Nobody put a gun to the head of the teenagers of the World and made them listen to Britney Spears, wear blue jeans and drink Starbucks coffee. For whatever reason American culture seems to be popular in parts of the World. I fail to see why we should apologize for that.
Well, if you won't, then please allow ME to personally apologize to the world for Britney Spears.
Clearly, the answer is to produce and support an open source product until it becomes wildly popular, then systematically introduce subtle but severe bugs that force everyone who runs your software to pay for your support contracts:)
The economy is better, the military is stronger and the world respects our word.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about the USA. Clearly not.
Our economy is in the tank right now; the US dollar is dropping like a rock relative to other foreign currency. Hell, the USD is worth less than 1 CAD for the first time I can remember. We're so deep in debt to other countries that my grandkid's grandkids will probably still be paying it off, all to fund this retarded "war". At the end of the Clinton administration, we had not only a balanced budget, but a yearly surpluss that could (in theory, though I guess I'm not naieve enough to believe it would ever happen) be used to pay down our debt. That's long gone. And you may not have heard, but millions of people just lost their houses because they couldn't afford their mortgage payments.
Our military is stretched so thin we couldn't fend off an invasion from Bermuda, let alone an actual serious military threat. And our government knows it, so much so that they're coddling North Korea and Iran, two countries that are infinitely more dangerous a threat to us than Iraq could ever have been if Saddam had even wanted to.
And the rest of the world hates us. Not that this is new, but our "word" doesn't mean dick to anyone but us after that whole WMD/uranium/etc. fiasco.
In this day and age I didn't know you could take a murder to trial purely on circumstance. I'll admit it's extremely weird, but do they actually think they can convict him beyond a reasonable doubt in this day and age with no direct evidence
In the United States, at least, "circumstantial evidence" is not a legally defined term. It's used very loosely (mostly on television) to indicate evidence that is two or more steps removed from directly linking a suspect to a crime. The reality is many, if not most murder cases are tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence.
Criminals, even dumb ones, are usually smart enough not to leave obvious clues to their identity at a pre-meditated crime scene. During unplanned/accidental/spontaneous crimes, you may occasionally find obvious, direct evidence. Otherwise, you rely on things like the presence of DNA, fingerprints, sales/bank receipts demonstrating a persons whereabouts, fiber or other trace evidence, etc. All of these are circumstantial evidence because they indirectly link a suspect to a crime. For example, their fingerprints were found on a wall near the crime scene, so they were at the crime scene, and they cannot come up with a valid explanation why, and they had a motive to commit the crime, thus implying they are guilty.
As mentioned elsethread, Scott Peterson's conviction was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Same goes for Tim McVeigh. Any good prosecutor will tell you that circumstantial evidence is sometimes better than direct evidence because there's usually so much more of it. It's simply a matter of convincing a jury that no other logical explanation, besides "guilty", can possible arise from all that evidence. Think of a Venn diagram: the number of people with a yellow Camaro is pretty high, as is the number of people with size 10 Nike Air, as is the number of people with a white and brown Pekingese; but as you start putting those together the number of people who qualify for all three criteria shrinks rapidly, hopefully down to one person.
So you think that US gambling laws are byzantine and contradictory? Fine, take it up with your local state or federal senator. The WTO has NO PLACE WHATSOEVER in this issue. It's simply trying to override the sovereignty of an independent state/nation.
That's a perfectly legitimate and acceptable position to take. That is, if you also conceded that the WTO has no right to interfere with any other country who's laws permit its citizens to copy and resell US copyright material, or sell cheap knock-offs using the trademarks of legitimate companies, or export disease-laden meat to the US to anyone willingto buy it, or whatever.
Oh, and you'd need to convince Congress to reverse their current position, which is to voluntarily agree to allow the WTO to do exactly what it's doing. Good luck explaining to the US manufacturers why everyone else in the world suddenly imposes 15000% tarrifs on US exports and refuses to sell us needed raw materials and products for anything close to to the prices they charge each other.
But hey, this is AMERRRRRICA! To hell with them derned ferners!
This article/section is missing citations or needs footnotes.
Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies.
I think [citation needed]I'd have a lot to add[citation needed] to Wikipedia, but I don't[citation needed]. Any time I have made any contribution, substantial[citation needed] or minor, someone else comes around and knocks it off. The feeling I've gotten is that people seem to 'own' pieces of territory in Wikipedia[citation needed]. Be it individual articles, or their interpretation, or something else. My contributions have no chance[verficiation needed] of surviving in the face of these Wiki die-hards. So what is the point? I'm a read-only user now[verficiation needed].
The Congress shall have power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
As with so many people in these near-xenophobic times, you appear to be making the incorrect assumption that the Constitution only applies to US Citizens. When the constitution means "United States" things, it explicitly says so. Section 8's enumerated power of copyright applies to all writings of authors everywhere in the world.
NBC had a runaway hit when it decided to revive Battlestar Galactica from the 70s crappy TV trash heap, and managed to turn it into one of the best sci-fi series ever produced. It was the highest rated show on Sci-Fi at least one season, and Time Magazine named it best show of the year.
It's only natural for them to see what other assets they have lying around that might prove successful if actually done right. Obviously, premier episode ratings don't mean much unless they stay high all season; still, the Bionic Woman premier last week was a huge success, second place for the timeslot with something like 15 million viewers. To NBC, this just means that people are interested in seeing these old shows brought back, done right, with real talented actors, real scripts, real production values, and treated as a real drama, not the cornball crap the originals were.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if Knight Rider was a huge success, too. As bad as the original show was, it was pretty popular at the time, and lasted four years. And if it does take off, I expect we'll see re-imagined versions of the A-Team, Airwolf, and if we're all very good, Greatest American Hero.
And why there is even a debate regarding the conveyance of the rights enjoyed by US Citizens in peacetime towards enemies and enemy combatants of the US, outside of the US, in a time of war, is simply beyond me.
I can't fathom why there's a debate about this, either. It's written in pretty plain English right in the Constitution that such people have such rights, end of story.
EditPadPro (www.jgsoft.com) is not free, in either sense, but it's very cheap for what it does. I have turned most of the development teams at my last three jobs onto it. One of its key features is configurable, user-extensible syntax highlighting. The highlighter includes the option to exclude matched language tokens from spellchecking. In the built-in highlighting schemes, for example, it will usually spellcheck inside comments but not much else, but as mentioned, you can easily take their color scheme and change it to suit.
Around the age of 11 or so the Power Rangers became "huge". Being a young, impressionable kid with no free will I watched it after school with my friends even though I thought it was "total crap". Anyway at that time I had completely forgotten about Voltron yet I KNEW that it was a rip-off of something that I used to watch as a young(er) child.
At the risk of being ridiculously pedantic:
Power Rangers is not, technically, a rip-off of Voltron. If anything, it's the other way around, but even then "rip-off" implies intentional but unathorized copying, which didn't really happen.
The Sentai series started airing in Japan in the early/mid 70's (it's been around longer than I have, so at least mid-1975), and as far as I know there is still a version of it churning out new episodes as of 2007. The show is produced jointly by Toei Animation, an animation studio, and Bandai, a toy studio, which is a pretty common arrangement for these types of shows. With the exception of a couple of early seasons, the Sentai series are all referred to as "Super Sentai" due to the use of mechanized things (vehicles, robots, etc).
Since Japanese TV studios love spin-offs, there were bound to be some Sentai ones. One of the spin-off shows Bandai/Toei produced was GoLion, which was very similar to the Super Sentai shows, only animated. (Fun fact: "go" is the Japanese word for "five", so "go lion!" literally means "5 lions.") This was quite intentional, as the Super Sentai shows are some of the most popular in Japan, and are ripe for spin-offs. Another spin-off, Dairugger, was also produced by Toei, and also had a combining robot theme, though it was unrelated plot-wise to GoLion. Both series ran during the early 1980s in Japan.
In 1984, Toei started what was supposed to be a series of three American anime shows called "Voltron" that were basically re-dubbed (and heavily edited) versions of the earlier shows. GoLion became the first season, and Dairugger the second. I don't think they ever made the third, so I don't remember what it was going to be based off of, but I'm sure Google knows.
Somewhere along the line, some other company bought the rights to the old Sentai footage. Disney owns the whole mess now, but I think they acquired it from a company called Saban Entertainment (the Dragonball Z people, IIRC), who got the rights from who knows where. Anyway, Saban took one of the Super Sentai seasons and spliced the action sequences into newly filmed American footage, overdubbed the Japanese dialog with English, and released the Power Rangers.
So, strictly speaking, both Volten and Power Rangers are American "rip-offs" of earlier Japanese shows, all of which are "rip-offs" of the original Sentai season, but since the footage and use rights have all be acquired legally and legitimately, it's more proper to call them all "spin-offs" than "rip-offs".
None of which changes the fact that a Voltron movie is going to suck for the same reason every comic book movie after X-Men sucked, namely, there's no way Hollywood can accidentally fail to fuck up quality source material more than once every 10 years or so.
--K
If they could somehow make a DRM system that would automatically stab people in the eye who send in/. summaries that misuse "begs the question", I'd get behind it 100000000%.
Since WWII the U.S. debt has increased 3.2% per year under Democratic presidents and 9.7% per year under Republican administrations.
Here's a cool fact you can use to impress your friends:
It's actually Congress that is in charge of determining the federal budget, not the president!!
I dunno about you, but a sizeable percentage of my friends are political morons. So here's an even cooler fact, that you can use to impress people who actually know what their talking about:
Congress's primary job has been to get itself reelected every 2 and/or 6 years. Congress may be the people actually making the laws, but there's 600ish people in Congress, and only one president. So guess who the American voters focus all of their attention on?
If the president is popular, Congress twists itself into a pretzel doing whatever he says in order to be able to boast "Look how much the president likes us!" and get re-elected. When the president is unpopular, Congress gives itself whiplash running as far away from him as they can before the next election.
If you honestly believe that your own state senators or district's representative has more control over the federal budget than the sitting president, you're living in an elementary school civics fantasy land.
Begging the question is a logical fallacy, much like circular reasoning.
Yes it is, but that doesn't stop it from having other definitions.
This is true, merely being a logical fallacy does not stop the phrase "begging the question" from having other definitions. Not having any other definitions, however, does stop it from having other definitions. Evolving a language over time does not mean "make shit mean whatever you feel like, and pray everyone can figure out what the hell you actually meant."
Based on the request from the Wine developers, it appears that they, at least, suspect that SQSoft has made code changes to the Wine code itself, and is distributing a modified Wine library without source. No matter what *GPL you use, and what version you use, that has always been the core prohibited behavior. The Wine devs are merely asking for the changes to *Wine* code that was made.
Its possible that SWSoft's developers are having to spoon-feed their managers and legal team the terms of the LGPL so they get the problem. In my opinion, knowing how software companies think, I would say it's much more likely that the management's first reaction was "Move those changes out of their code, without breaking these features, so we can link to their library externally." Until the dev team can come back and prove "it just doesn't work like that", their management is not going to accept that they need to open parts of their source to the public. Lawyers are slow, yes, but they're also (hopefully) well aware of copyright law, and will recognize the issue when they see it. Managers are notoriously good at ignoring reality in hopes that it magically changes overnight.
I'll assume that your house and your car are also licensed under the GPL. After all, it wouldn't do to take away my freedom to come in and use your bathroom and listen to your stereo and eat your food.
Tivo isn't taking away any freedom from me that I have any right to expect. If I purchase a piece of TiVo equipment than I should expect that TiVo gets to determine how that piece of equipment works. If I don't want to abide by their restrictions on running Linux, I go get Linux somewhere else. If I want to run Linux on a DVR without TiVos restructions, I build my own DVR. Obviously, I don't have the skill, nor inclination, to build my own, which shoots down two of the key arguments in favor of the GPL. One, most people, even most developers, don't give a crap if they have access to source code for some huge software project, because there is no way they're going to waste their time diving into that code to do anything. And second, people who whine that TiVo is limiting their rights by locking down what runs on the TiVo actually want to be able to hijack TiVos hard work and effort building the hardware, and are pissed off when TiVo claims their completely natural right to stop you.
The part that GPL advocates never seem to want to explain is that the GPL isn't about freedom in general. It's about freedom for the users. To get that freedom, the GPL quite explicitly takes away freedom from other people; specifically, developers, distributors, etc. To be fair, the language of the GPL, the FSF propoganda, and RMS himself never hesistate to make this point clear; just everyone else. Those people who get their freedom taken away do so voluntarily, knowing full well what they are doing, but it's just ridiculous to pretend it's not happening to make the GPL seem more "pure" than it really is. Like everything else that involves more than one person, its merely another way to decide where one freedom stops and another starts.
One of the links in the summary goes to the judgement on appeal from a case in the Netherlands of the RIAA (or whatever their equivalent is... there's like 35 plaintiffs) vs. some ISPs. The court ruled, twice, that the ISPs didn't have to turn over names & addresses based on the list of IPs the music companies gave them. The main reason was because the court didn't believe that MediaSentry was a proper means of obtaining them.
One of the reasons they didn't like MediaSentry was this:
The Preliminary Injunction Court also considered the fact that MediaSentry is an American company and that the United States of America could not be considered to be a country that has an appropriate protection level for personal data
At least the rest of the world has figured out what most of us Americans haven't: America's right to privacy is a rapidly disappearing illusion.
A comment made near the end of TFA may help explain why it's so "shocking":
Although the conditions that cause the reformation of a shock wave are rare around the Earth, they are common around these other celestial objects.
I would interpret this, in context with the rest of the article, to mean that the phenomenon measured by the Cluster doesn't normally happen around Earth. After all, we've been sending spacecraft out past the moon since long before 2001, so these can't be the first to get a chance to measure the region. I believe the point of the article was that these fluctuations were predicted in 1985, but until 2001, none of the measurements of Earth's bow shock supported the theory. The ESA was fully expecting similar readings this time around, but "shockingly" got readings that proved the 20-year-old theory.
--K
The author of TFA is seriously confused about a lot of things, one of those things being the goals of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman is probably one of the most extreme ultra-liberal people to ever sit at a keyboard, and yet I don't think he's ever once pushed for total abolition of copyright.
What RMS and ideologically similar people have proposed is this: software should not be covered under copyright law. You can see this ideal most clearly if you head over to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html and read the two articles called "Why Software Should {Be Free,Not Have Owners}". While I disagree with his philosophy, he makes a pretty solid empirical case for why software should not be "owned" in the same sense that books are "owned" by their author or art is "owned" by the artist.
The author of the article also fails to pick up on a key point about the GPL and why it exists: because there is copyright law, the FSF must use copyright law to accomplish their goals. If software was suddenly declared ineligible for copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL because no proprietary software company could prevent people with access to their source code from modifying or redistributing it, nor could they prevent people from modifying or distributing binary copies of the software. This is a small step back from the current state where the group of people with access to the GPL'd source code includes everyone with a copy of the binary, but it's a giant leap forward in eliminating all the complex legal issues around who can copy what and where.
Having actually read TFA, it looks like the author was, in fact, trying to do exactly those two things he does not have the right to do with the existing code base:
* Retroactively re-license existing versions from the GPL to the new version:
* Unlaterally re-license code that includes third part submissions, since most of the translation packages were done by user submission.
Ignoring those two actions, even if the license change is strictly legal, it's downright underhanded to pull a stunt like he did. He didn't just change the license on his software; he put out a point release on the primary distribution site, after having changed the license terms included with the package, then refused to let anyone bring it up on the official support mailing list. How many of us would notice if we downloaded and installed the lastest apache or postfix or whatever, and the license had silently and magically changed to a closed one?
I fully agree with everything you said. But none of it is relevant to Windows update. Your MAC address or Dell serial number aren't part of your set of PnP ID's. There's a big difference between the owner of a PC being able to identify it on their own network, and Microsoft being able to identify it from across the country.
(Caveat: I am assuming they're only gathering what they claim they're gathering, not because I trust them, but because if they were lying they would have been slammed for it on/. long ago.)
Ok, then why encrypt it if there's nothing to worry about?
Most likely so every script kiddie between here and Redmond can't see how many hundreds of security patches I'm missing and potentially start the next gigantic PR disaster worm infection.
--K
Slashdot Mirror
Modded +1000000 insightful for using "begging the question" properly.
--K
I have discovered a most remarkable way to accomplish this, but the proof won't fit in the margin.
--K
Well, if you won't, then please allow ME to personally apologize to the world for Britney Spears.
--K
Clearly, the answer is to produce and support an open source product until it becomes wildly popular, then systematically introduce subtle but severe bugs that force everyone who runs your software to pay for your support contracts :)
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about the USA. Clearly not.
Our economy is in the tank right now; the US dollar is dropping like a rock relative to other foreign currency. Hell, the USD is worth less than 1 CAD for the first time I can remember. We're so deep in debt to other countries that my grandkid's grandkids will probably still be paying it off, all to fund this retarded "war". At the end of the Clinton administration, we had not only a balanced budget, but a yearly surpluss that could (in theory, though I guess I'm not naieve enough to believe it would ever happen) be used to pay down our debt. That's long gone. And you may not have heard, but millions of people just lost their houses because they couldn't afford their mortgage payments.
Our military is stretched so thin we couldn't fend off an invasion from Bermuda, let alone an actual serious military threat. And our government knows it, so much so that they're coddling North Korea and Iran, two countries that are infinitely more dangerous a threat to us than Iraq could ever have been if Saddam had even wanted to.
And the rest of the world hates us. Not that this is new, but our "word" doesn't mean dick to anyone but us after that whole WMD/uranium/etc. fiasco.
--Mike
In the United States, at least, "circumstantial evidence" is not a legally defined term. It's used very loosely (mostly on television) to indicate evidence that is two or more steps removed from directly linking a suspect to a crime. The reality is many, if not most murder cases are tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence.
Criminals, even dumb ones, are usually smart enough not to leave obvious clues to their identity at a pre-meditated crime scene. During unplanned/accidental/spontaneous crimes, you may occasionally find obvious, direct evidence. Otherwise, you rely on things like the presence of DNA, fingerprints, sales/bank receipts demonstrating a persons whereabouts, fiber or other trace evidence, etc. All of these are circumstantial evidence because they indirectly link a suspect to a crime. For example, their fingerprints were found on a wall near the crime scene, so they were at the crime scene, and they cannot come up with a valid explanation why, and they had a motive to commit the crime, thus implying they are guilty.
As mentioned elsethread, Scott Peterson's conviction was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Same goes for Tim McVeigh. Any good prosecutor will tell you that circumstantial evidence is sometimes better than direct evidence because there's usually so much more of it. It's simply a matter of convincing a jury that no other logical explanation, besides "guilty", can possible arise from all that evidence. Think of a Venn diagram: the number of people with a yellow Camaro is pretty high, as is the number of people with size 10 Nike Air, as is the number of people with a white and brown Pekingese; but as you start putting those together the number of people who qualify for all three criteria shrinks rapidly, hopefully down to one person.
That's a perfectly legitimate and acceptable position to take. That is, if you also conceded that the WTO has no right to interfere with any other country who's laws permit its citizens to copy and resell US copyright material, or sell cheap knock-offs using the trademarks of legitimate companies, or export disease-laden meat to the US to anyone willingto buy it, or whatever.
Oh, and you'd need to convince Congress to reverse their current position, which is to voluntarily agree to allow the WTO to do exactly what it's doing. Good luck explaining to the US manufacturers why everyone else in the world suddenly imposes 15000% tarrifs on US exports and refuses to sell us needed raw materials and products for anything close to to the prices they charge each other.
But hey, this is AMERRRRRICA! To hell with them derned ferners!
--Mike
As with so many people in these near-xenophobic times, you appear to be making the incorrect assumption that the Constitution only applies to US Citizens. When the constitution means "United States" things, it explicitly says so. Section 8's enumerated power of copyright applies to all writings of authors everywhere in the world.
NBC had a runaway hit when it decided to revive Battlestar Galactica from the 70s crappy TV trash heap, and managed to turn it into one of the best sci-fi series ever produced. It was the highest rated show on Sci-Fi at least one season, and Time Magazine named it best show of the year.
It's only natural for them to see what other assets they have lying around that might prove successful if actually done right. Obviously, premier episode ratings don't mean much unless they stay high all season; still, the Bionic Woman premier last week was a huge success, second place for the timeslot with something like 15 million viewers. To NBC, this just means that people are interested in seeing these old shows brought back, done right, with real talented actors, real scripts, real production values, and treated as a real drama, not the cornball crap the originals were.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if Knight Rider was a huge success, too. As bad as the original show was, it was pretty popular at the time, and lasted four years. And if it does take off, I expect we'll see re-imagined versions of the A-Team, Airwolf, and if we're all very good, Greatest American Hero.
--K
I can't fathom why there's a debate about this, either. It's written in pretty plain English right in the Constitution that such people have such rights, end of story.
--K
EditPadPro (www.jgsoft.com) is not free, in either sense, but it's very cheap for what it does. I have turned most of the development teams at my last three jobs onto it. One of its key features is configurable, user-extensible syntax highlighting. The highlighter includes the option to exclude matched language tokens from spellchecking. In the built-in highlighting schemes, for example, it will usually spellcheck inside comments but not much else, but as mentioned, you can easily take their color scheme and change it to suit.
--K
At the risk of being ridiculously pedantic:
Power Rangers is not, technically, a rip-off of Voltron. If anything, it's the other way around, but even then "rip-off" implies intentional but unathorized copying, which didn't really happen.
The Sentai series started airing in Japan in the early/mid 70's (it's been around longer than I have, so at least mid-1975), and as far as I know there is still a version of it churning out new episodes as of 2007. The show is produced jointly by Toei Animation, an animation studio, and Bandai, a toy studio, which is a pretty common arrangement for these types of shows. With the exception of a couple of early seasons, the Sentai series are all referred to as "Super Sentai" due to the use of mechanized things (vehicles, robots, etc).
Since Japanese TV studios love spin-offs, there were bound to be some Sentai ones. One of the spin-off shows Bandai/Toei produced was GoLion, which was very similar to the Super Sentai shows, only animated. (Fun fact: "go" is the Japanese word for "five", so "go lion!" literally means "5 lions.") This was quite intentional, as the Super Sentai shows are some of the most popular in Japan, and are ripe for spin-offs. Another spin-off, Dairugger, was also produced by Toei, and also had a combining robot theme, though it was unrelated plot-wise to GoLion. Both series ran during the early 1980s in Japan.
In 1984, Toei started what was supposed to be a series of three American anime shows called "Voltron" that were basically re-dubbed (and heavily edited) versions of the earlier shows. GoLion became the first season, and Dairugger the second. I don't think they ever made the third, so I don't remember what it was going to be based off of, but I'm sure Google knows.
Somewhere along the line, some other company bought the rights to the old Sentai footage. Disney owns the whole mess now, but I think they acquired it from a company called Saban Entertainment (the Dragonball Z people, IIRC), who got the rights from who knows where. Anyway, Saban took one of the Super Sentai seasons and spliced the action sequences into newly filmed American footage, overdubbed the Japanese dialog with English, and released the Power Rangers.
So, strictly speaking, both Volten and Power Rangers are American "rip-offs" of earlier Japanese shows, all of which are "rip-offs" of the original Sentai season, but since the footage and use rights have all be acquired legally and legitimately, it's more proper to call them all "spin-offs" than "rip-offs".
None of which changes the fact that a Voltron movie is going to suck for the same reason every comic book movie after X-Men sucked, namely, there's no way Hollywood can accidentally fail to fuck up quality source material more than once every 10 years or so. --K
If they could somehow make a DRM system that would automatically stab people in the eye who send in /. summaries that misuse "begs the question", I'd get behind it 100000000%.
Congress's primary job has been to get itself reelected every 2 and/or 6 years. Congress may be the people actually making the laws, but there's 600ish people in Congress, and only one president. So guess who the American voters focus all of their attention on?
If the president is popular, Congress twists itself into a pretzel doing whatever he says in order to be able to boast "Look how much the president likes us!" and get re-elected. When the president is unpopular, Congress gives itself whiplash running as far away from him as they can before the next election.
If you honestly believe that your own state senators or district's representative has more control over the federal budget than the sitting president, you're living in an elementary school civics fantasy land.
--K
Based on the request from the Wine developers, it appears that they, at least, suspect that SQSoft has made code changes to the Wine code itself, and is distributing a modified Wine library without source. No matter what *GPL you use, and what version you use, that has always been the core prohibited behavior. The Wine devs are merely asking for the changes to *Wine* code that was made.
Its possible that SWSoft's developers are having to spoon-feed their managers and legal team the terms of the LGPL so they get the problem. In my opinion, knowing how software companies think, I would say it's much more likely that the management's first reaction was "Move those changes out of their code, without breaking these features, so we can link to their library externally." Until the dev team can come back and prove "it just doesn't work like that", their management is not going to accept that they need to open parts of their source to the public. Lawyers are slow, yes, but they're also (hopefully) well aware of copyright law, and will recognize the issue when they see it. Managers are notoriously good at ignoring reality in hopes that it magically changes overnight.
--K
I'll assume that your house and your car are also licensed under the GPL. After all, it wouldn't do to take away my freedom to come in and use your bathroom and listen to your stereo and eat your food.
Tivo isn't taking away any freedom from me that I have any right to expect. If I purchase a piece of TiVo equipment than I should expect that TiVo gets to determine how that piece of equipment works. If I don't want to abide by their restrictions on running Linux, I go get Linux somewhere else. If I want to run Linux on a DVR without TiVos restructions, I build my own DVR. Obviously, I don't have the skill, nor inclination, to build my own, which shoots down two of the key arguments in favor of the GPL. One, most people, even most developers, don't give a crap if they have access to source code for some huge software project, because there is no way they're going to waste their time diving into that code to do anything. And second, people who whine that TiVo is limiting their rights by locking down what runs on the TiVo actually want to be able to hijack TiVos hard work and effort building the hardware, and are pissed off when TiVo claims their completely natural right to stop you.
The part that GPL advocates never seem to want to explain is that the GPL isn't about freedom in general. It's about freedom for the users. To get that freedom, the GPL quite explicitly takes away freedom from other people; specifically, developers, distributors, etc. To be fair, the language of the GPL, the FSF propoganda, and RMS himself never hesistate to make this point clear; just everyone else. Those people who get their freedom taken away do so voluntarily, knowing full well what they are doing, but it's just ridiculous to pretend it's not happening to make the GPL seem more "pure" than it really is. Like everything else that involves more than one person, its merely another way to decide where one freedom stops and another starts.
One of the reasons they didn't like MediaSentry was this: At least the rest of the world has figured out what most of us Americans haven't: America's right to privacy is a rapidly disappearing illusion.
The author of TFA is seriously confused about a lot of things, one of those things being the goals of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman is probably one of the most extreme ultra-liberal people to ever sit at a keyboard, and yet I don't think he's ever once pushed for total abolition of copyright.
What RMS and ideologically similar people have proposed is this: software should not be covered under copyright law. You can see this ideal most clearly if you head over to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html and read the two articles called "Why Software Should {Be Free,Not Have Owners}". While I disagree with his philosophy, he makes a pretty solid empirical case for why software should not be "owned" in the same sense that books are "owned" by their author or art is "owned" by the artist.
The author of the article also fails to pick up on a key point about the GPL and why it exists: because there is copyright law, the FSF must use copyright law to accomplish their goals. If software was suddenly declared ineligible for copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL because no proprietary software company could prevent people with access to their source code from modifying or redistributing it, nor could they prevent people from modifying or distributing binary copies of the software. This is a small step back from the current state where the group of people with access to the GPL'd source code includes everyone with a copy of the binary, but it's a giant leap forward in eliminating all the complex legal issues around who can copy what and where.
--K
* Retroactively re-license existing versions from the GPL to the new version: * Unlaterally re-license code that includes third part submissions, since most of the translation packages were done by user submission.
Ignoring those two actions, even if the license change is strictly legal, it's downright underhanded to pull a stunt like he did. He didn't just change the license on his software; he put out a point release on the primary distribution site, after having changed the license terms included with the package, then refused to let anyone bring it up on the official support mailing list. How many of us would notice if we downloaded and installed the lastest apache or postfix or whatever, and the license had silently and magically changed to a closed one?
I fully agree with everything you said. But none of it is relevant to Windows update. Your MAC address or Dell serial number aren't part of your set of PnP ID's. There's a big difference between the owner of a PC being able to identify it on their own network, and Microsoft being able to identify it from across the country.
/. long ago.)
(Caveat: I am assuming they're only gathering what they claim they're gathering, not because I trust them, but because if they were lying they would have been slammed for it on