If the CDDB people want to play nasty, they will introduce a few subtle typographical errors, unusual capitalization, or false records into their data. If they can then show that FreeCDDB has these same errors, they've got you.
(This is an old trick used by mapmakers to catch copyright violations: they make up a few little alleyways that don't actually exist).
You'll need to make sure that people don't download data from the proprietary database and upload it to the free one.
The GPL was written with input from lawyers, and RMS regularly consults legal volunteers (at least one of which is is highly respected law professor specializing in intellectual property) when questions come up. So, when RMS talks about licensing conflicts, it is based on review by highly skilled legal talent (for example, on the MPL/GPL incompatibility problem).
ESR and Bruce Perens have, I think, both shot from the hip a bit too much on license issues (Eric is too quick to say that the OSD is satisfied, Bruce has sometimes been too quick to say that there are problems).
The GPL addresses this point. You can refuse to accept the GPL. If you do, then you get the default under copyright law: no right to modify, no right to redistribute. See section 5 of the GPL.
You seem to think that the default, if you refuse to accept the license, is public domain. The law does not work that way. By default, if you have a legal copy of a copyrighted program, you can run it and make one backup copy, but you can't give it to anyone else and you can't make derivative works based on it (e.g. copy a piece into a different program).
Section 4 of the GPL says that your license is terminated if you violate it, but the termination affects only the violator:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
No, this slogan was not about the whole continent, but only about how to divide the Pacific Northwest -- the land to the north of California and to the south of what was then Russian Alaska. Both the British and the Americans claimed the whole thing.
The slogan was only shouted by a few hotheads; the American government never threatened war if they didn't get the whole thing. But there were some minor battles over where to draw the line, particularly in the San Juan islands, where the US and the British almost went to war because someone shot a pig (true!).
You should understand that trademark law forces them to act that way. If you don't enforce your trademarks, they get declared public domain and you lose them.
Also, by putting Red Hat's name on the box you may damage their reputation if you screw up. Why should they put up with that?
VA people never had anything to do with the Linux Standards Association scam. As for their free software credentials, try this:
% traceroute www.gnu.org ... 5 ds3-h2-0.paix.he.net (204.188.70.2) 7.777 ms 6.134 ms 5.425 ms 6 gw.pa.via.net (209.81.1.2) 6.106 ms 81.857 ms 71.213 ms 7 S1-0-DS3.mtv.via.net (209.81.23.18) 116.607 ms 9.525 ms 9.336 ms 8 va.via.net (140.174.204.44) 11.548 ms 9.226 ms 10.798 ms 9 fsf.varesearch.com (209.81.8.252) 10.413 ms 22.981 ms 19.089 ms
That's right, VA Research provides Internet connectivity for the FSF. HJ Lu, who did so much work on gcc, libc5, and binutils for Linux, works for them.
You should retract your slander immediately. "Anonymous Coward", indeed.
It's true that VA Research is selling high-end boxes, not cheapo low-end boxes. That's because unless you can manufacture and assemble in a third world country, or are a huge company like Dell or Compaq, you can't make money at the low end, and VA Research needs to make money.
You don't understand Stallman's points. RMS is one of the most consistent people I know; he never acts counter to his own philosophy. He makes his living selling services connected to free software (as a consultant), and supports others in doing the same. He does not object to the sale of books, and the sale of services is key to his philosophy as the only ethical way for programmers to make a living.
His point is that free software needs free documentation; otherwise when someone improves the program, it's illegal for them to update the book to match the changes to the program.
Now, while I respect RMS, I still own some O'Reilly books (and work on proprietary software, as well as free software).
Just the same, O'Reilly seems to be trying to take over the free software movement and to exclude anyone who thinks like RMS: just write them out of history. Did you notice the list of people invited to O'Reilly's next "summit" on "collaborative software?" All the people who talk about freedom have been banned. No RMS, no Bruce Perens, no one from Debian. Why should O'Reilly be in charge of these kinds of events and select who attends?
Rob does have better things to do than talk to those people. Most of the trade press is clue-impaired. There are only a few journalists I can think of who consistently "get it": Andrew Leonard of Salon Magazine's "21st" section is probably the best out there, and Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News has a clue.
Notice that what these guys have in common is that commercial software companies aren't paying their bills: they write for more general-interest publications. This means they get to stay honest. Folks who write for Ziff-Davis or IDG publications are under great pressure to be whores.
The board is top-heavy with marketroids
on
Linux.com is Up
·
· Score: 1
With this board, it will be too easy to produce a "Linux is a great business opportunity! Look at all these cool ads for non-free software that runs on Linux!" site.
Rob, see if you can pull in at least one person who actually writes free software to keep 'em honest (in addition to you, of course).
Cygnus is donating resources to egcs, but it is not "Cygnus's egcs". egcs legally belongs to the Free Software Foundation, and it is a net-wide project, not a Cygnus project.
egcs has a steering committee that controls it, and Cygnus does not have a majority on that committee. So if Cygnus tried to do something with egcs that outsiders don't like, they would be outvoted. (I doubt if this would happen as they are good guys).
Cygnus's role in egcs is much like Red Hat's role in Gnome: they provide resources and pay people to work on it, but there are many outside developers.
Also, egcs is not Cygnus's only compiler effort. Typically they develop gcc enhancements under contract and provide those enhancements to their paying customers first. Later on these changes are integrated into egcs. (The paying customers are allowed to pass the changes on to others under the GPL terms, but they are not obliged to do so and typically they don't, meaning that they get the new code sooner than anyone else in exchange for their money).
ABC was allowed into China Lake (a sensitive DoD facility) to do this story. You can therefore conclude that the DoD wanted this story out. Why?
To get money out of congress to build lots of nasty EMP toys, that's why. You can take all the nonsense about how other countries are far ahead of the US in this area with a huge grain of salt; after all, US defense spending is far larger than the defense spending of every other country in the world, combined. And throughout the last few decades, phony stories about "gaps" (missile gap, etc) have been put out so that the US taxpayers will pay even more for cool ways to kill people.
Brin points out that cryptography will be useless when the authorities have a microscopic camera hidden in every suspect's house or office, watching the keyboard as they type in their PGP passphrase or obtaining the cleartext by capturing the message before it is sent.
How do you know this guy really has anything new?
on
1984, today.
·
· Score: 1
There's been quite a bit of work on binary-to-binary translation as well as binary-to-high level language translation, including a few startup companies in the field (I know of a small German startup that's doing very fast instruction set simulators for DSP processors this way). These guys have working code. What does this lone genius have? An idea, he says. An idea and a dollar gets you a cup of coffee.
If the idea really exists only in this guy's head, it's no idea at all... you have to prove these things out with software and testing, as well as peer review.
Just the same, I hope this guy wins... though he should have just taken the $2 million if the story is true. The normal going rate to compensate engineers for inventions is far less.
The less glamorous infrastructure has been a lot more work. Linux is possible because an extensive framework, consisting of a portable compiler, assembler, and linker that can be used for cross-compiling exists, as well as a C library.
In some ways a compiler is much harder than a kernel. In other ways the reverse is true (kernels have to deal with critical regions and race conditions).
Stallman's right. The competition for tax rates is a disaster. What it means is that those who can easily move (corporations, the wealthy) will pay zero tax, while those who cannot (people with mortgages) will pay higher tax. Someone has to pay for police protection, fire protection etc.
What's more, the cities and states engaging in the practice only lose: they and their citizens get nothing in exchange for the breaks, except for the opportunity to offer even more breaks. If the city or state doesn't dramatically cut its budget, they have to tax others more to give tax breaks to the favored few.
If a company gets a deal where they don't pay any tax, it means that you and I are paying to give them services for nothing. They will claim "but we provide jobs". No, they don't provide anything. If company X doesn't offer you a job, you go work for company Y. It's not a charity. In the case of NYC, most people getting the jobs NYC is subsidizing live in Jersey or Connecticut or suburban New York anyway.
Remember the 1990-1991 recession? Laid-off techies were moving out of Silicon Valley in droves, so many that the moving van companies couldn't cope.
Those of you in your twenties don't remember hard times. They will come again. The business cycle hasn't been repealed.
If you're tops in your field, you can do well even in recessions. If you aren't, or you were tops in your field but are getting a bit rusty, or you manage to get into a specialty that becomes obsolete, you may have big problems.
No, the free software world is not doomed. The reason is that a patent is merely a license to sue. The plaintiff (the patent holder) must prove that you've infringed, and that the patent is valid. In a large fraction of cases, the patent gets tossed out, partly because the patent office has been doing such a bad job.
If you are using techniques that you can prove existed before the patent filing date, they can't touch you. They can take you to court if they like; if so, perhaps we should start talking about free software legal defense arrangements that will not only defend people, but countersue.
The risk you are taking is that if they can show you knew about the patent, you infringed anyway and they win in court, monetary damages are tripled.
Getting a patent removed from the books costs $$$. But you don't have to do that.
The bogus patents are merely annoying. What can be really crippling is the strong patents that can't easily be shown to be invalidated by prior art or worked around.
It's fashonable in Linux circles to express contempt for all things Microsoftian. But this is a mistake; we can learn a lot from looking at what works on the Microsoft and Mac platforms, while leaving behind what does not work.
Many people who have spent all their time in the Unix world have never seen a good GUI. A good GUI is one that enables an expert in an application area to be highly productive. One reason why users are highly productive is that the applications they need to use work consistently. In that sense, X's configurability has worked against us... it makes it too easy for every app to work differently. In many Unix/Linux shops, no one can sit down at his neighbor's desktop and help with a problem, because everyone has a different window manager and has rebound all the keys to work differently.
Too many people on Slashdot say "I don't like it because it looks like Windows". What you are saying is that you would rather be different for the sake of being different, and you don't care that this will make life harder for new users.
Windows made lots of botches that should not be copied, e.g. to shut down your computer you first press a button named "Start".
One thing Microsoft spends a lot of money on is human-factors research. What is easiest for people to use? Coming up with a theme per day is fine and dandy, but it would be nicer to conduct studies on what works the best for different types of users.
No, the French restrictions on crypto are much more draconian than the US restrictions.
The US restricts export of crypto, but currently places no restrictions on domestic use. France forbids domestic use as well without a license, and the penalty is jail.
There are no other democratic countries I know of with a policy anything like that (well, there are some semi-democracies like Iran that ban crypto: I use "semi-democracy" for countries where people vote but power is in the hands of non-elected officials, like kings or mullahs).
Obviously William S B has never used the Gimp. The Gimp and Photoshop are obviously closely related programs, while Paintbrush is obviously a far less capable program, to anyone with experience or knowledge of the three.
RMS believes that manuals for free software must themselves be free, so that those who change and improve the software can keep the manuals current. Since O'Reilly specializes in non-free books on free software, RMS considers O'Reilly an impediment to the movement.
Since he says so in public, you can be fairly certain that Mr. O'Reilly is not going to invite RMS to his conference.
While I am no fan of Microsoft, this kind of accounting procedure is commonplace, because Wall Street insists that revenue targets be met exactly. This means that most companies do some version of this "cookie jar" trick: move money around from quarter to quarter, build a backlog, recognize revenue earlier or later, all so you get a nice smooth exponential growth curve.
Some forms of this are legal, and some forms aren't so legal. But if Microsoft gets prosecuted for this, then I'm afraid half of Silicon Valley is next.
The argument that this defrauds the stockholder is questionable, because the stock price goes down if this is not done. So maybe you're hurting your stockholders if you don't play as many accounting games as possible. Who knows? The stock market is a fantasy in any case.
The wrongful termination of the auditor is another matter.
You have it backwards: the corporations do not make the bands rich, the bands make the corporations rich.
It's the beginning of the end for the traditional record company, who sells you a CD for $15 and gives $1 to the musicians. It used to be that the musicians needed the record companies to handle the logistics and the distribution, but the deal is going to change.
In this new world, the musicians can make more money and the public can get access to the music for less money, all by cutting out the suits in the middle.
Slashdot Mirror
If the CDDB people want to play nasty, they will introduce a few subtle typographical errors, unusual capitalization, or false records into their data. If they can then show that FreeCDDB has these same errors, they've got you.
(This is an old trick used by mapmakers to catch copyright violations: they make up a few little alleyways that don't actually exist).
You'll need to make sure that people don't download data from the proprietary database and upload it to the free one.
The GPL was written with input from lawyers, and RMS regularly consults legal volunteers (at least one of which is is highly respected law professor specializing in intellectual property) when questions come up. So, when RMS talks about licensing conflicts, it is based on review by highly skilled legal talent (for example, on the MPL/GPL incompatibility problem).
ESR and Bruce Perens have, I think, both shot from the hip a bit too much on license issues (Eric is too quick to say that the OSD is satisfied, Bruce has sometimes been too quick to say that there are problems).
The GPL addresses this point. You can refuse to accept the GPL. If you do, then you get the default under copyright law: no right to modify, no right to redistribute. See section 5 of the GPL.
You seem to think that the default, if you refuse to accept the license, is public domain. The law does not work that way. By default, if you have a legal copy of a copyrighted program, you can run it and make one backup copy, but you can't give it to anyone else and you can't make derivative works based on it (e.g. copy a piece into a different program).
Section 4 of the GPL says that your license is terminated if you violate it, but the termination affects only the violator:
No, this slogan was not about the whole continent, but only about how to divide the Pacific Northwest -- the land to the north of California and to the south of what was then Russian Alaska. Both the British and the Americans claimed the whole thing.
The slogan was only shouted by a few hotheads; the American government never threatened war if they didn't get the whole thing. But there were some minor battles over where to draw the line, particularly in the San Juan islands, where the US and the British almost went to war because someone shot a pig (true!).
You should understand that trademark law forces them to act that way. If you don't enforce your trademarks, they get declared public domain and you lose them.
Also, by putting Red Hat's name on the box you may damage their reputation if you screw up. Why should they put up with that?
VA people never had anything to do with the Linux Standards Association scam. As for their free software credentials, try this:
% traceroute www.gnu.org
...
5 ds3-h2-0.paix.he.net (204.188.70.2) 7.777 ms 6.134 ms 5.425 ms
6 gw.pa.via.net (209.81.1.2) 6.106 ms 81.857 ms 71.213 ms
7 S1-0-DS3.mtv.via.net (209.81.23.18) 116.607 ms 9.525 ms 9.336 ms
8 va.via.net (140.174.204.44) 11.548 ms 9.226 ms 10.798 ms
9 fsf.varesearch.com (209.81.8.252) 10.413 ms 22.981 ms 19.089 ms
That's right, VA Research provides Internet connectivity for the FSF. HJ Lu, who did so much work on gcc, libc5, and binutils for Linux, works for them.
You should retract your slander immediately. "Anonymous Coward", indeed.
It's true that VA Research is selling high-end boxes, not cheapo low-end boxes. That's because unless you can manufacture and assemble in a third world country, or are a huge company like Dell or Compaq, you can't make money at the low end, and VA Research needs to make money.
You don't understand Stallman's points. RMS is one of the most consistent people I know; he never acts counter to his own philosophy. He makes his living selling services connected to free software (as a consultant), and supports others in doing the same. He does not object to the sale of books, and the sale of services is key to his philosophy as the only ethical way for programmers to make a living.
His point is that free software needs free documentation; otherwise when someone improves the program, it's illegal for them to update the book to match the changes to the program.
Now, while I respect RMS, I still own some O'Reilly books (and work on proprietary software, as well as free software).
Just the same, O'Reilly seems to be trying to take over the free software movement and to exclude anyone who thinks like RMS: just write them out of history. Did you notice the list of people invited to O'Reilly's next "summit" on "collaborative software?" All the people who talk about freedom have been banned. No RMS, no Bruce Perens, no one from Debian. Why should O'Reilly be in charge of these kinds of events and select who attends?
Rob does have better things to do than talk to those people. Most of the trade press is clue-impaired. There are only a few journalists I can think of who consistently "get it": Andrew Leonard of Salon Magazine's "21st" section is probably the best out there, and Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News has a clue.
Notice that what these guys have in common is that commercial software companies aren't paying their bills: they write for more general-interest publications. This means they get to stay honest. Folks who write for Ziff-Davis or IDG publications are under great pressure to be whores.
With this board, it will be too easy to produce a "Linux is a great business opportunity! Look at all these cool ads for non-free software that runs on Linux!" site.
Rob, see if you can pull in at least one person who actually writes free software to keep 'em honest (in addition to you, of course).
Cygnus is donating resources to egcs, but it is not "Cygnus's egcs". egcs legally belongs to the Free Software Foundation, and it is a net-wide project, not a Cygnus project.
egcs has a steering committee that controls it, and Cygnus does not have a majority on that committee. So if Cygnus tried to do something with egcs that outsiders don't like, they would be outvoted. (I doubt if this would happen as they are good guys).
Cygnus's role in egcs is much like Red Hat's role in Gnome: they provide resources and pay people to work on it, but there are many outside developers.
Also, egcs is not Cygnus's only compiler effort. Typically they develop gcc enhancements under contract and provide those enhancements to their paying customers first. Later on these changes are integrated into egcs. (The paying customers are allowed to pass the changes on to others under the GPL terms, but they are not obliged to do so and typically they don't, meaning that they get the new code sooner than anyone else in exchange for their money).
ABC was allowed into China Lake (a sensitive DoD facility) to do this story. You can therefore conclude that the DoD wanted this story out. Why?
To get money out of congress to build lots of nasty EMP toys, that's why. You can take all the nonsense about how other countries are far ahead of the US in this area with a huge grain of salt; after all, US defense spending is far larger than the defense spending of every other country in the world, combined. And throughout the last few decades, phony stories about "gaps" (missile gap, etc) have been put out so that the US taxpayers will pay even more for cool ways to kill people.
Brin points out that cryptography will be useless when the authorities have a microscopic camera hidden in every suspect's house or office, watching the keyboard as they type in their PGP passphrase or obtaining the cleartext by capturing the message before it is sent.
There's been quite a bit of work on binary-to-binary translation as well as binary-to-high level language translation, including a few startup companies in the field (I know of a small German startup that's doing very fast instruction set simulators for DSP processors this way). These guys have working code. What does this lone genius have? An idea, he says. An idea and a dollar gets you a cup of coffee.
If the idea really exists only in this guy's head, it's no idea at all ... you have to prove these things out with software and testing, as well as peer review.
Just the same, I hope this guy wins ... though he should have just taken the $2 million if the story is true. The normal going rate to compensate engineers for inventions is far less.
Does anyone know why Gnome 0.99.7 includes gtk+-1.1.12 ... even though the gtk+ guys have released 1.1.15?
The less glamorous infrastructure has been a lot more work. Linux is possible because an extensive framework, consisting of a portable compiler, assembler, and linker that can be used for cross-compiling exists, as well as a C library.
In some ways a compiler is much harder than a kernel. In other ways the reverse is true (kernels have to deal with critical regions and race conditions).
Stallman's right. The competition for tax rates is a disaster. What it means is that those who can easily move (corporations, the wealthy) will pay zero tax, while those who cannot (people with mortgages) will pay higher tax. Someone has to pay for police protection, fire protection etc.
What's more, the cities and states engaging in the practice only lose: they and their citizens get nothing in exchange for the breaks, except for the opportunity to offer even more breaks. If the city or state doesn't dramatically cut its budget, they have to tax others more to give tax breaks to the favored few.
If a company gets a deal where they don't pay any tax, it means that you and I are paying to give them services for nothing. They will claim "but we provide jobs". No, they don't provide anything. If company X doesn't offer you a job, you go work for company Y. It's not a charity. In the case of NYC, most people getting the jobs NYC is subsidizing live in Jersey or Connecticut or suburban New York anyway.
Remember the 1990-1991 recession? Laid-off techies were moving out of Silicon Valley in droves, so many that the moving van companies couldn't cope.
Those of you in your twenties don't remember hard times. They will come again. The business cycle hasn't been repealed.
If you're tops in your field, you can do well even in recessions. If you aren't, or you were tops in your field but are getting a bit rusty, or you manage to get into a specialty that becomes obsolete, you may have big problems.
No, the free software world is not doomed. The reason is that a patent is merely a license to sue. The plaintiff (the patent holder) must prove that you've infringed, and that the patent is valid. In a large fraction of cases, the patent gets tossed out, partly because the patent office has been doing such a bad job.
If you are using techniques that you can prove existed before the patent filing date, they can't touch you. They can take you to court if they like; if so, perhaps we should start talking about free software legal defense arrangements that will not only defend people, but countersue.
The risk you are taking is that if they can show you knew about the patent, you infringed anyway and they win in court, monetary damages are tripled.
Getting a patent removed from the books costs $$$. But you don't have to do that.
The bogus patents are merely annoying. What can be really crippling is the strong patents that can't easily be shown to be invalidated by prior art or worked around.
It's fashonable in Linux circles to express contempt for all things Microsoftian. But this is a mistake; we can learn a lot from looking at what works on the Microsoft and Mac platforms, while leaving behind what does not work.
Many people who have spent all their time in the Unix world have never seen a good GUI. A good GUI is one that enables an expert in an application area to be highly productive. One reason why users are highly productive is that the applications they need to use work consistently. In that sense, X's configurability has worked against us ... it makes it too easy for every app to work differently. In many Unix/Linux shops, no one can sit down at his neighbor's desktop and help with a problem, because everyone has a different window manager and has rebound all the keys to work differently.
Too many people on Slashdot say "I don't like it because it looks like Windows". What you are saying is that you would rather be different for the sake of being different, and you don't care that this will make life harder for new users.
Windows made lots of botches that should not be copied, e.g. to shut down your computer you first press a button named "Start".
One thing Microsoft spends a lot of money on is human-factors research. What is easiest for people to use? Coming up with a theme per day is fine and dandy, but it would be nicer to conduct studies on what works the best for different types of users.
No, the French restrictions on crypto are much more draconian than the US restrictions.
The US restricts export of crypto, but currently places no restrictions on domestic use. France forbids domestic use as well without a license, and the penalty is jail.
There are no other democratic countries I know of with a policy anything like that (well, there are some semi-democracies like Iran that ban crypto: I use "semi-democracy" for countries where people vote but power is in the hands of non-elected officials, like kings or mullahs).
Obviously William S B has never used the Gimp. The Gimp and Photoshop are obviously closely related programs, while Paintbrush is obviously a far less capable program, to anyone with experience or knowledge of the three.
RMS believes that manuals for free software must themselves be free, so that those who change and improve the software can keep the manuals current. Since O'Reilly specializes in non-free books on free software, RMS considers O'Reilly an impediment to the movement.
Since he says so in public, you can be fairly certain that Mr. O'Reilly is not going to invite RMS to his conference.
While I am no fan of Microsoft, this kind of accounting procedure is commonplace, because Wall Street insists that revenue targets be met exactly. This means that most companies do some version of this "cookie jar" trick: move money around from quarter to quarter, build a backlog, recognize revenue earlier or later, all so you get a nice smooth exponential growth curve.
Some forms of this are legal, and some forms aren't so legal. But if Microsoft gets prosecuted for this, then I'm afraid half of Silicon Valley is next.
The argument that this defrauds the stockholder is questionable, because the stock price goes down if this is not done. So maybe you're hurting your stockholders if you don't play as many accounting games as possible. Who knows? The stock market is a fantasy in any case.
The wrongful termination of the auditor is another matter.
You have it backwards: the corporations do not make the bands rich, the bands make the corporations rich.
It's the beginning of the end for the traditional record company, who sells you a CD for $15 and gives $1 to the musicians. It used to be that the musicians needed the record companies to handle the logistics and the distribution, but the deal is going to change.
In this new world, the musicians can make more money and the public can get access to the music for less money, all by cutting out the suits in the middle.