Since most of the "make it hard to get a patent" ideas get shot down by the "what about the little guy?" counter-argument, what about a sliding scale of costs depending on how many you've already got?
For instance, if it was free to get the first, say, five patents, then Joe Public with a good idea or a small company with just a few inventions would face no fees in protecting themselves.
Then for 5-10, it's say $1000 per patent - because by now you ought to be making money from your patent.
For 10-20, $2000, and so on and so forth.
Microsoft et al are patenting like crazy because a few thousand $s per patent doesn't really matter to them. But if a sliding scale meant they had to pay more than a million dollars for each patent, then they'd slow down so fast you'd think you were in a time warp.
Plus, if it were coupled with a "void previous patents really easily" initiative, then it would actually encourage the removal of existing stupid patents: Corporations will be thinking "If I throw away these rubbish patents on 'one-click shopping' then I'd fall into a lower price band and only pay half as much for these useful and innovative patents that I want!"
I can't think of a fairer way to reduce the ludicrous numbers of patents getting submitted. Under this system, the little guy has no problem affording a patent, while only corporations that actually have hundreds or thousands of innovative ideas will be able to afford to have hundreds or thousands of patents .
Tiny, tiny refresh/stop button, one of the most used buttons in any browser and its about 10 pixels across.
Really? I can't remember the last time I used a navigation button on my browser. Escape, Ctrl-R, and mouse gestures are so much easier. . .
Other than that, I agree with you: It's hideous. It might be an acceptable UI if it was a browser aimed at users heavily into mouse-gestures or something, but when it's aimed at people who might find tabbed browsing so confusing it has to be easy to turn it off this is a really bad UI.
Yeah, because all the government agencies that are switching to FOSS won't mind at all that they have to cough up cash to switch back to proprietary software.
And all the corporations with webservers that run the most common software (BSD or Linux with Apache) will see no problem with throwing it all away and going over to Windows instead, I'm sure.
Linux isn't a "hobbyist" OS any more; there are many powerful organisations that have invested a great deal of time & money in it. Any measure that makes FOSS difficult or impossible to run will fail: Alternatives will spring up; hacks will be discovered; upgrades to the new stuff will be refused.
And that's without all the "Joe SixPack" end-users taking their shiny new PCs back to the store because "My MP3 collection doesn't work on it, it's rubbish: I want a PC that just works!"
Considering that Firefox is hugely successful and doesn't have any sub-distros (that I am aware of)
Depends. . .
e.g. At work, where software installs aren't permitted on the main machines, I use Portable Firefox rather than a normal install.
Another way to look at it is that Firefox is the Linux kernel and the various extensions you can get for it are the "distros" - the same product at the heart, but very different ways of looking & acting.
So I'd say Linux already *IS* like Firefox, different flavours and all!
Most of the people that *I* talk to who are considering switching to Linux are concerned with nothing but GUIs: So long as there's a decent desktop and the package management has a nice frontend, they couldn't care less about the inner workings of the distro.
DEs are freely interchangeable between distros, and even package manager GUIs are fairly universal - There may be hundreds of distros, but how many are there that don't use RPMs, apt-get or source code?
The amount of community time spent on distro-specific stuff is miniscule compared to the time spent on projects that can be used on a wide variety of distros. The number of distros is therefore largely irrelevant, rather than some community-draining problem like TFA says.
After all, that's the whole point of Open Source, isn't it. . ? Sharing code amongst projects. . ?
. . . why not just create a "Windows license" so you can only install & use Windows after you prove you're not going to leave it wide-open to spammers?
Wouldn't be too hard. A few questions like:
What's a firewall?
What's an anti-virus?
What browser do you use?
Should you open this attachment?
Should you download this software?
. . . would weed out almost every user who, metaphorically, throws his computer open and yells "Free bandwidth, get it while it's hot!" to the spammers. Without a huge global network of PCs sending their spam out for free, spammers can't send spam, and the whole problem goes away.
Note for the humour-impaired: Yes, that is in fact a joke
That's one of the biggest things that tempts me to build a Linux media center to replace my current DVD player: mplayer lets me skip all that crap at the start of the disc.
Maybe it's unreasonable of me, but I resent being forced to play some "Don't download DVD's, it's theft" crap before I can watch the movie that I bloody paid for.
On a rental disc, I can accept it. I can even accept mandatory adverts on hired discs. But not on my own, paid-for discs, thanks very much.
Over 100 comments, and still everybody is talking about him being fired.
He wasn't. All the posts about legal redress and the moral question about whether or not you can be fired for an opinion are completely moot.
Tribal Group, which owns Aldcliffe Computing, said in a statement: "Mr Hanff was employed on a probationary basis for one week in one of our software companies."
They didn't fire him. They just didn't renew his contract. Before you post your outrage, bear this fact firmly in mind: Hanff was not fired
Sun officials believe that by making the source codes open to developers
Sun still doesn't "get" open source. Check out this interview on news.com with Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO.
We have a strategy that's very different from everybody else's, and it's community development. The way we say that is with the S curve in all our new literature. It's not for Scott, it's not for Sun, it's for "share." We're grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the word "share." We own that space.
The oxymoron appears to have gone unnoticed. But it makes it very clear that Sun is still all about proprietary stuff. They might share it, but they still own it. And that's straight from the horse's mouth.
They definitely and clearly stated it will be based on the x86 architecture.
Really? Where?
I've not been following the story particularly closely, but the last article I saw on the subject completely refuted the Apple would be based on x86:
an Apple spokesman who commented on what the switch does not mean: "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac." Future "Mactel" computers will have specially designated Intel chips, not generic x86 compatible chips found in common PCs
Is there an authorative statement from Apple that contradicats this?
Reminds me of the people marching with signs reading "BUSH = HITLER". The very fact they can march in public holding that sign and nothing happens to them proves that it isn't true.
Ah, but how do you know that they weren't dragged away and shot the moment they were off-camera?;o)
So, what's wrong with just saying "All work on this site, copyright Joe Blow. All characters, the site logo, and the strip name are trademarks of Joe Blow. This material is protected by all applicable laws, including international treaties"?
Nothing's wrong with it, it's just utterly irrelevant.
CC licenses are for when you WANT to allow others some rights to use your work. If you don't want to do that, just sticking "Copyright, leave it alone" is fine.
Think of it as the difference between locking all the doors so nobody can get into any part of a building (Standard copyright); locking some doors so people can use some rooms in a building (Creative Commons); and locking no doors so anybody can go into any room (No copyright).
CC is an easy way to unlock some doors without accidentally opening up others. If all you want is to lock every door, then CC doesn't apply.
But why would you need some special general purpose license?
Because of that "IANAL" thing - true of most people with web content. And just putting a message like "You can copy my stuff within reason" is pretty much equivalent to "Help yourself to everything" if you ever want to take it to a courtroom.
The CC licenses, on the other hand, ARE written by lawyers. So they say exactly what you want them to say, and when you say "You can do this, but not that" you know that you're not leaving a dozen loopholes to be exploited.
Minor correction, but TFA didn't make any claim that it was "years ahead of Linux". It said it will "take three to five years to fully develop and deliver.", i.e. that MS are five years away from creating a CLI that'll be ahead of where BASH is right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Since most of the "make it hard to get a patent" ideas get shot down by the "what about the little guy?" counter-argument, what about a sliding scale of costs depending on how many you've already got?
For instance, if it was free to get the first, say, five patents, then Joe Public with a good idea or a small company with just a few inventions would face no fees in protecting themselves.
Then for 5-10, it's say $1000 per patent - because by now you ought to be making money from your patent.
For 10-20, $2000, and so on and so forth.
Microsoft et al are patenting like crazy because a few thousand $s per patent doesn't really matter to them. But if a sliding scale meant they had to pay more than a million dollars for each patent, then they'd slow down so fast you'd think you were in a time warp.
Plus, if it were coupled with a "void previous patents really easily" initiative, then it would actually encourage the removal of existing stupid patents: Corporations will be thinking "If I throw away these rubbish patents on 'one-click shopping' then I'd fall into a lower price band and only pay half as much for these useful and innovative patents that I want!"
I can't think of a fairer way to reduce the ludicrous numbers of patents getting submitted. Under this system, the little guy has no problem affording a patent, while only corporations that actually have hundreds or thousands of innovative ideas will be able to afford to have hundreds or thousands of patents .
Who will Linus use them to sue first?
Enjoy!
Really? I can't remember the last time I used a navigation button on my browser. Escape, Ctrl-R, and mouse gestures are so much easier. . .
Other than that, I agree with you: It's hideous. It might be an acceptable UI if it was a browser aimed at users heavily into mouse-gestures or something, but when it's aimed at people who might find tabbed browsing so confusing it has to be easy to turn it off this is a really bad UI.
Damn right! Just think how intuitively people interpet somebody gesturing at them with a broken bottle :)
Oddly enough, there's a world outside of America that really won't care about Congress. Remember the recent stories about Brazil & FOSS. . ?
And all the corporations with webservers that run the most common software (BSD or Linux with Apache) will see no problem with throwing it all away and going over to Windows instead, I'm sure.
Linux isn't a "hobbyist" OS any more; there are many powerful organisations that have invested a great deal of time & money in it. Any measure that makes FOSS difficult or impossible to run will fail: Alternatives will spring up; hacks will be discovered; upgrades to the new stuff will be refused.
And that's without all the "Joe SixPack" end-users taking their shiny new PCs back to the store because "My MP3 collection doesn't work on it, it's rubbish: I want a PC that just works!"
Ah, the irony. . .
Wow, RMS might finally get that OpenBIOS (well, at least an equivalent thereof) he wants!
You can always get Trusted Gentoo if you're that desperate ;o)
Linux is not Windows
Depends. . .
e.g. At work, where software installs aren't permitted on the main machines, I use Portable Firefox rather than a normal install.
Another way to look at it is that Firefox is the Linux kernel and the various extensions you can get for it are the "distros" - the same product at the heart, but very different ways of looking & acting.
So I'd say Linux already *IS* like Firefox, different flavours and all!
DEs are freely interchangeable between distros, and even package manager GUIs are fairly universal - There may be hundreds of distros, but how many are there that don't use RPMs, apt-get or source code?
The amount of community time spent on distro-specific stuff is miniscule compared to the time spent on projects that can be used on a wide variety of distros. The number of distros is therefore largely irrelevant, rather than some community-draining problem like TFA says.
After all, that's the whole point of Open Source, isn't it. . ? Sharing code amongst projects. . ?
Wouldn't be too hard. A few questions like:
- What's a firewall?
- What's an anti-virus?
- What browser do you use?
- Should you open this attachment?
- Should you download this software?
. . . would weed out almost every user who, metaphorically, throws his computer open and yells "Free bandwidth, get it while it's hot!" to the spammers. Without a huge global network of PCs sending their spam out for free, spammers can't send spam, and the whole problem goes away.Note for the humour-impaired: Yes, that is in fact a joke
Apparently a thin film of Vaseline on the camera lens will still fix most of those problems ;o)
Maybe it's unreasonable of me, but I resent being forced to play some "Don't download DVD's, it's theft" crap before I can watch the movie that I bloody paid for.
On a rental disc, I can accept it. I can even accept mandatory adverts on hired discs. But not on my own, paid-for discs, thanks very much.
Only one of my MEPs, from the Green party, actually wrote back with a "We agree, we're trying to make sure it doesn't happen."
He wasn't. All the posts about legal redress and the moral question about whether or not you can be fired for an opinion are completely moot.
Tribal Group, which owns Aldcliffe Computing, said in a statement: "Mr Hanff was employed on a probationary basis for one week in one of our software companies."
They didn't fire him. They just didn't renew his contract. Before you post your outrage, bear this fact firmly in mind: Hanff was not fired
Sun still doesn't "get" open source. Check out this interview on news.com with Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO.
We have a strategy that's very different from everybody else's, and it's community development. The way we say that is with the S curve in all our new literature. It's not for Scott, it's not for Sun, it's for "share." We're grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the word "share." We own that space.
The oxymoron appears to have gone unnoticed. But it makes it very clear that Sun is still all about proprietary stuff. They might share it, but they still own it. And that's straight from the horse's mouth.
Not sure about that, but it IS the same eBay that threatened to delete user's accounts because they were selling Linux. . .
Excellent. Much obliged!
Really? Where?
I've not been following the story particularly closely, but the last article I saw on the subject completely refuted the Apple would be based on x86:
an Apple spokesman who commented on what the switch does not mean: "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac." Future "Mactel" computers will have specially designated Intel chips, not generic x86 compatible chips found in common PCs
Is there an authorative statement from Apple that contradicats this?
Ah, but how do you know that they weren't dragged away and shot the moment they were off-camera? ;o)
Nothing's wrong with it, it's just utterly irrelevant.
CC licenses are for when you WANT to allow others some rights to use your work. If you don't want to do that, just sticking "Copyright, leave it alone" is fine.
Think of it as the difference between locking all the doors so nobody can get into any part of a building (Standard copyright); locking some doors so people can use some rooms in a building (Creative Commons); and locking no doors so anybody can go into any room (No copyright).
CC is an easy way to unlock some doors without accidentally opening up others. If all you want is to lock every door, then CC doesn't apply.
Because of that "IANAL" thing - true of most people with web content. And just putting a message like "You can copy my stuff within reason" is pretty much equivalent to "Help yourself to everything" if you ever want to take it to a courtroom.
The CC licenses, on the other hand, ARE written by lawyers. So they say exactly what you want them to say, and when you say "You can do this, but not that" you know that you're not leaving a dozen loopholes to be exploited.
Minor correction, but TFA didn't make any claim that it was "years ahead of Linux". It said it will "take three to five years to fully develop and deliver.", i.e. that MS are five years away from creating a CLI that'll be ahead of where BASH is right now.