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Slashback: ODF Wars, Duval Layoff, French DRM
from the changing-the-world-one-commitee-at-a-time dept.
Mandriva CEO responds to Duval Layoff. UltimaGuy writes "Duval has detailed his side of the story, 'Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva "thanks me" and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving.' Mandriva's CEO has responded, stating that 'Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.'"
Apple responds to French DRM legislation. Sardon writes "In the aftermath of France's move to force companies to open their DRM, Apple has shot back. Calling the proposed legislation "state-sponsored piracy," Apple complained loudly about the prospects of opening up their DRM, arguing that DRM interoperability tools would just increase piracy. However, as the article points out, DRM interoperability isn't likely to make a significant contribution to piracy, seeing as how P2P networks are already flooded. If the measure passes the French Senate, Apple may consider closing its music operations in France."
Microsoft possibly undermining ODF ISO approval. Andy Updegrove writes "If you haven't been paying attention to the odf(oasis) vs. xmlrs(microsoft) format wars, here is what is happening... Both formats need iso approval. This process is very thorough all complaints and gripes are heard and reviewed, which takes quite a bit of time. It is easy for voters to slow this process down considerably. And, our good friends Microsoft joined a very small subcommittee called 'V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface.' It just so happens that this small subcommittee (six companies - including Microsoft) is the entity charged with reconciling the votes that are being cast in the ISO vote to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument Format. So, presumably, Microsoft is going to delay ODF's ISO approval in hopes of xmlrs getting approval first and being the chosen format in Europe."
A more in-depth look at Fedora Core 5. LinuxForums has posted a much more in-depth look at the install process and functionality of the new Fedora Core 5 release. From the article: "I have to say though: this distribution impressed me in a way that no other distribution did before. Some things should of course be improved, such as the automatic hardware detection or, as mentioned above, the menus. But apart from these little details I can confidently say that Fedora Core 5 is the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution available at the moment."
More thoughts on the GPLv3. Guttata writes "Forbes has an interview with Richard Stallman on the upcoming GPLv3, which touches on Linus' stance on keeping the kernel at GPLv2. The article also shows Stallman's take on DRM, especially in reference to areas such as TiVo." Relatedly Glyn Moody writes "The FSF's General Counsel, Eben Moglen, explains why there is no situation in which the brokenness or otherwise of the GPL is ever an issue. Thanks to copyright law, GPL violators are always in the wrong."
Britannica strikes back at Wikipedia. tiltowait writes "Remember that study published by Nature magazine which likened Wikipedia's reliability to that of Encyclopedia Britannica? Well, Britannica has released -- not corrections -- but a corporate response stating that 'Nature's research was invalid [...] almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and misleading.' So then, is this just one more example of how refereed journals can't be trusted?"
Gael was not fired. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Gael was not fired. (Score:3, Informative)
This reminds me of a movie Startup.Com ( http://imdb.com/title/tt0256408/ [imdb.com]). It was about a couple guys who had an idea- to have a website that sold city services. Instead of going to the city to buy a license plate sticker, they sold it on-line. Want to pay a parking ticket? Do it at their website. Good idea.
So, early on, one of the founders decides to cash in for a couple
Uhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uhh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Steve Jobs == Disney (Score:3, Interesting)
MS is doing DRM but also fights it. As a gigantic player it knows deep down that piracy hasn't exactly hurt it. MS software is pirated to hell and back yet the billions keep rolling in and it controls the OS and office software markets. Could there be a link? That software that is easy to pirate gets used a lot so that is what p
Re:Uhh (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple doesn't make much money (directly) from the iTunes Music Store--Steve Jobs himself has said this. Primarily, the purpose of the iTMS is to help sell iPods. What Apple doesn't want to happen is for people to buy able to buy music from iTunes for use on third-party players. If the French iTMS stops being
You actually believe that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet Apple refuses to license (for more money!) their DRM and let someone ELSE sale music that will play on the ipod.
They're obviously either making money or planning to make money from music sales.
Re:Uhh (Score:4, Interesting)
"Apple doesn't make much money (directly) from the iTunes Music Store--Steve Jobs himself has said this."
To clarify... Steve said that more than a year ago, when the iTMS was in startup mode. Analysts state that it's making money now.
"Oh, sure, people can use Hymn, but Joe User isn't that sophisticated."
Spot on. The GP used the "everybody is like Slashdotters" fallacy. I'm fairly non-technical. I could use Hymn or buy-burn-rip to get content from iTMS to my Creative player, but it's not worth the hassle of learning new software, or the effort. So, my next player will be an Apple. If interoperatability were legislated where I live, I would buy a Creative player, not an Apple player, next time. Simple as that.
Parent
Re:Uhh (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue isn't that Apple would still get money for the music. The issue is that Apple wouldn't have to sell an iPod for someone to listen to their iTunes Music Store music portably.
Also, there's the issue that the music industry that grants allowances for Apple to sell their music would not stand for DRM-less music
French pirate babes (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, naughty little French pirates. They need to be punished. They need to know what it feels like. I implore all Slashdotters to head over to Google Video and pirate some Alizee music videos [google.com]. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, Alizee is a hot French babe... uhh, I mean, PIRATE!
Re:French pirate babes (Score:2, Funny)
Re:French pirate babes (Score:2)
Re:French pirate babes (Score:2)
Good work!
Let the beatings begin. (Score:3, Informative)
The term you want is privateer [wikipedia.org]. Privateers had letters of marque which legitimized their attacks as being sponsored by a government. (Except for the Spanish, who had a habit of refusing to honor letters of marque and just hanged them as common pirates.) Buccaneers [wikipedia.org], on the other hand, were pirates who started out in the barbecue business.
No, seriously. Buccaneers were originally hunters who sold cooked meat, grilled over an open fire, to passing ships. Eventually, an enterprising band of buccaneers realiz
Jeeezzz.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:French pirate babes (Score:5, Informative)
Now for the less jowful news. I happen to live in France, as you might have gathered, and I'm a bit surprised by the international analysis of the DADVSI law (since that's it name) that indeed got through Parliament tuesday evening.
The fact is that the government has :
I'm very flattered by all the positive light this is being shown in internationally, it's not every day the world has nice things to say about this country, but I must point out that IT enthusiasts over here are miserably decrying this law, and would probably be in the streets themselves if they weren't already chocablock with students demonstrating
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Microsoft shoots self in foot (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft shoots self in foot (Score:2)
Peer review? (Score:2)
On a minor note, they make a
Fired (Score:3, Insightful)
relieved of command...
disestablished...
made redundant...
surplus to requirements...
it all amounts to the same thing at the end of the day: Yer Outta Here.
PJ from Groklaw talks about ODF (Score:2)
The www.consortiuminfo.org blog links to her, but I know some
Laid off!? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry but the founder is not laid off. He quits if he tires of the company's direction or he's fired if he becomes an obstacle but he's not laid off. It's a question of morale: If the founder himself is of so little value that he can be laid off then every other employee is worthless too. When your employer shows they don't value your presence its past time to jump ship.
Re:Laid off!? (Score:2, Informative)
If the people in those positions decide that you are a drain to the company (too high a salary, not enough work), then you are laid off.
There's no morale question here. The company decided that he wasn't able to provide value, but he hadn't d
Troubling statement from RMS.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a "free" version of that program?
It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).
Am I the only one that sees this statement as a dangerous precedent? I mean, for all intents and purposes, RMS feels that 'stealing' copyrighted code is justifiable, if it's done with the intent to "liberate it".
Maybe you might consider this a trolling or a flame, but I think that it is quotes such as these that may end up bringing the most amount of trouble for the RMS crowd... I think the man is losing touch with reality, and approaching a point where zealotry is clowding his judgment to a dangerous level. How can we convince businesses that using the GPL and open source is a GOOOD THING if one of the main characters is in effect condoning IP theft if done for the 'right reasons'?
Re:Troubling statement from RMS.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Troubling statement from RMS.... (Score:3, Interesting)
RMS considers the concept of intellectual property immoral. Therefore "freeing" code is a perfectly appropriate action (to him). I'd rather see people stand by their beliefs than bend for practical reasons.
Re:Troubling statement from RMS.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a "dangerous precedent," as you call it; merely the inevitable conclusion one reaches if you subscribe to the same axioms as RMS.
In the common (both senses of the word) world view, taking code written by someone else and redistributing it is considered bad; a violation of the rights o
Re:Troubling statement from RMS.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope you make the difference between ethical and legal. RMS never said it was legal or that peopel should to it (he specifically says it wouldn't work). He simply things it would be ethical if allowed by law. It just shows how the sense of ethics is different between people. Nothing to see here.
Oh, and there's no such thing as "IP
Re:Troubling statement from RMS.... (Score:3, Informative)
The only thing that has chang
Privateer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Privateer (Score:4, Funny)
I believe the word Apple is looking for is "Privateer". A state-sponsored pirate is a privateer.
I like it! Maybe France will start granting people Letters of Marque.
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GNU/Linux (Score:2, Troll)
The FSF has already had its chance to bundle their tools around their own kernel with Hurd and that has failed miserably after MANY years of wasting resources on it. I wish he/they would stop trying to claim ownership of someone else's kernel to buy them the air of legitimacy needed to foist their political ideals on anyone who decides to use free software. The existing GPL isn't broke
Re:GNU/Linux (Score:3)
As for the GPL, it seems to me to be not much more than fixing loopholes. Back in the day, all computers were general-purpose, and there was not much concept of "firmwa
Re:GNU/Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not some irrelevant issue. It's a significant loophole which the DRM-related clauses attempt to close.
Parent
State Sponsored Piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple responds to French DRM legislation (Score:5, Insightful)
I know in this instance France wants Apple to open their DRM. But who is to say that another state might want to close DRM?
What we might end up with is worse than DVD's that are region coded. We might get the hardware that is region specific, and no other method of opening data (music, files, movies).
I think the world will move in that direction. What other reason would Sony or Universal have for forcing regions with DVD's? Why are they opposed of me buying movies from Spain or Germany? And if a company is so paranoid, just imagine nation-states that are worried their culture is being corroded away.
Re:Apple responds to French DRM legislation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple responds to French DRM legislation (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do we have region codes? We pay $15US (or more) for a DVD here in the US. In China they sell pretty much the same DVDs (sometimes without the extra commentaries etc, what a big loss) for $2-$3US [slate.com], a fraction of the cost we pay. Obviously, taking into consideration how much the average citizen of China makes, that's a lot for them. But relative to our $15+ DVDs, even if we had to not only buy the DVD in China but pay for shipping back here, it would be cheaper to buy it in China.
So basically, we hav
Fedora Installation (Score:2)
It would be soooo much faster if it actually made use of parallel processes. One process copying from the CDROM, and another installing to the hard drive when the package is available. I mean, how hard can it be?! I've written perl scripts which
Love the quality of spin (Score:4, Informative)
"You talk like a press release."
-- David Rodriguez
He was also "laid off" due to economic pressure (ie the new directors turned a profitable $20 million a year in revenue company into something that burned through twice that amount in less than a year before imploding). If you want to see the whole story it's here [waxy.org].
This is America (Score:5, Funny)
S.O.P. for Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
I am referring to, of course, Microsoft's strange participation in the subcommittee involved in getting ODF ISO approved. They declined any and all participation in creating ODF and yet somehow they are involved in getting it ISO approved? Microsoft is now something along the lines of the fox guarding the henhouse.
And when I discuss Microsoft's "competitive" activities, I tend to think of elementary school kids running the 100 yard dash where Microsoft, instead of simply running as fast as it can, resorts to tying the laces of the shoes of other kids or to tripping them in some fashion.
Although "Competing" and "Impeding" rhyme nicely enough, they are certainly VERY different approaches when trying to win and one of them is often cause for legal retaliation.
Britannica... (Score:3, Interesting)
Britannica response (Score:5, Interesting)
Science without review is Junk Science (Score:4, Informative)
And why should anyone be surprised? 14-year-old with too much time on his hands has as much weight in wikipedia as some 50-year-old senior academic in a given subject. More in practice as the said teenager can sit all night making revisions whereas the prof probably has classes and schoolwork to go over..
I know a bit about genetics (Score:3, Insightful)
Britannica response: There is no inaccuracy here. We stand by our author, Francisco Ayala, who insists that the reviewer is wrong through and through: the altruistic behavior is favored by natural selection because relatives share (in fractions depending on the degree of relatedness) all their genes.
I can't see the original article (Britannica attacks Nature for not making their data available, but they're guilty of the same thing).
But it sounds like the reviewer was saying that the Britannica article conflates individual fitness with allele fitness.
Example: imagine a species S. A grenade is thrown at five individuals of species S. If one of them jumps on it, she will die but the other four will live. Else, each will die with probabilty 0.5. Should she do it? If we are looking at things from her individual point of view, she should not do it *no matter her relation to the other individuals*. Nobody's individual survival is benefitted by dying. But if we are looking at things from the point of view of her alleles, then her relation to the other four do make sense. If they are her clones, then the allele has a 0% chance of dying off at this moment if she does it, and a 1 in 32 chance if she doesn't. The average numbers of survivors is also higher: 4 vs 2.5.
It's true that the presence of altruistic individuals increases everyone's survival odds -- nonetheless, altruism is not justified on an individual level -- if it were, it wouldn't be altruism.
Ayala is wrong that altruistic behavior is favored by natural selection. Genes coding for altruistic behavior are favored; the behavior itself is not favored.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure Ayala understands this. Ayala thinks he's saying the right thing: in his brain, "altruistic behavior" is a shorthand for "genes coding for altruistic behavior", because he's an expert in kin selection and thinks about this all day. He just forgot that he was writing for a general encyclopedia. At least, that's the only theory I can come up with for why he insists that he's right..
Of course, if I later read the Britannica article and discover that it is correct, I'll be glad to retract this. Also, I'm not a geneticist -- I just like to think I understand some of genetics because I've read a bit about it; and this bit is basically game theory anyway. Perhaps a real geneticist will tell me that Ayala is using terms in the standard way, so the criticism fails on those grounds. If so, I'll accept that correction too.
You could try their website (Score:3, Interesting)
They do have it all on their website, you know. I think you have to pay for full access, but it's a lot cheaper than a set of encyclopedias.
Or you could buy the circa-$50 disk version, and install that, if you're running Windows or using a PPC Mac (as of yet their product doesn't run on Intel Macs due to some component developed by a third party which hasn't been made universal). Then you'd have access to it all without even needing to be online.
Re:Brittanica's problem isn't accuracy (Score:5, Interesting)
More than that: Wikipedia is what Hypertext was originally meant to me. (See... well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext [wikipedia.org] ) And boy is it fun!
Britannica may or may not be more reliable for the subjects it covers, but it's also limited in scope. Would Britannica have an article about Matisyahu [wikipedia.org], for example? Britannica's front page claims 120,000 articles; Wikipedia, over a million, just for the English edition.
Parent
Re:Attribution and GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's sort of implied that when you license code under the GPL, you have set it "free". What this means is that the code is no longer really yours, it belongs to the collective pool of free software, from which anyone may draw freely.
It's true that there are some bad people out there who modify free software and re-sell it, but the problem is not them. It's is the people who have never heard of free software who are buying it. Why would you buy a copy of OpenOffice, or an office suite that looks exactly like it but is called something else?
The solution here is user education, not a tightening of the license..
Parent
Re:Attribution and GPL (Score:3, Informative)
No, you still retain copyright and ownership. That means if a company approaches you and says they'll pay you some money in exchange for not having to open source their product based on your original code, you are free to make that deal. No other person who got the cod