Which, given how critical access to their services is, is a pretty scary situation. We have a small number of private entities who get to decide who, essentially, has access to 'money' and who does not. They need no court order, and are often willing to do what the DoJ asks as long as the volumes are small....they will not cut off big spenders, but poor organizations that could never afford to take them or the government to court are easy targets..
No.. I suspect you are marked troll not for the things that are true but unpopular, and more for the rather over the top extrapolation you use them for.
The US is not inactive in this regard, our government simply isn't going the 'open treaty' route. They have, however, been sending diplomats to various nations pressuring them to implement US friendly internet laws, and they have been using the US's place both among financial institutions and internet infrastructural to basically set the rules for the internet in other countries. Where countries are more oppressive, we have even been funding darknets to help subvert their own government....
The US is against this treaty (well, ok, there are many reasons since it isn't a good treaty) in part because it codifies the rules and gives other countries a say. Right now the US pretty much unilaterally acts as the internet ruler, spreading US law across it, free to do and change whatever they want whenever they want without any judicial review. Pretty sweet deal.
To be fair, the US government does have a pretty long and distinguished history of signing agreements (or for that matter, domestic laws or, well, our own constitution) and then ignoring them if whatever administration is in power feels that the other parties can't stop them.
Not to say this is a US specific thing, it is probably a product of having enough power to ignore rules and not be stopped.. so the US gets highlight since we have quite a bit of power (both economic and military) so we end up on the 'winning' side of such violations more often then not.
Only a fool pays more then they are required too. However, that is not the issue... the issue is how the laws have been set up to make it rather easy for people (and companies) over a certain income to not be required to pay all that much. They have access to laws and tools that the rest of the population (private and corporate) do not, in no small part because large companies have had more of a say in writing the laws then others.
I would more say this was a win-win for Google. They made demands of Apple, Apple said 'no, we can do this without you', Apple took a huge PR hit for pushing out a sub-par application that did not have Google's data anymore... and now Google has swept in to save the day with their own branded application instead...
Google ends up looking good, Apple takes pretty much all the PR damage.. and Google gets to remind Apple who is more powerful.
Not only that, but if this school has such lax requirements regarding people having to take classes under its control... I suspect that even though it has accreditation it is probably one warning flags that local managers watch for. They sound pretty sketchy, and sketchy places have a habit of giving out degrees that are rather suspect.
Depends on how good of a job you want. Many jobs no longer accept a high school diploma as a minimal education and require at least an associate degree. Often they do not care what the degree is, only that the person has one. I know a woman who was kicked out of college that slams into this barrier pretty frequently.
completely defeating the entire point of having his software be GPL in the first place, and in the process, probably scaring quite a few people away from using GPL software entirely legitimately.
I actually really worry about GPL getting divisive. I know a lot of embedded developers soured after GPLv3 which targeted embedded systems while leaving web ones alone, so many felt it represented the needs of people who consumed embedded but worked in the web/server world,... which in OSS the server centric developers vastly outnumber the embedded ones.. so you end up with a rather skewed voice.
Thus there was some bad blood there that moved some people away from GPL.. I worry that stunts like this might push people further away, which could potentially diminish the role of OSS in these new environments... which of course pits the purist against the pragmatist... people who want the pure abstract freedom at all levels and people who want rich tools/applications widly distributed and building off each other with source available to everyone.
Having gone back over the argument of the person who filed the claim, I think that within the US at least it was probably baseless. The AppStore restrictions apply to the distribution mechanism and the wrapper the binary comes in. The person claimed they were fighting for the 'rights of the user' to modify the binary and run it however they like.
However, since jailbreaking is legally protected in the US, the user always has the freedom to grab the original source and install the application outside the restrictions of the app store, thus VLC appearing in the app store under its restrictions does not bar the user from exersizing their rights under the GPL
Thus I return to my earlier take on it.. that the person didn't like Apple and wanted people to use other products, so he used a legal threat to bump VLC off the Appstore..a childish 'I am gonna take my toys and go home, and make sure no one else can use them unless they use them where I want them to be used' tantrum.
Add in the extra sleeze of using the VLC feed to make his announcement (making it look like the VLC team in general was announcing the claim) and then ranting about censorship and restricting his freedom when they removed it from the official feed.
One of the ironies here is he used one of the very behaviors that 'freedom centric' people often complain about to his own advantage... most places when provided with a copyright infringement complaint simply take it a face value and remove the offending material. So he probably banked on the assumption that Apple, when receiving the complaint, would simply act on it in good faith and remove VLC.
Hrm. Reread some of the drama... multiple developers (the ones who were pissed at being in the iOS store) have explicitly said they would not allow the project to re-lisence under LGPL anyway. So unless their code is being ripped out and replaced....
The more that I think about it, the less likely I find that they can actually do this. Even with new code, they are linking to existing GPL code. Looking at their updates it appears they are trying to move over to LGPL but are not there yet, so the whole package is still GPL... thus I do not believe they can actually make a 'Windows Store' exception any more then they could have made an 'Apple Store' exception.. and looking at how the FSF treated the GNU Go port, even if the VLC team wants to do so, other parties might file a complaint anyway.
Apples DRM restricts a single purchase of an application to 5 devices, so while the source was available, Rémi Denis-Courmont felt that the distribution restrictions were not compatible with GPL, and Apple did not feel like fighting him on it.
I am a little skeptical of the claim since, at it's heart, the GPL is about releasing source back to the community, not about how the final binary is distributed. There was also an argument (not sure if it was in the copyright complaint) that iOS did not allow users to change the version they had installed, so they couldn't grab the source, recompile, and update their version.. but that is an old battle line with GPL and embedded devices.... which is probably beyond the scope of this discussion (and would probably result in a flame war between consumers and developers)
I have yet to see a company that does not describe their particular product as 'the best'. Google has described its maps as the best too.. but that has not stopped people from getting trapped in the the wilderness in the past.
While the person was legally entitled to do what they did.... yeah, they were a douche. As far a I can tell they did it specifically because they wanted users off iOS and onto Android.. so utilizing a legal technicality to try to force people onto a platform they liked better.
I had forgotten about that drama.... yeah, I imagine some of the same issues could come into play with the Win8 version unless they got with LGPL instead.. though it sounds like they are going with a 'behaves like LGPL in places where GPL compatibility issues stop us from posting to the store.'... which.. can they even do?
Such competition is backed by the Chinese Government. If we want our companies to be able to compete, we need to have our own government actually support young industries, not just old embedded ones.
It depends on what other creditors have a claim to their assets, but yes, the money from liquidation actually should at least in part go back to the government... though it looks like a big part of their debt is actually to the company buying them, so that increases the chances that other creditors will get paid.
I think one of the core uses comes from that 'appropriate action' part. It is not always possible or even desirable to handle an error where the error actually occurred.
Another major use case would be where the programmer does not have control over the code, such as loadable modules or libraries linked to.
I can see the argument that they are a fancy goto, but then again events are just fancy function calls. That exceptions can propegate up a call stack until something catches them (without the throwing function needing any knowledge of anything earlier on the stack) gives them significant extra functionality.
Considering that there were similar stories in the past with the same basic problem in other mapping services (including Google Maps), yeah.. this really strikes me as Apple bashing.
Once again, Apple is singled out for an industry wide problem. None of the databases are perfect, esp when you get into the more rural or preserve type areas. In this case the police are doing what they tend to do in such announcements... latch on to something already in the public imagination and insert themselves into the narrative.
Considering how mature exception handling is at this point, I would hardly call it the 'current fashion'.
Exceptions have their uses. If someone is writing them off completely, then that speaks to them either not considering those cases, being willfully ignorant, or not being competent in the tool.
While normally I agree with your argument here, I think you are way over applying it as a way to shut down defense of a tool you do not like.
Besides, the 'you don't understand it' argument is tiresome when people use it to silence people who fail to acknowledge as the one true solution, so essentially the opposite usage since in this case it is being used to attack a 'one false way' argument, with no accompanying 'one true way' one.
In other words, you do not know how to use them effectively therefor any use of them must be bad?
T/C blocks are a tool, just like everything else in programming. They can be abused, and they can be perfect for the job. Anyone who tries to claim that some tool is universally bad and has distain for any piece of code using it regardless of its appropriateness does not strike me as a very good programmer, or at minimal a very limited programmer.
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Which, given how critical access to their services is, is a pretty scary situation. We have a small number of private entities who get to decide who, essentially, has access to 'money' and who does not. They need no court order, and are often willing to do what the DoJ asks as long as the volumes are small....they will not cut off big spenders, but poor organizations that could never afford to take them or the government to court are easy targets..
No.. I suspect you are marked troll not for the things that are true but unpopular, and more for the rather over the top extrapolation you use them for.
The US is not inactive in this regard, our government simply isn't going the 'open treaty' route. They have, however, been sending diplomats to various nations pressuring them to implement US friendly internet laws, and they have been using the US's place both among financial institutions and internet infrastructural to basically set the rules for the internet in other countries. Where countries are more oppressive, we have even been funding darknets to help subvert their own government....
The US is against this treaty (well, ok, there are many reasons since it isn't a good treaty) in part because it codifies the rules and gives other countries a say. Right now the US pretty much unilaterally acts as the internet ruler, spreading US law across it, free to do and change whatever they want whenever they want without any judicial review. Pretty sweet deal.
To be fair, the US government does have a pretty long and distinguished history of signing agreements (or for that matter, domestic laws or, well, our own constitution) and then ignoring them if whatever administration is in power feels that the other parties can't stop them.
Not to say this is a US specific thing, it is probably a product of having enough power to ignore rules and not be stopped.. so the US gets highlight since we have quite a bit of power (both economic and military) so we end up on the 'winning' side of such violations more often then not.
Only a fool pays more then they are required too. However, that is not the issue... the issue is how the laws have been set up to make it rather easy for people (and companies) over a certain income to not be required to pay all that much. They have access to laws and tools that the rest of the population (private and corporate) do not, in no small part because large companies have had more of a say in writing the laws then others.
At the end of the day, the dominant culture is almost always crappy to the weaker subcultures.
I would more say this was a win-win for Google. They made demands of Apple, Apple said 'no, we can do this without you', Apple took a huge PR hit for pushing out a sub-par application that did not have Google's data anymore... and now Google has swept in to save the day with their own branded application instead...
Google ends up looking good, Apple takes pretty much all the PR damage.. and Google gets to remind Apple who is more powerful.
Not only that, but if this school has such lax requirements regarding people having to take classes under its control... I suspect that even though it has accreditation it is probably one warning flags that local managers watch for. They sound pretty sketchy, and sketchy places have a habit of giving out degrees that are rather suspect.
In 30 years it has changed dramatically. Given how common degrees are, many HR departments will simply filter out any resumes that do not have one.
Depends on how good of a job you want. Many jobs no longer accept a high school diploma as a minimal education and require at least an associate degree. Often they do not care what the degree is, only that the person has one. I know a woman who was kicked out of college that slams into this barrier pretty frequently.
completely defeating the entire point of having his software be GPL in the first place, and in the process, probably scaring quite a few people away from using GPL software entirely legitimately.
I actually really worry about GPL getting divisive. I know a lot of embedded developers soured after GPLv3 which targeted embedded systems while leaving web ones alone, so many felt it represented the needs of people who consumed embedded but worked in the web/server world,... which in OSS the server centric developers vastly outnumber the embedded ones.. so you end up with a rather skewed voice.
Thus there was some bad blood there that moved some people away from GPL.. I worry that stunts like this might push people further away, which could potentially diminish the role of OSS in these new environments... which of course pits the purist against the pragmatist... people who want the pure abstract freedom at all levels and people who want rich tools/applications widly distributed and building off each other with source available to everyone.
(to add)
Having gone back over the argument of the person who filed the claim, I think that within the US at least it was probably baseless. The AppStore restrictions apply to the distribution mechanism and the wrapper the binary comes in. The person claimed they were fighting for the 'rights of the user' to modify the binary and run it however they like.
However, since jailbreaking is legally protected in the US, the user always has the freedom to grab the original source and install the application outside the restrictions of the app store, thus VLC appearing in the app store under its restrictions does not bar the user from exersizing their rights under the GPL
Thus I return to my earlier take on it.. that the person didn't like Apple and wanted people to use other products, so he used a legal threat to bump VLC off the Appstore..a childish 'I am gonna take my toys and go home, and make sure no one else can use them unless they use them where I want them to be used' tantrum.
Add in the extra sleeze of using the VLC feed to make his announcement (making it look like the VLC team in general was announcing the claim) and then ranting about censorship and restricting his freedom when they removed it from the official feed.
One of the ironies here is he used one of the very behaviors that 'freedom centric' people often complain about to his own advantage... most places when provided with a copyright infringement complaint simply take it a face value and remove the offending material. So he probably banked on the assumption that Apple, when receiving the complaint, would simply act on it in good faith and remove VLC.
Hrm. Reread some of the drama... multiple developers (the ones who were pissed at being in the iOS store) have explicitly said they would not allow the project to re-lisence under LGPL anyway. So unless their code is being ripped out and replaced....
The more that I think about it, the less likely I find that they can actually do this. Even with new code, they are linking to existing GPL code. Looking at their updates it appears they are trying to move over to LGPL but are not there yet, so the whole package is still GPL... thus I do not believe they can actually make a 'Windows Store' exception any more then they could have made an 'Apple Store' exception.. and looking at how the FSF treated the GNU Go port, even if the VLC team wants to do so, other parties might file a complaint anyway.
Apples DRM restricts a single purchase of an application to 5 devices, so while the source was available, Rémi Denis-Courmont felt that the distribution restrictions were not compatible with GPL, and Apple did not feel like fighting him on it.
I am a little skeptical of the claim since, at it's heart, the GPL is about releasing source back to the community, not about how the final binary is distributed. There was also an argument (not sure if it was in the copyright complaint) that iOS did not allow users to change the version they had installed, so they couldn't grab the source, recompile, and update their version.. but that is an old battle line with GPL and embedded devices.... which is probably beyond the scope of this discussion (and would probably result in a flame war between consumers and developers)
I have yet to see a company that does not describe their particular product as 'the best'. Google has described its maps as the best too.. but that has not stopped people from getting trapped in the the wilderness in the past.
While the person was legally entitled to do what they did.... yeah, they were a douche. As far a I can tell they did it specifically because they wanted users off iOS and onto Android.. so utilizing a legal technicality to try to force people onto a platform they liked better.
I had forgotten about that drama.... yeah, I imagine some of the same issues could come into play with the Win8 version unless they got with LGPL instead.. though it sounds like they are going with a 'behaves like LGPL in places where GPL compatibility issues stop us from posting to the store.'... which.. can they even do?
Well, if they don't accept 'contributions' then they need SOME way to remind the politicians who is boss.....
Such competition is backed by the Chinese Government. If we want our companies to be able to compete, we need to have our own government actually support young industries, not just old embedded ones.
It depends on what other creditors have a claim to their assets, but yes, the money from liquidation actually should at least in part go back to the government... though it looks like a big part of their debt is actually to the company buying them, so that increases the chances that other creditors will get paid.
I think one of the core uses comes from that 'appropriate action' part. It is not always possible or even desirable to handle an error where the error actually occurred.
Another major use case would be where the programmer does not have control over the code, such as loadable modules or libraries linked to.
I can see the argument that they are a fancy goto, but then again events are just fancy function calls. That exceptions can propegate up a call stack until something catches them (without the throwing function needing any knowledge of anything earlier on the stack) gives them significant extra functionality.
Considering that there were similar stories in the past with the same basic problem in other mapping services (including Google Maps), yeah.. this really strikes me as Apple bashing.
Once again, Apple is singled out for an industry wide problem. None of the databases are perfect, esp when you get into the more rural or preserve type areas. In this case the police are doing what they tend to do in such announcements... latch on to something already in the public imagination and insert themselves into the narrative.
Considering how mature exception handling is at this point, I would hardly call it the 'current fashion'.
Exceptions have their uses. If someone is writing them off completely, then that speaks to them either not considering those cases, being willfully ignorant, or not being competent in the tool.
While normally I agree with your argument here, I think you are way over applying it as a way to shut down defense of a tool you do not like.
Besides, the 'you don't understand it' argument is tiresome when people use it to silence people who fail to acknowledge as the one true solution, so essentially the opposite usage since in this case it is being used to attack a 'one false way' argument, with no accompanying 'one true way' one.
In other words, you do not know how to use them effectively therefor any use of them must be bad?
T/C blocks are a tool, just like everything else in programming. They can be abused, and they can be perfect for the job. Anyone who tries to claim that some tool is universally bad and has distain for any piece of code using it regardless of its appropriateness does not strike me as a very good programmer, or at minimal a very limited programmer.