Of course this is only a survey of people who are so advertiser friendly as to sit and tell a bunch of market researchers what they think. People who strongly dislike advertising are no doubt fairly strongly inclined towards telling those market researchers to fuck off instead of giving free clues as to how to target their insidious mindraping propaganda more efficiently. I know I am.
I'd far rather Creative decided it needed a monopoly on mp3 players, and it succeeds in removing the iPod from store shelves and forces Apple to pay them swingeing royalties for their supposedly amazing software idea, thus, at one stroke, teaching Apple a much-needed lesson in Why Being A Litigous Gang of IP-Hoarding Fuckbags Is A Bad Thing, illustrating to the vast, mindless, consumer hordes exactly why software patents are evil and reducing the number of iPod-afflicted zombies polluting all my train journeys with subtle-yet-annoying ka-ching noises emanating from their ears.
But I'm guessing there'll be a settlement before it goes that far, alas.
It's a minor matter if you're Nvidia and you're not distributing the Linux kernel with your shim/blob setup. If you're distributing all of the kernel+shim+blob together, then you could well be infringing the kernel copyrights.
No. At least not according to the FSF's theories on the subject.
A driver linked to the kernel shares the same namespace, addressspace, and whathaveyou. The FSF believes that when you link your library/driver to the main executable is irrelevant, the main criterion is *how* the two parts link to each other, and not whether you do it at runtime or compiletime. If the kernel was only talking to the driver by means of sockets and signals and sundry other interprocess communication, then the two would be seperate. As it is, though, Linux kernel modules are part of the kernel executable and so when placed together in a medium so that the driver can be linked in, then it's a derivative work.
Autoconf is just a program invoked by others that communicates to others mostly by writing out files, IIRC. That's nowhere near linked closely enough to another program to be derived from it.
There are other theories as to what constitutes a derivative work when it comes to libraries and linking, and not much case law to go on.
It's not about having seperate downloads, it's about who's distributing what.
If you offer someone Linux and tell them where to get the binary blobs, then you're abiding by the GPL because what you're distributing is purely GPL-compatible. The blob distributors are also GPL compliant, since they're not distributing other people's GPLed code, and the drivers aren't derivative works of a GPL'ed project, such as linux, because the binary blobs are the same binary blobs used in the windows driver.
So in normal circumstances, the person making the derivative work is the user. The GPL doesn't mind users marrying non-GPL code to the GPLed bit, so long as the user doesn't distribute it. Kororaa seems to have made the mistake of putting the blobs in with the Linux kernel proper on a livecd, which means it may have infringed.
Erm, the allegations are based a story that entered the public domain in an NYT story in December 2005 which alleged that President Bush signed a secret order shortly after September 11th 2001 to conduct warrantless wiretaps of US citizens. This is backed up by the testimony of one Mark Klein, an AT&T tech who was approached by the NSA in 2002 to do some of the work. Clinton had absolutely nothing to do with the current allegations of illegal domestic spying. This is GWB's crime all the way.
Now I wouldn't call you a liar if you said that Clinton had perhaps done something similar sometime, but the reason people didn't complain about Clinton doing this is because there was, and AFAIK still is, no real evidence that he did so, and there was certainly no major news outlet or civil rights group making any allegations of domestic wiretapping when he was in power. If you remember, the US media jumped all over Clinton for all sorts of personal scandals when he was in power (Whitewater, Lewinsky, etc); if there wasn't an outcry over Clinton, it's because there wasn't an allegation to cry about.
Why should people complain about things that they've probably not heard of, and for which there appears to be no evidence?
The next level in corporate deniability:
on
Faking a Company
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Of course, once this 'faked company' meme has taken hold, the multinationals will exploit it to the full by making sure all their outsourced third world factories and production centres can be turned into 'pirate' factories at short notice:
Bleeding heart liberal type: You're running sweatshops and paying 12 year olds 10 cents for an 18 hour working day! You're pumping toxic chemicals into the drinking water supply! You're making defective products that explode and kill people! You bribe politicians! Your factories are run by fascist thugs who hire death squads to kill union organisers! And we have proof this time! You're going to jail at long last!
CEO of MegaCorp, your friendly neighbourhood planet-raping multinational: Errr umm... that's not us! Yeah, that's it! They're a bunch of pirates who made a fake MegaCorp factory! We've never seen those guys in our lives! Officer! Arrest that factory! Secretary - type me up a shoddy-looking forgery of our licensing agreement. "Fake" factory workers - You're all fired! Back to unemployment and poverty for you!
Police forces in Britain already send the football clubs a bill for policing their event. The police don't make a profit but they do recoup a big portion of the costs.
Violence between fans at football matches is very rare these days, due to policing and segregation and whatnot. What violence there is tends to take place away from the football ground itself. If a fight happens between rival fans on a train 30 miles away from a football stadium, how realistic is it to blame the football clubs? Come to think of it, if there is some sort of causing link between gaming and violence, it's likely so subtle and tenuous that you really cannot point any finger of blame at gamemakers, or censor them. You can't say speech isn't speech because if you say something to half a million people, two of them might twist your words enough to use them to kill somebody. Pretty much every preacher, politician or rock star in the land would have to be forcibly silenced if that was the case.
Top football matches in the UK are already rather expensive and the football fans rarely complain, except if venal American asset-strippers happen to take over their club.
Re:Thats what abandonware is!
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 5, Informative
No. It's not legal. It's just a law that isn't enforced much, in that most copyright holders of really old games don't bother chasing up abandonware sites, since it's not exactly a huge revenue loss.
Funnily enough I followed your link and it said this at me: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. -- Kent Pitman "
If you're going to post links, link to something that backs up whatever daft point you're trying to make, instead of ripping it to shreds.
Well the figures you give seem well on the high side; there's considerable dispute among historians as to what the actual numbers are. Usually even the highest "Black Book of Communism" type figures give around 20 million for the USSR, not the 60 million you mention, and those figures include famines and suchlike. Which is perhaps right, as long as every avoidable death in a noncommunist country gets attributed to some sort of government too, which I don't really see happening - the famine deaths in British-ruled India, or large numbers of deaths from easily-treated diseases in Latin American shanty-towns don't seem to get counted as part of the capitalist tally.
Besides, to get anywhere near that 60 million figure, I imagine you must be attributing the 20 million or so deaths caused by the Nazi invasion of World War 2 to 'communism'.
As for the figures of intellectuals, I imagine there are probably exactly 0 self-identified communists writing regularly for the Guardian. I looked at the columnists list on their website, and only Paul Foot, who is dead, and Julie Burchill, who is now a Christian and writes for the Times, struck me as communists. The self-identified communists among the other two groups are probably a tiny fraction of the total. Did you timewarp here from 1947 or something?
Well if you're to count all killings by all muslims everywhere with only US anti-abortion bombings, you're sure to come up with a one-sided figure.
As far as recent times are concerned, you've neglected to mention the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian muslims by Serbs and Croats during the Balkan wars, or the massacres committed by the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda. And there's Northern Ireland too. Rwanda's Hutu's? Christians, mostly. Mexico has an internal refugee problem in part because of Protestant-Catholic conflict going on (among other causes). Both George Bush and Tony Blair have both mentioned God while trying to justify their criminal and/or disastrous invasion of Iraq.
And if you want to go through 'all of US history' you might find a lot more deaths at the hands of Christians. It was Christian beliefs that justified the Native American genocide, and that genocide included forcible conversion to Christianity too. The KKK were quite militantly protestant among other things. John Brown and his gang killed people for primarily religious reasons (and quite right too, of course). Salem Witchtrials anyone?
Christians can be just as nasty as Muslims y'know. Violence is a people thing, not a religion thing.
You're obviously a tad naive. Microsoft is almost certainly scared of people dual-booting with non-Microsoft OSes.
From Halloween I, A leaked, internal Microsoft document on Open Source Software:
"OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat. " (my emphasis)
Notice that there are THREE ways here that Microsoft feels that OSS is threatening it. A 'revenue threat', which is people not spending money on things that Microsoft sells, a 'platform threat' which is when people have an alternative to using Microsoft software, and Microsoft might lose it's monopoly, and a 'developer mindshare threat' which is when people make software for non-Microsoft platforms.
A dual-booted OSX/Vista box isn't a revenue threat, but it's potentially a 'platform threat' and a 'developer mindshare threat' (although the latter might be part-mitigated by your games example, of course). Microsoft isn't happy if it merely gets your money; it needs to totally dominate your computing world.
IBM found out about the emails in discovery for SCO vs IBM.
As for what's in the emails, well that's subject of speculation. It might be about the $10 million worth of Unix licenses that Microsoft 'bought' and SCO lied about in their court or SEC filings. It might be about the $50-70 million worth of funding from Baystar that Microsoft helped put SCO's way (that's documented in the Halloween documents somewhere on catb.org) for no apparent reason. Or it might be that Bill Gates was doing some babysitting for Darl or something. You'll just have to watch the court filings for clues.
Well that's not the only reason IBM is calling Microsoft to the stand.
IBM wants everything Microsoft has on the SCO/Linux battle partly because SCO CEO Darl Mcbride was emailing Microsoft regularly over something that's not quite public yet, immediately prior to the lawsuit, and also IBM needs everything Microsoft has relating to Unix because SCO gave M$ and Sun a clean bill of health as regards Unix. IBM might be trying to compare it's practices relating to the Unix code base against those of Microsoft and Sun in order to show that it was at least as compliant as those two.
"In countries such as the US, you can camp outside the President's house and protest without being shot or imprisoned indefinetly."
The country he was talking about was not one of those countries. Unless your name is Brian Haw, you can be arrested for protesting within a mile of the Houses of Parliament. Downing Street falls within that catchment area too.
Brian Haw gets arrested too, but they have to find other bogus excuses to arrest him.
"The only way that they can guarantee a stable, secure, and performant environment is to assert control over their hardware. "
This isn't about the 'guarantee' of Apple support. Apple is well within their rights not to support OSX on other hardware, both legally and morally.
"They can't write drivers for everything"
No-ones asking them to. All they have to do when someone runs OSX on unauthorised hardware is say 'Use Apple's hardware. We're not supporting you if you don't'.
"Regardless, theft is theft"
I see no theft here. Copyright infringement is not theft, and making OSX run on your hardware of choice is not copyright infringement.
" and I believe Apple is perfectly within their rights,"
What rights are these? The DMCA gives Apple the right to censor people who provide devices which have the main objective of circumventing technical measures to protect copyrights. The right to control what hardware your software runs on is not one of the exclusive rights granted to copyright holders. Apple's lawyers are probably out of line here.
I'm not surprised at the amount of swearing this guy came across.
If some anal retentive dickwad was sitting at his PC typing up all the ingame chat swearwords into a bloody Excel spreadsheet when it was his turn to be guarding the flag from those fucking Redteam fuckbags, I'd swear at him too!
Sounds to me like the games industry is bitching because they make it that less effective and more expensive to bribe up a handful of review scores using advertising revenue or whatever.
I think you're slightly confused. DRM can be open sourced, as long as the actual key to decrypt your data is somehow kept secret from the poor bugger using it - in much the same way your Linux box encrypts your password in an entirely open-source manner, although the password itself is secret.
In fact, Sun has started work on an "open source DRM system" already. It's a pity that it wasn't using the GPLv2; that way anyone could make a GPLv3 derivative of it, then deny Sun the right to sue under the DMCA. Oh well.
"Open Source DRM" is ironic, like having a concentration camp run by a non-heirarchical, politically correct worker's co-operative. It's not impossible, unfortunately.
If the supplier A got 1 source disk and a huge pile of devices with binary-only Linux on it, from supplier B then supplier B isn't infringing the GPL, since B provides source.
If supplier A then gives away those devices (which is his right under 'first sale' - see 17 USC 109 if you're a USian) then he is not infringing anyone's copyrights, merely passing on a physical device with software on it. He's not copying code, after all, merely passing on a lawfully acquired physical copy of it, and his right to do so comes not from the GPL but from 17 USC 109, if he's in the US. No copyright license can deprive him of his first sale right. That's the whole point of the law.
First sale is an important right, designed so that you can lend, give away, alienate yourself of, sell second-hand copies of books, records and computer software. It interacts with the GPL in odd ways though, since you can lawfully acquire copies of GPLed code in more ways that were thought of by the guys framing the original copyright law.
As I say, the one case where this cropped up went in favour of the GPL.
First sale isn't a huge problem since all that lets you do is push out your binary-only GPLed code on a physical medium (so the loophole is only really worthwhile for device manufacturers) and in doing so, the manufacturer probably loses the right to do anything that only the GPL allows. It's rather fiddly to get the loophole working properly, doesn't work everywhere and in the only court case where the subject has been brought up, German judges ruled in favour of the GPL and the netfilter team, and against the hardware manufacturers claiming their first sale rights.
And yes, you can apply binary-only proprietary patches to your GPL code, but you can't distribute the GPLed code itself, so basically that's a method of making life annoying and difficult for the end-user. Those sweet debian people are hardly in the business of killing of the GPL, and they've an entire 'contrib' section devoted to stuff like that.
So these are hardly GPL-killers.
"I could even in theory distribute a device with an unchange version linux and have it run my patch on first boot."
I think you're pushing it too far. Here's a similar example. It's a criminal offence to distribute gcc with the copyright notices deleted, for example. It's lawful to delete the copyright notices yourself. Is it legal for you to distribute a computer with gcc installed that deletes the copyright notices as soon as the user switches it on, before the end user sees it? Under your theory, yes, but I don't see that one getting past a judge.
My guess is that, at the very least, the end-user would have to play a conscious, active part in the process of applying the patch. Putting some sort of patch-applying boobytrap or timebomb in your device to get round the GPL would probably still count as an act of the distributor, not the end-user. I await the rather fanciful test-case on this subject, however.
Of course, IANAL, I just talk crap about this stuff on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this is only a survey of people who are so advertiser friendly as to sit and tell a bunch of market researchers what they think. People who strongly dislike advertising are no doubt fairly strongly inclined towards telling those market researchers to fuck off instead of giving free clues as to how to target their insidious mindraping propaganda more efficiently. I know I am.
That would suck.
I'd far rather Creative decided it needed a monopoly on mp3 players, and it succeeds in removing the iPod from store shelves and forces Apple to pay them swingeing royalties for their supposedly amazing software idea, thus, at one stroke, teaching Apple a much-needed lesson in Why Being A Litigous Gang of IP-Hoarding Fuckbags Is A Bad Thing, illustrating to the vast, mindless, consumer hordes exactly why software patents are evil and reducing the number of iPod-afflicted zombies polluting all my train journeys with subtle-yet-annoying ka-ching noises emanating from their ears.
But I'm guessing there'll be a settlement before it goes that far, alas.
It's a minor matter if you're Nvidia and you're not distributing the Linux kernel with your shim/blob setup. If you're distributing all of the kernel+shim+blob together, then you could well be infringing the kernel copyrights.
No. At least not according to the FSF's theories on the subject.
A driver linked to the kernel shares the same namespace, addressspace, and whathaveyou. The FSF believes that when you link your library/driver to the main executable is irrelevant, the main criterion is *how* the two parts link to each other, and not whether you do it at runtime or compiletime. If the kernel was only talking to the driver by means of sockets and signals and sundry other interprocess communication, then the two would be seperate. As it is, though, Linux kernel modules are part of the kernel executable and so when placed together in a medium so that the driver can be linked in, then it's a derivative work.
Autoconf is just a program invoked by others that communicates to others mostly by writing out files, IIRC. That's nowhere near linked closely enough to another program to be derived from it.
There are other theories as to what constitutes a derivative work when it comes to libraries and linking, and not much case law to go on.
It's not about having seperate downloads, it's about who's distributing what.
If you offer someone Linux and tell them where to get the binary blobs, then you're abiding by the GPL because what you're distributing is purely GPL-compatible. The blob distributors are also GPL compliant,
since they're not distributing other people's GPLed code, and the drivers aren't derivative works of a GPL'ed project, such as linux, because the binary blobs are the same binary blobs used in the windows driver.
So in normal circumstances, the person making the derivative work is the user. The GPL doesn't mind users marrying non-GPL code to the GPLed bit, so long as the user doesn't distribute it. Kororaa seems to have made the mistake of putting the blobs in with the Linux kernel proper on a livecd, which means it may have infringed.
Erm, the allegations are based a story that entered the public domain in an NYT story in December 2005 which alleged that President Bush signed a secret order shortly after September 11th 2001 to conduct warrantless wiretaps of US citizens. This is backed up by the testimony of one Mark Klein, an AT&T tech who was approached by the NSA in 2002 to do some of the work. Clinton had absolutely nothing to do with the current allegations of illegal domestic spying. This is GWB's crime all the way.
Now I wouldn't call you a liar if you said that Clinton had perhaps done something similar sometime, but the reason people didn't complain about Clinton doing this is because there was, and AFAIK still is, no real evidence that he did so, and there was certainly no major news outlet or civil rights group making any allegations of domestic wiretapping when he was in power. If you remember, the US media jumped all over Clinton for all sorts of personal scandals when he was in power (Whitewater, Lewinsky, etc); if there wasn't an outcry over Clinton, it's because there wasn't an allegation to cry about.
Why should people complain about things that they've probably not heard of, and for which there appears to be no evidence?
Of course, once this 'faked company' meme has taken hold, the multinationals will exploit it to the full by making sure all their outsourced third world factories and production centres can be turned into 'pirate' factories at short notice:
... that's not us! Yeah, that's it! They're a bunch of pirates who made a fake MegaCorp factory! We've never seen those guys in our lives! Officer! Arrest that factory! Secretary - type me up a shoddy-looking forgery of our licensing agreement. "Fake" factory workers - You're all fired! Back to unemployment and poverty for you!
Bleeding heart liberal type: You're running sweatshops and paying 12 year olds 10 cents for an 18 hour working day! You're pumping toxic chemicals into the drinking water supply! You're making defective products that explode and kill people! You bribe politicians!
Your factories are run by fascist thugs who hire death squads to kill union organisers! And we have proof this time! You're going to jail at long last!
CEO of MegaCorp, your friendly neighbourhood planet-raping multinational: Errr umm
Third World Workers: Sigh. Shafted again...
I think you need some facts.
Police forces in Britain already send the football clubs a bill for policing their event. The police don't make a profit but they do recoup a big portion of the costs.
Violence between fans at football matches is very rare these days, due to policing and segregation and whatnot. What violence there is tends to take place away from the football ground itself. If a fight happens between rival fans on a train 30 miles away from a football stadium, how realistic is it to blame the football clubs? Come to think of it, if there is some sort of causing link between gaming and violence, it's likely so subtle and tenuous that you really cannot point any finger of blame at gamemakers, or censor them. You can't say speech isn't speech because if you say something to half a million people, two of them might twist your words enough to use them to kill somebody. Pretty much every preacher, politician or rock star in the land would have to be forcibly silenced if that was the case.
Top football matches in the UK are already rather expensive and the football fans rarely complain, except if venal American asset-strippers happen to take over their club.
No. It's not legal. It's just a law that isn't enforced much, in that most copyright holders of really old games don't bother chasing up abandonware sites, since it's not exactly a huge revenue loss.
Some do, notably Sierra and Lucasarts, though.
Funnily enough I followed your link and it said this at me:
"Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. -- Kent Pitman "
If you're going to post links, link to something that backs up whatever daft point you're trying to make, instead of ripping it to shreds.
Minor quibble - Caldera didn't acquire Santa Cruz, they bought the Unix business from them and then changed their name to 'The SCO Group'.
Santa Cruz still existed afterwards - they changed their name to Tarantella and were later bought up by Sun.
Wrong.
Symbol Technologies Inc. & Cognex Corporation vs Lemelson Medical, 2004 WL 161331 (D. Nevada).
Lemelson had 14 patents efectively declared invalid and unenforceable because of the doctrine of prosecution laches.
Hope this helps.
Well yeah.
One Apple sells Beatles songs to British people in record stores.
The other Apple sells those same Beatles songs to British people over the internet.
Don't you think that there is perhaps grounds for confusion here?
Well the figures you give seem well on the high side; there's considerable dispute among historians as to what the actual numbers are. Usually even the highest "Black Book of Communism" type figures give around 20 million for the USSR, not the 60 million you mention, and those figures include famines and suchlike. Which is perhaps right, as long as every avoidable death in a noncommunist country gets attributed to some sort of government too, which I don't really see happening - the famine deaths in British-ruled India, or large numbers of deaths from easily-treated diseases in Latin American shanty-towns don't seem to get counted as part of the capitalist tally.
Besides, to get anywhere near that 60 million figure, I imagine you must be attributing the 20 million or so deaths caused by the Nazi invasion of World War 2 to 'communism'.
As for the figures of intellectuals, I imagine there are probably exactly 0 self-identified communists writing regularly for the Guardian. I looked at the columnists list on their website, and only Paul Foot, who is dead, and Julie Burchill, who is now a Christian and writes for the Times, struck me as communists. The self-identified communists among the other two groups are probably a tiny fraction of the total. Did you timewarp here from 1947 or something?
Well if you're to count all killings by all muslims everywhere with only US anti-abortion bombings, you're sure to come up with a one-sided figure.
As far as recent times are concerned, you've neglected to mention the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian muslims by Serbs and Croats during the Balkan wars, or the massacres committed by the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda. And there's Northern Ireland too. Rwanda's Hutu's? Christians, mostly. Mexico has an internal refugee problem in part because of Protestant-Catholic conflict going on (among other causes). Both George Bush and Tony Blair have both mentioned God while trying to justify their criminal and/or disastrous invasion of Iraq.
And if you want to go through 'all of US history' you might find a lot more deaths at the hands of Christians. It was Christian beliefs that justified the Native American genocide, and that genocide included forcible conversion to Christianity too. The KKK were quite militantly protestant among other things. John Brown and his gang killed people for primarily religious reasons (and quite right too, of course). Salem Witchtrials anyone?
Christians can be just as nasty as Muslims y'know. Violence is a people thing, not a religion thing.
You're obviously a tad naive. Microsoft is almost certainly scared of people dual-booting with non-Microsoft OSes.
From Halloween I, A leaked, internal Microsoft document on Open Source Software:
"OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat. " (my emphasis)
Notice that there are THREE ways here that Microsoft feels that OSS is threatening it. A 'revenue threat', which is people not spending money on things that Microsoft sells, a 'platform threat' which is when people have an alternative to using Microsoft software, and Microsoft might lose it's monopoly, and a 'developer mindshare threat' which is when people make software for non-Microsoft platforms.
A dual-booted OSX/Vista box isn't a revenue threat, but it's potentially a 'platform threat' and a 'developer mindshare threat' (although the latter might be part-mitigated by your games example, of course). Microsoft isn't happy if it merely gets your money; it needs to totally dominate your computing world.
IBM found out about the emails in discovery for SCO vs IBM.
As for what's in the emails, well that's subject of speculation. It might be about the $10 million worth of Unix licenses that Microsoft 'bought' and SCO lied about in their court or SEC filings. It might be about the $50-70 million worth of funding from Baystar that Microsoft helped put SCO's way (that's documented in the Halloween documents somewhere on catb.org) for no apparent reason. Or it might be that Bill Gates was doing some babysitting for Darl or something. You'll just have to watch the court filings for clues.
Well that's not the only reason IBM is calling Microsoft to the stand.
IBM wants everything Microsoft has on the SCO/Linux battle partly because SCO CEO Darl Mcbride was emailing Microsoft regularly over something that's not quite public yet, immediately prior to the lawsuit, and also IBM needs everything Microsoft has relating to Unix because SCO gave M$ and Sun a clean bill of health as regards Unix. IBM might be trying to compare it's practices relating to the Unix code base against those of Microsoft and Sun in order to show that it was at least as compliant as those two.
"In countries such as the US, you can camp outside the President's house and protest without being shot or imprisoned indefinetly."
The country he was talking about was not one of those countries. Unless your name is Brian Haw, you can be arrested for protesting within a mile of the Houses of Parliament. Downing Street falls within that catchment area too.
Brian Haw gets arrested too, but they have to find other bogus excuses to arrest him.
Just so you know.
Hello corporate astroturfer or dimwit mac fanboy.
"The only way that they can guarantee a stable, secure, and performant environment is to assert control over their hardware. "
This isn't about the 'guarantee' of Apple support. Apple is well within their rights not to support OSX on other hardware, both legally and morally.
"They can't write drivers for everything"
No-ones asking them to. All they have to do when someone runs OSX on unauthorised hardware is say 'Use Apple's hardware. We're not supporting you if you don't'.
"Regardless, theft is theft"
I see no theft here. Copyright infringement is not theft, and making OSX run on your hardware of choice is not copyright infringement.
" and I believe Apple is perfectly within their rights,"
What rights are these? The DMCA gives Apple the right to censor people who provide devices which have the main objective of circumventing technical measures to protect copyrights.
The right to control what hardware your software runs on is not one of the exclusive rights granted to copyright holders. Apple's lawyers are probably out of line here.
I'm not surprised at the amount of swearing this guy came across.
If some anal retentive dickwad was sitting at his PC typing up all the ingame chat swearwords into a bloody Excel spreadsheet when it was his turn to be guarding the flag from those fucking Redteam fuckbags, I'd swear at him too!
Sounds to me like the games industry is bitching because they make it that less effective and more expensive to bribe up a handful of review scores using advertising revenue or whatever.
I think you're slightly confused. DRM can be open sourced, as long as the actual key to decrypt your data is somehow kept secret from the poor bugger using it - in much the same way your Linux box encrypts your password in an entirely open-source manner, although the password itself is secret.
In fact, Sun has started work on an "open source DRM system" already. It's a pity that it wasn't using the GPLv2; that way anyone could make a GPLv3 derivative of it, then deny Sun the right to sue under the DMCA. Oh well.
"Open Source DRM" is ironic, like having a concentration camp run by a non-heirarchical, politically correct worker's co-operative. It's not impossible, unfortunately.
If the supplier A got 1 source disk and a huge pile of devices with binary-only Linux on it, from supplier B then supplier B isn't infringing the GPL, since B provides source.
If supplier A then gives away those devices (which is his right under 'first sale' - see 17 USC 109 if you're a USian) then he is not infringing anyone's copyrights, merely passing on a physical device with software on it. He's not copying code, after all, merely passing on a lawfully acquired physical copy of it, and his right to do so comes not from the GPL but from 17 USC 109, if he's in the US.
No copyright license can deprive him of his first sale right. That's the whole point of the law.
First sale is an important right, designed so that you can lend, give away, alienate yourself of, sell second-hand copies of books, records and computer software. It interacts with the GPL in odd ways though, since you can lawfully acquire copies of GPLed code in more ways that were thought of by the guys framing the original copyright law.
As I say, the one case where this cropped up went in favour of the GPL.
First sale isn't a huge problem since all that lets you do is push out your binary-only GPLed code on a physical medium (so the loophole is only really worthwhile for device manufacturers) and in doing so, the manufacturer probably loses the right to do anything that only the GPL allows. It's rather fiddly to get the loophole working properly, doesn't work everywhere and in the only court case where the subject has been brought up, German judges ruled in favour of the GPL and the netfilter team, and against the hardware manufacturers claiming their first sale rights.
And yes, you can apply binary-only proprietary patches to your GPL code, but you can't distribute the GPLed code itself, so basically that's a method of making life annoying and difficult for the end-user. Those sweet debian people are hardly in the business of killing of the GPL, and they've an entire 'contrib' section devoted to stuff like that.
So these are hardly GPL-killers.
"I could even in theory distribute a device with an unchange version linux and have it run my patch on first boot."
I think you're pushing it too far. Here's a similar example.
It's a criminal offence to distribute gcc with the copyright notices deleted, for example. It's lawful to delete the copyright notices yourself. Is it legal for you to distribute a computer with gcc installed that deletes the copyright notices as soon as the user switches it on, before the end user sees it? Under your theory, yes, but I don't see that one getting past a judge.
My guess is that, at the very least, the end-user would have to play a conscious, active part in the process of applying the patch. Putting some sort of patch-applying boobytrap or timebomb in your device to get round the GPL would probably still count as an act of the distributor, not the end-user. I await the rather fanciful test-case on this subject, however.
Of course, IANAL, I just talk crap about this stuff on the internet.