To further clarify, here is an extract from the interview with Law Professor Eben Moglen
Given the subject matter, the "Former Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eben Moglen" is probably the more relevant description of who is being interviewed.
The GPL is a legally enforceable way to be sure that your work will remain in the public domain
No, it isn't. Work subject to copyright and released under the GPL is not in the public domain, and doesn't enter the public domain any differently than any other copyright-protected work.
(And, since the GPL enables people to make works incorporating substantially all of your work and present them as new works under their copyright, it makes it very easy for work that is yours and, by operation of time, should be entering the public domain to be obscured as someone else's copyright-protected-but-GPL-licensed work. Not that, given the practice of perpetually extending copyright, any work covered by the GPL ever will actually enter the public domain in the first place.)
Then they have the networking part, that communicates to servers, opening several sockets at a time and coordinating their retrieval. And they have to be able to do it with HTTP1.0 or HTTP2.0.
Can you point me to some resources (like, say, the RFC) for HTTP 2.0? I'm having trouble finding any evidence that it exists...
In other words, it depends a lot whether the non-GPL theme developers ever distributed Wordpress to anyone. If they didn't, they can argue that their themes are not derivatives according to copyright law, and they may have a chance. If they did, they have accepted the GPL's interpretation, and that will be difficult to get around in court.
Well, except that most of the "definition" of "derivative works" that is contentious isn't in the GPL, but in a section qualified with "we believe" in the FSF's FAQ concerning the GPL, so it isn't part of what people "accept" when they accept the GPL.
The FSF FAQ is not part of the GPLv2, is not incorporated by reference into the GPLv2, and, in terms of what constitutes a derivative work, is simply a statement of the FSF's opinion on copyright law. Note that even if it was a part of the GPLv2, it wouldn't matter if you were distributing just the theme you created, since what would matter is whether or not you needed a copyright license in the first place, which, if its not a derivative work under copyright law, you don't.
The terms of the GPL can't change copyright law to make people restricted by the license in performing acts that aren't within the exclusive rights of the copyright holder under copyright law in the first place.
Are all my C programs derivatives of libc because they call libc functions and libc functions call into it?
Under the FSF interpretation, yes, which is why linking exceptions (e.g., the Classpath exception) to the GPL exist.
Note that it is matter of endless debate (and has been since the FSF first announced its interpretation) whether or not this interpretation is consistent with, e.g., the legal definition of a "derivative work" in US law which ultimately defines whether or not a copyright license is necessary in the first place.
GPL is much wider then just the code. GPL states that anything linked to it needs to be GPL.
The GPL may state this (IIRC, it doesn't, the FSF's FAQ on the GPL, not the license text, says this), but even if it does, it doesn't matter if the think linking to the GPL code isn't a "derivative work" under copyright law (regardless of whether it would be under the terms of the license) since, if its not a derivative work under copyright law, you don't need a copyright license to produce and distribute it in the first place.
If I sell a product that doesn't contain *any* of your copyrighted code (and API calls certainly can't be copyrighted), you have no basis to sue me for copyright.
The FSF's own interpretation of the consequences of the GPL text on linking clearly disagree with the "API calls certainly can't be copyrighted" concept.
In this particular case (as apparently there is large cut and paste of code), this seems to be a pretty clear issue; OTOH, the more expansive interpretations often offered of the GPL (including the interpretation that would hold that all templates, etc., for a GPL blogging platform needing to be GPL) is arguably untenable, as many of the things which proponents of this view would demand that the GPL must apply to are not what would otherwise be considered derivative works, and consequently require no license to produce in the first place.
Regardless of whether it makes sense or not, a contract is a contract.
That's actually not even approximately true. If the terms of a written document purporting to be a contract literally don't make sense (i.e., have a clear meaning), then the agreement may quite well fail to be a contract. The absence of sufficiently clear obligations for either party could, for instance, make the agreement fail to be a contract for lack of mutual consideration. Not making sense could also cause a contract to fail for evidence of an actual agreement on the essential terms of the exchange.
Anyone else think that the Nexus One was a project designed to push Android adoption, and that Google's support for the hardware fell off because the rest of the Android hardware market bulked up sooner than they expected? it's an idea i've considered.
Google's CEO has outright stated that the N1 was intended to push "phone hardware" forward, and I think its pretty clear that that's somewhat true, and specifically it was designed to demonstrate that Android-powered high-end smartphones capable of competing head-to-head with the iPhone were viable and to encourage manufacturers to build and carriers to push them.
If you look at Google's core business, the main relation of mobile to it is that Google needs for the mobile internet device market not to be dominated by one vendor that can serve as a gatekeeper, to keep open web technologies the most important way of reaching the whole mobile market.
I don't think Google ever saw selling smartphones as a core part of its business so much as a temporary means of assuring that the mobile space would be a place where its existing core business could reach.
And to all those "oh please, evaluate why people are doing it" get a grip, the bucket must stop somewhere, at the end people are there to perform a job, and sometimes this is not done in the best of conditions, so the policies in place are there to mitigate risks, not to make users life pleasant.
followed by:
If people can't be arsed to cooperate to keep security adequate then they should not be working for you.
Indicates a real problem.
From the perspective articulated here, its acceptable that the security staff can't be "arsed" to cooperate to keep operations efficient, but it is unacceptable that anyone else can't be "arsed" to follow security dictates.
This is the kind of thing that leads people (like Demings, and more recently the whole "lean methods" school) to observe that optimizing narrowly is often directly opposed to optimizing overall operations.
You've more or less just forwarded the theory that popularity is the primary indicator of value, and oddly, most people understand that it's a problematic one (if at no other time than when their viewpoint is unpopular).
Yes, lots of people would prefer that rather than having to accept that that value is subjective, everyone else would just conform to their personal value structure.
And the people that feel this most strongly are, naturally, usually the people whose personal value structures are farther what is common in society.
A breakthrough in solar cell technology is infinitely more important than who punched Snookie in the face
More important to you (and, hey, to me, too) perhaps, but the thing is that "importance" of news isn't objective. Its subjective. What people care about is what is important to them.
Its perhaps not what would be most important to them if they were rational actors with perfect knowledge of their own long-term utility, but then, as convenient a model as rational actor theory can be, and as useful as it might be in certain situations, its pretty clear that people really aren't ideal rational actors.
Eventually, it creates a hard divide: Stories that people feel like reading get all the ad money.
Why is it bad that the only stories that get produced are the ones that interest readers?
It seems that, if we accept your explanation of the facts, your basic problem is that almost no one wants to read the material you consider "important". But, if no one actually wants to read it, in what sense is it "important"? It seems that it isn't really important to most people.
This is why headlines have become so outrageously hyperbolic.
No, its not. Headlines were ridiculously hyperbolic long before Google or its algorithms existed. Because headlines ultimately are advertising designed to draw people in, and hyperbole works for that (sure, people start to get numb to it, and you need to use more hyperbole to get the same effect...)
If the internet has contributed anything to that, its not the search algorithms used by Google so much as the presentation of so many headlines to users that even more hyperbole is needed to draw in the user. Its the algorithms in people's head that drive the hyperbole, not the algorithms in Google's servers.
Something can be "abysmal" in terms of user experience and still be better than the existing alternatives in a space, and better than not consuming any product in the space, from a user perspective.
OTOH, if it is abysmal in terms of user experience, given something that seems to offer a viable alternative, people are likely to jump ship rapidly. It wasn't that long ago that MySpace was the social network at the center of all the attention. If Facebook can't keep its users happy, its time in the sun may be limited, too.
Whether the users are happy or not doesn't mean squat to Facebook because their users aren't their customers.
Its true that, instead of customers, their users are the suppliers of the product that they sell to their customers.
However, that doesn't make user satisfaction irrelevant, as user satisfaction is a key factor in user retention in the presence of alternatives.
There was a time when MySpace was the dominant social networking site, and if Facebook can't keep its users happy, it it won't keep its users indefinitely. And without users, it won't have anything to sell to its customers.
Seems like they had to hold the laser on the target for a long time until it worked. If you can keep a laser beam on target that long, you might as well use the laser to guide an effective, high explosive round to it.
Depending on the duty cycle of the parts in the weapon laser vs. a painting laser, it could well be far more efficient, from a logistical point of view, to use this system than to expend some consumable weapon guided by a painting laser. Never underestimate the importance of logistics.
It also could be more reliable, as you just have to keep the laser operating and on target, rather than keep a laser operating and on target and avoid a failure in the launching, propulsion, guidance, or warhead system of the separate passive-laser homing missile. Given the consequence of failure with you point defense system, even small differences in reliability can be a big deal.
I like widescreen better than "TV" (4:3), but I like 16x10 widescreen better than 16x9 widescreen (too short).
Calling 4:3 "TV" is kind of funny, since TVs are now almost invariably 16:9 which is exactly why monitors are almost invariably 16:9, since the main selling point of widescreen monitors is compatibility with 16:9 widescreen content designed for widescreen TVs.
There's probably less market for non-16:9 widescreen than for 4:3 monitors.
And just like with desktop printers, the price of office grade equipment will also drop, so you don't have to use consumer crap inkjets.
Please reread GP, which addresses "desktop laser printers" not inkjets. The ones that are conveniently sized for desktop use (or even the larger ones that are still practical for home use) have a higher cost in consumables than heavier duty, more expensive to purchase, industrial models.
The same thing would very likely be the case with "desktop POD" machines. The printing cost of home printing may be cheap enough to be worthwhile in many cases, but its not likely to be as cheap as the printing costs experienced by higher-volume shops.
I use an office desktop printer that prints for a penny per page of text. Stick a cutter/binder on the side of it and I could print cheaper than I could buy new mass-market paperbacks.
GP addressed the claim that desktop POD setups would have equal or cheaper printing costs than contemporaneous large-scale POD setups. That its possible to print at home cheaper than the retail price of printed books is a very different claim.
I hate glossy screens, too. But I hate 16x9 computer displays even more.
Why would a corporate notebook PC or desktop LCD/LED monitor need to be 16x9 instead of 16x10?
16x10? I presume you mean 4:3 (16:12) which was common before 16:9 became all the rage.
I think 16:9 for desktops monitors is driven largely by use for consuming widescreen media (though for some applications, getting the width to get two large windows side-by-side makes them better than a 4:3 display with similar total pixel count.) Corporate use tends to them because they are what is cheap and common due to home use.
For notebooks, 16:9 format matches better to a convenient format for the keyboard part of the device than 4:3 does.
We don't think of rotating passwords as a solution to the problem - we think of it as a countermeasure that will buy us time when issues arise.
Regular rotation clearly doesn't buy you time (it limits the time of exposure when a certain problems occur, but doesn't buy you time.)
What are we going to do to reprimand password sharing?
Reprimanding is not the solution.
The solution is: 1) Find out what the problem is in the existing system that people are working around by sharing problems, and 2) Address that problem in a way that removes the incentive to share passwords.
As IT we just police
This view is probably the source of many of your problems. As IT your mission should be marshalling technology to enable the broader organization to acheive its goals efficiently and safely, not being "just police".
Rotating the passwords gives us the time we need that when attacks come up - we can address them properly.
How? Regular rotation of passwords does nothing to delay the impact of an attack. Selective forced expiration of passwords in response to an identified attack may by some time, but that's very different than a regular and frequent rotation policy.
You know, following a case for months, bribing your way into certain "circles", and so on. Otherwise newspapers will become mere newswire and blogger aggregators.
Newspapers -- at least the dailies -- had largely stopped paying for investigative journalism (and original content more generally) and become newswire aggregators before the internet was even a significant medium for news distribution to the public, along with other cost-cutting moves in the consolidation and cost-cutting trend in the industry that was in full swing by the 1980s.
And the spiral of declining readership had already begun then, too; and each round of bad readership numbers led to more cost cutting.
Alternative media like the internet sources aren't killing newspapers and, by so doing, killing investigative journalism. The newspaper industry had already started the process of killing distinct, original content in each newspaper, including investigative journalism, long ago, and by doing so was well on the way to killing itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the subject matter, the "Former Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eben Moglen" is probably the more relevant description of who is being interviewed.
No, it isn't. Work subject to copyright and released under the GPL is not in the public domain, and doesn't enter the public domain any differently than any other copyright-protected work.
(And, since the GPL enables people to make works incorporating substantially all of your work and present them as new works under their copyright, it makes it very easy for work that is yours and, by operation of time, should be entering the public domain to be obscured as someone else's copyright-protected-but-GPL-licensed work. Not that, given the practice of perpetually extending copyright, any work covered by the GPL ever will actually enter the public domain in the first place.)
Can you point me to some resources (like, say, the RFC) for HTTP 2.0? I'm having trouble finding any evidence that it exists...
Except that scale is not the fundamental problem, organizational culture is.
Well, except that most of the "definition" of "derivative works" that is contentious isn't in the GPL, but in a section qualified with "we believe" in the FSF's FAQ concerning the GPL, so it isn't part of what people "accept" when they accept the GPL.
The FSF FAQ is not part of the GPLv2, is not incorporated by reference into the GPLv2, and, in terms of what constitutes a derivative work, is simply a statement of the FSF's opinion on copyright law. Note that even if it was a part of the GPLv2, it wouldn't matter if you were distributing just the theme you created, since what would matter is whether or not you needed a copyright license in the first place, which, if its not a derivative work under copyright law, you don't.
The terms of the GPL can't change copyright law to make people restricted by the license in performing acts that aren't within the exclusive rights of the copyright holder under copyright law in the first place.
Under the FSF interpretation, yes, which is why linking exceptions (e.g., the Classpath exception) to the GPL exist.
Note that it is matter of endless debate (and has been since the FSF first announced its interpretation) whether or not this interpretation is consistent with, e.g., the legal definition of a "derivative work" in US law which ultimately defines whether or not a copyright license is necessary in the first place.
The GPL may state this (IIRC, it doesn't, the FSF's FAQ on the GPL, not the license text, says this), but even if it does, it doesn't matter if the think linking to the GPL code isn't a "derivative work" under copyright law (regardless of whether it would be under the terms of the license) since, if its not a derivative work under copyright law, you don't need a copyright license to produce and distribute it in the first place.
The FSF's own interpretation of the consequences of the GPL text on linking clearly disagree with the "API calls certainly can't be copyrighted" concept.
In this particular case (as apparently there is large cut and paste of code), this seems to be a pretty clear issue; OTOH, the more expansive interpretations often offered of the GPL (including the interpretation that would hold that all templates, etc., for a GPL blogging platform needing to be GPL) is arguably untenable, as many of the things which proponents of this view would demand that the GPL must apply to are not what would otherwise be considered derivative works, and consequently require no license to produce in the first place.
That's actually not even approximately true. If the terms of a written document purporting to be a contract literally don't make sense (i.e., have a clear meaning), then the agreement may quite well fail to be a contract. The absence of sufficiently clear obligations for either party could, for instance, make the agreement fail to be a contract for lack of mutual consideration. Not making sense could also cause a contract to fail for evidence of an actual agreement on the essential terms of the exchange.
Google's CEO has outright stated that the N1 was intended to push "phone hardware" forward, and I think its pretty clear that that's somewhat true, and specifically it was designed to demonstrate that Android-powered high-end smartphones capable of competing head-to-head with the iPhone were viable and to encourage manufacturers to build and carriers to push them.
If you look at Google's core business, the main relation of mobile to it is that Google needs for the mobile internet device market not to be dominated by one vendor that can serve as a gatekeeper, to keep open web technologies the most important way of reaching the whole mobile market.
I don't think Google ever saw selling smartphones as a core part of its business so much as a temporary means of assuring that the mobile space would be a place where its existing core business could reach.
followed by:
Indicates a real problem.
From the perspective articulated here, its acceptable that the security staff can't be "arsed" to cooperate to keep operations efficient, but it is unacceptable that anyone else can't be "arsed" to follow security dictates.
This is the kind of thing that leads people (like Demings, and more recently the whole "lean methods" school) to observe that optimizing narrowly is often directly opposed to optimizing overall operations.
Yes, lots of people would prefer that rather than having to accept that that value is subjective, everyone else would just conform to their personal value structure.
And the people that feel this most strongly are, naturally, usually the people whose personal value structures are farther what is common in society.
More important to you (and, hey, to me, too) perhaps, but the thing is that "importance" of news isn't objective. Its subjective. What people care about is what is important to them.
Its perhaps not what would be most important to them if they were rational actors with perfect knowledge of their own long-term utility, but then, as convenient a model as rational actor theory can be, and as useful as it might be in certain situations, its pretty clear that people really aren't ideal rational actors.
Why is it bad that the only stories that get produced are the ones that interest readers?
It seems that, if we accept your explanation of the facts, your basic problem is that almost no one wants to read the material you consider "important". But, if no one actually wants to read it, in what sense is it "important"? It seems that it isn't really important to most people.
Even if you think it should be.
No, its not. Headlines were ridiculously hyperbolic long before Google or its algorithms existed. Because headlines ultimately are advertising designed to draw people in, and hyperbole works for that (sure, people start to get numb to it, and you need to use more hyperbole to get the same effect...)
If the internet has contributed anything to that, its not the search algorithms used by Google so much as the presentation of so many headlines to users that even more hyperbole is needed to draw in the user. Its the algorithms in people's head that drive the hyperbole, not the algorithms in Google's servers.
Something can be "abysmal" in terms of user experience and still be better than the existing alternatives in a space, and better than not consuming any product in the space, from a user perspective.
OTOH, if it is abysmal in terms of user experience, given something that seems to offer a viable alternative, people are likely to jump ship rapidly. It wasn't that long ago that MySpace was the social network at the center of all the attention. If Facebook can't keep its users happy, its time in the sun may be limited, too.
Its true that, instead of customers, their users are the suppliers of the product that they sell to their customers.
However, that doesn't make user satisfaction irrelevant, as user satisfaction is a key factor in user retention in the presence of alternatives.
There was a time when MySpace was the dominant social networking site, and if Facebook can't keep its users happy, it it won't keep its users indefinitely. And without users, it won't have anything to sell to its customers.
Depending on the duty cycle of the parts in the weapon laser vs. a painting laser, it could well be far more efficient, from a logistical point of view, to use this system than to expend some consumable weapon guided by a painting laser. Never underestimate the importance of logistics.
It also could be more reliable, as you just have to keep the laser operating and on target, rather than keep a laser operating and on target and avoid a failure in the launching, propulsion, guidance, or warhead system of the separate passive-laser homing missile. Given the consequence of failure with you point defense system, even small differences in reliability can be a big deal.
Calling 4:3 "TV" is kind of funny, since TVs are now almost invariably 16:9 which is exactly why monitors are almost invariably 16:9, since the main selling point of widescreen monitors is compatibility with 16:9 widescreen content designed for widescreen TVs.
There's probably less market for non-16:9 widescreen than for 4:3 monitors.
Please reread GP, which addresses "desktop laser printers" not inkjets. The ones that are conveniently sized for desktop use (or even the larger ones that are still practical for home use) have a higher cost in consumables than heavier duty, more expensive to purchase, industrial models.
The same thing would very likely be the case with "desktop POD" machines. The printing cost of home printing may be cheap enough to be worthwhile in many cases, but its not likely to be as cheap as the printing costs experienced by higher-volume shops.
GP addressed the claim that desktop POD setups would have equal or cheaper printing costs than contemporaneous large-scale POD setups. That its possible to print at home cheaper than the retail price of printed books is a very different claim.
16x10? I presume you mean 4:3 (16:12) which was common before 16:9 became all the rage.
I think 16:9 for desktops monitors is driven largely by use for consuming widescreen media (though for some applications, getting the width to get two large windows side-by-side makes them better than a 4:3 display with similar total pixel count.) Corporate use tends to them because they are what is cheap and common due to home use.
For notebooks, 16:9 format matches better to a convenient format for the keyboard part of the device than 4:3 does.
Regular rotation clearly doesn't buy you time (it limits the time of exposure when a certain problems occur, but doesn't buy you time.)
Reprimanding is not the solution.
The solution is:
1) Find out what the problem is in the existing system that people are working around by sharing problems, and
2) Address that problem in a way that removes the incentive to share passwords.
This view is probably the source of many of your problems. As IT your mission should be marshalling technology to enable the broader organization to acheive its goals efficiently and safely, not being "just police".
How? Regular rotation of passwords does nothing to delay the impact of an attack. Selective forced expiration of passwords in response to an identified attack may by some time, but that's very different than a regular and frequent rotation policy.
Newspapers -- at least the dailies -- had largely stopped paying for investigative journalism (and original content more generally) and become newswire aggregators before the internet was even a significant medium for news distribution to the public, along with other cost-cutting moves in the consolidation and cost-cutting trend in the industry that was in full swing by the 1980s.
And the spiral of declining readership had already begun then, too; and each round of bad readership numbers led to more cost cutting.
Alternative media like the internet sources aren't killing newspapers and, by so doing, killing investigative journalism. The newspaper industry had already started the process of killing distinct, original content in each newspaper, including investigative journalism, long ago, and by doing so was well on the way to killing itself.