[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Alan DuBoff]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2008, Rick Moen wrote:

> Nah, that's actually one of the problems with e-mail as a 
> discussion medium; my sense of humour's arid enough that 
> people often miss the overtone of amusement and raillery.

I couldn't agree more about email, and know that when we see 
each other in person we rarely have problems, but I am also 
misunderstood myself...we miss a dimension in email.

With that said, I know your involvement with the OSI and was 
trying to pick your brain with this dialog. I certainly don't 
have a reasonable answer for the bigger problem at hand, which 
seems to get down to patents and copyrights, hency my ambition 
to see copyrights removed...that is not so easy in our 
patent/copyright society *we* live in. Since I do plan to stay 
in the U.S. I need to work with the system in place.

> Anyway, the main point I wanted to get across was the same one 
> that Dan Bernstein apparently missed when he "public domained" 
> a bunch of his software and then wrote a basically 
> non-sequitur attack on the people (qualified legal 
> authorities, not just yr. humble correspondent) who'd said 
> that doesn't really work:  Walking away from your copyrighted 
> works, including writing formal 
> I'm-walking-away-from-this-property statements such as CC's 
> "public domain dedication", is not sufficient to put it into 
> the public domain.  It just isn't.  That's just abandonment of 
> property, same as with any other property -- or, at minimum, 
> might well be ruled to be that.

Don Marti tried to explain some of this to me at LinuxWorld, and 
I questioned some things then, just as I do with you now. 
Software patents, copyrights, and licensing is just a mess. It 
does sadden me to think that we can't have truly open and free 
software, *yet*. I certainly haven't given up on that idea. I'm 
willing to share, and want others to use my code when possible 
to enhance, and I know we can do that with the current system, 
it just doesn't make it right.

> The fact is, we live in a legal environment where copyright 
> arises automatically and persists whether you want it to or 
> not, because a strong consensus around the world made it that 
> way (the Berne treaty), starting many decades ago.  That's 
> just base reality, and it's _really_ easy to work with, e.g., 
> with a one-line licence statement -- as long as you don't try 
> instead to ignore it, which may (or may not, depending on the 
> judge and jurisdiction) shoot you and your users in the foot.

I know you keep beating this into my stubborn head, but I 
continue to refuse that there couldn't be a better solution, so 
I keep looking for a way...:-/

Will we be stuck with Roe vs. Wade for enternity, for lack of a 
better analogy? Hopefully nobody beats me up over that comment, 
I just point it out as it has been one of the biggest 
controversaries in history. Software patent, copyright and 
licensing has the potential to be as big of a controversary, 
IMO.

Music publishing and distribution is in a similar quagmire, much 
of that was put in place back in 1919 when RCA first introduced 
the radio. Things have changed, but we're forced to live within 
the same restrictions that seemed good almost 100 years ago.

Anyway, I don't want to over power this mailing list...this used 
to be one of the most active open source mailing lists on the 
inet, IMO, and it's gotten quite quiet these days. Later I will 
post an announcement for my meeting this week (why I came over 
here and subscribed again), and I will ask Smalley some things 
when I see him pretaining to the way the NSA licenses and/or 
distributes their code, to better understand it...I suspect he 
might say, "I really have nothing to do with it, that's up to 
the NSA" kinda thing...but it's good for us to try to understand 
for those of us in the U.S.

Apologies for the long reply.

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration