In today's column, he urged Google to provide an alternative version of Gmail (possibly with a charge) that would have better privacy features, and no scanning messages to insert ads. If Google listens, then maybe he has power.
It appears that both Microsoft and Real wanted to charge the BBC a huge amount of money to license their codecs, so much that it was thought cheaper to develop their own.
If they patented the codec but then release an implementation under the GPL, it follows that they are effectively granting anyone permission to, as patent lawyers say, "practice the patent" as long as they do so in a GPL program that is a derivative work of what they released. It would be good of them to say so explicitly, though.
There are a growing number of GPL-licensed patents now (patents where the owner permits GPL implementations). IBM has done this with a number of their patents.
"When a crook in New York City cracked a safe and stole a gun, then used it in a crime and shot somebody, they provided lawyers for the shooting victim to sue the gunowner whose gun had been stolen."
I don't believe this (unless there are other facts in the case that you are omitting). Please post links to coverage of this case.
This kind of stuff makes most of the world think that the most powerful nation on earth is run by some Taliban-like cult: the last nation on earth of Christian heritage where significant numbers of people count the "begats" and argue that the world is under 10,000 years old, that almost all living things were destroyed by a world-wide flood, that dinosaur bones were (pick one) created by the devil, or by God to test our faith, or were forgotten by Noah when he collected two of each animal for the ark.
There are a lot of Christians I respect, but they treat the Bible as inspiration and consider most of the stories in it to be legends and parables. Just as Jesus told the story of the mustard seed, the Bible tells the story of a man named Job. It's a lesson, like Aesop's fables.
If you're a Catholic and don't believe in evolution, you are going against official doctrine. Interestingly, about 50% of American Catholics haven't gotten the word: they say they don't believe in evolution, despite the Vatican repeatedly saying that it's a fact as far as they are concerned.
"Scientific folk" only see religion as a competitor when politicians use religion to shut down science (as George Bush did with stem cell research), or to prevent teaching of science in the schools.
Here's how you do it: first off, electronic voting software must be open source, and furthermore it must be inspected by qualified computer security experts. The software developers and security inspectors would be paid for their work, of course, but they would need to either assign their copyright to the state or at least assign unlimited distribution rights to the state.
Then, when the voter votes, a printout of that vote is produced, and the voter is asked by the machine to confirm that he or she has inspected the paper record and agrees that it matches the voter's intent. In the security inspection, particular attention is paid to ensuring that the printout will match the submitted vote. Nevertheless, the paper record is then deposited in a locked box, watched over by experienced little old ladies, one per political party per polling station the way things are done today. For a randomly selected sample of polling stations, all the paper ballots are counted and compared to the electronically reported figure. In very close races, all of the paper records can be counted. To make recounts more efficient, the paper printouts can be designed to be optically readable and machine counted if need be.
"But that will be expensive", some will whine. Big deal: assuring that the voters' will is respected is the #1 priority in a democratic society.
German Linux proponents should do their best to discredit this salesman, by making his history widely known to as many German companies as possible. Wie sagt man "flip-flop" auf Deutsch? Why should anyone believe a word out of this guy's mouth? He'll now be telling customers the exact opposite of what he told them before, just because someone is paying him more?
Copyright protects expression, not function. Trying to stretch it to protect functional aspects of a GUI should be out of bounds. Imagine if every brand of automobile had to have a completely different control mechanism. Only one brand could have a steering wheel; maybe the next guy would have to use something that looks like a rudder. One would have a gas pedal, another would have a hand throttle. Would this be a good thing?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pretty much the standard at this point for electronic design automation (EDA) tools. This means that it will be used in the design of most chips produced this year and in the next several years. It's 2.4 based, and will remain so for some time.
Things have always been this way. None of the major distributors ship a pure Linus kernel, including SUSE. Everyone includes patches. Backporting 2.6 features helps everyone because it subjects those features to more testing, meaning that 2.6 will be better as a result.
Red Hat has more kernel hackers than anyone else, which means that they have the ability to support kernels with more hacks. So what SUSE is really saying is "How dare Red Hat use its competitive advantage?"
Finally, it's not true that "everyone else is working on 2.6". People in the "open source community" are still maintaining 2.2, remember. Future 2.4 releases may well include some of the backported stuff developed by Red Hat and others.
With C or C++, we can point to ISO standards, tell people to code to that and file a bug against the compiler if it doesn't accept it. Sun could have gone the standards committee route. They could even have done for Java what the DoD did for Ada: make the standard open but keep the trademark, and you can only claim to have an Ada compiler if you pass the testsuite.
An antivirus program only finds known viruses, or variants of known viruses that trigger some common rule. They are useless against new viruses, particularly rapidly spreading new viruses.
At one time, he expressed pessimism that Linux on the desktop would ever win out over Microsoft, but he was always strongly pro-Linux on servers. It's unjust to claim that he had a "stance against Linux".
Similarly with Red Hat: their management made some "use Windows on the desktop for now" statements in the past, and I wish they hadn't made such statements, but their intent was more like "the Linux desktop isn't quite there yet". After all, at the time Red Hat was paying a number of people to work on desktop Linux full-time.
Nevertheless, it appears to be a clear DMCA violation. The DMCA (bad law that it is) makes no exceptions for fair use; it forbids trafficking in any device, technology, or service that disables any form of copy protection. I doubt if the SourceForge people are going to risk jail, so you should expect this software to disappear soon from SourceForge.
Re:Redhat is still around?
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SuSE and IBM would have nothing to sell if they had to take out Red Hat's contributions, and would not be able to effectively take over if all the maintainers of vital Linux and GNU components being paid by Red Hat were to disappear.
I am often irritated by Red Hat, but I never make the mistake of thinking that we can do without them.
Novell has nothing "locked", as their contributions are GPLed just like Red Hat's.
Because of the extreme pro-GATT press bias, there was little public awareness at the time of passage of the consequences. GATT basically establishes an unaccountable world government that hands down edicts, ordering nations to overturn their laws or face billions of dollars a year in sanctions. If they could only do this when a country tried to impose a discriminatory tariff, it would be one thing. But anything that inconveniences the flow of money or goods across borders can be overridden, except for specific exceptions written into the GATT (these mainly allow for continued agricultural tariffs and intellectual property protection).
Re:Excellent
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You're confusing vector programs (Sodipodi, Illustrator) with bitmap programs (GIMP, Photoshop). If you want to draw diagrams, you want one of the former, not one of the latter.
However, the simplest way to draw a rectangle in GIMP is:
Choose the rectangle select tool, drag out a rectangle.
Using the right mouse button, execute "Stroke" from the Edit menu. This will draw a rectangle, using the current brush tool, following the selection you just made.
To get an ellipse, use the ellipse select tool. Or use the Bezier curve tool to draw Bezier curves.
If you want to do this a lot, you can attach the keyboard accelerator of your choice to the Stroke function (it doesn't have one by default).
So program your laptop to upload a file to your ISP giving the laptop's location (determined from a GPS device) every time the laptop connects to the net. The first time the bad guy goes online, he's nailed.
This is just stupid. X-No-Archive tells Google not to archive it, but anyone who gets a full Usenet feed the old-fashioned way is fully capable of archiving it, without any help from Google. Same with anything else on Usenet. You young 'uns seem to think that Usenet is a Google facility. The way Usenet works, there is a Path: header on every post that allows the post to be traced back to the point where it entered Usenet. The government does not need to subpeona Google to get a copy of everything on Usenet, all they need is to find peers who will feed the whole thing to them, completely in the open. If you post to Usenet, you are giving your posting to the world, including to the governments of the world.
The leak came from a Microsoft partner,
Mainsoft.
The partner's access to Microsoft source was given long before Microsoft started their "shared source" program.
No, it doesn't work that way. All the major Linux and BSD distros backport security fixes into older apps that they have released; they do not insist that you upgrade to the next major version.
When someone (e.g. Red Hat) drops security coverage for older versions, multiple efforts (Progeny, Fedora Legacy) spring up to fill the gap.
Slashdot Mirror
In today's column, he urged Google to provide an alternative version of Gmail (possibly with a charge) that would have better privacy features, and no scanning messages to insert ads. If Google listens, then maybe he has power.
It appears that both Microsoft and Real wanted to charge the BBC a huge amount of money to license their codecs, so much that it was thought cheaper to develop their own.
If they patented the codec but then release an implementation under the GPL, it follows that they are effectively granting anyone permission to, as patent lawyers say, "practice the patent" as long as they do so in a GPL program that is a derivative work of what they released. It would be good of them to say so explicitly, though.
There are a growing number of GPL-licensed patents now (patents where the owner permits GPL implementations). IBM has done this with a number of their patents.
"When a crook in New York City cracked a safe and stole a gun, then used it in a crime and shot somebody, they provided lawyers for the shooting victim to sue the gunowner whose gun had been stolen."
I don't believe this (unless there are other facts in the case that you are omitting). Please post links to coverage of this case.
This kind of stuff makes most of the world think that the most powerful nation on earth is run by some Taliban-like cult: the last nation on earth of Christian heritage where significant numbers of people count the "begats" and argue that the world is under 10,000 years old, that almost all living things were destroyed by a world-wide flood, that dinosaur bones were (pick one) created by the devil, or by God to test our faith, or were forgotten by Noah when he collected two of each animal for the ark.
There are a lot of Christians I respect, but they treat the Bible as inspiration and consider most of the stories in it to be legends and parables. Just as Jesus told the story of the mustard seed, the Bible tells the story of a man named Job. It's a lesson, like Aesop's fables.
"Scientific folk" only see religion as a competitor when politicians use religion to shut down science (as George Bush did with stem cell research), or to prevent teaching of science in the schools.
Here's how you do it: first off, electronic voting software must be open source, and furthermore it must be inspected by qualified computer security experts. The software developers and security inspectors would be paid for their work, of course, but they would need to either assign their copyright to the state or at least assign unlimited distribution rights to the state.
Then, when the voter votes, a printout of that vote is produced, and the voter is asked by the machine to confirm that he or she has inspected the paper record and agrees that it matches the voter's intent. In the security inspection, particular attention is paid to ensuring that the printout will match the submitted vote. Nevertheless, the paper record is then deposited in a locked box, watched over by experienced little old ladies, one per political party per polling station the way things are done today. For a randomly selected sample of polling stations, all the paper ballots are counted and compared to the electronically reported figure. In very close races, all of the paper records can be counted. To make recounts more efficient, the paper printouts can be designed to be optically readable and machine counted if need be.
"But that will be expensive", some will whine. Big deal: assuring that the voters' will is respected is the #1 priority in a democratic society.
German Linux proponents should do their best to discredit this salesman, by making his history widely known to as many German companies as possible. Wie sagt man "flip-flop" auf Deutsch? Why should anyone believe a word out of this guy's mouth? He'll now be telling customers the exact opposite of what he told them before, just because someone is paying him more?
Copyright protects expression, not function. Trying to stretch it to protect functional aspects of a GUI should be out of bounds. Imagine if every brand of automobile had to have a completely different control mechanism. Only one brand could have a steering wheel; maybe the next guy would have to use something that looks like a rudder. One would have a gas pedal, another would have a hand throttle. Would this be a good thing?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pretty much the standard at this point for electronic design automation (EDA) tools. This means that it will be used in the design of most chips produced this year and in the next several years. It's 2.4 based, and will remain so for some time.
Things have always been this way. None of the major distributors ship a pure Linus kernel, including SUSE. Everyone includes patches. Backporting 2.6 features helps everyone because it subjects those features to more testing, meaning that 2.6 will be better as a result.
Red Hat has more kernel hackers than anyone else, which means that they have the ability to support kernels with more hacks. So what SUSE is really saying is "How dare Red Hat use its competitive advantage?"
Finally, it's not true that "everyone else is working on 2.6". People in the "open source community" are still maintaining 2.2, remember. Future 2.4 releases may well include some of the backported stuff developed by Red Hat and others.
With C or C++, we can point to ISO standards, tell people to code to that and file a bug against the compiler if it doesn't accept it. Sun could have gone the standards committee route. They could even have done for Java what the DoD did for Ada: make the standard open but keep the trademark, and you can only claim to have an Ada compiler if you pass the testsuite.
An antivirus program only finds known viruses, or variants of known viruses that trigger some common rule. They are useless against new viruses, particularly rapidly spreading new viruses.
At one time, he expressed pessimism that Linux on the desktop would ever win out over Microsoft, but he was always strongly pro-Linux on servers. It's unjust to claim that he had a "stance against Linux".
Similarly with Red Hat: their management made some "use Windows on the desktop for now" statements in the past, and I wish they hadn't made such statements, but their intent was more like "the Linux desktop isn't quite there yet". After all, at the time Red Hat was paying a number of people to work on desktop Linux full-time.
Nevertheless, it appears to be a clear DMCA violation. The DMCA (bad law that it is) makes no exceptions for fair use; it forbids trafficking in any device, technology, or service that disables any form of copy protection. I doubt if the SourceForge people are going to risk jail, so you should expect this software to disappear soon from SourceForge.
SuSE and IBM would have nothing to sell if they had to take out Red Hat's contributions, and would not be able to effectively take over if all the maintainers of vital Linux and GNU components being paid by Red Hat were to disappear.
I am often irritated by Red Hat, but I never make the mistake of thinking that we can do without them.
Novell has nothing "locked", as their contributions are GPLed just like Red Hat's.
It's trivial to get MP3 support in Fedora and to keep it current. Go to rpm.livna.org and follow the instructions.
Because of the extreme pro-GATT press bias, there was little public awareness at the time of passage of the consequences. GATT basically establishes an unaccountable world government that hands down edicts, ordering nations to overturn their laws or face billions of dollars a year in sanctions. If they could only do this when a country tried to impose a discriminatory tariff, it would be one thing. But anything that inconveniences the flow of money or goods across borders can be overridden, except for specific exceptions written into the GATT (these mainly allow for continued agricultural tariffs and intellectual property protection).
You're confusing vector programs (Sodipodi, Illustrator) with bitmap programs (GIMP, Photoshop). If you want to draw diagrams, you want one of the former, not one of the latter.
However, the simplest way to draw a rectangle in GIMP is:
To get an ellipse, use the ellipse select tool. Or use the Bezier curve tool to draw Bezier curves.
If you want to do this a lot, you can attach the keyboard accelerator of your choice to the Stroke function (it doesn't have one by default).
So program your laptop to upload a file to your ISP giving the laptop's location (determined from a GPS device) every time the laptop connects to the net. The first time the bad guy goes online, he's nailed.
This is just stupid. X-No-Archive tells Google not to archive it, but anyone who gets a full Usenet feed the old-fashioned way is fully capable of archiving it, without any help from Google. Same with anything else on Usenet. You young 'uns seem to think that Usenet is a Google facility. The way Usenet works, there is a Path: header on every post that allows the post to be traced back to the point where it entered Usenet. The government does not need to subpeona Google to get a copy of everything on Usenet, all they need is to find peers who will feed the whole thing to them, completely in the open. If you post to Usenet, you are giving your posting to the world, including to the governments of the world.
The leak came from a Microsoft partner, Mainsoft. The partner's access to Microsoft source was given long before Microsoft started their "shared source" program.
BetaNews has the details.
No, it doesn't work that way. All the major Linux and BSD distros backport security fixes into older apps that they have released; they do not insist that you upgrade to the next major version. When someone (e.g. Red Hat) drops security coverage for older versions, multiple efforts (Progeny, Fedora Legacy) spring up to fill the gap.
On the contrary: by making older Windows versions unusable, this release may force everyone to "upgrade" to XP, thus reducing Microsoft's costs.
My five-year old daughter is pretty good at breaking desktops.