I think you are correct. I see the big problem here as the precedent it sets. You have to realize that XFree86 contains LOTS of code copyrighted by lots of people and companies. If each of them puts this new clause on all their contributions, only with "The XFree86 Project, Inc." replaced by the individual or company's name, you rapidly end up with a piece of software that requires acknowledgement to potentially dozens or hundreds of people either in the end-user documentation or on the screen in the software itself (which admittedly might not be quite as odious if it's hidden away somewhere not likely to be seen without looking around for it).
And that's just for XFree86 alone. Imagine the precedent this sets for other software projects - if everybody had these kinds of clauses, imagine the printed manuals shipped with a boxed Linux distribution? Ugh. This is why everybody stopped using the original BSD license, it became clear that for sufficient numbers of dependencies and contributors to projects each separately licensing their copyrighted code, the overall results is an unmanageable mess. Thus people adopted the modified BSD license, and Berkeley finally relicensed (all/most) of their old BSD-licensed code under the new modified terms in 1999, and everybody rejoiced.
XFree86 seems to be trying to throwback to something similarly annoying, though perhaps slightly diluted. Given that the community as a whole has rejected these "advertising clauses" soundly, it's just a complete rejection of the concept of playing nice to go and add it back in to a high profile project like XFree86 to address some imagined wrong.
No, there is a no use of their trademark in advertising clause. That's definitely not GPL-incompatible and is almost identical to the last clause of the generally accepted and used BSD license (see here for example). In the general (modified) BSD license, this clause is definitely considered GPL compatible, so there's no reason this should be different. In fact, that clause is what differentiates the "modified BSD License" from the "MIT License".
The real problem is the addition of the advertising clause, as found in the original (GPL-incompatible) BSD license. They've tried to "update" the advertising clause by allowing it to be satisfied by including of an acknowledgement message in the software itself, but still many people will find that annoying unclear, and unnecessarily redundant. And probably GPL incompatible.
If you think Genesis is more than a literary framework, then you are effectively sticking your fingers in your ears and tuning out the evidence. Any scientist will admit that there's a lot we still don't understand about the evolutionary process, but only somebody choosing ignorance or suffering from insanity could interpret the vast amount of observational evidence as supporting a literalist interpretation of the Biblical Genesis.
It's quite clear that the Old Testament is the collection of the writings of many plainly different Jewish authors from somewhat different periods of time, smoothed out slightly and rolled into one. You may believe it is divinely inspired if you choose, but God didn't come down to Earth and set pen to paper himself.
Fundamentalists are scary people - you can't reason with those of any faith who actively reject rational thought.
No, he's not Dre or Timbaland - but we've heard plenty of Timbaland and Dre already. It's nice to hear something fresh, even if it's still a bit unrefined. To me, the Grey Album sounds tight for a small time DJ, not necessarily polished and admittedly a bit uneven in execution quality, but interesting for the conceptual quality of the mix selections and for what I hear as a fresher style than much of the mainstream hip hop stuff.
Anyway, I didn't really like the Black Album when I heard it the first few times. The Grey Album clicked right away for me. Admittedly, I'm not sufficiently familiar with the underground/"mash up" genre to really compare this work to its peers in that sense.
You never know with big companies - there could be contracts at play here that even the inside people aren't aware of. Why knows, IBM may have the right to resell "modified" versions of MS Office altered for compatibility with IBM branded hardware? Maybe there is some way they can finagle the right to do this somehow? Otherwise, they could just buy CrossOver Office and work on perfecting it (though I'm under the impression it's pretty good already, I've never actually tried it myself).
Some of the stuff the Sci-Fi channel does is crap, sure, but I think they take a lot of risks (relatively speaking in the industry) and they do produce good shows. Stargate SG-1 is a great show at times (some seasons more than others) - thank God Sci Fi picked it up and gave it a home. Farscape was well loved by many Slashdotters, and Battlestar Galactica (the pilots at least) were a hell of a lot better than 95% of the sci-fi that gets made out there.
I can't defend airing crap like Crossing Over and the alien hoax shit they show sometimes, but they are just trying to make a profitable line up, even if they sometimes seem to drastically misunderstand their core market (people who like watching TV shows featuring aliens aren't usually the people who actually believe in alien abductions...at least from my experience).
Depends. The nice thing is there are lots of readily available technologies to make ethanol, thanks to its many industrial and... other uses. Generally people argue that ethanol is a terrible source of energy because they look at ethanol production from corn in the midwest United States as a model - which is a very silly and inefficient way to make ethanol since growing and harvesting corn is quite costly in energy usage. However, this method is heavily subsidized by the government in the US making it vaguely economically plausible when you account for all the government intervention. There are however economically feasible methods of producing ethanol that don't involve corn growing or harvesting at all - broadly speaking, "bioethanol" refers to ethanol produced from cellulose-laden materials, which are pretty universally available and mighty cheap since they aren't generally very good at feeding humans and they tend to grow without much irrigation or human intervention needed. Not to mention all the wood chips, grass clippings, cardboard, corn husks/stover, and other "waste" sources of cellulose out there in the US. Either way you do it, though, the key step of ethanol production step is fermentation, which still relies on yeast colonies.
But the real trick is reducing the costs of processing cellulose to ethanol to make it competitive with processing glucose from corn (which is more easily broken down) into ethanol. This is trivial when you eliminate all the subsidies, it's just a bit harder when you consider the heavy corn ethanol subsidies. However, companies like Iogen have been producing much more efficient techniques such as enzymatic hydrolysis for breaking down cellulose into an easily fermentable form - which they goes into the yeast fermentation process. The technology is already being deployed at modest scale factories.
So the answer is that yes, yeast do the fermentation. And to make fossil fuel-free, net energy positive ethanol, you just add some weak acid or strong enzymes to the mix earlier on to make sugars that are more easily fermented. As for carbon emissions (as CO2 or otherwise), which you mention, ethanol from cellulose "consumes" as much carbon in the growing plants as it releases when combusted, and in that sense it is both renewable and net-carbon-neutral to the environment. So does ethanol from corn, though the fact that the overall energy production is negative in that case means that the energy deficit has to be made up, generally by burning fossil fuels to generate energy for growing and havesting corn.
Which brings us back to many people complaining here on Slashdot that ethanol is bad for the environment. They just don't understand that ethanol != corn ethanol.
Though you're generally right about the plethora of mediocre MMORPGs out there, I knew some people involved in Mythica, and they are surely not mediocre developers. And from what I've heard from them, the game was shaping up to be anything but a mediocre release, which makes this announcement quite shocking. I understand it from a business perspective, but it seems like this game had a really good shot at serious success. The naming issue was probably easily addressable, and surely is not behind the cancellation.
Um maybe because the software development was paid for by us, the taxpayers of the United States? In fact, by law, software developed by the government is supposed to be uncopyrightable, and when released to the public, should be placed into the public domain (obviously when not part of maintaining national security or some other classified system).
I think the primary purpose of this license is for software developed by NASA contractors that NASA wants to develop in an Open Source compatible fashion. Software like CLIPS that was originally developed by NASA is in fact already released in the public domain, in accordance with the law on the subject.
Wait a second - I don't think you understand the GPL. NASA is only required to provide source code to people who they have provided binaries to. If they have used it internally, they are not obligated to provide source code, though it's generally considered polite to do so if your improvements would be generally useful to the rest of the world. If NASA was selling or distributing binary-only copies of Flight Linux and refusing to provide source code, THAT would be a violation of the GPL.
Of course it would be nice if they'd realize that a Real Time Embedded OS is not a munition or a satellite control system itself. I understand them not wanting to release the apps that run on it, but surely they could contribute most of the patches to the kernel that they use.
Are you looking for a job? I sense you may have a financially rewarding future in the marketing department. Also, I need somebody to help writing business plans, and it seems you have that special sauce investors are looking for down perfectly.
Don't worry, you may have a small penis, but at least you have class. The Slashdot crowd seems to prefer that Ford thing they saw during the Superbowl - fricking NASCAR watching Americans have no taste (yes, I'm American, I'm allowed to diss our people). The geek crowd is really good at measuring features in their technogadgets, but not so good at discerning good taste or class in aesthetic purchases. Geeks with Ferraris... it's a beautiful thing...
No - generally Hubble data is highly prized - in my experience working in astrophysics (quite a few years back), when we had data from a Hubble run, we'd eek as many papers and as much good stuff out of it as possible. No, astronomers put an absurd amount of time and effort into analyzing their data, or rather there are always a couple of grad students and undergrads around to run data through the ringer.
Especially since data is generally so incredibly noisy it takes huge volumes of it to get a reasonable S/N to create convincing evidence of anything. Unlike laboratory sciences where you can run controlled experiments, your lab is trillions of miles away and you are relying on lots of hacks with optics and data processing to figure out what the hell is going on. Oh yeah, and you have to remember to be pointing your measuring equipment at the lab at the right moment when interesting things are happening, or you can forget about useful data.:)
Yeah, apparently certain IP addresses or subnets were on the Welchia slam list - a web site of mine got moved to a new IP address and I started seeing all sorts of weird HTTP traffic. Apparently the IP address I was moved to was on a Welchia list of some sort, and every two or three days lots and lots of Welchia infected hosts would send a packet my way. The result was about a thousand spurious connnections a day wasting a modest amount of bandwidth and totally screwing up our site statistics until we figured out how to block these particular requests.
This might be true (assuming post has some factuality behind it and isn't just a troll), but it may be for a different reason than you think. There are plenty of very bright, hardworking CS grads from Harvard, MIT and other top tier schools (I know those two very well personally), and the Waterloo and Carnegie Mellon CS folks I've met were quite impressive as well. The problem is that for an average Fortune 500 company it is difficult to get access to the upper echelon grads from these schools - previously, they would go work at the best startups (back when I graduated from college), these days they seem to often go to Microsoft, and other leading software companies. Developing general business software and IT crap for your average Fortune 500 company is not a desireable gig for a top-tier CS grad, even in a crappy market. So the students you'd get access to at those schools are the middling and lower tier of CS grads. At Wash U, on the other hand, you may have had access to the top CS grads, for whom your offers may have looked pretty sweet.
I remember Trilogy Software out in Austin - there were a few people there who had fallen into this fallacy about Waterloo ("Waterloo grads are the best because we've had the best luck with our Waterloo grads"). At my old company we had the best luck with our MIT grads - probably because we were in Boston, and had a lot of MIT connections, so we were able to hire some good MIT grads. This seems to be a consequence of the availability heuristic (to use a term from social psychology), not a meaningful assessment of the capabilities, motivation, or anything else of these schools' graduates.
Massachusetts has a similar law. You are supposed to self-report any such items for the Use Tax. Hehehe. I believe I read that New York does as well now. These things are of course generally unenforceable, and I would guess that only large companies would even think to do something like this.
Okay, okay, I misread the post. You can all stop flaming me now. I thought it said it required patching the Linux kernel _to fix_ rather than to exploit. In any case, it was only meant in jest, there was no need whatsoever for the mod slamming and flamefest.
Close, but it's more specific than that. The compensation they received for distributing their code under the GPL was the same compensation anybody gets for distributing code under the GPL - the guarantee that the licensee will have to release any of their modifications and improvements to SCO's code under the GPL. So SCO got to benefit from others' contributions and improvements to their contributed code, such as the linux-abi code that they developed and released to improve compatibility between Linux and SCO UNIX.
I see a lot of posts saying Linux will beat SCO in a court of law, and that a DDOS on SCO's website doesn't really accomplish anything. I see a lot o frustrated people angry at SCO who may take some momentary delight in their predicament but when asked sincerely would recognize that a DDOS isn't going to win Linux new friends or victory in court or in the court of public opinion.
Re:No joke
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Unfortunately, this is really the media's fault. There were several high profile articles that quoted posts modded +5, Funny on Slashdot's original article about MyDoom and cited them as the voice of the Open Source community, taking glee at this new virus. It was essentially cited as evidence that the "nefarious" Open Source community was somehow behind this virus or honestly approved of it. Basically these people don't understand how Slashdot works, that we find humor in even the most macabre topics, and that one person's comment doesn't mean anything more than that one random person thought something. As another poster said, it's like quoting a guy in a bar in LA and saying "people in LA think this...".
Anyway, I know and you know how to spot a troll/humorous post/etc. on Slashdot. And we know that people's opinions go all over the map on many issues discussed on Slashdot. Joe Reporter doesn't get this and there is a real risk of them printing more smear-stories about a community that like-it-or-not you will be perceived as part of by virtue of posting here. It's reasonable for us to try not to make that community look bad - not saying not to speak your mind, but to keep in mind that in a high profile story like this, even though you may be Joe Nobody, your words could be used against you and lots of other people.
Alright, you invite to join Orkut, and I will invite women. Lots of women. Some of them even like geeky guys (assuming you know how to shower and brush your teeth). I will bring these women into _your_ social network and introduce you to them. That's right, you could actually meet real women. Invite me and you MIGHT even get laid.
Think about it - can you afford not to invite the Fnkmaster into your Orkut family? I didn't think so... don't be afraid... push that invite button...
Somebody showed me a business plan for a company looking for seed capital to do exactly this back in late '99. Even _then_ it was underwhelming, and that's saying something.
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And that's just for XFree86 alone. Imagine the precedent this sets for other software projects - if everybody had these kinds of clauses, imagine the printed manuals shipped with a boxed Linux distribution? Ugh. This is why everybody stopped using the original BSD license, it became clear that for sufficient numbers of dependencies and contributors to projects each separately licensing their copyrighted code, the overall results is an unmanageable mess. Thus people adopted the modified BSD license, and Berkeley finally relicensed (all/most) of their old BSD-licensed code under the new modified terms in 1999, and everybody rejoiced.
XFree86 seems to be trying to throwback to something similarly annoying, though perhaps slightly diluted. Given that the community as a whole has rejected these "advertising clauses" soundly, it's just a complete rejection of the concept of playing nice to go and add it back in to a high profile project like XFree86 to address some imagined wrong.
The real problem is the addition of the advertising clause, as found in the original (GPL-incompatible) BSD license. They've tried to "update" the advertising clause by allowing it to be satisfied by including of an acknowledgement message in the software itself, but still many people will find that annoying unclear, and unnecessarily redundant. And probably GPL incompatible.
It's quite clear that the Old Testament is the collection of the writings of many plainly different Jewish authors from somewhat different periods of time, smoothed out slightly and rolled into one. You may believe it is divinely inspired if you choose, but God didn't come down to Earth and set pen to paper himself.
Fundamentalists are scary people - you can't reason with those of any faith who actively reject rational thought.
Anyway, I didn't really like the Black Album when I heard it the first few times. The Grey Album clicked right away for me. Admittedly, I'm not sufficiently familiar with the underground/"mash up" genre to really compare this work to its peers in that sense.
Never mind, I read the article and now I realize there is no way this guy from the Lotus division really knows what the hell he's talking about.
You never know with big companies - there could be contracts at play here that even the inside people aren't aware of. Why knows, IBM may have the right to resell "modified" versions of MS Office altered for compatibility with IBM branded hardware? Maybe there is some way they can finagle the right to do this somehow? Otherwise, they could just buy CrossOver Office and work on perfecting it (though I'm under the impression it's pretty good already, I've never actually tried it myself).
I can't defend airing crap like Crossing Over and the alien hoax shit they show sometimes, but they are just trying to make a profitable line up, even if they sometimes seem to drastically misunderstand their core market (people who like watching TV shows featuring aliens aren't usually the people who actually believe in alien abductions...at least from my experience).
But the real trick is reducing the costs of processing cellulose to ethanol to make it competitive with processing glucose from corn (which is more easily broken down) into ethanol. This is trivial when you eliminate all the subsidies, it's just a bit harder when you consider the heavy corn ethanol subsidies. However, companies like Iogen have been producing much more efficient techniques such as enzymatic hydrolysis for breaking down cellulose into an easily fermentable form - which they goes into the yeast fermentation process. The technology is already being deployed at modest scale factories.
So the answer is that yes, yeast do the fermentation. And to make fossil fuel-free, net energy positive ethanol, you just add some weak acid or strong enzymes to the mix earlier on to make sugars that are more easily fermented. As for carbon emissions (as CO2 or otherwise), which you mention, ethanol from cellulose "consumes" as much carbon in the growing plants as it releases when combusted, and in that sense it is both renewable and net-carbon-neutral to the environment. So does ethanol from corn, though the fact that the overall energy production is negative in that case means that the energy deficit has to be made up, generally by burning fossil fuels to generate energy for growing and havesting corn.
Which brings us back to many people complaining here on Slashdot that ethanol is bad for the environment. They just don't understand that ethanol != corn ethanol.
Though you're generally right about the plethora of mediocre MMORPGs out there, I knew some people involved in Mythica, and they are surely not mediocre developers. And from what I've heard from them, the game was shaping up to be anything but a mediocre release, which makes this announcement quite shocking. I understand it from a business perspective, but it seems like this game had a really good shot at serious success. The naming issue was probably easily addressable, and surely is not behind the cancellation.
I think the primary purpose of this license is for software developed by NASA contractors that NASA wants to develop in an Open Source compatible fashion. Software like CLIPS that was originally developed by NASA is in fact already released in the public domain, in accordance with the law on the subject.
Of course it would be nice if they'd realize that a Real Time Embedded OS is not a munition or a satellite control system itself. I understand them not wanting to release the apps that run on it, but surely they could contribute most of the patches to the kernel that they use.
Are you looking for a job? I sense you may have a financially rewarding future in the marketing department. Also, I need somebody to help writing business plans, and it seems you have that special sauce investors are looking for down perfectly.
Don't worry, you may have a small penis, but at least you have class. The Slashdot crowd seems to prefer that Ford thing they saw during the Superbowl - fricking NASCAR watching Americans have no taste (yes, I'm American, I'm allowed to diss our people). The geek crowd is really good at measuring features in their technogadgets, but not so good at discerning good taste or class in aesthetic purchases. Geeks with Ferraris... it's a beautiful thing...
Especially since data is generally so incredibly noisy it takes huge volumes of it to get a reasonable S/N to create convincing evidence of anything. Unlike laboratory sciences where you can run controlled experiments, your lab is trillions of miles away and you are relying on lots of hacks with optics and data processing to figure out what the hell is going on. Oh yeah, and you have to remember to be pointing your measuring equipment at the lab at the right moment when interesting things are happening, or you can forget about useful data.
Yeah, apparently certain IP addresses or subnets were on the Welchia slam list - a web site of mine got moved to a new IP address and I started seeing all sorts of weird HTTP traffic. Apparently the IP address I was moved to was on a Welchia list of some sort, and every two or three days lots and lots of Welchia infected hosts would send a packet my way. The result was about a thousand spurious connnections a day wasting a modest amount of bandwidth and totally screwing up our site statistics until we figured out how to block these particular requests.
I remember Trilogy Software out in Austin - there were a few people there who had fallen into this fallacy about Waterloo ("Waterloo grads are the best because we've had the best luck with our Waterloo grads"). At my old company we had the best luck with our MIT grads - probably because we were in Boston, and had a lot of MIT connections, so we were able to hire some good MIT grads. This seems to be a consequence of the availability heuristic (to use a term from social psychology), not a meaningful assessment of the capabilities, motivation, or anything else of these schools' graduates.
Massachusetts has a similar law. You are supposed to self-report any such items for the Use Tax. Hehehe. I believe I read that New York does as well now. These things are of course generally unenforceable, and I would guess that only large companies would even think to do something like this.
Okay, okay, I misread the post. You can all stop flaming me now. I thought it said it required patching the Linux kernel _to fix_ rather than to exploit. In any case, it was only meant in jest, there was no need whatsoever for the mod slamming and flamefest.
Fixing a bug in OpenBSD requires patching a Linux kernel? What will they think of next?! Installing Outlook for fix a Solaris root exploit?
I am so confused. Are we googling slashdot or slashdotting google? AAaAHHH! This verbing of nouns shall not stand!
Close, but it's more specific than that. The compensation they received for distributing their code under the GPL was the same compensation anybody gets for distributing code under the GPL - the guarantee that the licensee will have to release any of their modifications and improvements to SCO's code under the GPL. So SCO got to benefit from others' contributions and improvements to their contributed code, such as the linux-abi code that they developed and released to improve compatibility between Linux and SCO UNIX.
I see a lot of posts saying Linux will beat SCO in a court of law, and that a DDOS on SCO's website doesn't really accomplish anything. I see a lot o frustrated people angry at SCO who may take some momentary delight in their predicament but when asked sincerely would recognize that a DDOS isn't going to win Linux new friends or victory in court or in the court of public opinion.
Anyway, I know and you know how to spot a troll/humorous post/etc. on Slashdot. And we know that people's opinions go all over the map on many issues discussed on Slashdot. Joe Reporter doesn't get this and there is a real risk of them printing more smear-stories about a community that like-it-or-not you will be perceived as part of by virtue of posting here. It's reasonable for us to try not to make that community look bad - not saying not to speak your mind, but to keep in mind that in a high profile story like this, even though you may be Joe Nobody, your words could be used against you and lots of other people.
Think about it - can you afford not to invite the Fnkmaster into your Orkut family? I didn't think so... don't be afraid... push that invite button...
Somebody showed me a business plan for a company looking for seed capital to do exactly this back in late '99. Even _then_ it was underwhelming, and that's saying something.