Of course Apple is. And they weren't the first either. However, the claim as written, is in the best MS tradition - it's not quite lying, though it's deceptive as hell.
You see, Apple had an actual material product to sell. So did all the other pioneers. Microsoft was pretty much unique (there may be an exception but I can't think of it) in that they ran (this is not true anymore, and hasn't been for years) a profitable company with no tangible product. A "software company" as the blurb said.
Of course, Apple and lots of other companies were "software companies" in that they were companies that made software, but they weren't reliant on software for their entire revenue - apple made and sold hardware and developed their software as a compliment to that, just like Sun, DEC, IBM, etc. So there's some wiggle room to claim the statement is true.
I don't buy it for a minute, of course. Just another clever lie.
Sorry, ESR, but the flerbage nonsense is stupid. There's already a perfectly good word for that, it's called Liberty.
Proprietary software may be able to coexist with Liberty, but it will certainly take some work. The whole trend since the beginning of closed software has been for it to threaten Liberty, to eliminate it bit by bit, as quickly as it's producers believe they can get away with. The pace is ever increasing, and every time a draconian measure is abandoned because of public backlash... it returns with less fanfare a little later on.
And no, I'm not in favour of criminalising the offering of software under proprietary licenses. I don't believe the FSF is either - in that respect this article is simply an audacious straw man.
When the government uses my tax money to buy proprietary software, when it publishes public information which I am legally entitled to access, but in a form that is useless to me unless I pay microsoft their monopoly rent, my liberty is under assault. When they grant artificial monopoly privileges (software patents are one excellent example of this) and enforce them via law, this is no better than enforcing one particular license on developers would be.
Under no circumstances should tax money ever be spent on proprietary software. Under no circumstances should public information be published locked in a proprietary format. Instead of trying to break down monopolies with anti-trust law, the government should quit creating them and nurturing them in the first place.
Mostly good advice. A couple of disagreements. I don't think you should rule slack out. It's not the easiest to install, but it's really not that hard. Anyone that's installed pre-win95 dos shouldn't have much trouble getting slack going. The package management is minimalist, but it does the one thing you really need and does it well - it installs and uninstalls packages cleanly. I've used it and I've used RPM based distros and honestly had a lot less trouble with slack tarballs than with rpms. And it's the leanest, fastest distro you're likely to find - perfect for an older slower machine. I've run slack with KDE happily on a machine that was just unbearably slow running Redhat or Mandrake with KDE - very impressive. The slack team takes care to configure things properly before compiling, and it shows. The guy asking the question didn't give enough information about his own situation to rule slack out IMOP. While Mandrake is perfect for the would-be Windows refugee that is installing to a new, fast machine, and wants the minimum of hassle or unfamiliar-looking routines, it's not exactly the leanest and meanest and may not perform very well on an old backup computer.
Other than that, I agree with everything you say, although I prefer WindowMaker instead of Ice that's just personal preference, either is a great choice, full featured window managers without all the overhead.
Well to be fair, diplomacy isn't done, and AI is a fairly low priority, because the developers and users of the game have never made it a high priority. It's rarely run as a single player game - the focus of the project is and has always been multiplayer network games. And at that it excells.
Mailandnews.com is what I use. They have pop3, smtp-auth, and imap in addition to the web interface, although I notice since they got bought recently they aren't touting that fact anymore. Just use 'mailandnews.com' as pop, smtp, or imap server, and make sure your client is set for smpt-auth, they require it to avoid being used as an open relay themselves.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Silly silly person. Don't run X as root. Run X as user, when you need to do something as root, su in an xterm and start whatever you need running as root there.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Whoah, you really took a wrong turn. All you need to do to fix a corrupted lilo is stick in your slackware install disk, reboot, type in the proper parameters at the boot prompt (for instance if your root partition is/dev/hdb1 the paramaters are "root=/dev/hdb1 ro",) boot up, type "lilo" at the prompt after boot, remove the install disk, and reboot.
If the problem is bad hard drive geometry you can fix that in BIOS. You certainly didn't need to format or reinstall.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I am tired of corporations changing the rules of the game half-way through. I and many other college students in Boston use DSL and also use our @youruniversity.edu addresses. Because most universities do not have SMTP-AUTH servers - this would effectively prevent us from using our @edu addresses.
Simple solution - your university should have an SMTP-AUTH relay available. Hell, my free email service does - why can't your university? Don't blame Verizon for a problem at your uni.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Doubtless some people simply have buzzworditis. But it is certainly a viable alternative if there is no local radio station that meets your needs and you have something better than a modem. With DSL I can listen to the one radio station that has a good "americana" program (http://www.wets.org/ spends several hours a day playing music I like that I just don't hear anywhere else, and certainly not on any local stations) without any noticeable affect on my bandwidth for other things. I think that's pretty damn cool, personally. The hype factor will probably (hopefully) die off fairly soon, but the technology will still be useful for niche audiences that often aren't served by local stations.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
However, the way it was described to my legal-system-lame self was that the same pretense that the tobacco industry and gun industry is being sued under would apply to Computer Exploit, Rootkit, and Vulnrability developers -- that being that the developers and producers were aware of the damage their work would cause, but non-the-less released the software/information.
Pretense. Very well chosen word there.
The jury's still out, so to speak, on whether or not the firearms industry will indeed be sued out of existence, but things aren't looking real good right at the moment. The precedent has already been set, to a degree, by the tobacco cases, where it was easiest to whip up public support. The stronger the precedent gets, the less of a chance makers of root kits, or anything else that can possibly be misused (and what can't be?) will have when their turn comes.
The issues are exactly the same, and it's very important that those of you who don't own guns realise that now. If you wait to fight for something that you personally care about, it will be too late. Nanny-statism should be resisted on principle, not just when it infringes on you personally.
Martin Niemöller's famous and often (mis)quoted statement - "When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned" comes to mind. But remember, they didn't actually come for the Jews first. They came for the gun owners even before the jews - in 1938.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
all that a contract gives you is a right to sue -- nothing less, nothing more. if you want to face telocity, or directv, or whomever in court over a crappy would-be router you should fight them all the way.
A contract doesn't give you a right to sue. All you need to sue is enough money to pay the filing fees. A contract would give them grounds for a suit, perhaps.
Anyway, the situation described is not so black and white - comply or be sued. The situation as described is that of receiving a fraudulent bill. And yes, you can be sued for refusing to pay a fraudulent bill. You can be sued for anything. But there are plenty of intermediate steps before going to court.
The first thing you should do if you receive a fraudulent bill is contact the billing party. It could be an honest mistake. Even if it's not, when you call up and say "I got this bill, it says X, and X isn't true, I have Y right here and I checked it" you put the ball back in their court. If they can't back up their claim, but they still want to pursue it, they are in the weak position, not you. They are the ones that have to pay the filing fees, and the lawyers fees, and have you served, all before you even need to worry about it again. I've gotten dozens of incorrect bills , and I haven't paid one of them, and guess what? I haven't been sued. Not once.
Now maybe the bill isn't fraudulent. This pitiful excuse for an article doesn't even give us enough to make an educated guess on that subject really, but the source definately claims it is fraudulent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Do you really think one should pay a fraudulent bill reflexively, without even attempting to challenge it? At this time I'd like to bill you $500 for reading this post. The contract you signed for your internet service said that you would pay this bill. Really it did. Don't dispute the bill, don't doublecheck your contract, just mail me the check like a nice little sheep, k?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
If, however, you were wanting something graphical, the most promising one IMOP is in GWorkspace - although it definately still needs some work. KDE and Gnome both have been horribly disappointing to me, although obviously some people like them. Personally, if I wanted MS Windows on my computer I'd just pull out my CD and reinstall it *shrug*.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Just because you read it on K5 that means it's true? Now, I like K5 and all, but that doesn't follow.
Anyhow, whether it's true or not, it's a damn shoddy attempt at a slashdot story, which was the point I was making. The editors (at least some of them) are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from the phirst post weenies.
The K5 article is here btw, and provides a hell of a lot more information than Timothy provided here.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Not a whole lot here now is there? How do we know this guy didn't just make the thing up? Why am I not surprised to see that this was posted by Timothy? *sigh*
Anyhow, this makes no sense. If he read his contracts and there was no such clause, and he was getting ready to do something with the gateway, why did he send it back? He called them to tell them he was sending it back, but he couldn't be bothered to first call and ask them precisely where in the contract this supposed clause was? Odd. Dumb. True? Who knows. Next.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
While that may be good for unsavory, shady licensing schemes, it could be bad for GPL'd software.
Nonsense. The GPL is not a use license, and it does not even pretend that it has to be agreed to for use. The license in this case was one that restricted the rights of the user. The GPL is one that offers more rights than the user otherwise has under the law. It's apples and oranges - the two licenses have nothing in common other than being referred to by the word "license".
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Hmm looks promising. One question, I looked around the website a bit, but didn't find this mentioned - does gentoo use BSD style init, or that sysV atrocity?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The financial impact of the new VA Linux strategy will be significant. Historically, VA Linux has generated a significant majority of its revenues from the sale of its hardware products. VA expects its revenue to significantly decline with the elimination of the hardware segment.
So, they're pulling out of the area that was making the profits, to concentrate on the loss leaders? Someone explain this, it looks totally insane to me.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
There isn't any ethical or legal problem with this at all. Their products are proprietary add-ons and services, it's hardly different in kind to what RedHat does. When they modify GPL code, they are obliged to GPL the mods. When they write their own code from scratch, they are not. There is no requirement that proprietary programs be GPLd to run under a GPL OS (ever heard of Oracle?)
Bottom line, as long as they comply with the terms of the GPL when it comes to GPL code, they can put whatever license they want on their own. There might be a minor nitpick if their license doesn't make it clear that it only applies to their proprietary programs, not the OS as a whole, I'll grant, but if that is the case it will be easily fixed. There was a similar flap awhile back about Corel's license, and it didn't turn out to be any big deal, I recall.
I wonder when RMS will spout on this... IMO, this is FAR worse than the KDE/QT controversy, and it'd be hypocritical of him to not condemn it.
First off the KDE/QT deal was a totally different issue. KDE was making Free, not proprietary software, yet they were using a library with a license incompatible with the license of their own software. Much more serious problem. Fortunately that one got fixed, though it wasn't easy, and for all the flaming certain immature individuals gave RMS over it, they should be thanking him - if he hadn't raised a stink KDE might still be in a legal limbo, and QT unfree.
RMS is no fan of Caldera, in fact he has expressed what could only be termed contempt for CEO Ransom Love in particular. But I'll be surprised if he loses his objectivity on this issue. If they need to clarify the wording of their license, that's fine, that's not the end of the world, and the FSF has always worked to resolve these little bumps quickly and quietly in the past. The GPL is not, and was explicitly never intended to be, anti-business. It's designed to allow writers of Free Software to share code without fear of their code being proprietarised (the major weakness of the BSD license.)
See this entry in the GPL FAQ. Calderas proprietary products are aggregated, not integrated, and as long as that is so, they can license them under any terms they wish.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I'd rather send you money so that you could develop good GPL software rather than waste time and energy in court on the name...
While I applaud your good sense in this quote, I still have to do so reservedly. What AOL is doing here is harrassment, and changing the name will merely give them a green light to continue harrassment as an effective tactic.
If a good legal team that can defend them at minimal cost to the project cannot be found, then your advice is probably the best. On the other hand, what they are doing now, seeking to find such a defense team if at all possible, is definately called for as well. No need for them to cave immediately. Far better to put out the word as far and as fast as possible as to what is happening, and solicit aid. There are many possible ways it could be forthcoming. If it is not, they can still change their name next week...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Is there ANY advantage of their version of Linux over lets say Mandrake (or any other)?
Yes, actually there is. Remember the roots of Caldera are in Novell. Novell is still deeply rooted in many companies - and for good reason. For many, it combines the best of NT (ease of use) and Unix (power, speed, reliability.)
For companies with millions invested in Novell systems, the advantages of Linux are offset by the learning curve and the difficulties in integrating it into their existing systems. Caldera is a godsend for those companies, and they aren't going to even blink at these licensing fees. A lot of Calderas work is available under the GPL, yes, and it's quite possible to take any other distribution and integrate it perfectly into a Novell network - but it still isn't the easiest thing to do. Pay Caldera and they do the work for you. You get a system that is "plug and play" for that environment, instead of one that can be hacked into shape for it, and you get topnotch support from people that know both linux and novell inside and out.
I don't expect Caldera to ever get much mindshare out of the hacker set (excepting the ones they pay) however it has always been very attractive for enterprises that use novell and need a linux system that will fit into their existing network with minimal fuss. And, I repeat, those customers aren't going to blink at the licensing fees. It's still far more attractive than the alternatives to them, and it's a drop in the bucket compared to what they are used to paying anyway.
This was probably a very good decision for Caldera - the only people that it's going to bother are the ones that weren't going to be their customers anyway. And I'm sure they can use the revenue.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Well the license was not redifined but "clarified" in it's meaning, the license never changed, there are no free versions.
So Darren has said recently. But, in all fairness, that just doesn't fit the evidence. See for instance this post from a year ago, where Darren refers to his work as "public domain." Contrast that with his more recent statement in computerworld that he has "never considered IPFilter to be open-source."
The license hasn't changed, no, but Darrens publically stated interpretation of the license sure as hell has.
Having followed this story closely, the best I can tell what happened is this. Darren initially intended his license to be BSD compatible, wrote it to be BSD compatible, and everyone using and contributing thought it was indeed BSD compatible. Darren didn't correct them because so far as he was concerned they were correct. Recently he got upset at the possibility or actuality (not sure which) of people distributing modified versions of his own betas, and added the "clarification" to a beta, intending only to prohibit modified versions of that particular version, not of regular releases. At this point Theo and others realised that the original license was indeed less than perfectly clear, and fearing that he would try to extend the prohibition further, and concerned that the license wasn't clear enough about modifications, they began to ask him to change the license. Apparently Theo managed to really rub him the wrong way in the process, and he got angry, and decided based on the vagueness in the licensing terms he could get away with closing it all retroactively, just to spite Theo. Begin the flamefests and the inevitable removal of ipfilter from OBSD.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.
You're correct that this doesn't change the legal situation proper. However, the legal position proper was never the problem. Legally the little felines are and have always been freely hackable. The problem was simply the threat of big bad company with presumably deep pockets sicking the landsharks on individual hackers that couldn't afford to defend themselves, merits (or lack thereof) of the case be damned. The troubles at DC mean that threat just lost all credibility - they obviously are not in a position to engage in such tactics.
Sure, it's possible some other big bad company with deep pockets and no ethics could come along and buy the property and turn around and start in on the same route, but it surely is very unlikely. The "property" is obviously not worth the trouble, and even stuffed shirts that didn't understand that before will now when they see how much good it did DC.
Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."
As another poster pointed out, there are already at least two such databases. Your objection that they don't include the elements of DCs intended setup that most of us found objectionable in the first place doesn't seem like any big deal to me. There's no need to buy anything from DC. Their copyright on the windows only spyware they distributed with the cuecats is not needed or even desireable, as cross platform Free Software programs that perform as desired and don't spy on the user are available.
Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?
It'll most likely be auctioned off to the highest bidder, before or after the bankruptcy declaration. They can expect to be spammed and junk mailed and telemarketed out of their minds. It sucks, but really, wtf did they expect when they happily traded off their privacy to DC in exchange for a little promised convenience?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
However, it costs money to produce software, if only to feed the authors, and GPL explicitly denies the software itself as a source of revenue. Has any pure software company ever made money by releasing all its software under GPL? (and selling support?)
At least one has - Slackware. Profitable from day one. Still profitable today. Not huge, no, but profitable. A small company with a small group of paid programmers that keep their target audience very happy.
Anyway, it's not quite correct to say that the GPL denies software revenue, although it certainly makes it tricky.
The future probably has room for quite a few successful ventures using GPL, but it may well be that only smaller ones like slack will be successful and releasing everything as Free Software, while larger companies will need to embrace the movement to some extent, but maintain some proprietary level, either in making hardware or keeping their top items pay-only. That's not really a problem. If you really need a large, complicated program with the most cutting edge features then you probably won't mind to pay for it. But eventually, when that cutting edge program ages a bit and is no longer cutting edge, it may well be cloned or freed regardless, and one will only need to pay if one really needs the newest features. In this fashion the best of both worlds can be achieved - companies that spend money programming the latest and greatest can make their money back and profit on top of that, but they can't turn the program into an indefinate license to print money either, and the stultifying effect on innovation and computer science excessive proprietarization causes will be almost completely avoided.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
libsomething.so is a symlink to libsomething.so.2, which in turn points to libsomething.so.2.17. The problem is when an app was coded and debuged on a system with version 2.17, but the end user only has 2.15. In theory, there shouldn't be any incompatible changes between 2.15 and 2.17, so the user just needs to load up to 2.17 and point.so.2 to.so.2.17. But in practice, in many situations this will cause existing binaries that point to.2 (which now points to 2.17) to break. So, the only solution is to load.so.2.17 into a new directory, and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD accordingly before starting up that app.
A rather nebulous assertion, since you don't give any specific examples. When the api changes the library should go to a new version number.
I'm not saying it's never happened, it's quite conceivable. There are two reasons why this could happen - either the library coders changed an api and didn't rev the version number appropriately (unlikely for any of the major libraries which tend to be maintained in a very professional manner) or an application coder circumvented the normal api (MUCH more likely.) Sometimes inexperienced coders will do this and think they are really clever for it, but it's actually very stupid. Either way, the problem is not in the system design, it's in someone doing something very stupid in their code. In either case it would be instantly clear who screwed up, and thus who should be on the receiving end of a stiff LART. This is probably why it's so rare.
This isn't an issue with GNU cash, and even if it was, it STILL wouldn't be anything like.dll hell, which is a design problem, not a problem with individual coders doing something stupid occasionally.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Apple is. And they weren't the first either. However, the claim as written, is in the best MS tradition - it's not quite lying, though it's deceptive as hell.
You see, Apple had an actual material product to sell. So did all the other pioneers. Microsoft was pretty much unique (there may be an exception but I can't think of it) in that they ran (this is not true anymore, and hasn't been for years) a profitable company with no tangible product. A "software company" as the blurb said.
Of course, Apple and lots of other companies were "software companies" in that they were companies that made software, but they weren't reliant on software for their entire revenue - apple made and sold hardware and developed their software as a compliment to that, just like Sun, DEC, IBM, etc. So there's some wiggle room to claim the statement is true.
I don't buy it for a minute, of course. Just another clever lie.
Sorry, ESR, but the flerbage nonsense is stupid. There's already a perfectly good word for that, it's called Liberty.
Proprietary software may be able to coexist with Liberty, but it will certainly take some work. The whole trend since the beginning of closed software has been for it to threaten Liberty, to eliminate it bit by bit, as quickly as it's producers believe they can get away with. The pace is ever increasing, and every time a draconian measure is abandoned because of public backlash... it returns with less fanfare a little later on.
And no, I'm not in favour of criminalising the offering of software under proprietary licenses. I don't believe the FSF is either - in that respect this article is simply an audacious straw man.
When the government uses my tax money to buy proprietary software, when it publishes public information which I am legally entitled to access, but in a form that is useless to me unless I pay microsoft their monopoly rent, my liberty is under assault. When they grant artificial monopoly privileges (software patents are one excellent example of this) and enforce them via law, this is no better than enforcing one particular license on developers would be.
Under no circumstances should tax money ever be spent on proprietary software. Under no circumstances should public information be published locked in a proprietary format. Instead of trying to break down monopolies with anti-trust law, the government should quit creating them and nurturing them in the first place.
Mostly good advice. A couple of disagreements. I don't think you should rule slack out. It's not the easiest to install, but it's really not that hard. Anyone that's installed pre-win95 dos shouldn't have much trouble getting slack going. The package management is minimalist, but it does the one thing you really need and does it well - it installs and uninstalls packages cleanly. I've used it and I've used RPM based distros and honestly had a lot less trouble with slack tarballs than with rpms. And it's the leanest, fastest distro you're likely to find - perfect for an older slower machine. I've run slack with KDE happily on a machine that was just unbearably slow running Redhat or Mandrake with KDE - very impressive. The slack team takes care to configure things properly before compiling, and it shows. The guy asking the question didn't give enough information about his own situation to rule slack out IMOP. While Mandrake is perfect for the would-be Windows refugee that is installing to a new, fast machine, and wants the minimum of hassle or unfamiliar-looking routines, it's not exactly the leanest and meanest and may not perform very well on an old backup computer.
Other than that, I agree with everything you say, although I prefer WindowMaker instead of Ice that's just personal preference, either is a great choice, full featured window managers without all the overhead.
Well to be fair, diplomacy isn't done, and AI is a fairly low priority, because the developers and users of the game have never made it a high priority. It's rarely run as a single player game - the focus of the project is and has always been multiplayer network games. And at that it excells.
Mailandnews.com is what I use. They have pop3, smtp-auth, and imap in addition to the web interface, although I notice since they got bought recently they aren't touting that fact anymore. Just use 'mailandnews.com' as pop, smtp, or imap server, and make sure your client is set for smpt-auth, they require it to avoid being used as an open relay themselves.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Silly silly person. Don't run X as root. Run X as user, when you need to do something as root, su in an xterm and start whatever you need running as root there.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Whoah, you really took a wrong turn. All you need to do to fix a corrupted lilo is stick in your slackware install disk, reboot, type in the proper parameters at the boot prompt (for instance if your root partition is /dev/hdb1 the paramaters are "root=/dev/hdb1 ro",) boot up, type "lilo" at the prompt after boot, remove the install disk, and reboot.
If the problem is bad hard drive geometry you can fix that in BIOS. You certainly didn't need to format or reinstall.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Simple solution - your university should have an SMTP-AUTH relay available. Hell, my free email service does - why can't your university? Don't blame Verizon for a problem at your uni.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Doubtless some people simply have buzzworditis. But it is certainly a viable alternative if there is no local radio station that meets your needs and you have something better than a modem. With DSL I can listen to the one radio station that has a good "americana" program (http://www.wets.org/ spends several hours a day playing music I like that I just don't hear anywhere else, and certainly not on any local stations) without any noticeable affect on my bandwidth for other things. I think that's pretty damn cool, personally. The hype factor will probably (hopefully) die off fairly soon, but the technology will still be useful for niche audiences that often aren't served by local stations.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
From the article:
Pretense. Very well chosen word there.
The jury's still out, so to speak, on whether or not the firearms industry will indeed be sued out of existence, but things aren't looking real good right at the moment. The precedent has already been set, to a degree, by the tobacco cases, where it was easiest to whip up public support. The stronger the precedent gets, the less of a chance makers of root kits, or anything else that can possibly be misused (and what can't be?) will have when their turn comes.
The issues are exactly the same, and it's very important that those of you who don't own guns realise that now. If you wait to fight for something that you personally care about, it will be too late. Nanny-statism should be resisted on principle, not just when it infringes on you personally.
Martin Niemöller's famous and often (mis)quoted statement - "When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned" comes to mind. But remember, they didn't actually come for the Jews first. They came for the gun owners even before the jews - in 1938.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
A contract doesn't give you a right to sue. All you need to sue is enough money to pay the filing fees. A contract would give them grounds for a suit, perhaps.
Anyway, the situation described is not so black and white - comply or be sued. The situation as described is that of receiving a fraudulent bill. And yes, you can be sued for refusing to pay a fraudulent bill. You can be sued for anything. But there are plenty of intermediate steps before going to court.
The first thing you should do if you receive a fraudulent bill is contact the billing party. It could be an honest mistake. Even if it's not, when you call up and say "I got this bill, it says X, and X isn't true, I have Y right here and I checked it" you put the ball back in their court. If they can't back up their claim, but they still want to pursue it, they are in the weak position, not you. They are the ones that have to pay the filing fees, and the lawyers fees, and have you served, all before you even need to worry about it again. I've gotten dozens of incorrect bills , and I haven't paid one of them, and guess what? I haven't been sued. Not once.
Now maybe the bill isn't fraudulent. This pitiful excuse for an article doesn't even give us enough to make an educated guess on that subject really, but the source definately claims it is fraudulent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Do you really think one should pay a fraudulent bill reflexively, without even attempting to challenge it? At this time I'd like to bill you $500 for reading this post. The contract you signed for your internet service said that you would pay this bill. Really it did. Don't dispute the bill, don't doublecheck your contract, just mail me the check like a nice little sheep, k?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Xterm is the best filemanager. :)
If, however, you were wanting something graphical, the most promising one IMOP is in GWorkspace - although it definately still needs some work. KDE and Gnome both have been horribly disappointing to me, although obviously some people like them. Personally, if I wanted MS Windows on my computer I'd just pull out my CD and reinstall it *shrug*.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Just because you read it on K5 that means it's true? Now, I like K5 and all, but that doesn't follow.
Anyhow, whether it's true or not, it's a damn shoddy attempt at a slashdot story, which was the point I was making. The editors (at least some of them) are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from the phirst post weenies.
The K5 article is here btw, and provides a hell of a lot more information than Timothy provided here.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Not a whole lot here now is there? How do we know this guy didn't just make the thing up? Why am I not surprised to see that this was posted by Timothy? *sigh*
Anyhow, this makes no sense. If he read his contracts and there was no such clause, and he was getting ready to do something with the gateway, why did he send it back? He called them to tell them he was sending it back, but he couldn't be bothered to first call and ask them precisely where in the contract this supposed clause was? Odd. Dumb. True? Who knows. Next.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Nonsense. The GPL is not a use license, and it does not even pretend that it has to be agreed to for use. The license in this case was one that restricted the rights of the user. The GPL is one that offers more rights than the user otherwise has under the law. It's apples and oranges - the two licenses have nothing in common other than being referred to by the word "license".
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Hmm looks promising. One question, I looked around the website a bit, but didn't find this mentioned - does gentoo use BSD style init, or that sysV atrocity?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
From the article:
So, they're pulling out of the area that was making the profits, to concentrate on the loss leaders? Someone explain this, it looks totally insane to me.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Damn good point. Jabber would be the logical choice, with transports available to make migration less painful.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
There isn't any ethical or legal problem with this at all. Their products are proprietary add-ons and services, it's hardly different in kind to what RedHat does. When they modify GPL code, they are obliged to GPL the mods. When they write their own code from scratch, they are not. There is no requirement that proprietary programs be GPLd to run under a GPL OS (ever heard of Oracle?)
Bottom line, as long as they comply with the terms of the GPL when it comes to GPL code, they can put whatever license they want on their own. There might be a minor nitpick if their license doesn't make it clear that it only applies to their proprietary programs, not the OS as a whole, I'll grant, but if that is the case it will be easily fixed. There was a similar flap awhile back about Corel's license, and it didn't turn out to be any big deal, I recall.
First off the KDE/QT deal was a totally different issue. KDE was making Free, not proprietary software, yet they were using a library with a license incompatible with the license of their own software. Much more serious problem. Fortunately that one got fixed, though it wasn't easy, and for all the flaming certain immature individuals gave RMS over it, they should be thanking him - if he hadn't raised a stink KDE might still be in a legal limbo, and QT unfree.
RMS is no fan of Caldera, in fact he has expressed what could only be termed contempt for CEO Ransom Love in particular. But I'll be surprised if he loses his objectivity on this issue. If they need to clarify the wording of their license, that's fine, that's not the end of the world, and the FSF has always worked to resolve these little bumps quickly and quietly in the past. The GPL is not, and was explicitly never intended to be, anti-business. It's designed to allow writers of Free Software to share code without fear of their code being proprietarised (the major weakness of the BSD license.)
See this entry in the GPL FAQ. Calderas proprietary products are aggregated, not integrated, and as long as that is so, they can license them under any terms they wish.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
While I applaud your good sense in this quote, I still have to do so reservedly. What AOL is doing here is harrassment, and changing the name will merely give them a green light to continue harrassment as an effective tactic.
If a good legal team that can defend them at minimal cost to the project cannot be found, then your advice is probably the best. On the other hand, what they are doing now, seeking to find such a defense team if at all possible, is definately called for as well. No need for them to cave immediately. Far better to put out the word as far and as fast as possible as to what is happening, and solicit aid. There are many possible ways it could be forthcoming. If it is not, they can still change their name next week...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Yes, actually there is. Remember the roots of Caldera are in Novell. Novell is still deeply rooted in many companies - and for good reason. For many, it combines the best of NT (ease of use) and Unix (power, speed, reliability.)
For companies with millions invested in Novell systems, the advantages of Linux are offset by the learning curve and the difficulties in integrating it into their existing systems. Caldera is a godsend for those companies, and they aren't going to even blink at these licensing fees. A lot of Calderas work is available under the GPL, yes, and it's quite possible to take any other distribution and integrate it perfectly into a Novell network - but it still isn't the easiest thing to do. Pay Caldera and they do the work for you. You get a system that is "plug and play" for that environment, instead of one that can be hacked into shape for it, and you get topnotch support from people that know both linux and novell inside and out.
I don't expect Caldera to ever get much mindshare out of the hacker set (excepting the ones they pay) however it has always been very attractive for enterprises that use novell and need a linux system that will fit into their existing network with minimal fuss. And, I repeat, those customers aren't going to blink at the licensing fees. It's still far more attractive than the alternatives to them, and it's a drop in the bucket compared to what they are used to paying anyway.
This was probably a very good decision for Caldera - the only people that it's going to bother are the ones that weren't going to be their customers anyway. And I'm sure they can use the revenue.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
So Darren has said recently. But, in all fairness, that just doesn't fit the evidence. See for instance this post from a year ago, where Darren refers to his work as "public domain." Contrast that with his more recent statement in computerworld that he has "never considered IPFilter to be open-source."
The license hasn't changed, no, but Darrens publically stated interpretation of the license sure as hell has.
Having followed this story closely, the best I can tell what happened is this. Darren initially intended his license to be BSD compatible, wrote it to be BSD compatible, and everyone using and contributing thought it was indeed BSD compatible. Darren didn't correct them because so far as he was concerned they were correct. Recently he got upset at the possibility or actuality (not sure which) of people distributing modified versions of his own betas, and added the "clarification" to a beta, intending only to prohibit modified versions of that particular version, not of regular releases. At this point Theo and others realised that the original license was indeed less than perfectly clear, and fearing that he would try to extend the prohibition further, and concerned that the license wasn't clear enough about modifications, they began to ask him to change the license. Apparently Theo managed to really rub him the wrong way in the process, and he got angry, and decided based on the vagueness in the licensing terms he could get away with closing it all retroactively, just to spite Theo. Begin the flamefests and the inevitable removal of ipfilter from OBSD.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You're correct that this doesn't change the legal situation proper. However, the legal position proper was never the problem. Legally the little felines are and have always been freely hackable. The problem was simply the threat of big bad company with presumably deep pockets sicking the landsharks on individual hackers that couldn't afford to defend themselves, merits (or lack thereof) of the case be damned. The troubles at DC mean that threat just lost all credibility - they obviously are not in a position to engage in such tactics.
Sure, it's possible some other big bad company with deep pockets and no ethics could come along and buy the property and turn around and start in on the same route, but it surely is very unlikely. The "property" is obviously not worth the trouble, and even stuffed shirts that didn't understand that before will now when they see how much good it did DC.
As another poster pointed out, there are already at least two such databases. Your objection that they don't include the elements of DCs intended setup that most of us found objectionable in the first place doesn't seem like any big deal to me. There's no need to buy anything from DC. Their copyright on the windows only spyware they distributed with the cuecats is not needed or even desireable, as cross platform Free Software programs that perform as desired and don't spy on the user are available.
It'll most likely be auctioned off to the highest bidder, before or after the bankruptcy declaration. They can expect to be spammed and junk mailed and telemarketed out of their minds. It sucks, but really, wtf did they expect when they happily traded off their privacy to DC in exchange for a little promised convenience?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
At least one has - Slackware. Profitable from day one. Still profitable today. Not huge, no, but profitable. A small company with a small group of paid programmers that keep their target audience very happy.
Anyway, it's not quite correct to say that the GPL denies software revenue, although it certainly makes it tricky.
The future probably has room for quite a few successful ventures using GPL, but it may well be that only smaller ones like slack will be successful and releasing everything as Free Software, while larger companies will need to embrace the movement to some extent, but maintain some proprietary level, either in making hardware or keeping their top items pay-only. That's not really a problem. If you really need a large, complicated program with the most cutting edge features then you probably won't mind to pay for it. But eventually, when that cutting edge program ages a bit and is no longer cutting edge, it may well be cloned or freed regardless, and one will only need to pay if one really needs the newest features. In this fashion the best of both worlds can be achieved - companies that spend money programming the latest and greatest can make their money back and profit on top of that, but they can't turn the program into an indefinate license to print money either, and the stultifying effect on innovation and computer science excessive proprietarization causes will be almost completely avoided.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
A rather nebulous assertion, since you don't give any specific examples. When the api changes the library should go to a new version number.
I'm not saying it's never happened, it's quite conceivable. There are two reasons why this could happen - either the library coders changed an api and didn't rev the version number appropriately (unlikely for any of the major libraries which tend to be maintained in a very professional manner) or an application coder circumvented the normal api (MUCH more likely.) Sometimes inexperienced coders will do this and think they are really clever for it, but it's actually very stupid. Either way, the problem is not in the system design, it's in someone doing something very stupid in their code. In either case it would be instantly clear who screwed up, and thus who should be on the receiving end of a stiff LART. This is probably why it's so rare.
This isn't an issue with GNU cash, and even if it was, it STILL wouldn't be anything like .dll hell, which is a design problem, not a problem with individual coders doing something stupid occasionally.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."