable. What does? Cross-licensing of patent portfolios. The costs are predictable and the results are exactly what is desired: a quid pro quo license of patents after inadvertent violation has been discovered.
I agree with Richard Stallman about the Amazon patent, but unlike him I don't place the blame on Amazon. They have done what is necessary to survive in the current legal climate. The law, and its implementation, need changing. Patents should be restricted to their original purpose.
It is high time for the free software community to try an experiment with a Free Patent. It will be licensed for free to all end-users. For free software projects the only requirement to license it is to file a notice that you are using it with the patent holder and include some boilerplate text acknowledging the patent in your license. Commercial use requires the same notices and a small fee on a per program rather than per unit basis, plus some additional terms concerning licensing of that company's patent portfolio for use in free software. This could create a system in which defensive patents are used only defensively, to prevent anyone else from patenting an idea and using the patent against you. That sounds utterly absurd.
You beat me to one of the issues: books. He referred to Andrew Carnegie and libraries in the original article. A university is going to need textbooks for classes and a library. While it is all well and good to say that lecturers will do it for recognition and posterity, there is no way to stock a library with an up-to-date, complete collection of relevant material for free. Some items can be obtained that way. An online university could mirror Project Gutenberg. I also heard yesterday that the Oxford English Dictionary is going online and that they are looking for institutions (such as libraries) to subscribe and then provide access to communities. He could make them an offer to pay to put them online for everyone.
Then there is the issue of up-to-date technical references and textbooks. There are going to be people willing to write material for free for a good cause. But making it complete, getting it reviewed for technical accuracy and keeping it up-to-date are a different issue. A good start might be to seek out good material that is already on the net on various subjects and offer the authors a permanent, stable home for it. That alone, with a really good index and search engine could be a fantastic asset.
Another idea that might attract some good free material would be to offer a service like Source Forge to people interested in creating free content. Give them free web space, backups, CVS trees, mailing lists, etc. for the project. Host mirrors for some of the open text formatting tools: (La)TeX, texinfo, DocBook, etc. and encourage authors to use one of them and link to the mirror so that users can download the software they need easily.
And, I second the motion to interview him. Maybe we can help him set the initial direction on some of this by asking some good questions. Whether his free online university succeeds or fails in the end, it is worth the effort. It will help answer the questions about what an online school can offer and what it needs to do to offer it.
I prefer electronic texts for certain uses:
But books are easier to read in a wider variety of physical settings. If I spill my drink on a paperback over lunch, I may lose several dollars worth of paperback, but I don't lose valuable hardware.
So, why don't we treat using someone else's IP address, hostname or e-mail address as a crime similar to forgery or impersonation? I don't object to a legitimate business contacting me by e-mail. If I can't reply to the message, they aren't legitimate.
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Consider it a list of questions that you should have answers to.
First, unless there were specific provisions in the original license that would allow it, you won't be able to impose a new license on existing users. The obvious choice is to grandfather them, allowing them to continue to use the version they have under the old license.
Second, you will need the agreement of the authors in some form. The FSF handles it by getting copyright assignments from contributors. As the copyright holder, they can then act alone. For small changes in the license, especially those that would make a free software project freer, you may have little problem.
Finally, if the copyright holders are okay with it, you can offer the user a choice of multiple licenses. Perl, for example, can be used under either the GPL or the Artistic License.
First of all, I will say that I am heavily biased toward the laissez faire side of the argument. But there is a fundamental problem with a resource that can be accessed from anywhere and whose value can easily be diminished by someone willing to despoil it (jamming). If it were possible for everyone who wanted to be heard to do so, without cost to anyone else, that would certainly be a desirable goal. But there isn't nearly enough bandwidth for that.
How should we decide who gets it? Does it belong to the highest bidder? And for how long. Can the first person to apply for bandwidth get it? We would have frequency squatting. How can we decide on the value of new uses vs. older established ones? Do we push out marginal radio stations to make room for stations that will pay more for the frequency? I certainly don't have all of the answers to these questions.
However, moving towards a market where the people who have the frequencies can sell the bandwidth is a partial solution. An excellent, and lengthy, discussion about the complexities of allocating property rights can be found here in David Friedman's forthcoming book Law's Order: An Economic Account. Perhaps the most enlightening point, is that from the point of view of economic efficiency it doesn't matter who the property rights are awarded to (assuming it isn't a stubborn codger who won't deal with anyone no matter how much it may hurt him). You will get the same outcome, with the only difference being the profit that the guy who originally holds the property rights makes. If the FCC sells that to the highest bidder, that money goes to the FCC. No worse that any other solution since they regulated the right into existance.
He made one important point about the flexibility of a private sector solution to the problem. Another one that he is unlikely to make is the one that xant just made. Private sector solutions are open to competition. And perhaps the best form of competition initially is an organization that offers a small number of simple privacy statements and requires that you adhere to one in order to be certified. They could be:
The principal advantage to this approach is that it would limit the number of privacy statements that a person would have to read and understand. And it would limit the frequency of changes to them.
As for the disputes, I have found that participation in open source mailing lists has led me to be more polite, and more deliberate in what I say. I try not to give offense, even while I am opinionated. Based on what I have seen, there are a lot of people who act the same way. We are trying to exchange ideas and we are willing to put in the effort to make it work.