I've had an LG G Watch R for a little over a month now and quite like it. I don't use it to run apps per se, but it is a good interface to the phone. Anything on Android that would cause a notification will appear on the watch, and I can dismiss them as needed. Of course, it doesn't replace the phone, but 9 times out of 10 I just want to see the notice not actually do anything. I review it here if you are interested: http://www.adventuresinoss.com...
This is what I have done:
1) create a document with all sensitive information (passwords, account numbers, etc.)
2) encrypt it with the keys of two tech-savvy friends
3) e-mail the file to two non-tech-savvy friends with instructions to send it to the people in step 2 upon my death
I'm not sure what you would do if you don't have enough friends (grin) but this seems to be a pretty simple and robust solution for my needs.
I read a lot, but I don't own an eBook reader specifically because of the DRM. When I buy a physical book it's mine to keep, sell or share. The "Animal Farm" fiasco with the original Kindle scared me off investing on any eBooks, at least while the price point is so close to a paper book. Sell me a $25 book in eBook format for $1 and I'll live with the DRM. Sell me one for $23.95 and no deal.
What I am waiting for is an eBook vendor to follow the lead of the Blu-ray/DVD industry and include a digital copy along with the physical one. If I could pay $25 for a hardback *and* get a digital copy I'd be there in an instant.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and open source is definitely not a democracy. Democracies have the potential to devolve into rule by the mob. In the open source projects I am involved with, influence is based on merit. Those people who do the most work get to, ultimately, make the most decisions.
This doesn't mean that the casual user should have no input. But eventually someone has to make a decision: left vs. right, red vs. blue, etc. The beauty of open source is that if you don't like it, you can change it.
As a person who runs an open source company, the first sentence "Why do people think they own code just because they've paid for it?" caught my eye. The reason most companies think they own code is that 99% of the contracts I read have a "work for hire" clause. This means that as a contractor you sign away the same rights that employees do. You come up with a patentable idea on company time? They own it. You write code? They own it.
Open source presents an interesting problem. Quite often in the same contracts they have clauses against distribution of the work for hire. I spend quite a bit of time lining out those paragraphs before I sign such a contract.
There are no inalienable "developer rights" that need to be asserted. Quite simply this is a case of contract law. If you want to retain the ownership of your code, don't sign a contract that gives it away. Heck, it worked for Bill Gates.
In this case we have serious concerns about the behavior of a particular company, Cittio. Perhaps these concerns are unfounded, but my question was to ask for advice concerning how to go about, perhaps, getting rid of these concerns. The GPL is a license based on copyright law, and thus doesn't even take affect until a "copy" is distributed, so of course Cittio is under no legal obligation to reveal how they are using OpenNMS until they actually provide the code.
Now, I should note that they have configured a demo system for this client to use on the client's hardware. While I am most definitely not a lawyer, that could be construed as "distribution", although it could be argued that no ownership has changed hands. In any case, the fact that their use of OpenNMS was not clearly disclosed (as is recommended by the GPL Violations Vendor FAQ) was enough to cause us some concern. If there is nothing to hide, why not be up front about it?
This happened right after we received a query from a Cittio software engineer looking to compile one of our GPL'd libraries. Now, if they are truly using OpenNMS in an unmodified fashion, why the question? Can't they just use OpenNMS as distributed? Again, there is probably a simple answer, but I am at a loss as to how to get it.
It seems that your recommendation (along with many others) is to just forget about it or to hire a lawyer. Neither is very useful to me.
I disagree. According to the GPL "you must show them these terms so they know their rights." At what point? This client had already received at least two quotes from Cittio. If they choose this solution, the next step would be to issue a purchase order. Does Cittio then go "oh, before I invoice this, there's something you need to know". My argument would be that they need to make potential customers aware of their use of open source software before the purchase, not after it.
I wasn't really asking for legal advice on Slashdot. While I am at times stupid, I am not that stupid (grin). I was actually looking to see if there were other suggestions and other courses of action. If you read my post, I make two claims: that it appears that Cittio is not making clients aware of their rights under the GPL (it was a client who was unaware that OpenNMS was used as part of Cittio, not me) and that it appears that at least one of their developers is doing more with the OpenNMS code than just packaging it, which suggests (and note I say "suggests") that they may be using OpenNMS code as part of their application. Neither claim is libelous.
I never claimed to be unaware of Cittio's use of OpenNMS. If you read my post my claim is that potential Cittio "clients", not me, are being kept in the dark about what open source software is being used as part of Watchtower. It is not up to the end user to suddenly find out that the code they are purchasing is based on open source work. The GPL clearly states "you must show them these terms so they know their rights." This is, apparently, not being done.
The history of OpenNMS is pretty long and convoluted. It was started by a company called Oculan, and I was an employee of theirs when they decided to stop publishing their code under the GPL. I wanted to keep the project alive, and thus I took over maintaining the code in 2002. So all of the original "1.0" code is copyright Oculan (and that IP is now owned by Raritan) while almost all of the other changes are copyright "The OpenNMS Group". Both companies are commercial entities, although OpenNMS is never licensed outside of the GPL.
According to Daniel B. Ravicher at the SFLC (who I contacted in 2005): "SFLC unfortunately cannot generally represent for profit entities". The fact that the SFLC won't defend us doesn't mean that we "don't have any standing in the matter".
We do own the copyright to our work, but it is a derivative work based on the GPL and it is very unclear how such things can be defended since it is based on the work of other (duly noted in every copyright notice in the OpenNMS code).
Thanks for the defense. Our server usually has a load average of about 0.2 - 0.3 with peaks up to 1 or so (when the Mac mail.app clients hit the imap server). When the Slashdot article went up this is what I got from my hosting provider:
At console, your server was very slow, and very hard to work with; I was unable to determine why SSH failed to respond to remote connections. Your server is under a lot of stress, the last load average I was able to get:
load average: 162.58, 171.32, 149.41
Heh.
This server is about 5 years old, and since we had just gotten a new, refurb Dell 2650 installed (dual 3.0 GHz CPUs, 4GB RAM, etc.) I quickly moved the wiki to the new server. We put a squid proxy in front of it for acceleration and the site screams. I love this open source stuff (grin).
Grrr. We've been on Slashdot before but man, this sucks. OpenNMS sent me an alarm (and the fact that I can't get to my mail also alerted me) but what can you do. Usually Rackspace does a good job and I've opened a support ticket to see if they can do anything about it. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had an LG G Watch R for a little over a month now and quite like it. I don't use it to run apps per se, but it is a good interface to the phone. Anything on Android that would cause a notification will appear on the watch, and I can dismiss them as needed. Of course, it doesn't replace the phone, but 9 times out of 10 I just want to see the notice not actually do anything. I review it here if you are interested: http://www.adventuresinoss.com...
This is what I have done: 1) create a document with all sensitive information (passwords, account numbers, etc.) 2) encrypt it with the keys of two tech-savvy friends 3) e-mail the file to two non-tech-savvy friends with instructions to send it to the people in step 2 upon my death I'm not sure what you would do if you don't have enough friends (grin) but this seems to be a pretty simple and robust solution for my needs.
I read a lot, but I don't own an eBook reader specifically because of the DRM. When I buy a physical book it's mine to keep, sell or share. The "Animal Farm" fiasco with the original Kindle scared me off investing on any eBooks, at least while the price point is so close to a paper book. Sell me a $25 book in eBook format for $1 and I'll live with the DRM. Sell me one for $23.95 and no deal. What I am waiting for is an eBook vendor to follow the lead of the Blu-ray/DVD industry and include a digital copy along with the physical one. If I could pay $25 for a hardback *and* get a digital copy I'd be there in an instant.
Click through to the blog post. One of the founders, Brian Weaver, was at the party. He puts the official date around 1 July 1999.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and open source is definitely not a democracy. Democracies have the potential to devolve into rule by the mob. In the open source projects I am involved with, influence is based on merit. Those people who do the most work get to, ultimately, make the most decisions.
This doesn't mean that the casual user should have no input. But eventually someone has to make a decision: left vs. right, red vs. blue, etc. The beauty of open source is that if you don't like it, you can change it.
As a person who runs an open source company, the first sentence "Why do people think they own code just because they've paid for it?" caught my eye. The reason most companies think they own code is that 99% of the contracts I read have a "work for hire" clause. This means that as a contractor you sign away the same rights that employees do. You come up with a patentable idea on company time? They own it. You write code? They own it. Open source presents an interesting problem. Quite often in the same contracts they have clauses against distribution of the work for hire. I spend quite a bit of time lining out those paragraphs before I sign such a contract. There are no inalienable "developer rights" that need to be asserted. Quite simply this is a case of contract law. If you want to retain the ownership of your code, don't sign a contract that gives it away. Heck, it worked for Bill Gates.
You obviously misunderstood my earlier post.
In this case we have serious concerns about the behavior of a particular company, Cittio. Perhaps these concerns are unfounded, but my question was to ask for advice concerning how to go about, perhaps, getting rid of these concerns. The GPL is a license based on copyright law, and thus doesn't even take affect until a "copy" is distributed, so of course Cittio is under no legal obligation to reveal how they are using OpenNMS until they actually provide the code.
Now, I should note that they have configured a demo system for this client to use on the client's hardware. While I am most definitely not a lawyer, that could be construed as "distribution", although it could be argued that no ownership has changed hands. In any case, the fact that their use of OpenNMS was not clearly disclosed (as is recommended by the GPL Violations Vendor FAQ) was enough to cause us some concern. If there is nothing to hide, why not be up front about it?
This happened right after we received a query from a Cittio software engineer looking to compile one of our GPL'd libraries. Now, if they are truly using OpenNMS in an unmodified fashion, why the question? Can't they just use OpenNMS as distributed? Again, there is probably a simple answer, but I am at a loss as to how to get it.
It seems that your recommendation (along with many others) is to just forget about it or to hire a lawyer. Neither is very useful to me.
SImply because it is part of the license. We wrote code under the GPL and it is a requirement.
I disagree. According to the GPL "you must show them these terms so they know their rights." At what point? This client had already received at least two quotes from Cittio. If they choose this solution, the next step would be to issue a purchase order. Does Cittio then go "oh, before I invoice this, there's something you need to know". My argument would be that they need to make potential customers aware of their use of open source software before the purchase, not after it.
I wasn't really asking for legal advice on Slashdot. While I am at times stupid, I am not that stupid (grin). I was actually looking to see if there were other suggestions and other courses of action. If you read my post, I make two claims: that it appears that Cittio is not making clients aware of their rights under the GPL (it was a client who was unaware that OpenNMS was used as part of Cittio, not me) and that it appears that at least one of their developers is doing more with the OpenNMS code than just packaging it, which suggests (and note I say "suggests") that they may be using OpenNMS code as part of their application. Neither claim is libelous.
I never claimed to be unaware of Cittio's use of OpenNMS. If you read my post my claim is that potential Cittio "clients", not me, are being kept in the dark about what open source software is being used as part of Watchtower. It is not up to the end user to suddenly find out that the code they are purchasing is based on open source work. The GPL clearly states "you must show them these terms so they know their rights." This is, apparently, not being done.
The history of OpenNMS is pretty long and convoluted. It was started by a company called Oculan, and I was an employee of theirs when they decided to stop publishing their code under the GPL. I wanted to keep the project alive, and thus I took over maintaining the code in 2002. So all of the original "1.0" code is copyright Oculan (and that IP is now owned by Raritan) while almost all of the other changes are copyright "The OpenNMS Group". Both companies are commercial entities, although OpenNMS is never licensed outside of the GPL. According to Daniel B. Ravicher at the SFLC (who I contacted in 2005): "SFLC unfortunately cannot generally represent for profit entities". The fact that the SFLC won't defend us doesn't mean that we "don't have any standing in the matter". We do own the copyright to our work, but it is a derivative work based on the GPL and it is very unclear how such things can be defended since it is based on the work of other (duly noted in every copyright notice in the OpenNMS code).
Thanks for the defense. Our server usually has a load average of about 0.2 - 0.3 with peaks up to 1 or so (when the Mac mail.app clients hit the imap server). When the Slashdot article went up this is what I got from my hosting provider:
At console, your server was very slow, and very hard to work with; I was unable to determine why SSH failed to respond to remote connections. Your server is under a lot of stress, the last load average I was able to get:
load average: 162.58, 171.32, 149.41
Heh.
This server is about 5 years old, and since we had just gotten a new, refurb Dell 2650 installed (dual 3.0 GHz CPUs, 4GB RAM, etc.) I quickly moved the wiki to the new server. We put a squid proxy in front of it for acceleration and the site screams. I love this open source stuff (grin).
FYI - the #opennms channel on irc.freenode.net is still up (grin)
Grrr. We've been on Slashdot before but man, this sucks. OpenNMS sent me an alarm (and the fact that I can't get to my mail also alerted me) but what can you do. Usually Rackspace does a good job and I've opened a support ticket to see if they can do anything about it. Sorry.