But IBM already has a copy of SCO's code; they licensed it after all. They can release the output of "shred" without violating their agreements with SCO.
If we can show that SCO's violating the BSD license, maybe we can convince some BSD copyright holder to sue them first, and demand as part of discovery the MD5 checksums from "shred", showing duplicated BSD code but no duplicated BSD copyright.
Well, fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), the tobacco industry lobbyists won a battle with the homeland security people: lighters and matches are not banned from airplanes, because big tobacco called their pet politicians and fought the proposed regs. You can take a Bic lighter on a plane in the US.
Well, actually, now that the US allows "business method" patents, you can essentially patent the idea of doing something. For example, Priceline patented the idea of doing a reverse auction over a network.
The parent article is not insightful. There is no legal obligation for a patent-holder to prosecute all infringers equally. Yes, a patent holder can, too, dictate who can and who cannot use the patent, and can be as unfair as he wants to be, because the patent is his property. Your claim that selective prosecution is not available if someone wants to keep a patent is total crap; perhaps you are confused since there is a similar provision in trademark law.
Excuse me? If you and I both have Red Hat 9, and we both fire up grip to create ogg files for the same track on the same CD, we'll wind up with bit-for-bit identical.ogg files, which will then have the same MD5 sum.
And only an idiot would put "Ripped by laird" in the ID3 tag.
It only works as long as the blacklist provider has credibility (that is, that ISPs believe that the provider is being responsible), and SPEWS has long since blown theirs.
Let's all fix this with meta-moderation: everyone please attach "unfair" to any moderation that calls a message "Informative" that has no new information at all.
Light bulbs with longer lifetimes are easier to build: just make the filament thicker. Of course, this decreases the energy efficiency of the light bulb, which is why people don't do this.
Don't overrate Microsoft. They have two huge monopolies, the OS and Office. Almost everything else they do loses money. They are powerful but they are not invincible.
They also have the problem that Google has some very broad patents. I don't see how Microsoft can build a better search engine without infringing; it would seem that they would have to attack the patents themselves as overbroad (which they arguably are -- Google patented the very idea that links are considered when scoring a result).
The kind of capitalism you describe is tought in college economics courses. There's not much of it in real life. Many buyers, many sellers, full information. In this "perfect competition" situation, profit drops to zero as things reach equilibrium. This is not the situation we have in the US. Instead, we have monopolies and colluding ogliopolies, to make sure there's enough profit to pay off the politicians who draw up the rules to protect their contributors.
It would appear that a company that buys a license, accepts its terms, and then engages in any copying of Linux code violates the GPL and forfeits its license to copy or modify the Linux kernel. That's because it is engaging in sublicensing in a way that is directly forbidden by the GPL.
The solution for problems like this is to provide a wrapper around the program that does what you want.
We can't change tar's behavior because that will break things, but we could add a smarttar command that would test the input and then invoke tar, or a smartrpm, etc.
If Bush's approval numbers continue their decline, a Democrat who is able to give him a tough fight is quite likely to win. If Dean gets the nomination and picks someone like Sen. Graham of Florida or Gen. Clark for VP, we've got a race on our hands.
By November 2004, Dean's early opposition to the Iraq war will be a quite popular position, as the quagmire is still going to be going on then, even if Saddam is caught or killed.
I wouldn't want to stand in the way of anyone scratching his or her own itch, but I would suggest that it might be better for people to try to team up with existing projects rather than create, say, the 37th IRC client. If you must start something new, start something new, that does not yet exist.
Speaking as a very small part of the GCC team, I am very happy with a lot of the work Apple is now contributing: they have a sizable compiler team now and are contributing all that work back. Some of Apple's team are long-time gcc hackers, others
are well-known C++ gurus,
who can work almost full time on free software thanks to Apple picking up
their paycheck.
In particular, gcc 3.4 will have precompiled headers (this work was contributed by Apple).
If you insist on only using the GPL, your revenue potential is limited. But a GPL/proprietary combination can bring in more money than proprietary-only. If Troll required every developer to pay for Qt, you would never have heard of them.
The free license, and working with the KDE people, gave them publicity you can't buy.
As for your last paragraph, we have several existence proofs to the contrary: Troll Tech makes
good money, despite the availability of their main
product under the GPL.
Have you looked at these patents? The claims seem wildly overbroad. Claim #1 of patent 6,427,140 would seem to cover any protocol that first does a negotiation, where there are two or more possible protocols to be used, and then delivers secure content. That would include SSL or SSH, both of which were pre-existing technology.
The problem with patents as practiced today is that the inventor comes up with something new, and then the lawyers try to tweak the language to claim every possible related thing under the sun.
These overbroad patent claims impede progress.
At least things like the RSA and LZW patents covered one specific algorithm; these guys try to claim any procedure that negotiates rules by means of a protocol, which is an approach that goes back to before TCP/IP existed.
One of the main things that article focuses on is that "apple" gets you to Apple Computer, not to articles about apples. However, that's just stupid, if I wanted to read about apples, I'd type "apples", and it would work fine.
The only way to satisfy the author of the critique would be to clone the author a few thousand times, have the clones personally read all the web pages and highly rank the pages that the author cares about. That's because in most of his examples, he wants the search engine to read his mind: not the general public's mind, thank you, because when Joe Average types "flowers" to Google he's looking to buy flowers for his wife, girlfriend, or mother, not for an encyclopedia example on flowering plants.
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But IBM already has a copy of SCO's code; they licensed it after all. They can release the output of "shred" without violating their agreements with SCO.
If we can show that SCO's violating the BSD license, maybe we can convince some BSD copyright holder to sue them first, and demand as part of discovery the MD5 checksums from "shred", showing duplicated BSD code but no duplicated BSD copyright.
Well, fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), the tobacco industry lobbyists won a battle with the homeland security people: lighters and matches are not banned from airplanes, because big tobacco called their pet politicians and fought the proposed regs. You can take a Bic lighter on a plane in the US.
Well, actually, now that the US allows "business method" patents, you can essentially patent the idea of doing something. For example, Priceline patented the idea of doing a reverse auction over a network.
The parent article is not insightful. There is no legal obligation for a patent-holder to prosecute all infringers equally. Yes, a patent holder can, too, dictate who can and who cannot use the patent, and can be as unfair as he wants to be, because the patent is his property. Your claim that selective prosecution is not available if someone wants to keep a patent is total crap; perhaps you are confused since there is a similar provision in trademark law.
Excuse me? If you and I both have Red Hat 9, and we both fire up grip to create ogg files for the same track on the same CD, we'll wind up with bit-for-bit identical .ogg files, which will then have the same MD5 sum.
And only an idiot would put "Ripped by laird" in the ID3 tag.
Almost all of it is from Microsoft, and for them it's a good investment if they can slow down Linux deployment by creating fear.
Yes, let's kick blind people off the net! If they can't parse your machine-unreadable image, screw them. Right?
Me, I do pretty well with Bayesian spam filters.
It only works as long as the blacklist provider has credibility (that is, that ISPs believe that the provider is being responsible), and SPEWS has long since blown theirs.
To distinguish between more logic levels, you'd have to increase the voltage level, and power is proportional to the square of voltage.
Let's all fix this with meta-moderation: everyone please attach "unfair" to any moderation that calls a message "Informative" that has no new information at all.
Light bulbs with longer lifetimes are easier to build: just make the filament thicker. Of course, this decreases the energy efficiency of the light bulb, which is why people don't do this.
Don't overrate Microsoft. They have two huge monopolies, the OS and Office. Almost everything else they do loses money. They are powerful but they are not invincible.
They also have the problem that Google has some very broad patents. I don't see how Microsoft can build a better search engine without infringing; it would seem that they would have to attack the patents themselves as overbroad (which they arguably are -- Google patented the very idea that links are considered when scoring a result).
The kind of capitalism you describe is tought in college economics courses. There's not much of it in real life. Many buyers, many sellers, full information. In this "perfect competition" situation, profit drops to zero as things reach equilibrium. This is not the situation we have in the US. Instead, we have monopolies and colluding ogliopolies, to make sure there's enough profit to pay off the politicians who draw up the rules to protect their contributors.
So dump Lilo and use Grub (since Grub is immune to this particular error: Grub does not have to be re-installed every time the kernel is modified).
To be fair, the Grub manual needs to be redone; I pity the fool who has trouble with Grub and uses the Grub manual to try to find the way out.
Debeers is worse; Microsoft's monopoly doesn't result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
It would appear that a company that buys a license, accepts its terms, and then engages in any copying of Linux code violates the GPL and forfeits its license to copy or modify the Linux kernel. That's because it is engaging in sublicensing in a way that is directly forbidden by the GPL.
The solution for problems like this is to provide a wrapper around the program that does what you want. We can't change tar's behavior because that will break things, but we could add a smarttar command that would test the input and then invoke tar, or a smartrpm, etc.
If Bush's approval numbers continue their decline, a Democrat who is able to give him a tough fight is quite likely to win. If Dean gets the nomination and picks someone like Sen. Graham of Florida or Gen. Clark for VP, we've got a race on our hands. By November 2004, Dean's early opposition to the Iraq war will be a quite popular position, as the quagmire is still going to be going on then, even if Saddam is caught or killed.
I wouldn't want to stand in the way of anyone scratching his or her own itch, but I would suggest that it might be better for people to try to team up with existing projects rather than create, say, the 37th IRC client. If you must start something new, start something new, that does not yet exist.
Speaking as a very small part of the GCC team, I am very happy with a lot of the work Apple is now contributing: they have a sizable compiler team now and are contributing all that work back. Some of Apple's team are long-time gcc hackers, others are well-known C++ gurus, who can work almost full time on free software thanks to Apple picking up their paycheck.
In particular, gcc 3.4 will have precompiled headers (this work was contributed by Apple).
Richard Stallman is the person who first suggested the term Posix.
If you insist on only using the GPL, your revenue potential is limited. But a GPL/proprietary combination can bring in more money than proprietary-only. If Troll required every developer to pay for Qt, you would never have heard of them. The free license, and working with the KDE people, gave them publicity you can't buy.
As for your last paragraph, we have several existence proofs to the contrary: Troll Tech makes good money, despite the availability of their main product under the GPL.
Have you looked at these patents? The claims seem wildly overbroad. Claim #1 of patent 6,427,140 would seem to cover any protocol that first does a negotiation, where there are two or more possible protocols to be used, and then delivers secure content. That would include SSL or SSH, both of which were pre-existing technology.
The problem with patents as practiced today is that the inventor comes up with something new, and then the lawyers try to tweak the language to claim every possible related thing under the sun. These overbroad patent claims impede progress. At least things like the RSA and LZW patents covered one specific algorithm; these guys try to claim any procedure that negotiates rules by means of a protocol, which is an approach that goes back to before TCP/IP existed.
One of the main things that article focuses on is that "apple" gets you to Apple Computer, not to articles about apples. However, that's just stupid, if I wanted to read about apples, I'd type "apples", and it would work fine.
The only way to satisfy the author of the critique would be to clone the author a few thousand times, have the clones personally read all the web pages and highly rank the pages that the author cares about. That's because in most of his examples, he wants the search engine to read his mind: not the general public's mind, thank you, because when Joe Average types "flowers" to Google he's looking to buy flowers for his wife, girlfriend, or mother, not for an encyclopedia example on flowering plants.