MAPS put a persistent spammer's machines in the RBL. AboveNet and Teleglobe black-hole things in the RBL at the router level. Spammer doesn't like this.
If by "spammer" you mean "Website operator who runs a Web site that sells software including e-mail software that could be abused to send spam.
Network neutrality means ISPs aren't allowed to filter based on the source or destination of the traffic. The filter here isn't based on source or destination, just on volume.
This is incorrect. They were blocking a list of source/destination addresses, not just any IP that sent too much data. Also, they were blocking particular sites that were not sending e-mail at all, just offering particular software for sale that the list maintainers did not like. Net neutrality certainly would make that illegal.
Analogy: UPS charges everyone the same rates and takes anyone's packages, but they won't take any packages weighing more than 1000lbs. When the spammer shows up with a 10,000lb package and UPS refuses it, they aren't refusing it because it's from the spammer, they're refusing it because it's over-weight.
Your analogy is wrong though. They aren't stopping this package because it weighs 10,000lb. It is only 2lbs and contains marketing brochures for a crate company. They are stopping it because they have a list of people and this person happens to sell large crates that could be used to try to ship large items.
Actually, the fact that the spelling and grammar checkers in Windows can only be used in a few programs is a big minus for me. I mean if you're going to all the effort to code these things, why not make them available to editors and Web browsers and chat clients and terminals and everything else? On of the reasons OS X is winning the war as my primary desktop OS is its ability to share arbitrary functionality like this among all programs.
...is there *any* new features that are relevant to anyone?
Yes. For me the application level sound controls are a big plus. It is nice to be able to have audio alerts for chats at work, but be able to turn off sound from Web pages so they don't disturb my co-workers. This is actually nicer than Kubuntu or Mac OS X right now.
The indexed searching is a big plus too. I never thought I'd use it when it was added to OS X, but being able to quickly and globally find some string in the text of a PDF of Word file or ODF file or even photoshop image is a real life saver.
If the EU demanded a total, open, no cost solution, MS probably wouldn't give in. Heck they might even rather pull out of the European market entirely than do that.
I've heard people say this sort of thing before. Let me tell you what would happen if MS decided to "pull out" of the EU. Realistically, the board of directors at MS would have an emergency meeting and fire the CEO then appoint someone new who would apologize for the old CEO and claim he had lost his mind or something. Then, MS would probably pressure the US to deport the now criminal CEO to the EU for prosecution and/or institutionalization. Then business would go back to normal except with a lot more anti-MS sentiment in the EU and the possibility of the EU taking a lot of new legal actions against MS.
Now assuming the entire board of directors and majority shareholders and CEO at MS were insane and decided to "pull out" of europe here is what would happen. MS would have just broken countless licensing agreements with multinational corporations who would then sue MS into nothingness in other countries with lawsuit after lawsuit for failing to provide support and licensing for Windows in Europe. The EU would probably take direct action against the now criminal MS organization who just blatantly rejected their authority and fled the country without complying with the courts while at the same time breaking EU antitrust laws in the most extreme way ever in all of history. The EU would now have a huge issue to beat the US with in diplomatic situations, trade talks, and the WTO making MS hated by US lawmakers (until MS was sued to nothingness). The EU would probably confiscate and freeze all MS owned property and funds in the EU likely including their intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights. They would then either found a european MS company and grant them these assets and have a very good case in international courts that it was the true owner of all of said patents and copyrights and that the US company was violating those copyrights etc. Or the EU would keep the real property and release the rest into the public domain and allow any company that wanted to modify and use MS's code and sell versions of Windows.
Either way, MS would be utterly destroyed. MS has power, including the power to bribe governments, but not enough to go head to head with a government on its own ground or to thumb their nose at one of the largest economies in the world.
You'll be able to license their specs for whatever is covered under the agreement, and the fees will be fixed and reasonable, but it will cost money and there may be conditions on it. That's probably fine for the EU. Their concern isn't making OSS fans happy, their concern is that companies be able to produce products that compete with Microsoft's stuff.
You're mostly right with this but the EU may be bullish about it, particularly since all the large (and EU based) competitors are providing open source solutions. A license that excludes OSS, excludes all the competitors and is as unacceptable as a phone company who provided space for gear that was too small for any existing hardware on the market. The EU's concern is somewhat about making competitors, who happen to be OSS companies, happy.
In order to transport food, we need cars. So the car industry is a "basic nessesity[sic]"...
I disagree. We don't need cars to transport food. We can walk. We can use horses. We can use airplanes or boats or bicycles. There are options and we can adapt. This is not so with regard to food.
Using this logic, it is easy to justify anything as a nationally vital industry.
Only if your logic or assumptions are broken, as I've shown yours to be.
This is clearly not true, so the assumption must be false.
I think I've already demonstrated where your logic derails. Food subsidies are a reasonable precaution in order to insure a steady, non-disruptable supply of a basic necessity. They may or may not be a good idea. That puts them in a completely different category from an oil subsidy. Our economy can move away from oil dependence as a means of providing for transport and security. We can't move away from our reliance upon food.
Whilst I completely agree with you about OpenGL; with PDF they did have the pretty good excuse that Adobe refused to license it to them for use in Office 2007 (which they were understandably pretty ticked off about, considering Adobe had freely granted it to every other office suite on the planet).
Your statement with regard to PDF is factually incorrect. Adobe never refused to license it to anyone. They have an open license that applies equally to all comers and MS doesn't have to do anything fancy or sign anything to get such a license.
The quarrel with MS and Adobe was over the fact that MS was planning to break the law by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly and Office near monopoly in order to promote their tools over Adobe's offerings. All of Adobe's complaints applied to both XPS and PDF and both of them were part of the plan and already written by the time Adobe said anything, so you can't claim MS created XPS as a response to Adobe's actions. Instead of risking the courts ruling that MS's office suite constituted monopoly power in that space, MS withdrew the features from that bundle, but they are still including the XPS features in Windows in violation of the law. Since Windows has already been declared a monopoly, this is just one more abuse and MS figures that by the time the courts take any action against them they will have already destroyed that market beyond any repair and they'll just have to shell out a few million bucks or take some pointless action that does not really help years after the fact.
I encourage you to please not continue repeating the MS FUD about PDF licensing, which is and has been open to MS and all other comers for a long time. It just doesn't mean MS can use that license in a way that violates criminal law.
To my knowledge, Exchange Server, Share Point etc. are not areas of monopoly for Microsoft.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of monopoly abuse. The law does not forbid MS from having a monopoly, it forbids them from tying monopolized products to products in other markets. In this case MS does not have a monopoly on some protocol. They have a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Any protocols that secretly communicate between MS's desktop operating system and some other product offering in a different market (Windows server) mean that people in the market for a server OS are more likely to choose Windows server only because MS has tied it to their existing desktop monopoly. A lot of companies bought a Windows based exchange server instead of a Linux based server because exchange was built into their Windows desktops and they needed something to talk to them and the Linux server could not do so because the protocol was being kept secret. In this way the market for server OS's was subverted and more consumers ended up buying an inferior, more expensive product only because of the artificially introduced problem that Linux servers would not integrate as well with Windows desktops.
The article is plain WRONG.
The spin on the article certainly seems a bit off. My understanding was that the EU had previously rejected MS's proposal to license protocols instead of providing open documentation because the program the USDoJ approved has not worked and both MS and the US government admit that the licensing is not working and the offerings from MS in this regard are so out of date as to be unusable.
Something to do with the price of OS X being included in the price of the mac itself? I seem to recall seeing several other topics (among many others) where, in the discussion, people get VERY uppity about having to pay for windows to be included on their machines.
I really don't understand how our educational system could have failed this badly. Really. I can understand that maybe schools don't teach economics at all. I can understand that they don't teach formal logic or decision making. I don't really understand how so many people can make assertive statements about monopolies without looking up the word and understanding both what a monopoly is and what the law forbids it from doing and why. Is it not simply common sense to understand at least on a very basic level the topic you're discussing? Most of the people here don't even seem to know what a monopoly is, let alone why someone would complain when a monopoly takes an action, but not when a non-monopoly takes the same action. I really and truly hope a lot of people here are paid by MS to confuse people, because the alternative is even worse.
For the jillionth time I'll explain monopolies and bundling. It is legal to bundle products and services in a free market. It is legal to become a monopoly. It is illegal to bundle a product or service you have monopolized the market for, with another product or service from a pre-existing, separate market.
In this example it is legal for Apple to bundle computer systems and operating systems and applications and toasters if they feel like it. They have a monopoly on none of these markets. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. They can sell bundled mice and toasters and cheese if they want, but they cannot sell any bundle that includes a desktop OS.
Why? The reason a monopolist is forbidden from bundling in that way is simple, power. Monopolies combined with tying or bundling give a monopolist the power to break capitalism for profit. They can undermine our economic system and prevent the innovation, low prices, and variety that are the main advantages of capitalism. Monopolies take all the worse aspects capitalism and combine them with all the worst aspects of extreme socialism.
Ethically is it legal to forbid actions based upon how much power someone has. For example, is it ethical to pass a law that says anyone who used an enlarging ray to make themselves 10000 feet tall is forbidden from walking downtown? Just because they have the power to crush people and buildings underfoot, should they have fewer rights? In my opinion, yes. With power comes risk to society and responsibility for that power.
Monopolies are 10000 foot tall companies that have the power to undermine capitalism. For a simple example, suppose I have a monopoly on electrical power distribution. I own the lines and the law restricts that to one company per geographical region for the sake of safety. Well and good. Being a monopoly is not illegal. Now suppose I want to go into the cheese selling business. I already have a customer base. If I stop selling electricity by itself and only sell a bundle of electricity + a month's supply of cheese for $30 more than I was selling just electricity, what will happen? Well people need electricity. A few might buy generators and try to make their own, or try to go without and heat with wood, but in general everyone will still buy electricity and with that they will buy my cheese. So now everyone has this cheese. Are they going throw away the cheese and go to the store and buy different cheese? What about families that can't afford that extra $30, they'll substitute it even for other food. So cheese sales from other places goes to hell and stores stop carrying it except specialty shops (think Apple) and the entire cheese market is taken over. So there were people out there making better tasting cheese that cost less to produce and they went out of business because of this action. Is that right or good for anyone? And what motivation do I, as the electricity
Only time will tell if Apple is just as bad as MS. While they are gaining market share, at what point do the vulnerabilities turn into money?
Time has already shown Apple is not as bad. The point where market share turns into money is when adding an exploit for the mac to a multi-vector worm will net more bots than yet another Windows vector. There are several reasons it has not happened and motivation for hackers is not one of them. Worms have not attacked macs because it is hard. There are not many attack vectors on OS X and those vectors do not remain vulnerable for long periods. The culture of malware development has a very Windows-centric skill set in general. Propagation to the sparse Mac platform is more troublesome and more likely to alert AV vendors and the proportion of boxes that are run by security people is higher resulting in potentially faster mitigation of your malware.
I think Windows is a LOT more secure than it used to be.
Windows has more technological features that address security, but they seem to be losing the malware arms race. What is more "secure" the statue downtown with an electric fence around it, or the Pentagon complex? The pentagon certainly has more technical measures in place to stop intruders. Why then is it so much more likely to have that security penetrated? The risk of a security failing is based not only on the technical measures, but whether those technical measures are appropriate for the threats it is likely to face. Apple hasn't implemented security 100 times better than Windows, but the average user is easily 100 times less likely to be compromised by a worm. This is because non-monopolies adopt security that is appropriate for their customers. MS needs to adopt a lot more advanced security to get to the same level but they don't because as a monopoly it does not cost them enough money when their customers are compromised.
If an average mac user has their machine compromised by a worm once a month and Apple does not implement measures to stop it, they will be looking into Linux or even going back to Windows. Apple would lose money. If the average Windows user is compromised by a worm once a month, they might be pissed, but most don't even know anything else exists and nothing else is sold in the local stores. They almost certainly buy another Windows machine for their next box. MS loses little or no money.
The way to fix the security of Windows is not to adopt the user-level separations from Linux, or the default Firewall policies from OS X. It is to establish a competitive free market for desktop OS's and let the competition fix the problem from the top down. Break MS into at least two companies both with rights to Windows code and patents and half the engineers. Forbid them from colluding or communicating in any non-public fashion. Within a few years both of them will have relatively secure OS offerings that give users what they want. That is the only solution that will provide adequate security for Windows in the long term and that is what is working for the other OS's that Windows is lacking.
Well, I guess it's moot right now, since Apple broke it's wireless support thoroughly with the 2007-002 update back at the beginning of March, and has remained silent about addressing the problem since then.
There are always going to be conflicts between different implementations of a specification in hardware/software, but I'm not sure the problem you list is really a significant one in the large scheme of things. Here at work we have numerous wireless access points, mostly D-link brand. We also have about 50 mac laptops, a mix of powerbooks, ibooks, macbooks, and macbook pros, as well as numerous lenovo thinkpads. Out of those 50 or so mixed machines (all of which applied said patch) we don't have any that stopped working with the wireless points and this is the first I've heard of this bug.
I do wish Apple was better about communicating if they're working on fixing a bug or not and provided more feedback to users, but I don't see that this bug does a lot to speak to Apple's behavior with regard to the misrepresented wireless hack this article discusses.
Uh sorry but I must be missing something here. Doesnt WINE aim to be a complete implementation too?
WINE aims to re-implement the "userland" APIs and the ones commonly used by regular software and provide a translation layer to another OS. As such, it will only achieve the complete implementation when it can do everything Windows can including boot, at which point it would be a complete OS like ReactOS. I don't think any of the WINE team will ever want to take it that far. Their goal seems to be "good enough" to run most normal software.
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Wine offers a much more compelling method of migrating from Windows.
WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one. I don't have any real confidence that WINE will ever work reliably for arbitrary software. It is a nice crutch for specific, common applications. It is a reasonable route to building a quick and dirty port. I don't think it will ever fill the role of a method of moving away from Windows and still running random (often proprietary or outdated) applications.
ReactOS would still require you to be running a full separate operating system. If you wanted to do that, you could run your current Windows XP licenses in virtual machines, and just run Linux on the host, or what have you.
That is pretty much what I am doing now, except most WinXP licenses are not portable to new hardware and such a move is often accompanied by a move to new hardware. ReactOS is likely to be more lightweight than the current version of Windows and less likely to cause headaches with licensing and registration and DRM shutting it down arbitrarily. It also would have save my company a hundred bucks a license and that adds up.
Granted, Wine isn't entirely there yet... but neither is ReactOS.
I actually looked at WINE and a couple of commercial WINE-based offerings and ReactOS before I chose to run WinXP in a VM. It was the most expensive solution by far (other than Windows outside a VM) but the only one that worked. In future I could see going either way, but I think the overhead from ReactOS is likely going to end up less of a consideration that the necessarily limited range of WINE.
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ReactOS would still be unsupported and untrusted in business, and it's proliferation would only add to MSFT's dominance of the market.
ReactOS would be useful for companies looking for a way to move off of Windows but who have binaries that only run on Windows. Due to the proliferation of VM technology, a VM running ReactOS on top of your OS of choice could make migration away from Windows cheap enough to be an option. If ReactOS is cheap enough, it could displace Windows by itself for limited applications. A free OS Dell or someone can install that still lets them get paid for crapware and which still lets end users run games and junk software from Walmart could easily grab market share away from Windows. Anything that threatens MS's dominance with Windows, whether it detracts from Linux or your favorite OS or not, is good for motivating MS to make Windows better. If Windows is as good as other OS's, I don't care if it is dominant as much.
I'm sure they could raise executive salaries so they were only a little profitable. Then they'd "need" them.
Are you being obtuse or are you trying to imply you think farmers are overpaid?
Rubber band subsidies help remove our dependence upon foreign rubber band sources both in war and economically. The same goes for subsidies for punk rock bands, bloggers, plumbers, and pet groomers.
Food is a basic necessity. Transportation is a basic need in wartime. Nothing you list is. I can listen to old school punk, use paper clicps, ignore blogs, crap in the back yard, and eat my pets all before I can go without food.
They both have the same objective: buy votes from farm-related industries with money stolen from taxpayers.
Politicians implementing them might have the same goal. That has nothing to do with the practical affects.
Yeah, because "Ethanol subsidies" are so much different than "farm subsidies".
I find them to be very different. Ethanol companies are hugely profitable and do not need the subsidies, farmers do. Ethanol subsidies help maintain a system whereby the US is made dependent upon foreign industry, a huge liability both in war and in the economic war. Farm subsidies help remove our dependence upon foreign food sources both in war and economically. Ethanol subsidies encourage pollution, while farm subsidies help discourage pollution by decreasing the amount of shipping needed to move food. I'm not saying they are a good idea, only that the issue is quite different from that of ethanol subsidies.
For a day to day assessment for the USA's position with regard to DoS attacks, botnets, phishing, and scanning, check out this page and look at the bottom chart. You can see the number one ranked country, ASN, and host for each category.
What I'm getting from this conversation is that you think that so much emphasis is placed on the license because the license is one of the primary motivators that sells the software. "OSS tends to be better only in that the license gives users more options." True?
I agree if one assumes that your statement "the license is one of the primary motivators" is a given. I'm not sure that is really true in a commercial setting. From what I've seen at several different companies, having an open source license of any sort is considered a plus and a bigger plus if the software is widely deployed (tracking issue) or if we want to redistribute it. It is usually given as much value as having a license or vendor pre-approved by the legal department. In fact, I'd say open source software that uses a weird license like some of the ones Sun and Apple use, tends to be given the same consideration as closed source software, but from a pre-approved vendor. Neither of these factors usually is weighed anywhere near as heavily as cost of implementation of feature set. It could be, however, that my experience is not the common case. I get the impression from other professionals that it is, but I don't have any formal studies to back that up.
Just for discussion sake, what is the functionality of those speciality servers that you guys are building?
Network security and traffic monitoring.
Do you disagree with my point that most of the articles out there are too focused on licensing costs/benefits of cheaper licenses and not focused enough on the actual functional benefits that OSS offers over the competition?
I don't understand. Are you talking about the functional benefits of a given piece of software that happens to be OSS or the functional benefits the OSS license it confers to that software? Most articles about OSS talk about the benefits of the license because that is the common factor and that is appropriate. Most articles about a given kind of software, like Web servers, talk about what is common to Web servers, like their ability to serve Web pages quickly and securely and flexibly and cheaply and they might also mention how one server having an OSS license gives it an advantage. That also seems appropriate to me.
Are you saying you think there should be articles claiming open source software leads to more/better functions in that software and hence it is better? If so I think that is bunk. There is good OSS that has more functionality than competing closed source software. There is closed source software that has better functionality than alternative OSS offerings. OSS tends to be better only in that the license gives users more options. Aside from that it depends upon the given software being evaluated.
Not really non standard. Just apropriate[sic] for anyone not sitting back and going why isn't business flocking to open source and then watching most of the fud[sic] going around.
Every business I've worked for since graduating undergraduate school has utilized open source software and all the software companies have contributed. Who says business is not flocking to open source?
What is wirth[sic] debating is how to implement the intended goals of the GPL and weather[sic] or not any current drafts do this to the satisfaction of the comunity[sic] that makes it relevent[sic].
The intended goals of a given version of the GPL is what it says crossed with how well a given licensor understands what they're agreeing to.
Thye[sic] are saying if you use GPLv3 software you have to make your hardware in a certain way.
No. They're saying if you want to redistribute the code I wrote, you have to agree to use it in this way, regardless of if it is used on hardware or software. It is up to the owner of the copyright to decide to whom they want to license their code and with what restrictions. If you don't like it, use code written under the BSD license.
It is that the myth of the BSA being worse is overstated.
The BSA audits companies and sues for millions every year. They offer bounties to individuals who turn in noncompliant employers. They had had real and damaging affects upon numerous businesses who simply chose to use that software. Find me a case of an open source software group suing a user (not re-distributor) of their software for damages.
Big deal is exaclty right. It shoehorns restrictions of the GPL were is shouln't. But I suppose wiping the drive and making the resale vaue significantly less is a good position for a company to be involved with.
We're talking business cases. Compliance is basically free. Is there any real cost to my shipping the code on boxes I wiped and re-installed with OSS? Is it in any way comparable to the risk posed by BSA audits or the cost of tracking compliance? From a dollars and cents perspective, OSS wins big time.
What is the purpose of the license? To cover big companies?, little companies?, the indevidual business man?, everyone who uses the software? And if it isn't all of the above, Then why does the license appear to make it look that way?
The license is to stop flagrant abuse, especially abuse that runs contrary to the spirit as well as the letter of the license. If the cost/risk is that if I'm a slacker and someone complains I have to ship out some crappy burned disks with source on them, and I can charge for that service I just don't see any risk to my business and you're not showing one.
And saying you have less chances of the FSF comming after you then the BSA is about stupid. It has nothing to do with the facts that they can.
You don't write many business plans do you? They are all about cost and risk and reward. The risk and potential damage of the FSF coming after a software user is nil and nil. They don't have a case and if they did they'd win the right to make me ship the source they already distribute and anyone can get cheaper elsewhere. The risk of the BSA coming after me is they do have a case and they have extralegal powers including a grant from congress that says I have to pay their absurdly high legal fees and the BSA routinely does this. Of course it makes a difference if I'm choosing software for my business.
There is no significant protection or advantage of protections in using OSS if you violate the license then there is with the BSA and propriatary licenses.
You can do more without violating the license. Most accidental violations result in no damages and only a token cost on the part of the offender. Making sure you don't violate is a lot easier with open source.
I was talking about functionality and licensing as seperate selling points. It seems to me that for the most part OSS is sold based on licensing. Will it ever be sold on functionality?
I strongly disagree. "Open source software" the concept is licensing and thus the benefits of that license are what is discussed. Any given application, however, is sold mostly on features, only one of which is the license. No one decides to use apache only because it is open source. They use it because it is stable and secure and extensible. The company I work for builds really expensive specialty servers running on Linux. The bottom line model is about $40K. Another couple hundred bucks for a Windows server license would be nothing, if there was some advantage. The fact of the matter is, Linux works better for us. It is more stable and secure and customizable. That is open source being sold based on functionality, not license.
From what little exposure I've had to it, it seems to me like the OSS mantra should be, "It's cheap and it's good enough."
You might get that impression if you do a Google search for "open source." If however you look at a given open source project, rarely will you see it competing only on the license instead of price and features and license and support.
What functionality does OSS deliver to the SMB market that the competetition hasn't already been doing for years?
The functionality is based upon the individual offering, not the licensing. Does Apache have a better feature set than ISS? Most people think so and it is more suitable to a small business. The point is, you can't talk about the "functionality" of a means of licensing any more than you can talk about the functionality of software developed on the West coast versus the East coast. It doesn't make sense as a correlative measure.
It gets worse if you use the GPLv3 as it is currently drafted, but they are aksing for source on webprograms and stuff people could use but it doesn't get distributed.
Your interpretation seems a little non-standard. Anyway, commenting on the GPLv3 at this point is a little pointless as it does not supplant v2 and it does not exist in a final form.
They are trying to dictate what you can do in the future outside the use of the software with the Anti-patten lawsuite thing.
Patten was a competent general, but now he's dead, lets not sue dead people.
They are attempting to control what you do with your hardware with the anti-DRM clause.
Again, I strongly disagree with your interpretation. It applies only to distributing software, not what I do with my hardware if I'm not distributing software at all.
A company who has 200 workstations will get rid of them at some point. So lets say they are reimaged with some Opensource solution then sold. Oh, now they are subject becuase they are distributing.
Yeah, and they have to include the source, big deal and who cares? Just sell em blank or abide by the license, or buy commercial software for them, with a transferable license if you don't like it.
Suppose a company buys a computer, loads OSS on it and gives it to an employee to work from home? now they have distributed it.
Distribution within the company does not count. Besides, no one cares and is motivated for coming after you for this type of violation. If I put Linux on a computer without the source and give it away or sell it the chances that the FSF will come after me is about zero. They have nothing to gain and at most they'll waste money in court and get an order that says I have to give them the source as well, which will cost me about a quarter.
And it used to be that anything outside the scope of distributing the license was off limits to the GPL. When the GPLv3 comes into play, some division of your company half way around the world could do something to make you lose youe right to even use the FOSS software.
That seems highly unlikely from my reading. More likely the division of your company halfway around the world will make you have to distribute some source, boo hoo.
There isn't a real strong case one way or another. I can see many psoitives to using OSS in the business. Getting away from the BSA or restriction imposed doesn't seem to be one of them.
Tell it to Ernie Ball. The BSA audit cost him $100 grand in fees. He's since switched to Linux and the chances that he will have any problems for using Linux are basically zero and in a worst case scenario of him reselling workstations or something the fix would cost him nothing. That is a real business case advantage.
Most claim to they are...
??? umm, that's not coherent.
...the future of FOSS and the GPL.
The future of open source is whatever we make it. If you don't like the GPLv3, don't use it. Use software that is licensed the way you want, whether that is a BSD license, an older version of the GPL, or something else entirely. The point is, open source licenses do have significant advantages and avoiding costly audits from the BSA are a real advantage to most of them.
I think the point you're missing is that in both cases there's an implicit threat hanging over anyone who uses their software. Trading, multiple copies, all are diversions to the main point. Use our software in an approved manner, or else...!
And this is where you've failed to understand the fundamental difference. No one has ever been sued for using GPL'd software. Some have been sued for republishing GPL'd software, but it is illegal under copyright law to republish software without permission in the first place. An analogy would be whether you're sued for saying "hi" to someone in public who has a shirt on that says, "by reading this you agree not to say 'hi' to me" or if you're sued for theft when you see them in public, say "hi" grab their laptop bag and leave without having permission to take the bag and don't mow their lawn (when that person has granted permission to take their laptop to any and all people who agree to a legal contract that obligates them to mow the person's lawn). No one has a reasonable expectation that they can republish another person's work, for profit, just as no one has the expectation they can just take someone's laptop.
No, he's quite on the mark, and all of you seemed determined to ignore his point (guess that's why he got a flamebait). It's not about license terms, and who knew what.* It's not about who you like better. It's about the fact that there are GPL advocates who will rat on you. Just because they don't take out ads doesn't in any way diminish his point. Good or bad, that's a fact.
I disagree. The original poster was off the mark because he tried to equate the BSA coming after you for using software you can't prove you have a license for with GPL supporters coming after you for reselling software you know you don't have a license for. The difference is between using and reselling. No one will come after me for viewing a movie, but if I start selling copies of it, you better bet I should know I'm breaking the law.
*All your arguments could apply to closed-source as well. Those companies who violate their EULAs KNEW what they were doing too.
Wrong. No one reads EULAs and even if you do how are you supposed to know if accounting lost your serial number or receipt? EULs are questionably legal and routinely include terms that are completely unenforceable and everyone knows it. EULAs try to remove arbitrary rights you have while using software. The GPL grants certain rights with certain conditions. If you did not read the GPL and have no idea what it says, you have no problem so long as you are not doing something that would already be illegal under existing laws. That is a fundamental difference.
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You don't have to be objective to be correct or even to present a useful example as to why some change is needed.
If by "spammer" you mean "Website operator who runs a Web site that sells software including e-mail software that could be abused to send spam.
Network neutrality means ISPs aren't allowed to filter based on the source or destination of the traffic. The filter here isn't based on source or destination, just on volume.This is incorrect. They were blocking a list of source/destination addresses, not just any IP that sent too much data. Also, they were blocking particular sites that were not sending e-mail at all, just offering particular software for sale that the list maintainers did not like. Net neutrality certainly would make that illegal.
Analogy: UPS charges everyone the same rates and takes anyone's packages, but they won't take any packages weighing more than 1000lbs. When the spammer shows up with a 10,000lb package and UPS refuses it, they aren't refusing it because it's from the spammer, they're refusing it because it's over-weight.Your analogy is wrong though. They aren't stopping this package because it weighs 10,000lb. It is only 2lbs and contains marketing brochures for a crate company. They are stopping it because they have a list of people and this person happens to sell large crates that could be used to try to ship large items.
Actually, the fact that the spelling and grammar checkers in Windows can only be used in a few programs is a big minus for me. I mean if you're going to all the effort to code these things, why not make them available to editors and Web browsers and chat clients and terminals and everything else? On of the reasons OS X is winning the war as my primary desktop OS is its ability to share arbitrary functionality like this among all programs.
...is there *any* new features that are relevant to anyone?Yes. For me the application level sound controls are a big plus. It is nice to be able to have audio alerts for chats at work, but be able to turn off sound from Web pages so they don't disturb my co-workers. This is actually nicer than Kubuntu or Mac OS X right now.
The indexed searching is a big plus too. I never thought I'd use it when it was added to OS X, but being able to quickly and globally find some string in the text of a PDF of Word file or ODF file or even photoshop image is a real life saver.
I've heard people say this sort of thing before. Let me tell you what would happen if MS decided to "pull out" of the EU. Realistically, the board of directors at MS would have an emergency meeting and fire the CEO then appoint someone new who would apologize for the old CEO and claim he had lost his mind or something. Then, MS would probably pressure the US to deport the now criminal CEO to the EU for prosecution and/or institutionalization. Then business would go back to normal except with a lot more anti-MS sentiment in the EU and the possibility of the EU taking a lot of new legal actions against MS.
Now assuming the entire board of directors and majority shareholders and CEO at MS were insane and decided to "pull out" of europe here is what would happen. MS would have just broken countless licensing agreements with multinational corporations who would then sue MS into nothingness in other countries with lawsuit after lawsuit for failing to provide support and licensing for Windows in Europe. The EU would probably take direct action against the now criminal MS organization who just blatantly rejected their authority and fled the country without complying with the courts while at the same time breaking EU antitrust laws in the most extreme way ever in all of history. The EU would now have a huge issue to beat the US with in diplomatic situations, trade talks, and the WTO making MS hated by US lawmakers (until MS was sued to nothingness). The EU would probably confiscate and freeze all MS owned property and funds in the EU likely including their intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights. They would then either found a european MS company and grant them these assets and have a very good case in international courts that it was the true owner of all of said patents and copyrights and that the US company was violating those copyrights etc. Or the EU would keep the real property and release the rest into the public domain and allow any company that wanted to modify and use MS's code and sell versions of Windows.
Either way, MS would be utterly destroyed. MS has power, including the power to bribe governments, but not enough to go head to head with a government on its own ground or to thumb their nose at one of the largest economies in the world.
You'll be able to license their specs for whatever is covered under the agreement, and the fees will be fixed and reasonable, but it will cost money and there may be conditions on it. That's probably fine for the EU. Their concern isn't making OSS fans happy, their concern is that companies be able to produce products that compete with Microsoft's stuff.You're mostly right with this but the EU may be bullish about it, particularly since all the large (and EU based) competitors are providing open source solutions. A license that excludes OSS, excludes all the competitors and is as unacceptable as a phone company who provided space for gear that was too small for any existing hardware on the market. The EU's concern is somewhat about making competitors, who happen to be OSS companies, happy.
I disagree. We don't need cars to transport food. We can walk. We can use horses. We can use airplanes or boats or bicycles. There are options and we can adapt. This is not so with regard to food.
Using this logic, it is easy to justify anything as a nationally vital industry.Only if your logic or assumptions are broken, as I've shown yours to be.
This is clearly not true, so the assumption must be false.I think I've already demonstrated where your logic derails. Food subsidies are a reasonable precaution in order to insure a steady, non-disruptable supply of a basic necessity. They may or may not be a good idea. That puts them in a completely different category from an oil subsidy. Our economy can move away from oil dependence as a means of providing for transport and security. We can't move away from our reliance upon food.
Your statement with regard to PDF is factually incorrect. Adobe never refused to license it to anyone. They have an open license that applies equally to all comers and MS doesn't have to do anything fancy or sign anything to get such a license.
The quarrel with MS and Adobe was over the fact that MS was planning to break the law by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly and Office near monopoly in order to promote their tools over Adobe's offerings. All of Adobe's complaints applied to both XPS and PDF and both of them were part of the plan and already written by the time Adobe said anything, so you can't claim MS created XPS as a response to Adobe's actions. Instead of risking the courts ruling that MS's office suite constituted monopoly power in that space, MS withdrew the features from that bundle, but they are still including the XPS features in Windows in violation of the law. Since Windows has already been declared a monopoly, this is just one more abuse and MS figures that by the time the courts take any action against them they will have already destroyed that market beyond any repair and they'll just have to shell out a few million bucks or take some pointless action that does not really help years after the fact.
I encourage you to please not continue repeating the MS FUD about PDF licensing, which is and has been open to MS and all other comers for a long time. It just doesn't mean MS can use that license in a way that violates criminal law.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of monopoly abuse. The law does not forbid MS from having a monopoly, it forbids them from tying monopolized products to products in other markets. In this case MS does not have a monopoly on some protocol. They have a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Any protocols that secretly communicate between MS's desktop operating system and some other product offering in a different market (Windows server) mean that people in the market for a server OS are more likely to choose Windows server only because MS has tied it to their existing desktop monopoly. A lot of companies bought a Windows based exchange server instead of a Linux based server because exchange was built into their Windows desktops and they needed something to talk to them and the Linux server could not do so because the protocol was being kept secret. In this way the market for server OS's was subverted and more consumers ended up buying an inferior, more expensive product only because of the artificially introduced problem that Linux servers would not integrate as well with Windows desktops.
The article is plain WRONG.The spin on the article certainly seems a bit off. My understanding was that the EU had previously rejected MS's proposal to license protocols instead of providing open documentation because the program the USDoJ approved has not worked and both MS and the US government admit that the licensing is not working and the offerings from MS in this regard are so out of date as to be unusable.
Something to do with the price of OS X being included in the price of the mac itself? I seem to recall seeing several other topics (among many others) where, in the discussion, people get VERY uppity about having to pay for windows to be included on their machines.
I really don't understand how our educational system could have failed this badly. Really. I can understand that maybe schools don't teach economics at all. I can understand that they don't teach formal logic or decision making. I don't really understand how so many people can make assertive statements about monopolies without looking up the word and understanding both what a monopoly is and what the law forbids it from doing and why. Is it not simply common sense to understand at least on a very basic level the topic you're discussing? Most of the people here don't even seem to know what a monopoly is, let alone why someone would complain when a monopoly takes an action, but not when a non-monopoly takes the same action. I really and truly hope a lot of people here are paid by MS to confuse people, because the alternative is even worse.
For the jillionth time I'll explain monopolies and bundling. It is legal to bundle products and services in a free market. It is legal to become a monopoly. It is illegal to bundle a product or service you have monopolized the market for, with another product or service from a pre-existing, separate market.
In this example it is legal for Apple to bundle computer systems and operating systems and applications and toasters if they feel like it. They have a monopoly on none of these markets. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. They can sell bundled mice and toasters and cheese if they want, but they cannot sell any bundle that includes a desktop OS.
Why? The reason a monopolist is forbidden from bundling in that way is simple, power. Monopolies combined with tying or bundling give a monopolist the power to break capitalism for profit. They can undermine our economic system and prevent the innovation, low prices, and variety that are the main advantages of capitalism. Monopolies take all the worse aspects capitalism and combine them with all the worst aspects of extreme socialism.
Ethically is it legal to forbid actions based upon how much power someone has. For example, is it ethical to pass a law that says anyone who used an enlarging ray to make themselves 10000 feet tall is forbidden from walking downtown? Just because they have the power to crush people and buildings underfoot, should they have fewer rights? In my opinion, yes. With power comes risk to society and responsibility for that power.
Monopolies are 10000 foot tall companies that have the power to undermine capitalism. For a simple example, suppose I have a monopoly on electrical power distribution. I own the lines and the law restricts that to one company per geographical region for the sake of safety. Well and good. Being a monopoly is not illegal. Now suppose I want to go into the cheese selling business. I already have a customer base. If I stop selling electricity by itself and only sell a bundle of electricity + a month's supply of cheese for $30 more than I was selling just electricity, what will happen? Well people need electricity. A few might buy generators and try to make their own, or try to go without and heat with wood, but in general everyone will still buy electricity and with that they will buy my cheese. So now everyone has this cheese. Are they going throw away the cheese and go to the store and buy different cheese? What about families that can't afford that extra $30, they'll substitute it even for other food. So cheese sales from other places goes to hell and stores stop carrying it except specialty shops (think Apple) and the entire cheese market is taken over. So there were people out there making better tasting cheese that cost less to produce and they went out of business because of this action. Is that right or good for anyone? And what motivation do I, as the electricity
Time has already shown Apple is not as bad. The point where market share turns into money is when adding an exploit for the mac to a multi-vector worm will net more bots than yet another Windows vector. There are several reasons it has not happened and motivation for hackers is not one of them. Worms have not attacked macs because it is hard. There are not many attack vectors on OS X and those vectors do not remain vulnerable for long periods. The culture of malware development has a very Windows-centric skill set in general. Propagation to the sparse Mac platform is more troublesome and more likely to alert AV vendors and the proportion of boxes that are run by security people is higher resulting in potentially faster mitigation of your malware.
I think Windows is a LOT more secure than it used to be.Windows has more technological features that address security, but they seem to be losing the malware arms race. What is more "secure" the statue downtown with an electric fence around it, or the Pentagon complex? The pentagon certainly has more technical measures in place to stop intruders. Why then is it so much more likely to have that security penetrated? The risk of a security failing is based not only on the technical measures, but whether those technical measures are appropriate for the threats it is likely to face. Apple hasn't implemented security 100 times better than Windows, but the average user is easily 100 times less likely to be compromised by a worm. This is because non-monopolies adopt security that is appropriate for their customers. MS needs to adopt a lot more advanced security to get to the same level but they don't because as a monopoly it does not cost them enough money when their customers are compromised.
If an average mac user has their machine compromised by a worm once a month and Apple does not implement measures to stop it, they will be looking into Linux or even going back to Windows. Apple would lose money. If the average Windows user is compromised by a worm once a month, they might be pissed, but most don't even know anything else exists and nothing else is sold in the local stores. They almost certainly buy another Windows machine for their next box. MS loses little or no money.
The way to fix the security of Windows is not to adopt the user-level separations from Linux, or the default Firewall policies from OS X. It is to establish a competitive free market for desktop OS's and let the competition fix the problem from the top down. Break MS into at least two companies both with rights to Windows code and patents and half the engineers. Forbid them from colluding or communicating in any non-public fashion. Within a few years both of them will have relatively secure OS offerings that give users what they want. That is the only solution that will provide adequate security for Windows in the long term and that is what is working for the other OS's that Windows is lacking.
There are always going to be conflicts between different implementations of a specification in hardware/software, but I'm not sure the problem you list is really a significant one in the large scheme of things. Here at work we have numerous wireless access points, mostly D-link brand. We also have about 50 mac laptops, a mix of powerbooks, ibooks, macbooks, and macbook pros, as well as numerous lenovo thinkpads. Out of those 50 or so mixed machines (all of which applied said patch) we don't have any that stopped working with the wireless points and this is the first I've heard of this bug.
I do wish Apple was better about communicating if they're working on fixing a bug or not and provided more feedback to users, but I don't see that this bug does a lot to speak to Apple's behavior with regard to the misrepresented wireless hack this article discusses.
WINE aims to re-implement the "userland" APIs and the ones commonly used by regular software and provide a translation layer to another OS. As such, it will only achieve the complete implementation when it can do everything Windows can including boot, at which point it would be a complete OS like ReactOS. I don't think any of the WINE team will ever want to take it that far. Their goal seems to be "good enough" to run most normal software.
WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one. I don't have any real confidence that WINE will ever work reliably for arbitrary software. It is a nice crutch for specific, common applications. It is a reasonable route to building a quick and dirty port. I don't think it will ever fill the role of a method of moving away from Windows and still running random (often proprietary or outdated) applications.
ReactOS would still require you to be running a full separate operating system. If you wanted to do that, you could run your current Windows XP licenses in virtual machines, and just run Linux on the host, or what have you.That is pretty much what I am doing now, except most WinXP licenses are not portable to new hardware and such a move is often accompanied by a move to new hardware. ReactOS is likely to be more lightweight than the current version of Windows and less likely to cause headaches with licensing and registration and DRM shutting it down arbitrarily. It also would have save my company a hundred bucks a license and that adds up.
Granted, Wine isn't entirely there yet... but neither is ReactOS.I actually looked at WINE and a couple of commercial WINE-based offerings and ReactOS before I chose to run WinXP in a VM. It was the most expensive solution by far (other than Windows outside a VM) but the only one that worked. In future I could see going either way, but I think the overhead from ReactOS is likely going to end up less of a consideration that the necessarily limited range of WINE.
ReactOS would be useful for companies looking for a way to move off of Windows but who have binaries that only run on Windows. Due to the proliferation of VM technology, a VM running ReactOS on top of your OS of choice could make migration away from Windows cheap enough to be an option. If ReactOS is cheap enough, it could displace Windows by itself for limited applications. A free OS Dell or someone can install that still lets them get paid for crapware and which still lets end users run games and junk software from Walmart could easily grab market share away from Windows. Anything that threatens MS's dominance with Windows, whether it detracts from Linux or your favorite OS or not, is good for motivating MS to make Windows better. If Windows is as good as other OS's, I don't care if it is dominant as much.
Are you being obtuse or are you trying to imply you think farmers are overpaid?
Rubber band subsidies help remove our dependence upon foreign rubber band sources both in war and economically. The same goes for subsidies for punk rock bands, bloggers, plumbers, and pet groomers.Food is a basic necessity. Transportation is a basic need in wartime. Nothing you list is. I can listen to old school punk, use paper clicps, ignore blogs, crap in the back yard, and eat my pets all before I can go without food.
They both have the same objective: buy votes from farm-related industries with money stolen from taxpayers.Politicians implementing them might have the same goal. That has nothing to do with the practical affects.
I find them to be very different. Ethanol companies are hugely profitable and do not need the subsidies, farmers do. Ethanol subsidies help maintain a system whereby the US is made dependent upon foreign industry, a huge liability both in war and in the economic war. Farm subsidies help remove our dependence upon foreign food sources both in war and economically. Ethanol subsidies encourage pollution, while farm subsidies help discourage pollution by decreasing the amount of shipping needed to move food. I'm not saying they are a good idea, only that the issue is quite different from that of ethanol subsidies.
For a day to day assessment for the USA's position with regard to DoS attacks, botnets, phishing, and scanning, check out this page and look at the bottom chart. You can see the number one ranked country, ASN, and host for each category.
I agree if one assumes that your statement "the license is one of the primary motivators" is a given. I'm not sure that is really true in a commercial setting. From what I've seen at several different companies, having an open source license of any sort is considered a plus and a bigger plus if the software is widely deployed (tracking issue) or if we want to redistribute it. It is usually given as much value as having a license or vendor pre-approved by the legal department. In fact, I'd say open source software that uses a weird license like some of the ones Sun and Apple use, tends to be given the same consideration as closed source software, but from a pre-approved vendor. Neither of these factors usually is weighed anywhere near as heavily as cost of implementation of feature set. It could be, however, that my experience is not the common case. I get the impression from other professionals that it is, but I don't have any formal studies to back that up.
Network security and traffic monitoring.
Do you disagree with my point that most of the articles out there are too focused on licensing costs/benefits of cheaper licenses and not focused enough on the actual functional benefits that OSS offers over the competition?I don't understand. Are you talking about the functional benefits of a given piece of software that happens to be OSS or the functional benefits the OSS license it confers to that software? Most articles about OSS talk about the benefits of the license because that is the common factor and that is appropriate. Most articles about a given kind of software, like Web servers, talk about what is common to Web servers, like their ability to serve Web pages quickly and securely and flexibly and cheaply and they might also mention how one server having an OSS license gives it an advantage. That also seems appropriate to me.
Are you saying you think there should be articles claiming open source software leads to more/better functions in that software and hence it is better? If so I think that is bunk. There is good OSS that has more functionality than competing closed source software. There is closed source software that has better functionality than alternative OSS offerings. OSS tends to be better only in that the license gives users more options. Aside from that it depends upon the given software being evaluated.
Not really non standard. Just apropriate[sic] for anyone not sitting back and going why isn't business flocking to open source and then watching most of the fud[sic] going around.
Every business I've worked for since graduating undergraduate school has utilized open source software and all the software companies have contributed. Who says business is not flocking to open source?
What is wirth[sic] debating is how to implement the intended goals of the GPL and weather[sic] or not any current drafts do this to the satisfaction of the comunity[sic] that makes it relevent[sic].
The intended goals of a given version of the GPL is what it says crossed with how well a given licensor understands what they're agreeing to.
Thye[sic] are saying if you use GPLv3 software you have to make your hardware in a certain way.
No. They're saying if you want to redistribute the code I wrote, you have to agree to use it in this way, regardless of if it is used on hardware or software. It is up to the owner of the copyright to decide to whom they want to license their code and with what restrictions. If you don't like it, use code written under the BSD license.
It is that the myth of the BSA being worse is overstated.
The BSA audits companies and sues for millions every year. They offer bounties to individuals who turn in noncompliant employers. They had had real and damaging affects upon numerous businesses who simply chose to use that software. Find me a case of an open source software group suing a user (not re-distributor) of their software for damages.
Big deal is exaclty right. It shoehorns restrictions of the GPL were is shouln't. But I suppose wiping the drive and making the resale vaue significantly less is a good position for a company to be involved with.
We're talking business cases. Compliance is basically free. Is there any real cost to my shipping the code on boxes I wiped and re-installed with OSS? Is it in any way comparable to the risk posed by BSA audits or the cost of tracking compliance? From a dollars and cents perspective, OSS wins big time.
What is the purpose of the license? To cover big companies?, little companies?, the indevidual business man?, everyone who uses the software? And if it isn't all of the above, Then why does the license appear to make it look that way?
The license is to stop flagrant abuse, especially abuse that runs contrary to the spirit as well as the letter of the license. If the cost/risk is that if I'm a slacker and someone complains I have to ship out some crappy burned disks with source on them, and I can charge for that service I just don't see any risk to my business and you're not showing one.
And saying you have less chances of the FSF comming after you then the BSA is about stupid. It has nothing to do with the facts that they can.
You don't write many business plans do you? They are all about cost and risk and reward. The risk and potential damage of the FSF coming after a software user is nil and nil. They don't have a case and if they did they'd win the right to make me ship the source they already distribute and anyone can get cheaper elsewhere. The risk of the BSA coming after me is they do have a case and they have extralegal powers including a grant from congress that says I have to pay their absurdly high legal fees and the BSA routinely does this. Of course it makes a difference if I'm choosing software for my business.
There is no significant protection or advantage of protections in using OSS if you violate the license then there is with the BSA and propriatary licenses.
You can do more without violating the license. Most accidental violations result in no damages and only a token cost on the part of the offender. Making sure you don't violate is a lot easier with open source.
I strongly disagree. "Open source software" the concept is licensing and thus the benefits of that license are what is discussed. Any given application, however, is sold mostly on features, only one of which is the license. No one decides to use apache only because it is open source. They use it because it is stable and secure and extensible. The company I work for builds really expensive specialty servers running on Linux. The bottom line model is about $40K. Another couple hundred bucks for a Windows server license would be nothing, if there was some advantage. The fact of the matter is, Linux works better for us. It is more stable and secure and customizable. That is open source being sold based on functionality, not license.
From what little exposure I've had to it, it seems to me like the OSS mantra should be, "It's cheap and it's good enough."You might get that impression if you do a Google search for "open source." If however you look at a given open source project, rarely will you see it competing only on the license instead of price and features and license and support.
The functionality is based upon the individual offering, not the licensing. Does Apache have a better feature set than ISS? Most people think so and it is more suitable to a small business. The point is, you can't talk about the "functionality" of a means of licensing any more than you can talk about the functionality of software developed on the West coast versus the East coast. It doesn't make sense as a correlative measure.
Your interpretation seems a little non-standard. Anyway, commenting on the GPLv3 at this point is a little pointless as it does not supplant v2 and it does not exist in a final form.
They are trying to dictate what you can do in the future outside the use of the software with the Anti-patten lawsuite thing.Patten was a competent general, but now he's dead, lets not sue dead people.
They are attempting to control what you do with your hardware with the anti-DRM clause.Again, I strongly disagree with your interpretation. It applies only to distributing software, not what I do with my hardware if I'm not distributing software at all.
A company who has 200 workstations will get rid of them at some point. So lets say they are reimaged with some Opensource solution then sold. Oh, now they are subject becuase they are distributing.Yeah, and they have to include the source, big deal and who cares? Just sell em blank or abide by the license, or buy commercial software for them, with a transferable license if you don't like it.
Suppose a company buys a computer, loads OSS on it and gives it to an employee to work from home? now they have distributed it.Distribution within the company does not count. Besides, no one cares and is motivated for coming after you for this type of violation. If I put Linux on a computer without the source and give it away or sell it the chances that the FSF will come after me is about zero. They have nothing to gain and at most they'll waste money in court and get an order that says I have to give them the source as well, which will cost me about a quarter.
And it used to be that anything outside the scope of distributing the license was off limits to the GPL. When the GPLv3 comes into play, some division of your company half way around the world could do something to make you lose youe right to even use the FOSS software.That seems highly unlikely from my reading. More likely the division of your company halfway around the world will make you have to distribute some source, boo hoo.
There isn't a real strong case one way or another. I can see many psoitives to using OSS in the business. Getting away from the BSA or restriction imposed doesn't seem to be one of them.Tell it to Ernie Ball. The BSA audit cost him $100 grand in fees. He's since switched to Linux and the chances that he will have any problems for using Linux are basically zero and in a worst case scenario of him reselling workstations or something the fix would cost him nothing. That is a real business case advantage.
Most claim to they are...??? umm, that's not coherent.
...the future of FOSS and the GPL.The future of open source is whatever we make it. If you don't like the GPLv3, don't use it. Use software that is licensed the way you want, whether that is a BSD license, an older version of the GPL, or something else entirely. The point is, open source licenses do have significant advantages and avoiding costly audits from the BSA are a real advantage to most of them.
And this is where you've failed to understand the fundamental difference. No one has ever been sued for using GPL'd software. Some have been sued for republishing GPL'd software, but it is illegal under copyright law to republish software without permission in the first place. An analogy would be whether you're sued for saying "hi" to someone in public who has a shirt on that says, "by reading this you agree not to say 'hi' to me" or if you're sued for theft when you see them in public, say "hi" grab their laptop bag and leave without having permission to take the bag and don't mow their lawn (when that person has granted permission to take their laptop to any and all people who agree to a legal contract that obligates them to mow the person's lawn). No one has a reasonable expectation that they can republish another person's work, for profit, just as no one has the expectation they can just take someone's laptop.
I disagree. The original poster was off the mark because he tried to equate the BSA coming after you for using software you can't prove you have a license for with GPL supporters coming after you for reselling software you know you don't have a license for. The difference is between using and reselling. No one will come after me for viewing a movie, but if I start selling copies of it, you better bet I should know I'm breaking the law.
*All your arguments could apply to closed-source as well. Those companies who violate their EULAs KNEW what they were doing too.Wrong. No one reads EULAs and even if you do how are you supposed to know if accounting lost your serial number or receipt? EULs are questionably legal and routinely include terms that are completely unenforceable and everyone knows it. EULAs try to remove arbitrary rights you have while using software. The GPL grants certain rights with certain conditions. If you did not read the GPL and have no idea what it says, you have no problem so long as you are not doing something that would already be illegal under existing laws. That is a fundamental difference.