The aim was to allow GPLed software to be used in safety critical embedded devices where both legal regulations and the user (some hospital, or airline or nuclear plant) both didn't want the device to be tamperable with.
The FSF were probably thinking of various ways round this, and figured that the best way was to limit the protection in the GPL to consumer devices. There is the side effect you speak of, where it's theoretically possible that Big Evil Corporations might end up having DRM being inflicted on them in, say, general computing installations, but the FSF figures that those guys are big enough and powerful enough to tell anyone crippling their systems with DRM to fuck off.
If you really are running a mainframe, I'd guess you'd be big enough and rich enough and old enough to tell your software vendors to fuck off if they want to inflict software on you that you disapprove of...
Erm the particular phrasing of the GPLv3 draft is that 'No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures. When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technical measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technical measures.'
Meaning it's phrased as a waiver by the copyright holder/distributor, and therefore they'll find it impossible to successfully sue under the DMCA for violating copy protection implemented in GPLv3. Not that it matters anyway, I think - nobody uses open source copy protection.
Cookery analogy is a good one. Why do you think different national and ethnic cuisines evolved at all, if it wasn't from people making the best use of whatver ingredients they had to hand? What's so good about the overprocessed and unhealthy junk that gets shipped to or from halfway across the planet?
Now, carry on the analogy to your side of the fence: your side wants to set up a totalitarian police state, with identity cards, checkpoints, constant surveillance, DRM (Dining Rights Management), informants and hefty jail sentences and show trials, purely in order that nobody eats from the local Mcdonalds without paying. Is that really a price worth paying because you're slightly bored of turnip soup?
Err, Microsoft got a big pile of FUD around these supposed patent breaches. Maybe some CEOs and IT procurement people believed them and maybe it affected their buying decisions. That's bad.
Now when we've got them to make a humiliating climbdown, you want us to shut up?
I say we scream this headline all the way to Bangalore and back, just so everyone gets the message that the patent threat was a pile of worthless hot air all along...
"In areas where adequate free OSS solutions are made available by the FOSS community, commercial development will cease, and OSS dominate, without gutting the copyright system."
Why NOT gut the copyright system if we can? Surely the default should be to have no state-granted monopoly rights, and no restrictions on people's personal behaviour, if it's at all possible. And in any case, the copyright system in software does lend itself to monopolies and the abuse of monopoly power, as we can all see with the hoo-hah over Microsoft, and their deliberate attempts to 'decommodotize protocols' and prevent interoperability with competing products. Saying that the better products will always win in the market is very naïve, given some of the things that have happened in the software market over the years.
"I would be very surprised if any FOSS effort could, for instance, create a major motion picture, or for that matter a AAA computer game."
Would gamers stop gaming if they could only play nethack and Tuxracer and xpilot rather than Halo 5 and Final Fantasy 19? I really doubt it. Would people stop watching movies because those who made them weren't making Toy Story 7 and 300:The Sequel? I reckon people's tastes accommodate whatever's out there. The billions spent every year on advertising proves it. Do we need a system of laws and police just to make sure that the shiny, glossy, polished turds dropped by EA and Hollywood get made every year?
But the other difference there is in the initial capital outlay required to produce those things. It USED to be the case too with copyrightable works - books required printing presses, mass produced music required studio time and record pressing plants. Drugs require extensive testing. The initial capital outlay needed to be covered somehow, and they did it with a state granted monopoly on copying the items.
Nowadays though, with software and music, and to a lesser extent books and films, making those things can just be done on the cheap. Huge amounts of general-use software can and is just be written by interested people collaborating over the net. The price of music making and recording paraphenalia has plummeted - the only thing the music recording industry really has to offer most musicians in today's internet-enabled world is access to advertising. There's really not much in the way of fixed costs to overcome.
If this process carries on in earnest, there won't be much justification for the 'necessary evil' of a state-granted monopoly on the reproduction of informational goods. In fact, in software, there's not much justification for it right now.
Why do we need government intervention, and BSA informant campaigns and jail sentences and whatnot, to protect Microsoft's ability to stop people using it's software without paying, if there is software out there that will do the same or equivalent jobs without monopolies and government interference and all that policework? It might be justifiable if it was likely that there would be little to no software without the restrictions. When the net is full-to-bursting with free-to-copy-distribute-and-modify software that does almost everything you can think of (with the possible exception of interoperating with certain secret proprietary protocols), it's hard to think of a reason why we need a system that pressures and threatens almost the whole world into paying rent to the world's richest man just because he can't be bothered finding a different way of making a living...
Taking away consumers fair use rights, and the abilities to copy data is now 'enablement'?
Okay, I can see where they're going with this. It opens up a whole new way of looking at things.
Perhaps those guys in Guantanamo bay were being introduced to cellroom-based liberation therapy, where they are given brand new rights to stay in tiny windowless cubicles behind bars in Cuba, unlike the rest of us, who have to be kept out of there with fences and machine gun nests and minefields. And those Abu Graib so-called "torture victims" were in actual fact being given the benefit of the government's pain-tolerance management entitlement scheme. And at Virginia Tech recently, we had a private citizen taking it upon himself to offer the staff and students a free program of ballistics-based physiological refurbishment.
I think the people behind this 'Digital Consumer Enablement' idea should use it as the basis for a self-administered proctological insertment opportunity.
"But I have never read anything from green peace talking about the health of humans unless it is prefaced with the environment and something to do with it"
You mean to say that an environmentalist group doesn't talk about the health of humans, unless it's got something to do with the environment? Never! Next you'll be telling me that the Free Software Foundation doesn't care enough about Darfur, except insofar as regards the Sudanese software industry. And Human Rights Watch is conspicuously silent on the Ivory Trade, unless there's a human rights angle. And the Campaign Against the Arms Trade has conspicuously failed to denounce the bastards who dropped their rubbish in my back garden last Wednesday week! Stinking hypocrites, the lot of them!
What is the world coming to, when single-issue pressure groups just stick to whatever single issue it is they were set up to campaign on?
The site I'm thinking of was Zen's Den, which announced the documents at 10:30pm, ET on the 27th of April. Groklaw's article on the same documents were at 07:57 PM EDT on April 28th.
There's at most a 1 hour difference between ET and EDT, so that's a considerable time difference. I actually thought the difference was much less meself, but there you go.
Tuxrocks and Scofacts often beat Groklaw to the punch too. Groklaw isn't usually the first site to carry the SCO documents; it does, however, have the most comprehensive archive and usually the best analysis.
The PACER system was the first place on the net to 'break' this news. Groklaw wasn't even second, in that at least one, and probably more, anti-SCO sites had the filing up on the net before Groklaw.
And I think you're taking the demand for credit a bit too far, eh? It's not as if it's a verbatim quote, or a sizeable paraphrase, or strictly speaking, even a paraphrase at all of the Groklaw sentence. How many ways are there of saying 'SCO tried to make ESR, Eben and Linus STFU' in a neutral and unbiased journalistic tone? It's not even clear (although it is likely) that the ZDnet writers even read Groklaw, let alone pilfered enough of Groklaw's material to warrant a credit.
"That's basically what they're selling now and still seems to be doing OK."
But we're not talking about now, we're talking about a hypothetical copyright-free future, remember?
That means Microsoft doesn't get to charge those $billions worth of license fees, which means it doesn't get to spend $billions on making it's slightly shinier newer windows versions. The hypothetical future would pit the open source software, more or less developed by the internet like it is now, for nothing, versus the binary-only poor-value crippled secret software, which is necessarily developed by a reasonably well-paid clique of people, and they need to collect what cash they can on their code before someone finds a crack and it's free to all.
In a hypothetical copyright-free world, the fight is not open-source software versus today's expensive proprietary software. It's open source versus nasty binary-only freeware.
"But if most commodity (cheap) hardware got locked down and was undocumented I think they would be in trouble."
If we're going to play at bizarre non-sequiturs then I much prefer: "But if Netcraft confirmed that BSD is dying, then I think they would be in trouble" or "But if Theo De Raadt turned into green cheese on the same day as they abolished copyright, OpenBSD might have a bit of difficulty."
What makes you think that that crippled binary-only malware with the activation codes is going to win in the marketplace against proper free open source software that comes with source code and doesn't attack the user, and runs on cheap commodity hardware instead of your untrustworthy hardware platforms? What you're saying is that proprietary software will become worse, and you seem to think that'll magically make proprietary software sell more.
"Hardware manufacturers would stop documenting anything at all, because they have no other protection for their designs."
Hardware interfaces aren't *copyrighted* now, nor can they be. You can't put a copyright on the information needed to make your hardware talk to software - such information would fail the 'abstraction/filtration/comparison' test in US copyright law, as being 'dictated by externalities'. Sure a specification might be copyrighted, but the facts that it contains aren't. Hardware manufacturers nowadays either keep their interfaces secret, or use patents, not copyright law.
"Without any copyright protection, OSS would be dead in fairly short order."
BSD has next no copyright protection worth the name, and it hasn't died yet after 15 years or so. Netcraft does confirm that it is dying though...
Indeed, SCO are being sued for lying about Linux. IBM (in one of it's counterclaims) and RedHat have both sued SCO under the Lanham Act for lying about their products. It's an icing-on-the-cake thing, in that any damages awarded are likely to go unpaid, since SCO seems to owe Novell somewhere in the region of $30 million, which is about $10-15 million more than SCO is actually worth, depending on how you count it...
Oh, and the snippet you've cut isn't actually that bad, in that the only actual lie I can see is the claim that RedHat has campaigned against copyrights. You can probably find a number of free software supporters who support both abolishing copyright law in software (or something close to that) AND the GPL (in those states unfortunate enough to let copyright law exist). After all, the GPL or copyleft licenses in general, are not ends in themselves, but just a means of providing the legal freedoms to copy, modify and run software; abolishing copyright law is another means of largely providing those same rights. (The 'you must provide source code' provision of copyleft licenses is the only exception, but market forces might weed out binary-only software, as being of inferior quality and value, in the absence of enforceable license fees).
Maybe they're gloating because it's not easy to get an OpenBSD vulnerability, unlike certain other OSes we can mention. Moreso, even, because their work will hit the front page of an Operating System's website. That doesn't happen every day if you're a security professional. Well, not unless you're Bruce Schneier of course...
Maybe we should see the same thing on the Microsoft website: "Welcome, users. It has been 43 hours since our last remotely exploitable vulnerability in the default installation
"The repetition lessoned the humanity of the action, until she reported feeling like she wasn't killing people but simply scoring points in a game. Eventually she got bored, went to the library, and "ended" the game. "
"Yes, she got so numb that killing people bored her. Oh yeah, way to go!"
What's your problem with that? Isn't it a Good Thing that the murders in Super Columbine Massacre aren't portrayed as fun, the way murder is in every other computer game out there? I suppose you prefer games where you're rewarded for killing people.
Not only that, but this is actually a good demonstration of the mindset of the Columbine killers themselves. Don't believe me? It's actually true that after the last shooting in the Columbine massacre, that of Corey DePooter, Harris and Klebold were overheard complaining that killing people didn't give them a thrill anymore. The gamer in your quote is going through the same thing. Your complaint is actually a tribute to how EFFECTIVE this game is, at making murder suck, while the Grand Theft Autos and all those Rainbow Six Death Squad simulations and military flight simulators are in the business of making murder fun...
Super Columbine Massacre RPG is one of the few games that is actually saying something ABOUT violence and what violence is, as opposed to merely mentioning it...
"Say what you will about Windows on the desktop, but the homogenization of the desktop OS is one of the main things that accelerated the growth of the PC."
Do you mean the growth of the PC in the 1980s, with all those DOS clones that have since died, or the growth of the PC in the 1990s, with about 4 flavours of Windows to choose from, not to mention all the x86 unices that were being born around that time? The PC was about the only major desktop machine in those days with a choice of OS, and the hardware itself was even more heterogenous.
"The Americans entered WWI too late to have a major impact on the outcome (though they probably hastened the end), and the UK has at least as good a claim to resisting fascism when it counted in WWII. Which isn't to say that the USA didn't make a profound contribution to these struggles, but there were British and Canadian troops storming the beaches at Normandy too, you know."... and Normandy, hellish as it was for the participants, was just a sideshow to the massive and brutal slaughter going on in the Eastern Front. The people of the Soviet Union did, by far, most of the killing and dying in World War 2. If we owe anyone for stopping Germany, it's to those 20 million Russians who died in the war, not to some government made up of chickenhawk war criminals 50 years on.
"(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent." (emphasis mine)
Not that I think HID's whinge has any merit whatsoever. Hell, even the first amendment should protect someone demonstrating a prototype cracking tool for the purposes of showing to the general public that it's possible, and there may be specific specific exceptions in patent law too, I've not checked thoroughly.
"What is this going to accomplish? Even if they do have patents against Linux, then they aren't going to reveal them until it is most advantageous."
And sitting on a known case of infringement until such time as it's more profitable or tactically advantageous to sue is covered by the laches doctrine; if Microsoft tries that, and it can be shown in court that they tried it, then they'll lose the case.
There are some tests for whether someone is a reporter for the purposes of constitutional privilege, mostly on whether what someone's saying in their publication is generally considered news. I don't think the law would make any material, legal, difference (relating to freedom of speech issues) between the output of an indymedia cameraman and, say, a conventional freelance news photographer, despite one guy's output being unpaid and on the internet. Certainly the judge in Apple vs Does did address that very subject, and found it was almost unanimous among all the respondents there (I think there was a brief by some Industry cartel murmuring that people posting on the internet might be dangerous to business or something, but they can go screw themselves, obviously).
An eweek article clarifies the situation. Eben Moglen was quoted out of context; he was talking about writing GPLv3
"According to a recent Reuters report, the FSF's (Free Software Foundation) board was going to be looking into Novell Inc.'s rights to continue selling its version of the Linux operating system. That's not actually what's will be happening.
Eben Moglen, the Software Freedom Law Center executive director and FSF board member, explained: "This is a story being hyped by the Reuters guy who wrote it."
The Reuters quote was: "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft."
"What he actually asked me," said Moglen in an e-mail interview, "was 'Is it true that some members of the community want GPLv3 to keep Novell from distributing future versions of GPL'd software?' I said, 'Yes, the Free Software Foundation is opposed to the deal, and is thinking about what to do; there will be a new draft soon [of the GPLv3 (Gnu General Public License Version 3).]"
See Special Report: Novell's Linux Facelift
Therefore, "The actual quote he prints is entirely accurate, but his lede destroys the context and is making unnecessary waves."
The FSF, which governs the GPL (GNU General Public License), has long been concerned about Novell recent patent deal with Microsoft Corp. The Samba Group has stated that it wants Novell to abandon the deal. Open-source figure Bruce Perens started a petition that accused Novell of betraying the free software community. And, one group of free software supporters launched a Web site with a self-explanatory name, Boycott Novell. "
The USPTO doesn't prosecute for perjury, that's the District Attorney's job. Perhaps you USians should bypass the patent office and complain direct to the prosecutors...
Now you're confusing me. I think you're trying hard to say SOMETHING as a retort, because I pointed out how you made an ass of yourself in your previous post, but what you actually mean by this latest post I can't decipher.
Wang Xiaoyun lives and researches in Beijing. Whether she's a communist or an anti-communist or not, I don't know, but the fact that both the Chinese government, and it's US-based enemies have published relatively uncritical articles on this research does tend to give it a bit of credibility; you desperately want to dismiss this as some sinister Chinese propaganda, but when the propagandists on both sides of the fence say the same thing, then it gets a bit confusing as to what sort of propaganda we're talking about here. Maybe there's no propaganda angle here at all; maybe this is (shock) news!
Now the article is pretty badly written, but the news in it seems perfectly plausible; the same researcher was after all, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed attack in a European journal that discovered ways of constructing collisions in MD5, and has appeared at a crypto conference with collisions on the MD4 scheme. Why don't you think she's able to crack SHA-1? Because she's Chinese? Because she's in a country with communists in it? Because some anti-communists wrote a newspaper article about her? Because SHA-1 is sooper-seekrit NSA stuff that is uncrackable?
Slashdot Mirror
The aim was to allow GPLed software to be used in safety critical embedded devices where both legal regulations and the user (some hospital, or airline or nuclear plant) both didn't want the device to be tamperable with.
The FSF were probably thinking of various ways round this, and figured that the best way was to limit the protection in the GPL to consumer devices. There is the side effect you speak of, where it's theoretically possible that Big Evil Corporations might end up having DRM being inflicted on them in, say, general computing installations, but the FSF figures that those guys are big enough and powerful enough to tell anyone crippling their systems with DRM to fuck off.
If you really are running a mainframe, I'd guess you'd be big enough and rich enough and old enough to tell your software vendors to fuck off if they want to inflict software on you that you disapprove of...
Erm the particular phrasing of the GPLv3 draft is that 'No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures. When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technical measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technical measures.'
Meaning it's phrased as a waiver by the copyright holder/distributor, and therefore they'll find it impossible to successfully sue under the DMCA for violating copy protection implemented in GPLv3. Not that it matters anyway, I think - nobody uses open source copy protection.
Cookery analogy is a good one. Why do you think different national and ethnic cuisines evolved at all, if it wasn't from people making the best use of whatver ingredients they had to hand? What's so good about the overprocessed and unhealthy junk that gets shipped to or from halfway across the planet?
Now, carry on the analogy to your side of the fence: your side wants to set up a totalitarian police state, with identity cards, checkpoints, constant surveillance, DRM (Dining Rights Management), informants and hefty jail sentences and show trials, purely in order that nobody eats from the local Mcdonalds without paying. Is that really a price worth paying because you're slightly bored of turnip soup?
Err, Microsoft got a big pile of FUD around these supposed patent breaches. Maybe some CEOs and IT procurement people believed them and maybe it affected their buying decisions. That's bad.
Now when we've got them to make a humiliating climbdown, you want us to shut up?
I say we scream this headline all the way to Bangalore and back, just so everyone gets the message that the patent threat was a pile of worthless hot air all along...
"In areas where adequate free OSS solutions are made available by the FOSS community, commercial development will cease, and OSS dominate, without gutting the copyright system."
Why NOT gut the copyright system if we can? Surely the default should be to have no state-granted monopoly rights, and no restrictions on people's personal behaviour, if it's at all possible. And in any case, the copyright system in software does lend itself to monopolies and the abuse of monopoly power, as we can all see with the hoo-hah over Microsoft, and their deliberate attempts to 'decommodotize protocols' and prevent interoperability with competing products. Saying that the better products will always win in the market is very naïve, given some of the things that have happened in the software market over the years.
"I would be very surprised if any FOSS effort could, for instance, create a major motion picture, or for that matter a AAA computer game."
Would gamers stop gaming if they could only play nethack and Tuxracer and xpilot rather than Halo 5 and Final Fantasy 19? I really doubt it. Would people stop watching movies because those who made them weren't making Toy Story 7 and 300:The Sequel? I reckon people's tastes accommodate whatever's out there. The billions spent every year on advertising proves it. Do we need a system of laws and police just to make sure that the shiny, glossy, polished turds dropped by EA and Hollywood get made every year?
But the other difference there is in the initial capital outlay required to produce those things. It USED to be the case too with copyrightable works - books required printing presses, mass produced music required studio time and record pressing plants. Drugs require extensive testing. The initial capital outlay needed to be covered somehow, and they did it with a state granted monopoly on copying the items.
Nowadays though, with software and music, and to a lesser extent books and films, making those things can just be done on the cheap. Huge amounts of general-use software can and is just be written by interested people collaborating over the net.
The price of music making and recording paraphenalia has plummeted - the only thing the music recording industry really has to offer most musicians in today's internet-enabled world is access to advertising. There's really not much in the way of fixed costs to overcome.
If this process carries on in earnest, there won't be much justification for the 'necessary evil' of a state-granted monopoly on the reproduction of informational goods. In fact, in software, there's not much justification for it right now.
Why do we need government intervention, and BSA informant campaigns and jail sentences and whatnot, to protect Microsoft's ability to stop people using it's software without paying, if there is software out there that will do the same or equivalent jobs without monopolies and government interference and all that policework? It might be justifiable if it was likely that there would be little to no software without the restrictions. When the net is full-to-bursting with free-to-copy-distribute-and-modify software that does almost everything you can think of (with the possible exception of interoperating with certain secret proprietary protocols), it's hard to think of a reason why we need a system that pressures and threatens almost the whole world into paying rent to the world's richest man just because he can't be bothered finding a different way of making a living...
Taking away consumers fair use rights, and the abilities to copy data is now 'enablement'?
Okay, I can see where they're going with this. It opens up a whole new way of looking at things.
Perhaps those guys in Guantanamo bay were being introduced to cellroom-based liberation therapy, where they are given brand new rights to stay in tiny windowless cubicles behind bars in Cuba, unlike the rest of us, who have to be kept out of there with fences and machine gun nests and minefields. And those Abu Graib so-called "torture victims" were in actual fact being given the benefit of the government's pain-tolerance management entitlement scheme. And at Virginia Tech recently, we had a private citizen taking it upon himself to offer the staff and students a free program of ballistics-based physiological refurbishment.
I think the people behind this 'Digital Consumer Enablement' idea should use it as the basis for a self-administered proctological insertment opportunity.
"But I have never read anything from green peace talking about the health of humans unless it is prefaced with the environment and something to do with it"
You mean to say that an environmentalist group doesn't talk about the health of humans, unless it's got something to do with the environment? Never! Next you'll be telling me that the Free Software Foundation doesn't care enough about Darfur, except insofar as regards the Sudanese software industry. And Human Rights Watch is conspicuously silent on the Ivory Trade, unless there's a human rights angle. And the Campaign Against the Arms Trade has conspicuously failed to denounce the bastards who dropped their rubbish in my back garden last Wednesday week! Stinking hypocrites, the lot of them!
What is the world coming to, when single-issue pressure groups just stick to whatever single issue it is they were set up to campaign on?
The site I'm thinking of was Zen's Den, which announced the documents at 10:30pm, ET on the 27th of April. Groklaw's article on the same documents were at 07:57 PM EDT on April 28th. There's at most a 1 hour difference between ET and EDT, so that's a considerable time difference. I actually thought the difference was much less meself, but there you go.
Tuxrocks and Scofacts often beat Groklaw to the punch too. Groklaw isn't usually the first site to carry the SCO documents; it does, however, have the most comprehensive archive and usually the best analysis.
The PACER system was the first place on the net to 'break' this news. Groklaw wasn't even second, in that at least one, and probably more, anti-SCO sites had the filing up on the net before Groklaw.
And I think you're taking the demand for credit a bit too far, eh? It's not as if it's a verbatim quote, or a sizeable paraphrase, or strictly speaking, even a paraphrase at all of the Groklaw sentence. How many ways are there of saying 'SCO tried to make ESR, Eben and Linus STFU' in a neutral and unbiased journalistic tone? It's not even clear (although it is likely) that the ZDnet writers even read Groklaw, let alone pilfered enough of Groklaw's material to warrant a credit.
The Shadow Cabinet is the fake government posts we give the people who lose a general election in the UK.
It's like the US, except you call the loser of the election 'Mister President'...
"That's basically what they're selling now and still seems to be doing OK."
But we're not talking about now, we're talking about a hypothetical copyright-free future, remember?
That means Microsoft doesn't get to charge those $billions worth of license fees, which means it doesn't get to spend $billions on making it's slightly shinier newer windows versions. The hypothetical future would pit the open source software, more or less developed by the internet like it is now, for nothing, versus the binary-only poor-value crippled secret software, which is necessarily developed by a reasonably well-paid clique of people, and they need to collect what cash they can on their code before someone finds a crack and it's free to all.
In a hypothetical copyright-free world, the fight is not open-source software versus today's expensive proprietary software. It's open source versus nasty binary-only freeware.
"But if most commodity (cheap) hardware got locked down and was undocumented I think they would be in trouble."
If we're going to play at bizarre non-sequiturs then I much prefer:
"But if Netcraft confirmed that BSD is dying, then I think they would be in trouble"
or
"But if Theo De Raadt turned into green cheese on the same day as they abolished copyright, OpenBSD might have a bit of difficulty."
What makes you think that that crippled binary-only malware with the activation codes is going to win in the marketplace against proper free open source software that comes with source code and doesn't attack the user, and runs on cheap commodity hardware instead of your untrustworthy hardware platforms? What you're saying is that proprietary software will become worse, and you seem to think that'll magically make proprietary software sell more.
"Hardware manufacturers would stop documenting anything at all, because they have no other protection for their designs."
Hardware interfaces aren't *copyrighted* now, nor can they be. You can't put a copyright on the information needed to make your hardware talk to software - such information would fail the 'abstraction/filtration/comparison' test in US copyright law, as being 'dictated by externalities'. Sure a specification might be copyrighted, but the facts that it contains aren't. Hardware manufacturers nowadays either keep their interfaces secret, or use patents, not copyright law.
"Without any copyright protection, OSS would be dead in fairly short order."
BSD has next no copyright protection worth the name, and it hasn't died yet after 15 years or so. Netcraft does confirm that it is dying though...
Indeed, SCO are being sued for lying about Linux. IBM (in one of it's counterclaims) and RedHat have both sued SCO under the Lanham Act for lying about their products. It's an icing-on-the-cake thing, in that any damages awarded are likely to go unpaid, since SCO seems to owe Novell somewhere in the region of $30 million, which is about $10-15 million more than SCO is actually worth, depending on how you count it...
Oh, and the snippet you've cut isn't actually that bad, in that the only actual lie I can see is the claim that RedHat has campaigned against copyrights. You can probably find a number of free software supporters who support both abolishing copyright law in software (or something close to that) AND the GPL (in those states unfortunate enough to let copyright law exist). After all, the GPL or copyleft licenses in general, are not ends in themselves, but just a means of providing the legal freedoms to copy, modify and run software; abolishing copyright law is another means of largely providing those same rights. (The 'you must provide source code' provision of copyleft licenses is the only exception, but market forces might weed out binary-only software, as being of inferior quality and value, in the absence of enforceable license fees).
Maybe they're gloating because it's not easy to get an OpenBSD vulnerability, unlike certain other OSes we can mention. Moreso, even, because their work will hit the front page of an Operating System's website. That doesn't happen every day if you're a security professional. Well, not unless you're Bruce Schneier of course...
Maybe we should see the same thing on the Microsoft website: "Welcome, users. It has been 43 hours since our last remotely exploitable vulnerability in the default installation
"The repetition lessoned the humanity of the action, until she reported feeling like she wasn't killing people but simply scoring points in a game. Eventually she got bored, went to the library, and "ended" the game. "
"Yes, she got so numb that killing people bored her. Oh yeah, way to go!"
What's your problem with that? Isn't it a Good Thing that the murders in Super Columbine Massacre aren't portrayed as fun, the way murder is in every other computer game out there? I suppose you prefer games where you're rewarded for killing people.
Not only that, but this is actually a good demonstration of the mindset of the Columbine killers themselves. Don't believe me? It's actually true that after the last shooting in the Columbine massacre, that of Corey DePooter, Harris and Klebold were overheard complaining that killing people didn't give them a thrill anymore. The gamer in your quote is going through the same thing. Your complaint is actually a tribute to how EFFECTIVE this game is, at making murder suck, while the Grand Theft Autos and all those Rainbow Six Death Squad simulations and military flight simulators are in the business of making murder fun...
Super Columbine Massacre RPG is one of the few games that is actually saying something ABOUT violence and what violence is, as opposed to merely mentioning it...
"Say what you will about Windows on the desktop, but the homogenization of the desktop OS is one of the main things that accelerated the growth of the PC."
Do you mean the growth of the PC in the 1980s, with all those DOS clones that have since died, or the growth of the PC in the 1990s, with about 4 flavours of Windows to choose from, not to mention all the x86 unices that were being born around that time? The PC was about the only major desktop machine in those days with a choice of OS, and the hardware itself was even more heterogenous.
"The Americans entered WWI too late to have a major impact on the outcome (though they probably hastened the end), and the UK has at least as good a claim to resisting fascism when it counted in WWII. Which isn't to say that the USA didn't make a profound contribution to these struggles, but there were British and Canadian troops storming the beaches at Normandy too, you know." ... and Normandy, hellish as it was for the participants, was just a sideshow to the massive and brutal slaughter going on in the Eastern Front. The people of the Soviet Union did, by far, most of the killing and dying in World War 2. If we owe anyone for stopping Germany, it's to those 20 million Russians who died in the war, not to some government made up of chickenhawk war criminals 50 years on.
Except 35 USC 28 perhaps:
"(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent." (emphasis mine)
From: here
Not that I think HID's whinge has any merit whatsoever. Hell, even the first amendment should protect someone demonstrating a prototype cracking tool for the purposes of showing to the general public that it's possible, and there may be specific specific exceptions in patent law too, I've not checked thoroughly.
"What is this going to accomplish? Even if they do have patents against Linux, then they aren't going to reveal them until it is most advantageous."
And sitting on a known case of infringement until such time as it's more profitable or tactically advantageous to sue is covered by the laches doctrine; if Microsoft tries that, and it can be shown in court that they tried it, then they'll lose the case.
c) Hatched in a jam jar by mad scientists
There are some tests for whether someone is a reporter for the purposes of constitutional privilege, mostly on whether what someone's saying in their publication is generally considered news.
I don't think the law would make any material, legal, difference (relating to freedom of speech issues) between the output of an indymedia cameraman and, say, a conventional freelance news photographer, despite one guy's output being unpaid and on the internet. Certainly the judge in Apple vs Does did address that very subject, and found it was almost unanimous among all the respondents there (I think there was a brief by some Industry cartel murmuring that people posting on the internet might be dangerous to business or something, but they can go screw themselves, obviously).
An eweek article clarifies the situation. Eben Moglen was quoted out of context; he was talking about writing GPLv3
"According to a recent Reuters report, the FSF's (Free Software Foundation) board was going to be looking into Novell Inc.'s rights to continue selling its version of the Linux operating system. That's not actually what's will be happening.
Eben Moglen, the Software Freedom Law Center executive director and FSF board member, explained: "This is a story being hyped by the Reuters guy who wrote it."
The Reuters quote was: "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft."
"What he actually asked me," said Moglen in an e-mail interview, "was 'Is it true that some members of the community want GPLv3 to keep Novell from distributing future versions of GPL'd software?' I said, 'Yes, the Free Software Foundation is opposed to the deal, and is thinking about what to do; there will be a new draft soon [of the GPLv3 (Gnu General Public License Version 3).]"
See Special Report: Novell's Linux Facelift
Therefore, "The actual quote he prints is entirely accurate, but his lede destroys the context and is making unnecessary waves."
The FSF, which governs the GPL (GNU General Public License), has long been concerned about Novell recent patent deal with Microsoft Corp. The Samba Group has stated that it wants Novell to abandon the deal. Open-source figure Bruce Perens started a petition that accused Novell of betraying the free software community. And, one group of free software supporters launched a Web site with a self-explanatory name, Boycott Novell. "
The USPTO doesn't prosecute for perjury, that's the District Attorney's job. Perhaps you USians should bypass the patent office and complain direct to the prosecutors...
Now you're confusing me. I think you're trying hard to say SOMETHING as a retort, because I pointed out how you made an ass of yourself in your previous post, but what you actually mean by this latest post I can't decipher.
Wang Xiaoyun lives and researches in Beijing. Whether she's a communist or an anti-communist or not, I don't know, but the fact that both the Chinese government, and it's US-based enemies have published relatively uncritical articles on this research does tend to give it a bit of credibility; you desperately want to dismiss this as some sinister Chinese propaganda, but when the propagandists on both sides of the fence say the same thing, then it gets a bit confusing as to what sort of propaganda we're talking about here. Maybe there's no propaganda angle here at all; maybe this is (shock) news!
Now the article is pretty badly written, but the news in it seems perfectly plausible; the same researcher was after all, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed attack in a European journal that discovered ways of constructing collisions in MD5, and has appeared at a crypto conference with collisions on the MD4 scheme. Why don't you think she's able to crack SHA-1? Because she's Chinese? Because she's in a country with communists in it? Because some anti-communists wrote a newspaper article about her? Because SHA-1 is sooper-seekrit NSA stuff that is uncrackable?
Give up now, please. You're flailing.