I've been trying to call them now for several minutes, and no one answers the phone. I guess they are slashdotted. This is only second-hand information, but a friend of mine who tried to order them earlier this morning reported that their sales crew didn't know what he was talking about when he wanted to order the multias.
I'm not much to spend money on geek toys, but I've got a 2gig 2.5" IDE drive sitting around doing nothing, so I figure it's not that much money that I'd have to spend. If only I could successfully call them on the phone...
While I did truthfully find this essay amusing, I think that RMS deserves much more respect than this. I used to be one of the many slashdotters who would criticize RMS as being a radical who held antediluvian beliefs, but I have finally come to the realization that, as abrasive as RMS is, he's almost always right. Even as a pragmatist, I believe that if you choose to ignore the community's freedoms in favor of coming up with a license that best suits the company's needs and no the community's, that the project will not be as successful.
I honestly think that the various open source groups out there may end up hurting us alot more than helping us. The QT license, for instance, is not a great deal better than the old Minix license, if I read it correctly. Remember that the only thing that the Minix license gave us, coupled with AST's unwillingness to add and fix things in Minix, was the necessity to create an entire new OS with linux.
While the various open source proponents may have tried to help our world, I think that in the end they may hurt it. While we may have gained a great number of short-term benefits, such as greater exposure in the press and more respect and recognition (hey, we're even competitors to Microsoft!), I think that, in the long run, we will be hurt. We will be left with many projects that will stagnate from disinterest, and companies like Microsoft saying "See there? We told you open source was bad." We'll also be left with the pieces of dozens of dead projects with incompatible licenses whose work cannot ever be salvaged for code snippets.
Perhaps the best thing that the FSF can do right now is to just wait. I think that only time will tell whether free software or open source will reign supreme. My belief is that all of these incompatibly-licensed projects from various vendors suddenly embracing open source will die within ten years, while GNU's contributions, which were born long before the words "open" and "source" were placed togethor, will still be the cornerstone upon which we place our OSes.
Instead of having empowered the free software community, we have instead empowered a bunch of marketting machines who feel that they can exploit our wealth to expand their own. The most ludicrous example of this is IBM's supposed advocation of open source. Can we please try to remember that IBM is the same company that holds the most software patents in the world?
I think that I should also say that I greatly disapprove of RMS's adoption of Linux as GNU/Linux, not because I don't think that RMS has a right to claim it, but because I think that GNU is more than Linux. As a slashdotter who as maligned you in the past, RMS, I apologize.
What would help alot more would be if IBM were to stop applying for software patents and to make plans to open its current patent portfolio freely to the public. How a company can claim to support open source on one hand and then be the largest producer of software patents in the world is, in my mind at least, ludicrous.
Granted, IBM is a large company, and I'm sure that there are those there that are true believers in open source, but the company as a whole has actually chosen to stand as one of our enemies, not as our friend.
We need to remember here that, as with almost all companies, IBM is interested in open source only so far as it gets them money. If IBM weren't of this opinion, they'd be using the GPL, BSD, or other similar already-in-place license, instead of choosing a license to gain some kind of additional advantage for them.
Please, IBM, the open source community would be much better served with the elimination of software patents than it would by yet another open source license.
You are wrong. Maybe you should check your facts. The SDK's license only protected the SDK itself, not software written with it (I don't know whether 3dfx has since changed the license). 3dfx has used heavy-handed legal threats to quash software designers whose software is against their best interests. Here are a few URLs you should check out:
Although I can't seem to find any references to it anymore, I seem to recall that there *was* at least one "clean-room" Glide wrapper. If I find the URL, I will post it.
In any case, unless the wrapper developers are modifying and distributing portions of the SDK itself, your analogy of someone ripping CODA itself and making it proprietary is highly flawed. I believe that the courts have found that software written with the aid of developer tools (such as compilers) are considered original works owned by the authors of the code, NOT the authors of the compilers/developer tools. It is certainly possible for a compiler/SDK vendor to make agreeing to certain restrictions a prerequisite to a copyright license, but, as far as I know, that is not (or at least was not) the case with 3dfx's SDK.
... They are merely attempting to exploit it. Folks, we need to remember that the only thing that 3dfx ever did for us was release *ONLY* the 2d specs for their cards, give *ONE* developer access to specs to write a *BINARY-ONLY* GLIDE port, and put up a silly little web page. 3dfx has always been an extremely proprietary company that is openly hostile to open standards and open source. If I recall correctly, there are several independent, clean-room developers of GLIDE implementations that are being sued by 3dfx. 3dfx is not supporting the Linux community, only the Linux platform. We should be boycotting 3dfx, not cheering them along as they undermine the open standards and open source communities that have made Linux what it is today.
Except for patents on the building blocks of quantum computing (which is where the current state of technology is, just trying to get a couple of qbits to do *something*), I don't believe that patents should be possible here. One of the fundamental requirements for a patent is that the device actually works. We are obviously not there yet. To my knowledge, the only thing that we have right now are simulators of quantum computers on top of standard computers. I'd have to think that such *extremely* preliminary research results should not be patentable. Comments?
...If I had an AGP slot. My defecation-list of hardware vendors is quite long, but Matrox is now very definitely not on it. My current video card is a Mystique 220 (anyone out there want to code up 3d support for that, too?:), and I am now quite proud that I bought it. I will continue to buy Matrox products and recommend them to my peers.
Note to 3dfx: Giving specs out to *one* developer under an NDA is *not* the way to garner favor among Linux users. Neither are press releases which announce nothing usable (2d-only specs for a 3d card is silly at best and an insult at worst, and nothing else here has actually changed). We need support for free-software/open-source/etc., *not* just support for the intel-only Linux platform. Otherwise, it's just like any other commercial, proprietary Unix system. Come on, folks, this shouldn't be so difficult for hardware manufacturers.
And does it stand a chance of having Clinton's veto overriden? I don't think that our President will like his police-state agenda attacked (and remember that he cared so much about national security in his draft-dodgint, i-did-not-inhale, hippy, communist-supporting Oxford days). Clue: law enforcement agencies do not have rights, individuals do. Law enforcement agencies only have those few powers that our legislation allows them. Arguing for the rights of law enforcement agencies has no logical basis. It's just a shame that so many people actually successfully do so, and usually on a basis of "well, for national security reasons, you'll just have to trust us."
Seriously, I'd like to see a good summary of the real meat of this bill. If this is just something that will allow certain companies to sell powerful encryption technologies to just banks, then it does exactly nothing for us. E-commerce is of rather small importance in my mind. My personal privacy, the privacy of the users I support, and the integrity of the systems that I administer are much more relevant to me. I'm sick of having to go to the Netherlands to get real security tools.
GNOME is going to be completely useless to me, and probably almost all others interested in it from a user standpoint, if it is based off of a development version of GTK+. GNOME 1.0's release should be held back until GTK/GLIB 1.2 is released and all the GNOME apps are proven to work with it. I have used several rpm releases of GNOME, from 0.20 to a few of the 0.99s, and found it to be buggy as sin. Things like orbit spontaneously eating itself and never working again, and GNOME applications (especially gmc) not detecting when its connection to the X server is severed and then just sucking up CPU cycles like mad. I hope that most of this stuff has been fixed by now, but I figure that with the state of GNOME at the last chance I looked at it, it could definitely use the wait to for GTK1.2. Sorry for the smack, but I honestly don't believe that GNOME is ready for prime-time... yet.
Folks, the RCX has a whopping 32 kilobytes of external RAM. A programming language that uses a dynamic stack (to allow scoped variables, and true recursion-supporting function calls) would be a horrible waste of that RAM. It looks like you wouldn't even be able to port and run Interactive-C applications with this little primary storage. Take a good look at NQC, folks. It's really just BASIC made to look like C. The function calls are just figments of your imagination, they don't really exist, they are just spiffied-up GOTOs. As for an entire OS, you have got to be friggin *kidding* me!
The information in this patent is actually pretty useful. It's an idea of having a door hinge that can't be removed while the door is closed (you have to remove the flaps before you can slide out the pin, and you can't remove the flaps when the door is closed). I'm not a locksmith/carpenter/whatever, so I don't know how obvious this is. The fact that Microsoft owns this patent is interesting, to say the least.
The number of CDs that I purchase has easily doubled, if not tripled, since I was exposed to MP3s. While I won't say that I don't have a bunch of tunes in MP3 that I don't have the CD for (enough negatives there?), I'm still supporting a helluva lot more artists now than I was before, and a much greater diversity of artists as well. Almost everyone that I have talked to who uses MP3s has had the same experiences.
Perhaps RIAA should quit acting like a bunch of pricks like usual and do a little bit of analysis on the sales before and after MP3s became popular. Betcha they increased. My faith in RIAA doing something smart (not even necessarily "the right thing", just smart for their own profits), however, is somewhat less than complete.
Software works which fall under open source licenses can be considered public domain, depending on the definition of public domain. If the definition of public domain is chosen to be "software without an owner," then it is not public domain. However, in many fields, public domain is defined as any piece of software where the license does not place restrictions on the distribution and modification of the software in question. This definition is the one used in the free software exemption of the cryptography clauses in the Wassenar Agreement, for instance. Both are perfectly valid definitions of public domain.
Since the software in RedHat distributions are all free software (except certain packages included in the commercial distribution only), the software in RedHat Linux falls under the later definition of "public domain."
The basis of a democracy is that the citizens should *zero* patience for problems with the government. It doesn't whatever reason the PTO is incapable of properly dealing with it software patents (which frankly shouldn't be patents in the first place). If the PTO is incapable of accomplishing the task, then it should simply not involve itself in software patents until such time as it is prepared to do so.
This deal will only protect the site from the Harry Fox Agency. All lyrics to songs not owned by the Harry Fox Agency and those they represent are still wide open to lawsuit. And this could very well be hundreds of other agencies that we're talking about, all capable of attacking the site one by one.
I suspect that this deal being offered by HFA represents a backing down more than anything. Even if the site were to go commercial, and HFA would receive a certain percentage of the profits, the profits received by the site from advertising would be so low as to be ridiculous. HFA would not gain a great deal of money from this deal, it is simply a way for them to back down while saving face. Attacking a fan site like this is quite simply a mistake. I doubt that this site has done anything except *encourage* the purchasing of music. Perhaps HFA has finally realized this and wants a way out while keeping some shreds of dignity.
Sorry, but device drivers and other operating system components *must* be open source before I will run it or buy hardware associated with it. I've been using open source for far too long to go back to proprietary crud. Don't think binary-only drivers are that big a deal? Talk to someone with OSS-commercial and ask them how easy it is to change kernels. I don't honestly care about commercial *applications*, as I can live with or without them.
I realize that probably alot of the reason that things are kept closed are because of NDAs Creative and other companies have with 3dfx and such, and I understand. But you should also understand that my understanding still won't motivate me to throw money at you for your products.
If this were something similar to the Neomagic Xfree86 driver development, where it was almost expected that the driver would be opened later when Neomagic realized it wouldn't hurt them, I'd probably be more optimistic. However, this is quite a different situation, and even this developer admits it. Most of this code is *never* going to see the light of day. Does this guy think he really is *that* much of an uber-coder that he can write all of those drivers *on his own*, without missing something? I don't feel like seeing exploit code for a proprietary sound driver on bugtraq one day, thanks. I'll go without a 3d accelerator and even other basic hardware until the entire industry takes its collective head out of its collective arse.
Well, it's been awhile since my high school government class, but isn't an act of Congress required before the federal government may be sued? I don't think that anyone stands a chance of getting that. A much better tactic would be simply lobbying the Congress to outlaw patents on intangible objects (business models, software, mathematics equations, genetic coding, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to call them now for several minutes, and no one answers the phone. I guess they are slashdotted. This is only second-hand information, but a friend of mine who tried to order them earlier this morning reported that their sales crew didn't know what he was talking about when he wanted to order the multias.
I'm not much to spend money on geek toys, but I've got a 2gig 2.5" IDE drive sitting around doing nothing, so I figure it's not that much money that I'd have to spend. If only I could successfully call them on the phone...
While I did truthfully find this essay amusing, I think that RMS deserves much more respect than this. I used to be one of the many slashdotters who would criticize RMS as being a radical who held antediluvian beliefs, but I have finally come to the realization that, as abrasive as RMS is, he's almost always right. Even as a pragmatist, I believe that if you choose to ignore the community's freedoms in favor of coming up with a license that best suits the company's needs and no the community's, that the project will not be as successful.
I honestly think that the various open source groups out there may end up hurting us alot more than helping us. The QT license, for instance, is not a great deal better than the old Minix license, if I read it correctly. Remember that the only thing that the Minix license gave us, coupled with AST's unwillingness to add and fix things in Minix, was the necessity to create an entire new OS with linux.
While the various open source proponents may have tried to help our world, I think that in the end they may hurt it. While we may have gained a great number of short-term benefits, such as greater exposure in the press and more respect and recognition (hey, we're even competitors to Microsoft!), I think that, in the long run, we will be hurt. We will be left with many projects that will stagnate from disinterest, and companies like Microsoft saying "See there? We told you open source was bad." We'll also be left with the pieces of dozens of dead projects with incompatible licenses whose work cannot ever be salvaged for code snippets.
Perhaps the best thing that the FSF can do right now is to just wait. I think that only time will tell whether free software or open source will reign supreme. My belief is that all of these incompatibly-licensed projects from various vendors suddenly embracing open source will die within ten years, while GNU's contributions, which were born long before the words "open" and "source" were placed togethor, will still be the cornerstone upon which we place our OSes.
Instead of having empowered the free software community, we have instead empowered a bunch of marketting machines who feel that they can exploit our wealth to expand their own. The most ludicrous example of this is IBM's supposed advocation of open source. Can we please try to remember that IBM is the same company that holds the most software patents in the world?
I think that I should also say that I greatly disapprove of RMS's adoption of Linux as GNU/Linux, not because I don't think that RMS has a right to claim it, but because I think that GNU is more than Linux. As a slashdotter who as maligned you in the past, RMS, I apologize.
What would help alot more would be if IBM were to stop applying for software patents and to make plans to open its current patent portfolio freely to the public. How a company can claim to support open source on one hand and then be the largest producer of software patents in the world is, in my mind at least, ludicrous.
Granted, IBM is a large company, and I'm sure that there are those there that are true believers in open source, but the company as a whole has actually chosen to stand as one of our enemies, not as our friend.
We need to remember here that, as with almost all companies, IBM is interested in open source only so far as it gets them money. If IBM weren't of this opinion, they'd be using the GPL, BSD, or other similar already-in-place license, instead of choosing a license to gain some kind of additional advantage for them.
Please, IBM, the open source community would be much better served with the elimination of software patents than it would by yet another open source license.
You are wrong. Maybe you should check your facts. The SDK's license only protected the SDK itself, not software written with it (I don't know whether 3dfx has since changed the license). 3dfx has used heavy-handed legal threats to quash software designers whose software is against their best interests. Here are a few URLs you should check out:
l ideWrapper.html
http://www.angelic-coders.com/kshaikh/Article_G
http://www.glideunderground.com/
Although I can't seem to find any references to it anymore, I seem to recall that there *was* at least one "clean-room" Glide wrapper. If I find the URL, I will post it.
In any case, unless the wrapper developers are modifying and distributing portions of the SDK itself, your analogy of someone ripping CODA itself and making it proprietary is highly flawed. I believe that the courts have found that software written with the aid of developer tools (such as compilers) are considered original works owned by the authors of the code, NOT the authors of the compilers/developer tools. It is certainly possible for a compiler/SDK vendor to make agreeing to certain restrictions a prerequisite to a copyright license, but, as far as I know, that is not (or at least was not) the case with 3dfx's SDK.
... They are merely attempting to exploit it. Folks, we need to remember that the only thing that 3dfx ever did for us was release *ONLY* the 2d specs for their cards, give *ONE* developer access to specs to write a *BINARY-ONLY* GLIDE port, and put up a silly little web page. 3dfx has always been an extremely proprietary company that is openly hostile to open standards and open source. If I recall correctly, there are several independent, clean-room developers of GLIDE implementations that are being sued by 3dfx. 3dfx is not supporting the Linux community, only the Linux platform. We should be boycotting 3dfx, not cheering them along as they undermine the open standards and open source communities that have made Linux what it is today.
First of all, IANAL.
Except for patents on the building blocks of quantum computing (which is where the current state of technology is, just trying to get a couple of qbits to do *something*), I don't believe that patents should be possible here. One of the fundamental requirements for a patent is that the device actually works. We are obviously not there yet. To my knowledge, the only thing that we have right now are simulators of quantum computers on top of standard computers. I'd have to think that such *extremely* preliminary research results should not be patentable. Comments?
...If I had an AGP slot. My defecation-list of hardware vendors is quite long, but Matrox is now very definitely not on it. My current video card is a Mystique 220 (anyone out there want to code up 3d support for that, too? :), and I am now quite proud that I bought it. I will continue to buy Matrox products and recommend them to my peers.
Note to 3dfx: Giving specs out to *one* developer under an NDA is *not* the way to garner favor among Linux users. Neither are press releases which announce nothing usable (2d-only specs for a 3d card is silly at best and an insult at worst, and nothing else here has actually changed). We need support for free-software/open-source/etc., *not* just support for the intel-only Linux platform. Otherwise, it's just like any other commercial, proprietary Unix system. Come on, folks, this shouldn't be so difficult for hardware manufacturers.
And does it stand a chance of having Clinton's veto overriden? I don't think that our President will like his police-state agenda attacked (and remember that he cared so much about national security in his draft-dodgint, i-did-not-inhale, hippy, communist-supporting Oxford days). Clue: law enforcement agencies do not have rights, individuals do. Law enforcement agencies only have those few powers that our legislation allows them. Arguing for the rights of law enforcement agencies has no logical basis. It's just a shame that so many people actually successfully do so, and usually on a basis of "well, for national security reasons, you'll just have to trust us."
Seriously, I'd like to see a good summary of the real meat of this bill. If this is just something that will allow certain companies to sell powerful encryption technologies to just banks, then it does exactly nothing for us. E-commerce is of rather small importance in my mind. My personal privacy, the privacy of the users I support, and the integrity of the systems that I administer are much more relevant to me. I'm sick of having to go to the Netherlands to get real security tools.
GNOME is going to be completely useless to me, and probably almost all others interested in it from a user standpoint, if it is based off of a development version of GTK+. GNOME 1.0's release should be held back until GTK/GLIB 1.2 is released and all the GNOME apps are proven to work with it. I have used several rpm releases of GNOME, from 0.20 to a few of the 0.99s, and found it to be buggy as sin. Things like orbit spontaneously eating itself and never working again, and GNOME applications (especially gmc) not detecting when its connection to the X server is severed and then just sucking up CPU cycles like mad. I hope that most of this stuff has been fixed by now, but I figure that with the state of GNOME at the last chance I looked at it, it could definitely use the wait to for GTK1.2. Sorry for the smack, but I honestly don't believe that GNOME is ready for prime-time... yet.
Folks, the RCX has a whopping 32 kilobytes of external RAM. A programming language that uses a dynamic stack (to allow scoped variables, and true recursion-supporting function calls) would be a horrible waste of that RAM. It looks like you wouldn't even be able to port and run Interactive-C applications with this little primary storage. Take a good look at NQC, folks. It's really just BASIC made to look like C. The function calls are just figments of your imagination, they don't really exist, they are just spiffied-up GOTOs. As for an entire OS, you have got to be friggin *kidding* me!
The information in this patent is actually pretty useful. It's an idea of having a door hinge that can't be removed while the door is closed (you have to remove the flaps before you can slide out the pin, and you can't remove the flaps when the door is closed). I'm not a locksmith/carpenter/whatever, so I don't know how obvious this is. The fact that Microsoft owns this patent is interesting, to say the least.
The number of CDs that I purchase has easily doubled, if not tripled, since I was exposed to MP3s. While I won't say that I don't have a bunch of tunes in MP3 that I don't have the CD for (enough negatives there?), I'm still supporting a helluva lot more artists now than I was before, and a much greater diversity of artists as well. Almost everyone that I have talked to who uses MP3s has had the same experiences.
Perhaps RIAA should quit acting like a bunch of pricks like usual and do a little bit of analysis on the sales before and after MP3s became popular. Betcha they increased. My faith in RIAA doing something smart (not even necessarily "the right thing", just smart for their own profits), however, is somewhat less than complete.
Software works which fall under open source licenses can be considered public domain, depending on the definition of public domain. If the definition of public domain is chosen to be "software without an owner," then it is not public domain. However, in many fields, public domain is defined as any piece of software where the license does not place restrictions on the distribution and modification of the software in question. This definition is the one used in the free software exemption of the cryptography clauses in the Wassenar Agreement, for instance. Both are perfectly valid definitions of public domain.
Since the software in RedHat distributions are all free software (except certain packages included in the commercial distribution only), the software in RedHat Linux falls under the later definition of "public domain."
The basis of a democracy is that the citizens should *zero* patience for problems with the government. It doesn't whatever reason the PTO is incapable of properly dealing with it software patents (which frankly shouldn't be patents in the first place). If the PTO is incapable of accomplishing the task, then it should simply not involve itself in software patents until such time as it is prepared to do so.
This deal will only protect the site from the Harry Fox Agency. All lyrics to songs not owned by the Harry Fox Agency and those they represent are still wide open to lawsuit. And this could very well be hundreds of other agencies that we're talking about, all capable of attacking the site one by one.
I suspect that this deal being offered by HFA represents a backing down more than anything. Even if the site were to go commercial, and HFA would receive a certain percentage of the profits, the profits received by the site from advertising would be so low as to be ridiculous. HFA would not gain a great deal of money from this deal, it is simply a way for them to back down while saving face. Attacking a fan site like this is quite simply a mistake. I doubt that this site has done anything except *encourage* the purchasing of music. Perhaps HFA has finally realized this and wants a way out while keeping some shreds of dignity.
Sorry, but device drivers and other operating system components *must* be open source before I will run it or buy hardware associated with it. I've been using open source for far too long to go back to proprietary crud. Don't think binary-only drivers are that big a deal? Talk to someone with OSS-commercial and ask them how easy it is to change kernels. I don't honestly care about commercial *applications*, as I can live with or without them.
I realize that probably alot of the reason that things are kept closed are because of NDAs Creative and other companies have with 3dfx and such, and I understand. But you should also understand that my understanding still won't motivate me to throw money at you for your products.
If this were something similar to the Neomagic Xfree86 driver development, where it was almost expected that the driver would be opened later when Neomagic realized it wouldn't hurt them, I'd probably be more optimistic. However, this is quite a different situation, and even this developer admits it. Most of this code is *never* going to see the light of day. Does this guy think he really is *that* much of an uber-coder that he can write all of those drivers *on his own*, without missing something? I don't feel like seeing exploit code for a proprietary sound driver on bugtraq one day, thanks. I'll go without a 3d accelerator and even other basic hardware until the entire industry takes its collective head out of its collective arse.
Well, it's been awhile since my high school government class, but isn't an act of Congress required before the federal government may be sued? I don't think that anyone stands a chance of getting that. A much better tactic would be simply lobbying the Congress to outlaw patents on intangible objects (business models, software, mathematics equations, genetic coding, etc.).