- AFS server software costs money (from Transarc), though you can get linux client software for free.
AFAIK, OpenAFS is a complete implementation, and it is available for a couple of platforms (not just for Linux on the client, and definitely for Linux on the server).
BitKeeper is not even "free to use". According to the license, I have to use it in a way which does not cripple the Open Logging feature. In other words, the context in which the program is run is restricted. This is even worse than what you have to do when you use most source-less gratuit software.
The submitter of the story obviously linked to the wrong article.
The court says that the idea of an FAQ is not copyrightable (good thing), that a list of common questions relating to a certain subject is not copyrightable (good thing), and that in this particular case, the answers where so different that they weren't infringing (we haven't got the lists for side-by-side comparison, so this remains unclear, but there sin't something fishy about it in itself).
To me, it seems that the court made a reasonable decision. In particular, it did not rule that FAQs (which usually include the answers) are never protected by copyright.
They have exported the Windows source code to countries such as Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Isreal, Hungary, Japan, and even Singapore. Check the list yourself.
The memory of the Erfurt school murders is still fresh, and the German Government is drafting legislation which will be discussed in parliament soon.
On the one hand, access to firearms shall be restricted even more, on the other, videos and games with explicit violence shall be banned completely so that even adults cannot access them. Otherwise, the government fears that parents might give them to their children, which is currently explicitly allowed by law for works which are considered harmful to children and teenagers.
Some kind of Internet regulation is planned as well to enforce this even for free content you can download etc.
As far as I know, Cygnus was profitable, at least in the Golden Years just before Open Source more or less hit the mainstream press. There is an interview at developerWorks in which Cygnus Solutions cofounder Michael Tiemann claims that they were profitable until the venture capitalists came, since investors "give you money so you can actually accelerate the rate of spending versus revenue".
It's probably not too easy to turn back the clock for Red Hat, as there is increasing competition on the GCC customization market, where companies pay immense sums for adaption of GCC to certain microprocessor platforms and support for that GCC derivate (at least they paid these sums when Cygnus didn't have much competition!).
Yes, but if the service is highly distributed, sites can participate without immense bandwidth requirements.
Look at IRC: If there was only a single IRC server for the whole world, it would require a tremendous amount of bandwidth (and processing power). The way IRC is distributed, individual servers have got moderate bandwidth requirements (a constant rate of 200 kBit/sec or so for IRCNet, IIRC, and substantial bandwidth reserves for resyncing). Similar rules apply to Usenet (although the bandwidth requirements are moderate only if you don't need binaries).
This isn't self-defense, but self-delusion. Slashdot and Sourceforge have already become part of the corporate Internet. In fact, Slashdot is a fine example for the content-dividing effect of the Internet: The Internet is now so large that you cannot pay the bandwidth for a successful site.
If you'd chosen Usenet or some of the IRC networks as examples, I would have agreed. Centrally administered services can hardly keep the spirit of the earlier days, but truely distributed services can do, if they supported by many companies and individuals, not only by providing content, but also by offering infrastructure.
Vint Cerf seems to view users mainly as consumers. He doesn't even mention the danger of proprietary protocols, trade secrets and patents, and the domination of big media conglomerates, which has already started to divide the Internet in the content-producing Rich and the content-consuming Poor.
It's unfortunate that the days of the beginning Internet mass media, on which everyone could publish more or less equally, rapidly become history, and nobody seems to regret it.
moving on. i know of hundreds of buisiness that use free software and make a profit because of it, so while there are only a few companies that make money selling GPL'ed software,
There are basically two different patent systems: Registration patents (patents are solely registered without being examined, to prove existance at a certain point of time), and patents which are actually reviewed by the patent office. France has got registration patents, for example, but the US Patent and Trademark Office is expected to review patents.
Defies the whole persona of vim. vim loses what makes it useful when you stick it in a window and add menus and buttons.
I'm not so sure. I think it would be great if you could add the contents of feedback forms using vi in your favorite web browser (it's already possible if you use w3m, for example, or W3 using viper, but some people prefer graphical browsers at a decent speed).
On many systems, mandatory, periodic rebooting is part of the ressource management of the operating system (think of memory leaks, descriptor leaks, and so on). Even if you implement RAM using ferrite-core memory (or something else, like this new approach), these maintainance reboots won't go away, and they won't become faster.
In any case, such memory devices would be great for storing the journal of certain file systems, or even as replacement for traditional mass storage.
Not in the US, and not at this time. Given enough abuse, perhaps legislators in one or more of the major markets will change the law. There are only piddlin' little gaps now, but I wonder what would happen if there was a really serious rift in IP law between the US and the EC, or China?
Patent legislation is bound to international treaties. Unlike the US, especially European countries tend to follow treaties they have signed, so I wouldn't expect dramatic differences in legislation in the near future.
But maybe this is an interesting possibility: If you don't follow the Kyoto protocol, we won't implement TRIPS.;-)
If they do decide to try to get royalties, they will find out that a lot of people are jumping to other technologies.
You just wait until the technology is widely deployed, and then start to enforce patents. Unlike trademarks, patents do not become invalid if they are not enforced.
Slashdot Mirror
Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university.
I hope they don't offer public console access to their SPARC boxes (Stop-A/Stop-N is your friend).
- AFS server software costs money (from Transarc), though you can get linux client software for free.
AFAIK, OpenAFS is a complete implementation, and it is available for a couple of platforms (not just for Linux on the client, and definitely for Linux on the server).
In case the site is slashdotted, you can get the images from there and there.
BitKeeper is not even "free to use". According to the license, I have to use it in a way which does not cripple the Open Logging feature. In other words, the context in which the program is run is restricted. This is even worse than what you have to do when you use most source-less gratuit software.
The same risks exist today with ASCII domain names: transposed letters "1lI", "O0", playing tricks with "@" and most user agents.
You just must not take anything for granted which you see or read on the web.
The submitter of the story obviously linked to the wrong article.
The court says that the idea of an FAQ is not copyrightable (good thing), that a list of common questions relating to a certain subject is not copyrightable (good thing), and that in this particular case, the answers where so different that they weren't infringing (we haven't got the lists for side-by-side comparison, so this remains unclear, but there sin't something fishy about it in itself).
To me, it seems that the court made a reasonable decision. In particular, it did not rule that FAQs (which usually include the answers) are never protected by copyright.
They have exported the Windows source code to countries such as Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Isreal, Hungary, Japan, and even Singapore. Check the list yourself.
Maybe it's time for another trial.
They could port the GNU C Library, for example. Wasn't it first developed on SunOS anyway?
The memory of the Erfurt school murders is still fresh, and the German Government is drafting legislation which will be discussed in parliament soon.
On the one hand, access to firearms shall be restricted even more, on the other, videos and games with explicit violence shall be banned completely so that even adults cannot access them. Otherwise, the government fears that parents might give them to their children, which is currently explicitly allowed by law for works which are considered harmful to children and teenagers.
Some kind of Internet regulation is planned as well to enforce this even for free content you can download etc.
Gcc generates the wrong result assember opcodes under some circumstances at some target CPUs? This is good?
Most compilers do, especially if the source code was written by C programmers who don't know the C language (as defined in the standard) very well.
Also, it does a shitty job at optimizing at anything above Pentium on Intel platform. Just forget good code on PII, PIII and PIV.
Simply buy an Athlon if you need the speed.
It's to few people working on it to keep up. The horrible bugs must go!
You might want to submit them to the bug tracking system, along with proper test cases.
As far as I know, Cygnus was profitable, at least in the Golden Years just before Open Source more or less hit the mainstream press. There is an interview at developerWorks in which Cygnus Solutions cofounder Michael Tiemann claims that they were profitable until the venture capitalists came, since investors "give you money so you can actually accelerate the rate of spending versus revenue".
It's probably not too easy to turn back the clock for Red Hat, as there is increasing competition on the GCC customization market, where companies pay immense sums for adaption of GCC to certain microprocessor platforms and support for that GCC derivate (at least they paid these sums when Cygnus didn't have much competition!).
Yes, but if the service is highly distributed, sites can participate without immense bandwidth requirements.
Look at IRC: If there was only a single IRC server for the whole world, it would require a tremendous amount of bandwidth (and processing power). The way IRC is distributed, individual servers have got moderate bandwidth requirements (a constant rate of 200 kBit/sec or so for IRCNet, IIRC, and substantial bandwidth reserves for resyncing). Similar rules apply to Usenet (although the bandwidth requirements are moderate only if you don't need binaries).
This isn't self-defense, but self-delusion. Slashdot and Sourceforge have already become part of the corporate Internet. In fact, Slashdot is a fine example for the content-dividing effect of the Internet: The Internet is now so large that you cannot pay the bandwidth for a successful site.
If you'd chosen Usenet or some of the IRC networks as examples, I would have agreed. Centrally administered services can hardly keep the spirit of the earlier days, but truely distributed services can do, if they supported by many companies and individuals, not only by providing content, but also by offering infrastructure.
Vint Cerf seems to view users mainly as consumers. He doesn't even mention the danger of proprietary protocols, trade secrets and patents, and the domination of big media conglomerates, which has already started to divide the Internet in the content-producing Rich and the content-consuming Poor.
It's unfortunate that the days of the beginning Internet mass media, on which everyone could publish more or less equally, rapidly become history, and nobody seems to regret it.
Of course. We've just doubled the bandwidth, now we can read all Slashdot stories twice.
This is Moglen's follow-up article referenced in the first one.
No need to read Linux Today, everything has already been posted to Slashdot.
moving on. i know of hundreds of buisiness that use free software and make a profit because of it, so while there are only a few companies that make money selling GPL'ed software,
Microsoft itself is probably among these companies.
There are basically two different patent systems: Registration patents (patents are solely registered without being examined, to prove existance at a certain point of time), and patents which are actually reviewed by the patent office. France has got registration patents, for example, but the US Patent and Trademark Office is expected to review patents.
Defies the whole persona of vim. vim loses what makes it useful when
you stick it in a window and add menus and buttons.
I'm not so sure. I think it would be great if you could add the contents
of feedback forms using vi in your favorite web browser (it's already
possible if you use w3m, for example, or W3 using viper, but some people
prefer graphical browsers at a decent speed).
On many systems, mandatory, periodic rebooting is part of the ressource management of the operating system (think of memory leaks, descriptor leaks, and so on). Even if you implement RAM using ferrite-core memory (or something else, like this new approach), these maintainance reboots won't go away, and they won't become faster.
In any case, such memory devices would be great for storing the journal of certain file systems, or even as replacement for traditional mass storage.
Not in the US, and not at this time. Given enough abuse, perhaps legislators in one or more of the major markets will change the law. There are only piddlin' little gaps now, but I wonder what would happen if there was a really serious rift in IP law between the US and the EC, or China?
;-)
Patent legislation is bound to international treaties. Unlike the US, especially European countries tend to follow treaties they have signed, so I wouldn't expect dramatic differences in legislation in the near future.
But maybe this is an interesting possibility: If you don't follow the Kyoto protocol, we won't implement TRIPS.
If they do decide to try to get royalties, they will find out that a lot of people are jumping to other technologies.
You just wait until the technology is widely deployed, and then start to enforce patents. Unlike trademarks, patents do not become invalid if they are not enforced.
No one will notice another idler....
For some channels, this assumption is false. IRC is used for coordinating illegal activities other than cracking computers.
All they need to do to monitor IRC is login...
No, it's more complicated. People are interested in silently monitoring IRC, and this is a bit more complicated.