On further reading, I'm not sure what Linus meant by estoppel. Not that it matters much to me, because he isn't a lawyer.
As for having confidence from a lawyer's opinion, if a lawyer sees two separate documents (files) purporting to grant rights, written by different people in different styles at different times, and one of them (the GPL) has something similar to an "entire agreement" clause (4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License.) then the lawyer's gonna say "you're on shaky legal ground."
I've read the LKML stuff, and Linus's views on derived works, but it is pretty much all speculation by amateurs.
Commonplace doesn't make legal, agreed. But I maintain that you won't find a judge (i.e. ex-lawyer) who'll enforce copyright on contract draftings, except perhaps in the most egregious case of, say, someone buying a legal forms kit (do your own will, real-estate agreement, divorce kits, etc.), photocopying and reselling it.
I love how Linus's word is taken as revealed truth, even on legal matters. He's a good coder, but I wouldn't want him drafting my will.
Two points on the above:
Just try getting a court to enforce copyright on the text of a contract; you'll get laughed out of the room. Lawyers steal clauses from each others' contracts all the time, and it is accepted practice in the legal community.
Estoppel can be used as a shield (i.e. to prevent another party from harming you) but not as a sword. It would take a very good lawyer, and possibly a sleepy judge, to use estoppel in the manner that Linus suggests above.
Normally I wouldn't bother replying to an AC, but since you got modded up...
You might not think of the firmware as of zero value, but that's the price of it, friend. It's "free" software. So unless you've got some oddball economic theory involving a hidden subsidy, we'll just go with the generally accepted price==value. Unless you think there's some secret high value code in what, externally, is (yawn) just another access point?
Also, you didn't rebut my.sig! Spreading the.sig was the sole point of the post.
Don't get me wrong. I think that, under GPL, people are fully entitled to ask for the source for this thing.
But big deal. The source is going to be 99.8% unchanged from the previously public version, and the 0.2% remaining is just going to be bootstrap code and code to work around bugs in the specific hardware, etc. Further, I bet nobody actually does anything interesting with it now that they've got the source. After all, the HW's only good for one thing, and it already does it.
Suing every commodity router builder that comes down the pike with a product like this, which has essentially zero software value added in it, is just going to make some manufacturers squeamish about using Linux inside. And I want them to use Linux, because I, as a consumer, would rather have that than the lower quality, higher cost alternatives that exist.
Looking at it another way, if the OSS community sues over these dinky issues, where they get no great new software to show for it, they'll lose out on luring some big fish to use OSS plus their own super-duper-multimedia-software, which the community could then sue for and actually get something out of it.
P.S. For those that say "but we might get a driver for the buggy chipset that we've only got a buggy closed source driver for now" - will you listen to yourselves? Support another chipset vendor, you twits!
Secure code in risky languages: Hard
on
Exploiting Software
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If you've been around long enough to start seeing patterns in software flaws, keep asking yourself: "What misfeatures of the program's source language contributed to this flaw?"
Personally, I find that I rarely need to access the thirty-second element of a thirty element array, and I'd die happy if I never have to type for(i=0; i<offbyone; i++){ again.
I used to think that Perl with taint checking enabled was the cat's meow, but I'm now leaning towards Lisp. For the rest of you, is it fair to blame the programmer when his tools (which are supposed to make his life easier) fail him? Use better tools!
My Pentium(TM) Family User's Manual, Volume 3: Architecture and Programming Manual shows, on the front cover, a hand holding a chip marked "intel pentium iCOMP(TM) Index=815 (m)(c)INTEL '92 '93
It is either a 90 or a 100MHz part, don't know which.
The practice of inventing a silly(TM) performance index that looks better on your chips than your competitor's, or can't be used without a license, is pretty old.
With only two candidates running, there won't be much of a diversity of viewpoints, and they'll no doubt have virtually (grin) indistinguishable policies on everything, in the middle of the political spectrum.
The alternatives would've been the OS checking for malicious data itself, or asking you once.
Asking you three times didn't make anything more secure, it just annoyed the mouse-driver, who is often the least qualified to answer the question (not in your case).
"Five hundred people" ask a question to which someone obviously knows the answer and the curator, being unable to figure it out him/herself, doesn't do the research?
With Bush declaring that mercury and arsenic are vegetables, and the USDA insisting that testing some cows that can't walk and no cows that can is effective enough, plus those electricity problems in the northeast and California, I'd say the software industry could withstand a little US style "regulation".
They ARE Oscars, just not the glitzy ones that the media covers. Sometimes software wins, sometimes hardware (e.g. innovative camera systems, mounts, sound equipment etcetera).
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, it took a long time after Google was launched for it to beat Altavista. I expect the same will be true here.
As for having confidence from a lawyer's opinion, if a lawyer sees two separate documents (files) purporting to grant rights, written by different people in different styles at different times, and one of them (the GPL) has something similar to an "entire agreement" clause (4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License.) then the lawyer's gonna say "you're on shaky legal ground."
I've read the LKML stuff, and Linus's views on derived works, but it is pretty much all speculation by amateurs.
Commonplace doesn't make legal, agreed. But I maintain that you won't find a judge (i.e. ex-lawyer) who'll enforce copyright on contract draftings, except perhaps in the most egregious case of, say, someone buying a legal forms kit (do your own will, real-estate agreement, divorce kits, etc.), photocopying and reselling it.
Two points on the above:
Just try getting a court to enforce copyright on the text of a contract; you'll get laughed out of the room. Lawyers steal clauses from each others' contracts all the time, and it is accepted practice in the legal community.
Estoppel can be used as a shield (i.e. to prevent another party from harming you) but not as a sword. It would take a very good lawyer, and possibly a sleepy judge, to use estoppel in the manner that Linus suggests above.
De minimis non curat lex.
You might not think of the firmware as of zero value, but that's the price of it, friend. It's "free" software. So unless you've got some oddball economic theory involving a hidden subsidy, we'll just go with the generally accepted price==value. Unless you think there's some secret high value code in what, externally, is (yawn) just another access point?
Also, you didn't rebut my .sig! Spreading the .sig was the sole point of the post.
But big deal. The source is going to be 99.8% unchanged from the previously public version, and the 0.2% remaining is just going to be bootstrap code and code to work around bugs in the specific hardware, etc. Further, I bet nobody actually does anything interesting with it now that they've got the source. After all, the HW's only good for one thing, and it already does it.
Suing every commodity router builder that comes down the pike with a product like this, which has essentially zero software value added in it, is just going to make some manufacturers squeamish about using Linux inside. And I want them to use Linux, because I, as a consumer, would rather have that than the lower quality, higher cost alternatives that exist.
Looking at it another way, if the OSS community sues over these dinky issues, where they get no great new software to show for it, they'll lose out on luring some big fish to use OSS plus their own super-duper-multimedia-software, which the community could then sue for and actually get something out of it.
P.S. For those that say "but we might get a driver for the buggy chipset that we've only got a buggy closed source driver for now" - will you listen to yourselves? Support another chipset vendor, you twits!
Personally, I find that I rarely need to access the thirty-second element of a thirty element array, and I'd die happy if I never have to type for(i=0; i<offbyone; i++){ again.
I used to think that Perl with taint checking enabled was the cat's meow, but I'm now leaning towards Lisp. For the rest of you, is it fair to blame the programmer when his tools (which are supposed to make his life easier) fail him? Use better tools!
It is either a 90 or a 100MHz part, don't know which.
The practice of inventing a silly(TM) performance index that looks better on your chips than your competitor's, or can't be used without a license, is pretty old.
Art imitates life, I guess.
There's commercial software that does what you want, but you can't find anything for free. You could a) pay b) code c) whine to slashdot.
Asking you three times didn't make anything more secure, it just annoyed the mouse-driver, who is often the least qualified to answer the question (not in your case).
Some curator.
And we'll all be on 64 bit CPUs by then, so you can multiply everything by 2*(% of pointers in the resident set).
Remember, wasting RAM funds terroris... oh, wait, that's oil.
With Bush declaring that mercury and arsenic are vegetables, and the USDA insisting that testing some cows that can't walk and no cows that can is effective enough, plus those electricity problems in the northeast and California, I'd say the software industry could withstand a little US style "regulation".
They ARE Oscars, just not the glitzy ones that the media covers. Sometimes software wins, sometimes hardware (e.g. innovative camera systems, mounts, sound equipment etcetera).
Intel convinced HP to discard HP's PA-RISC and go with Itanic, what will HP do now?
Nice to see that soon Itanic/Unobtanium will leave nothing but an oil slick.