That company crops up in various stories. Before Richard Stallman decided to launch the GNU project to give people freedom, he spent two years out-programming Symbolics as punishment for their destruction of MIT's hacker community. Here's where some of the story can be found, about half way down.
Is the exclusion of future products that remove meta data there because the patent doesn't cover that or because the judge wants to give MS a path to avoid future infringement?
Any hints at what MS's possible grounds for further appeal are?
The court transcript, even though it's a public domain document, is only provided to people by the court if they make an account and pay 8c per page. Once you have the page, since it's public domain, you can post it anywhere. RECAP is a Firefox or IceCat plugin that can automatically post those public domain transcripts to archive.org so that we can all read them and link to them, and that would help with documenting case law in the USA on swpat.org, among other things.
The Pirate Party have policies against software patents, so this is good news also in that respect.
Their voting weight will be small, but they can help make the group dynamics of the European Parliament more favourable to campaigners against software patents (much as the Greens did in 2002-2005, and still do).
Logical programmers don't need religions. We can celebrate Grav-mass - a day for "the existence of comprehensible physical laws", which we celebrate by poorly sticking fruit onto a tree:-)
The point of the article is that FSFE's legal department, with its goal of fostering free software, doesn't spend its time doing what the average business legal department does.
To reduce GPL violations, it's much more efficient to educate lawyers and create a forum in which they can exchange best practices, than to wait until they happen and then threaten a court case.
That's training and network building, which FSFE does while you're drafting NDAs.
You can download this proprietary software at no cost, but it's not
free
software (free as in freedom).
No one can see what it's doing, and no one can make changes, and
no one can publish modified versions if there's any problem that users
would like to see changed.
Donate to FSFE - fighting swpat, DRM, etc.
on
To Whom Should I Donate?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Don't forget the organisations that defend your right to write software, like FSFE.
And you don't have to be European to like FSFE's work. As well as fighting against software patents at the European level, we have people working at the UN/WIPO/WSIS global level to prevent harm in future treaty (such as TRIPS, which was the basis for the EU proposal to allow software patents).
And we do licence enforcement, campaigning for open standards, campaigning against the criminalisation of the grey areas of copyright law, and we supported SAMBA in their push to make the documentation published by Microsoft usable by free software developers. And more, but if I stop to think, then this post won't appear high enough to be seen:-)
The legislative approach is difficult, but I think it's the best option in the USA. Getting good legislation would be very difficult. Most legislation in the USA is dreadful, but there's a good constitution, so the judges have the job of reconciling the letter of the law with common sense. So I think this campaign is taking the right approach by working via the court system.
My thoughts exactly. Or, more specifically, one-fingered gloves. This would be more visible as a protest.
Not really - a certain constant movement is needed
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
·
· Score: 1
Wikipedia is in dynamic equalibribium. There are spammers, messers, advertisers, and people using it as a soapbox. The damage from these people can only be kept acceptably low if there are thousands of people who care enough about the content to keep fixing and improving the pages.
Rubbish: "...giving the buyer the opportunity to choose not to purchase it."
This is no good when the manufacturers form a cartel and decide that all devices will be locked this way, or when the content industry forms and decides that content will only be available for devices locked this way.
Then the free market can no longer express what the people want.
And if Linus had done, maybe we'd all have that free driver by now.
The big companies rally everyone to worship Linus, and with the spotlight on, he does: nothing....and that's exactly what the big companies will continue to shine the light there.
Slashdot Mirror
That company crops up in various stories. Before Richard Stallman decided to launch the GNU project to give people freedom, he spent two years out-programming Symbolics as punishment for their destruction of MIT's hacker community. Here's where some of the story can be found, about half way down.
Q: Why are games so expensive?
A: Because it costs us that much to convince you you want to buy it.
Thanks a lot. Navigating the USA's court system isn't my speciality. I just know enough to know how to ask for help :-)
I've added a link now from http://swpat.org/wiki/i4i_v._Microsoft
If we had the transcript, maybe we could see:
The court transcript, even though it's a public domain document, is only provided to people by the court if they make an account and pay 8c per page. Once you have the page, since it's public domain, you can post it anywhere. RECAP is a Firefox or IceCat plugin that can automatically post those public domain transcripts to archive.org so that we can all read them and link to them, and that would help with documenting case law in the USA on swpat.org, among other things.
If we could see the court transcript, we'd have more info about why MS were fined x, y, z.
If someone has a PACER account, they could put the transcript on archive.org simply with the RECAP plugin:
* https://www.recapthelaw.org/
And then we could have a more complete picture on http://en.swpat.org/wiki/I4i_v._Microsoft
You can't grep videos.
If someone could RECAP the court transcript of the recent i4i v. Microsoft case, that would be very useful.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/I4i_v._Microsoft
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Talk:I4i_v._Microsoft
Thanks.
I'm documenting this here: swpat.org/wiki/Bilski. All help appreciated.
If anyone wants to help, I'm documenting this on en.swpat.org/wiki/Blackboard_inc.
The Pirate Party have policies against software patents, so this is good news also in that respect.
Their voting weight will be small, but they can help make the group dynamics of the European Parliament more favourable to campaigners against software patents (much as the Greens did in 2002-2005, and still do).
...or just get a PDF reader that's free software.
Logical programmers don't need religions. We can celebrate Grav-mass - a day for "the existence of comprehensible physical laws", which we celebrate by poorly sticking fruit onto a tree :-)
I better go RTFA, coz from the intro it sure sounds like a patent troll itself.
The point of the article is that FSFE's legal department, with its goal of fostering free software, doesn't spend its time doing what the average business legal department does.
To reduce GPL violations, it's much more efficient to educate lawyers and create a forum in which they can exchange best practices, than to wait until they happen and then threaten a court case.
That's training and network building, which FSFE does while you're drafting NDAs.
You can download this proprietary software at no cost, but it's not free software (free as in freedom).
No one can see what it's doing, and no one can make changes, and no one can publish modified versions if there's any problem that users would like to see changed.
Don't forget the organisations that defend your right to write software, like FSFE.
And you don't have to be European to like FSFE's work. As well as fighting against software patents at the European level, we have people working at the UN/WIPO/WSIS global level to prevent harm in future treaty (such as TRIPS, which was the basis for the EU proposal to allow software patents).
And we do licence enforcement, campaigning for open standards, campaigning against the criminalisation of the grey areas of copyright law, and we supported SAMBA in their push to make the documentation published by Microsoft usable by free software developers. And more, but if I stop to think, then this post won't appear high enough to be seen :-)
You can donate, or join the Fellowship.
No one runs "just a kernel" on their phone. Look at OpenMoko, they use GNU libc just like Debian and Fedora do.
"numerous changes in this revision of the OS"
Asking people to call it GNU/Linux is one thing, but it's not much to ask Slashdot not to call a kernel changelog an OS changelog.
The legislative approach is difficult, but I think it's the best option in the USA. Getting good legislation would be very difficult. Most legislation in the USA is dreadful, but there's a good constitution, so the judges have the job of reconciling the letter of the law with common sense. So I think this campaign is taking the right approach by working via the court system.
FWIW, my background is that I worked on the EU anti-swpat campaign.
My thoughts exactly. Or, more specifically, one-fingered gloves. This would be more visible as a protest.
Wikipedia is in dynamic equalibribium. There are spammers, messers, advertisers, and people using it as a soapbox. The damage from these people can only be kept acceptably low if there are thousands of people who care enough about the content to keep fixing and improving the pages.
BTW, slashdotters wanting to contribute might be interested in the Free Software Wikiproject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Free_Software
Or the Free software portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software
Don't know if it's related, but maybe Ecuador isn't too afraid of MS nowadays since they're moving to free software:
http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/12/13/%C2%A1success-for-free-software-in-latin-america/
Rubbish: "...giving the buyer the opportunity to choose not to purchase it."
This is no good when the manufacturers form a cartel and decide that all devices will be locked this way, or when the content industry forms and decides that content will only be available for devices locked this way.
Then the free market can no longer express what the people want.
Ignore the fines, they're nothing.
The important thing is that when MS eventually publish their specs, they will not be allowed exclude free software from using them.
This is what FSFE and Samba have been working for since 2001, not fines.
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ms-vs-eu/
And if Linus had done, maybe we'd all have that free driver by now.
...and that's exactly what the big companies will continue to shine the light there.
The big companies rally everyone to worship Linus, and with the spotlight on, he does: nothing.