"My guess is that the rationale is that this isn't a copyright case, but a licensing case. Thus the education group, AFPA, can actually be a party to the lawsuit. Still, it does raise questions over who has the right to make sure the GPL is enforced."
Yes this is not a pure copyright case since the copyright owner isn't involved at all.
About the question, it has been answered clearly: any person who is provided a GPL software binary can ask its provider to give him the corresponding source. Note that neither Edu4 nor the judge raised any doubt about that, and the only valid basis for the source code request is in the GPL, ie it's not in a separate contract between Edu4 and AFPA.
So at least in France this is now quite well settled.
Without seeing the documents the only conclusion so far for techdirt readers is that Intel pays more advertising in the WSJ than AMD, so the article written by a professionnal journalist is pro-Intel.
Anyway as for performance it's a joke of course. Where I worked we stopped purchasing Intel servers (from Dell/IBM/...) and switched to AMD (from Sun) since they offered better performance/cost. When Intel decided to produce better chips we went back to Intel (from Dell).
Dell lost scores and scores of customers (we bought servers by the hundreds) when it was still Intel only and AMD had better chips (but Dell was still saying of course Intel chips are better - Mike you know how marketing works).
For data just look at the sequence of http://www.top500.org/ and the rise (and then relative fall) of AMD.
Now of course since the EU documents are secret we don't know what's really in it.
A few days ago there were some discussions in France about an administrative decision on "smart grid" company offer to have a box to switch off some home appliances in order to balance grid when needed:
A few days ago there were some discussions in France about an administrative decision on "smart grid" company offer to have a box to switch off some home appliances in order to balance grid when needed:
One of the most commonly cited measure in economics is unemployment. But unemployment of 10% does mean that one out of ten person are without job, because of the concept of "active population" which is people with jobs plus people looking "actively" for a job. Each country typically defines 5 to 10 "actively looking" levels and publishes one as "official unemployment". OECD takes all those and publishes a normalized, that is comparable between countries, unemployment level. However a little know fact ...
From OECD normalized numbers for 2007 (latest available):
* men aged 25-54
employment divided by population
France: 88.3% (hence 11.7% jobless)
USA: 87.5% (hence 12.5% jobless)
So with a slightly higher relative working population in this age/sex group France has ... a 70% higher unemployment rate than the USA.
* women aged 25-54
E/P
FR 76.1
USA 72.5
unemployment
FR 7.7
USA 3.8
So here we have clearly more women working in France (3.6 percentage point) relative to their population but unemployment is 102% higher in France!
* conclusion
Employment/population is an objective measure. Unemployment is an extremely subjective measure and so it's easy to get very wide discrepancies as shown above.
* question
Any paper studying this discrepancy in OECD normalized numbers? For male 25-54 there's no real reason not to work, so what are all those USA men doing?
* second question
What credit do you place on "empirical validation" of economic theories (and papers) who use unemployment by country to select the right policy?
What they call a "resolution" from the European Parliament is just a voted-on press release, it's not a law and has no more value than a blog post somewhere on the internet.
See "non-binding resolutions" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament
99% of what is reported by the media are those resolutions which have no interest whatsoever.
The European Parliament does has no legislative initiative, that is it cannot propose new law. It must wait from the European Commission to propose one and then the law proposal, called a "directive" follows the "Codecision" procedure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codecision_procedure
Where the unelected and opaque commission of 27 people has the last word on everything, a unique quasi-dictatorial body concentrating most of legislative and executive power over 500 millions EU citizens.
The "telco bill" is a directive, will be voted by the European Parliament without any significant change and will apply to 500 millions citizens.
Just like the "database" bill was voted, etc...
The only directive that was rejected by the parliament in the whole history of codecision was the patent directive (in second reading), but the commission will keep pushing such a patent directive until one passes.
Sad state and no wonder you see in the media from time to time that citizen rejected some EU stuff by referendum when by chance there's a referendum.
I wonder when will google start to instead of removing a page when a DMCA takedown arrives, just replace the page content with a link to similar content from another artist/whatever but with friendler licence or attitude, and having the page also explaining the original owner wasn't cool.
There's no problem in having prices for options on traded stocks (unless the stock itself isn't liquid), there's a actually a fully public market for those in most countries. I worked for ten years in this area.
So it's not true it's "impossible" to value them, the prices are available and just as good as stock prices when the stock is liquid.
Of course if the stock is not liquid, there's no good stock price and no good option price so in this particular case (startups included) it's indeed impossible to have a good price for both stock and options.
One side note on this debate: while privacy-like protection might be commonly accepted for accounting information about private firms which make public only limited agregated data, since we're talking about more or less direct nationalization of some parts of the economy it would be good to remind the public and politicians that there's no good reason at all in the internet age with near zero publication cost not to have fully detailed accounting information on public entities, down to each purchase and each valuation of each asset.
As many people correctly guessed it's not about laws but about a part of government instructions to public servants.
Instead of suing with FOIA-like laws to know what the government told your public servant to do, it's just much simpler to have those on the web in the first place and otherwise you argue they're not valid, end of story.
And start using FreeBSD or NetBSD for its products to avoid the GPL 'infection'."""
To my knowledge FreeBSD and NetBSD compiler is GCC (GNU CC) and in this case Cisco is accused of violating GCC copyright by not releasing their source modification together with their binary redistribution.
Hopefully FreeBSD and OpenBSD maintainers do release their GCC patches.
Government grants patents to ebay so consumer can't escape them because of government granted monopolies, so it's not surprising to see government has to come back and clean up some stuff.
It would be better of course not to have those government granted monopolies in the first place, but since they are there's no choice for the government to intervene more.
Reenforcing existing property rights is just perfect match for "conservatism".
One of the most proheminent libertarian around, Hayek, wrote without ambiguity on "intellectual" property:
""" Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made. [...]
The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.
Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988 (p. 35) Friedrich von Hayek"""
I guess that just about half of the libertarians are just hypocrites.
Pete, the free software alternative to flight simulator is FlightGear.
You can order a DVD for $15 on the web site that will run it on your windows machine, the latest version was released on December 18th, 2007 so it cannot be more recent. If you like it, it will run the same on Linux and I believe there's also a MacOS X port.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by guerby.
"My guess is that the rationale is that this isn't a copyright case, but a licensing case. Thus the education group, AFPA, can actually be a party to the lawsuit. Still, it does raise questions over who has the right to make sure the GPL is enforced."
Yes this is not a pure copyright case since the copyright owner isn't involved at all.
About the question, it has been answered clearly: any person who is provided a GPL software binary can ask its provider to give him the corresponding source. Note that neither Edu4 nor the judge raised any doubt about that, and the only valid basis for the source code request is in the GPL, ie it's not in a separate contract between Edu4 and AFPA.
So at least in France this is now quite well settled.
Data!
Without seeing the documents the only conclusion so far for techdirt readers is that Intel pays more advertising in the WSJ than AMD, so the article written by a professionnal journalist is pro-Intel.
Anyway as for performance it's a joke of course. Where I worked we stopped purchasing Intel servers (from Dell/IBM/...) and switched to AMD (from Sun) since they offered better performance/cost. When Intel decided to produce better chips we went back to Intel (from Dell).
Dell lost scores and scores of customers (we bought servers by the hundreds) when it was still Intel only and AMD had better chips (but Dell was still saying of course Intel chips are better - Mike you know how marketing works).
For data just look at the sequence of http://www.top500.org/ and the rise (and then relative fall) of AMD.
Now of course since the EU documents are secret we don't know what's really in it.
IP = protectionnism
Well who needs another proof intellectual property is just protectionism with another name?
Not much real "free traders" left...
Same kind of struggle in France
A few days ago there were some discussions in France about an administrative decision on "smart grid" company offer to have a box to switch off some home appliances in order to balance grid when needed:
http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2009/07/22/frances-complicated-relationship-with-efficiency/
Text of the french administrative decision (with some pictures):
http://www.cre.fr/fr/content/download/8808/155078/file/090709Effacementsdiffus.pdf
There's not enough information available for me (yet) to sort out what this means.
Same kind of struggle in France
A few days ago there were some discussions in France about an administrative decision on "smart grid" company offer to have a box to switch off some home appliances in order to balance grid when needed:
http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2009/07/22/frances-complicated-relationship-with-efficiency/
Text of the french administrative decision (with some pictures):
http://www.cre.fr/fr/content/download/8808/155078/file/090709Effacementsdiffus.pdf
There's not enough information available for me (yet) to sort out what this means.
Translation
Original french quote:
"Il m'arrive parfois d'être téléchargé illégalement, pas suffisamment à mon grand regret",
The following report is not correct:
"he wished he downloaded more unauthorized content"
Something more in line:
"he wished people downloaded his works illegally more often"
A tentative translation of the quote:
"I'm sometimes downloaded illegally, but not often enough much to my regret"
The direct form "I'm downloaded" is a reference to Carla Bruni answer to a question on this topic, she said she liked "to be teleported" :).
Unemployment
One of the most commonly cited measure in economics is unemployment. But unemployment of 10% does mean that one out of ten person are without job, because of the concept of "active population" which is people with jobs plus people looking "actively" for a job. Each country typically defines 5 to 10 "actively looking" levels and publishes one as "official unemployment". OECD takes all those and publishes a normalized, that is comparable between countries, unemployment level. However a little know fact ...
From OECD normalized numbers for 2007 (latest available):
* men aged 25-54
employment divided by population
France: 88.3% (hence 11.7% jobless)
USA: 87.5% (hence 12.5% jobless)
normalized unemployment rate
France: 6.3%
USA: 3.7%
So with a slightly higher relative working population in this age/sex group France has ... a 70% higher unemployment rate than the USA.
* women aged 25-54
E/P
FR 76.1
USA 72.5
unemployment
FR 7.7
USA 3.8
So here we have clearly more women working in France (3.6 percentage point) relative to their population but unemployment is 102% higher in France!
* conclusion
Employment/population is an objective measure. Unemployment is an extremely subjective measure and so it's easy to get very wide discrepancies as shown above.
* question
Any paper studying this discrepancy in OECD normalized numbers? For male 25-54 there's no real reason not to work, so what are all those USA men doing?
* second question
What credit do you place on "empirical validation" of economic theories (and papers) who use unemployment by country to select the right policy?
What they call a "resolution" from the European Parliament is just a voted-on press release, it's not a law and has no more value than a blog post somewhere on the internet.
See "non-binding resolutions" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament
99% of what is reported by the media are those resolutions which have no interest whatsoever.
The European Parliament does has no legislative initiative, that is it cannot propose new law. It must wait from the European Commission to propose one and then the law proposal, called a "directive" follows the "Codecision" procedure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codecision_procedure
Where the unelected and opaque commission of 27 people has the last word on everything, a unique quasi-dictatorial body concentrating most of legislative and executive power over 500 millions EU citizens.
The "telco bill" is a directive, will be voted by the European Parliament without any significant change and will apply to 500 millions citizens.
Just like the "database" bill was voted, etc...
The only directive that was rejected by the parliament in the whole history of codecision was the patent directive (in second reading), but the commission will keep pushing such a patent directive until one passes.
Sad state and no wonder you see in the media from time to time that citizen rejected some EU stuff by referendum when by chance there's a referendum.
Real answer
I wonder when will google start to instead of removing a page when a DMCA takedown arrives, just replace the page content with a link to similar content from another artist/whatever but with friendler licence or attitude, and having the page also explaining the original owner wasn't cool.
That could be interesting.
Options
There's no problem in having prices for options on traded stocks (unless the stock itself isn't liquid), there's a actually a fully public market for those in most countries. I worked for ten years in this area.
So it's not true it's "impossible" to value them, the prices are available and just as good as stock prices when the stock is liquid.
Of course if the stock is not liquid, there's no good stock price and no good option price so in this particular case (startups included) it's indeed impossible to have a good price for both stock and options.
One side note on this debate: while privacy-like protection might be commonly accepted for accounting information about private firms which make public only limited agregated data, since we're talking about more or less direct nationalization of some parts of the economy it would be good to remind the public and politicians that there's no good reason at all in the internet age with near zero publication cost not to have fully detailed accounting information on public entities, down to each purchase and each valuation of each asset.
As many people correctly guessed it's not about laws but about a part of government instructions to public servants.
Instead of suing with FOIA-like laws to know what the government told your public servant to do, it's just much simpler to have those on the web in the first place and otherwise you argue they're not valid, end of story.
"""by alternatives() - Dec 12th, 2008 @ 3:54am
And start using FreeBSD or NetBSD for its products to avoid the GPL 'infection'."""
To my knowledge FreeBSD and NetBSD compiler is GCC (GNU CC) and in this case Cisco is accused of violating GCC copyright by not releasing their source modification together with their binary redistribution.
Hopefully FreeBSD and OpenBSD maintainers do release their GCC patches.
IP and repeat
I join the "Thank you Mike" group :).
As for repeat basic common sense point, Dean Baker also deserves a medal: Dean Baker Beat The Press
Patents
Government grants patents to ebay so consumer can't escape them because of government granted monopolies, so it's not surprising to see government has to come back and clean up some stuff.
It would be better of course not to have those government granted monopolies in the first place, but since they are there's no choice for the government to intervene more.
Hayek
Reenforcing existing property rights is just perfect match for "conservatism".
One of the most proheminent libertarian around, Hayek, wrote without ambiguity on "intellectual" property:
""" Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made. [...]
The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.
Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988 (p. 35) Friedrich von Hayek"""
I guess that just about half of the libertarians are just hypocrites.
FlightGear
Pete, the free software alternative to flight simulator is FlightGear.
You can order a DVD for $15 on the web site that will run it on your windows machine, the latest version was released on December 18th, 2007 so it cannot be more recent. If you like it, it will run the same on Linux and I believe there's also a MacOS X port.