Most of the TCG spec is optional and can be turned off, and thus is not particularly dangerous unless you don't control what your software does. It will make Windows Media DRM and similar proprietary systems stronger and harder to break (though still not impossible), but it won't affect people who run Free and Open Source Software. Some of these features may even be useful in a FOSS environment, such as by keeping your encryption keys safe even if your machine is remotely compromised.
The primary danger in the TCG spec is Remote Attestation. This allows your machine to non-forgeably attest that it is running a particular hardware/software configuration. While Remote Attestation is also opt-in, refusal to attest to your systems configuration will be treated the same as attesting to a disallowed configuration: no access. This would mean no "compatible but unsupported" clients, something that the FOSS community has been amazingly good at providing for many protocols.
Essentially, Remote Attestation would take away your ability to have your computer say things like "Uh, yeah, I'm running IE7 on Windows Vista, sure!", "Yeah, this is iTunes 42.9 requesting purchase of music file blah.m4p", "Of course I'm running the official IM client from AOL/MSN/etc, certainly not something unofficial like Gaim", and "Yes, of *course* I'm just going to stream this file and delete it after viewing, I certainly wouldn't want to download it to watch over something faster than my slow Internet connection".
But surely you could see many programmers hiding little bugs within the program to make themselves tax free. Not everything must or can be open source. Government's might use open source to develop software for their use (which has been done extensivly across Australia) but no government in their right mind would release their software as open source. There are so many security risks involved.
No server programmer in their right mind would trust the client to do validation and use the data it supplies blindly. The server should be validating submitted forms and rejecting those that don't add up; then it doesn't matter what client people use. (For that matter, it's just a *form*; why not use plain HTML forms and work on every browser?) If the security of their tax system depends on their client-side validation, rest assured that there will be modified versions of the software floating around which conveniently omit a few things here and there, whether or not the source is available.
The government doesn't need to write a client for every possible OS, particularly ones that are (for the moment) used by a minority of users. They just need to provide all the information for anyone else to be able to. Releasing the source to their client is one way to do that; another would be a full specification of the protocol. If Australia has a FOIA equivalent, use it to demand the protocol specification.
I support open source as use it frequently, but if your program/OS isn't usable, then is it really any good?
"My toaster is broken, it can't cook pizza!". GNU/Linux isn't designed to run Windows programs. The fact that one particular program running on it can passably do so using emulation is an interesting novelty that benefits some people while transitioning away from the programs in question. It is a stopgap, not a good long-term solution.
Of course, if you read the release notes, you'd know all this...;)
Another important item from the release notes:
The recommended tool for upgrading between Debian GNU/Linux releases is to use the package management tool aptitude. This tool makes safer decisions about package installations than running apt-get directly.
But I noticed that the Harry Potter trailer is out and I can't get that one on my linux box. I can download the.mov file but this is just a bootstrap of somesort. Some of them have the actual.mov file in them as a URL and you can get this out with a Hex editor. The Harry Potter one doesn't though. Anyone know how to get the actual trailer, please?
You could also try mplayerplug-in, which can figure out the reference; personally, I don't like having videos playing embedded in my browser, so I always just dig out the URL and download them.
Unfortunately, the audio codec in all three is Quicktime audio (QDM2) rather than AAC or MP3, so mplayer and other players can't play it without binary-only codecs. The Narnia trailer, on the other hand, uses MP3.
Why is it... That we have invented a million different ways to distract ourselves while blasting down the highway, without developing self-driving cars?
Building self-driving cars is a Very Hard Problem. It's being worked on, and great progress has been made, but it's not going to be ready for prime time yet.
The other major problem in building self-driving cars is that unless everyone is using them, a self-driving car has to be able to share the road with human drivers, not just other self-driving cars (which are much easier to get information from). Many of the demonstrations of groups of self-driving cars used communication between cars, or at the very least made assumptions about the ways those other cars would drive. A real self-driving system could not make such assumptions. Furthermore, even if all cars become self-driving, it isn't necessarily a good idea to trust the information provided by every other car on the road.
Your proposed license is not an Open Source or Free Software license at all:
Translation of messages and documentation in the English-language version to other languages is permitted. However, this permission-to-translate clause must be replaced in the translated version by a clause forbidding any further translation.
From the Debian Free Software Guidelines, as well as the Open Source Definition:
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
Your license does not permit specific kinds of modified works from being distributed under the same terms.
I can understand the issue you are trying to solve: you don't want translations that don't come from the original, most likely because that would result in compounding errors due to mistranslation or limited translation. However, this is just one possible way that someone could make your program worse; they could also introduce bugs, security issues, standards-violations/extensions, or just features you don't like. Attempting to prevent people from making the program worse will also prevent people from exercising the right to create derivative works.
A much better solution is to require that modified works are clearly labelled as modified, and not represented as the original. Licenses such as the GPL and the zlib license do exactly that. This way, people can still modify the program for any purpose, but they won't make you look bad in the process, only themselves.
Another minor issue with your license is the fact that you require people to provide an offer for source code that is valid in perpetuity, without providing the alternative of just providing source code at the same time as providing the binary. This means that if someone ever provided a version of your program on their website, they would have to keep a copy of the source for that version indefinitely. This gets even worse if they distributed several versions.
These are just a few symptoms of what happens when you attempt to write your own license rather than using a well-established Free Software / Open Source license.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the TCG spec is optional and can be turned off, and thus is not particularly dangerous unless you don't control what your software does. It will make Windows Media DRM and similar proprietary systems stronger and harder to break (though still not impossible), but it won't affect people who run Free and Open Source Software. Some of these features may even be useful in a FOSS environment, such as by keeping your encryption keys safe even if your machine is remotely compromised.
The primary danger in the TCG spec is Remote Attestation. This allows your machine to non-forgeably attest that it is running a particular hardware/software configuration. While Remote Attestation is also opt-in, refusal to attest to your systems configuration will be treated the same as attesting to a disallowed configuration: no access. This would mean no "compatible but unsupported" clients, something that the FOSS community has been amazingly good at providing for many protocols.
Essentially, Remote Attestation would take away your ability to have your computer say things like "Uh, yeah, I'm running IE7 on Windows Vista, sure!", "Yeah, this is iTunes 42.9 requesting purchase of music file blah.m4p", "Of course I'm running the official IM client from AOL/MSN/etc, certainly not something unofficial like Gaim", and "Yes, of *course* I'm just going to stream this file and delete it after viewing, I certainly wouldn't want to download it to watch over something faster than my slow Internet connection".
No server programmer in their right mind would trust the client to do validation and use the data it supplies blindly. The server should be validating submitted forms and rejecting those that don't add up; then it doesn't matter what client people use. (For that matter, it's just a *form*; why not use plain HTML forms and work on every browser?) If the security of their tax system depends on their client-side validation, rest assured that there will be modified versions of the software floating around which conveniently omit a few things here and there, whether or not the source is available.
The government doesn't need to write a client for every possible OS, particularly ones that are (for the moment) used by a minority of users. They just need to provide all the information for anyone else to be able to. Releasing the source to their client is one way to do that; another would be a full specification of the protocol. If Australia has a FOIA equivalent, use it to demand the protocol specification.
"My toaster is broken, it can't cook pizza!". GNU/Linux isn't designed to run Windows programs. The fact that one particular program running on it can passably do so using emulation is an interesting novelty that benefits some people while transitioning away from the programs in question. It is a stopgap, not a good long-term solution.
Another important item from the release notes:
Mail to debian-announce
News on www.debian.org
Congrats to the Debian project!
It's a relative reference. You found http://movies.apple.com/movies/wb/harry_potter_gob let/hp_gobletoffire-ref.mov. Download that file. Run "strings hp_gobletoffire-ref.mov" and look at the result:
So grab one of those files from the same URL base: http://movies.apple.com/movies/wb/harry_potter_gob let/hp_gobletoffire_m480.mov
You could also try mplayerplug-in, which can figure out the reference; personally, I don't like having videos playing embedded in my browser, so I always just dig out the URL and download them.
Unfortunately, the audio codec in all three is Quicktime audio (QDM2) rather than AAC or MP3, so mplayer and other players can't play it without binary-only codecs. The Narnia trailer, on the other hand, uses MP3.
The other major problem in building self-driving cars is that unless everyone is using them, a self-driving car has to be able to share the road with human drivers, not just other self-driving cars (which are much easier to get information from). Many of the demonstrations of groups of self-driving cars used communication between cars, or at the very least made assumptions about the ways those other cars would drive. A real self-driving system could not make such assumptions. Furthermore, even if all cars become self-driving, it isn't necessarily a good idea to trust the information provided by every other car on the road.
Bitmap fonts are not copyrightable. Truetype fonts are copyrightable.
From the Debian Free Software Guidelines, as well as the Open Source Definition:
Your license does not permit specific kinds of modified works from being distributed under the same terms.
I can understand the issue you are trying to solve: you don't want translations that don't come from the original, most likely because that would result in compounding errors due to mistranslation or limited translation. However, this is just one possible way that someone could make your program worse; they could also introduce bugs, security issues, standards-violations/extensions, or just features you don't like. Attempting to prevent people from making the program worse will also prevent people from exercising the right to create derivative works.
A much better solution is to require that modified works are clearly labelled as modified, and not represented as the original. Licenses such as the GPL and the zlib license do exactly that. This way, people can still modify the program for any purpose, but they won't make you look bad in the process, only themselves.
Another minor issue with your license is the fact that you require people to provide an offer for source code that is valid in perpetuity, without providing the alternative of just providing source code at the same time as providing the binary. This means that if someone ever provided a version of your program on their website, they would have to keep a copy of the source for that version indefinitely. This gets even worse if they distributed several versions.
These are just a few symptoms of what happens when you attempt to write your own license rather than using a well-established Free Software / Open Source license.