The thing is, if you allow different products from different sources to be publicly distributed under a single trademarked name, the trademark becomes dilluted and can be declared invalid (by court, trademark dispute board, etc.) That's what the law says, there's not much you can do about it.
BTW, that's why the "Linux" trademark wouldn't surive a test in court now. It doesn't identify a single product from a single source. It's dilluted and invalid.
I've just read TFA and realised that all people in the room were sharing the same IP address, so what I described in parent post wouldn't help. The only thing they can do is force SSL to all requests.
Even if you don't have encrypted transfer, session cookies can be easily secured by associating them with a certain IP address. The attacker who captures the cookies has a differnt IP address so the cookie is rejected as invalid. The only situation where this solution may get a bit annoying is if you're behind a load-balancing proxy, which changes your IP address on every request (fortunately, this is somewhat rare.) It's better than allow easy hijacks...
Ok, I admit your reasons sound reasonable (no sarcasm intended). It's actually good to see at least some new ideas went into the Digg-invented system. Thanks for the explanation. I like it and apologize if I sounded like a troll. I sometimes post nasty stuff.
If I want to ship it with modifications, including a different license, I may do so
The author gave you only permissions to do only certain explicitly stated things. He didn't assign copyright to you nor any other kind of intellectual property. He remains the copyright holder. That's why you still need his explicit permission to relicense the code. Because he only allowed you to redistribute the code and use it (i.e. incorporate it) in your work. There is no permission to relicense the code -- on the contrary, the license states that the terms and conditions and the legal notice must be retained (hence, the license cannot be changed!). Get it now?
You can always relicense BSD software as GPL - that's implicit in the license text
You can, but only if you are the copyright holder. So you've missed the point completely. Read my post again, before posting. By the way, this is given by copyright law. Any right not explicitly granted in the text of BSD is reserved (and NOT granted). Only public domain code can be relicensed without the author's consent.
So, you've not "disproved the oft-repeated hypothesis about the GPL being viral". GPL is and will always be viral, no matter what you think. It's actually quite easy to see and understand.
Is there really a need for the Apache, CDDL, Mozilla, and Artistic licenses and their countless derivatives?
Yes, because GPL2/3 are viral and actually prevents cooperation*, and BSD is obsolete (doesn't cover many important aspects of modern business).
* Why GPL prevents cooperation? Because the GPL requires that the whole software must be licensed under the GPL. Now imagine a large open source project consisting of portions written by hundreds of authors all licensed under BSD. Some of the authors are dead, some of them impossible to find or contact. As you cannot get their permission for relicensing, you cannot use any GPL code in your software. That's how GPL actually PREVENTS co-operation and sharing in the Open Source and Free Software world (and it should be avoided if possible).
At least I learned something rather interesting from the site, which I didn't know:
"When the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft reached out to Mozilla last summer, the lab offered support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird running on Windows Vista."
1) That would maybe work if CRT monitors weren't a minority. Even if an LCD displays displays a screen consisting entirely of black-color pixels, the power consumption is the same as if they were white.
2) This is obvious slashvertisment. He Slashdotted his Google custom search and he gets ~75% of the that the Google AdWords ads displayed next to the search results will earn.
2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done).
I can give you a list of serious bugs in Windows 2000 that Windows XP doesn't have. Things like NTFS mounted as read-only, zero-size swap file, etc. etc. All of them are in XP, but no in Win2000. Windows 2000 just sucks big time.
If there were blatant mechanical problems with it, they'd have noticed long ago.
That is as stupid as saying that if there were blatant mechanical problems with Windows, people would've noticed long ago. GPL is not a lawyer's work, but a politician and zealot's work.
Those are sections of the license. Section 9 says that "I don't have to accept this license" if I only want to use the unmodified program. So, an average Joe user stops reading further sections (including sections 15 and 16, which are the disclaimers and limitations of liabilities).
I just found out that GPL indeed explicitly allows the user to NOT ACCEPT the license if he doesn't modify the program! Unbelievable legal mockery. So the following section is not legally binding for me (and the section is obviously intended to protect the free software authors from users suing them for damages arising out of their use, which it fails to do):
[The following part is entirely in upper case letters, however, the Slasdhot filter doesn't allow it, so I converted it to lower case:]
15. Disclaimer of Warranty. there is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
16. limitation of liability. in no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
The above is redundant, because I don't have to accept it. Silly, ridiculous, and unusable license.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.
Ok, then GPL3 is more unusuable shite than I initially thought. As a "mere" user, I don't have to accept the GPL. So the following section is not legally binding for me (and the section is obviously intended to protect the free software authors from users suing them for damages arising out of their use, which it fails to do):
[The following part is entirely in upper case letters, however, the Slasdhot filter doesn't allow it, so I converted it to lower case:]
15. Disclaimer of Warranty. there is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
16. limitation of liability. in no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
The above is redundant, because I don't have to accept it. Silly, ridiculous, and unusable license.
In fact, the license explicitly gives you the permission to use the program without recognising the license.
Nonsense. If you don't accept the license (GPL) you have no right to use the program. Why? Because the work is implicitly protected by copyright law which makes the copy illegal (i.e., you have no right to use it).
If what you wrote was true, the Diclaimer of Warranties (you know the all-caps parts), etc., would fail to protect the authors from you suing them (e.g. if your use of the program deletes your files, etc.)
nope... It's not his logic... It's the MS EULA... Your license for IE is only valid if you hold a license for Windows...
Logic... Why was Internet Explorer available as free download for Mac OS? And as for the Windows version, could you run it if you don't have Windows? And, can you run Firefox for Windows if you don't own a copy of Windows? No. Unless you're a thief (sorry, "pirate").
Are you one of those idiots that insists that your public company website is hosted internally because you think it is safer?
No, I'm one of those morons who believes that my own data are safer and more secure when stored on my own hard drive in my own house and behind my own firewall configuration.
on-line systems will eventually replace Microsoft Word, OpenOffice etc. completely.
So, whom will you share your files with? Google? Yahoo? MS? Or which company will host your files? Jeez... These "web-2.0" morons are starting to piss me off.
You are wrong, son. When a composer writes some music, goes to a publisher, publisher pays the recording session (studio, hw), the musician records it, the publisher makes the CDs and publishes them. Do you know what happened with copyright? No. I'll tell you:
1) The copyright to the actual music is held by the composer. 2) The copyright in the actual record is held by the publisher.
Now you see that, although it's interesting, it has nothing to do with the matters we are discussing. The problem is that open source has no "records" with separate copyright rights or anything like that. Most importantly, large open source projects have contributors from almost all countries.
So, again, you would have to analyze carefully laws in all those countries. I can assure you that in many countries, copyright cannot be given up. So if the author in the country X assigns copyright to FSF or whoever, he might not know that laws in his country allow him to sue FSF in his country (and remember that internet jurisdiction doesn't exit -- internet applies to all countries).
2 years later the author X goes bezerk because FSF pisses him off, and decides to sue to them for relicensing his work, of course, rightfully claiming that the copyright assignment sheet is invalid under applicable law in his country. (This is exactly the same as with commercial software EULAs probably being invalid in Europe, or at least EU).
Yes, written agreements, license agreements, copyright assignment sheets, etc. can all be held invalid by a court of law in the country where the copyright holder lives.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, if you allow different products from different sources to be publicly distributed under a single trademarked name, the trademark becomes dilluted and can be declared invalid (by court, trademark dispute board, etc.) That's what the law says, there's not much you can do about it.
BTW, that's why the "Linux" trademark wouldn't surive a test in court now. It doesn't identify a single product from a single source. It's dilluted and invalid.
I've just read TFA and realised that all people in the room were sharing the same IP address, so what I described in parent post wouldn't help. The only thing they can do is force SSL to all requests.
Even if you don't have encrypted transfer, session cookies can be easily secured by associating them with a certain IP address. The attacker who captures the cookies has a differnt IP address so the cookie is rejected as invalid. The only situation where this solution may get a bit annoying is if you're behind a load-balancing proxy, which changes your IP address on every request (fortunately, this is somewhat rare.) It's better than allow easy hijacks...
Ok, I admit your reasons sound reasonable (no sarcasm intended). It's actually good to see at least some new ideas went into the Digg-invented system. Thanks for the explanation. I like it and apologize if I sounded like a troll. I sometimes post nasty stuff.
We really, really do not want to copy Digg :)
Really? Well at least the system appears to be copied from Digg...
There are philisophical reasons for this...
Such as to make it less obvious that you're trying to copy Digg?
If I want to ship it with modifications, including a different license, I may do so
The author gave you only permissions to do only certain explicitly stated things. He didn't assign copyright to you nor any other kind of intellectual property. He remains the copyright holder. That's why you still need his explicit permission to relicense the code. Because he only allowed you to redistribute the code and use it (i.e. incorporate it) in your work. There is no permission to relicense the code -- on the contrary, the license states that the terms and conditions and the legal notice must be retained (hence, the license cannot be changed!). Get it now?
You can always relicense BSD software as GPL - that's implicit in the license text
You can, but only if you are the copyright holder. So you've missed the point completely. Read my post again, before posting. By the way, this is given by copyright law. Any right not explicitly granted in the text of BSD is reserved (and NOT granted). Only public domain code can be relicensed without the author's consent.
So, you've not "disproved the oft-repeated hypothesis about the GPL being viral". GPL is and will always be viral, no matter what you think. It's actually quite easy to see and understand.
Is there really a need for the Apache, CDDL, Mozilla, and Artistic licenses and their countless derivatives?
Yes, because GPL2/3 are viral and actually prevents cooperation*, and BSD is obsolete (doesn't cover many important aspects of modern business).
* Why GPL prevents cooperation? Because the GPL requires that the whole software must be licensed under the GPL. Now imagine a large open source project consisting of portions written by hundreds of authors all licensed under BSD. Some of the authors are dead, some of them impossible to find or contact. As you cannot get their permission for relicensing, you cannot use any GPL code in your software. That's how GPL actually PREVENTS co-operation and sharing in the Open Source and Free Software world (and it should be avoided if possible).
.... and then I woke up.
At least I learned something rather interesting from the site, which I didn't know:
"When the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft reached out to Mozilla last summer, the lab offered support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird running on Windows Vista."
1) That would maybe work if CRT monitors weren't a minority. Even if an LCD displays displays a screen consisting entirely of black-color pixels, the power consumption is the same as if they were white.
2) This is obvious slashvertisment. He Slashdotted his Google custom search and he gets ~75% of the that the Google AdWords ads displayed next to the search results will earn.
2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done).
I can give you a list of serious bugs in Windows 2000 that Windows XP doesn't have. Things like NTFS mounted as read-only, zero-size swap file, etc. etc. All of them are in XP, but no in Win2000. Windows 2000 just sucks big time.
The Firefox name is synonymous with security
l nerabilities.html#Firefox
You were just kidding right? List of known vulnerabilities in Firefox:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vu
However, the real problem might not be Firefox' password manager.
I call bullshit. If the "real problem might not be Firefox password manager", then why IE6 and IE7 password managers are not vulnerable?
I know it will hurt all the fanboys, but the less secure browsers are: Firefox, Mozilla, Safari.
Wednesday, the world was a little different
*Sigh* Another American who belives US == the world
If there were blatant mechanical problems with it, they'd have noticed long ago.
That is as stupid as saying that if there were blatant mechanical problems with Windows, people would've noticed long ago. GPL is not a lawyer's work, but a politician and zealot's work.
Those are sections of the license. Section 9 says that "I don't have to accept this license" if I only want to use the unmodified program. So, an average Joe user stops reading further sections (including sections 15 and 16, which are the disclaimers and limitations of liabilities).
I just found out that GPL indeed explicitly allows the user to NOT ACCEPT the license if he doesn't modify the program! Unbelievable legal mockery. So the following section is not legally binding for me (and the section is obviously intended to protect the free software authors from users suing them for damages arising out of their use, which it fails to do):
[The following part is entirely in upper case letters, however, the Slasdhot filter doesn't allow it, so I converted it to lower case:]
15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
there is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
16. limitation of liability.
in no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
The above is redundant, because I don't have to accept it. Silly, ridiculous, and unusable license.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.
Ok, then GPL3 is more unusuable shite than I initially thought. As a "mere" user, I don't have to accept the GPL. So the following section is not legally binding for me (and the section is obviously intended to protect the free software authors from users suing them for damages arising out of their use, which it fails to do):
[The following part is entirely in upper case letters, however, the Slasdhot filter doesn't allow it, so I converted it to lower case:]
15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
there is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
16. limitation of liability.
in no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
The above is redundant, because I don't have to accept it. Silly, ridiculous, and unusable license.
In fact, the license explicitly gives you the permission to use the program without recognising the license.
Nonsense. If you don't accept the license (GPL) you have no right to use the program. Why? Because the work is implicitly protected by copyright law which makes the copy illegal (i.e., you have no right to use it).
If what you wrote was true, the Diclaimer of Warranties (you know the all-caps parts), etc., would fail to protect the authors from you suing them (e.g. if your use of the program deletes your files, etc.)
nope... It's not his logic... It's the MS EULA... Your license for IE is only valid if you hold a license for Windows...
Logic... Why was Internet Explorer available as free download for Mac OS? And as for the Windows version, could you run it if you don't have Windows? And, can you run Firefox for Windows if you don't own a copy of Windows? No. Unless you're a thief (sorry, "pirate").
Red herring shit.
Are you one of those idiots that insists that your public company website is hosted internally because you think it is safer?
No, I'm one of those morons who believes that my own data are safer and more secure when stored on my own hard drive in my own house and behind my own firewall configuration.
on-line systems will eventually replace Microsoft Word, OpenOffice etc. completely.
So, whom will you share your files with? Google? Yahoo? MS? Or which company will host your files? Jeez... These "web-2.0" morons are starting to piss me off.
You are wrong, son. When a composer writes some music, goes to a publisher, publisher pays the recording session (studio, hw), the musician records it, the publisher makes the CDs and publishes them. Do you know what happened with copyright? No. I'll tell you:
1) The copyright to the actual music is held by the composer.
2) The copyright in the actual record is held by the publisher.
Now you see that, although it's interesting, it has nothing to do with the matters we are discussing. The problem is that open source has no "records" with separate copyright rights or anything like that. Most importantly, large open source projects have contributors from almost all countries.
So, again, you would have to analyze carefully laws in all those countries. I can assure you that in many countries, copyright cannot be given up. So if the author in the country X assigns copyright to FSF or whoever, he might not know that laws in his country allow him to sue FSF in his country (and remember that internet jurisdiction doesn't exit -- internet applies to all countries).
2 years later the author X goes bezerk because FSF pisses him off, and decides to sue to them for relicensing his work, of course, rightfully claiming that the copyright assignment sheet is invalid under applicable law in his country. (This is exactly the same as with commercial software EULAs probably being invalid in Europe, or at least EU).
Yes, written agreements, license agreements, copyright assignment sheets, etc. can all be held invalid by a court of law in the country where the copyright holder lives.