Some times to get laws and attitudes changed, mass civil disobedience comes into play. Some laws get on the books that are just so freaking lame, stupid and unfair that they invite mass disobedience. An example would be alcohol prohibition, where so many people disobeyed the law willingly that eventually it was changed.t.
Simply not paying in fact does contribute too, as it denies income to the publishers. In music and software, that is possible.
The trick is probably to use a 20 (or maybe 25, to avoid old submarine patents) year old technology to get around it.
The law allows for monopolies and abuse of power. And it gives you your options. Follow the law - pay licenses for everything, or use legal but impractical alternatives. Break the law - ignore the law and deal with potential legal consequence. Agree with the law or campaign to change the law.
I would like to see how they are going to enforce that.
There is overlaying stuff here, You bought a camera, that camera is yours, you own it. Using to film your new episode of 2 girls 1 cup and sell it online is your right, and yours alone.
That's like buying a car, and the manufacturer tells you, that you are not allowed to use to car to race, because the steering software is not licensed for racing.
If anyone is liable it's the manufacturer of the camera, he has not right to enforce how you are going to use your hardware even if it was in the EULA, and if you do break the EULA as it is, it there ass's who is going to be prosecuted. "The Usual IANAL statement".
I believe that the no-racing car software license could in fact be created. And if there are any no-profitable-business-calls or any other contracts on your cellphone software that you agreed to, you could be legally liable for that contract too.
Yeah, but the difference is how it used to be that the manufacturer paid for a license, sold you the product (cost of license built-in), and you used it for whatever you wanted.
Nowadays, they want to control not just how the product is made and sold, but how it is USED. That's just plain too much power.
I agree. Being paid for one's work is fine, most people agree with that. Taking it and ''maximizing profit" to have ever-increasing leverage over everyone's work is quite another. Taken to its logical conclusion, we will soon begin to have an intellectual property owners social class, who just profit, and non-owners class, who just work.
"declare in their manuals that they are for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes only."
You don't always do everything that the manual tells you to, do you? I'm pretty sure that thousands of people a day use these cameras for commercial purposes without any problem (I know we use them at work). And I'm also pretty sure the MPEG-LA doesn't want to see the issue end up in court, because they'd probably lose.
That could work forever, if they never decide to enforce their rights. If they decide it's not making any money and sell it to some patent troll law group it will become quite a nightmare however. Suddenly we all find out there's some hidden marks in all our works that have been published all over the world and we are in court for it.
"declare in their manuals that they are for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes only."
You don't always do everything that the manual tells you to, do you? I'm pretty sure that thousands of people a day use these cameras for commercial purposes without any problem (I know we use them at work). And I'm also pretty sure the MPEG-LA doesn't want to see the issue end up in court, because they'd probably lose.
Fine solution. Ignore the patents-copyrights. Go Pirate Party!
Reward people with more time. Most people spend inordinate amounts of time solving simple, repetitive tasks. Paying bills, cleaning house, washing clothes, buying supplies, transportation, finding entertainment, fixing things, answering phones. Paying a specialized 'time savers crew' might be much cheaper than a team of programmers doing all this stuff individually, plus frequently they are all awfully messy with it. Get a coding party or campout where people can spend time at to get away and get work done.
I always thought setting up clear recognition of who has most contributed to open source would be great. Setting criteria would be important. Lines of code, time of involvement, hours of labor, number of users or longevity of code...
Got to be smarter than that. I dislike monopolies and MS as much as anyone, but finding problems and publicizing them will only help test it and reduce QA labor costs for Microsoft. It won't make people not use it, or wonder if Linux or anything else is better. Testing some programs for Linux will be better, talking to people managing various projects, writing user manuals for a few programs. Wine HQ has lots of programs that need testing and installation instructions. Questioning copyrights and patents could get some results, campaigning for legislation change. But just bashing Microsoft and saying "in Linux it is better" won't do much.
Please show where in American history there was a time when people were free to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.
Today. They are free to sit at their computer and do it. There will likely be no consequences. About 0,01% of people in the US are taken as punishment for everyone else.
We've never had the unlimited right to share what does not belong to us.
Not legally, duly coded into law, but in practice, you download a couple programs and you're on, free music. It's what every kid on the planet wishes to do as much as possible. Legal consequence? What's that? It's just music.
If *everyone* disobeys, they will just automate the process, strip of us of more rights without due process and end up just adding a RIAA tax.
It seems everyone does disobey, music is basically copied freely now, more than sold, software is not too different, movies and books are going that direction.
Indeed the right to privacy should not be abused as a shield from the law, as it often is, by government and corporations. The law does however evolve with the times, new realities, public pressure, cultural changes, momentary needs, etc. It's not set in stone forever. "The law", all aspects of it, includes custom, tradition, social tolerance, a bunch of stuff that's not even written anywhere - like it or not. Copyright and IP law is at a crossroads moment, is widely ignored, ridicularized, called obsolete, bypassed, complained about, in all circles, even in copyright owners homes and offices. That's a sign that it's modification could happen, but that chance exists under pressure only -- they won't voluntarily give up their rights. Eroding the actual profits they gain will help, their ability to enforce the law, public perception of the morality and right of the law, every change in culture, interpretation, opinion, practice, will eventually be possible to become law.
As far as I can see, the best way to change this stuff is civil disobedience - breaking the law, asserting rights to use all human knowledge as a human right, and accusing the law of denying the rights to freedom of thought, expression, assembly, knowledge and communication. As a political campaign, ideally I think this should be public, not anonymous, and in great numbers, accompanied by media communications. A public wifi network in a public square, public distribution of copyrighted works on media, etc. Sheets of paper with links and instructions on how to share files, addresses, etc. Following this, public debate on the law will begin, and the more public involved in the debate, the vocal they are, the more likely the public will win, not the copyright holders.
There are no competent people, no secure or quality products, and no certain outcomes. Get over it and get to work trying to get whatever result you want, or to drinking beer. Either way, everything will end up somewhere. Try not to do it with guns, and nobody will die, that way you can try again.
Microsoft was the "modern, young, alternative" to IBM. Then Apple, then Next, Google, and so many others. It's pointless - companies are run for profit, and letting opportunities for profit pass is not what they do. Morality or legality of actions is an issue, but the profit is quite the issue. The alternative would be for us to give our money to open source programmers, but we keep shooting our feet and not doing that.
The only things I have used that had reasonable speed for real work were RDP, Citrix, and LTSP. I used vnc, tightvnc and ultravnc many times, but never found it to be usable for day-to-day stuff.
With the source code, and some following of basic standards that have been around forever (like POSIX) it's not terribly difficult to get pretty much any app to work on pretty much any platform
Of course it's nice to have the source. But time is limited, and if open-source mandates every user has to know how and have time to modify programs, it will continue to be only for techs. It's much much more useful if the binary still works and nothing *needs* to be changed. Sourceforge is full of people trying to figure out what good is the source code, and just forgetting about it. Unfortunately there's more chance of a user figuring out how to run any program, old or new, on a closed source OS, and I believe that is the single, primary reason open source OS's don't advance much in terms of users -- the users can't figure out how to run programs.
Supporting old stuff means tougher standards, higher compatibility. Floppies were a pretty terrible standard, but they lasted forever basically because nobody could ever agree on a new standard. SuperDisk LS-120 was late, plus didn't catch on. But. Old phones work fine on today's network. Cars work with today's gas and roads. Old televisions work with today's services and electricity. But try to run some old BINARY. Chancer are better if you are using a closed-source OS. Unfortunately, stuff just lasts longer than technology, or tech-people, would like. People enjoy using the stuff they have paid for, sometimes with sacrifice, they expect it to work, fix it if broken, etc, and they are right. Lots of stuff lasts decades working. Computer stuff generally doesn't, and somehow we techies find it great and laugh at people when they want old computers and programs to work, as if we actually liked it when it happened to us. We have old stuff that we would like to be more useful too. There are old programs that sometimes cannot be replaced easily, but the environment and hardware for them is somehow basically nonexistent. Yes, recompiling and recoding works - but why does Linux always have to rely on that, and other systems less so, having better binary compatibility?
Stick to a strict definition, and important parts of democracy and freedom are largely an illusion, too, because of the implementation. A few fundamental key parts are missing, or don't work. But that doesn't mean people don't strongly believe in it. In fact, they often get mighty angry if you talk about it or try to make these freedoms actually work. Just try to actually do something about unfair situations, instead of complaining about it, and you'll start finding limitations.
http://www.sco.com/products/openserver6/osr6-gnu-utils-PA-FINAL.pdf GNU Utilities Supplement for SCO OpenServer 6
The GNU Utilities Supplement represents the initial supported release of a selection of key GNU utilities for
OpenServer 6. With these key utilities customers will be able to more easily port and develop open source
products and customer specific applications for OpenServer 6 using the native C and C++ Development
System. It will also allow active participation in open source development projects and deployment of updated
releases of those projects based on customer specific schedule requirements
Slashdot Mirror
Some times to get laws and attitudes changed, mass civil disobedience comes into play. Some laws get on the books that are just so freaking lame, stupid and unfair that they invite mass disobedience. An example would be alcohol prohibition, where so many people disobeyed the law willingly that eventually it was changed.t.
Simply not paying in fact does contribute too, as it denies income to the publishers. In music and software, that is possible.
There's 1135 patents worldwide that are essential to H.264, 1114 of which are active, 162 of which are active and in the US.
Here's the list: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf
The trick is probably to use a 20 (or maybe 25, to avoid old submarine patents) year old technology to get around it.
The law allows for monopolies and abuse of power. And it gives you your options. Follow the law - pay licenses for everything, or use legal but impractical alternatives. Break the law - ignore the law and deal with potential legal consequence. Agree with the law or campaign to change the law.
I would like to see how they are going to enforce that. There is overlaying stuff here, You bought a camera, that camera is yours, you own it. Using to film your new episode of 2 girls 1 cup and sell it online is your right, and yours alone. That's like buying a car, and the manufacturer tells you, that you are not allowed to use to car to race, because the steering software is not licensed for racing. If anyone is liable it's the manufacturer of the camera, he has not right to enforce how you are going to use your hardware even if it was in the EULA, and if you do break the EULA as it is, it there ass's who is going to be prosecuted. "The Usual IANAL statement".
I believe that the no-racing car software license could in fact be created. And if there are any no-profitable-business-calls or any other contracts on your cellphone software that you agreed to, you could be legally liable for that contract too.
Yeah, but the difference is how it used to be that the manufacturer paid for a license, sold you the product (cost of license built-in), and you used it for whatever you wanted.
Nowadays, they want to control not just how the product is made and sold, but how it is USED. That's just plain too much power.
I agree. Being paid for one's work is fine, most people agree with that. Taking it and ''maximizing profit" to have ever-increasing leverage over everyone's work is quite another. Taken to its logical conclusion, we will soon begin to have an intellectual property owners social class, who just profit, and non-owners class, who just work.
I'd still like to see some examples of this that aren't in east texas, or even better, outside the land of lawsuits (AKA the USA).
The US may have more lawsuits than most places, but when involving lots of money issues become issues everywhere.
"declare in their manuals that they are for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes only." You don't always do everything that the manual tells you to, do you? I'm pretty sure that thousands of people a day use these cameras for commercial purposes without any problem (I know we use them at work). And I'm also pretty sure the MPEG-LA doesn't want to see the issue end up in court, because they'd probably lose.
That could work forever, if they never decide to enforce their rights. If they decide it's not making any money and sell it to some patent troll law group it will become quite a nightmare however. Suddenly we all find out there's some hidden marks in all our works that have been published all over the world and we are in court for it.
"declare in their manuals that they are for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes only." You don't always do everything that the manual tells you to, do you? I'm pretty sure that thousands of people a day use these cameras for commercial purposes without any problem (I know we use them at work). And I'm also pretty sure the MPEG-LA doesn't want to see the issue end up in court, because they'd probably lose.
Fine solution. Ignore the patents-copyrights. Go Pirate Party!
Or just change the law. No more copyrights-patents.
So what Open Corporate Culture would promote and reward good behaviour in a realistic way?
It's called Basic Human Dignity. That's what people want. For everyone.
Reward people with more time. Most people spend inordinate amounts of time solving simple, repetitive tasks. Paying bills, cleaning house, washing clothes, buying supplies, transportation, finding entertainment, fixing things, answering phones. Paying a specialized 'time savers crew' might be much cheaper than a team of programmers doing all this stuff individually, plus frequently they are all awfully messy with it. Get a coding party or campout where people can spend time at to get away and get work done.
I always thought setting up clear recognition of who has most contributed to open source would be great. Setting criteria would be important. Lines of code, time of involvement, hours of labor, number of users or longevity of code...
Got to be smarter than that. I dislike monopolies and MS as much as anyone, but finding problems and publicizing them will only help test it and reduce QA labor costs for Microsoft. It won't make people not use it, or wonder if Linux or anything else is better. Testing some programs for Linux will be better, talking to people managing various projects, writing user manuals for a few programs. Wine HQ has lots of programs that need testing and installation instructions. Questioning copyrights and patents could get some results, campaigning for legislation change. But just bashing Microsoft and saying "in Linux it is better" won't do much.
Please show where in American history there was a time when people were free to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.
Today. They are free to sit at their computer and do it. There will likely be no consequences. About 0,01% of people in the US are taken as punishment for everyone else.
We've never had the unlimited right to share what does not belong to us.
Not legally, duly coded into law, but in practice, you download a couple programs and you're on, free music. It's what every kid on the planet wishes to do as much as possible. Legal consequence? What's that? It's just music.
If *everyone* disobeys, they will just automate the process, strip of us of more rights without due process and end up just adding a RIAA tax.
It seems everyone does disobey, music is basically copied freely now, more than sold, software is not too different, movies and books are going that direction.
Indeed the right to privacy should not be abused as a shield from the law, as it often is, by government and corporations. The law does however evolve with the times, new realities, public pressure, cultural changes, momentary needs, etc. It's not set in stone forever. "The law", all aspects of it, includes custom, tradition, social tolerance, a bunch of stuff that's not even written anywhere - like it or not. Copyright and IP law is at a crossroads moment, is widely ignored, ridicularized, called obsolete, bypassed, complained about, in all circles, even in copyright owners homes and offices. That's a sign that it's modification could happen, but that chance exists under pressure only -- they won't voluntarily give up their rights. Eroding the actual profits they gain will help, their ability to enforce the law, public perception of the morality and right of the law, every change in culture, interpretation, opinion, practice, will eventually be possible to become law.
As far as I can see, the best way to change this stuff is civil disobedience - breaking the law, asserting rights to use all human knowledge as a human right, and accusing the law of denying the rights to freedom of thought, expression, assembly, knowledge and communication. As a political campaign, ideally I think this should be public, not anonymous, and in great numbers, accompanied by media communications. A public wifi network in a public square, public distribution of copyrighted works on media, etc. Sheets of paper with links and instructions on how to share files, addresses, etc. Following this, public debate on the law will begin, and the more public involved in the debate, the vocal they are, the more likely the public will win, not the copyright holders.
There are no competent people, no secure or quality products, and no certain outcomes. Get over it and get to work trying to get whatever result you want, or to drinking beer. Either way, everything will end up somewhere. Try not to do it with guns, and nobody will die, that way you can try again.
Microsoft was the "modern, young, alternative" to IBM. Then Apple, then Next, Google, and so many others. It's pointless - companies are run for profit, and letting opportunities for profit pass is not what they do. Morality or legality of actions is an issue, but the profit is quite the issue. The alternative would be for us to give our money to open source programmers, but we keep shooting our feet and not doing that.
The only things I have used that had reasonable speed for real work were RDP, Citrix, and LTSP. I used vnc, tightvnc and ultravnc many times, but never found it to be usable for day-to-day stuff.
With the source code, and some following of basic standards that have been around forever (like POSIX) it's not terribly difficult to get pretty much any app to work on pretty much any platform
Of course it's nice to have the source. But time is limited, and if open-source mandates every user has to know how and have time to modify programs, it will continue to be only for techs. It's much much more useful if the binary still works and nothing *needs* to be changed. Sourceforge is full of people trying to figure out what good is the source code, and just forgetting about it. Unfortunately there's more chance of a user figuring out how to run any program, old or new, on a closed source OS, and I believe that is the single, primary reason open source OS's don't advance much in terms of users -- the users can't figure out how to run programs.
Supporting old stuff means tougher standards, higher compatibility. Floppies were a pretty terrible standard, but they lasted forever basically because nobody could ever agree on a new standard. SuperDisk LS-120 was late, plus didn't catch on. But. Old phones work fine on today's network. Cars work with today's gas and roads. Old televisions work with today's services and electricity. But try to run some old BINARY. Chancer are better if you are using a closed-source OS. Unfortunately, stuff just lasts longer than technology, or tech-people, would like. People enjoy using the stuff they have paid for, sometimes with sacrifice, they expect it to work, fix it if broken, etc, and they are right. Lots of stuff lasts decades working. Computer stuff generally doesn't, and somehow we techies find it great and laugh at people when they want old computers and programs to work, as if we actually liked it when it happened to us. We have old stuff that we would like to be more useful too. There are old programs that sometimes cannot be replaced easily, but the environment and hardware for them is somehow basically nonexistent. Yes, recompiling and recoding works - but why does Linux always have to rely on that, and other systems less so, having better binary compatibility?
Stick to a strict definition, and important parts of democracy and freedom are largely an illusion, too, because of the implementation. A few fundamental key parts are missing, or don't work. But that doesn't mean people don't strongly believe in it. In fact, they often get mighty angry if you talk about it or try to make these freedoms actually work. Just try to actually do something about unfair situations, instead of complaining about it, and you'll start finding limitations.
http://www.sco.com/products/openserver6/osr6-gnu-utils-PA-FINAL.pdf
GNU Utilities Supplement for SCO OpenServer 6
The GNU Utilities Supplement represents the initial supported release of a selection of key GNU utilities for OpenServer 6. With these key utilities customers will be able to more easily port and develop open source products and customer specific applications for OpenServer 6 using the native C and C++ Development System. It will also allow active participation in open source development projects and deployment of updated releases of those projects based on customer specific schedule requirements
I wonder just what would change if SCO did get it. Does Linux run UNIX? I guess the answer to that is "sort of"... And outside the US?