CompuServe (which, ironically, is now owned by AOL) had private chat rooms and the ability to invite people into them for many years before the patent application was filed.
Also, the UNIX "finger" and "talk" programs are prior art. I can't count the number of times when, before AOL was even started, I typed "finger" to see who was online and initiated a "talk" with one of those people.
$300K is noise to any company with as many employees as Red Hat. It's a negligible profit that would be easy to create ex nilhilo, merely by making perfectly permissible accounting decisions (which companies are allowed to make under GAAP).
Alas, Red Hat still attempts to sell copies of GPLed, rather than commercial, software, and so will never be able to gain a true market edge over competitors. Not a horse to bet on if you're a betting man, IMHO.
Interestingly, none of the possible combinations of choices on the Creative Commons page leads to an MIT, Apache, or BSD-style license, in which one allows use of the code for any purpose but disclaims liability. If you do not demand attribution, allow unrestricted commercial use, and allow derivative works to be created, the site attempts to steer you to the public domain. Are the authors doing this in an attempt to dissuade users from choosing this sort of license?
Yes, monopolizing unlicensed spectrum via sheer numbers should be illegal. In my hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, we had a 900 MHz wireless network that served several community institutions and businesses. The local gas company, a rapacious monopoly known as Kinder Morgan, became a Ricochet franchisee and attempted to install the system all over town. It wasn't an adequate replacement for the existing system (it would only have run at 64 Kbps, tops), but would knock it right off the air. (The Ricochet equipment isn't designed for speed, it's designed to get through the walls of buildings and compete viciously with anything else on the band.) Our community network would have been off the air, together with some of our schools.
Only by protesting before the City Council were we able to get Kinder Morgan to agree to shift us to 2.4 GHz if they took over the 900 MHz band. (They almost did it, too, but then abruptly terminated their franchise when they realized it wasn't making money.) But they almost got the entire band to themselves, despite the fact that this was public spectrum. Nasty. For the full story, see http://www.lariat.org/metricom.html.
I tested Aerie's "revived" Ricochet service in Denver, Colorado during Thanksgiving. (The company was nice enough to activate an old modem for me so that I could compare the service to the original Ricochet.)
One good thing I noticed was that setup and getting online are easier with Aerie's system than they were with Metricom's. There's no need to set up PAP or CHAP authentication or remember passwords; the system authenticates strictly via the modem's built-in serial number.
Unfortunately, I also noticed that the system was half as fast as it used to be. Before Metricom's bankruptcy, speeds of 128 Kbps (not blazingly fast, but comparable to ISDN) were easily achieved if you were close to one of the system's pole-top nodes. But Aerie has apparently throttled the system back to 40-50 Kbps -- about the speed of a V.90 modem. The company may have done this to reduce its upstream bandwidth costs or to compensate for the loss of the licensed spectrum that Metricom used to exchange data between its hubs (called "wired access points" or WAPs) and its pole-top units. (I believe that Metricom auctioned this spectrum off separately from the rest of its system.)
The system also suffers, as before, from its dependency upon being able to "own" the 900 MHz band. It is well known that, in areas served by Ricochet, it is virtually impossible for anyone else to use the 900 MHz unlicensed band (which is supposed to be free for everyone to use) because the hundreds of Ricochet transmitters blot out everything else on the band. (Worse still, they increase their transmit power when they encounter a source of interference, descending in a "swarm" upon anyone else who tries to use the band.) 900 MHz cordless phones will still work indoors (albeit with reduced range), but outdoor networking on that band is exceedingly difficult. And if someone manages to set up a robust enough link (perhaps by using an old Breezecom frequency hopping unit), Ricochet users nearby will experience serious interference.
Ricochet really should run entirely on reserved spectrum and not try to take over the "commons" by virtue of sheer numbers.
When it does work, Ricochet is convenient in fact can be very handy. But unless Aerie can boost the speed to the original 128 Kbps and overcome the problem of trying to monopolize public spectrum (which, to be fair, they inherited from Metricom), I suspect that few people will be buying.
I'm sure they'll go down in flames by losing you as a customer...
If enough people refuse to visit their Web site because of their obnoxious insistence upon dropping Passport cookies on visitors, it'll hurt Starbucks; pocketbook sufficiently that the company will start to care.
The biggest problem with the The Liberty Alliance is that it is not a real alternative to Microsoft's Passport. Passport is a single-signon systemthat forces users to put all of their eggs in one basket and trust their identities to potentially untrustworthy third parties. So is The Liberty Alliance. What's more, the name "Liberty Alliance" is Big Brotherish in a "freedom is slavery" sense: One does not get liberty from any system in which one must surrender one's personal information or control of one's digital identity to others.
The Liberty Alliance could offer a true alternative to Passport by creating a system in which users, not large, faceless, and untrustworthy corporations, were in control of their identities. But it hasn't, and that's why it's floundering.
How could a developer build a successful commercial program through, say, Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative?" They can't. They can't create commercial software with Windows code.
That's dead wrong. All of Microsoft's development tools come with Microsoft code that developers are free to use to create commercial software. This includes large collections of "controls" that save the programmer days -- if not weeks or months -- of GUI programming time.
Ironically, Microsoft's terms for the use of these products are less onerous than those of the GPL. Commercial software developers can incorporate Microsoft's controls in their own products, and then license their work for money. They cannot do the same with GPLed code.
1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
...
Article 25
1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Unfortunately, the "Hacktivismo" license, like the GPL, contains mechanisms whose intent is to destroy, or preclude the formation or success of, software businesses. It does this by preventing them from being able to use the code in the way that most benefits them: by creating commercial software with the code. (You'll notice that the "Hacktivismo" license keeps referring to the rights of "end-users" only, intentionally ignoring the rights of developers.)
In short, the license does anything but promote human rights. Rather, it discriminates against some humans in favor of others.
I don't think that the LinuxBIOS people would be insulted by the notion of making their code truly free. You, however, appear want the code not to be free; in your message, above, you pick specific people whom you would not like to have it. Sorry, but the moment you do that, you're making the code un-free.
Richard Stallman himself says so. "The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy," says Stallman, pointing out the ways in which the GPL is specifically intended to be onerous to software vendors and other software-based businesses. Denying freedom to some, but not others, is exactly the intent of the GPL.
It seems to me that the GPL is the wrong license for a BIOS.
You see, a BIOS is not like an operating system, where 99.99% of users and vendors use the same exact version. (They change the application software that runs above it, but not the OS itself.) But vendors just about ALWAYS have to modify a BIOS to fit their specific hardware. And there's really no other practical way to do this other than to insert code directly into the BIOS itself. Code that must be modified in this way to be useful should really be licensed under an MIT/Apache-style license, so that anyone can do this without any constraints or special obligations.
An Apache/MIT license would also allow vendors to differentiate their products from their competitors' -- and might help them to survive in the face of stiff competition from the behemoths of the computing world. One reason why VA Linux's hardware business failed (and was shut down last year) is that VA was unable to distinguish their generic "white boxes" from other folks' products. One of the ways they might have been able to do it would have been to provide an especially good BIOS, BIOS support for unique peripherals or motherboard features, and/or special BIOS enhancements.
Under the GPL, one can't do this because any competitor can copy what you do. But under an MIT or Apache-style license, it would be possible for manufacturers to make mods to the BIOS without being forced to "donate" their hard work to rapacious competitors (including the big guys, such as Dell and HP).
Thus, it seems to me that an open source BIOS should be licensed under a license that allows maximum freedom, such as the Apache, MIT, or Artistic License.
Just attempted to access the catalog for this auction, and discovered that Dove had made the pages specific to MSIE. Neither Netscape nor Mozilla will display them. No IE? Can't see the catalog. Guess I won't be bidding.
Ah, COMDEX. It was Hell, but I'll miss it.
on
The Last Comdex?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Before I buy a hard drive, I always ask data recovery companies what they think of the most recent models. This page, created by Drive Service Company says the following about Fujitsu:
Fujitsu (Desktop drives only) Their 10, 15, 20 and 30gb desktop models have been failing left and right with either servo loss or electronic failure. Notebook drives are only so-so but are no longer manufactured. They have had so many returned drives, that they have stopped making drives all together.
It then goes on to say:
Fujitsu Notebook drives of any kind are prone to head crash, desktop drives are bad now too, sorry. Again, they have stopped making drives and now barely support what is left out there.
Believe it or not, their most recommended brand is now Seagate (the high end models). And they strongly recommend anything with a SCSI interface over IDE -- not for performance reasons (there's really not that much difference if you cache) but for reliability.
Many lawyers -- some of whom are proponents of open source software -- say that they see serious and fundamental problems in the GPL. It'd be nice to resolve these, and have a court rule one way or the other. Otherwise, there's too much FUD in the air. People just don't know where they really stand.
One advantage of the Berkeley license is that it has been tested in court and ruled valid. And it doesn't have the most dicey quality of the GPL: its viral nature.
It's capable of reading more than 400 formats. (About the only thing it couldn't read was Apple IWM disks, which use group code recording.) A brilliant piece of work.
My guess is that the records were doctored and expunged before Karl Auerbach got to them. ICANN stalled him for months, which would have allowed plenty of time for this.
It's not like you've done anything for the GPL community to begin with.
Straw man argument; there's no one "GPL community."
However, people who have written or used GPLed software have benefited from the use of the code that I have released under the BSD License. (I will never license my code under the GPL, in part due to spiteful attitudes like the one you express above.)
Does this answer your worries about the use of the LGPL?
No, because it's incorrect on several points. In particular, it does not address the question of how one could distribute an application for an OS that does not come with a compiler or linker. It also assumes the presence of a "strip" utility, and that the use of such a utility would be sufficient to avoid copyright infringement when one uses a commercial library (it's not). In short, I'm afraid that the above arguments are full of holes; in particular, they do not apply at all to those of us who develop for platforms other than Linux (e.g. PalmOS).
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the UNIX "finger" and "talk" programs are prior art. I can't count the number of times when, before AOL was even started, I typed "finger" to see who was online and initiated a "talk" with one of those people.
Alas, Red Hat still attempts to sell copies of GPLed, rather than commercial, software, and so will never be able to gain a true market edge over competitors. Not a horse to bet on if you're a betting man, IMHO.
Interestingly, none of the possible combinations of choices on the Creative Commons page leads to an MIT, Apache, or BSD-style license, in which one allows use of the code for any purpose but disclaims liability. If you do not demand attribution, allow unrestricted commercial use, and allow derivative works to be created, the site attempts to steer you to the public domain. Are the authors doing this in an attempt to dissuade users from choosing this sort of license?
http://www.brettglass.com/spam/
"Ending is better than mending." --Hypnopaedic instruction from Huxley's Brave New World
Only by protesting before the City Council were we able to get Kinder Morgan to agree to shift us to 2.4 GHz if they took over the 900 MHz band. (They almost did it, too, but then abruptly terminated their franchise when they realized it wasn't making money.) But they almost got the entire band to themselves, despite the fact that this was public spectrum. Nasty. For the full story, see http://www.lariat.org/metricom.html.
One good thing I noticed was that setup and getting online are easier with Aerie's system than they were with Metricom's. There's no need to set up PAP or CHAP authentication or remember passwords; the system authenticates strictly via the modem's built-in serial number.
Unfortunately, I also noticed that the system was half as fast as it used to be. Before Metricom's bankruptcy, speeds of 128 Kbps (not blazingly fast, but comparable to ISDN) were easily achieved if you were close to one of the system's pole-top nodes. But Aerie has apparently throttled the system back to 40-50 Kbps -- about the speed of a V.90 modem. The company may have done this to reduce its upstream bandwidth costs or to compensate for the loss of the licensed spectrum that Metricom used to exchange data between its hubs (called "wired access points" or WAPs) and its pole-top units. (I believe that Metricom auctioned this spectrum off separately from the rest of its system.)
The system also suffers, as before, from its dependency upon being able to "own" the 900 MHz band. It is well known that, in areas served by Ricochet, it is virtually impossible for anyone else to use the 900 MHz unlicensed band (which is supposed to be free for everyone to use) because the hundreds of Ricochet transmitters blot out everything else on the band. (Worse still, they increase their transmit power when they encounter a source of interference, descending in a "swarm" upon anyone else who tries to use the band.) 900 MHz cordless phones will still work indoors (albeit with reduced range), but outdoor networking on that band is exceedingly difficult. And if someone manages to set up a robust enough link (perhaps by using an old Breezecom frequency hopping unit), Ricochet users nearby will experience serious interference.
Ricochet really should run entirely on reserved spectrum and not try to take over the "commons" by virtue of sheer numbers.
When it does work, Ricochet is convenient in fact can be very handy. But unless Aerie can boost the speed to the original 128 Kbps and overcome the problem of trying to monopolize public spectrum (which, to be fair, they inherited from Metricom), I suspect that few people will be buying.
If enough people refuse to visit their Web site because of their obnoxious insistence upon dropping Passport cookies on visitors, it'll hurt Starbucks; pocketbook sufficiently that the company will start to care.
Microsoft -- and its Passport partners -- are already attempting to coerce users to sign up and give them personal information. For example, if you attempt to visit the Starbucks.com Web site, and your system is set up to refuse unwanted cookies, you get this page. Far from convincing me to sign up for Passport, this message has, instead, convinced me not to patronize Starbucks.
The Liberty Alliance could offer a true alternative to Passport by creating a system in which users, not large, faceless, and untrustworthy corporations, were in control of their identities. But it hasn't, and that's why it's floundering.
That's dead wrong. All of Microsoft's development tools come with Microsoft code that developers are free to use to create commercial software. This includes large collections of "controls" that save the programmer days -- if not weeks or months -- of GUI programming time.
Ironically, Microsoft's terms for the use of these products are less onerous than those of the GPL. Commercial software developers can incorporate Microsoft's controls in their own products, and then license their work for money. They cannot do the same with GPLed code.
It has made slight profits during a few quarters, but over its lifetime it has been grossly unprofitable. See their Form 10-Q on Edgar.
Not true at all. It also states that works containing even the smallest amount of the code must be licensed at no charge. In short, given away.
In short, the license does anything but promote human rights. Rather, it discriminates against some humans in favor of others.
I don't think that the LinuxBIOS people would be insulted by the notion of making their code truly free. You, however, appear want the code not to be free; in your message, above, you pick specific people whom you would not like to have it. Sorry, but the moment you do that, you're making the code un-free.
Richard Stallman himself says so. "The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy," says Stallman, pointing out the ways in which the GPL is specifically intended to be onerous to software vendors and other software-based businesses. Denying freedom to some, but not others, is exactly the intent of the GPL.
You see, a BIOS is not like an operating system, where 99.99% of users and vendors use the same exact version. (They change the application software that runs above it, but not the OS itself.) But vendors just about ALWAYS have to modify a BIOS to fit their specific hardware. And there's really no other practical way to do this other than to insert code directly into the BIOS itself. Code that must be modified in this way to be useful should really be licensed under an MIT/Apache-style license, so that anyone can do this without any constraints or special obligations.
An Apache/MIT license would also allow vendors to differentiate their products from their competitors' -- and might help them to survive in the face of stiff competition from the behemoths of the computing world. One reason why VA Linux's hardware business failed (and was shut down last year) is that VA was unable to distinguish their generic "white boxes" from other folks' products. One of the ways they might have been able to do it would have been to provide an especially good BIOS, BIOS support for unique peripherals or motherboard features, and/or special BIOS enhancements.
Under the GPL, one can't do this because any competitor can copy what you do. But under an MIT or Apache-style license, it would be possible for manufacturers to make mods to the BIOS without being forced to "donate" their hard work to rapacious competitors (including the big guys, such as Dell and HP).
Thus, it seems to me that an open source BIOS should be licensed under a license that allows maximum freedom, such as the Apache, MIT, or Artistic License.
Just attempted to access the catalog for this auction, and discovered that Dove had made the pages specific to MSIE. Neither Netscape nor Mozilla will display them. No IE? Can't see the catalog. Guess I won't be bidding.
http://discuss.extremetech.com/extremetech/message s?msg=22210.3
It then goes on to say:
Believe it or not, their most recommended brand is now Seagate (the high end models). And they strongly recommend anything with a SCSI interface over IDE -- not for performance reasons (there's really not that much difference if you cache) but for reliability.
One advantage of the Berkeley license is that it has been tested in court and ruled valid. And it doesn't have the most dicey quality of the GPL: its viral nature.
It's capable of reading more than 400 formats. (About the only thing it couldn't read was Apple IWM disks, which use group code recording.) A brilliant piece of work.
My guess is that the records were doctored and expunged before Karl Auerbach got to them. ICANN stalled him for months, which would have allowed plenty of time for this.
Straw man argument; there's no one "GPL community."
However, people who have written or used GPLed software have benefited from the use of the code that I have released under the BSD License. (I will never license my code under the GPL, in part due to spiteful attitudes like the one you express above.)
No, because it's incorrect on several points. In particular, it does not address the question of how one could distribute an application for an OS that does not come with a compiler or linker. It also assumes the presence of a "strip" utility, and that the use of such a utility would be sufficient to avoid copyright infringement when one uses a commercial library (it's not). In short, I'm afraid that the above arguments are full of holes; in particular, they do not apply at all to those of us who develop for platforms other than Linux (e.g. PalmOS).