CCP is aware that an individual claims to have access to the source code of the EVE client. This access is not a security risk to CCP in any way. CCP does not believe in security by obscurity. The Python scripting language that is used by the client can be easily decompiled to generate human-readable code, and CCP has designed its server-side systems with that understanding. Access to the source code for the EVE client exposes no security vulnerabilities, has no privacy protection issues, and poses no threat to our customers' billing information. The server-side interface used by the client is carefully protected to ensure that no abusive or unwanted information is transmitted to, or from the EVE system. Nothing the EVE client can do can affect the game state, no advantage can be gained by manipulating the EVE client, no advantageous or disadvantageous information can be transmitted to other EVE users by altering the EVE client. The EVE client is signed with a security certificate registered to CCP, and hashes are available on our web site for those who wish to ensure the integrity of EVE client download files they may have received from a source other than direct download from CCP's web site.
CCP does not confirm or deny, nor make any comment, regarding issues of internal security, and will not be doing so in this case. As a policy, CCP removes message board posts regarding violations of its EULA and Terms of Service, and CCP considers any alteration of the Client software, including decompilation, to be such violations.
If you're "lucky", you have a buffet of connection options in the US. You have cable access (in most places that's 1MB or faster) and DSL from a variety of providers (256K and up, often 1MB and faster). In many places you can get residential wireless, with speeds dependent on how many people are sharing an AP. If you live in high-density housing you may have access to fiber, with speeds from 3MB and up. Generally speaking, the cost of this access is less than $100 per month, and may be as little as $50 per month.
A rough estimate would be that 70% or more of the US population is "lucky" by the above definition.
"Broadband" connections in the US are not hard to get, are not prohibitively expensive, and generally work as advertised with little tech support required. The people who are not well served in the US are rural users, and some users in old inner city areas with a poor existing infrastructure. The people with the most technical support issues are those attempting to host servers and other business class services on residential networks, or those using old, outdated, or unsupported combinations of hardware & software; the average user, with an average hardware/software mix for the most part achieves plug & play connectivity. Tech support loads at most ISPs are 1:10 or higher (in other words, less than 10% of the customers need tech support for connectivity issues) and in most cases, tech support problems are traced to user error.
I suspect that the poor adoption rates for broadband in the US have more to do with lack of interest on the part of consumers than with technical availability. Many people don't view the internet as something they need or want - especially the 40+ percent of the US population 50 and older, who grew up without it don't know what they're missing.
Re:It is NOT open source gaming...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
Had >you read the license (Open Gaming License v1.1), viewable at www.opengamingfoundation.org, you would see that there are no content restrictions of any kind. You can create any game component you wish.
The d20 System Trademark License is more restrictive, but is only important if you want to put the d20 Trademark on your product. If you do not, and many publishers have decided not to, you can igore its restrictions.
Sincerely,
Ryan S. Dancey CEO, OrganizedPlay
Re:D&D has been gone for a 2 decades
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I can say with some authority (I helped broker the sale of TSR to Wizards of the Coast, and then ran the tabletop gaming unit inside Wizards from 1998 to 2000) that the previous post in this thread:
"it was AdvancedD&D because of ownership disputes arising from the original Gygax play group. It is now officially the 'D20 system' and not even a game anymore but a set of leaseable rules.
The whole mess is tied up in court over ownership between Gary Gygax, David Cook, some original investors in what used to be TSR, who filed a law suit following the sale to WoTC, and Hasbro INC, the newest 'owners'. "
Is completely and totally false in every respect.
------------------
Ryan S. Dancey CEO OrganizedPlay for more information about Open Gaming, please see http://www.opengamingfoundation.org
The Pak don't have hyperdrive, so it would be impossible for them to deal with the core explosion. By the time they realized they had a problem, the wavefront of radiation would have already hit the Pak homeworld because it's moving at the speed of light. They'd see it just before it hit them.
The Pak protectors on the Ringworld are latecomers to the party. There must be some backstory to fill in the gap between the original Pak colonists, Pssthpok's journey, the arrival of the Pak armada the Brenan-Monster fought at Home, and the time required to populate the Ringworld with hominids (and for significant evolutionary differentiation to have had time to work on those hominids.)
And Pak would >never have brought Kzinti to a world populated by their children!
Because the Ringworld is aligned with the plane of the galaxy, and the Ringworld's construction stops most radiation, could the Ringworld be used as a lifeboat to ride out the explosion wave from the detonation of the galaxy's core?
It always struck me that there was some implied relationship between the Slaver war, the Ringworld, and the core explosion.
How's this for a theory:
The Slavers used their galaxy-spanning "kill yourselves now" telepathic doomsday weapon, but enough Tnuciptin survived (stasis boxes, travelling via hyperspace, etc.) to take revenge by using their own doomsday weapon to detonate the galaxy's core, ensuring that the Slavers couldn't win the war either.
Assuming that a galaxy-wide civilization was destroyed by the conflict, the Ringworld looks like a localized "last, best effort" solution to survive the core explosion built by someone with extraordinarily good tech, but not a lot of resources, with a crumbling infrastructure. The brute force approaches (bussard ramjets for attitude control, etc.) are at odds with the super-science of scrith and the material used to link the shadow squares.
If you looked at a lifeboat from a modern ocean liner, you'd see some amazing plastics, maybe some electronic wizardry (GPS, radio, etc.) but you'd find basic stuff like oars, life jackets, etc. as well - a mix of high and not-so-high tech to deal with the transition from civilization to an uncivilized environment.
If you bill a customer's credit card, you are required to keep that credit card information on file so that you can reverse the charges and/or provide information on charge traces that may be requested by the customer.
There's an implict social contract between the parties when a credit card is used - the contract is that in exchange for providing a good or service to you with nothing in the way of security other than reliance on a banking infrastructure, I will be allowed/required to keep certain private information about you so that I can validate my accounting records of our transaction on demand.
Keeping this kind of info is not being "up to No Good", it's fulfiling my obligations under the social contract.
The OGL exists to establish a framework for Open Gaming.
Open Gaming is defined as:
The right to copy, modify, and distribute game rules and materials that use those rules without approval, oversight, or cost.
and
A licensing framework to ensure that each person who receives Open Game Content is made aware of their rights, and is required to pass those rights forward to whomever they redistribute the material to.
That's about as close to a parallel with Free Software as possible within the context of game publishing.
Shared Source, on the other hand, means "you can look, but can't touch, redistribute, or comment pubically" on a batch of work. That's a pretty big gap, don't you think?
On the other hand, it's a lot more fun to whisper about a corporate conspiracy to engineer the downfall of the industry.
Ryan S. Dancey CEO, OrganizedPlay (For more about Open Gaming, please visit www.opengamingfoundation.org)
Unfortunately for the principles at stake in this case, I tend to agree with the publisher of the software using the GPL'd code in DLLs that they're not violating the terms of the GPL license.
The GPL is, at heart, a copyright license. It controls the right of a person to use, copy, modify and distribute a work that is copyright. As such, the scope of it's effectiveness is bounded by the scope of the copyright laws.
The crux of the GPL's leverage is it's application in derivative works. If a portion of sourceode licensed using the GPL is combined with other material into a whole, the resulting work will be a derivative work, and the GPL's terms will apply to that work. I seriously doubt that a court will apply any of the computer-science analysis to the code, meaning that terms like "execution thread" and "shared memory" will be ignored. The court will ask "is the GPL'd code combined into a file with the non-GPL'd file", and the answer will be "no". From that point onward, I think the court is going to look very skeptically at the idea that run-time linking can create a derivative work.
In the case of DLLs loaded at runtime, there is never a time when the GPL'd code is combined with the rest of the software to form a derivative work. Interaction with the DLL is in the form of interfaces where the operating system mediates the exchange of data between the calling program and the DLL, and the return of data from the DLL to the calling program. The two pieces of code are never combined into one whole program.
Even if the author of the code in the DLL were to claim that the header files used to construct the DLL calls represented a copyright, and if used in the sourcecode for the calling program represented the creation of a derivative work, the company could simply replace the header files with ordinal values and value types in the description of the external function and call the functions in the DLL without even using the names of the functions or the names of the variables being passed, thus eliminating that source of copyright infringement.
Let me give you another example. Using Windows, printer drivers are stored in DLLs. They are accessed by software at run-time to set printer settings, to rasterize output, and to peform various other kinds of error checking.
If the GPL is held to apply to software that links at runtime to DLLs, it would mean that every Windows printer driver in the world would be required to conform to the GPL in order for GPL'd software to use them.
It has been suggested that the exemption in the GPL for code distributed with the operating system covers printer drivers, but unfortunately many drivers are installed by users and are not a part of the operating system distribution.
Here's an even more extreme example. If the model of "run time calling" is found to create derivative works comprised of the calling software and the target of the call, then anything using an RPC mechanism is also going to have to follow the rules of the GPL. Including the results of RPC calls made using HTTP. Meaning that GPL'd web browsers could only legally connect to GPL'd web servers.
My opinion is that a court will not find the combination of a program using GPL'd code through run-time calls to a GPL'd library to form a derivative work. If it does not form a derivative work, the GPL cannot apply to the calling code. If it does not apply, then distributing a closed-source program that relies on run-time calls to GPL'd DLLs is going to be a legal method of circumventing the copyleft of the GPL.
If the court does hold in that direction, it will essentially mean that the LGPL is a pointless license; anyone will probably be able to encapsulate GPL'd code in DLLs, and as long as they distribute that code in compliance with the GPL, distribute proprietary code that calls those DLLs in the same package. If that happens, the only benefit to using the LGPL will be to allow static linking at compile time to LGPL'd code, something so trivial to replace with a run-time link that the LGPL will become irrelevant.
I am actually glad to see a court test of this issue, because it will help clarify the scope of the GPL and provide the first real road map for how copyleft licenses can be applied to derivative works. It's a valuable lesson to be learned, regardless of the copyleft in question.
Nearly a decade ago, I engaged David in a mock debate at a convention just north of Seattle. He played the role of Dukakis as I remember, and I upheld the role of Bush-the-father.
It is nice to know that in a day and age of constant change, that some people do have a consistent worldview. David's libertarian streak is alive and well; though he continues to see the Republicans as antithetical to those views and the Democrats as merely misguided dupes. A fairly strange interpretation of the history of the two parties, but I forgive him his minor eccentricities.
The Republican Party has a problem. It motivates the very rich donors to its campaigns by promising them tax relief. To a wealthy Republican, paying taxes is one of the worst of all possible expenses, because most wealthy Republicans are convinced in their hearts that the money will absolutely be squandered, and worse yet, squandered on programs diametrically opposed to their ethics, morals and world views.
The problem is that most people don't have a viscereal reaction to paying taxes. (I would argue that most people have no idea how much they actually do pay in taxes because they don't ever touch the payroll deductions and rarely bother to notice the bit of sales tax or social engineering taxes on cigarettes and gasoline.) Thus, the primary plank in the Republican platform is something that their funding sources care deeply and passionately about, but the rank and file don't - and the noncommitted general public doesn't either.
The GOP needs to take a step back to first principles to address these issues. Instead of talking tax cuts, they should be talking overall reduction in the size of government. AFTER they reduce the expenses of government - including the national debt, they should then talk about reducing the tax burden. This stands in stark contrast to the current plan, which is to try and reduce the size of government in parallel with reducing the tax burden - essentially having our cake and eating it too!
Bush-the-son could walk away with a landslide in this election if he promised to delay tax reform until after the national deficit was retired, a social security reform act was passed that ensured the system would be solvent for at least 25 more years, and provided for funding a reasonable level of health care for seniors and the poor without imposing major new taxes.
The wealthy Republicans aren't going to stop funding GOP candidates if those candidates focus on limiting government not reducing taxes - where else are they going to go? The Democrats would lose the only rational argument they have left to explain why they should be allowed any measure of power in the national government if the GOP had a rational plan to address the social safety net. And the economy would benefit as the debt and eventually the national tax burden declined.
Then we could move on to the next important issue in our body politic: Why we have reduced Presidential elections in the minds of many to a decision to support or attack Roe v. Wade, and what we can do to restore sanity to the process of judicial appointments.
Rather than trying to reform a totally corrupt and misguided party, or waste time on ineffective third parties, I'd much rather see someone with Brin's insights apply their attention to the quiet consensus building in the GOP that is close to finding the right path and needs to develop a social conscience to match its fiscal prudence.
Slashdot Mirror
That guy should be crucified.
CCP is aware that an individual claims to have access to the source code of the EVE client. This access is not a security risk to CCP in any way. CCP does not believe in security by obscurity. The Python scripting language that is used by the client can be easily decompiled to generate human-readable code, and CCP has designed its server-side systems with that understanding. Access to the source code for the EVE client exposes no security vulnerabilities, has no privacy protection issues, and poses no threat to our customers' billing information. The server-side interface used by the client is carefully protected to ensure that no abusive or unwanted information is transmitted to, or from the EVE system. Nothing the EVE client can do can affect the game state, no advantage can be gained by manipulating the EVE client, no advantageous or disadvantageous information can be transmitted to other EVE users by altering the EVE client. The EVE client is signed with a security certificate registered to CCP, and hashes are available on our web site for those who wish to ensure the integrity of EVE client download files they may have received from a source other than direct download from CCP's web site.
CCP does not confirm or deny, nor make any comment, regarding issues of internal security, and will not be doing so in this case. As a policy, CCP removes message board posts regarding violations of its EULA and Terms of Service, and CCP considers any alteration of the Client software, including decompilation, to be such violations.
--------
Ryan S. Dancey
Chief Marketing Officer
CCP
If you're "lucky", you have a buffet of connection options in the US. You have cable access (in most places that's 1MB or faster) and DSL from a variety of providers (256K and up, often 1MB and faster). In many places you can get residential wireless, with speeds dependent on how many people are sharing an AP. If you live in high-density housing you may have access to fiber, with speeds from 3MB and up. Generally speaking, the cost of this access is less than $100 per month, and may be as little as $50 per month.
A rough estimate would be that 70% or more of the US population is "lucky" by the above definition.
"Broadband" connections in the US are not hard to get, are not prohibitively expensive, and generally work as advertised with little tech support required. The people who are not well served in the US are rural users, and some users in old inner city areas with a poor existing infrastructure. The people with the most technical support issues are those attempting to host servers and other business class services on residential networks, or those using old, outdated, or unsupported combinations of hardware & software; the average user, with an average hardware/software mix for the most part achieves plug & play connectivity. Tech support loads at most ISPs are 1:10 or higher (in other words, less than 10% of the customers need tech support for connectivity issues) and in most cases, tech support problems are traced to user error.
I suspect that the poor adoption rates for broadband in the US have more to do with lack of interest on the part of consumers than with technical availability. Many people don't view the internet as something they need or want - especially the 40+ percent of the US population 50 and older, who grew up without it don't know what they're missing.
Had >you read the license (Open Gaming License v1.1), viewable at www.opengamingfoundation.org, you would see that there are no content restrictions of any kind. You can create any game component you wish.
The d20 System Trademark License is more restrictive, but is only important if you want to put the d20 Trademark on your product. If you do not, and many publishers have decided not to, you can igore its restrictions.
Sincerely,
Ryan S. Dancey
CEO, OrganizedPlay
I can say with some authority (I helped broker the sale of TSR to Wizards of the Coast, and then ran the tabletop gaming unit inside Wizards from 1998 to 2000) that the previous post in this thread:
"it was AdvancedD&D because of ownership disputes arising from the original Gygax play group. It is now officially the 'D20 system' and not even a game anymore but a set of leaseable rules.
The whole mess is tied up in court over ownership between Gary Gygax, David Cook, some original investors in what used to be TSR, who filed a law suit following the sale to WoTC, and Hasbro INC, the newest 'owners'. "
Is completely and totally false in every respect.
------------------
Ryan S. Dancey
CEO OrganizedPlay
for more information about Open Gaming, please see http://www.opengamingfoundation.org
The Pak don't have hyperdrive, so it would be impossible for them to deal with the core explosion. By the time they realized they had a problem, the wavefront of radiation would have already hit the Pak homeworld because it's moving at the speed of light. They'd see it just before it hit them.
The Pak protectors on the Ringworld are latecomers to the party. There must be some backstory to fill in the gap between the original Pak colonists, Pssthpok's journey, the arrival of the Pak armada the Brenan-Monster fought at Home, and the time required to populate the Ringworld with hominids (and for significant evolutionary differentiation to have had time to work on those hominids.)
And Pak would >never have brought Kzinti to a world populated by their children!
Ryan
Because the Ringworld is aligned with the plane of the galaxy, and the Ringworld's construction stops most radiation, could the Ringworld be used as a lifeboat to ride out the explosion wave from the detonation of the galaxy's core?
It always struck me that there was some implied relationship between the Slaver war, the Ringworld, and the core explosion.
How's this for a theory:
The Slavers used their galaxy-spanning "kill yourselves now" telepathic doomsday weapon, but enough Tnuciptin survived (stasis boxes, travelling via hyperspace, etc.) to take revenge by using their own doomsday weapon to detonate the galaxy's core, ensuring that the Slavers couldn't win the war either.
Assuming that a galaxy-wide civilization was destroyed by the conflict, the Ringworld looks like a localized "last, best effort" solution to survive the core explosion built by someone with extraordinarily good tech, but not a lot of resources, with a crumbling infrastructure. The brute force approaches (bussard ramjets for attitude control, etc.) are at odds with the super-science of scrith and the material used to link the shadow squares.
If you looked at a lifeboat from a modern ocean liner, you'd see some amazing plastics, maybe some electronic wizardry (GPS, radio, etc.) but you'd find basic stuff like oars, life jackets, etc. as well - a mix of high and not-so-high tech to deal with the transition from civilization to an uncivilized environment.
Very much like the Ringworld.
Thanks for your time,
Sincerely,
Ryan S. Dancey
If you bill a customer's credit card, you are required to keep that credit card information on file so that you can reverse the charges and/or provide information on charge traces that may be requested by the customer.
There's an implict social contract between the parties when a credit card is used - the contract is that in exchange for providing a good or service to you with nothing in the way of security other than reliance on a banking infrastructure, I will be allowed/required to keep certain private information about you so that I can validate my accounting records of our transaction on demand.
Keeping this kind of info is not being "up to No Good", it's fulfiling my obligations under the social contract.
The OGL exists to establish a framework for Open Gaming.
Open Gaming is defined as:
The right to copy, modify, and distribute game rules and materials that use those rules without approval, oversight, or cost.
and
A licensing framework to ensure that each person who receives Open Game Content is made aware of their rights, and is required to pass those rights forward to whomever they redistribute the material to.
That's about as close to a parallel with Free Software as possible within the context of game publishing.
Shared Source, on the other hand, means "you can look, but can't touch, redistribute, or comment pubically" on a batch of work. That's a pretty big gap, don't you think?
On the other hand, it's a lot more fun to whisper about a corporate conspiracy to engineer the downfall of the industry.
Ryan S. Dancey
CEO, OrganizedPlay
(For more about Open Gaming, please visit www.opengamingfoundation.org)
Unfortunately for the principles at stake in this case, I tend to agree with the publisher of the software using the GPL'd code in DLLs that they're not violating the terms of the GPL license.
The GPL is, at heart, a copyright license. It controls the right of a person to use, copy, modify and distribute a work that is copyright. As such, the scope of it's effectiveness is bounded by the scope of the copyright laws.
The crux of the GPL's leverage is it's application in derivative works. If a portion of sourceode licensed using the GPL is combined with other material into a whole, the resulting work will be a derivative work, and the GPL's terms will apply to that work. I seriously doubt that a court will apply any of the computer-science analysis to the code, meaning that terms like "execution thread" and "shared memory" will be ignored. The court will ask "is the GPL'd code combined into a file with the non-GPL'd file", and the answer will be "no". From that point onward, I think the court is going to look very skeptically at the idea that run-time linking can create a derivative work.
In the case of DLLs loaded at runtime, there is never a time when the GPL'd code is combined with the rest of the software to form a derivative work. Interaction with the DLL is in the form of interfaces where the operating system mediates the exchange of data between the calling program and the DLL, and the return of data from the DLL to the calling program. The two pieces of code are never combined into one whole program.
Even if the author of the code in the DLL were to claim that the header files used to construct the DLL calls represented a copyright, and if used in the sourcecode for the calling program represented the creation of a derivative work, the company could simply replace the header files with ordinal values and value types in the description of the external function and call the functions in the DLL without even using the names of the functions or the names of the variables being passed, thus eliminating that source of copyright infringement.
Let me give you another example. Using Windows, printer drivers are stored in DLLs. They are accessed by software at run-time to set printer settings, to rasterize output, and to peform various other kinds of error checking.
If the GPL is held to apply to software that links at runtime to DLLs, it would mean that every Windows printer driver in the world would be required to conform to the GPL in order for GPL'd software to use them.
It has been suggested that the exemption in the GPL for code distributed with the operating system covers printer drivers, but unfortunately many drivers are installed by users and are not a part of the operating system distribution.
Here's an even more extreme example. If the model of "run time calling" is found to create derivative works comprised of the calling software and the target of the call, then anything using an RPC mechanism is also going to have to follow the rules of the GPL. Including the results of RPC calls made using HTTP. Meaning that GPL'd web browsers could only legally connect to GPL'd web servers.
My opinion is that a court will not find the combination of a program using GPL'd code through run-time calls to a GPL'd library to form a derivative work. If it does not form a derivative work, the GPL cannot apply to the calling code. If it does not apply, then distributing a closed-source program that relies on run-time calls to GPL'd DLLs is going to be a legal method of circumventing the copyleft of the GPL.
If the court does hold in that direction, it will essentially mean that the LGPL is a pointless license; anyone will probably be able to encapsulate GPL'd code in DLLs, and as long as they distribute that code in compliance with the GPL, distribute proprietary code that calls those DLLs in the same package. If that happens, the only benefit to using the LGPL will be to allow static linking at compile time to LGPL'd code, something so trivial to replace with a run-time link that the LGPL will become irrelevant.
I am actually glad to see a court test of this issue, because it will help clarify the scope of the GPL and provide the first real road map for how copyleft licenses can be applied to derivative works. It's a valuable lesson to be learned, regardless of the copyleft in question.
Nearly a decade ago, I engaged David in a mock debate at a convention just north of Seattle. He played the role of Dukakis as I remember, and I upheld the role of Bush-the-father.
It is nice to know that in a day and age of constant change, that some people do have a consistent worldview. David's libertarian streak is alive and well; though he continues to see the Republicans as antithetical to those views and the Democrats as merely misguided dupes. A fairly strange interpretation of the history of the two parties, but I forgive him his minor eccentricities.
The Republican Party has a problem. It motivates the very rich donors to its campaigns by promising them tax relief. To a wealthy Republican, paying taxes is one of the worst of all possible expenses, because most wealthy Republicans are convinced in their hearts that the money will absolutely be squandered, and worse yet, squandered on programs diametrically opposed to their ethics, morals and world views.
The problem is that most people don't have a viscereal reaction to paying taxes. (I would argue that most people have no idea how much they actually do pay in taxes because they don't ever touch the payroll deductions and rarely bother to notice the bit of sales tax or social engineering taxes on cigarettes and gasoline.) Thus, the primary plank in the Republican platform is something that their funding sources care deeply and passionately about, but the rank and file don't - and the noncommitted general public doesn't either.
The GOP needs to take a step back to first principles to address these issues. Instead of talking tax cuts, they should be talking overall reduction in the size of government. AFTER they reduce the expenses of government - including the national debt, they should then talk about reducing the tax burden. This stands in stark contrast to the current plan, which is to try and reduce the size of government in parallel with reducing the tax burden - essentially having our cake and eating it too!
Bush-the-son could walk away with a landslide in this election if he promised to delay tax reform until after the national deficit was retired, a social security reform act was passed that ensured the system would be solvent for at least 25 more years, and provided for funding a reasonable level of health care for seniors and the poor without imposing major new taxes.
The wealthy Republicans aren't going to stop funding GOP candidates if those candidates focus on limiting government not reducing taxes - where else are they going to go? The Democrats would lose the only rational argument they have left to explain why they should be allowed any measure of power in the national government if the GOP had a rational plan to address the social safety net. And the economy would benefit as the debt and eventually the national tax burden declined.
Then we could move on to the next important issue in our body politic: Why we have reduced Presidential elections in the minds of many to a decision to support or attack Roe v. Wade, and what we can do to restore sanity to the process of judicial appointments.
Rather than trying to reform a totally corrupt and misguided party, or waste time on ineffective third parties, I'd much rather see someone with Brin's insights apply their attention to the quiet consensus building in the GOP that is close to finding the right path and needs to develop a social conscience to match its fiscal prudence.