Copyright doesn't work like that. Only the owner has the right to do that.
And he's the company's agent. They knew of and accepted his actions.
Yes, he's the company's agent. However, that doesn't mean he has the right or authority to do so. Claiming they knew of and accepted his actions isn't provable, and in many cases has been proven to not be effective in a court of law. There are so many things wrong with that in itself that in many cases, it isn't. Prove they knew it. Prove they accepted it. Prove they weren't consulting with legal for the past . Now prove that they knew of each and every contribution he made and they accepted each and every single one. If you can't do all of those, you've lost your case. I've seen court cases where it's even more cut and dry and has gone on for longer periods of time and yet, the courts have sided with the company. That is why you ALWAYS need to have it explicitly written down and approved before doing anything in your field outside of work or you risk losing the rights to the company.
I've had this in every one of my employment contracts for the past 15 years, and it's saved my ass more than once.
Sure, they own the work; and he freed the source on their behalf.
Copyright doesn't work like that. Only the owner has the right to do that. It isn't a chain like FOSS. Additionally, they have the right to revoke it at anytime even if they let it go for a while. Copyrights don't need to be protected unless you lose the right like for say a trademark.
How many devs would start using a non FOSS framework these days? The freeing of the project is why it's a success.
Two different issues here. The first, how many would? I'm going to assume you are in the FOSS bubble and haven't looked outside it. The vast majority are still under standard copyright, trademark, or patents -- not FOSS. While FOSS has made absolutely huge strides in both quality and popularity, it is still massively dwarfed still. Your typical FOSS language or platform doesn't even make the top 5 (could be top 10, but I don't remember all 10 from memory). Also, while perhaps interesting, this isn't relevant to who owns the rights to the code.
Secondly, about why the project is a success, also not relevant to who owns the code.
Lastly, about accepting patches... Well that might muddy the waters some, however, nothing prevents the company from exerting its right to the copyright able portions of the code base. Effectively killing the project unless rewritten. The FOSS project may be able to do the same. Close the source, claim it removed any offending patches and feel free to sue them if you can prove they didn't. But this is much more of a grey area, and while I do have a fair amount of knowledge about copyrights, trademarks, and patents, I am not a lawyer. Even if I was, I think it would be safe to say that it's up to the courts to decide.
Sure, rewriting the applications would take some time, but I think you'll find that you'll spend less time rolling out a C++ application that you would a Java application. There is so many more things that can go wrong with Java than a standard C++ application. And I'm not sure why you even mention having to make sure their machines are up-to-date. That's a bigger issue with having to rely on the JVM than the C++ libraries that get compiled into the application or are dynamically linked in and most installers can chain in the C++ runtime libraries (that can be set to be application specific or system wide installation -- obviously app specific causes less headaches).
UH, yeah. I know the large companies I was in, I was constantly getting sidetracked by having to study law so that I could lead an IP infringement suit. That's what all good corporate programmers spend their time on.
Note that most "programmers" fall under works for hire. Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that
Moreover, it held that supervision or control over creation of the work alone is not controlling.
So works done that they haven't explicitly asked for, are indeed still covered by works for hire.
Additionally,
If a work is made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is the initial owner of the copyright unless both parties involved have signed a written agreement to the contrary.
I can send you links to judgements from other courts that prove you wrong as well if you so like, but talking out of your ass won't help. Please link to either an official document, like from the copyright office as I did, or to Supreme Court rulings on the matter, otherwise, I'll assume this discussion is over.
Umm.. A 0-day exploit is one that is found in the wild 0-days after the vendor knows about it. I know the definition is constantly getting abused, but that is what it means. It literally means the vendor has had 0 days to try and figure it out, come up with a solution to it, do regression testing, and release it. There used to be many more types of exploits out there measured by how long the vendor has either known about it, or has released a patch for it, obviously with 0 days being the worst (or best) of them depending on your point of view.
Are you trying to say that you can take the control systems out of a combat jet and drop them into a turbo prop and if the plane crashes it's a software bug?
I'm no expert, but do 747's have pilot preferences to change the colors of the readouts, the location of the instruments, and be switchable between mi/hr, km/hr, and fractions of the speed of sound? Can they download updates over the internets wirelessly so they can install the latest version of instruments with new "ringtone" warnings?
It would be nice if people who posted had a clue about what they were talking about before posting drivel. You are wrong. It doesn't matter what the license was. The license was invalid, and the employee had absolutely no right to distribute stuff under it.
I can't walk into my office after hours, take all the furniture out of it, place it on the front lawn and have a garage sale. When the police stop by they aren't going to let people walk away with the stuff, they are going to grab it back and give it back to it's rightful owners. Just because I placed a sign on the stuff that said, "It can be yours for free, so long as you give it away when you are finished with it" doesn't change anything.
In addition to not knowing employment law, I see you don't know anything about copyright law either since you said "The project is explicitly registered as a public domain project under Apache license", which makes absolutely no sense. BTW, I have a bridge to sell you for free for $5,000.
Fred,
I am going to assume that you are not a lawyer (God help you if you are), and you haven't taken any serious jobs. First, it's law. Second, as angel said, even though it doesn't need to be specifically stated in an employment contract, it usually is anyway just so that an employee can't feign ignorance of the law.
You may want to argue that this isn't how it should be, but that doesn't change the way it is. I'm not sure how it works in every field, but specifically, in the field of programming, ANY WORK done while you are under contract/employment is owned by your employer whether it is done at you place of work, at home, in your bathroom or anywhere else no matter if it was done before, during, after normal work hours, on a weekend, sick time, vacation, or holiday (actually, I'm not totally sure about on vacation, would have to double check with legal on that one) unless EXPLICITLY specified as an exclusion IN WRITING from your employer.
Actually that graph shows that you'd benefit from 1440p if you sit 12.5 feet away from a 100" screen. I'd also argue that it is much more apparent than that, but I don't have any pretty graphs to show for it.
Plenty of 3rd parties don't have any issues using the API. You can find phones, voicemail software, video camera plugins that all work with skype. Of course, with skype you have access to chat with anyone that has a skype, messenger, or facebook chat account.
It won't be long before an advert-filled, forced-upgrade version of Skype that consumes more resources than my web browser (and has an integrate IE component or whatever) is the only way to use it.
Because that's exactly what happened to Messenger. Oh, wait, no it didn't.
With more log-structured data stores and map-reduce, it becomes more feasible to collect everything up front on cheaper infrastructure (e.g. even cheap SATA disks are blazingly fast for sequential access, which B-tree DBs don't take advantage of but log-oriented DBs like Cassandra as specifically architected to use).
I'll have to do some performance testing later, but you do realize that almost all relational databases support a concept known as clustered indexes, which takes advantage of sequential access, correct? Sounds like you don't understand how current relational databases work.
As for your first case, it's less a factor of speed than it is the content of what you are writing. If it's mostly free-form crap that doesn't or won't ever have to be analyzed based on the actual content (Blogs, posts, etc) then yes. If you need to be able to query the data at a later point and be able to run statistics on it regularly, then no, especially if accuracy in the statistic is important.
And on the other side, NoSQL typically fails much more than it succeeds because NoSQL defers most of it's logic to the application itself, and that fails very quickly in enterprise situations where you have many needs across many departments. If you think of NoSQL being like a large filing cabinet full of files you have no idea what is in them, if that works for you then NoSQL might be a solution. However, if you want to be able to say look through all the files to find something within them, then NoSQL fails miserably. It also fails if your needs change rapidly, like needing to reanalyze your data in a way that wasn't thought of when you put the system live -- which happens every day in enterprise warehouses.
And we've been trying to solve problems with trying to boot from machines with multiple SCSI adapters installed since 1986, mostly because of BIOS limitations and they still haven't been completely fixed. Multiple adapters trying to install their boot roms so they they can be seen and bootable by BIOS only to find out that there isn't any addressable space left. 26 years later, and the problems still exist. It's just getting worse because desktop boards are becoming more and more packed with features that need support at boot time (Multiple raid controllers, Multiple USB hosts, Firewire, etc).
Is it possible to fit new devices and continue down the BIOS path? Sure. And you can set up a new standard in BIOS so that it can do page swapping and all kinds of other stuff to fix many of these limitations. Just like how we did way back in the day with XMS/EMS/QDPMI memory pre-32-bit OS's. And you'll take a performance hit for all devices as you manually cram all that stuff into your little 1MB area of memory and try to intelligently swap stuff in and out of that as needed.
Or.... We can stop pretending this is 1984 and build something new that doesn't suck.
#4 is false. How do propose that Windows will detect that it's not being virtualized if the host doesn't want it to know? Did you think that somehow there is magic dust that makes it so that VMs can't virtualize a UEFI boot environment, secure boot and all?
Slashdot Mirror
Yay for slashdot eating things that look like html ;-(
That should have read "Prove they weren't consulting with legal for the past {timeframe}."
Copyright doesn't work like that. Only the owner has the right to do that.
And he's the company's agent. They knew of and accepted his actions.
Yes, he's the company's agent. However, that doesn't mean he has the right or authority to do so. Claiming they knew of and accepted his actions isn't provable, and in many cases has been proven to not be effective in a court of law. There are so many things wrong with that in itself that in many cases, it isn't. Prove they knew it. Prove they accepted it. Prove they weren't consulting with legal for the past . Now prove that they knew of each and every contribution he made and they accepted each and every single one. If you can't do all of those, you've lost your case. I've seen court cases where it's even more cut and dry and has gone on for longer periods of time and yet, the courts have sided with the company. That is why you ALWAYS need to have it explicitly written down and approved before doing anything in your field outside of work or you risk losing the rights to the company.
I've had this in every one of my employment contracts for the past 15 years, and it's saved my ass more than once.
Sure, they own the work; and he freed the source on their behalf.
Copyright doesn't work like that. Only the owner has the right to do that. It isn't a chain like FOSS. Additionally, they have the right to revoke it at anytime even if they let it go for a while. Copyrights don't need to be protected unless you lose the right like for say a trademark.
How many devs would start using a non FOSS framework these days? The freeing of the project is why it's a success.
Two different issues here. The first, how many would? I'm going to assume you are in the FOSS bubble and haven't looked outside it. The vast majority are still under standard copyright, trademark, or patents -- not FOSS. While FOSS has made absolutely huge strides in both quality and popularity, it is still massively dwarfed still. Your typical FOSS language or platform doesn't even make the top 5 (could be top 10, but I don't remember all 10 from memory). Also, while perhaps interesting, this isn't relevant to who owns the rights to the code.
Secondly, about why the project is a success, also not relevant to who owns the code.
Lastly, about accepting patches... Well that might muddy the waters some, however, nothing prevents the company from exerting its right to the copyright able portions of the code base. Effectively killing the project unless rewritten. The FOSS project may be able to do the same. Close the source, claim it removed any offending patches and feel free to sue them if you can prove they didn't. But this is much more of a grey area, and while I do have a fair amount of knowledge about copyrights, trademarks, and patents, I am not a lawyer. Even if I was, I think it would be safe to say that it's up to the courts to decide.
Sure, rewriting the applications would take some time, but I think you'll find that you'll spend less time rolling out a C++ application that you would a Java application. There is so many more things that can go wrong with Java than a standard C++ application. And I'm not sure why you even mention having to make sure their machines are up-to-date. That's a bigger issue with having to rely on the JVM than the C++ libraries that get compiled into the application or are dynamically linked in and most installers can chain in the C++ runtime libraries (that can be set to be application specific or system wide installation -- obviously app specific causes less headaches).
UH, yeah. I know the large companies I was in, I was constantly getting sidetracked by having to study law so that I could lead an IP infringement suit. That's what all good corporate programmers spend their time on.
That's false. Unless you're in certain states in the USA where slavery has made a comeback.
You mean unless you are in the United States, or any territory that US copyright law is enforced. For your reference:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf
Note that most "programmers" fall under works for hire. Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that
Moreover, it held that supervision or control over creation of the work alone is not controlling.
So works done that they haven't explicitly asked for, are indeed still covered by works for hire.
Additionally,
If a work is made for hire, the employer or other person
for whom the work was prepared is the initial owner of the
copyright unless both parties involved have signed a written
agreement to the contrary.
I can send you links to judgements from other courts that prove you wrong as well if you so like, but talking out of your ass won't help. Please link to either an official document, like from the copyright office as I did, or to Supreme Court rulings on the matter, otherwise, I'll assume this discussion is over.
Umm.. A 0-day exploit is one that is found in the wild 0-days after the vendor knows about it. I know the definition is constantly getting abused, but that is what it means. It literally means the vendor has had 0 days to try and figure it out, come up with a solution to it, do regression testing, and release it. There used to be many more types of exploits out there measured by how long the vendor has either known about it, or has released a patch for it, obviously with 0 days being the worst (or best) of them depending on your point of view.
Are you trying to say that you can take the control systems out of a combat jet and drop them into a turbo prop and if the plane crashes it's a software bug?
I'm no expert, but do 747's have pilot preferences to change the colors of the readouts, the location of the instruments, and be switchable between mi/hr, km/hr, and fractions of the speed of sound? Can they download updates over the internets wirelessly so they can install the latest version of instruments with new "ringtone" warnings?
Those systems use real software engineers, not programmers. There's a big difference, and you've stumbled across it.
Just how many people do you think are in the White House?
like asking a girl you haven't even met yet to sleep with you is ridiculous
Yet, you'd be surprised at how often one will tell you yes.
You are wrong. Keep posting garbage.
It would be nice if people who posted had a clue about what they were talking about before posting drivel. You are wrong. It doesn't matter what the license was. The license was invalid, and the employee had absolutely no right to distribute stuff under it.
I can't walk into my office after hours, take all the furniture out of it, place it on the front lawn and have a garage sale. When the police stop by they aren't going to let people walk away with the stuff, they are going to grab it back and give it back to it's rightful owners. Just because I placed a sign on the stuff that said, "It can be yours for free, so long as you give it away when you are finished with it" doesn't change anything.
In addition to not knowing employment law, I see you don't know anything about copyright law either since you said "The project is explicitly registered as a public domain project under Apache license", which makes absolutely no sense. BTW, I have a bridge to sell you for free for $5,000.
Fred,
I am going to assume that you are not a lawyer (God help you if you are), and you haven't taken any serious jobs. First, it's law. Second, as angel said, even though it doesn't need to be specifically stated in an employment contract, it usually is anyway just so that an employee can't feign ignorance of the law.
You may want to argue that this isn't how it should be, but that doesn't change the way it is. I'm not sure how it works in every field, but specifically, in the field of programming, ANY WORK done while you are under contract/employment is owned by your employer whether it is done at you place of work, at home, in your bathroom or anywhere else no matter if it was done before, during, after normal work hours, on a weekend, sick time, vacation, or holiday (actually, I'm not totally sure about on vacation, would have to double check with legal on that one) unless EXPLICITLY specified as an exclusion IN WRITING from your employer.
Erm, you mean like Zevia http://www.walmart.com/ip/21091622?adid=22222222227015569424&wmlspartner=wlpa&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=&wl3=21486607510&wl4=&wl5=pla&veh=sem, Sobe Lifewater http://www.amazon.com/Sobe-Lifewater-Variety-Pack-Bottles/dp/B003FXIUWY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357936948&sr=8-1&keywords=sobe+lifewater, Trop50 http://www.shoprite.com/pd/Tropicana-Trop50/Orange-Juice/59-fl-oz/048500020135/, etc?
Odd, been drinking some of those for years.
Correct, and what makes you think the EU won't try and make a cash grab from every search engine including now defunct ones?
1. Declare normal business practices illegal. ...
2.
3. Profit!
This chart doesn't go up to 4K, but suggests that you'd have to sit closer than 10 feet away from a 100" screen to take advantage of even 1440p:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/ [engadget.com]
Actually that graph shows that you'd benefit from 1440p if you sit 12.5 feet away from a 100" screen. I'd also argue that it is much more apparent than that, but I don't have any pretty graphs to show for it.
And netflix https://signup.netflix.com/superhd and iTunes and youtube.
if Skype offered a proper API that other programs could use, Pidgin etc. would jump on it
Here ya go: http://developer.skype.com/desktop-api-reference
Plenty of 3rd parties don't have any issues using the API. You can find phones, voicemail software, video camera plugins that all work with skype. Of course, with skype you have access to chat with anyone that has a skype, messenger, or facebook chat account.
It won't be long before an advert-filled, forced-upgrade version of Skype that consumes more resources than my web browser (and has an integrate IE component or whatever) is the only way to use it.
Because that's exactly what happened to Messenger. Oh, wait, no it didn't.
With more log-structured data stores and map-reduce, it becomes more feasible to collect everything up front on cheaper infrastructure (e.g. even cheap SATA disks are blazingly fast for sequential access, which B-tree DBs don't take advantage of but log-oriented DBs like Cassandra as specifically architected to use).
I'll have to do some performance testing later, but you do realize that almost all relational databases support a concept known as clustered indexes, which takes advantage of sequential access, correct? Sounds like you don't understand how current relational databases work.
As for your first case, it's less a factor of speed than it is the content of what you are writing. If it's mostly free-form crap that doesn't or won't ever have to be analyzed based on the actual content (Blogs, posts, etc) then yes. If you need to be able to query the data at a later point and be able to run statistics on it regularly, then no, especially if accuracy in the statistic is important.
And on the other side, NoSQL typically fails much more than it succeeds because NoSQL defers most of it's logic to the application itself, and that fails very quickly in enterprise situations where you have many needs across many departments. If you think of NoSQL being like a large filing cabinet full of files you have no idea what is in them, if that works for you then NoSQL might be a solution. However, if you want to be able to say look through all the files to find something within them, then NoSQL fails miserably. It also fails if your needs change rapidly, like needing to reanalyze your data in a way that wasn't thought of when you put the system live -- which happens every day in enterprise warehouses.
Unless I am mistaken (Which I could very well be).. Samsung has like 2 fabs currently, compared to TSMC's 14.
And we've been trying to solve problems with trying to boot from machines with multiple SCSI adapters installed since 1986, mostly because of BIOS limitations and they still haven't been completely fixed. Multiple adapters trying to install their boot roms so they they can be seen and bootable by BIOS only to find out that there isn't any addressable space left. 26 years later, and the problems still exist. It's just getting worse because desktop boards are becoming more and more packed with features that need support at boot time (Multiple raid controllers, Multiple USB hosts, Firewire, etc).
Is it possible to fit new devices and continue down the BIOS path? Sure. And you can set up a new standard in BIOS so that it can do page swapping and all kinds of other stuff to fix many of these limitations. Just like how we did way back in the day with XMS/EMS/QDPMI memory pre-32-bit OS's. And you'll take a performance hit for all devices as you manually cram all that stuff into your little 1MB area of memory and try to intelligently swap stuff in and out of that as needed.
Or.... We can stop pretending this is 1984 and build something new that doesn't suck.
#4 is false. How do propose that Windows will detect that it's not being virtualized if the host doesn't want it to know? Did you think that somehow there is magic dust that makes it so that VMs can't virtualize a UEFI boot environment, secure boot and all?
Real slashdotters unplug the CPU.