No, no, they send them to the overseas torture camp called the BBC and make them all watch re-runs of "The Prisoner" until they capitulate and vote Republican.
It would explain the British cooperation with recent US politics.
Oh, it's useful. Such a market verifies the existence of these exploits, earlier than otherwise would occur when groups like CERT refuse to publish because the vendor hasn't fixed them.
I welcome the idea. Even if their primary customer is black hats, the ability to point to them and say "see, there are these 5 vital fixes that Symantec hasn't done or MacAfee won't touch" is helpful to making sure they do, indeed, fix them.
Wait. You're going to do this by hand? And given that Itunes and other system software is installed by the privileged user, there's no graceful way to prevent such software from hogging more privileges than it needs, right? And you're right back at the root user granting specific groups privileges and setting up permissions for specific file repositories pretty swiftly.
Such restriction is desirable, but it can get extremely painful to maintain very quickly. It's particularly bad when applications need access to each other's repositories, auch as Outlook and everything else, or web browsers that need access to the local filesystem as file:///.
Apple didn't have to do the office work. Lotus and half a dozen other systems could have taken up that market niche without Microsoft "bundling" Office with Windows, without the illegal deals prevent OEM vendors from putting non-Microsoft tools on the default installation, without the deliberately obfuscated documentation of Windows and the use by Office of hidden and unpublished system calls to improve performance, etc.
You've a point that the VMS user interface was awful. But DEC had been pursuing a new OS (which it abandoned for various reasons linked to Cutler's departure), and there were plenty of other venders hotly pursuing a better interface for their more robust architectures. MS managed to steal a server class system architecture to slap its interface on top of.
I think my point stands: Microsoft didn't create the market, its illegal and anti competitive efforts in fact hindered the market and development of computer use.
You're saying that the growth of the PC market is their fault. No. There have been numerous businesses clamoringn to step into the nich, from Apple to Be and NeXT and now Linux. Many of them had fascinating and wonderful approaches: all of them have been plagued by Microsoft's corrupt, criminal activities and had their growth thereby hindered. Just because they're the largest company involved doesn't mean they're the ones who created the market: it's to their business advantage to slow innovation by anyone else, so they can buy it or steal it, and they do so frequently and iintroduce it as their own.
By the way, to a considerable (but lessening over time) extent you *are* running VMS on your desktop. Cutler's theft was pretty wholesale. Why do you think the new NT kernel was so much better? Because Culer nad his merry pirates wrote much of VMS, and they stole it. So if that OS had been the new basis for desktops, we'd have had 64-bit architectures at least 5 years earlier for the home.
You've a point that finer-grained access is not identical. But the technology is already implemented by Trusted Computing, and is designed to control authentication as well as access to files, software features, and hardwares. So it's basically one aspect of a done deal.
Finer grained access is an automatic consequence of rigorous DRM: to perform it on a user, or program level, is an additional feature on top of what you had originally asked for. That's fine, but if it's user manageable, it's usually virus reconfigurable, too. And if it's not user managed, then it turns over control of file access and features to someone else.
We've seen sophisticated systems for this. NTFS has some: SELinux has others. Neither are as graceful and network friendly as, for example, AFS is. But tying file access to processes is..... difficult without the level of encryption and hardware based access control that is the holy grail of DRM proponents. So much like encryption and authentication, they're extremely linked processes.
You're on Slashdot. It's illegal for you to have a GF that isn't on a webcam, paid for by the minute. Your punishment is to send her to my apartment for reprogramming. Tonight. With chocolate covered espresso beans, scented oil, and her own Wii controller.
No. They shouldn't. This is the basis of DRM, which circumvents hundreds of years of copyright law to put in the publisher's hands what you, as a purchaser, can do with the material. It can potentially block abuse, but it's very likely to be abused ot promote monopoly, avoid competition, and prevent backup copies or fair use quotation that are protected uses.
It's also called "Trusted Computing". Since the master keys for that remain in Microsoft's hands, accessible to so-called law enforcement without a warrant, and there is no documented way for me as a citizen to get my own keys back, and the keys are revocable without warning and at whim, it is in fact a form of "Trust Me With Your Computer". It's clearly aimed at DRM, not at system security.
Excuse me, but what *ARE* you talking about? The PC market was successfully built up, true. But it was also massively hindered by Bill's attacks on Netscape, the theft of VMS technologies by DEC, and the stunning fraud that is Microsoft API documentation. Yes, being a car thief would generate local economic benefits to car painters and mechanics who file the numbers off the engines for you (such as David Cutler).
It's like saying the IRS creates jobs by requiring people to hire lawyers and accountants to help with their forms. Those jobs are frankly a waste of people's time and money, better spent elsewhere for services they actually want.
The range between "not a nice and fluffy company" and wholesale copyright violation, trade secret theft, violations of NDA, fraud, excessvie "spin doctoring", FUD, and misaimed attempts to enforce undesirable DRM and monopolistic business practices against potential competitors is a fairly serious one.
You may as well ask small shop owners not to dislike Walmart: it interferes directly with the jobbies, and livelihoods, of many of us here.
Chimneys have bends in them, it's not a straight line access. The same applies to household plumbing and stairwells. Many walls now have insulating foil components, as described elsewhere. And much smaller holes reduce the signal by quite a lot: you don't have to block every photon, just reduce it well below the background noise to be quite secure.
I can also see it in use in RFID prevalent spaces, such as around loading docks, to block interference from other signals and assure reading the tags correctly.
If you're downloading music or movies without the permission of the copyright holders, it's theft, according to hundreds of years of copyright law precedent What's so hard about understanding the laws?
Those laws have loopholes for legitimate use, but they're what protect us GPL contributors from seeing our work stolen, licensed, and used against us to keep us out of business. Those laws are sometimes silly: but if you're going to engage in theft, saying "but you still have the bytes, I just copied them" is just rationalization. If you've got a copy of something and it's damaged, I have no problem with you bittorrenting another copy, or grabbing a different format of music you bought. But downloading Shrek III because "they still have the bits" is just rude to people who worked hard.
Not at all: you've obviously not watched the process from as close as I have. Even if the behavior is, in fact, clearly criminal, simply reporting it doesn't establish that fact to the court where you're defending yourself in a wrongful termination suit, or where you are being sued for NDA violations and being slapped with a gag order. Do you imagine for more than 3 seconds that the AT&T employees aware if the illegal NSA wiretaps on core routers of the Internet would have held their jobs for longer than it took to escort them from the building if they exposed the wiretaps? Or do you imagine that if I went and called the FSF about a GPL violation my company was doing, and there were any obvious way to trace it to me, that I'd have a job tomorrow? In particular, if the violation involved trade secrets (which it often does!)?
The NDA is one of the available levers a company, or a manager can use to silence a former employee. Unless the offense is amazingly egregious, and I had the willingness and facilities to prove it in court, and the ability to get a job in the industry afterwards. They can be useful and good sources of protection, but make no mistake. They're for the protection of the company, not the employee. A company that is violating the GPL, and not addressing it when notified by their own staff of the violation, has already demonstrated their ethical and legal carelessness. Do you imagine that such a company, or the managers involved, will not protect their interests by silencing and punishing someone who speaks out against them?
Sir, I believe I've been fired when my activities were about to reveal wholesale theft management members of a company, by tracking the purchased hardware in a much more transparent way. But there were layoffs going on: no one could believe I had been targeted for layoffs, but it happened. It was only later, unofficially, that I tracked down where the "lay this guy off" order came from. Do you imagine that I could easily or effectively establish such a case? Then you are very much an optimist, and I hope you never encounter the kind of malfeasance I've seen.
And oh, yes. If you don't believe lawyers and HR departments do not cook up this sort of trumped up reason to hire or fire employees, or avoid obeying the law, take a good look at the video on how not to hire an American at http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/18/22435/ 0365.
How to ease out an unwanted employee is basic training for HR people, and how to protect the company from legal issues of it is basic training for any corporate attorney. It's often for good reason, but it certainly need not be.
Heh. You go and tell the district attorney about it, or notify the people being robbed that they are, in fact, being robbed in a business matter. Then watch them "settle" the issue, with no conviction, while you lose your job. Then pay the attorney to represent you in a civil suit for being fired. That "without cause" is exceptionally difficult to demonstrate. And it doesn't take a network of HR daemons: it simply takes your supervisor, or the paperwork pushers, to "express concern" and start skewing employee evaluations. It's exactly how you ease out anyone you don't want to fire publicly.
It's a harsh matter: I applaud the people who stand up for what's right, but only a limited few states have good "whistleblower" laws to protect people in such situations. The "mandatory reporting" laws are themselves awkward and dangerous to invoke: like reporting sexual abuse by your thesis advisor, the risk to your own career is quite profound, and the bureaucrats in any institution can and will cooperate in minimizing the damage to their institution, often at the expense of the whistleblower.
You mean perhaps something like this? (http://www.merl.com/projects/LED_chemical_sensors /) These folks invented the beer mug that tells the barkeep how much beer is left in your glass, that was previously announced on Slashdot.
Most don't NDA's don't outright *forbid* such behavior, but they most certainly prevent it. Look again, carefully, at the details of a typical NDA. Reporting the criminal activity will get you fired under the NDA, and leave you in the position to establish the criminal behavior as a defense against an unlawful firing. Unfortunately, you no longer have a job. Nor are you likely to get one when this shows up on your resume.
And if it's an ongoing issue that you're trying to resolve about internal criminal behavior, keep a close eye on how HR gathers a file on you to justify your dismissal for other reasons. This is standard in any corporate environment where an employee may be fired for reasons the company does not want on the record, for whatever reason. Nasty, but far too often true. I got nailed that way once and learned important lessons.
It's not called "stalling". It's called "investigating the claim". It is often, clearly to any outside observer, stalling. And the games they play in the meeting with their clients to avoid the client ever saying out loud the statements that would end the stalling are fascinating to watch.
Careful: your customers having to ask makes things interesting. For example, a typical NDA prevents you from reporting corporate criminality without a subpoena. But unless the subpoena has been written due to other discovered evidence, it won't happen, so the cult of secrecy for code theft or other corporate misbhavior remains unexposed.
I've seen it happen with GPL code, where I was told not to notify the customers of the availability: they could ask for it if they wanted, but they didn't know to ask, and I happened to be present when programmers were discussing the issue from the customer. The sales engineer present at the meeting gave me a subtle signal to keep my mouth shut: he and I exchanged words about this later on.
Whoa, whoa. I didn't say it's a good thing to be fragmented. But to a large extent, it's pointless to defragment with a reasonably well written file system such as ext2 and ext3. There's quite a bit of low level work that went into optimizing their disk access, and the file structure is not prone to the sort of performance degradation common to FAT32 or to a lesser extent NTFS when numerous caching operations are done. Moreover, the typical caching of frequently accessed files in available RAM massively reduces the performance hit of fragmentation.
The fragmentation you're worrying about is more important for, for example, high bandwidth video streaming. But unless you've engaged in interesting games to prevent any other processes from accessing that disk at all, the performance hit is negligible if even perceptible to ordinary use.
I'm afraid not: many manufacturers already put electronics in the cartridges, to report on remaining ink levels, type of ink, etc. I can't see how expanding the capabilities of that chip a bit would lead to additional physical wastee. It's likely to be only a fiscal cost of manufacturing, not of disposal.
[ Technical note: You don't normally defrag ext2 or ext3: neither need it. ]
I've seen very similar complaints from folks who never understood or had the GPL carefully explained to them. Yes, if you build on top of someone else's code base (such as a Linux kernel, which is under GPL) and send that modified tool to your customers, then you have to send along your modifications to your customers. This is how Linux the kernel, and the GNU softwaer on which so much of Linux the operating system, became so powerful and effective.
If you're going to compete in that world, and reap the benefits of the software, you'll have to have some real addition to sell on top of it. This may be continuing technical innovation in your product line: this may be unique support for its use: it may be customization services for your customers. But yeah, you can't change 2 lines of code to break compatibility with anyone else's products and pretend it's the same product, then keep it secret. (That's basically what Microsoft did with Kerberos in Active Directory: it's been worked around in MIT's source code.) Nor can you reap 1000 man-weeks of development time, add 2 weeks for a cute new feature, and deny the others who provided that 1000 man-weeks the opportunity to test or include that feature.
If your source code is so precious that only you can be allowed to see or use it, then you are massively vulnerable to software theft. And frankly, that kind of secrecy makes your code untrustworthy: what precisely are you scared of people seeing? That you've hacked your libraries to work around a hardware bug that should never have been there? Or that your security model is a sad, sad joke? Or that your much vaunted "new feature" is something that has been in place for 4 years, but was never published? (Yes, I've seen all of these happen.)
We can expect the lawyers of any company challenged this way to delay, delay, delay until the challenge actually costs them money, for example by scaring off investors or landing them in court. Publication of the modified source code can open up their trade secrets or optimizations, or even disabled feature sets enabled only for more expensive releases, to activation by hackers and competitors.
I've seen at least one company do their damnedest to ignore the GPL and "forget" to notify their customers of GPL based code or modifications, or provide source, as a "trade secret". It led to a very serious argument between my supervisor and the company president, who liked us having some secret tools we could use to push our products. I wanted the GPL-based fixes to go into the next software release so we wouldn't have to keep patching things and they would just work from then on.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, they send them to the overseas torture camp called the BBC and make them all watch re-runs of "The Prisoner" until they capitulate and vote Republican.
It would explain the British cooperation with recent US politics.
Oh, it's useful. Such a market verifies the existence of these exploits, earlier than otherwise would occur when groups like CERT refuse to publish because the vendor hasn't fixed them.
I welcome the idea. Even if their primary customer is black hats, the ability to point to them and say "see, there are these 5 vital fixes that Symantec hasn't done or MacAfee won't touch" is helpful to making sure they do, indeed, fix them.
Wait. You're going to do this by hand? And given that Itunes and other system software is installed by the privileged user, there's no graceful way to prevent such software from hogging more privileges than it needs, right? And you're right back at the root user granting specific groups privileges and setting up permissions for specific file repositories pretty swiftly.
Such restriction is desirable, but it can get extremely painful to maintain very quickly. It's particularly bad when applications need access to each other's repositories, auch as Outlook and everything else, or web browsers that need access to the local filesystem as file:///.
Apple didn't have to do the office work. Lotus and half a dozen other systems could have taken up that market niche without Microsoft "bundling" Office with Windows, without the illegal deals prevent OEM vendors from putting non-Microsoft tools on the default installation, without the deliberately obfuscated documentation of Windows and the use by Office of hidden and unpublished system calls to improve performance, etc.
You've a point that the VMS user interface was awful. But DEC had been pursuing a new OS (which it abandoned for various reasons linked to Cutler's departure), and there were plenty of other venders hotly pursuing a better interface for their more robust architectures. MS managed to steal a server class system architecture to slap its interface on top of.
I think my point stands: Microsoft didn't create the market, its illegal and anti competitive efforts in fact hindered the market and development of computer use.
You're saying that the growth of the PC market is their fault. No. There have been numerous businesses clamoringn to step into the nich, from Apple to Be and NeXT and now Linux. Many of them had fascinating and wonderful approaches: all of them have been plagued by Microsoft's corrupt, criminal activities and had their growth thereby hindered. Just because they're the largest company involved doesn't mean they're the ones who created the market: it's to their business advantage to slow innovation by anyone else, so they can buy it or steal it, and they do so frequently and iintroduce it as their own.
By the way, to a considerable (but lessening over time) extent you *are* running VMS on your desktop. Cutler's theft was pretty wholesale. Why do you think the new NT kernel was so much better? Because Culer nad his merry pirates wrote much of VMS, and they stole it. So if that OS had been the new basis for desktops, we'd have had 64-bit architectures at least 5 years earlier for the home.
You've a point that finer-grained access is not identical. But the technology is already implemented by Trusted Computing, and is designed to control authentication as well as access to files, software features, and hardwares. So it's basically one aspect of a done deal.
Finer grained access is an automatic consequence of rigorous DRM: to perform it on a user, or program level, is an additional feature on top of what you had originally asked for. That's fine, but if it's user manageable, it's usually virus reconfigurable, too. And if it's not user managed, then it turns over control of file access and features to someone else.
We've seen sophisticated systems for this. NTFS has some: SELinux has others. Neither are as graceful and network friendly as, for example, AFS is. But tying file access to processes is..... difficult without the level of encryption and hardware based access control that is the holy grail of DRM proponents. So much like encryption and authentication, they're extremely linked processes.
You're on Slashdot. It's illegal for you to have a GF that isn't on a webcam, paid for by the minute. Your punishment is to send her to my apartment for reprogramming. Tonight. With chocolate covered espresso beans, scented oil, and her own Wii controller.
No. They shouldn't. This is the basis of DRM, which circumvents hundreds of years of copyright law to put in the publisher's hands what you, as a purchaser, can do with the material. It can potentially block abuse, but it's very likely to be abused ot promote monopoly, avoid competition, and prevent backup copies or fair use quotation that are protected uses.
It's also called "Trusted Computing". Since the master keys for that remain in Microsoft's hands, accessible to so-called law enforcement without a warrant, and there is no documented way for me as a citizen to get my own keys back, and the keys are revocable without warning and at whim, it is in fact a form of "Trust Me With Your Computer". It's clearly aimed at DRM, not at system security.
It's only illegal if you can't find the body, right? Tell it to Hans Reiser, the author of ReiserFS. That story is covered elsewhere on Slashdot.
Excuse me, but what *ARE* you talking about? The PC market was successfully built up, true. But it was also massively hindered by Bill's attacks on Netscape, the theft of VMS technologies by DEC, and the stunning fraud that is Microsoft API documentation. Yes, being a car thief would generate local economic benefits to car painters and mechanics who file the numbers off the engines for you (such as David Cutler).
It's like saying the IRS creates jobs by requiring people to hire lawyers and accountants to help with their forms. Those jobs are frankly a waste of people's time and money, better spent elsewhere for services they actually want.
The range between "not a nice and fluffy company" and wholesale copyright violation, trade secret theft, violations of NDA, fraud, excessvie "spin doctoring", FUD, and misaimed attempts to enforce undesirable DRM and monopolistic business practices against potential competitors is a fairly serious one.
You may as well ask small shop owners not to dislike Walmart: it interferes directly with the jobbies, and livelihoods, of many of us here.
Chimneys have bends in them, it's not a straight line access. The same applies to household plumbing and stairwells. Many walls now have insulating foil components, as described elsewhere. And much smaller holes reduce the signal by quite a lot: you don't have to block every photon, just reduce it well below the background noise to be quite secure.
I can also see it in use in RFID prevalent spaces, such as around loading docks, to block interference from other signals and assure reading the tags correctly.
If you're downloading music or movies without the permission of the copyright holders, it's theft, according to hundreds of years of copyright law precedent What's so hard about understanding the laws?
Those laws have loopholes for legitimate use, but they're what protect us GPL contributors from seeing our work stolen, licensed, and used against us to keep us out of business. Those laws are sometimes silly: but if you're going to engage in theft, saying "but you still have the bytes, I just copied them" is just rationalization. If you've got a copy of something and it's damaged, I have no problem with you bittorrenting another copy, or grabbing a different format of music you bought. But downloading Shrek III because "they still have the bits" is just rude to people who worked hard.
OK, I'll use small words. "Copying someone else's code without permission is called theft of intellectual property".
Are those words small enough?
Not at all: you've obviously not watched the process from as close as I have. Even if the behavior is, in fact, clearly criminal, simply reporting it doesn't establish that fact to the court where you're defending yourself in a wrongful termination suit, or where you are being sued for NDA violations and being slapped with a gag order. Do you imagine for more than 3 seconds that the AT&T employees aware if the illegal NSA wiretaps on core routers of the Internet would have held their jobs for longer than it took to escort them from the building if they exposed the wiretaps? Or do you imagine that if I went and called the FSF about a GPL violation my company was doing, and there were any obvious way to trace it to me, that I'd have a job tomorrow? In particular, if the violation involved trade secrets (which it often does!)? The NDA is one of the available levers a company, or a manager can use to silence a former employee. Unless the offense is amazingly egregious, and I had the willingness and facilities to prove it in court, and the ability to get a job in the industry afterwards. They can be useful and good sources of protection, but make no mistake. They're for the protection of the company, not the employee. A company that is violating the GPL, and not addressing it when notified by their own staff of the violation, has already demonstrated their ethical and legal carelessness. Do you imagine that such a company, or the managers involved, will not protect their interests by silencing and punishing someone who speaks out against them? Sir, I believe I've been fired when my activities were about to reveal wholesale theft management members of a company, by tracking the purchased hardware in a much more transparent way. But there were layoffs going on: no one could believe I had been targeted for layoffs, but it happened. It was only later, unofficially, that I tracked down where the "lay this guy off" order came from. Do you imagine that I could easily or effectively establish such a case? Then you are very much an optimist, and I hope you never encounter the kind of malfeasance I've seen.
And oh, yes. If you don't believe lawyers and HR departments do not cook up this sort of trumped up reason to hire or fire employees, or avoid obeying the law, take a good look at the video on how not to hire an American at http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/18/22435/ 0365.
How to ease out an unwanted employee is basic training for HR people, and how to protect the company from legal issues of it is basic training for any corporate attorney. It's often for good reason, but it certainly need not be.
Heh. You go and tell the district attorney about it, or notify the people being robbed that they are, in fact, being robbed in a business matter. Then watch them "settle" the issue, with no conviction, while you lose your job. Then pay the attorney to represent you in a civil suit for being fired. That "without cause" is exceptionally difficult to demonstrate. And it doesn't take a network of HR daemons: it simply takes your supervisor, or the paperwork pushers, to "express concern" and start skewing employee evaluations. It's exactly how you ease out anyone you don't want to fire publicly.
It's a harsh matter: I applaud the people who stand up for what's right, but only a limited few states have good "whistleblower" laws to protect people in such situations. The "mandatory reporting" laws are themselves awkward and dangerous to invoke: like reporting sexual abuse by your thesis advisor, the risk to your own career is quite profound, and the bureaucrats in any institution can and will cooperate in minimizing the damage to their institution, often at the expense of the whistleblower.
You mean perhaps something like this? (http://www.merl.com/projects/LED_chemical_sensors /) These folks invented the beer mug that tells the barkeep how much beer is left in your glass, that was previously announced on Slashdot.
Most don't NDA's don't outright *forbid* such behavior, but they most certainly prevent it. Look again, carefully, at the details of a typical NDA. Reporting the criminal activity will get you fired under the NDA, and leave you in the position to establish the criminal behavior as a defense against an unlawful firing. Unfortunately, you no longer have a job. Nor are you likely to get one when this shows up on your resume.
And if it's an ongoing issue that you're trying to resolve about internal criminal behavior, keep a close eye on how HR gathers a file on you to justify your dismissal for other reasons. This is standard in any corporate environment where an employee may be fired for reasons the company does not want on the record, for whatever reason. Nasty, but far too often true. I got nailed that way once and learned important lessons.
It's not called "stalling". It's called "investigating the claim". It is often, clearly to any outside observer, stalling. And the games they play in the meeting with their clients to avoid the client ever saying out loud the statements that would end the stalling are fascinating to watch.
Careful: your customers having to ask makes things interesting. For example, a typical NDA prevents you from reporting corporate criminality without a subpoena. But unless the subpoena has been written due to other discovered evidence, it won't happen, so the cult of secrecy for code theft or other corporate misbhavior remains unexposed.
I've seen it happen with GPL code, where I was told not to notify the customers of the availability: they could ask for it if they wanted, but they didn't know to ask, and I happened to be present when programmers were discussing the issue from the customer. The sales engineer present at the meeting gave me a subtle signal to keep my mouth shut: he and I exchanged words about this later on.
Whoa, whoa. I didn't say it's a good thing to be fragmented. But to a large extent, it's pointless to defragment with a reasonably well written file system such as ext2 and ext3. There's quite a bit of low level work that went into optimizing their disk access, and the file structure is not prone to the sort of performance degradation common to FAT32 or to a lesser extent NTFS when numerous caching operations are done. Moreover, the typical caching of frequently accessed files in available RAM massively reduces the performance hit of fragmentation. The fragmentation you're worrying about is more important for, for example, high bandwidth video streaming. But unless you've engaged in interesting games to prevent any other processes from accessing that disk at all, the performance hit is negligible if even perceptible to ordinary use.
I'm afraid not: many manufacturers already put electronics in the cartridges, to report on remaining ink levels, type of ink, etc. I can't see how expanding the capabilities of that chip a bit would lead to additional physical wastee. It's likely to be only a fiscal cost of manufacturing, not of disposal.
[ Technical note: You don't normally defrag ext2 or ext3: neither need it. ]
I've seen very similar complaints from folks who never understood or had the GPL carefully explained to them. Yes, if you build on top of someone else's code base (such as a Linux kernel, which is under GPL) and send that modified tool to your customers, then you have to send along your modifications to your customers. This is how Linux the kernel, and the GNU softwaer on which so much of Linux the operating system, became so powerful and effective.
If you're going to compete in that world, and reap the benefits of the software, you'll have to have some real addition to sell on top of it. This may be continuing technical innovation in your product line: this may be unique support for its use: it may be customization services for your customers. But yeah, you can't change 2 lines of code to break compatibility with anyone else's products and pretend it's the same product, then keep it secret. (That's basically what Microsoft did with Kerberos in Active Directory: it's been worked around in MIT's source code.) Nor can you reap 1000 man-weeks of development time, add 2 weeks for a cute new feature, and deny the others who provided that 1000 man-weeks the opportunity to test or include that feature.
If your source code is so precious that only you can be allowed to see or use it, then you are massively vulnerable to software theft. And frankly, that kind of secrecy makes your code untrustworthy: what precisely are you scared of people seeing? That you've hacked your libraries to work around a hardware bug that should never have been there? Or that your security model is a sad, sad joke? Or that your much vaunted "new feature" is something that has been in place for 4 years, but was never published? (Yes, I've seen all of these happen.)
We can expect the lawyers of any company challenged this way to delay, delay, delay until the challenge actually costs them money, for example by scaring off investors or landing them in court. Publication of the modified source code can open up their trade secrets or optimizations, or even disabled feature sets enabled only for more expensive releases, to activation by hackers and competitors.
I've seen at least one company do their damnedest to ignore the GPL and "forget" to notify their customers of GPL based code or modifications, or provide source, as a "trade secret". It led to a very serious argument between my supervisor and the company president, who liked us having some secret tools we could use to push our products. I wanted the GPL-based fixes to go into the next software release so we wouldn't have to keep patching things and they would just work from then on.