> Has Darl McBride got away with a fat severance package and a job at > Microsoft, or did the directors of SCO go down with their ship in > any meaningful way?
I'd say that Darl has gone down ON SCO - and given it something nasty, something incurable and fatal.
Surely no reputable corporation would hire this person unless they're wanting to hire devious, immoral, trash in order to do something dodgy.
> Although Gimp resembles Photoshop it isn't the same. Some skills > are transferable but if you are teaching graphic design it's > silly to teach anything other then what industry uses. It means > they must relearn many skills once they enter the job market.
What you are teaching high-school children is a knowledge of what is possible to do with software graphics-design packages.
You are educating them - drawing out their talents and understandings.
You are not training them how to use any one particular manufacturer's software.
If you want to train them on how to use a particular software application so that they can perform a particular role in a graphics design company, then you'd most likely NOT be a high-school. You'd be a tertiary institution that would have prerequisites such as the applicants being able to demonstrate a reasonable degree of artistic talent.
> Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no > matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain > all of the data present in an analog groove,
1/ Digital Audio has 100% complete separation between all audio tracks. 2/ mechanically representing a two channel stereo audio signal using the 2 walls of 1 spiraling groove produces output with approx 20% cross-talk. 3/ A pre-echo is definitely audible when a relatively quiet signal is followed closely by a relatively loud signal. 4/ Signals on a vinyl medium are only capable of a maximum signal/noise ratio of approx 70dB, when not factoring in pre-echo. 5/ The mere act of dragging a sharp point through a flexible vinyl grove introduces its own distortions. The vinyl both deforms as the point is dragged through it, and also has the more quickly modulated parts of the grove worn off, resulting in a progressive diminution of frequency response with each playback.
> AT&T doesn't seem to have any problems blocking their users from accessing > the Internet when they don't like what they're doing... they'll just drop > you if they don't like you. Why do they have issues blocking real criminals > from doing real criminal activities.
I suggest that the primary reason why ISPs like AT&T don't block this stuff is because it generates revenue for them.
they make their profits from data usage, and, as you know, these botnets generate massive amounts of data usage.
From a business perspective, AT&T would be stupid to cut out the primary driver behind the creator of such a large generator of increased revenue/data usage for them.
> Vodafone has come at the problem from the other end, offering a new > service that translates traditional Web pages into mobile-friendly > ones on the fly -- but it strips out the user agent in the process,
Sounds like Vodafone has been learning from Micro$oft on how to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
... what impact would that have on the American DMCA?
And why has this person not threatened to use the DMCA to force those who are not properly attributing that fellows work into complying with the license?
Even better question: Why was that idiot using an Artistic License" instead of the GPL?
The American Legal System Is A Joke!
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
> All right, all you Doubting Thomases. I double dog dare > you to complain about the US court system now.
Yeah - it's only taken 4 years to read an asset purchase agreement, and a deed of sale, and a set of minutes from a board meeting to conclude that no copyrights were sold.
That amount of time to produce this sort of decision is, laughable.
I think it is the correct decision, but the amount of time taken is grossly excessive for such a simple matter.
> Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more > 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians > are releasing online?
CD sales are diminishing because of one fundamental problem - most of the music being released these days is shite; and people have already purchased most of the older recordings that they want to buy.
> OK, but why would those corporations choose to build factories > in the poor countries instead of EU/US in that case (assuming > the products would be intended for the US/EU market)?
They shouldn't be manufacturing products in one place that they intend to sell on the other side of the world.
A complete waste of resources transporting goods all that way when they could be manufactured perhaps even within the same city that they will be sold in.
> I go through this same argument with a friend of mine on a regular > basis, only that one's about Wal-Mart in India. First, it costs a > lot less to live there than it does here.
Sorry - wrong.
A person in China wanting to purchase a CD (from for example, Amazon.com) would not be able to afford it - because that CD would still cost the same US$$ to purchase from China/India/Fiji/Indonesia that it would to purchase it from the UK or from the USA.
What you are actually advocating is that people in the "Third World" should not expect the same standard of living as people in the "First World"
> Second, unemployment is huge, so if every worker in the factory > died of a heart attack Friday night, the factory could easily be > fully staffed by Monday.
That is not a valid argument for an international corporation paying a subsistence wage to someone in China/India so that people in the First World can buy sweatshopped cheap merchandise.
Those corporations should be required to pay the same wages in US$$ as they should be paying in Europe or the USA.
> It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic > car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
That's because hand-washing a car generally does a better (and gentler) job of washing the grime off your car, and you employ a few people to do that while you're otherwise shopping and needing to have your car parked somewhere.
Prior to the robotic car-wash facilities your only choice was to wash it yourself, or to get a family member to do it for pocket money.
Now you can actually give a lesser skilled (ie thick) person a chance to actually earn a living.
> While sweatshop labor is not something that spoiled westerners find > particularly comfortable, there is a flip-side to the issue. That > flip-side is that at least these people are working, and usually at > least making enough to feed their families.
How horrid it must be for people earning $0.10 a day(!) to find that some Westerners (such as yourself) deem it acceptable to purchase things made by people earning so little for their effort; while those same Westerners would not even get out of bed to pee for less than $9.99 excl tax.
> The bounty is for a zero-day code execution hole on the following > Internet infrastructure technologies: Apache httpd, Berkeley Internet > Name Domain (BIND) daemon, Sendmail SMTP daemon, OpenSSH sshd, Microsoft > Internet Information (IIS) Server and Microsoft Exchange Server.
Anybody else noticed that the acronym for "Microsoft Internet Information Server" (MIIS) is pronounced "miss"?:o)
> I would suggest that if a great magazine can help you save hundreds > and thousands of dollars in bad equipment purchases later, than > yes, yes you should.
Hmmm...
Only once every couple of years or so I might purchase a piece of computer hardware worth "thousands of dollars", but I would be more likely to buy an IT magazine, or two, every month.
$40 is basically, the top price I would be prepared to pay, for a glossy, and even then only if there actually is editorial content (or a DVD) that I would want to take home and read.
Generally I would be checking websites (not magazines) for info about hardware if I was in the market to buy something.
> Linux users are technophiles who still cannot accomplish everything > without having to resort to a command line. This means that linux ain't > ready for the Windoze using masses. Almost all of you are men, which makes > me feel left out again. Many of the applications that linux is deployed > in, even in the home, are still not the primary workstation > type-uses - router, firewall, web server, print server.
Funny that, but I use SuSE Linux 10.2 as my everyday desktop box. I also use FreeBSD Unix as my file/print server, and SmoothWall Linux as my network firewall/router.
That is what I have at home.
I have to support M$ Windows based PCs at work.
Perhaps it is worth noting that there are things on Windows PCs that *still* require the use of a command prompt - that cannot be done from a GUI.
Things such as, ipconfig & ping - two very useful utilities.
What do I do on my Linux desktop that is easier done using a command prompt? SSHing into my File server - and I only need to do that for administrative purposes.
Perhaps in your sexist bitching about men vs women, have you ever stopped to consider that we are ALL equal human beings?
> Am I alone in actually paying the programmers, musicians, and > directors for their work?
No.
I am sure that the members of the RIAA also pay musicians and producers for their work.
I would say that on the whole, the members of the RIAA make considerably much more money off the music produced by those artists, than those artists actually make from that music.
Remember - in many cases those musicians do not own the copyright to those recordings - they merely get a small percentage arising from a clause in their agreement.
> Okay, he made an error. Why the HELL wasn't it caught in QA? Microsoft > wants us to believe that the reason that we have to wait for patches > is that they are getting some kind of exhaustive QA.
M$ doesn't have "QA". It has QC.
Quality Assurance is the fence at the top of the cliff that at each stage prevents faults from arising, and thus from impacting on later stages of development.
Quality Control is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff that responds to the emergency call once the fault has been discovered.
Most places do not implement QA. They frequently have only the most rudimentary QC.
Given the phenomenal number of security flaws and other bug fixes that have to be applied every month (that's every month since WindowsXP was released six years ago), what type of quality management do you think M$ uses in it's development process?
And, of course, lets not forget one basic point - this is only a problem for citizens of the USA, or persons resident in the USA, or for persons using services based in the USA.
For those of us in all the rest of the world which does not enjoy such liberties(?) as those enjoyed in the USA, we are perfectly free to post that very short string of letters & numbers as we please.
> retailers who sell CDs (for example) so do under the authority > of the record label they get them from. They are selling them > on behalf of the publisher.
No they're not.
They are selling merchandise just like any other retailer.
Ditto for second-hand CD shops, ditto for supermarkets, and ditto for clothing shops.
> "Having this many different tools is too confusing. Instead of socket > wrenches, box end wrenches, open-end wrenches and hammers, we should > just use crescent wrenches for everything"
But sometimes you need a spanner.
Sometimes you also need a screw driver.
And sometimes you need a tool designed specifically to get into that awkward spot that no other tool can get into.
tools are precision instruments designed to manipulate precision parts without damaging those parts.
If you have a one-tool-fits-all approach then you only end up reducing either the variety or the quality of what you can produce.
>> Of course if someone, for example, re-released an old recording after >> having, say, cleaned up the recording by substantially removing noise >> and other recording defects with the resulting work being technologically >> a much improved product over the original then they should be able to >> benefit from the results of their work by means of a copyright. > > but only the original author should get a copyright for that. I also think > that if no copyright for out of print, then also things with DRM (such as > the old NES/Famicom games, no longer available, but now they put on Virtual > Console with DRM) then it should also be considered out of print, until > they fix their mistake and remove all of the DRM, then the original company > is "printing" it again.
I think that the person or organization who does the work of cleaning up and restoring a *formerly* copyrighted work should get the benefit of their efforts by getting the copyright of any copies made of the cleaned-up/repaired version.
If the original copyright-holder does that, then great. But too bad if they can't be bothered to keep making available a work to the public.
There are thousands of copyrighted works (other than books) that are not currently available to the public.
There are even more books that have previously been published but are not currently available for the public to purchase.
I know of an organization which operates a print-on-demand service because demand is not sufficiently high enough to have thousands of copies of each work sitting in a storeroom. But they want to keep their works available for purchase in order to stop other organizations from making photocopies of existing copes that they have already bought.
As for DRM... DRM has never stopped me from accessing a work. I think for the purposes of this discussion about copyright, DRM is a red herring. DRM has already been shown to be highly disliked by the public, and record companies have already started to sell digital copies of music without DRM encumbrances.
> I'll go further - 'copyright' should be renamed 'sell-for-profit-right'. > > It means only the original xxxxrights holder can sell for profit, and has > nothing to do with 'copying'. The only reason 'copy'right was named that > way was becuause there was no concept of personal 'copying' at the time.
Retailers already can sell for profit - and they do. But they don't hold the copyright.
the key point here is that a copyright controls the manufacturing (or autofacturing:o) ) of copies of something, which the copyright holder can then sell for profit.
Joe public should be able to make copies of something for private use, or for free distribution when the copyright holder does not have "original" copes readily available for sale.
> The Court, among other things, emphasized the Supreme > Court's holding in Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. that "because > copyright law ultimately serves the purpose of enriching the > general public through access to creative works, it is peculiarly > important that the boundaries of copyright law be demarcated > as clearly as possible.
Actually, the purpose of "copyright" is to give someone (or some organization) exclusive rights, for a fixed period of time, to produce copies of something for the primary purpose of making money by selling those copies.
Personally I think that copyright for recorded music, film, or images, should be based also on availability for copies to be purchased by the public.
Thus, if something is out of print (so to speak) - no matter how long it is out of print - then the copyright holder should not be able to sue for infringement of copyright if the copies were distributed during the time the said item was out of print.
I think that is fair and reasonable. After all, if they intended to make money by selling copies then they would have copies available for purchase.
I also think that copyrights for recorded music should only apply for 25 years from the date of the first release.
That gives the producer of the recorded music more than enough time to make their money from selling millions of copies, and then that gives all the rest of us the right to enjoy the best of those recordings without the expense of royalties or copyright fees.
Of course if someone, for example, re-released an old recording after having, say, cleaned up the recording by substantially removing noise and other recording defects with the resulting work being technologically a much improved product over the original then they should be able to benefit from the results of their work by means of a copyright.
> So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you > must not only know something I don't, but you must also > be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this > subject, since he either lied under oath about this > particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what > was happening at the source code implementation level.
It is on record that M$ has even lied to its own staff about development/release timeframes.
The bottom line is that M$ is not a corporation that can be trusted.
Slashdot Mirror
> Has Darl McBride got away with a fat severance package and a job at
> Microsoft, or did the directors of SCO go down with their ship in
> any meaningful way?
I'd say that Darl has gone down ON SCO - and given it something nasty, something incurable and fatal.
Surely no reputable corporation would hire this person unless they're wanting to hire devious, immoral, trash in order to do something dodgy.
> Although Gimp resembles Photoshop it isn't the same. Some skills
> are transferable but if you are teaching graphic design it's
> silly to teach anything other then what industry uses. It means
> they must relearn many skills once they enter the job market.
What you are teaching high-school children is a knowledge of what is possible to do with software graphics-design packages.
You are educating them - drawing out their talents and understandings.
You are not training them how to use any one particular manufacturer's software.
If you want to train them on how to use a particular software application so that they can perform a particular role in a graphics design company, then you'd most likely NOT be a high-school. You'd be a tertiary institution that would have prerequisites such as the applicants being able to demonstrate a reasonable degree of artistic talent.
> Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no
> matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain
> all of the data present in an analog groove,
1/ Digital Audio has 100% complete separation between all audio tracks.
2/ mechanically representing a two channel stereo audio signal using the 2 walls of 1 spiraling groove produces output with approx 20% cross-talk.
3/ A pre-echo is definitely audible when a relatively quiet signal is followed closely by a relatively loud signal.
4/ Signals on a vinyl medium are only capable of a maximum signal/noise ratio of approx 70dB, when not factoring in pre-echo.
5/ The mere act of dragging a sharp point through a flexible vinyl grove introduces its own distortions. The vinyl both deforms as the point is dragged through it, and also has the more quickly modulated parts of the grove worn off, resulting in a progressive diminution of frequency response with each playback.
> AT&T doesn't seem to have any problems blocking their users from accessing
> the Internet when they don't like what they're doing... they'll just drop
> you if they don't like you. Why do they have issues blocking real criminals
> from doing real criminal activities.
I suggest that the primary reason why ISPs like AT&T don't block this stuff is because it generates revenue for them.
they make their profits from data usage, and, as you know, these botnets generate massive amounts of data usage.
From a business perspective, AT&T would be stupid to cut out the primary driver behind the creator of such a large generator of increased revenue/data usage for them.
> Vodafone has come at the problem from the other end, offering a new
> service that translates traditional Web pages into mobile-friendly
> ones on the fly -- but it strips out the user agent in the process,
Sounds like Vodafone has been learning from Micro$oft on how to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
... what impact would that have on the American DMCA?
And why has this person not threatened to use the DMCA to force those who are not properly attributing that fellows work into complying with the license?
Even better question: Why was that idiot using an Artistic License" instead of the GPL?
> All right, all you Doubting Thomases. I double dog dare
> you to complain about the US court system now.
Yeah - it's only taken 4 years to read an asset purchase agreement, and a deed of sale, and a set of minutes from a board meeting to conclude that no copyrights were sold.
That amount of time to produce this sort of decision is, laughable.
I think it is the correct decision, but the amount of time taken is grossly excessive for such a simple matter.
> Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more
> 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians
> are releasing online?
CD sales are diminishing because of one fundamental problem - most of the music being released these days is shite; and people have already purchased most of the older recordings that they want to buy.
> OK, but why would those corporations choose to build factories
> in the poor countries instead of EU/US in that case (assuming
> the products would be intended for the US/EU market)?
They shouldn't be manufacturing products in one place that they intend to sell on the other side of the world.
A complete waste of resources transporting goods all that way when they could be manufactured perhaps even within the same city that they will be sold in.
> I go through this same argument with a friend of mine on a regular
> basis, only that one's about Wal-Mart in India. First, it costs a
> lot less to live there than it does here.
Sorry - wrong.
A person in China wanting to purchase a CD (from for example, Amazon.com) would not be able to afford it - because that CD would still cost the same US$$ to purchase from China/India/Fiji/Indonesia that it would to purchase it from the UK or from the USA.
What you are actually advocating is that people in the "Third World" should not expect the same standard of living as people in the "First World"
> Second, unemployment is huge, so if every worker in the factory
> died of a heart attack Friday night, the factory could easily be
> fully staffed by Monday.
That is not a valid argument for an international corporation paying a subsistence wage to someone in China/India so that people in the First World can buy sweatshopped cheap merchandise.
Those corporations should be required to pay the same wages in US$$ as they should be paying in Europe or the USA.
> It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic
> car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
That's because hand-washing a car generally does a better (and gentler) job of washing the grime off your car, and you employ a few people to do that while you're otherwise shopping and needing to have your car parked somewhere.
Prior to the robotic car-wash facilities your only choice was to wash it yourself, or to get a family member to do it for pocket money.
Now you can actually give a lesser skilled (ie thick) person a chance to actually earn a living.
> While sweatshop labor is not something that spoiled westerners find
> particularly comfortable, there is a flip-side to the issue. That
> flip-side is that at least these people are working, and usually at
> least making enough to feed their families.
How horrid it must be for people earning $0.10 a day(!) to find that some Westerners (such as yourself) deem it acceptable to purchase things made by people earning so little for their effort; while those same Westerners would not even get out of bed to pee for less than $9.99 excl tax.
> The bounty is for a zero-day code execution hole on the following
:o)
> Internet infrastructure technologies: Apache httpd, Berkeley Internet
> Name Domain (BIND) daemon, Sendmail SMTP daemon, OpenSSH sshd, Microsoft
> Internet Information (IIS) Server and Microsoft Exchange Server.
Anybody else noticed that the acronym for "Microsoft Internet Information Server" (MIIS) is pronounced "miss"?
> I would suggest that if a great magazine can help you save hundreds
> and thousands of dollars in bad equipment purchases later, than
> yes, yes you should.
Hmmm...
Only once every couple of years or so I might purchase a piece of computer hardware worth "thousands of dollars", but I would be more likely to buy an IT magazine, or two, every month.
$40 is basically, the top price I would be prepared to pay, for a glossy, and even then only if there actually is editorial content (or a DVD) that I would want to take home and read.
Generally I would be checking websites (not magazines) for info about hardware if I was in the market to buy something.
> Linux users are technophiles who still cannot accomplish everything
> without having to resort to a command line. This means that linux ain't
> ready for the Windoze using masses. Almost all of you are men, which makes
> me feel left out again. Many of the applications that linux is deployed
> in, even in the home, are still not the primary workstation
> type-uses - router, firewall, web server, print server.
Funny that, but I use SuSE Linux 10.2 as my everyday desktop box.
I also use FreeBSD Unix as my file/print server, and SmoothWall Linux as my network firewall/router.
That is what I have at home.
I have to support M$ Windows based PCs at work.
Perhaps it is worth noting that there are things on Windows PCs that *still* require the use of a command prompt - that cannot be done from a GUI.
Things such as, ipconfig & ping - two very useful utilities.
What do I do on my Linux desktop that is easier done using a command prompt? SSHing into my File server - and I only need to do that for administrative purposes.
Perhaps in your sexist bitching about men vs women, have you ever stopped to consider that we are ALL equal human beings?
> Am I alone in actually paying the programmers, musicians, and
> directors for their work?
No.
I am sure that the members of the RIAA also pay musicians and producers for their work.
I would say that on the whole, the members of the RIAA make considerably much more money off the music produced by those artists, than those artists actually make from that music.
Remember - in many cases those musicians do not own the copyright to those recordings - they merely get a small percentage arising from a clause in their agreement.
> Okay, he made an error. Why the HELL wasn't it caught in QA? Microsoft
> wants us to believe that the reason that we have to wait for patches
> is that they are getting some kind of exhaustive QA.
M$ doesn't have "QA". It has QC.
Quality Assurance is the fence at the top of the cliff that at each stage prevents faults from arising, and thus from impacting on later stages of development.
Quality Control is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff that responds to the emergency call once the fault has been discovered.
Most places do not implement QA. They frequently have only the most rudimentary QC.
Given the phenomenal number of security flaws and other bug fixes that have to be applied every month (that's every month since WindowsXP was released six years ago), what type of quality management do you think M$ uses in it's development process?
And, of course, lets not forget one basic point - this is only a problem for citizens of the USA, or persons resident in the USA, or for persons using services based in the USA.
For those of us in all the rest of the world which does not enjoy such liberties(?) as those enjoyed in the USA, we are perfectly free to post that very short string of letters & numbers as we please.
WAKE UP America!
> If consumers would be willing to spend a little extra money
> on a magazine,
We already pay around $40 for a good IT magazine. And you suggest we should pay more???
> retailers who sell CDs (for example) so do under the authority
> of the record label they get them from. They are selling them
> on behalf of the publisher.
No they're not.
They are selling merchandise just like any other retailer.
Ditto for second-hand CD shops, ditto for supermarkets, and ditto for clothing shops.
> "Having this many different tools is too confusing. Instead of socket
> wrenches, box end wrenches, open-end wrenches and hammers, we should
> just use crescent wrenches for everything"
But sometimes you need a spanner.
Sometimes you also need a screw driver.
And sometimes you need a tool designed specifically to get into that awkward spot that no other tool can get into.
tools are precision instruments designed to manipulate precision parts without damaging those parts.
If you have a one-tool-fits-all approach then you only end up reducing either the variety or the quality of what you can produce.
>> Of course if someone, for example, re-released an old recording after
>> having, say, cleaned up the recording by substantially removing noise
>> and other recording defects with the resulting work being technologically
>> a much improved product over the original then they should be able to
>> benefit from the results of their work by means of a copyright.
>
> but only the original author should get a copyright for that. I also think
> that if no copyright for out of print, then also things with DRM (such as
> the old NES/Famicom games, no longer available, but now they put on Virtual
> Console with DRM) then it should also be considered out of print, until
> they fix their mistake and remove all of the DRM, then the original company
> is "printing" it again.
I think that the person or organization who does the work of cleaning up and restoring a *formerly* copyrighted work should get the benefit of their efforts by getting the copyright of any copies made of the cleaned-up/repaired version.
If the original copyright-holder does that, then great. But too bad if they can't be bothered to keep making available a work to the public.
There are thousands of copyrighted works (other than books) that are not currently available to the public.
There are even more books that have previously been published but are not currently available for the public to purchase.
I know of an organization which operates a print-on-demand service because demand is not sufficiently high enough to have thousands of copies of each work sitting in a storeroom. But they want to keep their works available for purchase in order to stop other organizations from making photocopies of existing copes that they have already bought.
As for DRM... DRM has never stopped me from accessing a work. I think for the purposes of this discussion about copyright, DRM is a red herring. DRM has already been shown to be highly disliked by the public, and record companies have already started to sell digital copies of music without DRM encumbrances.
> I'll go further - 'copyright' should be renamed 'sell-for-profit-right'.
:o) ) of copies of something, which the copyright holder can then sell for profit.
>
> It means only the original xxxxrights holder can sell for profit, and has
> nothing to do with 'copying'. The only reason 'copy'right was named that
> way was becuause there was no concept of personal 'copying' at the time.
Retailers already can sell for profit - and they do. But they don't hold the copyright.
the key point here is that a copyright controls the manufacturing (or autofacturing
Joe public should be able to make copies of something for private use, or for free distribution when the copyright holder does not have "original" copes readily available for sale.
> The Court, among other things, emphasized the Supreme
> Court's holding in Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. that "because
> copyright law ultimately serves the purpose of enriching the
> general public through access to creative works, it is peculiarly
> important that the boundaries of copyright law be demarcated
> as clearly as possible.
Actually, the purpose of "copyright" is to give someone (or some organization) exclusive rights, for a fixed period of time, to produce copies of something for the primary purpose of making money by selling those copies.
Personally I think that copyright for recorded music, film, or images, should be based also on availability for copies to be purchased by the public.
Thus, if something is out of print (so to speak) - no matter how long it is out of print - then the copyright holder should not be able to sue for infringement of copyright if the copies were distributed during the time the said item was out of print.
I think that is fair and reasonable. After all, if they intended to make money by selling copies then they would have copies available for purchase.
I also think that copyrights for recorded music should only apply for 25 years from the date of the first release.
That gives the producer of the recorded music more than enough time to make their money from selling millions of copies, and then that gives all the rest of us the right to enjoy the best of those recordings without the expense of royalties or copyright fees.
Of course if someone, for example, re-released an old recording after having, say, cleaned up the recording by substantially removing noise and other recording defects with the resulting work being technologically a much improved product over the original then they should be able to benefit from the results of their work by means of a copyright.
> So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you
> must not only know something I don't, but you must also
> be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this
> subject, since he either lied under oath about this
> particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what
> was happening at the source code implementation level.
It is on record that M$ has even lied to its own staff about development/release timeframes.
The bottom line is that M$ is not a corporation that can be trusted.