Not being a lawyer, the distinction between exclusive and non-exclusive copyright had escaped me. I found an interesting summary of the potential issues in a different context. You are clearly right about that.
I note with some some interest that neither public performance nor public display is covered by the GPL. Therefore both remain with the original copyright owner. Thus if a theme is GPLed, the copyright owner can potentially sue over a screenshot. There would appear to be nothing preventing Linus Torvalds to sue a publically available Linux server. I sort of knew that there were some unresolved issues around which a license could be developed. I had not realized that such major issues have been ignored by the GPL. In fact item 0 clearly explains that they are not addressed. (And one could theoretically ship a second license along with a piece of GPLed software putting restrictions on the use of said software for public display.)
IANAL but when I read it closely the GPL seems to be an offer on the part of the copyright holder of a contract under which people are allowed to redistribute it. (Something that they would otherwise not have the right to do.) If the copyright holder later did something that lost them their copyright you might have a right to sue them for not maintaining their end of an offered contract, but you have no copyright on the code and hence no right to permit the code to be given away.
Term 0: The license only applies if the Copyright Holder gives permission. By aquiring the code you do not become copyright holder.
Term 1: Permission is granted to redistribute verbatim copies. No copyright is transferred.
Term 2: You are granted the right to make modifications if you meet specific conditions. These modifications would leave the copyright intertwined. I would guess that at this point for the original copyright owner to give away control of the copyright would be a contract conflict.
Term 3: Distribution rights. Again no transfer of copyright here.
Term 4: You may not request any other distribution terms. (Question relevant to Perl. If foo accepts Perl under the GPL, are they *bar*ed from distributing under the original terms? Looks like it!)
Term 5: A reminder that copyright law prevents you from redistributing if you do not negotiate a license with the copyright holder.
Term 6: A note that you have no obligations for the actions of the people that you distribute to. Obviously true since your contract is with the copyright holder(s). They must likewise seek a license with the copyright holder(s) and that is then a matter between the copyright holder and them.
Term 7: Basically outlines in detail the consequences of term 4. If you have no right to distribute except as the license allows, and you are unable to meet the license, then you cannot distribute.
Term 8: Affirms that the copyright holder may add terms regarding geography if there are likely to be enforcement problems of the license in those countries.
Term 9: Outlines FSF policy, and outlines out the consequence of accepting the statement that the FSF asks people to use.
Term 10: An explicit reminder of the rights of the copyright holder to negotiate different distribution terms at their will.
Terms 11, 12: The usual disclaimer in lieu of warranty that we know and love in software.
So it seems pretty clear to me. The license is an offered contract with the copyright holder. Should the copyright holder give up copyright then they are in serious danger of breaching their end of the offered contract. But that doesn't give you any rights to the software.
Regards, Ben
PS Again, IANAL but I am pretty convinced of this line of reasoning.
First of all there is simply no comparison between handing out names of a few people involved in a case of past dirty pool on behalf of the CIA and handing away the technical secret behind how to get from damaging a medium city to levelling a large one. The Progressive has forever raised the stakes in controlling nuclear material. Any enemy government that could previously put together a nuclear bomb can now put together a far more powerful H-bomb. If a terrorist organization managed to deliver a nuclear bomb to New York City previously they could cause serious damage to lower Manhattan. Now they would destroy the whole thing.
That is how serious the question was yet the government could do nothing about it.
Conversely the state secrets revealed by Deep Throat were of tremendous current interest. Did Deep Throat violate national security? No question! Yet the government simply does not have the right to investigate Woodward to find out his sources.
Let me throw another item in the mix. The Pentagon Papers. The government knew that The Times had classified material. They even knew who it was from, and the approximate contents of said material. Yet they were not allowed to prevent the publication of said material, and they were not allowed to investigate which specific documents the press had.
That decision ultimately got the US out of Vietnam. Had it been done earlier tens of thousands of American lives (and many more Vietnamese ones) would have been saved. Conversely had it been done later, more lives would have been lost.
No, in this relatively minor case the FBI has no grounds to investigate any newspaper unless they have direct evidence that the Times was engaged in directly illegal activities such as breaking and entering. Sure, lives are at stake. Well lives were at stake when the US put a puppet regime in power, and lives were at stake when his brutal little dictatorship led to an extremist theocracy. Personally I think that the US should be turning over various people who set up other puppet regimes for war crimes. That will not happen, but don't expect me to shed tears if a few names escape the censors.
Freedom and human rights matters more than their petty dictatorships. If I felt otherwise then I would rather that the Soviet Union had won the cold war.
You seem to think that the NY Times is both legally liable and under an obligation to the government to report information on what their sources are. Neither is true.
Perhaps another basic civic lesson is needed. Do you know who Deep Throat was? He brought down the Nixon government. He changed the face of US politics. Nobody knows who he was.
The press has an obligation for full disclosure to the public and privacy for their sources. Beyond the need to reveal enough to let people check what they have to say, they have zero obligation to indicate who gave them the tip.
People who follow the kernel threads summary are well aware that this topic shows up there.
For instance look here for an example of Linus apologizing for his behaviour, and then there is Donald Becker's problems. Past complaints have shown up as well.
Unfortunately I cannot right now find the post I was most interested in pointing out that the confrontational atmosphere limits participation by people from different cultures. (Specifically Japan.)
OTOH let me wrap up with my all-time favorite discussion of design philosophy, which happens to (coincidentally?) show Linus' flaming abilities...
In short I think there is an issue. Can it be fixed? Should it be fixed? I don't rightly know...
I have friends who have been told directly not to download the source to Sun's stuff to avoid their license restrictions.
Think about that for a bit.
I don't care about the copyright restrictions as long as someone isn't doing something outrageous, unfortunately companies seem to feel obliged to do something outrageouse so I pretty much have to care about them. (And yes, I do contribute bug fixes back when something bothers me. I even contributed one back to slashdot.) Therefore I will avoid gated communities on principle. Even if said company is actually fairly reasonable about it, it isn't worth my time to find that out...
Hey! Let us allow any application here talk to any server in the world by tunnelling a protocol on top of http! And if they care about their privacy, make that https!
And so a generation of application designers make mistakes, and firewalls need to learn to deal with SOAP. Except the pesky https encoded ones, which you cannot peek inside. So ban those.
Care to take bets on whether the boys from Redmond will have something critical (like say the verification that your usage period has not expired) that absolutely must go over https?
If an asteriod big enough to level NYC were to hit Earth, the first we would probably hear of it would be when it hit.
This is almost a certainty if it came from the day-side. (A few years ago a pair of mountains did this and were spotted heading *away* from us - they had actually come closer than the moon.)
And even if we did, how quickly could we put together a mission to divert an asteroid? Even if we did, would it work?
If you try to nudge an asteroid with a nuclear bomb and instead shatter it, what would have possibly wiped out a city could cause significant damage across an entire hemisphere instead.
And don't count on insurance. This would be classified as an "act of God" and insurance companies will not be liable unless you purchased special insurance for it.
Pick some sample regions. You know how many asteroids you know of in those regions. So do a careful search of that section and see what portion of the ones that you turn up are new.
FWIW my understanding of neurons is based on conversations with my wife who happens to have a PhD in biology and is pursuing her MD. (Note, the combined PhD/MD is considered a weaker combination than separate "real" degrees.)
Now I grant that neural networks may be different. And there may be differences between neurons.
But I definitely know that your basic neuron sends a stronger signal by firing more often, not by firing more strongly. Ditto for nerves and sensation. Stronger sensations are caused by more rapid firing, not more intense firing.
The relation between firing and other neurons noticing and caring is not digital. However the neuron has binary way of attempting to communicate - namely firing.
A neuron's life comes down to deciding when to fire. Fire/not fire is a binary decision. There are not different types of firing. You do or you don't.
OTOH the neuron's decision to fire is influenced by all sorts of things from the chemical balance, what other neurons have fired recently, whether it tends to fire with them, etc.
So a neuron makes a digital decision on analog criteria...
If you claim it was a desktop machine, you are clearly as great an idiot as the other posters think you are.
If it was a fileserver, well it is not unlikely that some techs somewhere at Dell did something like this, but I strongly doubt that had much to do with the above announcement.
It just happens to be a pet peeve of mine that many self-proclaimed environmentalists don't have a clue about what does and does not actually have an environmental impact.
Do you know how much toxic waste it takes to make a computer? And disposing of one is not easy either.
It is a safe bet that your computer is a bigger environmental hazard than all of the packaging for all of the software you are likely to buy for it. A very safe bet.
Obviously KDE cannot be distributed under a license that contradicts QPL. But the Qt restrictions are such that you cannot create a derived work from it that is compatible with the GPL.
Period.
If you try all you will get is a piece of software where anyone who wrote GPLed pieces can stop distribution. Most distributers are willing to take their chances, believing that if that happened to them then they could get the licenses sorted out retroactively.
When you assign blame you are making a normative claim about which is more important (said claim is explicit above). And while you have the right to your opinion, large sections of the free software community disagree. Yes, the GPL promotes a social agenda. But that agenda has technical content and technical implications. It is not simply "wrong", and it does not simply "have no place" in technical discussions.
The GPL was specifically designed to discourage licenses like the Qt one which limit the ability of users to modify key components.
The Qt licence was specifically designed to encourage non-commercial use of Qt so that Troll could charge for people using it commercially and for ports to Windows. But in doing so they have to put restrictions on end-users to keep them from just forking the code and creating a free port for Windows. Hence the Qt license is specifically designed to impose the kind of restrictions on software that Stallman et al stand against.
The problem is that the KDE people tried to mix the two. Thereby engaging in exactly what the GPL was meant to prevent. This is not to say that the GPL is the source of the problem. The problem is using it without trying to understand what it means and making sure you fit within its restrictions.
First the note. There seems to be some confusion about what the problem is. Here is a description of exactly how the conflict arises.
Which leads to the question. Is there anything in principle to stop Debian from shipping Qt along with a separate installer and KDE source-code that will allow the target machine to compile a clean copy locally? Then no distribution of tainted binaries has taken place but KDE has been successfully shipped...
Slashdot Mirror
Not being a lawyer, the distinction between exclusive and non-exclusive copyright had escaped me. I found an interesting summary of the potential issues in a different context. You are clearly right about that.
I note with some some interest that neither public performance nor public display is covered by the GPL. Therefore both remain with the original copyright owner. Thus if a theme is GPLed, the copyright owner can potentially sue over a screenshot. There would appear to be nothing preventing Linus Torvalds to sue a publically available Linux server. I sort of knew that there were some unresolved issues around which a license could be developed. I had not realized that such major issues have been ignored by the GPL. In fact item 0 clearly explains that they are not addressed. (And one could theoretically ship a second license along with a piece of GPLed software putting restrictions on the use of said software for public display.)
Hmmm...
Cheers,
Ben
IANAL but when I read it closely the GPL seems to be an offer on the part of the copyright holder of a contract under which people are allowed to redistribute it. (Something that they would otherwise not have the right to do.) If the copyright holder later did something that lost them their copyright you might have a right to sue them for not maintaining their end of an offered contract, but you have no copyright on the code and hence no right to permit the code to be given away.
At least that is the way I read it.
In support of that view look at the terms:
Term 0: The license only applies if the Copyright Holder gives permission. By aquiring the code you do not become copyright holder.
Term 1: Permission is granted to redistribute verbatim copies. No copyright is transferred.
Term 2: You are granted the right to make modifications if you meet specific conditions. These modifications would leave the copyright intertwined. I would guess that at this point for the original copyright owner to give away control of the copyright would be a contract conflict.
Term 3: Distribution rights. Again no transfer of copyright here.
Term 4: You may not request any other distribution terms. (Question relevant to Perl. If foo accepts Perl under the GPL, are they *bar*ed from distributing under the original terms? Looks like it!)
Term 5: A reminder that copyright law prevents you from redistributing if you do not negotiate a license with the copyright holder.
Term 6: A note that you have no obligations for the actions of the people that you distribute to. Obviously true since your contract is with the copyright holder(s). They must likewise seek a license with the copyright holder(s) and that is then a matter between the copyright holder and them.
Term 7: Basically outlines in detail the consequences of term 4. If you have no right to distribute except as the license allows, and you are unable to meet the license, then you cannot distribute.
Term 8: Affirms that the copyright holder may add terms regarding geography if there are likely to be enforcement problems of the license in those countries.
Term 9: Outlines FSF policy, and outlines out the consequence of accepting the statement that the FSF asks people to use.
Term 10: An explicit reminder of the rights of the copyright holder to negotiate different distribution terms at their will.
Terms 11, 12: The usual disclaimer in lieu of warranty that we know and love in software.
So it seems pretty clear to me. The license is an offered contract with the copyright holder. Should the copyright holder give up copyright then they are in serious danger of breaching their end of the offered contract. But that doesn't give you any rights to the software.
Regards,
Ben
PS Again, IANAL but I am pretty convinced of this line of reasoning.
First of all there is simply no comparison between handing out names of a few people involved in a case of past dirty pool on behalf of the CIA and handing away the technical secret behind how to get from damaging a medium city to levelling a large one. The Progressive has forever raised the stakes in controlling nuclear material. Any enemy government that could previously put together a nuclear bomb can now put together a far more powerful H-bomb. If a terrorist organization managed to deliver a nuclear bomb to New York City previously they could cause serious damage to lower Manhattan. Now they would destroy the whole thing.
That is how serious the question was yet the government could do nothing about it.
Conversely the state secrets revealed by Deep Throat were of tremendous current interest. Did Deep Throat violate national security? No question! Yet the government simply does not have the right to investigate Woodward to find out his sources.
Let me throw another item in the mix. The Pentagon Papers. The government knew that The Times had classified material. They even knew who it was from, and the approximate contents of said material. Yet they were not allowed to prevent the publication of said material, and they were not allowed to investigate which specific documents the press had.
That decision ultimately got the US out of Vietnam. Had it been done earlier tens of thousands of American lives (and many more Vietnamese ones) would have been saved. Conversely had it been done later, more lives would have been lost.
No, in this relatively minor case the FBI has no grounds to investigate any newspaper unless they have direct evidence that the Times was engaged in directly illegal activities such as breaking and entering. Sure, lives are at stake. Well lives were at stake when the US put a puppet regime in power, and lives were at stake when his brutal little dictatorship led to an extremist theocracy. Personally I think that the US should be turning over various people who set up other puppet regimes for war crimes. That will not happen, but don't expect me to shed tears if a few names escape the censors.
Freedom and human rights matters more than their petty dictatorships. If I felt otherwise then I would rather that the Soviet Union had won the cold war.
Regards,
Ben
You seem to think that the NY Times is both legally liable and under an obligation to the government to report information on what their sources are. Neither is true.
Perhaps another basic civic lesson is needed. Do you know who Deep Throat was? He brought down the Nixon government. He changed the face of US politics. Nobody knows who he was.
The press has an obligation for full disclosure to the public and privacy for their sources. Beyond the need to reveal enough to let people check what they have to say, they have zero obligation to indicate who gave them the tip.
Regards,
Ben
What the Times did is perfectly legal. Doesn't matter how much the government doesn't like it.
If you think that this is bad, read the thoughts 20 years later of the man who published the design of an H-bomb.
Cheers,
Ben
I first read it with the "strings" command and if I care I ask for it in text because I don't like to open Word documents due to viruses.
You would be amazed at how well people react to being told that you are concerned about viruses...
Cheers,
Ben
People who follow the kernel threads summary are well aware that this topic shows up there.
For instance look here for an example of Linus apologizing for his behaviour, and then there is Donald Becker's problems. Past complaints have shown up as well.
Unfortunately I cannot right now find the post I was most interested in pointing out that the confrontational atmosphere limits participation by people from different cultures. (Specifically Japan.)
OTOH let me wrap up with my all-time favorite discussion of design philosophy, which happens to (coincidentally?) show Linus' flaming abilities...
In short I think there is an issue. Can it be fixed? Should it be fixed? I don't rightly know...
Cheers,
Ben
UCITA gives software companies the right write licenses that let them sue you if you try to expose their products for the crap they are.
Ponder that fact for a bit...
Cheers,
Ben
I have friends who have been told directly not to download the source to Sun's stuff to avoid their license restrictions.
Think about that for a bit.
I don't care about the copyright restrictions as long as someone isn't doing something outrageous, unfortunately companies seem to feel obliged to do something outrageouse so I pretty much have to care about them. (And yes, I do contribute bug fixes back when something bothers me. I even contributed one back to slashdot.) Therefore I will avoid gated communities on principle. Even if said company is actually fairly reasonable about it, it isn't worth my time to find that out...
Cheers,
Ben
Hey! Let us allow any application here talk to any server in the world by tunnelling a protocol on top of http! And if they care about their privacy, make that https!
And so a generation of application designers make mistakes, and firewalls need to learn to deal with SOAP. Except the pesky https encoded ones, which you cannot peek inside. So ban those.
Care to take bets on whether the boys from Redmond will have something critical (like say the verification that your usage period has not expired) that absolutely must go over https?
Cheers,
Ben
If an asteriod big enough to level NYC were to hit Earth, the first we would probably hear of it would be when it hit.
This is almost a certainty if it came from the day-side. (A few years ago a pair of mountains did this and were spotted heading *away* from us - they had actually come closer than the moon.)
And even if we did, how quickly could we put together a mission to divert an asteroid? Even if we did, would it work?
If you try to nudge an asteroid with a nuclear bomb and instead shatter it, what would have possibly wiped out a city could cause significant damage across an entire hemisphere instead.
And don't count on insurance. This would be classified as an "act of God" and insurance companies will not be liable unless you purchased special insurance for it.
Cheers,
Ben
Pick some sample regions. You know how many asteroids you know of in those regions. So do a careful search of that section and see what portion of the ones that you turn up are new.
Cheers,
Ben
Or rather a sad one about the current state of the Patent Office?
Cheers,
Ben
FWIW my understanding of neurons is based on conversations with my wife who happens to have a PhD in biology and is pursuing her MD. (Note, the combined PhD/MD is considered a weaker combination than separate "real" degrees.)
Now I grant that neural networks may be different. And there may be differences between neurons.
But I definitely know that your basic neuron sends a stronger signal by firing more often, not by firing more strongly. Ditto for nerves and sensation. Stronger sensations are caused by more rapid firing, not more intense firing.
Regards,
Ben
The relation between firing and other neurons noticing and caring is not digital. However the neuron has binary way of attempting to communicate - namely firing.
Cheers,
Ben
A neuron's life comes down to deciding when to fire. Fire/not fire is a binary decision. There are not different types of firing. You do or you don't.
OTOH the neuron's decision to fire is influenced by all sorts of things from the chemical balance, what other neurons have fired recently, whether it tends to fire with them, etc.
So a neuron makes a digital decision on analog criteria...
Cheers,
Ben
Made for TV movies are also not eligible for Oscars. (Otherwise PBS has some documentaries that should have won!) Is this a surprise?
Cheers,
Ben
Here that is and search for "Adams".
Cheers,
Ben
I find this story dubious at best.
If you claim it was a desktop machine, you are clearly as great an idiot as the other posters think you are.
If it was a fileserver, well it is not unlikely that some techs somewhere at Dell did something like this, but I strongly doubt that had much to do with the above announcement.
Regards,
Ben
I wasn't complaining about it.
It just happens to be a pet peeve of mine that many self-proclaimed environmentalists don't have a clue about what does and does not actually have an environmental impact.
Cheers,
Ben
Do you know how much toxic waste it takes to make a computer? And disposing of one is not easy either.
It is a safe bet that your computer is a bigger environmental hazard than all of the packaging for all of the software you are likely to buy for it. A very safe bet.
Regards,
Ben
Obviously KDE cannot be distributed under a license that contradicts QPL. But the Qt restrictions are such that you cannot create a derived work from it that is compatible with the GPL.
Period.
If you try all you will get is a piece of software where anyone who wrote GPLed pieces can stop distribution. Most distributers are willing to take their chances, believing that if that happened to them then they could get the licenses sorted out retroactively.
But Debian does not have that freedom.
Hence this discussion.
Cheers,
Ben
When you assign blame you are making a normative claim about which is more important (said claim is explicit above). And while you have the right to your opinion, large sections of the free software community disagree. Yes, the GPL promotes a social agenda. But that agenda has technical content and technical implications. It is not simply "wrong", and it does not simply "have no place" in technical discussions.
Regards,
Ben
The GPL was specifically designed to discourage licenses like the Qt one which limit the ability of users to modify key components.
The Qt licence was specifically designed to encourage non-commercial use of Qt so that Troll could charge for people using it commercially and for ports to Windows. But in doing so they have to put restrictions on end-users to keep them from just forking the code and creating a free port for Windows. Hence the Qt license is specifically designed to impose the kind of restrictions on software that Stallman et al stand against.
The problem is that the KDE people tried to mix the two. Thereby engaging in exactly what the GPL was meant to prevent. This is not to say that the GPL is the source of the problem. The problem is using it without trying to understand what it means and making sure you fit within its restrictions.
Cheers,
Ben
First the note. There seems to be some confusion about what the problem is. Here is a description of exactly how the conflict arises.
Which leads to the question. Is there anything in principle to stop Debian from shipping Qt along with a separate installer and KDE source-code that will allow the target machine to compile a clean copy locally? Then no distribution of tainted binaries has taken place but KDE has been successfully shipped...
Cheers,
Ben