If you were British the accents in Monty Python would be very noticeable to you, because there are hundreds, or maybe thousands, of distinct accents, and of course the Pythonites chose the appropriate accent for each character. As soon as a Brit opens his mouth, other Brits will know his social class, the town he was born, where he went to school, etc.
You are using the identical defense that Microsoft used to circulate when people complained about Outlook opening all attachments. KMail (and other mailers) need to be able to distinguish between "safe" and "unsafe" attachment types.
The arrests, both in the US and in Europe, during what you call "anti-capitalism parades" have been draconian, often sweeping up everyone in a given area rather than focusing on the thugs at one corner who use any rally as an excuse to riot. Arresting someone who is clearly a journalist at such an event is an abuse of freedom of the press, and has a chilling effect on reporters covering demonstrations.
Re:What about GPL?? Sources??
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 2
The GPL only affects programs that contain GPLed code. No doubt Xandros has many programs that are completely proprietary, and customers have no right to repost those.
OK, let's say that the insurance companies can get prediction based on both genetics and lifestyle to the point where the money you pay them almost always exceeds the money they pay out for your health care,
barring accidents, and even for accidents their lifestyle data gives them good insight into your probability of being hurt.
This would mean that, for the majority, insurance would become vastly more expensive, to the point where it would become unaffordable. The government would have to pick it up, and effectively tax the healthy to help pay. The alternative is just to leave more and more people with no insurance at all, which will quickly drop the US life expectancy down to third world levels. So you just wind up killing the concept of private insurance altogether. This might be a good thing.
Also notice that in countries with a single-payer system, good genetic screening is much less of a problem. Since the government system is going to pay to treat everyone anyway, knowing in advance who's susceptible to what diseases might actually reduce costs, by focusing the right treatment on the right people. So it might well be that it is this "Gattaca" stuff that finally kills the broken US health insurance system.
Among the prisoners being held in Guantanamo are a dozen Kuwaitis. While some are likely to be bad
guys,
at least five appear to be there by mistake,
apparently humanitarian workers trying to help
with the Afgan refugee problem who got swept up
in the dragnet.
Now it's possible that they aren't telling the truth, but they are just sitting there rotting with no chance to make a case, not even to a military tribunal. The scariest quote in the
article I link to above is
So, are they guilty or innocent? And of what? The Defense Department says answering such questions is not what Guantanamo is about.
There are supposed to be two categories of people that can be captured in war: a POW, or an illegal combatant. The former is entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention, and the latter, as an accused criminal, is entitled to the rights of an accused criminal. Instead, a third category has been invented, or rather, copied from the South American generals of the 1970s: suspected "enemies of the state" who simply disappear.
Because a GNU/Linux distribution consists of a huge number of independently developed components, there will always be some cool new upgrade to some important package that comes out just a bit too late to make the cut. In many cases, "too late" can mean "two months before ship date", or even more, for any distributor who bothers to do testing before shipping. Waiting doesn't help, because then someone else upgrades their package, and so on. GCC, XFree86, Gnome, KDE, Apache, mysql, etc. all have their own schedules.
In any case, if 3.1 has cool new stuff, you may want to wait until 3.1.1 for the bugs in the cool new stuff to be fixed. This is no shot at KDE, the same is true for all other big projects.
Konqueror's integration is completely different from IE's integration. IE isn't just integrated into the desktop, but is wired deep into the bowels of the OS, using interfaces not available for other apps.
Microsoft made the design as non-modular as they could on purpose, just to kill Netscape. They scrambled up IE DLL's with system DLL's, just to make it painful to remove IE.
Konqueror just uses the same classes that any other app can use. It has no privileged position. Furthermore, you can run Konqueror from a Gnome desktop.
While many open source projects are clones of proprietary software, quite a few are unique to the free software world, with cloning, if any, going in the reverse direction: for example, Emacs, Perl, and Python are completely original creations of the free software world. RCS and CVS
were also always open source, and BitKeeper built on top of those ideas, obtaining many of its new ideas by polling open source software developers.
It shouldn't be surprising that most of the innovation in the free software world has to do with programming languages and environments, and tools to support programmers.
Also, innovators rarely make much money: frequently the second mover (who is in many cases Microsoft) learns from the mistakes of the innovator and winds up making all the money.
What I am asking for is for someone to clarify the exact legal status that the KDE League has.
This story has still not been cleared up
on
More on the KDE League
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The
KDE League bylaws clearly state that it is a nonprofit, and the article makes the case that it is not a 501(c)(3) organization. Is it, then, a
501(c)(6) organization (a business league)?
If so, there are, indeed, public disclosure requirements imposed by the IRS. See
this page and read the last paragraph.
Yes, this page applies to all nonprofits,
including business leagues, as
this page makes clear.
If, in fact, the KDE League is a "business league",
Dennis Powell (no matter how much of a jerk you or I might think he is, and believe me, I'm not a fan) was within his legal rights to ask for
disclosures. He is not be entitled to the full books, but he is entitled to "the last three annual information returns".
If the KDE league is not a 501(c)(6) either, then I don't see how it can be a legal nonprofit at all, in which case they owe Delaware filing fees that haven't been paid.
You can't just say that you're an ordinary corporation that doesn't expect to make money. With such a status you have to pay filing fees to the state of Delaware, and Delaware is now saying that the league doesn't owe them. So which is it? Either KDE League has to pay Delaware or they have to give Dennis Powell their annual information report. One or the other.
If I'm wrong, then it must be the case that the KDE League has some alternate legal status that I'm not familiar with. If so, what is it?
I'm not saying this to attack KDE. KDE and the KDE League are distinct entities, and I'm not seeing any evidence that the KDE League is serving the interests of KDE's developers or users. Any responses should leave the personality or beliefs of Dennis Powell out, as they are irrelevant.
But some of the questions the court asked were about power to recopyright. If the court can do retroactive copyright extensions, why can't it recopyright Alice? Why can't it recopyright Hans Christian Andersen's stuff and make Disney fork over money to his heirs? The only barrier would appear to be tradition, unless Lessig persuades the court to lay down some rules.
Ximian's Red Carpet does MD5 and GPG verification of packages every time it does an install or an update.
Re:of course 15 coders makes for less bugs
on
Open Source Studies
·
· Score: 2
There are very few proprietary projects that have more than 10-15 core coders, and when the projects are bigger, they get broken down into sub-projects of more manageable size.
For some of the best-known free software projects, particularly the Linux kernel and GCC, most of the core coders are paid to work on free software, either full-time or part-time.
Thanks to Slashdot for holding off for a day to allow the distro to propagate to the mirrors. In the past, this has been a problem: early announcements on Slashdot of a package everyone wants to download kills the primary site before all the mirrors get it.
At least they are following the GPL. A distressing number of people are distributing Linux and GNU binaries without worrying about their obligation to either provide matching source at the same time, or to include a written offer, good for three years, to provide source later.
Re:A users perspective of Red Hat 8 and KDE
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
I didn't notice spelling mistakes in the article.
I did notice some spelling differences, like
"behaviour", caused by the fact that the author is Australian and not American, as well as spelling mistakes he quotes Mosfet as making.
Of course Apple is in competition with third party developers. Almost all the apps beginning with "i" that they brag about directly compete with some third party application.
A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
But Red Hat has made the correct decision in picking and choosing the best apps, even if this harms integration. It says it is attacking the "business desktop" market. It can offer its customers Koffice, or the usual Gnome/Gtk apps Abiword and Gnumeric, or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is neither KDE nor Gnome, but it's the only free suite that does a reasonably reliable job of importing and exporting MS Office apps, meaning that it is the only suite suitable for the business user.
Similarly, while Konqueror does a great job of rendering documents that were correctly written according to the specs from W3C, it does a much poorer job than Mozilla of dealing with the real Web. Since business users frequently need to access web sites with broken HTML to get their work done, Konqueror does not yet cut it, and the inconsistencies in the Mozilla GUI vs the KDE desktop will only be a mild annoyance compared to the annoyance of not being able to work at all.
Using a pure KDE suite would work fine if it is mandated that everyone in your organization must use it and no one is allowed to send or receive a document from or to the outside world.
To paraphrase Schneider: if someone steals your palmprint (for example, by getting a print off
a surface that you touched and making a duplicate
good enough to fool the scanner), where do you go to be issued a new palm?
Biometrics are ok if they are only part of what you need to get into the system (e.g. the right fingerprint plus the right password).
The OSI can't help you, because the terms you are asking for conflict with the Open Source Definition.
You seek to forbid profit, to forbid profit violates open source.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were British the accents in Monty Python would be very noticeable to you, because there are hundreds, or maybe thousands, of distinct accents, and of course the Pythonites chose the appropriate accent for each character. As soon as a Brit opens his mouth, other Brits will know his social class, the town he was born, where he went to school, etc.
You are using the identical defense that Microsoft used to circulate when people complained about Outlook opening all attachments. KMail (and other mailers) need to be able to distinguish between "safe" and "unsafe" attachment types.
The arrests, both in the US and in Europe, during what you call "anti-capitalism parades" have been draconian, often sweeping up everyone in a given area rather than focusing on the thugs at one corner who use any rally as an excuse to riot. Arresting someone who is clearly a journalist at such an event is an abuse of freedom of the press, and has a chilling effect on reporters covering demonstrations.
The GPL only affects programs that contain GPLed code. No doubt Xandros has many programs that are completely proprietary, and customers have no right to repost those.
OK, let's say that the insurance companies can get prediction based on both genetics and lifestyle to the point where the money you pay them almost always exceeds the money they pay out for your health care, barring accidents, and even for accidents their lifestyle data gives them good insight into your probability of being hurt.
This would mean that, for the majority, insurance would become vastly more expensive, to the point where it would become unaffordable. The government would have to pick it up, and effectively tax the healthy to help pay. The alternative is just to leave more and more people with no insurance at all, which will quickly drop the US life expectancy down to third world levels. So you just wind up killing the concept of private insurance altogether. This might be a good thing.
Also notice that in countries with a single-payer system, good genetic screening is much less of a problem. Since the government system is going to pay to treat everyone anyway, knowing in advance who's susceptible to what diseases might actually reduce costs, by focusing the right treatment on the right people. So it might well be that it is this "Gattaca" stuff that finally kills the broken US health insurance system.
Among the prisoners being held in Guantanamo are a dozen Kuwaitis. While some are likely to be bad guys, at least five appear to be there by mistake, apparently humanitarian workers trying to help with the Afgan refugee problem who got swept up in the dragnet.
Now it's possible that they aren't telling the truth, but they are just sitting there rotting with no chance to make a case, not even to a military tribunal. The scariest quote in the article I link to above is
There are supposed to be two categories of people that can be captured in war: a POW, or an illegal combatant. The former is entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention, and the latter, as an accused criminal, is entitled to the rights of an accused criminal. Instead, a third category has been invented, or rather, copied from the South American generals of the 1970s: suspected "enemies of the state" who simply disappear.
Because a GNU/Linux distribution consists of a huge number of independently developed components, there will always be some cool new upgrade to some important package that comes out just a bit too late to make the cut. In many cases, "too late" can mean "two months before ship date", or even more, for any distributor who bothers to do testing before shipping. Waiting doesn't help, because then someone else upgrades their package, and so on. GCC, XFree86, Gnome, KDE, Apache, mysql, etc. all have their own schedules.
In any case, if 3.1 has cool new stuff, you may want to wait until 3.1.1 for the bugs in the cool new stuff to be fixed. This is no shot at KDE, the same is true for all other big projects.
Konqueror's integration is completely different from IE's integration. IE isn't just integrated into the desktop, but is wired deep into the bowels of the OS, using interfaces not available for other apps. Microsoft made the design as non-modular as they could on purpose, just to kill Netscape. They scrambled up IE DLL's with system DLL's, just to make it painful to remove IE.
Konqueror just uses the same classes that any other app can use. It has no privileged position. Furthermore, you can run Konqueror from a Gnome desktop.
While many open source projects are clones of proprietary software, quite a few are unique to the free software world, with cloning, if any, going in the reverse direction: for example, Emacs, Perl, and Python are completely original creations of the free software world. RCS and CVS were also always open source, and BitKeeper built on top of those ideas, obtaining many of its new ideas by polling open source software developers. It shouldn't be surprising that most of the innovation in the free software world has to do with programming languages and environments, and tools to support programmers.
Also, innovators rarely make much money: frequently the second mover (who is in many cases Microsoft) learns from the mistakes of the innovator and winds up making all the money.
What I am asking for is for someone to clarify the exact legal status that the KDE League has.
The KDE League bylaws clearly state that it is a nonprofit, and the article makes the case that it is not a 501(c)(3) organization. Is it, then, a 501(c)(6) organization (a business league)?
If so, there are, indeed, public disclosure requirements imposed by the IRS. See this page and read the last paragraph. Yes, this page applies to all nonprofits, including business leagues, as this page makes clear. If, in fact, the KDE League is a "business league", Dennis Powell (no matter how much of a jerk you or I might think he is, and believe me, I'm not a fan) was within his legal rights to ask for disclosures. He is not be entitled to the full books, but he is entitled to "the last three annual information returns".
If the KDE league is not a 501(c)(6) either, then I don't see how it can be a legal nonprofit at all, in which case they owe Delaware filing fees that haven't been paid.
You can't just say that you're an ordinary corporation that doesn't expect to make money. With such a status you have to pay filing fees to the state of Delaware, and Delaware is now saying that the league doesn't owe them. So which is it? Either KDE League has to pay Delaware or they have to give Dennis Powell their annual information report. One or the other.
If I'm wrong, then it must be the case that the KDE League has some alternate legal status that I'm not familiar with. If so, what is it?
I'm not saying this to attack KDE. KDE and the KDE League are distinct entities, and I'm not seeing any evidence that the KDE League is serving the interests of KDE's developers or users. Any responses should leave the personality or beliefs of Dennis Powell out, as they are irrelevant.
The recession of 1990-1991 was more painful, with a much higher unemployment rate.
But some of the questions the court asked were about power to recopyright. If the court can do retroactive copyright extensions, why can't it recopyright Alice? Why can't it recopyright Hans Christian Andersen's stuff and make Disney fork over money to his heirs? The only barrier would appear to be tradition, unless Lessig persuades the court to lay down some rules.
You mean the People's Republic of China. The Republic of China refers to Taiwan.
Ximian's Red Carpet does MD5 and GPG verification of packages every time it does an install or an update.
There are very few proprietary projects that have more than 10-15 core coders, and when the projects are bigger, they get broken down into sub-projects of more manageable size.
For some of the best-known free software projects, particularly the Linux kernel and GCC, most of the core coders are paid to work on free software, either full-time or part-time.
Thanks to Slashdot for holding off for a day to allow the distro to propagate to the mirrors. In the past, this has been a problem: early announcements on Slashdot of a package everyone wants to download kills the primary site before all the mirrors get it.
At least they are following the GPL. A distressing number of people are distributing Linux and GNU binaries without worrying about their obligation to either provide matching source at the same time, or to include a written offer, good for three years, to provide source later.
I didn't notice spelling mistakes in the article. I did notice some spelling differences, like "behaviour", caused by the fact that the author is Australian and not American, as well as spelling mistakes he quotes Mosfet as making.
Of course Apple is in competition with third party developers. Almost all the apps beginning with "i" that they brag about directly compete with some third party application.
George Bernard Shaw. The actual quote was:
But Red Hat has made the correct decision in picking and choosing the best apps, even if this harms integration. It says it is attacking the "business desktop" market. It can offer its customers Koffice, or the usual Gnome/Gtk apps Abiword and Gnumeric, or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is neither KDE nor Gnome, but it's the only free suite that does a reasonably reliable job of importing and exporting MS Office apps, meaning that it is the only suite suitable for the business user.
Similarly, while Konqueror does a great job of rendering documents that were correctly written according to the specs from W3C, it does a much poorer job than Mozilla of dealing with the real Web. Since business users frequently need to access web sites with broken HTML to get their work done, Konqueror does not yet cut it, and the inconsistencies in the Mozilla GUI vs the KDE desktop will only be a mild annoyance compared to the annoyance of not being able to work at all.
Using a pure KDE suite would work fine if it is mandated that everyone in your organization must use it and no one is allowed to send or receive a document from or to the outside world.
To paraphrase Schneider: if someone steals your palmprint (for example, by getting a print off a surface that you touched and making a duplicate good enough to fool the scanner), where do you go to be issued a new palm?
Biometrics are ok if they are only part of what you need to get into the system (e.g. the right fingerprint plus the right password).
The OSI can't help you, because the terms you are asking for conflict with the Open Source Definition. You seek to forbid profit, to forbid profit violates open source.