So, not "companies using software patents lose rights to GPL software," more like "if a company uses patents to attack $GPL_SOFT_PACKAGE, they forfeit rights to $GPL_SOFT_PACKAGE". Sounds fairly reasonable to me.
I think that's actually what the current GPL implies anyway. So, it's not so much a change in policy, but a clarification.
You're incorrectly assuming that MSNBC is accurately reporting on the GPL and the FSF. I can find no support for these claims on the FSF web site. So far, this looks like FUD to me, which wouldn't be suprising from an MSNBC reporter.
The GPLv3 probably will contain explicit provisions about software patents and DRM, but not the retributory and ill-advised penalties that the MSNBC reporter implies.
I don't see anything on the FSF site that supports the MSNBC story, and it sounds like FUD to me. The FSF will likely adopt specific measures against software patents in the GPL, but I doubt they will be as general as "penalizing" anybody who has software patents. That just wouldn't work because many supporters and contributors to FOSS projects have software patents--both individuals and companies--for a wide variety of reasons.
What the GPL could do is clarify and make implicit what is already implied: if you distribute GPL'ed software, you automatically give everybody a license to all your applicable patents that are necessary to use the software as you distributed it, no more and no less.
Ultimately, if you want to know what GPLv3 contains, you'll have to look at the drafts and participate in the FSF discussions. If you have done that, maybe you can tell us more about it. An MSNBC reporter who heard about it last Tuesday is both insufficiently well informed and far too biased to make a credible evaluation.
I use all four corners on my Macintosh, but is it good design? I don't think so. Once you enable those features, the computer becomes expert-only. You can hit them accidentally when going for a menu, title bar, etc.; all the Windows disappear, or something else horrible and frightening (to a novice) happens. And once you are done activating them, you have to move your mouse all the way across the screen for interacting with the application.
The corners become really confusing on multi-headed desktops; which corners trigger what? And how about moving across two or three displays in order to get to that corner, and then back again? The menu bar at the top of the primary display and the spotlight button suffer from similar problems.
The Macintosh UI is an excellent example that Fitt's law doesn't make for good GUI design in general, and that there are other considerations for where to place UI elements.
Unfortunately, Apple has painted themselves into a corner: the menu bar at the top has become a kind of trademark; they simply can't change to something else easily without upsetting a lot of their die-hard supporters.
With people like him working as "usability designers", it's not surprising that usability often sucks. The problem is not that what he says is strictly speaking wrong, the problem is that it is only sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and often explicitly secondary to other considerations.
There are already open source telephony applications: ohphone and GnomeMeeting.
The real problem is that VoIP-to-POTS gateways are proprietary right now; they should become commoditized, so that you can combine whatever client software you like with whatever POTS gateway you want to subscribe to.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD.
They also didn't shower regularly. This uncanny association really makes you wonder, doesn't it? Maybe it was poor personal hygiene after all, rather than a belief in GOD, that made them prosperous.
This won't do much for energy generation, but the Europeans are finally cathing up on fusion bomb research and they are learning the US PR trick of declaring it an "energy technology". There may be hope for those Europeans yet.
What NASA is showing you is the equivalent of taking a picture under incandescent light with a daylight color film (or daylight color balance). That's neither "right" nor "wrong", it's just a choice. It's a sensible choice, but it would simply probably not correspond to what you would actually perceive.
The "open" release of Solaris (OpenSolaris) includes a "binaries" package containg code (including kernel components like device drivers) that sun cant release at this time for whatever reasons. Without this code, Solaris is useless. Plus, sun needed a licence that dealt with the many patents (sun and otherwise) that cover or might cover the solaris codebase.
Do you have any pointers showing what you say to be true?
If it is true, then "OpenSolaris" is a fraud: if it relies on binary modules and is patent encumbered, it isn't "open" at all. But, then, I guess that's what we have come to expect from Sun.
So, you haven't actually read the CDDL, but you just like to bitch about it as if you know what the fuck you are talking about.
I'm not bitching about the CDDL, I'm bitching about Sun's past attempts to cheat and mislead the open source community with a variety of confusing licenses and legal loopholes hidden inside them. At some point, enough is enough, and there is no point for me or anybody else to waste time on the CDDL or any other junk Sun dreams up. If Sun wants to deal at all with the open source community, at this point, they must stick to standard open source licenses: BSD, GPL, LGPL, MIT.
You may as well work for Microsoft.
I don't work for Microsoft, but maybe you do. Or maybe you just work for McNealy and Schwartz--it amounts to the same thing--Sun has become pretty much as evil as Microsoft.
I think Microsoft has had a very bad influence on CS job prospects (note: MCSE is not a CS job). However, the fact that they are now having to go to China is a case of being hoisted by their own petard; after they destroyed most of the interesting R&D jobs, they don't have a choice but to go to China. So, I think Gates's lamentations are sincere; he probably doesn't even understand what he has done to CS research in this country.
In any case, even without Microsoft's destructive influence, Chinese high-tech workers would still be competing with US high-tech workes. And the Chinese government is fully within its rights to demand that any company doing business with/in China move jobs there--the US government is doing the same thing.
I largely agree with your view. However, I think MySQL is not quite as dangerous as Qt in that regard, because it's a client/server system. You don't need to link with MySQL for most of its uses, so it doesn't matter that much. Qt, however, is only useful when linked. Furthermore, Qt defines its own standard, while you can fairly easily replace MySQL with another SQL server.
Throw away the book about political theory since it doesn't apply anymore in the Western world.
"Anymore"? The US used to be run by a bunch of thugs and rich land owners elected by an all-white, all-male elite, and other nations weren't much better. Things have gotten better since then. Not as good as we might like, but better. And if we keep reading "the book about political theory" and insisting on it being implemented, maybe we can make as much progress in the next couple of hundred years as we did in the last couple of hundred year.
Maybe, eventually, it will stick. Maybe, eventually, folks will realize why the CDDL was pretty much the only license Sun could legally use.
That argument makes no sense. Sun only released the portions of Solaris they owned, and they could do so under whatever license they wanted.
On the other hand, for their own commercial releases, they can still link with whatever proprietary code they want to link with; releasing under the GPL/LGPL to others does not affect what they do with their own binary releases of code they actually own.
No, Sun picked the CDDL for business and publicity reasons, not for legal reasons.
Why is there so much whining? Over the last decade, Sun has released "open" source code, and even documentation, under some licenses that are quite evil: licenses that forbid you to work on related projects, licenses that force you to give whatever you do to Sun, licenses that force reciprocal patent agreements on you. And Sun has misrepresented what they were doing. Nobody has time to keep track of how Sun wants to mislead people today with language hidden deep inside complex license agreements.
Therefore, when it comes to Sun, there is a simple rule: if it's not one of the standard, well-known open source licenses (GPL, MIT X11, LGPL, BSD, Artistic), you should probably avoid it unless you are a lawyer and can spend the time analyzing the license very carefully.
I don't remember whether the CDDL contained any objectionable clauses, but Sun only has to blame themselves for this level of mistrust, not just because of the evil licenses Sun has tried to push on people, but also because of the statements Schwartz and McNealy keep making and the company they keep.
So, does that mean fair use is not protected by law in the USA?
It's protected to the degree the law protects it. And in the USA (and many other nations now), "fair use" has been greatly limited.
You can reverse-engineer the technology (a right protected by law), and an EULA that restricts your rights too far is not valid, even if you signed it.
The DCMA is a law, not a EULA. It modifies previous copyright law, so things that you used to be able to do under "fair use" provisions, you can't do anymore. Elected representatives have that power--that's how laws come about in a democracy.
What you have said is true, but I don't see why you think this is incompatible with anything the gp said.
The gp post was technically accurate about how the pictures were constructed. But the general topic was about what Mars would look like, and it would probably look even more "normal" than the NASA pictures suggest.
A quick color correction in the Gimp (reduce red curve, increase blue curve) yields a landscape with a fairly neutral sky, a slightly reddish sand, and neutral-to-cool rocks--something that looks very much like an earth desert. That's probably what you would see, and that's what a consumer digital camera would yield.
'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.' Schmidt previously worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell."
What else do you need to know about Microsoft? The company is run by an ill-tempered bald ex-football player who's in it for the sport and kill, nothing else. Ballmer deals in concepts like "team spirit", "take no prisoners", and "offense/defense", not bits, bytes, and software.
Ballmer is also overestimating his own business acumen. Ballmer didn't "bury" Novell or Sun; to the degree that Novell and Sun have problems, they are self-inflicted or due to changing market conditions. I can't think of much Ballmer has done as a businessman that was particularly clever; most of what he has been responsible has been shady or outright illegal bullying of other companies. Shady deals he really is good at.
Sadly, there are some good engineers and technologists at Microsoft, but they are just pawns in Ballmer's grand game and strategy. Well, fortunately, they seem to be leaving for greener pastures. Which brings us back to Ballmer's chair throwing...
You're assuming that because something reflects a lot of red light, it looks red to a human observer. That's wrong; color is not perceived that way.
Chances are that if you were on Mars at a time when both the sky and the ground filled with red dust and no man-made objects in view, things would look fairly neutral to you, with parts of the scenery even looking greenish or bluish.
You can think of human eyes having an auto white-balance built in, although it works rather differently from what is being used in digital cameras.
Is the protocol open? (My guess based on current information is: NO)
Can you send commands to the camera through WiFi? (No hint that it is, so probably NO).
Can the camera be run off a power supply? (Probably YES)
If you could do all those things, the camera would make a great web cam and Nikon could sell huge numbers of it. But probably it won't work again.
It is truly frustrating that there is so much great camera hardware out there and camera manufacturers screw up on the software, the protocols, and openness. I have yet to see even a working, fairly complete PTP implementation over USB.
Even police officers have their own set of prejudices and interests. Everyone does, wether or not they are privately owned.
The set of personal prejudices and interests individuals may bring to the police force is tightly circumscribed. If they violate the laws, rules, and regulations in those areas, those individuals are reprimanded or let go.
One of the things police may not have is personal or financial interest in private corporations that are related to their work. The reason those rules exist because otherwise we open the doors to corruption.
The approach to law enforcement described in the article gets around those rules and regulations by having corporations provide "advisors", and that is a problem.
Is real police tracking down people who break the law bizarre?
Real police are public employees; they are required to enforce the law equally for the benefit of everybody. When Microsoft supplies special "advisors" or resources to the police, it biases the police in favor of enforcing laws whose enforcement benefits Microsoft, and that is bizarre. It's not just bizarre, it is unacceptable.
And it is particularly bad because catching people who take advantage of security holes in Microsoft software just ought not to be high priority for law enforcement--Microsoft should fix their damned software and not burden law enforcement with cleaning up after their programmers.
Instead of doing something like this, he could have just made a page that has both the game on it and generates some ad revenue. He would have been more than able to pay for any extra bandwidth.
As Internet crime proliferates, law enforcement is relying more on the private sector to help counter it.
That's a big concern. People who work in law enforcement should not also have other kinds of interests. Even without deliberate abuse of power, someone who comes from a corporate environment will bring his own set of prejudices and interests to the table. For example, someone working for Microsoft may be more interested in pursuing piracy using Linux and less interested in tracking down people who write viruses that infect Macintosh. It also may lead to a situation where the primary means of getting the police to do something is to pay someone lots of money; it is even more disconcerting that those someones are ex-police, which really is getting pretty close to outright corruption.
If you think about it, it is also truly bizarre that companies like Microsoft find it easier to finance a private police force to track down virus writers than to fix their software.
Slashdot Mirror
So, not "companies using software patents lose rights to GPL software," more like "if a company uses patents to attack $GPL_SOFT_PACKAGE, they forfeit rights to $GPL_SOFT_PACKAGE". Sounds fairly reasonable to me.
I think that's actually what the current GPL implies anyway. So, it's not so much a change in policy, but a clarification.
That one is bold.
You're incorrectly assuming that MSNBC is accurately reporting on the GPL and the FSF. I can find no support for these claims on the FSF web site. So far, this looks like FUD to me, which wouldn't be suprising from an MSNBC reporter.
The GPLv3 probably will contain explicit provisions about software patents and DRM, but not the retributory and ill-advised penalties that the MSNBC reporter implies.
I don't see anything on the FSF site that supports the MSNBC story, and it sounds like FUD to me. The FSF will likely adopt specific measures against software patents in the GPL, but I doubt they will be as general as "penalizing" anybody who has software patents. That just wouldn't work because many supporters and contributors to FOSS projects have software patents--both individuals and companies--for a wide variety of reasons.
What the GPL could do is clarify and make implicit what is already implied: if you distribute GPL'ed software, you automatically give everybody a license to all your applicable patents that are necessary to use the software as you distributed it, no more and no less.
Ultimately, if you want to know what GPLv3 contains, you'll have to look at the drafts and participate in the FSF discussions. If you have done that, maybe you can tell us more about it. An MSNBC reporter who heard about it last Tuesday is both insufficiently well informed and far too biased to make a credible evaluation.
I use all four corners on my Macintosh, but is it good design? I don't think so. Once you enable those features, the computer becomes expert-only. You can hit them accidentally when going for a menu, title bar, etc.; all the Windows disappear, or something else horrible and frightening (to a novice) happens. And once you are done activating them, you have to move your mouse all the way across the screen for interacting with the application.
The corners become really confusing on multi-headed desktops; which corners trigger what? And how about moving across two or three displays in order to get to that corner, and then back again? The menu bar at the top of the primary display and the spotlight button suffer from similar problems.
The Macintosh UI is an excellent example that Fitt's law doesn't make for good GUI design in general, and that there are other considerations for where to place UI elements.
Unfortunately, Apple has painted themselves into a corner: the menu bar at the top has become a kind of trademark; they simply can't change to something else easily without upsetting a lot of their die-hard supporters.
With people like him working as "usability designers", it's not surprising that usability often sucks. The problem is not that what he says is strictly speaking wrong, the problem is that it is only sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and often explicitly secondary to other considerations.
There are already open source telephony applications: ohphone and GnomeMeeting.
The real problem is that VoIP-to-POTS gateways are proprietary right now; they should become commoditized, so that you can combine whatever client software you like with whatever POTS gateway you want to subscribe to.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD.
They also didn't shower regularly. This uncanny association really makes you wonder, doesn't it? Maybe it was poor personal hygiene after all, rather than a belief in GOD, that made them prosperous.
This won't do much for energy generation, but the Europeans are finally cathing up on fusion bomb research and they are learning the US PR trick of declaring it an "energy technology". There may be hope for those Europeans yet.
What NASA is showing you is the equivalent of taking a picture under incandescent light with a daylight color film (or daylight color balance). That's neither "right" nor "wrong", it's just a choice. It's a sensible choice, but it would simply probably not correspond to what you would actually perceive.
So they chose a license that is most compatible with their business needs. Wow. Big surprize. What is wrong with that?
What's wrong is when the licenses Sun chooses disagree with their marketing claims and their statements to/about open source.
The "open" release of Solaris (OpenSolaris) includes a "binaries" package containg code (including kernel components like device drivers) that sun cant release at this time for whatever reasons. Without this code, Solaris is useless. Plus, sun needed a licence that dealt with the many patents (sun and otherwise) that cover or might cover the solaris codebase.
Do you have any pointers showing what you say to be true?
If it is true, then "OpenSolaris" is a fraud: if it relies on binary modules and is patent encumbered, it isn't "open" at all. But, then, I guess that's what we have come to expect from Sun.
So, you haven't actually read the CDDL, but you just like to bitch about it as if you know what the fuck you are talking about.
I'm not bitching about the CDDL, I'm bitching about Sun's past attempts to cheat and mislead the open source community with a variety of confusing licenses and legal loopholes hidden inside them. At some point, enough is enough, and there is no point for me or anybody else to waste time on the CDDL or any other junk Sun dreams up. If Sun wants to deal at all with the open source community, at this point, they must stick to standard open source licenses: BSD, GPL, LGPL, MIT.
You may as well work for Microsoft.
I don't work for Microsoft, but maybe you do. Or maybe you just work for McNealy and Schwartz--it amounts to the same thing--Sun has become pretty much as evil as Microsoft.
I think Microsoft has had a very bad influence on CS job prospects (note: MCSE is not a CS job). However, the fact that they are now having to go to China is a case of being hoisted by their own petard; after they destroyed most of the interesting R&D jobs, they don't have a choice but to go to China. So, I think Gates's lamentations are sincere; he probably doesn't even understand what he has done to CS research in this country.
In any case, even without Microsoft's destructive influence, Chinese high-tech workers would still be competing with US high-tech workes. And the Chinese government is fully within its rights to demand that any company doing business with/in China move jobs there--the US government is doing the same thing.
I largely agree with your view. However, I think MySQL is not quite as dangerous as Qt in that regard, because it's a client/server system. You don't need to link with MySQL for most of its uses, so it doesn't matter that much. Qt, however, is only useful when linked. Furthermore, Qt defines its own standard, while you can fairly easily replace MySQL with another SQL server.
Throw away the book about political theory since it doesn't apply anymore in the Western world.
"Anymore"? The US used to be run by a bunch of thugs and rich land owners elected by an all-white, all-male elite, and other nations weren't much better. Things have gotten better since then. Not as good as we might like, but better. And if we keep reading "the book about political theory" and insisting on it being implemented, maybe we can make as much progress in the next couple of hundred years as we did in the last couple of hundred year.
Maybe, eventually, it will stick. Maybe, eventually, folks will realize why the CDDL was pretty much the only license Sun could legally use.
That argument makes no sense. Sun only released the portions of Solaris they owned, and they could do so under whatever license they wanted.
On the other hand, for their own commercial releases, they can still link with whatever proprietary code they want to link with; releasing under the GPL/LGPL to others does not affect what they do with their own binary releases of code they actually own.
No, Sun picked the CDDL for business and publicity reasons, not for legal reasons.
Why is there so much whining? Over the last decade, Sun has released "open" source code, and even documentation, under some licenses that are quite evil: licenses that forbid you to work on related projects, licenses that force you to give whatever you do to Sun, licenses that force reciprocal patent agreements on you. And Sun has misrepresented what they were doing. Nobody has time to keep track of how Sun wants to mislead people today with language hidden deep inside complex license agreements.
Therefore, when it comes to Sun, there is a simple rule: if it's not one of the standard, well-known open source licenses (GPL, MIT X11, LGPL, BSD, Artistic), you should probably avoid it unless you are a lawyer and can spend the time analyzing the license very carefully.
I don't remember whether the CDDL contained any objectionable clauses, but Sun only has to blame themselves for this level of mistrust, not just because of the evil licenses Sun has tried to push on people, but also because of the statements Schwartz and McNealy keep making and the company they keep.
So, does that mean fair use is not protected by law in the USA?
It's protected to the degree the law protects it. And in the USA (and many other nations now), "fair use" has been greatly limited.
You can reverse-engineer the technology (a right protected by law), and an EULA that restricts your rights too far is not valid, even if you signed it.
The DCMA is a law, not a EULA. It modifies previous copyright law, so things that you used to be able to do under "fair use" provisions, you can't do anymore. Elected representatives have that power--that's how laws come about in a democracy.
What you have said is true, but I don't see why you think this is incompatible with anything the gp said.
The gp post was technically accurate about how the pictures were constructed. But the general topic was about what Mars would look like, and it would probably look even more "normal" than the NASA pictures suggest.
A quick color correction in the Gimp (reduce red curve, increase blue curve) yields a landscape with a fairly neutral sky, a slightly reddish sand, and neutral-to-cool rocks--something that looks very much like an earth desert. That's probably what you would see, and that's what a consumer digital camera would yield.
'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.' Schmidt previously worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell."
What else do you need to know about Microsoft? The company is run by an ill-tempered bald ex-football player who's in it for the sport and kill, nothing else. Ballmer deals in concepts like "team spirit", "take no prisoners", and "offense/defense", not bits, bytes, and software.
Ballmer is also overestimating his own business acumen. Ballmer didn't "bury" Novell or Sun; to the degree that Novell and Sun have problems, they are self-inflicted or due to changing market conditions. I can't think of much Ballmer has done as a businessman that was particularly clever; most of what he has been responsible has been shady or outright illegal bullying of other companies. Shady deals he really is good at.
Sadly, there are some good engineers and technologists at Microsoft, but they are just pawns in Ballmer's grand game and strategy. Well, fortunately, they seem to be leaving for greener pastures. Which brings us back to Ballmer's chair throwing...
You're assuming that because something reflects a lot of red light, it looks red to a human observer. That's wrong; color is not perceived that way.
Chances are that if you were on Mars at a time when both the sky and the ground filled with red dust and no man-made objects in view, things would look fairly neutral to you, with parts of the scenery even looking greenish or bluish.
You can think of human eyes having an auto white-balance built in, although it works rather differently from what is being used in digital cameras.
Is the protocol open? (My guess based on current information is: NO)
Can you send commands to the camera through WiFi? (No hint that it is, so probably NO).
Can the camera be run off a power supply? (Probably YES)
If you could do all those things, the camera would make a great web cam and Nikon could sell huge numbers of it. But probably it won't work again.
It is truly frustrating that there is so much great camera hardware out there and camera manufacturers screw up on the software, the protocols, and openness. I have yet to see even a working, fairly complete PTP implementation over USB.
Even police officers have their own set of prejudices and interests. Everyone does, wether or not they are privately owned.
The set of personal prejudices and interests individuals may bring to the police force is tightly circumscribed. If they violate the laws, rules, and regulations in those areas, those individuals are reprimanded or let go.
One of the things police may not have is personal or financial interest in private corporations that are related to their work. The reason those rules exist because otherwise we open the doors to corruption.
The approach to law enforcement described in the article gets around those rules and regulations by having corporations provide "advisors", and that is a problem.
Is real police tracking down people who break the law bizarre?
Real police are public employees; they are required to enforce the law equally for the benefit of everybody. When Microsoft supplies special "advisors" or resources to the police, it biases the police in favor of enforcing laws whose enforcement benefits Microsoft, and that is bizarre. It's not just bizarre, it is unacceptable.
And it is particularly bad because catching people who take advantage of security holes in Microsoft software just ought not to be high priority for law enforcement--Microsoft should fix their damned software and not burden law enforcement with cleaning up after their programmers.
Instead of doing something like this, he could have just made a page that has both the game on it and generates some ad revenue. He would have been more than able to pay for any extra bandwidth.
As Internet crime proliferates, law enforcement is relying more on the private sector to help counter it.
That's a big concern. People who work in law enforcement should not also have other kinds of interests. Even without deliberate abuse of power, someone who comes from a corporate environment will bring his own set of prejudices and interests to the table. For example, someone working for Microsoft may be more interested in pursuing piracy using Linux and less interested in tracking down people who write viruses that infect Macintosh. It also may lead to a situation where the primary means of getting the police to do something is to pay someone lots of money; it is even more disconcerting that those someones are ex-police, which really is getting pretty close to outright corruption.
If you think about it, it is also truly bizarre that companies like Microsoft find it easier to finance a private police force to track down virus writers than to fix their software.