Don't kid yourself -- if AOL buys RH, they'll have a lot of power over the Linux universe, as much as anyone. It won't be absolute, completely unchallengable power, but it will be real and substantial, and it will be wielded in AOL's interests, not in ours.
All these comments could be true only if you assume the developers would play along with evil ploys.
And I assure you that this is not the case at least for most of us.
I can't confirm or deny the acquisition rumors (my guess about them is as bad as anyone else's), but I can confirm that most of us will not allow anyone to take our work proprietary or do other evil things.
If the rumors were true and AOL played along mostly by our rules, fine.
If they were true and they try to push Linux into the wrong direction (making parts proprietary, forcing weird SSSCA-like things in), we're out of here and they can't do anything about it.
Take a look at the community-wise important people at Red Hat - can anyone really imagine an Alan Cox hacking SSSCA enforcements into a proprietary fork of Linux? Or Ulrich Drepper adding the ConnectToAOL(const char *username, const char *password) system call to glibc?
Ingo Molnar adding patches to the PPP stack that slow down dialup connections unless the server is AOL?
In reality, if this were true, I think there would be two possible outcomes:
Red Hat would stay pretty much as is, maybe with a few minor changes and under a new label
Bad things happening, developers leaving, nobody remaining to do the bad things(tm), with the former Red Hat developers keeping on developing the last free version (did I mention I'm mirroring the internal devel tree to my home machine?)
Re:Moving away from X
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
We're already shipping those - they're in the
"ttfonts" package in Red Hat Linux. (Taken from
OpenOffice CVS a while back).
Re:Moving away from X
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The reason X has a bad image is that most Linux distros by default *don't* have good fonts.
The reason for this is that there are simply no good fonts under a sane license out there.
If you find any good fonts that are at least freely redistributable for both commercial and noncommercial purposes, please let me know and I'll make sure they get into some distros.
The best way to stop them is to find a minor who received their spam - sending XXX material to kids is a criminal offense in almost all countries, and spam always reaches kids...
You're telling me that you can trademark a term without having a related product?
Not really. You need some product, but you can use that to trademark the term for anything that is related, even if it's not closely related.
IANAL, but this is how I understand it:
There is a (much too) small number of categories in which you can register trademarks.
If you run some store selling paperclips at www.xyz.de, you could trademark "xyz" in the "computers" category [your store is accessible online with a computer, therefore it qualifies].
It would prevent, for example, anyone from writing an open source text editor and calling it xyz, because that would fall into the same category.
That's pretty much what this mess is all about, the trademark holder has nothing whatsoever to do with the open source product they're attacking, except for the fact that both are in some way related to computers. They don't have anything that competes or is in any other way related to the program, in fact they're not even using the same name (just a very similar one).
You can't just trademark a generic term. You can trademark a term that is associated with a particular product or service.
I wish it were that easy.
In Germany (where this mess originates), you can trademark a term in a category, e.g. trademark the term "pencil" (hint: or the same word in a different language) for anything related to computers.
Secondly, there is a way to research trademarks to find out whether you would be violating one or not
I have yet to see something that will let me research trademarks worldwide at no cost.
If I release an open source application called "dsgfoisejrfioeasjlfr", I have no way whatsoever of knowing whether this random gibberish (to me) is not a trademarked term in some country (it might even be a word in some language I'm not familiar with).
I've just noticed today's anti-spam obfuscation on my own post - I'm VERY opposed to the existence of any organization with the goal to spam Red Hat (SPAMredhat.com).
Slashdot, stop creating this domain or I'll give him a call... NOT.
The file containing the alias would still be a violation.
I just wonder how long it'll take before M$, Adobe or another EBC trademarks ls and forces everyone to use different commands.
Since you can trademark a generic term and sue someone using a variation thereof (not even the same term, just like in this case), it shouldn't be too difficult to get trademarks on "l" and "d", and then sue the hell out of any two letter commands using either trademark.
Since it's about a pretty generic term, my guess is
They trademarked the term for the sole purpose on cashing in on people accidentally violating it, therefore publishing the trademark would kill their business model.
Evil, but not beyond Gravenreuth or someone doing business with that guy.
They don't want the bad press and public discussion about trademarking generic words.
It does take a while to learn, but once you've learned it, it's the most powerful tool there can be.
Don't call it a horrid piece of software before you've learned how to use it.
A matter of perspective - my only major gripe with gnome is that its API re-invents the wheel over and over (C is not an object-oriented language, and gtk's attempt at emulating an object oriented language just isn't as good as the real thing, IMO).
It would seem that "The Dot" is already fallen under the Slashdot effect.
Currently working on it... The machine's load was temporarily up at 33.8, it's starting
to enter acceptable values (10.33 ATM) now, after some tweaking.
A typical teen nowadays has as much "knowledge" of life as most 25/30 year olds did in the 50's
Maybe, but computer geeks are not exactly typical teens. At least I know what I occasionally did for fun back when I was 14-15 (which isn't THAT long ago, it was late enough to give me a chance to toy with some early website defacing -- but it's so long ago that I can safely admit things without running in the danger of being arrested;) ).
Teens (at least the ones I know) are a usually a bit extreme in their views and not as controlled as older people, and "It's impossible to crack this" is an invitation to try that many can't resist, even though they know it's not exactly legal.
I agree about giving them hard punishments for real crimes, such as murder, beating up people until they go to hospital and such, but for stuff like this, a warning ("We know who you are, do it again and...") would suffice.
I tend to agree that prison conditions are too good, but on the other hand, locking someone up in a dark cell without anything is likely to get more nasty ideas into their heads (giving them enough time to think about taking revenge on the system that got them in there for something small [at least in their view])...
Maybe just a longer period of community service would be the best thing to do.
I think quite a few people responsible for deciding on what to do with a cracked website would agree with me in saying the resulting consequences have to depend on what the cracker did...
If someone just added a statement saying "Hi, I'm l33t hax0r, I've cracked this site 00000001 times", it's likely just a kid trying to have fun, not someone who should end up in prison.
On the other hand, if it's a spammer cracking my server and using it to send spam, they'd face all consequences I can think of. And there are quite a few in-between things...
I totally fail to see why "youngster piracy", as in
some kids who couldn't afford buying it anyway sharing software,
would be a bad thing(tm).
The companies don't lose anything (not having the cash to buy
a legit copy, the kids would just do anything else), but they
gain market share, and therefore mindshare.
And their whining about people making copies of stuff that's no longer available legally is even more ridiculous.
Ideally, everyone would move to just Open Source Software and the problem would be eliminated; in a less-utopic
world, we need a revision of copyright law, and fast.
I mean I can understand that Open Sourcing a large proprietary product like JHava can be hard. [...] Proprietary products can end up using libraries that you don't have the license to.
This is not even the case for JDK, or at least wasn't 2 years ago.
The blackdown people and various others have always had access to the source code and could build it without requiring proprietary libs, so it's just a matter of wanting vs. not wanting to open source it.
100% agreed that they'll lose if they don't make the right decision, and make it soon.
... it clearly shows how Open Source Software is more secure than proprietary software, contrary to Microsoft's favorite claim in defense of NT/XP servers.
Nobody could possibly claim a terrorist organization got its patches into the official releases of Open Source tools.
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
·
· Score: 2
EFI is indeed likely to be part of a M$ conspiracy, seeing how closely it resembles DOS.
Get to the correct boot drive by typing "fs0:". YUCK!
Re:Laws shouldn't allow for suing spammers...
on
Receive Spam, Make Money!
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If you actually take the time to read the spam, you can get much harder punishment for spammers.
Simply be creative in what you report.
"MAKE MONEY FAST": Report them to authorities not for spamming, but for fraud. Punishment is much harder.
"LOOK AT MY XXX SERVER!": Report them for sending pornographic material to children (spam will ALWAYS reach kids as well...) - at least in.de, this can get spammers to prison for a couple of years.
Other spam: If you're running your own mail server, call it theft of service (your mail server's resources were abused against its terms of use -- therefore, it's theft of service).
I've actually tried the second variant on a major repeat spammer; the court hasn't come to a decision yet, though.
First of all, a lot of people (basically, everyone outside the US and some European cities) actually pay for net connections per minute or per second, so receiving spam actually costs money.
If they want to put up a website telling how great their product is, I'm all for it - why not.
But stealing their potential users' money to get the word out is NOT acceptable.
How would you react if a local store sent you junk mail and included a bill for printing and shipping cost?
That's what spammers do, along with making sure the bill gets paid.
Also, a lot of spam is fraud ("MAKE MONEY FAST", "We need your help getting some millions out of Nigeria",...) - and fraud should never be legal.
Protecting fraudulent offers as free speech is probably not what most anti-censorship people want.
While it's tempting to mailbomb spammers, it just increases the problem.
It doesn't just boggle down your computer, it also affects your ISP's (innocent) mail server, and all the hosts that happen to be on the route between you and the spammer.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that gcc can do SSE these days, as well.
Check out the gcc HEAD branch, and try something along the lines of
-O2 -march=athlon -mcpu=athlon -msse -m3dnow -mmmx
They should of atleast had people working Saturday and Sunday
;)
We do. I can't remember the last day I didn't work, for example.
We just aren't in the office on weekends and holidays.
All these comments could be true only if you assume the developers would play along with evil ploys.
And I assure you that this is not the case at least for most of us.
I can't confirm or deny the acquisition rumors (my guess about them is as bad as anyone else's), but I can confirm that most of us will not allow anyone to take our work proprietary or do other evil things.
If the rumors were true and AOL played along mostly by our rules, fine.
If they were true and they try to push Linux into the wrong direction (making parts proprietary, forcing weird SSSCA-like things in), we're out of here and they can't do anything about it.
Take a look at the community-wise important people at Red Hat - can anyone really imagine an Alan Cox hacking SSSCA enforcements into a proprietary fork of Linux? Or Ulrich Drepper adding the ConnectToAOL(const char *username, const char *password) system call to glibc?
Ingo Molnar adding patches to the PPP stack that slow down dialup connections unless the server is AOL?
In reality, if this were true, I think there would be two possible outcomes:
We're already shipping those - they're in the
"ttfonts" package in Red Hat Linux. (Taken from
OpenOffice CVS a while back).
The reason X has a bad image is that most Linux distros by default *don't* have good fonts.
The reason for this is that there are simply no good fonts under a sane license out there.
If you find any good fonts that are at least freely redistributable for both commercial and noncommercial purposes, please let me know and I'll make sure they get into some distros.
The best way to stop them is to find a minor who received their spam - sending XXX material to kids is a criminal offense in almost all countries, and spam always reaches kids...
You're telling me that you can trademark a term without having a related product?
Not really. You need some product, but you can use that to trademark the term for anything that is related, even if it's not closely related.
IANAL, but this is how I understand it:
There is a (much too) small number of categories in which you can register trademarks.
If you run some store selling paperclips at www.xyz.de, you could trademark "xyz" in the "computers" category [your store is accessible online with a computer, therefore it qualifies].
It would prevent, for example, anyone from writing an open source text editor and calling it xyz, because that would fall into the same category.
That's pretty much what this mess is all about, the trademark holder has nothing whatsoever to do with the open source product they're attacking, except for the fact that both are in some way related to computers. They don't have anything that competes or is in any other way related to the program, in fact they're not even using the same name (just a very similar one).
You can't just trademark a generic term. You can trademark a term that is associated with a particular product or service.
I wish it were that easy.
In Germany (where this mess originates), you can trademark a term in a category, e.g. trademark the term "pencil" (hint: or the same word in a different language) for anything related to computers.
Secondly, there is a way to research trademarks to find out whether you would be violating one or not
I have yet to see something that will let me research trademarks worldwide at no cost.
If I release an open source application called "dsgfoisejrfioeasjlfr", I have no way whatsoever of knowing whether this random gibberish (to me) is not a trademarked term in some country (it might even be a word in some language I'm not familiar with).
I've just noticed today's anti-spam obfuscation on my own post - I'm VERY opposed to the existence of any organization with the goal to spam Red Hat (SPAMredhat.com).
Slashdot, stop creating this domain or I'll give him a call... NOT.
The file containing the alias would still be a violation.
I just wonder how long it'll take before M$, Adobe or another EBC trademarks ls and forces everyone to use different commands.
Since you can trademark a generic term and sue someone using a variation thereof (not even the same term, just like in this case), it shouldn't be too difficult to get trademarks on "l" and "d", and then sue the hell out of any two letter commands using either trademark.
Evil, but not beyond Gravenreuth or someone doing business with that guy.
Only GIF supports animation
Not entirely. MNG is an animated variant of PNG, and already widely supported (e.g. by anything using Qt, such as Konqueror).
No reason whatsoever to use gifs for anything, unless you're worried about legacy browsers.
It does take a while to learn, but once you've learned it, it's the most powerful tool there can be.
Don't call it a horrid piece of software before you've learned how to use it.
My only complaint about KDE is that it's all C++
A matter of perspective - my only major gripe with gnome is that its API re-invents the wheel over and over (C is not an object-oriented language, and gtk's attempt at emulating an object oriented language just isn't as good as the real thing, IMO).
It would seem that "The Dot" is already fallen under the Slashdot effect.
Currently working on it... The machine's load was temporarily up at 33.8, it's starting
to enter acceptable values (10.33 ATM) now, after some tweaking.
At least looking through the TV program, it appears ;)
every station is offering an ad marathon only.
I'll run a vim+make+gcc marathon instead...
A typical teen nowadays has as much "knowledge" of life as most 25/30 year olds did in the 50's
;) ).
Maybe, but computer geeks are not exactly typical teens. At least I know what I occasionally did for fun back when I was 14-15 (which isn't THAT long ago, it was late enough to give me a chance to toy with some early website defacing -- but it's so long ago that I can safely admit things without running in the danger of being arrested
Teens (at least the ones I know) are a usually a bit extreme in their views and not as controlled as older people, and "It's impossible to crack this" is an invitation to try that many can't resist, even though they know it's not exactly legal.
I agree about giving them hard punishments for real crimes, such as murder, beating up people until they go to hospital and such, but for stuff like this, a warning ("We know who you are, do it again and...") would suffice.
I tend to agree that prison conditions are too good, but on the other hand, locking someone up in a dark cell without anything is likely to get more nasty ideas into their heads (giving them enough time to think about taking revenge on the system that got them in there for something small [at least in their view])...
Maybe just a longer period of community service would be the best thing to do.
I think quite a few people responsible for deciding on what to do with a cracked website would agree with me in saying the resulting consequences have to depend on what the cracker did...
If someone just added a statement saying "Hi, I'm l33t hax0r, I've cracked this site 00000001 times", it's likely just a kid trying to have fun, not someone who should end up in prison.
On the other hand, if it's a spammer cracking my server and using it to send spam, they'd face all consequences I can think of. And there are quite a few in-between things...
I totally fail to see why "youngster piracy", as in
some kids who couldn't afford buying it anyway sharing software,
would be a bad thing(tm).
The companies don't lose anything (not having the cash to buy
a legit copy, the kids would just do anything else), but they
gain market share, and therefore mindshare.
And their whining about people making copies of stuff that's no longer available legally is even more ridiculous.
Ideally, everyone would move to just Open Source Software and the problem would be eliminated; in a less-utopic
world, we need a revision of copyright law, and fast.
I mean I can understand that Open Sourcing a large proprietary product like JHava can be hard. [...] Proprietary products can end up using libraries that you don't have the license to.
This is not even the case for JDK, or at least wasn't 2 years ago.
The blackdown people and various others have always had access to the source code and could build it without requiring proprietary libs, so it's just a matter of wanting vs. not wanting to open source it.
100% agreed that they'll lose if they don't make the right decision, and make it soon.
... it clearly shows how Open Source Software is more secure than proprietary software, contrary to Microsoft's favorite claim in defense of NT/XP servers.
Nobody could possibly claim a terrorist organization got its patches into the official releases of Open Source tools.
EFI is indeed likely to be part of a M$ conspiracy, seeing how closely it resembles DOS.
Get to the correct boot drive by typing "fs0:". YUCK!
If you actually take the time to read the spam, you can get much harder punishment for spammers.
.de, this can get spammers to prison for a couple of years.
Simply be creative in what you report.
"MAKE MONEY FAST": Report them to authorities not for spamming, but for fraud. Punishment is much harder.
"LOOK AT MY XXX SERVER!": Report them for sending pornographic material to children (spam will ALWAYS reach kids as well...) - at least in
Other spam: If you're running your own mail server, call it theft of service (your mail server's resources were abused against its terms of use -- therefore, it's theft of service).
I've actually tried the second variant on a major repeat spammer; the court hasn't come to a decision yet, though.
You're overlooking a couple of things.
...) - and fraud should never be legal.
First of all, a lot of people (basically, everyone outside the US and some European cities) actually pay for net connections per minute or per second, so receiving spam actually costs money.
If they want to put up a website telling how great their product is, I'm all for it - why not.
But stealing their potential users' money to get the word out is NOT acceptable.
How would you react if a local store sent you junk mail and included a bill for printing and shipping cost?
That's what spammers do, along with making sure the bill gets paid.
Also, a lot of spam is fraud ("MAKE MONEY FAST", "We need your help getting some millions out of Nigeria",
Protecting fraudulent offers as free speech is probably not what most anti-censorship people want.
While it's tempting to mailbomb spammers, it just increases the problem.
It doesn't just boggle down your computer, it also affects your ISP's (innocent) mail server, and all the hosts that happen to be on the route between you and the spammer.
So how do you go about finding their addresses?
Quite a bit of the spam I'm getting spamvertises websites with whois entries along the lines of
You suck, Antispammers invalidaccount@hotmail.com
1, Spam avenue
Spam city
NA 12345
1-900-555-1234
Unfortunately, quite a few registrars don't kick domains for putting in invalid contact information.