You're both right based on different perspectives. The original poster was sympathizing with all of the members of the MySQL community who contributed to the product but received none of the money from the sale. While they were not legally entitled to any of that money, most people considered it very bad form. However, you are correct that the users of MySQL still benefit regardless of who owns the company, but that doesn't do anything to make the actions of the sellers more acceptable.
That's a little unfair. Those sites are programmed to show ads regardless of the content you are attempting to access.
Ok, I'll give you that. But I hope this puts a fire under their asses to change the behavior for breaking news on tragedies.
News channels will break away for commercials as well.
There were no commercials during the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing as well as 9/11. If the news is important enough to interrupt the current broadcast for live coverage, they traditionally stick with the live coverage and don't try to commercialize the tragedy.
Sorry, Betteridge, but I have to agree with this headline. When I first learned of the bombing, I attempted to get to footage of the live feed. When I clicked on the link, I was treated to an upbeat commercial with two guys joking around and playing guitar in an attempt to sell Geico insurance. I thought there must be some mistake because no one in their right mind would force a viewer to watch commercials before getting news about a tragedy, but sure enough the live feed proceeded after the commercial. Humanity has commercialized tragedy much sooner than I expected.
The article wasn't clear on whether or not this could reverse the damage caused by MS or whether it would just prevent further damage. I know several people that suffer from this disease and it's utterly horrible. The worst case is my uncle who went from being in peak physical condition to requiring a cane or wheelchair to get around. He now stutters when he speaks, has trouble holding his head up, and can't keep his eyes still enough to even focus on words while trying to read. This disease slowly takes away all of your faculties and strips you of all autonomy and independence and a cure for it can't come fast enough.
I never said that they should be forced to disclose their source. My point was that if they choose not to disclose the source, then the source code should be treated as a trade secret and receive absolutely no copyright protection. That means that the company would have protection on their code indefinitely assuming they were capable of preventing a leak. But in the event of a leak, they would have little recourse. If they choose to release the source code instead, then the code should receive full copyright protection. However, what we have today is a system that rewards companies with copyright protection on their source code without getting the benefit of actually EVER seeing that source code. This violates the intent of intellectual property laws which is to have the creators release their work in exchange for a government-granted, time-limited monopoly. Right now, the companies are getting the benefit of the monopoly without ever having to disclose the actual intellectual property and that's just wrong.
So they are currently archiving the binaries, but what about the source code? Oh, that's right - companies get copyright protection on source code AND they get to treat the source code as a trade secret. How convenient for them!
My indifference to EA stopped after I noticed that SSX required a code to play the game online, presumably killing its resale value. I've already boycotted Ubisoft and EA is the latest to join that list. There's just too many good games to play for me to give my money to companies that act like greedy dicks.
Microsoft should know all about this since they did the same thing when they packaged IE with Windows. The EC ruled that Microsoft had to provide the user with an option to use a different browser when the user first logs in to the OS. However, Microsoft was a convicted monopolist in the OS market which was the basis for that decision. So is Microsoft trying to claim that Google has a monopoly on the mobile OS market? That would be a hard sell since there's still iOS, BB10, and Windows Phone. It sounds more like they're just sore about having one of the smallest market shares in the mobile space after dominating the desktop for so long.
Sure, but you aren't patenting the "best" mousetrap (or software equivalent), but an "improved" one. Maybe your new state machine-based sort algorithm works better in some instances where it can utilize a priori knowledge, but doesn't work well with completely random data. If you've still improved upon known sorts, isn't that the type of thing that we, the public, want you to tell us about, even if it isn't the best possible one?
The sort algorithm would contain enough detail to be something of actual value that the software development community would probably like to know, but I believe that would be considered a mathematical formula which does not enjoy patent protection. Besides that, the problem in general with patenting improvements to invents is that the patent on the existing invention is so broad that it covers all implementations of that invention (hence the reason software patents are counter-productive).
They shouldn't require the source code, because you shouldn't need the source to understand the invention. They should, however, have pseudocode and/or flow charts - and they're required to do so under 35 USC 112 currently. But, I agree, there should be more disclosure and better flow charts. Most patents are written in ways that I, personally, find questionable from a written description and enablement perspective. But that's not just software patents - I think pharma patents have huge problems in that area.
Pseudocode and flow charts are nice, but they fall far short of the documentation necessary to make the invention "able to be trivially implemented by another person in the same field." I have seen developers that were handed documentation more detailed than any software patent and watched them create something that matched the documentation but did nothing of value. By the time you start providing documentation detailed enough to create your own useful implementation, you are practically at the code level already.
I think the problem (at least for software) is on the litigation side of things... litigators want patents to be as vague as possible so that, in litigation, they can make the patent say whatever they want. It might be a tough fight to change that, but you could probably make good headway by including a rule that patents must include a clear description of an exemplary implementation that, while not being considered to limit the invention, still is helpful to explain it.
Believe me, I'm not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but software patents just don't make sense. They are frequently written before the software is even implemented so that they are filed before everyone else. What's worse, almost every software developer I know who has written any software of significance would do things differently if they had a second chance. Software development is a complicated process of attempting to balance functionality, performance, robustness, maintainability, cost, scalability, reusability, ease of use, etc. Having some patent about how one development shop implemented something is just about worthless since someone else writing it from scratch will likely have already used the original product, know its shortcomings, and would attempt to create something entirely different that lacks those shortcomings. That is if the company that produced the original product has not locked out competitors already with patents. With software, the code is just about the only thing that really matters and we have ample protection thanks to copyright.
Sounds reasonable. The justification is that trade secrets are bad because they stifle innovation by requiring constant re-invention of the same concepts over and over, and prevent people from being able to improve others' work. Patents give an incentive to people to destroy trade secrets, by giving a time-limited monopoly in exchange for required public disclosure.
I fully agree with everything you have said for every industry except software. In industries other than software, engineers invent technologies that push limitations imposed by the physics and chemistry that make up our universe. In software, the only limitation placed on the software itself is the limits of the developer's imagination. I have never once read the headline to a software patent and wondered how the developer managed to push the boundaries to accomplish the task at hand. The challenge in software development is not how to find a way to get the software to do what you wish: the challenge is finding the best way to accomplish the task given all of the options at your disposal. While it may seem reasonable to grant a patent on the latter, the problem is that the best solution differs depending on your client and varies wildly on a case-by-case basis. And if you don't like that argument, then how about the fact that software patents contain no useful information about how the "invention" works, a.k.a. disclosing the trade secret. Instead, the "inventor" gets to keep the trade secret in the form of the source code. So they get the benefit of the patent protection on a very broad concept and they get to keep the specifics about how the invention actually works protected under trade secret. That undeserved protection of a very broad concept stifles more innovation in the software industry than it has ever protected. The best thing for software innovation is to keep the protection of copyright on the source code and allow developers to create whatever they want, even if it has been done before, as long as they do not illegally copy the source code of others. That appears to be the concensus among most software developers that are interested in true innovation instead of locking out competition.
Okay, your turn to rebut that. Plus, while you're at it, quit dodging the question and answer why Stallman's solution, lacking any of the "free" or "gratis" requirements of the grandparent poster, still is morally justified.
I will not defend Stallman's solution because I agree with you that his reasoning is flawed.
Frankly, this whole "I don't have to answer, you do" bullshiat is not a valid debate tactic.
In general, it is quite a shitty debate tactic. The reason I felt justified in using it in this case is because our legal system is based on a system in which everything is considered legal unless there is a law that explicitly forbids it (there is a Latin term that I can't remember that describes this). Therefore, if you wish to defend a law that is coming under fire for being considered unjust and outside of the scope of its intended utility by the people in the relevant industry (in this case, software patents), the burden is on you to defend its utility.
Note that Stallman's solution doesn't include either of those requirements, and therefore lacks the same moral justification.
If you want to defend a law that prevents someone from creating, manufacturing, distributing, or selling a good, then the onus is on you to provide the moral justification for the existence of that law. Otherwise, the law is an unnecessary impediment to our freedom and should be promptly abolished.
Would this be the same Dianne Feinstein that voted yea on a bill that limits the government's power to regulate guns? Not to mention that the regulations on the sales of games with mature content to minors is working very well and that the percentage of video games with a mature rating is pretty low. So yeah, Dianne, keep pursuing tougher regulation on video games instead of tightening regulations on guns - that definitely seems like the logical stance for a senator to make.
What he's saying is that X11 is still perfectly network transparent, but that the clients are using the protocol in a manner that only works well over very high bandwidth, very low latency links, like a local socket.
So if you want your app to be reasonably usable over connections slower than LANs, you need to design your app in a very specific manner. That doesn't sound unreasonable, but it also doesn't sound transparent, which was my original point.
I think you have misunderstood the intent of the original post. The poster was not saying that X doesn't work over a network - as you have pointed out, anyone can easily prove that X technically works over a network. The point was that the efficiency of "network transparency" in X is no longer a reality. That is because the intent of X was that a request could be made to render a primitive, such as text, by providing a few parameters over X (networked or local) about the text that should be rendered and the result can be displayed with minimal protocol chatter. However, since many elements of modern GUIs use bitmaps for display elements, many of the transmissions over X are simply bitmap requests instead of requests to render X primitives. At that point, X is basically behaving like a glorified rootless VNC server - just sending a series of bitmap updates that can be costly over slow or high-latency networks. Perhaps the original poster should have said the "efficiency of network transparency" is no longer a reality to make the point a little clearer.
And if an X application running on the client system is doing that, then, IMHO, the blame lies with the developer of the application and not X11.
So what you're saying is that X11 isn't network transparent, at least from the perspective of developers. And the example of inefficiency that you provided (drawing bitmaps) is something that all modern GUIs do extensively today. Your defense of X11 seems to be out of touch with the reality of modern GUI development. This is precisely why the people that actually do development on X11 or using X11 want a new graphics stack while the people that don't do any X11 development say that X is good enough.
As others have pointed out, the iPhone 3G topped out at iOS 4 (and that's if you can't deal with how slowly it ran). Even if it could run iOS 5, you neglected the possibility that the person could have sold the phone before iOS 5 even came out. My iPhone 3G definitely had no such erase option and since the damn phone refuses to mount like a proper USB device, I was not able to use software from my laptop to securely wipe the phone before selling it. Oh well, at least I haven't had my identity stolen yet.
I guess you could take your phone over to AT&T and use it on their 2G network. Ever since 3G, each carrier uses their own set of spectrum, so a smartphone is really only usable for the carrier in which it was produced.
And I heard the reduction in crime was caused by banning lead from gasoline. Excessive quantities of lead have been proven to make people more violent. The fact of the matter is that it is difficult to know exactly why it happened, but I know of studies that claim to have proven the reduction was caused by banning leaded gasoline and I have never heard of any studies even finding a correlation with the acceptance of abortion.
I think what the OP was saying is that with a contract, you could be guaranteed a specific monthly price for the duration of the contract. With the program that T-Mobile just announced, you could buy a phone outright that only works on their network and then they could stick you with a huge price hike the following month.
This is one headline that I have to agree with, even if the article concludes the contrary. We are coming out of a period in which huge masses of the population were upgrading to smartphones and tablets. Many of those people have already purchased these items and the innovation in those areas seems to be slowing down. The current generation of these devices do just about everything anyone could need and there seems to be little room for improvement. There also doesn't seem to be much hype surrounding possible new tech products like there was leading up to smartphones and tablets. Given that mixed with the number of buyouts and mergers that are frequently indicative of a bubble, and I can't help but think that we are at least standing on another peak in the tech industry. Now if only there was a way to determine when everyone else will come to the same realization.
Slashdot Mirror
You're both right based on different perspectives. The original poster was sympathizing with all of the members of the MySQL community who contributed to the product but received none of the money from the sale. While they were not legally entitled to any of that money, most people considered it very bad form. However, you are correct that the users of MySQL still benefit regardless of who owns the company, but that doesn't do anything to make the actions of the sellers more acceptable.
Ok, I'll give you that. But I hope this puts a fire under their asses to change the behavior for breaking news on tragedies.
There were no commercials during the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing as well as 9/11. If the news is important enough to interrupt the current broadcast for live coverage, they traditionally stick with the live coverage and don't try to commercialize the tragedy.
Sorry, Betteridge, but I have to agree with this headline. When I first learned of the bombing, I attempted to get to footage of the live feed. When I clicked on the link, I was treated to an upbeat commercial with two guys joking around and playing guitar in an attempt to sell Geico insurance. I thought there must be some mistake because no one in their right mind would force a viewer to watch commercials before getting news about a tragedy, but sure enough the live feed proceeded after the commercial. Humanity has commercialized tragedy much sooner than I expected.
The article wasn't clear on whether or not this could reverse the damage caused by MS or whether it would just prevent further damage. I know several people that suffer from this disease and it's utterly horrible. The worst case is my uncle who went from being in peak physical condition to requiring a cane or wheelchair to get around. He now stutters when he speaks, has trouble holding his head up, and can't keep his eyes still enough to even focus on words while trying to read. This disease slowly takes away all of your faculties and strips you of all autonomy and independence and a cure for it can't come fast enough.
I never said that they should be forced to disclose their source. My point was that if they choose not to disclose the source, then the source code should be treated as a trade secret and receive absolutely no copyright protection. That means that the company would have protection on their code indefinitely assuming they were capable of preventing a leak. But in the event of a leak, they would have little recourse. If they choose to release the source code instead, then the code should receive full copyright protection. However, what we have today is a system that rewards companies with copyright protection on their source code without getting the benefit of actually EVER seeing that source code. This violates the intent of intellectual property laws which is to have the creators release their work in exchange for a government-granted, time-limited monopoly. Right now, the companies are getting the benefit of the monopoly without ever having to disclose the actual intellectual property and that's just wrong.
So they are currently archiving the binaries, but what about the source code? Oh, that's right - companies get copyright protection on source code AND they get to treat the source code as a trade secret. How convenient for them!
My indifference to EA stopped after I noticed that SSX required a code to play the game online, presumably killing its resale value. I've already boycotted Ubisoft and EA is the latest to join that list. There's just too many good games to play for me to give my money to companies that act like greedy dicks.
Microsoft should know all about this since they did the same thing when they packaged IE with Windows. The EC ruled that Microsoft had to provide the user with an option to use a different browser when the user first logs in to the OS. However, Microsoft was a convicted monopolist in the OS market which was the basis for that decision. So is Microsoft trying to claim that Google has a monopoly on the mobile OS market? That would be a hard sell since there's still iOS, BB10, and Windows Phone. It sounds more like they're just sore about having one of the smallest market shares in the mobile space after dominating the desktop for so long.
The sort algorithm would contain enough detail to be something of actual value that the software development community would probably like to know, but I believe that would be considered a mathematical formula which does not enjoy patent protection. Besides that, the problem in general with patenting improvements to invents is that the patent on the existing invention is so broad that it covers all implementations of that invention (hence the reason software patents are counter-productive).
Pseudocode and flow charts are nice, but they fall far short of the documentation necessary to make the invention "able to be trivially implemented by another person in the same field." I have seen developers that were handed documentation more detailed than any software patent and watched them create something that matched the documentation but did nothing of value. By the time you start providing documentation detailed enough to create your own useful implementation, you are practically at the code level already.
Believe me, I'm not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but software patents just don't make sense. They are frequently written before the software is even implemented so that they are filed before everyone else. What's worse, almost every software developer I know who has written any software of significance would do things differently if they had a second chance. Software development is a complicated process of attempting to balance functionality, performance, robustness, maintainability, cost, scalability, reusability, ease of use, etc. Having some patent about how one development shop implemented something is just about worthless since someone else writing it from scratch will likely have already used the original product, know its shortcomings, and would attempt to create something entirely different that lacks those shortcomings. That is if the company that produced the original product has not locked out competitors already with patents. With software, the code is just about the only thing that really matters and we have ample protection thanks to copyright.
I fully agree with everything you have said for every industry except software. In industries other than software, engineers invent technologies that push limitations imposed by the physics and chemistry that make up our universe. In software, the only limitation placed on the software itself is the limits of the developer's imagination. I have never once read the headline to a software patent and wondered how the developer managed to push the boundaries to accomplish the task at hand. The challenge in software development is not how to find a way to get the software to do what you wish: the challenge is finding the best way to accomplish the task given all of the options at your disposal. While it may seem reasonable to grant a patent on the latter, the problem is that the best solution differs depending on your client and varies wildly on a case-by-case basis. And if you don't like that argument, then how about the fact that software patents contain no useful information about how the "invention" works, a.k.a. disclosing the trade secret. Instead, the "inventor" gets to keep the trade secret in the form of the source code. So they get the benefit of the patent protection on a very broad concept and they get to keep the specifics about how the invention actually works protected under trade secret. That undeserved protection of a very broad concept stifles more innovation in the software industry than it has ever protected. The best thing for software innovation is to keep the protection of copyright on the source code and allow developers to create whatever they want, even if it has been done before, as long as they do not illegally copy the source code of others. That appears to be the concensus among most software developers that are interested in true innovation instead of locking out competition.
I will not defend Stallman's solution because I agree with you that his reasoning is flawed.
In general, it is quite a shitty debate tactic. The reason I felt justified in using it in this case is because our legal system is based on a system in which everything is considered legal unless there is a law that explicitly forbids it (there is a Latin term that I can't remember that describes this). Therefore, if you wish to defend a law that is coming under fire for being considered unjust and outside of the scope of its intended utility by the people in the relevant industry (in this case, software patents), the burden is on you to defend its utility.
If you want to defend a law that prevents someone from creating, manufacturing, distributing, or selling a good, then the onus is on you to provide the moral justification for the existence of that law. Otherwise, the law is an unnecessary impediment to our freedom and should be promptly abolished.
Would this be the same Dianne Feinstein that voted yea on a bill that limits the government's power to regulate guns? Not to mention that the regulations on the sales of games with mature content to minors is working very well and that the percentage of video games with a mature rating is pretty low. So yeah, Dianne, keep pursuing tougher regulation on video games instead of tightening regulations on guns - that definitely seems like the logical stance for a senator to make.
So if you want your app to be reasonably usable over connections slower than LANs, you need to design your app in a very specific manner. That doesn't sound unreasonable, but it also doesn't sound transparent, which was my original point.
I think you have misunderstood the intent of the original post. The poster was not saying that X doesn't work over a network - as you have pointed out, anyone can easily prove that X technically works over a network. The point was that the efficiency of "network transparency" in X is no longer a reality. That is because the intent of X was that a request could be made to render a primitive, such as text, by providing a few parameters over X (networked or local) about the text that should be rendered and the result can be displayed with minimal protocol chatter. However, since many elements of modern GUIs use bitmaps for display elements, many of the transmissions over X are simply bitmap requests instead of requests to render X primitives. At that point, X is basically behaving like a glorified rootless VNC server - just sending a series of bitmap updates that can be costly over slow or high-latency networks. Perhaps the original poster should have said the "efficiency of network transparency" is no longer a reality to make the point a little clearer.
Excellent rebuttal! It was full of useful and informative facts to prove the OP wrong and definitely deserving of the upmod that it received.
So what you're saying is that X11 isn't network transparent, at least from the perspective of developers. And the example of inefficiency that you provided (drawing bitmaps) is something that all modern GUIs do extensively today. Your defense of X11 seems to be out of touch with the reality of modern GUI development. This is precisely why the people that actually do development on X11 or using X11 want a new graphics stack while the people that don't do any X11 development say that X is good enough.
As others have pointed out, the iPhone 3G topped out at iOS 4 (and that's if you can't deal with how slowly it ran). Even if it could run iOS 5, you neglected the possibility that the person could have sold the phone before iOS 5 even came out. My iPhone 3G definitely had no such erase option and since the damn phone refuses to mount like a proper USB device, I was not able to use software from my laptop to securely wipe the phone before selling it. Oh well, at least I haven't had my identity stolen yet.
I'm sure she will enjoy her new position at Fox Hen-House Security Services.
Ah yes, the infamous Cinnabuntu! It seems like a great idea at the time, but an hour later you're full of regret.
"I want to create a vending machine that sells vending machines, but it'd have to be REALLY fucking big!"
-- Mitch Hedberg
Who cares about image and video preview in a terminal? I'm more blown away by the fact that the terminal is self-aware!
I guess you could take your phone over to AT&T and use it on their 2G network. Ever since 3G, each carrier uses their own set of spectrum, so a smartphone is really only usable for the carrier in which it was produced.
And I heard the reduction in crime was caused by banning lead from gasoline. Excessive quantities of lead have been proven to make people more violent. The fact of the matter is that it is difficult to know exactly why it happened, but I know of studies that claim to have proven the reduction was caused by banning leaded gasoline and I have never heard of any studies even finding a correlation with the acceptance of abortion.
I think what the OP was saying is that with a contract, you could be guaranteed a specific monthly price for the duration of the contract. With the program that T-Mobile just announced, you could buy a phone outright that only works on their network and then they could stick you with a huge price hike the following month.
This is one headline that I have to agree with, even if the article concludes the contrary. We are coming out of a period in which huge masses of the population were upgrading to smartphones and tablets. Many of those people have already purchased these items and the innovation in those areas seems to be slowing down. The current generation of these devices do just about everything anyone could need and there seems to be little room for improvement. There also doesn't seem to be much hype surrounding possible new tech products like there was leading up to smartphones and tablets. Given that mixed with the number of buyouts and mergers that are frequently indicative of a bubble, and I can't help but think that we are at least standing on another peak in the tech industry. Now if only there was a way to determine when everyone else will come to the same realization.