The only way to fight this epidemy is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents.
Finally, engineers and companies may be scared of receiving this award, with the attached bad publicity, and may think twice before submitting blatently stupid patents.
It's been a very long time since I met a Newton or Palm cult member! Time to update the list.
Allow me to change the definition of "cult" slightly to "whatever belief your smart friends want you to give up". Then cult #1 is:
Name: Windows Established: 1995 Gathering of the Tribe: InfoWorld and other magazines that pretend that everything except Windows is a "cult" Major Deity: Bill Gates Sacred Relic: 30-letter authorization keys The Antichrist: Linus Torvalds
The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation.
As a developer, I'm not a big fan of selling services. So what about a hybrid approach where the code is open, but you still have to buy it -- so it's not free, it's libre.
I'd call this hybrid license Fair Source, a cross between GPL and the Software Bill of Rights.
These products would be commercial in the sense that anyone could start a real business, invest in marketing (a big lack in current FOSS proejcts), but still retain the coolness of open source.
Finally an Open Source project with some real marketing geniuses on board! That alone deserves celebration.
I don't think this will quite work, but it's a step in the right direction. Will users get to pick which line they adopt? You could even imagine an auction system. Some lines might become very trendy: "I own the main function declaration of the program, but that cost me $500".
Having been a hiring manager for a couple of years, I got used to scanning resumes and deciding within 10 seconds whether to read further or not. Guess what: the one thing that matters is relevant experience.
How can you get relevant experience in a few months? Contribute to an Open Source project. Join one of the Fair projects listed on my site.
Contribute. Learn. Then put this fresh experience on your resume. Then you'll be hired (at least you would have a year ago - in this new economy, even Bill Gates would be jobless).
I always believed that 20 years from now, technology will allow us to keep a constant record of all that we see. It will be great for keeping memories of the kids, sure. It will also completely change the way we interact. The most fascinating part of this future is that very strong ethical, privacy and legal limits will have to be put in place.
Think of the switch from analog audio to digital. With analog, you could record, but you couldn't store forever without losing quality. Stuff eventually got lost, or forgotten. It's a different ball-game when information stays around forever, easily accessible. Google Search taught us as much.
Bottom line: there is no technological answer to this, it will have to come from principles and laws. Anyone can steal mail from my mailbox, there is no lock. But people don't. Let's see how we can create similar principles for digital information.
It's great because while you can generally deduct your expenses from your income, if you are contributing to free software code, by definition you are not making any money.
An alternative of course is to join a fair project instead (warning: shameless plug - you have been warned). Think of it like open source, except that if someone makes money with the resulting software , that person owes a fair share back to the developers.
$200 is too low. I want to be able to deduct my MacBook Pro. But hey, New York is leading the way. Anyone knows if this has a chance to pass?
Ok, I'll play devil's advocate for a second. Here are the relevant parts of section 7 of the GPLv2:
If, for any reason, conditions are imposed on you that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
Here's an example. The US government probably prevents you from selling your open source software to Cuba or Iran. If I read section 7 correctly, that counts as a "condition imposed on you". So really you lose all rights to using that code?
You got to be careful with literal interpretation of legalese... sometimes you can push the arguments too far.
I hope the same applies to this theory that Microsoft is forcing people to violate the GPL and therefore lose their rights to the code.
It's hard to imagine life without the null pointer! That being said, the author is not really responsible for billions of dollars of mistakes, the programmers are.
If there is one thing I'll complain about, it's the choice of the value 0. It's almost impossible to trace it. When we do hardware debug of chips, we prefer to use a much more visible value such as 0xdeadbeef for instance. Otherwise a bad pointer will bland too much with all the uninitialized values out there.
In assembly, null has no particular meaning. If you dereference an address, you can do it in any range you like. It's just that 0 on most machines was not a good place to store anything, since it would typically be used to boot the OS or some other critical IO function that you don't want to mess up with. Thus null was born.
There's actually a very good reason for those questions. Of course it's not to find terrorists by hoping that they answer yes to the question when crossing the border.
The trick is that since the terrorist will say no, they can be deported for lying on an immigration form, which has much less of a legal burden than proving that they actually are terrorists. Just like Al Capone, if you can't catch them for their crime, get them on a technicality.
Boucher lost his Fifth Amendment privilege when he admitted that it was his computer and that he stored images in the encrypted part of the hard drive.
I don't know anything about the 5th Amendment, but I was under the impression that it was way stronger than this quote suggests. Just because I admitted that it's my laptop, I now can't take the 5th? In movies at least, that's not how it works:-)
Imagine if you treated the 1st Amendment the same way... we'd be in serious trouble. "By admitting that you have an opinion contrary to the government, you gave up your rights to free speech".
3 patents relate to car navigation systems and I can't really tell who's right...
But patent 5579517 is very simple for all to understand: it's the infamous way of Windows 95 to offer long file names (32 characters) over DOS, which only allowed 8-character names.
So Microsoft patented the way to store a cross-reference between the nice, readable filename, and the ugly, DOS name.
Does Linux do that? Sure, there might be a FAT driver somewhere... But I hope TomTom doesn't use FAT. If so, Microsoft is abusing the patent process.
And am I the only one to see irony in the fact that Microsoft patented a software defect?
It's called ignorance (mine). Most posts I read here have a signature, so I sign my posts just the same way I was doing it 2000 years ago on Usenet (except it seems that one line is the etiquette here, versus 4 lines - good choice by the way, one liner is better).
And then one day you realize that you don't have to type it by hand, there is a feature (is it under preferences or profile I guess).
Instead of this fancy legal term of "hot news", I use another term for what AHN is doing to AP: "plagiarism". According to nolo:
putting your name on someone else's work is still plagiarism and is unethical within artistic, scientific, academic and political communities
I guess the press is not one of those communities. I'm not a big fan of lawsuits: I was sued once by a company that wanted to put me out of business and they almost succeeded. Being right doesn't matter, it's whoever has the deepest pockets.
So in this case, I'd much rather have the community (the readers) shun AHN. It's important for everyone to know what is going on, and let the public make their own choices.
Just like the settlement it reached with book authors, Google could give $66 to each homeowner photographed by StreetView. We could call that agreement the Google stimulus package:-)
There is a serious discussion to be had about privacy rights and Google's objective to picture, reference and catalog everything. Some inside Google take the "do no evil" to heart. Street View blurs faces and license plates.
Good, but I wish it didn't have to be voluntary. We know what voluntary compliance by various industries lead to. That's why privacy laws have to set clear boundaries. In the dismissed lawsuit, note that the Google driver did enter a private road by mistake. Mistakes in sensitive privacy situations can be very damaging.
-- Join a FairSoftware Project: share the revenue, be part of important decisions
I used to work for a processor company. I learned one thing: it's impossible to beat Intel, they just invest so much in technology that even if you come up with a smarter cache algorithm, a better pipeline, or (god forbid) a better instruction set, they'll still crush you.
That used to be true for the last 20 years. The only problem today is that no one really cares anymore about CPU speed. 32nm technology will allow Intel to put more cores on a die. They'll get marginal, if any, frequency improvements. We just need to wait for the applications to follow and learn to use 16 cores and more. I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
You can use any of a number of already existing policies. For instance, the Open Standards Policy of Massachusetts is very nicely worded:
Commonwealth's Position
Effective and efficient government service delivery requires system integration and data sharing.
Technology investments must be made based on total cost of ownership and best value to the Commonwealth. Component-based software development based on open standards allows for a more cost-effective "build once, use many times" approach.
Open systems and specifications are often less costly to acquire, develop and maintain and do not result in vendor lock-in.
A great initiative on paper, but I doubt it will lead to much. As someone who wrote a patent more than a decade ago and had the pleasure of being sued by my ex-employer (using my patents against me - nice), I can attest to the craziness of claim construction and other esoteric legal arguments.
Unlike coding as a group, which gave us Linux, creating meaningful and valid prior art is both harder and much less rewarding. That's why I doubt it can get enough contributors to make a difference.
Can't we just force the patent examiners to use Google search instead?
Not to split hair, but I don't think Google is providing Internet access to local users, which is my definition of an ISP. Rather, it's storing content (videos) on Google Video. That would qualify them in my book as an ICP.
Does that justify a lawsuit and an arrest? I disagree with the law on content providers but I can see why some countries don't accept freedom of speech as an absolute value and want to put some restrictions on it (hate speech being an example).
This was said in the context of private companies, not publicly traded ones.
I just glance at Fairsoftware, but I didn't see who is liable when you are sued with that plan
Liability is an interesting topic. Don't believe everything lawyers tell you:-) For instance, no matter how good your contract is, if another party wants to shut you down, they can outspend you. I have been on the receiving end. It's ugly, bogus and unfair, but that's life.
To answer your specific question: projects don't sell directly to the consumer, so the consumer has no direct claims against the distributed contributors. That's a form of liability protection, but again, if anyone promises you that you can't get sued, they are lying.
Some points to consider: 10% is worth nothing because until the company gets acquired, shares have no cash value. For a small IT shop, it's unlikely that it ever will be acquired, it will probably fold once all the key consultants or the owner are burned out.
What would be meaningful is a 10% revenue share of the annual profits. Check out FairSoftware for a good example of how to mix equity and revenue sharing (disclaimer: I came up with that). It doesn't apply directly to your situation because your company is already mature, but it's a useful guide to everyone considering starting a software business today.
Another curious point: how does the owner intend to force you to stick around for another 5 years? Are you talking about stock options vesting over that period of time? Five years is a very long time. Think of it this way: if you had been offered stock options from the beginning, you'd already be fully vested, since you say you have already been working there for 6 years. Ask for some credit for time served:-)
Bottom line: the fact that you are getting this offer is a strong sign that you are in a good negotiating position. But my advice is that the offer is weak. You can do better. Congratulations and good luck! Ownership is cool.
I don't care so much about the download speed of 60 Mbit/s (although it would allow streaming of live HD, which requires 6 - 10 Mbit/s sustained).
What I'd love is the upload bandwidth of 5 Mbit/s. Forget about file swapping: the killer app for the family is video conferencing that works. Can you see me? I'm tired of the pixellized, ugly, breaking video chat on skype.
Of course, I wouldn't trust a soon-to-be-bankrupt provider on anything, especially the promise that they don't plan to throttle the traffic. Yeah, right!
This is voodoo science. And I don't mean the LHC experiments.
I mean the TFA that in essence claims that because an expert may be wrong, any probability the expert assigns to a risk can be ignored and inflated by as much you feel like it. Talk about bias.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. On the one hand, $100,000 is serious money. On the other hand, it barely pays for a good developer for one year.
If that's all the resources that one of the most prominent open source foundations has to fight proprietary software, we're in trouble.
Anyway, where does one apply for more grants from the Mozilla foundation? Here are the grant amounts for 2007, see if you can read a subliminal message:
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to fight this epidemy is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents.
Finally, engineers and companies may be scared of receiving this award, with the attached bad publicity, and may think twice before submitting blatently stupid patents.
--
can we do Libre without Free? FairSoftware
It's been a very long time since I met a Newton or Palm cult member! Time to update the list.
Allow me to change the definition of "cult" slightly to "whatever belief your smart friends want you to give up". Then cult #1 is:
Name: Windows
Established: 1995
Gathering of the Tribe: InfoWorld and other magazines that pretend that everything except Windows is a "cult"
Major Deity: Bill Gates
Sacred Relic: 30-letter authorization keys
The Antichrist: Linus Torvalds
The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation.
As a developer, I'm not a big fan of selling services. So what about a hybrid approach where the code is open, but you still have to buy it -- so it's not free, it's libre.
I'd call this hybrid license Fair Source, a cross between GPL and the Software Bill of Rights.
These products would be commercial in the sense that anyone could start a real business, invest in marketing (a big lack in current FOSS proejcts), but still retain the coolness of open source.
Finally an Open Source project with some real marketing geniuses on board! That alone deserves celebration.
I don't think this will quite work, but it's a step in the right direction. Will users get to pick which line they adopt? You could even imagine an auction system. Some lines might become very trendy: "I own the main function declaration of the program, but that cost me $500".
I'll ask the people on my entrepreneur network if they like the model!
Having been a hiring manager for a couple of years, I got used to scanning resumes and deciding within 10 seconds whether to read further or not. Guess what: the one thing that matters is relevant experience.
How can you get relevant experience in a few months? Contribute to an Open Source project. Join one of the Fair projects listed on my site.
Contribute. Learn. Then put this fresh experience on your resume. Then you'll be hired (at least you would have a year ago - in this new economy, even Bill Gates would be jobless).
Transparency still beats all other alternatives.
Keep in mind that the end-user will not be exposed to those internal discussions, although they take place in public, open forums.
I always believed that 20 years from now, technology will allow us to keep a constant record of all that we see. It will be great for keeping memories of the kids, sure. It will also completely change the way we interact. The most fascinating part of this future is that very strong ethical, privacy and legal limits will have to be put in place.
Think of the switch from analog audio to digital. With analog, you could record, but you couldn't store forever without losing quality. Stuff eventually got lost, or forgotten. It's a different ball-game when information stays around forever, easily accessible. Google Search taught us as much.
Bottom line: there is no technological answer to this, it will have to come from principles and laws. Anyone can steal mail from my mailbox, there is no lock. But people don't. Let's see how we can create similar principles for digital information.
It's great because while you can generally deduct your expenses from your income, if you are contributing to free software code, by definition you are not making any money.
An alternative of course is to join a fair project instead (warning: shameless plug - you have been warned). Think of it like open source, except that if someone makes money with the resulting software , that person owes a fair share back to the developers.
$200 is too low. I want to be able to deduct my MacBook Pro. But hey, New York is leading the way. Anyone knows if this has a chance to pass?
Ok, I'll play devil's advocate for a second. Here are the relevant parts of section 7 of the GPLv2:
If, for any reason, conditions are imposed on you that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
Here's an example. The US government probably prevents you from selling your open source software to Cuba or Iran. If I read section 7 correctly, that counts as a "condition imposed on you". So really you lose all rights to using that code?
You got to be careful with literal interpretation of legalese... sometimes you can push the arguments too far.
I hope the same applies to this theory that Microsoft is forcing people to violate the GPL and therefore lose their rights to the code.
It's hard to imagine life without the null pointer! That being said, the author is not really responsible for billions of dollars of mistakes, the programmers are.
If there is one thing I'll complain about, it's the choice of the value 0. It's almost impossible to trace it. When we do hardware debug of chips, we prefer to use a much more visible value such as 0xdeadbeef for instance. Otherwise a bad pointer will bland too much with all the uninitialized values out there.
In assembly, null has no particular meaning. If you dereference an address, you can do it in any range you like. It's just that 0 on most machines was not a good place to store anything, since it would typically be used to boot the OS or some other critical IO function that you don't want to mess up with. Thus null was born.
I always wondered about the point of those things
There's actually a very good reason for those questions. Of course it's not to find terrorists by hoping that they answer yes to the question when crossing the border.
The trick is that since the terrorist will say no, they can be deported for lying on an immigration form, which has much less of a legal burden than proving that they actually are terrorists. Just like Al Capone, if you can't catch them for their crime, get them on a technicality.
It's that simple.
FTA:
Boucher lost his Fifth Amendment privilege when he admitted that it was his computer and that he stored images in the encrypted part of the hard drive.
I don't know anything about the 5th Amendment, but I was under the impression that it was way stronger than this quote suggests. Just because I admitted that it's my laptop, I now can't take the 5th? In movies at least, that's not how it works :-)
Imagine if you treated the 1st Amendment the same way... we'd be in serious trouble. "By admitting that you have an opinion contrary to the government, you gave up your rights to free speech".
3 patents relate to car navigation systems and I can't really tell who's right...
But patent 5579517 is very simple for all to understand: it's the infamous way of Windows 95 to offer long file names (32 characters) over DOS, which only allowed 8-character names.
So Microsoft patented the way to store a cross-reference between the nice, readable filename, and the ugly, DOS name.
Does Linux do that? Sure, there might be a FAT driver somewhere... But I hope TomTom doesn't use FAT. If so, Microsoft is abusing the patent process.
And am I the only one to see irony in the fact that Microsoft patented a software defect?
It's called ignorance (mine). Most posts I read here have a signature, so I sign my posts just the same way I was doing it 2000 years ago on Usenet (except it seems that one line is the etiquette here, versus 4 lines - good choice by the way, one liner is better).
And then one day you realize that you don't have to type it by hand, there is a feature (is it under preferences or profile I guess).
Instead of this fancy legal term of "hot news", I use another term for what AHN is doing to AP: "plagiarism". According to nolo:
putting your name on someone else's work is still plagiarism and is unethical within artistic, scientific, academic and political communities
I guess the press is not one of those communities. I'm not a big fan of lawsuits: I was sued once by a company that wanted to put me out of business and they almost succeeded. Being right doesn't matter, it's whoever has the deepest pockets.
So in this case, I'd much rather have the community (the readers) shun AHN. It's important for everyone to know what is going on, and let the public make their own choices.
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
My favorite Google Street View story: Google Maps Car Hits Deer.
Just like the settlement it reached with book authors, Google could give $66 to each homeowner photographed by StreetView. We could call that agreement the Google stimulus package :-)
There is a serious discussion to be had about privacy rights and Google's objective to picture, reference and catalog everything. Some inside Google take the "do no evil" to heart. Street View blurs faces and license plates.
Good, but I wish it didn't have to be voluntary. We know what voluntary compliance by various industries lead to. That's why privacy laws have to set clear boundaries. In the dismissed lawsuit, note that the Google driver did enter a private road by mistake. Mistakes in sensitive privacy situations can be very damaging.
--
Join a FairSoftware Project: share the revenue, be part of important decisions
I used to work for a processor company. I learned one thing: it's impossible to beat Intel, they just invest so much in technology that even if you come up with a smarter cache algorithm, a better pipeline, or (god forbid) a better instruction set, they'll still crush you.
That used to be true for the last 20 years. The only problem today is that no one really cares anymore about CPU speed. 32nm technology will allow Intel to put more cores on a die. They'll get marginal, if any, frequency improvements. We just need to wait for the applications to follow and learn to use 16 cores and more. I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
--
FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
You can use any of a number of already existing policies. For instance, the Open Standards Policy of Massachusetts is very nicely worded:
Commonwealth's Position
--
Interested in exploring a possible business idea with friends?
A great initiative on paper, but I doubt it will lead to much. As someone who wrote a patent more than a decade ago and had the pleasure of being sued by my ex-employer (using my patents against me - nice), I can attest to the craziness of claim construction and other esoteric legal arguments.
Unlike coding as a group, which gave us Linux, creating meaningful and valid prior art is both harder and much less rewarding. That's why I doubt it can get enough contributors to make a difference.
Can't we just force the patent examiners to use Google search instead?
--
Fair Revenue Sharing for Bloggers: Pageviews or Equity?
Not to split hair, but I don't think Google is providing Internet access to local users, which is my definition of an ISP. Rather, it's storing content (videos) on Google Video. That would qualify them in my book as an ICP.
Does that justify a lawsuit and an arrest? I disagree with the law on content providers but I can see why some countries don't accept freedom of speech as an absolute value and want to put some restrictions on it (hate speech being an example).
really? MS shares aren't worth anything?
This was said in the context of private companies, not publicly traded ones.
I just glance at Fairsoftware, but I didn't see who is liable when you are sued with that plan
Liability is an interesting topic. Don't believe everything lawyers tell you :-) For instance, no matter how good your contract is, if another party wants to shut you down, they can outspend you. I have been on the receiving end. It's ugly, bogus and unfair, but that's life.
To answer your specific question: projects don't sell directly to the consumer, so the consumer has no direct claims against the distributed contributors. That's a form of liability protection, but again, if anyone promises you that you can't get sued, they are lying.
Some points to consider: 10% is worth nothing because until the company gets acquired, shares have no cash value. For a small IT shop, it's unlikely that it ever will be acquired, it will probably fold once all the key consultants or the owner are burned out.
What would be meaningful is a 10% revenue share of the annual profits. Check out FairSoftware for a good example of how to mix equity and revenue sharing (disclaimer: I came up with that). It doesn't apply directly to your situation because your company is already mature, but it's a useful guide to everyone considering starting a software business today.
Another curious point: how does the owner intend to force you to stick around for another 5 years? Are you talking about stock options vesting over that period of time? Five years is a very long time. Think of it this way: if you had been offered stock options from the beginning, you'd already be fully vested, since you say you have already been working there for 6 years. Ask for some credit for time served :-)
Bottom line: the fact that you are getting this offer is a strong sign that you are in a good negotiating position. But my advice is that the offer is weak. You can do better. Congratulations and good luck! Ownership is cool.
I don't care so much about the download speed of 60 Mbit/s (although it would allow streaming of live HD, which requires 6 - 10 Mbit/s sustained).
What I'd love is the upload bandwidth of 5 Mbit/s. Forget about file swapping: the killer app for the family is video conferencing that works. Can you see me? I'm tired of the pixellized, ugly, breaking video chat on skype.
Of course, I wouldn't trust a soon-to-be-bankrupt provider on anything, especially the promise that they don't plan to throttle the traffic. Yeah, right!
--
5 Reasons You Shouldnâ(TM)t Incorporate Your Business
This is voodoo science. And I don't mean the LHC experiments.
I mean the TFA that in essence claims that because an expert may be wrong, any probability the expert assigns to a risk can be ignored and inflated by as much you feel like it. Talk about bias.
--
The 5 Steps to a Great Startup Idea
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. On the one hand, $100,000 is serious money. On the other hand, it barely pays for a good developer for one year.
If that's all the resources that one of the most prominent open source foundations has to fight proprietary software, we're in trouble.
Anyway, where does one apply for more grants from the Mozilla foundation? Here are the grant amounts for 2007, see if you can read a subliminal message:
- mozdev.org: $10,000
- Parrot: $10,000
- Dojo Ajax toolkit: $70,000
- Jambu: $10,000
- NVDA: $90,000
- creatives commons: $100,000
- seneca college: $100,000
- Gnome: $10,000
- coreboot: $10,000
--
The 5 Steps to a Great Startup Idea