There is a fear of derivative inheritance problems. Why is Disney still pushing to keep Mickey copyrighted? Certainly revenue, but what if Mickey falls into the public domain? The original copyright sticks, but what of derivative works-- does a 1955 copyright of Mickey have the same weight if the 1933 Mickey becomes incapable of protection? What of a 2008 copyright on Mickey? When does Mickey get so old that it actually falls outside of the intent of copyright protection and becomes a service mark or a franchise?
If one writes code, and binds it to a license, the copyright has a lot to do with the license granted. When the copyright is mooted by age, what then of derivative works? Will code be so old that it's a moot point anyway?
Not at all. The copyright owner/assigns can do with the code what they want, but what's published under the GPL remains usable under the constraints of the GPL and subsequent copyright holders. The owner/assigns exclusively can add to the code and have subsequent revisions bound by whatever they choose. But a GPL update to code derived from GPL code is bound by GPL use constraints-- except from the original author/assigns/owners.
And Martin is a great target, because communications decision-making is so controversial. However, there's still a huge number of telco/carrier contributions to various political campaigns and funds that are being ignored here. What of the millions of dollars used to influence policy and legislation? What of congressmen that shill for MPAA/RIAA and the cable/comm companies? It's all PR. Nothing but media blasts and putting Martin on the hotseat (which he richly deserves, for so many reasons).
Yes, that's true. But If I munched the source from soureforge and did something with it (in my case of not being the copyright holder or an assign) then the GPL applies to me. If you, as the copyright holder or assign wants to dinker with it, it's your copyright. Have at it. Once released, users of the code (rather than owners/assigns) are obligated under the usage provisions. They can can copyright their changes at will, but the license that's inherited is GPL. The original copyright holder(s) can mess around as their sense of philosophy dictates.
Good question. I don't know the answer but can guess that it's the extra constraints of the GPL license that cause subsequent use problems for those wishing to take advantage of the BSD licensing premise.
But that's only to the original owner of the work that copyrighted it, and his/her designated specific assigns. Others that use the original work under the use of the GPL copyright variants are bound by the GPL. Only the original owner (or assigns) can deviate from the obligations inferred by the modifications pledged by the GPL. Parallel tracks of development are increasingly common-- original owner permitting.
If, in your analogy, C==B==A then the point is moot-- they are the same property. Derivative works are bound by the assertion of the greatest grant of subsequent rights of use to the original work. That kind of three-card-Monty thinking would get thrown out of the lowest court.
The establishment of copyright becomes the basis for establishing ownership and rights under the work. The GPL doesn't abrogate copyright. Instead, it establishes use of the work under the copyright. If it is released as a GPL work, then the GPL modifies the rights established (if ownership is clear) under the copyright, and subsequent use of the work. We therefore largely agree, excepting that the unquestioning limitations imposed by the GPL on the copyright takes effect at its declaration. It's not the sort of thing where one can say, ok, GPL, then say: no, not GPL. It is, or it is not, in perpetuity of the life of the copyright defined at its declaration. Derivative works are covered by the GPL in inclining clarity through different licensing modifications (2,3). One cannot, however, take it back. It is a subsequent modification that cannot be imperiled by subsequent dictat.
There is case law (sorry, I don't have Lexis, but I recall it clearly enough) that says that one cannot put items into the public domain and recall them. It's a similar principle.
There are a few theories of law (at least in the US) that would tend to negate the redaction. You can't really have it both ways. Once GPL'd, there are many theories that allow torts and injury remedies based on having used the GPL-licensed code. Published, the GPL code presents specific tenets of use, including many rights given subsequent users. Pulling those rights would be a train wreck; lots of injuries. I respect Moglen, and IANAL; however, I see too many possible injuries to users to try to revert or alter the license-- unless it's a superset of the GPL, and even then, it's tenuous.
You can't effectively revoke the GPL, once you've licensed your code using it--in any of its versions. The cat's out of the bag once you've pledged it. There is no mechanism to call it all back, once released in this way. You can fork your own code, go a different direction, but the basis of that code is GPL for better (and rarely worse).
Re-write it? Easily done in most cases. The copyright nature of the release remains for the duration of the law in effect at the time the work was copyrighted (or lefted, or whatever).
The arguments you've heard about revoking GPL don't hold water, I'm afraid.
That's what a colleague of mine in a huge CPA firm believes in: trailing edge. No debugging. Everything's fixed by the time he gets there. Users probably already know about the apps and all. Parts are easy to find, maybe on eBay or CL. Lots of books and docs and howtos are easily available. All the service packs are out. Interoperability problems have been solved. Goose it with faster hardware and things work the first time out with little fear of reliability or interoperability.
Is he crazy? No, just so financially conservative that I've seen holes clean through the bottom of his shoes. And he leads a very uneventful life. There might be some wisdom in that. Consider not having to constantly patch stuff through the first half of its life cycle. Or that everything you've deployed has a chance of still working with everything you've deployed without a lot of drama.
He won't jump out of an airplane with a parachute. But I will. And I'll get the latest stuff. And I'll aggressively integrate it and denigrate the vendors whose stuff isn't baked when it arrives in a 'production' version. Is he wiser? Perhaps. Duller, too.
Saying that Apple is no different than Verizon T-Mobile, et al, is damning with faint praise. The telcos/carriers want a proprietary infrastructure so that they can control both stability and product sales. They're both weak and monopolistic arguments.
Until someone litigates, nothing will happen. My personal hope is for a rogue skype client. The telcos don't currently have the ability to figure out what's a skype conversation, and what's other 'authorized' digital traffic. A nice VoIP app would be a great kick in the shorts to their revenue streams.
We went through anti-trust with Judge Greene (remember him? The Baby Bells?) and there's not enough mood to take these sleazebags back into US Federal Court and give them a nice drubbing. Perhaps in a few years, but not now. Apple gets to look like Microsoft for a while. The surf's up for them. This halo-effect won't last long when the public attitude shifts towards the splendor of better products-- and you'll see some of them at the end of the month at CTIA. Happiness now spreads at the speed of the Internet and texting. So does unhappiness.
He can take his ten euros, his hardware sales, his subscriptions, and self-fornicate with them.
What an abnormally stupid thing for even a marketing guy to say. It seems to thread together the common hubris among carriers, telcos, and their equipment providers. Quick-- somebody tell them about the lipfart problem before it's too late. I actually like Sony Ericsson phones (they last longer) over Moto, LG, and the iGroan.
Linux users are tool makers, and gamers like to be entertained and challenged. The intersection of these sets is small. Builders like to make things, while gamers need to compete. Toolmakers vs gamers yeilds a small set.
So Thomson, a French company (if memory serves) is serving the interests of the Fraunhofer Institute? This would seem to make sense despite whose managing the IP-- it's an EU venue.
The Fraunhofer Institute, who invented the MP3 and makes similar formats, is likely a source of information about the violators of at least the codec IP infringement. MP3 and many other formats aren't in the public domain in the GPL sense. They're likely behind part of this.
I heard an excellent synopsis of current opinion, yesterday (while waiting for my tires to be changed), in the form of this quote:
"pendulum's gonna fcuking swing in November, baby. Gerald Ford gave amnesty to Nixon. Obama won't. They better torch the place on the way out and learn how to drink tea 'cause the UK's the only place that's gonna let those jokers stay and not hang."
While there's no seeming penalty, civil or criminal, there is a bigger penalty: ongoing confidence in government. The hubris and arrogance has become intolerable. This is just one symptom of a government gone berserk. Vetoing a bill on torture was another. Sliming the US House of Representatives because it won't pass a bill allowing the telcos to violate the very tenets of liberty in the constitution is another. The list is long. The list is sad. These are evil days, my friends.
We agree in principal, but what of the missing iPhones debacle? Lots of them made it to China, Japan, India, and so forth.
Yes, Apple makes some apparent gross margin on each phone. In some spreadsheet and presentation somewhere deep in the goo of Apple's offices in Cupertino, there's a number they didn't make. That's the loss. Every iPhone that doesn't get good-buddy-carrier connected means Apple loses $$ on that phone-- despite the gross margin. Idiots ^H^H^H People that buy the AT&T deal in the US get robbed, in my opinion. Worse, they're captive to a carrier that's both weak and stupid (not that I've found one with brains-- from a consumer's perspective).
Your argument that there's perhaps a positive gross margin on each and every phone is valid. So is the loss when someone puts in a Telecom Italia or an o2 or whatever SIM they like into the phone instead of the partner/revenue'd SIM. You call it value-add, I call it lost revenue.... not that Apple deserves it anyway.
Uh, read the thread and you'll understand: you get one task, and it terminates. Have a nice single-threaded day. MacOS !=Unix in this particular feature set.
Mmmmmm. Nice OSX code. Always tasty. Binaries the size of Minnesota.
Sure you can port stuff. That's fine. You can do that (to a certain extent) with Windows Mobile, too. The "leg-up" reminds me of a dog and fire hydrant.
With current OSX frameworks, it's now time to disable lots of stuff you've come to enjoy. READ the docs. Please throw out your multitasking and other delicious inter-app communications frameworks; get lots of your information from your newly rebuilt parsers. Do the type-checking carefully, lest you blow up your app, and others, too. That's because it's a serial machine, not a concurrency machine. That means that object types have to be built carefully to thread linearly and consecutively while you have the machine, because it's single-task and other events will cause havoc-- and they're not in your control as the kernel decides 'who's-on-first'.
1) as a rev 1.0, this one was.8 and went for glitz and Apple market momentum rather than any real groundbreaking. Certainly it will evolve. The question is whether to devote time coding for it. Some have values that say yes, others a resounding NO 2) there is little doubt that Steve Jobs can sell shit on a shingle. Nice ideas are then relegated to the scrap heap: good by XServe RAID SAN boxes, just to cite the most recent one 3) if Apple doesn't get the sales contract cut from a carrier, they lose money. It's $$ lost. It's a binding restriction that's clever, as it's also very onerous as well. 4) The Apple iPhone SDK has an abstraction layer that's different than other systems (take Opera or Symbian, for generic examples). Code for Palm, Windows, then add-in carrier choke-holds, and it's an interesting time for phone coders. 5) Again, an abstraction layer for OSX is different in so many ways. The idea of playing on a number of platforms so as not to be captive to the whims, fancy, and market destruction of a single platform is very important. Single-tasking mandates are perhaps the roughest and betray the problems with the OSX microkernel. 6) No, I believe Apple will digest the best. Make a kewl app, and like Microsoft (and so many others that have captive platforms) and you'll see Apple finding a way to offer similar functionality. People have voted their preferences in software on such platforms for decades; the vendors usually get the best of breed vote, then amazingly (not) that functionality finds its way into the base offering, repackaged, repainted, whatever. Yes, they also live by the success of third party apps that are smart enough to prevent the platform vendor from digesting their ideas successfully. Apple is no different (in my mind) than Microsoft in this regard. You need only to look at the mix of apps in Leopard, compared to OSX 10.0 (more like NeXtStEP) to understand why/how/when this happens.
Paying customers being pissed doesn't bother Apple unless they stop becoming paying customers. If I were to list the long list of foibles with Leopard, PowerBooks, MacBooks, etc., it would result in the usual shitstorm of Apple FanBoiZ spewing their longwinded, prejudicial torts. This is a religion we're talking about, and it's just as strong as the Linux or Windows religion. These things are only tools, not orthodoxy. I tried one for a day; I'll take my battered SE T610 as a functional tool over the iPhone for another year. There are lots of competitors in this market that aren't smart enough to fire up a developer network; the list of these hardware makers that don't understand software is a long list-- starting with Motorola and extending to LG and others (RIP Sanyo and a host of others that don't get it).
And with that said, I know at least three coders that are in some soft of bliss/nirvana state this week because of the SDK release. You can almost smell the incense and coffee burning. That's fine. Not one of them has bought the damned phone yet.... but now they will. Watch for an eBay spike in iPhone sales as a direct result of the SDK release. It's almost amusing.
1) the base phone is a barely 3G, non-multi-tasking, bling-bling phone, at least for now 2) other organizations (open moku will be cited along with others) have failed to get developer energy 3) the iPhone's business model is being constantly corrupted (look at SIM unlock #s to understand 'renegade thinking') 4) unless you find your own business model, or market through Apple, you won't get much but love with your code 5) your code will need lots of adaptation to be used on other phone substrates 6) Apple will likely digest the best and discard the rest-- have we not learned anything?
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There is a fear of derivative inheritance problems. Why is Disney still pushing to keep Mickey copyrighted? Certainly revenue, but what if Mickey falls into the public domain? The original copyright sticks, but what of derivative works-- does a 1955 copyright of Mickey have the same weight if the 1933 Mickey becomes incapable of protection? What of a 2008 copyright on Mickey? When does Mickey get so old that it actually falls outside of the intent of copyright protection and becomes a service mark or a franchise?
If one writes code, and binds it to a license, the copyright has a lot to do with the license granted. When the copyright is mooted by age, what then of derivative works? Will code be so old that it's a moot point anyway?
Sorry; maybe I've had too much coffee.
Not at all. The copyright owner/assigns can do with the code what they want, but what's published under the GPL remains usable under the constraints of the GPL and subsequent copyright holders. The owner/assigns exclusively can add to the code and have subsequent revisions bound by whatever they choose. But a GPL update to code derived from GPL code is bound by GPL use constraints-- except from the original author/assigns/owners.
Listing the sins would take terabytes that I don't have time for. Sorry.
And Martin is a great target, because communications decision-making is so controversial. However, there's still a huge number of telco/carrier contributions to various political campaigns and funds that are being ignored here. What of the millions of dollars used to influence policy and legislation? What of congressmen that shill for MPAA/RIAA and the cable/comm companies? It's all PR. Nothing but media blasts and putting Martin on the hotseat (which he richly deserves, for so many reasons).
Yes, that's true. But If I munched the source from soureforge and did something with it (in my case of not being the copyright holder or an assign) then the GPL applies to me. If you, as the copyright holder or assign wants to dinker with it, it's your copyright. Have at it. Once released, users of the code (rather than owners/assigns) are obligated under the usage provisions. They can can copyright their changes at will, but the license that's inherited is GPL. The original copyright holder(s) can mess around as their sense of philosophy dictates.
Good question. I don't know the answer but can guess that it's the extra constraints of the GPL license that cause subsequent use problems for those wishing to take advantage of the BSD licensing premise.
I understand that logic.
But that's only to the original owner of the work that copyrighted it, and his/her designated specific assigns. Others that use the original work under the use of the GPL copyright variants are bound by the GPL. Only the original owner (or assigns) can deviate from the obligations inferred by the modifications pledged by the GPL. Parallel tracks of development are increasingly common-- original owner permitting.
If, in your analogy, C==B==A then the point is moot-- they are the same property. Derivative works are bound by the assertion of the greatest grant of subsequent rights of use to the original work. That kind of three-card-Monty thinking would get thrown out of the lowest court.
The establishment of copyright becomes the basis for establishing ownership and rights under the work. The GPL doesn't abrogate copyright. Instead, it establishes use of the work under the copyright. If it is released as a GPL work, then the GPL modifies the rights established (if ownership is clear) under the copyright, and subsequent use of the work. We therefore largely agree, excepting that the unquestioning limitations imposed by the GPL on the copyright takes effect at its declaration. It's not the sort of thing where one can say, ok, GPL, then say: no, not GPL. It is, or it is not, in perpetuity of the life of the copyright defined at its declaration. Derivative works are covered by the GPL in inclining clarity through different licensing modifications (2,3). One cannot, however, take it back. It is a subsequent modification that cannot be imperiled by subsequent dictat.
There is case law (sorry, I don't have Lexis, but I recall it clearly enough) that says that one cannot put items into the public domain and recall them. It's a similar principle.
There are a few theories of law (at least in the US) that would tend to negate the redaction. You can't really have it both ways. Once GPL'd, there are many theories that allow torts and injury remedies based on having used the GPL-licensed code. Published, the GPL code presents specific tenets of use, including many rights given subsequent users. Pulling those rights would be a train wreck; lots of injuries. I respect Moglen, and IANAL; however, I see too many possible injuries to users to try to revert or alter the license-- unless it's a superset of the GPL, and even then, it's tenuous.
You can't effectively revoke the GPL, once you've licensed your code using it--in any of its versions. The cat's out of the bag once you've pledged it. There is no mechanism to call it all back, once released in this way. You can fork your own code, go a different direction, but the basis of that code is GPL for better (and rarely worse).
Re-write it? Easily done in most cases. The copyright nature of the release remains for the duration of the law in effect at the time the work was copyrighted (or lefted, or whatever).
The arguments you've heard about revoking GPL don't hold water, I'm afraid.
We would agree. The word 'piker' comes to mind. And he's also astoundingly rich, if somewhat bereft of common sense.
That's what a colleague of mine in a huge CPA firm believes in: trailing edge. No debugging. Everything's fixed by the time he gets there. Users probably already know about the apps and all. Parts are easy to find, maybe on eBay or CL. Lots of books and docs and howtos are easily available. All the service packs are out. Interoperability problems have been solved. Goose it with faster hardware and things work the first time out with little fear of reliability or interoperability.
Is he crazy? No, just so financially conservative that I've seen holes clean through the bottom of his shoes. And he leads a very uneventful life. There might be some wisdom in that. Consider not having to constantly patch stuff through the first half of its life cycle. Or that everything you've deployed has a chance of still working with everything you've deployed without a lot of drama.
He won't jump out of an airplane with a parachute. But I will. And I'll get the latest stuff. And I'll aggressively integrate it and denigrate the vendors whose stuff isn't baked when it arrives in a 'production' version. Is he wiser? Perhaps. Duller, too.
Saying that Apple is no different than Verizon T-Mobile, et al, is damning with faint praise. The telcos/carriers want a proprietary infrastructure so that they can control both stability and product sales. They're both weak and monopolistic arguments.
Until someone litigates, nothing will happen. My personal hope is for a rogue skype client. The telcos don't currently have the ability to figure out what's a skype conversation, and what's other 'authorized' digital traffic. A nice VoIP app would be a great kick in the shorts to their revenue streams.
We went through anti-trust with Judge Greene (remember him? The Baby Bells?) and there's not enough mood to take these sleazebags back into US Federal Court and give them a nice drubbing. Perhaps in a few years, but not now. Apple gets to look like Microsoft for a while. The surf's up for them. This halo-effect won't last long when the public attitude shifts towards the splendor of better products-- and you'll see some of them at the end of the month at CTIA. Happiness now spreads at the speed of the Internet and texting. So does unhappiness.
He can take his ten euros, his hardware sales, his subscriptions, and self-fornicate with them.
What an abnormally stupid thing for even a marketing guy to say. It seems to thread together the common hubris among carriers, telcos, and their equipment providers. Quick-- somebody tell them about the lipfart problem before it's too late. I actually like Sony Ericsson phones (they last longer) over Moto, LG, and the iGroan.
Linux users are tool makers, and gamers like to be entertained and challenged. The intersection of these sets is small. Builders like to make things, while gamers need to compete. Toolmakers vs gamers yeilds a small set.
So Thomson, a French company (if memory serves) is serving the interests of the Fraunhofer Institute? This would seem to make sense despite whose managing the IP-- it's an EU venue.
The Fraunhofer Institute, who invented the MP3 and makes similar formats, is likely a source of information about the violators of at least the codec IP infringement. MP3 and many other formats aren't in the public domain in the GPL sense. They're likely behind part of this.
I heard an excellent synopsis of current opinion, yesterday (while waiting for my tires to be changed), in the form of this quote:
"pendulum's gonna fcuking swing in November, baby. Gerald Ford gave amnesty to Nixon. Obama won't. They better torch the place on the way out and learn how to drink tea 'cause the UK's the only place that's gonna let those jokers stay and not hang."
While primitive, it's got a certain flavor.
While there's no seeming penalty, civil or criminal, there is a bigger penalty: ongoing confidence in government. The hubris and arrogance has become intolerable. This is just one symptom of a government gone berserk. Vetoing a bill on torture was another. Sliming the US House of Representatives because it won't pass a bill allowing the telcos to violate the very tenets of liberty in the constitution is another. The list is long. The list is sad. These are evil days, my friends.
We agree in principal, but what of the missing iPhones debacle? Lots of them made it to China, Japan, India, and so forth.
Yes, Apple makes some apparent gross margin on each phone. In some spreadsheet and presentation somewhere deep in the goo of Apple's offices in Cupertino, there's a number they didn't make. That's the loss. Every iPhone that doesn't get good-buddy-carrier connected means Apple loses $$ on that phone-- despite the gross margin. Idiots ^H^H^H People that buy the AT&T deal in the US get robbed, in my opinion. Worse, they're captive to a carrier that's both weak and stupid (not that I've found one with brains-- from a consumer's perspective).
Your argument that there's perhaps a positive gross margin on each and every phone is valid. So is the loss when someone puts in a Telecom Italia or an o2 or whatever SIM they like into the phone instead of the partner/revenue'd SIM. You call it value-add, I call it lost revenue.... not that Apple deserves it anyway.
Uh, read the thread and you'll understand: you get one task, and it terminates. Have a nice single-threaded day. MacOS !=Unix in this particular feature set.
Mmmmmm. Nice OSX code. Always tasty. Binaries the size of Minnesota.
Sure you can port stuff. That's fine. You can do that (to a certain extent) with Windows Mobile, too. The "leg-up" reminds me of a dog and fire hydrant.
With current OSX frameworks, it's now time to disable lots of stuff you've come to enjoy. READ the docs. Please throw out your multitasking and other delicious inter-app communications frameworks; get lots of your information from your newly rebuilt parsers. Do the type-checking carefully, lest you blow up your app, and others, too. That's because it's a serial machine, not a concurrency machine. That means that object types have to be built carefully to thread linearly and consecutively while you have the machine, because it's single-task and other events will cause havoc-- and they're not in your control as the kernel decides 'who's-on-first'.
We would agree on some points, not on others:
.8 and went for glitz and Apple market momentum rather than any real groundbreaking. Certainly it will evolve. The question is whether to devote time coding for it. Some have values that say yes, others a resounding NO
1) as a rev 1.0, this one was
2) there is little doubt that Steve Jobs can sell shit on a shingle. Nice ideas are then relegated to the scrap heap: good by XServe RAID SAN boxes, just to cite the most recent one
3) if Apple doesn't get the sales contract cut from a carrier, they lose money. It's $$ lost. It's a binding restriction that's clever, as it's also very onerous as well.
4) The Apple iPhone SDK has an abstraction layer that's different than other systems (take Opera or Symbian, for generic examples). Code for Palm, Windows, then add-in carrier choke-holds, and it's an interesting time for phone coders.
5) Again, an abstraction layer for OSX is different in so many ways. The idea of playing on a number of platforms so as not to be captive to the whims, fancy, and market destruction of a single platform is very important. Single-tasking mandates are perhaps the roughest and betray the problems with the OSX microkernel.
6) No, I believe Apple will digest the best. Make a kewl app, and like Microsoft (and so many others that have captive platforms) and you'll see Apple finding a way to offer similar functionality. People have voted their preferences in software on such platforms for decades; the vendors usually get the best of breed vote, then amazingly (not) that functionality finds its way into the base offering, repackaged, repainted, whatever. Yes, they also live by the success of third party apps that are smart enough to prevent the platform vendor from digesting their ideas successfully. Apple is no different (in my mind) than Microsoft in this regard. You need only to look at the mix of apps in Leopard, compared to OSX 10.0 (more like NeXtStEP) to understand why/how/when this happens.
Paying customers being pissed doesn't bother Apple unless they stop becoming paying customers. If I were to list the long list of foibles with Leopard, PowerBooks, MacBooks, etc., it would result in the usual shitstorm of Apple FanBoiZ spewing their longwinded, prejudicial torts. This is a religion we're talking about, and it's just as strong as the Linux or Windows religion. These things are only tools, not orthodoxy. I tried one for a day; I'll take my battered SE T610 as a functional tool over the iPhone for another year. There are lots of competitors in this market that aren't smart enough to fire up a developer network; the list of these hardware makers that don't understand software is a long list-- starting with Motorola and extending to LG and others (RIP Sanyo and a host of others that don't get it).
And with that said, I know at least three coders that are in some soft of bliss/nirvana state this week because of the SDK release. You can almost smell the incense and coffee burning. That's fine. Not one of them has bought the damned phone yet.... but now they will. Watch for an eBay spike in iPhone sales as a direct result of the SDK release. It's almost amusing.
1) the base phone is a barely 3G, non-multi-tasking, bling-bling phone, at least for now
2) other organizations (open moku will be cited along with others) have failed to get developer energy
3) the iPhone's business model is being constantly corrupted (look at SIM unlock #s to understand 'renegade thinking')
4) unless you find your own business model, or market through Apple, you won't get much but love with your code
5) your code will need lots of adaptation to be used on other phone substrates
6) Apple will likely digest the best and discard the rest-- have we not learned anything?