Now lets say you have a huge catalog of songs you'd like to defend. You're a big mega corporation so what you do is you hire developers to analyze songs for fingerprints and -- funny how pedantic algorithms get to be -- submit anything over the 'safe harbor' limit to Control Gate C (that being the legal arm which churns out thousands of take down notices).
Anybody implementing an automated system like that without a human well-versed in copyright law manually validating the list would be skating on very thin ice. DMCA takedown notices require the notifier to swear under penalty of perjury that the information contained in the DMCA takedown notice is accurate. Would you swear under penalty of perjury that such a system is always accurate? That there are no bugs?
On the other hand, if you assume that there is a proper human validation in the legal arm you mention rather than simply "churning them out", then that human can quite reasonably be given enough discretion to avoid cases like this.
This is not the case. Apple don't perform in-depth testing in this manner; they don't have access to the source code and some developers have already successfully bypassed the rules of the App Store by hiding functionality as easter eggs. It is trivial to put malicious code in an iPhone app that won't be triggered until after the application is already in the App Store. The security restrictions on what the iPhone OS lets you do doesn't save you from this kind of attack either; it sounds like all an equivalent iPhone app would have to do is embed a UIWebView and wait for people to enter their information.
VMWare Server 1.x was great. For 2.x, they decided to ditch the native client in favour of an awful web interface that barely worked. That's one of the reasons why you don't hear many people singing its praises any more. It went from being useful to being absolutely horrible to use. VirtualBox is also free to use, it understands VMWare images, and it doesn't have that awful web interface.
Unlocked merely means you can use it with any compatible service provider; it's not artificially locked to a single provider. Just because a phone is unlocked, it doesn't mean you have root access on it.
And in response to Van Hoof's comments about VMware, Stallman said people should not write about their work on Planet GNOME "unless VmWare (sic) becomes free software. GNOME should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing."
Emphasis mine. Of course they are allowed to talk about it. But they shouldn't expect Planet GNOME to publish it.
I don't know a terrible lot about the open source movement, but from what I've read here and elsewhere, Stallman's an extremist, and that's NOT a good role model to follow.
Stallman has nothing to do with the open source movement, he's the leader of the free software movement. The free software movement is about morals and ideals, the open-source movement is about being liberal with licensing for more immediately pragmatic purposes, such as raising the quality of the code. There is overlap in licensing, code and developer mindshare between the two movements. It seems to me a good portion of the GNOME developer community want to be open-source developers but not necessarily free software developers. If this is the case then GNU is not the right place for GNOME to be organised.
Why would code compiled on your system run any faster than the same code on someone else's system?
Emphasis mine. You are making an unwarranted assumption - that it is the same code. When compiling a port, you can often set flags to change which functionality is compiled into the port. For example, if you are running a server, you can specify that support for X11 should be omitted. Generic binaries can't be as flexible.
Firstly, Android is based on Linux, and the Linux kernel is GPLv2. Secondly, the reason why I ask is that one of the strengths of the GPLv2 is that it is based solely on copyright - it isn't an EULA, it only comes into effect when you copy. If no copying takes place, I fail to see why the distributor-not-copier needs a license or permission from the copyright holder. If they don't need permission, then they don't need to agree to the GPL.
Let me put it another way - I own a G1, which came preinstalled with Android. If I wanted to sell it to somebody, would I be bound by the GPL? If so, why? I haven't made any copies of the code. If not, then what is the difference between me doing it once and a phone company doing it a million times?
Maybe not in this case, but what about if a company outsourced phone manufacturing? The external company would be the ones making the copies by preinstalling the software onto the phones, and they would be fulfilling the terms of the GPL by providing the source to the phone company. At this point, the phone company haven't made any copies, they have essentially just bought a shipment of goods. What compels them to be bound by the terms of the GPL? Don't you actually have to make copies to be bound by its terms?
(You know damn well that was the only point of bnetd.)
Scroll up and read the questions. There's plenty of interest there for features that an open-source server could provide without waiting around for Blizzard to implement it. Data feeds. APIs. Federation. Solutions to congestion. Alternative platforms. Interoperability with other services. The problem of app rejections. LAN play. Reputations.
If you seriously think that the only reason for an open-source server is so people can copy the game illegally, then you are an idiot.
How many questions there would have been answered by bnetd already, had Blizzard not sued them for daring to be compatible with Battle.net? And nary a mention of the debacle - nice to see how these days Slashdot as a whole rolls over on Free Software as soon as they are bribed with something shiny.
The people downloading illegally never wanted to be legit in the first place..otherwise they would have gone to a store....
Not necessarily. Illegal downloads are often more convenient than legitimate copies. You don't have to go to a store, any DRM has been removed, there's often a greater selection available, and the products are sometimes better. For instance, why would I buy the crappy region 2 DVD with none of the extra features the region 1 DVD has? Why would I pay for the privilege of having to find out how to reconfigure my DVD player when I can just download the same film? Why would I hunt down a second-hand copy of a CD and give money to somebody of unknown trustworthiness for a product of unknown quality when I can download the same music for free?
When you can see that in many cases it is simply a lot more convenient to download illegally, you don't have to resort to guessing that they are breaking the law for the hell of it, there's a perfectly good explanation right in front of you. Distribute your product in a way that is more convenient than illegal downloads and you'll get many of those people "who just don't want to be legit" back.
First thing I did after this was to tear up and cancel that card and then link my regular credit card to paypal which is a Citibank Card
So wait, you got screwed by PayPal, so at the first available opportunity, you gave them your credit card details so you could continue to use their service? This kind of thing is exactly why corporations continue to screw people over - they know they can keep doing it time and time again, and people will just keep coming back for more.
Everything on OS X has the close button on the right of the right.
Safari has close buttons on the left of the tab. The software you mention is third-party, not Apple software, so looking to them for examples of UI consistency is a bit of a red herring.
That has been an evolving thing which was sorted out before Nokia was involved.
Nokia bought TrollTech in 2008. Qt was released under the LGPL license in 2009.
it became clear that Mr Stallman and others refused flatly to read the qt licence changes when there was an attempt to make it more compatible with the GPL.
Thanks in part to the discussions held here by the freshmeat community, Trolltech has decided to release the next version of Qt under the GNU General Public License. In today's editorial, Eirik Eng and Matthias Ettrich explain the reasoning behind their decision.
We have been in contact with Richard Stallman (President of the Free Software Foundation) on the issue, and he has been kind enough to offer his help and analysis. He has also sent us comments from Professor Eben Moglen, Professor of Law & Legal history and General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation.
That's from the article written about the decision to release Qt under the GPL, by the people who made that decision. If you use Google, you will also find plenty of mailing list threads where people are discussing the QPL's incompatibilities, and Stallman participated in some of those threads.
Yes, I understand that some people in the Free Software community considered a modified QPL to be compatible with the GPL, but disagreeing with them doesn't mean that you haven't read the license, and just because TrollTech attempted to make changes to make the QPL compatible, it doesn't mean that they were successful. Sometimes bugfixes don't fix the entire problem. Complaining about the bug after an incomplete fix doesn't mean you haven't run the software.
No, not wrong. Ten years ago, Qt changed to the GPL. This thread is about the recent change in license to the LGPL.
The license changes before they switched to the GPL were problematic because they weren't entirely compatible with the GPL, not because nobody read them. Choosing the GPL was the easiest way of making Qt's license GPL-compatible.
I think that pressure from Gnome and the fundamentalists helped make Qt change their license to the LGPL.
I can't agree with that. TrollTech were doing nicely dual licensing Qt. They were essentially making proprietary software companies fund Free Software development. That was their business model. LGPLing it would have lost them plenty of money, and for what? The respect of GNOME fundamentalists? Their customers were already choosing Qt over GTK and the GNOME libraries, throwing away their business model might have helped their "market share" in the Free Desktop "market", but it would have lost them loads of money.
Qt was LGPLed right after TrollTech were bought by Nokia. The licensing fees for Qt aren't significant to Nokia, they wanted a high-quality toolkit and the developers that built it. So it wasn't necessary to keep it GPLed. Then it makes sense to LGPL it to get more users/developers/market share/whatever. But before that point, the "pressure" from GNOME was insignificant compared with the pressure of bills to pay.
What happened? Gmail stayed about the same speed. All the other major webmail providers started using Ajax and caught up, speed-wise. Now GMail doesn't stand out from the crowd any more, even though it hasn't slowed down much, if at all. The use of Ajax essentially redefined what it meant for webmail to be fast. By yesterday's standards, Gmail is blazingly fast.
Nonsense. Using Ajax can slow down a site, or it can speed it up immensely. It depends on how you use it. When GMail was first launched, everybody raved about how fast it was. That was the Ajax.
If you want a fast site, don't put anything on any page that doesn't absolutely need to be there, and have fast pipes and fast and enough servers.
Assume you did that for Slashdot. You could then make further speed improvements by using Ajax in various places, for example so that it didn't reload a page full of hundreds of comments whenever you moderated.
I don't think this is likely to be a concern anyway. There's a clear parallel with Nintendo's case where reproducing their logo was necessary for interoperability, and although it's never gone to court, the same applies to browser vendors' user-agent strings, including Apple's. Apple's Safari browser claims to be Mozilla in its user-agent string for interoperability purposes. It's hard to see how that differs from what Palm are doing.
I've had good results with some home-grown scripts that grab the project-specific details from a database and then generate the relevant config files using a templating system like Genshi. Run it periodically against the database, check in changes and email diffs to the admin.
I have seen projects run into major problems necessitating extensive rewrites because of fundamental mistakes in low level programming and design decisions that were taken by developers, not a bunch of weaselly managers and marketing creeps.
But the question is how did the project manage to get into such a state without anybody stopping this? Is there no oversight? That's a managerial problem. Is there nobody competent to speak up? That's a managerial problem. Are the competent people not listened to? That's a managerial problem. Are the competent people so overworked that they aren't aware of what the rest of the team is doing? That's a managerial problem.
When developers screw up, the fault lies with the developers. When developers are allowed to screw up over the entire course of a project, irrevocably damaging the project, the fault lies with the managers.
In the end coders must also live up to a minimal level of competence.
Agreed, but my point is that if an organisation has no such competence in its development team, this is not a problem any developer can take responsibility for; it's a problem with how the organisation is run.
Not really. If a project is a catastrophe, then that's usually attributable to executive decisions. If the output of the developers caused the catastrophe, then it's usually because the project was mismanaged - not assigning any resources to QA, ignoring risks, handling change requests badly, allowing feature creep, setting unrealistic deadlines, and so on. It's rare that developers are actually to blame for a project going pear-shaped, and when they are, management are often complicit because they knowingly hired cheap developers without experience. The developers are there to write code, it's the managers' jobs to ensure that the project succeeds.
Re:No more compound documents?
on
XHTML 2 Cancelled
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Take a look at the current draft of HTML 5. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything presentation-related.
I think this attitude is more a case of wishful thinking and sometimes outright denial rather than than reality. Take a look at some of these, for instance:
<br> and <pre> - explicitly control line-breaking (<pre> has ASCII art as a use case!).
<ul> and <ol> - the order of HTML elements already forms part of their semantics. The real reason both element types are kept around is because one is numbered and one is not.
<small> - nuff said.
<i> - I'll quote this, because it's utterly laughable: "The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized." - or, in other words, "let's list every case we can think of where using italics is the typographical convention so we can pretend it isn't an element type that means use italics." Are there any real shared semantics between a ship name and a thought? No, they just want to use italics.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody implementing an automated system like that without a human well-versed in copyright law manually validating the list would be skating on very thin ice. DMCA takedown notices require the notifier to swear under penalty of perjury that the information contained in the DMCA takedown notice is accurate. Would you swear under penalty of perjury that such a system is always accurate? That there are no bugs?
On the other hand, if you assume that there is a proper human validation in the legal arm you mention rather than simply "churning them out", then that human can quite reasonably be given enough discretion to avoid cases like this.
This is not the case. Apple don't perform in-depth testing in this manner; they don't have access to the source code and some developers have already successfully bypassed the rules of the App Store by hiding functionality as easter eggs. It is trivial to put malicious code in an iPhone app that won't be triggered until after the application is already in the App Store. The security restrictions on what the iPhone OS lets you do doesn't save you from this kind of attack either; it sounds like all an equivalent iPhone app would have to do is embed a UIWebView and wait for people to enter their information.
VMWare Server 1.x was great. For 2.x, they decided to ditch the native client in favour of an awful web interface that barely worked. That's one of the reasons why you don't hear many people singing its praises any more. It went from being useful to being absolutely horrible to use. VirtualBox is also free to use, it understands VMWare images, and it doesn't have that awful web interface.
Even if he is, it's understandable. He's working on ground-breaking technology.
Unlocked merely means you can use it with any compatible service provider; it's not artificially locked to a single provider. Just because a phone is unlocked, it doesn't mean you have root access on it.
Emphasis mine. Of course they are allowed to talk about it. But they shouldn't expect Planet GNOME to publish it.
Stallman has nothing to do with the open source movement, he's the leader of the free software movement. The free software movement is about morals and ideals, the open-source movement is about being liberal with licensing for more immediately pragmatic purposes, such as raising the quality of the code. There is overlap in licensing, code and developer mindshare between the two movements. It seems to me a good portion of the GNOME developer community want to be open-source developers but not necessarily free software developers. If this is the case then GNU is not the right place for GNOME to be organised.
Emphasis mine. You are making an unwarranted assumption - that it is the same code. When compiling a port, you can often set flags to change which functionality is compiled into the port. For example, if you are running a server, you can specify that support for X11 should be omitted. Generic binaries can't be as flexible.
Firstly, Android is based on Linux, and the Linux kernel is GPLv2. Secondly, the reason why I ask is that one of the strengths of the GPLv2 is that it is based solely on copyright - it isn't an EULA, it only comes into effect when you copy. If no copying takes place, I fail to see why the distributor-not-copier needs a license or permission from the copyright holder. If they don't need permission, then they don't need to agree to the GPL.
Let me put it another way - I own a G1, which came preinstalled with Android. If I wanted to sell it to somebody, would I be bound by the GPL? If so, why? I haven't made any copies of the code. If not, then what is the difference between me doing it once and a phone company doing it a million times?
Maybe not in this case, but what about if a company outsourced phone manufacturing? The external company would be the ones making the copies by preinstalling the software onto the phones, and they would be fulfilling the terms of the GPL by providing the source to the phone company. At this point, the phone company haven't made any copies, they have essentially just bought a shipment of goods. What compels them to be bound by the terms of the GPL? Don't you actually have to make copies to be bound by its terms?
You know, you don't really take "screenshots" of real life. Most people just call them "photos".
(You know damn well that was the only point of bnetd.)
Scroll up and read the questions. There's plenty of interest there for features that an open-source server could provide without waiting around for Blizzard to implement it. Data feeds. APIs. Federation. Solutions to congestion. Alternative platforms. Interoperability with other services. The problem of app rejections. LAN play. Reputations.
If you seriously think that the only reason for an open-source server is so people can copy the game illegally, then you are an idiot.
How many questions there would have been answered by bnetd already, had Blizzard not sued them for daring to be compatible with Battle.net? And nary a mention of the debacle - nice to see how these days Slashdot as a whole rolls over on Free Software as soon as they are bribed with something shiny.
Not necessarily. Illegal downloads are often more convenient than legitimate copies. You don't have to go to a store, any DRM has been removed, there's often a greater selection available, and the products are sometimes better. For instance, why would I buy the crappy region 2 DVD with none of the extra features the region 1 DVD has? Why would I pay for the privilege of having to find out how to reconfigure my DVD player when I can just download the same film? Why would I hunt down a second-hand copy of a CD and give money to somebody of unknown trustworthiness for a product of unknown quality when I can download the same music for free?
When you can see that in many cases it is simply a lot more convenient to download illegally, you don't have to resort to guessing that they are breaking the law for the hell of it, there's a perfectly good explanation right in front of you. Distribute your product in a way that is more convenient than illegal downloads and you'll get many of those people "who just don't want to be legit" back.
So wait, you got screwed by PayPal, so at the first available opportunity, you gave them your credit card details so you could continue to use their service? This kind of thing is exactly why corporations continue to screw people over - they know they can keep doing it time and time again, and people will just keep coming back for more.
Safari has close buttons on the left of the tab. The software you mention is third-party, not Apple software, so looking to them for examples of UI consistency is a bit of a red herring.
Nokia bought TrollTech in 2008. Qt was released under the LGPL license in 2009.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
That's from the article written about the decision to release Qt under the GPL, by the people who made that decision. If you use Google, you will also find plenty of mailing list threads where people are discussing the QPL's incompatibilities, and Stallman participated in some of those threads.
Yes, I understand that some people in the Free Software community considered a modified QPL to be compatible with the GPL, but disagreeing with them doesn't mean that you haven't read the license, and just because TrollTech attempted to make changes to make the QPL compatible, it doesn't mean that they were successful. Sometimes bugfixes don't fix the entire problem. Complaining about the bug after an incomplete fix doesn't mean you haven't run the software.
No, not wrong. Ten years ago, Qt changed to the GPL. This thread is about the recent change in license to the LGPL.
The license changes before they switched to the GPL were problematic because they weren't entirely compatible with the GPL, not because nobody read them. Choosing the GPL was the easiest way of making Qt's license GPL-compatible.
I can't agree with that. TrollTech were doing nicely dual licensing Qt. They were essentially making proprietary software companies fund Free Software development. That was their business model. LGPLing it would have lost them plenty of money, and for what? The respect of GNOME fundamentalists? Their customers were already choosing Qt over GTK and the GNOME libraries, throwing away their business model might have helped their "market share" in the Free Desktop "market", but it would have lost them loads of money.
Qt was LGPLed right after TrollTech were bought by Nokia. The licensing fees for Qt aren't significant to Nokia, they wanted a high-quality toolkit and the developers that built it. So it wasn't necessary to keep it GPLed. Then it makes sense to LGPL it to get more users/developers/market share/whatever. But before that point, the "pressure" from GNOME was insignificant compared with the pressure of bills to pay.
What happened? Gmail stayed about the same speed. All the other major webmail providers started using Ajax and caught up, speed-wise. Now GMail doesn't stand out from the crowd any more, even though it hasn't slowed down much, if at all. The use of Ajax essentially redefined what it meant for webmail to be fast. By yesterday's standards, Gmail is blazingly fast.
Nonsense. Using Ajax can slow down a site, or it can speed it up immensely. It depends on how you use it. When GMail was first launched, everybody raved about how fast it was. That was the Ajax.
Assume you did that for Slashdot. You could then make further speed improvements by using Ajax in various places, for example so that it didn't reload a page full of hundreds of comments whenever you moderated.
I don't think this is likely to be a concern anyway. There's a clear parallel with Nintendo's case where reproducing their logo was necessary for interoperability, and although it's never gone to court, the same applies to browser vendors' user-agent strings, including Apple's. Apple's Safari browser claims to be Mozilla in its user-agent string for interoperability purposes. It's hard to see how that differs from what Palm are doing.
I've had good results with some home-grown scripts that grab the project-specific details from a database and then generate the relevant config files using a templating system like Genshi. Run it periodically against the database, check in changes and email diffs to the admin.
No, I don't.
But the question is how did the project manage to get into such a state without anybody stopping this? Is there no oversight? That's a managerial problem. Is there nobody competent to speak up? That's a managerial problem. Are the competent people not listened to? That's a managerial problem. Are the competent people so overworked that they aren't aware of what the rest of the team is doing? That's a managerial problem.
When developers screw up, the fault lies with the developers. When developers are allowed to screw up over the entire course of a project, irrevocably damaging the project, the fault lies with the managers.
Agreed, but my point is that if an organisation has no such competence in its development team, this is not a problem any developer can take responsibility for; it's a problem with how the organisation is run.
Not really. If a project is a catastrophe, then that's usually attributable to executive decisions. If the output of the developers caused the catastrophe, then it's usually because the project was mismanaged - not assigning any resources to QA, ignoring risks, handling change requests badly, allowing feature creep, setting unrealistic deadlines, and so on. It's rare that developers are actually to blame for a project going pear-shaped, and when they are, management are often complicit because they knowingly hired cheap developers without experience. The developers are there to write code, it's the managers' jobs to ensure that the project succeeds.
I think this attitude is more a case of wishful thinking and sometimes outright denial rather than than reality. Take a look at some of these, for instance: