Next, Time-Warner will sue Scripting News for
copyright violation (for republishing the evidence).
The biggest threat to freedom today is corporate abuse of intellectual property laws to suppress
criticism and to prevent anyone from knowing
anything the money guys don't want known.
I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.
Under your proposed definition, the chart is still wrong,
as the dates given on the chart are not dates for releases
of "complete systems using the Linux kernel".
And surely you know that there are a number
of contributors to the complete system that
uses the Linux kernel that do object
to use of the term "Linux" to describe the
whole system, even if you think (as I do) that
some like RMS carry it too far.
There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the web
page.
Well, duh. There is more to a picture than
the characters and lines on the page, there is
also what is implied to an intelligent reader. Putting an event on the diagram
marks it as significant; leaving an event off
the diagram marks it as insignificant. The
release dates of the various Linux kernels can
be obtained from many sources; it would be nice
to tell the story of the Linux distributions,
as it is woefully under-publicized.
The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common
error. Every Unix or Unix-like distribution listed in the picture consists not only of a kernel, but of hundreds of utilities (all the
little programs that you can count on having
in your/bin and/usr/bin directories).
Drawing the picture this way gives too much
credit to Linus Torvalds and too little to two
other groups of heros:
The folks who gave you the hundred-odd programs
required by Posix plus all the development tools, mainly the FSF and its army
of volunteers and the folks at Cygnus, the first
to demonstrate that you could run a company based
on free software. (RMS is right to complain
about lack of credit here).
Even more important, the folks like Peter McDonald, Adam Richter, and Patrick Volkering
who demonstrated how to produce complete
Linux distributions that mere mortals could use.
(RMS would look better if he demanded more credit
for these folks as well; the task of producing
a complete, working distribution installable
by non-experts is gigantic
and neither RMS nor Torvalds had anything to do
with it).
The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux
kernels (or at least putting in large asterisks
making sure that these are kernels only) and replacing them with a diagram showing
the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases, with
the branching relationships showing how the
later distributions depend on the earlier ones.
As Neal Stephenson has pointed out, the tax authorities will still get their bite even in a strong crypto world. If all else fails, they can fund everything with property taxes: try hiding your real estate on the net.
Compiling the firmware into the module may not be allowed, depending on the copyright on the firmware (you're making a derivative work of the firmware, which may be restricted by the firmware's license); in any case, this approach would make it illegal to compile the driver into the kernel (as, presumably, the firmware's license is not GPL-compatible).
I don't see the problem, though, with the IOCTL approach. Why not have a function that loads the firmware from memory? It seems like a flexible approach. To load the firmware from a file it's basically two calls, an mmap to make the file look like memory, and then the ioctl to load it. Why go through the pain of making the kernel do file I/O?
The ioctl approach is more hacker-friendly, as it allows users to experiment with different firmware more easily.
Java can be compiled to machine code as well as to byte code as well, and several existing Java compilers already do so.
There's a lot of overhead for COM, and Microsoft isn't that stupid. You must be wrong about asserting that every object is a COM object. Perhaps only every object can be a COM object?
Also, without forward declarations, how are recursive data structures defined? (e.g. binary trees?)
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
The first sentence seems to be saying that the GPL is not a contract, and the rest says "So what? You still have to follow the rules."
If this argument made by the GPL is found invalid, then it still seems to be true that someone who wants to copy or modify GPLed code does not have the permission of the copyright holder to make such modification. So if the GPL is invalid, that would mean that it's not legal to copy or modify GPL code at all, not (as fantasized by some GPL opponents) that GPLed code would become public domain.
If lawyers think that a piece of legal text is invalid, they challenge it. If they think it's valid, they advise their clients to comply with it. The reason the FSF hasn't gone to court yet is because most lawyers think it's probably valid, and those who think otherwise haven't been willing to bet on it.
The WTO is being used by corporations of multiple nations to gut environmental laws of multiple nations. It isn't just US corporations vs Europe.
The WTO has already demanded that the US repeal a law mandating that tuna be caught in a way that doesn't kill dolphins, under threat of sanctions -- and the US complied. Result: more dead dolphins.
Now, there are some possible good uses for the WTO rules: why haven't people sued the RIAA yet? Surely the region codes in DVDs are a trade violation!
The GNU C compiler used to have an interesting easter egg: at one point, the ANSI C draft (it wasn't finalized yet) said that the effect of #pragma was undefined. At the time, GCC had no pragmas; RMS didn't like them because you couldn't use a pragma in a macro.
So the easter egg was this: if your code contained a #pragma, gcc would attempt to launch a game of rogue or hack. If it couldn't find either program on your system, it would print a message reading "You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different".
The first error in your proof occurs on page ____1____, in line _____3____.
Sincerely,
Joe
That is, you make a fundamental error about the implications of reducing a problem to another problem. If I reduce a problem to a polynomial problem using a polynomial transformation, I know I have a polynomial algorithm, but you propose doing the reverse: "reducing" the problem to an exponential problem. That proves nothing; after all, I can provide you with an exponential sort algorithm (try every permutation until you find one that puts the values in order). The problem you transform to may not be the least expensive problem.
For many employees, if you do something on your own time that is related to what you do at work, the company may still own it, or may forbid you from distributing it (if it can be seen as competing with what the company does, or depending on what your employment contract says).
If you are a salaried employee, the very concept of "your own time" may not exist. Many folks in R&D positions have signed papers saying that all of their work-related ideas belong to the company, period. Remember all those forms you signed when you were hired? Did you read them carefully?
Fortunately, it's probably easier than ever to get your company to agree to let you extend a GPLed program and release your changes.
But whatever you do, do not screw us all by going behind your company's back and releasing code we all then come to depend on. Your company might then have the legal right to demand that everyone stop distributing the program!
Because this researcher is telling you exactly what he is doing, so you can implement it in a compatible way, while MS is not telling how to build a modified Kerberos that is compatible with their scheme.
Bizarre. You think that companies can make their own law? A "fine" clause would not be valid just because someone writes one into a shrink-wrap contract.
NetPD would only be bound to obey Napster's terms of service if they have a legally binding agreement with Napster. In some places, clicking on the "I agree" button creates such a contract. But lots of folks have reverse-engineered the Napster protocols. This reverse engineering can be used to track users. Anyone running Napster from a box with a static IP address, and serving up MP3s belonging to bands/record companies that don't like Napster, is a moron. You will be traced. Even if you have a dynamic IP address, your ISP could help to nail you.
You write:
While I praise this article for pointing out the fact that AOL's filtering software is not at the level it should be, I think any accusations of outright liberal bias are premature and ignore the fundamental differences between whitelist and blacklist filtering.
Sorry, I'm not buying it. While of course accidents happen, any organization maintaining
such a list that is committed to avoiding bias
would, when given a request to add the Republican
Party web site to the whitelist, add the
Democratic Party's site at the same time, and
would do the same in other cases where advocacy
for one side of a cause is considered for addition. Failure to do this is irresponsible
and a sign of active bias. Now that the CNET
story is out, then either the company will fix
the list, or by not doing so will confirm their
bias.
Unix is a registered trademark of the Open Group. That
organization could pretty much demand that it
be turned over, thanks to the new cybersquatting
law: someone is clearly attempting to profit
by selling someone else's trademark.
The type of intermediate GPL already exists. To use it, put your work under the GPL and then say "As a special exception, you may also do foo, where foo is replaced by whatever you want to permit (e.g. link with MPL or QPL code).
Note that the copyright owner is the only one that can add exceptions, and for works with many owners, all the owners have to agree
Net did not succeed because gov't left it alone
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 2
You say The whole tech industry has flourished (in the US) partly because no one government paid attention to us at all and pretty much let all problems be solved by technical means and by market forces.
But this is completely false! The Internet was designed on government contract. The net exists in the form it does today because of a previous breakup of a big company by antitrust action: the AT&T breakup in 1984. Even pre-84 the only thing stopping the phone company from killing any attempt at networking dead in its tracks were consent decrees. Unix (and therefore Linux) only exists as well because of legal constraints on the old phone company; otherwise it would have been an unreleased internal research product.
Up through the early 1980s half of the revenues for the electronics industry in the US came from the Dept. of Defense; in other countries it was government money as well. The Japanese (Sony) were the first to make a commercial success from electronics (here "commercial" means a taxpayer wasn't paying). Many successful US tech firms are spinoffs of university research projects that got their funding from the taxpayers.
Both CERN and NCSA were government-funded entities, meaning that the taxpayers of Europe and the US put up the funds for the creation of the Web, Mosaic, etc.
The Internet has prospered because up until recently, market forces were not running the show: the IETF was deciding things based on consensus and engineering excellence, not by a dollar-based bidding war of corporate alliances.
Now, there are nice things about the market, especially when it works the way the textbooks say: many buyers, many sellers, perfect information (all the buyers know all the prices and quality available from each seller, etc). But it isn't and never was the whole story.
Wow! I thought that I was running a operating system called "Linux" on my home PCs, and that I got this software installed without paying any money to the developers (I've paid CheapBytes and InfoMagic for CDs, but nothing to Red Hat or other distributors). Thanks to AviN, I now know that I was hallucinating: since the developers did not make money, the product does not exist in the first place.
CmdrTaco, it looks like we've been called on our joke. Thanks to AviN's impeccable logic, it's clear that we're making everything up: the alleged subject matter of this web site does not exist. Thankfully, you sold out in time.
Now that the whole thing will collapse, you can take a much-deserved vacation.
You say that Mutt makes you immune from a Melissa-style virus. All the Melissa approach needs to succeed is to trick enough users into running an executable so that it spreads faster than it dies. So all I have to do is to compose a message that will trick, say, 1/10 of the Linux users into running it, if on average each execution will send out more than 10 copies. The program would search for your aliases, as stored by mutt, elm, Netscape's mailer, or whatever, and send them all a message.
If a message that appeared to come from your best friend (and, in fact, it would be from your best friend, if he were suckered) told you to run a program, would you run it? If so, the Melissa approach would get you, whether or not you use Mutt.
It's legal to study GPLed code to determine the algorithms and protocols, and duplicate them in proprietary code, as long as the proprietary code is not a derivative work. The safe way to do this is the "cleanroom procedure": engineer A studies the code and writes up a report on how it does what it does; engineer B, who has never seen the code, writes a new version based on the report. Really paranoid companies have a lawyer check the report and filter communication between A and B.
The author believes, and states, that Borders and B&N have to charge most US residents sales taxes, because they have stores in almost every state. Not so: these stores assert that their online operations are separate companies. borders.com says it has operations only in Michigan and Tennessee, for example; see their pricing policy. Barnes and Noble claim to have online operations in only four states. So large companies can locate their online operations only in states with no sales tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Next, Time-Warner will sue Scripting News for copyright violation (for republishing the evidence).
The biggest threat to freedom today is corporate abuse of intellectual property laws to suppress criticism and to prevent anyone from knowing anything the money guys don't want known.
I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.
Under your proposed definition, the chart is still wrong, as the dates given on the chart are not dates for releases of "complete systems using the Linux kernel". And surely you know that there are a number of contributors to the complete system that uses the Linux kernel that do object to use of the term "Linux" to describe the whole system, even if you think (as I do) that some like RMS carry it too far.
There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the web page.
Well, duh. There is more to a picture than the characters and lines on the page, there is also what is implied to an intelligent reader. Putting an event on the diagram marks it as significant; leaving an event off the diagram marks it as insignificant. The release dates of the various Linux kernels can be obtained from many sources; it would be nice to tell the story of the Linux distributions, as it is woefully under-publicized.
The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error. Every Unix or Unix-like distribution listed in the picture consists not only of a kernel, but of hundreds of utilities (all the little programs that you can count on having in your /bin and /usr/bin directories).
Drawing the picture this way gives too much
credit to Linus Torvalds and too little to two
other groups of heros:
The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels (or at least putting in large asterisks making sure that these are kernels only) and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases, with the branching relationships showing how the later distributions depend on the earlier ones.
But if a court (a government entity) cooperates with a corporation in unjustly silencing an individual, it is in violation of the 1st Amendment.
As Neal Stephenson has pointed out, the tax authorities will still get their bite even in a strong crypto world. If all else fails, they can fund everything with property taxes: try hiding your real estate on the net.
Compiling the firmware into the module may not be allowed, depending on the copyright on the firmware (you're making a derivative work of the firmware, which may be restricted by the firmware's license); in any case, this approach would make it illegal to compile the driver into the kernel (as, presumably, the firmware's license is not GPL-compatible).
I don't see the problem, though, with the IOCTL approach. Why not have a function that loads the firmware from memory? It seems like a flexible approach. To load the firmware from a file it's basically two calls, an mmap to make the file look like memory, and then the ioctl to load it. Why go through the pain of making the kernel do file I/O?
The ioctl approach is more hacker-friendly, as it allows users to experiment with different firmware more easily.
Java can be compiled to machine code as well as to byte code as well, and several existing Java compilers already do so.
There's a lot of overhead for COM, and Microsoft isn't that stupid. You must be wrong about asserting that every object is a COM object. Perhaps only every object can be a COM object?
Also, without forward declarations, how are recursive data structures defined? (e.g. binary trees?)
The GPL states (section 5):
The first sentence seems to be saying that the GPL is not a contract, and the rest says "So what? You still have to follow the rules."
If this argument made by the GPL is found invalid, then it still seems to be true that someone who wants to copy or modify GPLed code does not have the permission of the copyright holder to make such modification. So if the GPL is invalid, that would mean that it's not legal to copy or modify GPL code at all, not (as fantasized by some GPL opponents) that GPLed code would become public domain.
If lawyers think that a piece of legal text is invalid, they challenge it. If they think it's valid, they advise their clients to comply with it. The reason the FSF hasn't gone to court yet is because most lawyers think it's probably valid, and those who think otherwise haven't been willing to bet on it.
The WTO is being used by corporations of multiple nations to gut environmental laws of multiple nations. It isn't just US corporations vs Europe.
The WTO has already demanded that the US repeal a law mandating that tuna be caught in a way that doesn't kill dolphins, under threat of sanctions -- and the US complied. Result: more dead dolphins.
Now, there are some possible good uses for the WTO rules: why haven't people sued the RIAA yet? Surely the region codes in DVDs are a trade violation!
Please name any European country in which the GPL has been ruled invalid. Hint: the answer is none; no country has so ruled.
So, you want an open source easter egg?
The GNU C compiler used to have an interesting easter egg: at one point, the ANSI C draft (it wasn't finalized yet) said that the effect of #pragma was undefined. At the time, GCC had no pragmas; RMS didn't like them because you couldn't use a pragma in a macro.
So the easter egg was this: if your code contained a #pragma, gcc would attempt to launch a game of rogue or hack. If it couldn't find either program on your system, it would print a message reading "You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different".
See this link for more details.
The first error in your proof occurs on page ____1____, in line _____3____.
Sincerely,
Joe
That is, you make a fundamental error about the implications of reducing a problem to another problem. If I reduce a problem to a polynomial problem using a polynomial transformation, I know I have a polynomial algorithm, but you propose doing the reverse: "reducing" the problem to an exponential problem. That proves nothing; after all, I can provide you with an exponential sort algorithm (try every permutation until you find one that puts the values in order). The problem you transform to may not be the least expensive problem.
Hence you do not prove that P != NP.
For many employees, if you do something on your own time that is related to what you do at work, the company may still own it, or may forbid you from distributing it (if it can be seen as competing with what the company does, or depending on what your employment contract says).
If you are a salaried employee, the very concept of "your own time" may not exist. Many folks in R&D positions have signed papers saying that all of their work-related ideas belong to the company, period. Remember all those forms you signed when you were hired? Did you read them carefully?
Fortunately, it's probably easier than ever to get your company to agree to let you extend a GPLed program and release your changes.
But whatever you do, do not screw us all by going behind your company's back and releasing code we all then come to depend on. Your company might then have the legal right to demand that everyone stop distributing the program!
Well, duh.
Because this researcher is telling you exactly what he is doing, so you can implement it in a compatible way, while MS is not telling how to build a modified Kerberos that is compatible with their scheme.
Bizarre. You think that companies can make their own law? A "fine" clause would not be valid just because someone writes one into a shrink-wrap contract.
NetPD would only be bound to obey Napster's terms of service if they have a legally binding agreement with Napster. In some places, clicking on the "I agree" button creates such a contract. But lots of folks have reverse-engineered the Napster protocols. This reverse engineering can be used to track users. Anyone running Napster from a box with a static IP address, and serving up MP3s belonging to bands/record companies that don't like Napster, is a moron. You will be traced. Even if you have a dynamic IP address, your ISP could help to nail you.
You write: While I praise this article for pointing out the fact that AOL's filtering software is not at the level it should be, I think any accusations of outright liberal bias are premature and ignore the fundamental differences between whitelist and blacklist filtering. Sorry, I'm not buying it. While of course accidents happen, any organization maintaining such a list that is committed to avoiding bias would, when given a request to add the Republican Party web site to the whitelist, add the Democratic Party's site at the same time, and would do the same in other cases where advocacy for one side of a cause is considered for addition. Failure to do this is irresponsible and a sign of active bias. Now that the CNET story is out, then either the company will fix the list, or by not doing so will confirm their bias.
But the cybersquatting law makes them broader. unix.com can be seized by the Open Group as soon as they ask for it. It's not even a close thing.
Unix is a registered trademark of the Open Group. That organization could pretty much demand that it be turned over, thanks to the new cybersquatting law: someone is clearly attempting to profit by selling someone else's trademark.
The type of intermediate GPL already exists. To use it, put your work under the GPL and then say "As a special exception, you may also do foo, where foo is replaced by whatever you want to permit (e.g. link with MPL or QPL code).
Note that the copyright owner is the only one that can add exceptions, and for works with many owners, all the owners have to agree
You say The whole tech industry has flourished (in the US) partly because no one government paid attention to us at all and pretty much let all problems be solved by technical means and by market forces.
But this is completely false! The Internet was designed on government contract. The net exists in the form it does today because of a previous breakup of a big company by antitrust action: the AT&T breakup in 1984. Even pre-84 the only thing stopping the phone company from killing any attempt at networking dead in its tracks were consent decrees. Unix (and therefore Linux) only exists as well because of legal constraints on the old phone company; otherwise it would have been an unreleased internal research product.
Up through the early 1980s half of the revenues for the electronics industry in the US came from the Dept. of Defense; in other countries it was government money as well. The Japanese (Sony) were the first to make a commercial success from electronics (here "commercial" means a taxpayer wasn't paying). Many successful US tech firms are spinoffs of university research projects that got their funding from the taxpayers.
Both CERN and NCSA were government-funded entities, meaning that the taxpayers of Europe and the US put up the funds for the creation of the Web, Mosaic, etc.
The Internet has prospered because up until recently, market forces were not running the show: the IETF was deciding things based on consensus and engineering excellence, not by a dollar-based bidding war of corporate alliances.
Now, there are nice things about the market, especially when it works the way the textbooks say: many buyers, many sellers, perfect information (all the buyers know all the prices and quality available from each seller, etc). But it isn't and never was the whole story.
Wow! I thought that I was running a operating system called "Linux" on my home PCs, and that I got this software installed without paying any money to the developers (I've paid CheapBytes and InfoMagic for CDs, but nothing to Red Hat or other distributors). Thanks to AviN, I now know that I was hallucinating: since the developers did not make money, the product does not exist in the first place.
CmdrTaco, it looks like we've been called on our joke. Thanks to AviN's impeccable logic, it's clear that we're making everything up: the alleged subject matter of this web site does not exist. Thankfully, you sold out in time.
Now that the whole thing will collapse, you can take a much-deserved vacation.
You say that Mutt makes you immune from a Melissa-style virus. All the Melissa approach needs to succeed is to trick enough users into running an executable so that it spreads faster than it dies. So all I have to do is to compose a message that will trick, say, 1/10 of the Linux users into running it, if on average each execution will send out more than 10 copies. The program would search for your aliases, as stored by mutt, elm, Netscape's mailer, or whatever, and send them all a message.
If a message that appeared to come from your best friend (and, in fact, it would be from your best friend, if he were suckered) told you to run a program, would you run it? If so, the Melissa approach would get you, whether or not you use Mutt.
It's legal to study GPLed code to determine the algorithms and protocols, and duplicate them in proprietary code, as long as the proprietary code is not a derivative work. The safe way to do this is the "cleanroom procedure": engineer A studies the code and writes up a report on how it does what it does; engineer B, who has never seen the code, writes a new version based on the report. Really paranoid companies have a lawyer check the report and filter communication between A and B.
The author believes, and states, that Borders and B&N have to charge most US residents sales taxes, because they have stores in almost every state. Not so: these stores assert that their online operations are separate companies. borders.com says it has operations only in Michigan and Tennessee, for example; see their pricing policy. Barnes and Noble claim to have online operations in only four states. So large companies can locate their online operations only in states with no sales tax.