I first heard of the Orphan Works Act of 2008 by way of an open source advocate voicing concerns regarding the lack of diligence allowing companies to ignore the GPL. While this is could be an issue, I think if a party fails to do something as simple as perform a google search and see it listed at the top, a judge would probably hold that the searcher didn't perform a diligent search, especially since computer stuff more often than not found in the Internet. Besides, there are plenty of GPL violations that occur now. And considering most software has in it (either in the code or the application itself) some sort of documentation that points to the software's website. I don't think there's a judge who would find a company who ignored that sort of obvious information as a company who performed a diligent search.
So I decided to find out more about this bill and the second google hit was a petition to stop the Orphan Works Act of 2008 by some nutjobs who think copyright should last, quite literally, for eternity:
We believe it is the unalienable right of the individual artist or person to decide how their photographs, illustrations, videos, music or paintings are used for eternity.
Sorry, but copyright shouldn't last for 50 years after the death of the creator, it shouldn't last for 70 years after the death of the author and it certainly shouldn't last for eternity. The ultimate purpose of copyright (which is a time-limited monopoly on the rights to copy (or otherwise reproduce) a work) is not to provide for the authors of the works, but rather to enrich society as a whole. As a way to encourage individuals to create works, there needed to be some financial benefit, so the government granted the author a time period of 14 years (renewable for an additional 14) during which the author would hold a monopoly on the right to copy the work. After that, the author had to either come up with a new work, or get another job because the work became public domain, because the goal all along was to give society free access to the largest amount of works possible.
Now that's not to say I'm in favor of the Orphan Works Act of 2008. I'm not. But I am against the 7336 people who have signed this online petition. And not only these people, but other people who run around claiming that this bill "destroys the copyright validity of all artists. And then go on to claim that the Bushites are the anti-christ:
Who or what is the motivating power behind such a horror as this bill?
Guess! Fascism, Neo-cons? You see, as I warned you long ago and forever since, The Bushites ARE the anti-Christ. They realize that much financial and critical support comes from the Progressives and Liberals in the arts and the vast majority of artists of all sorts ARE Progressives and Liberals. When God or nature bestows upon a man, woman, or child a great creative gift, with that gift most often includes the sensitivity it takes to recognize the vagaries and the subtlety in nature and art. Artists of every sort are keen observers, because they have to be, and they are trained to be and by their very gift they are born ro be so.
The Anti-Christ forces, which supplant merely being The Anti-Christ, but are in reality Anti-God, Anti-Spiritual giftedness, anti-prophet, but pro-illicit profit. Their goal is the utter destruction of the God-Gifted artists. They hate and hold on contempt those favored with gifts, which includes athletes. If you will note, they have gone after with scant evidence all members of the arts and sports with lawsuits and skimpy, fringe, phonied, trumped up indictments, many of which I have correctly called as failing, here in these pages in many articles. They are aided and abetted by those who attack the messengers rather than perpetrators.
I share the position of Adam Huttler regarding the Orphan Works Act of 2008 in that I don't know if the bill is either good or bad (or a little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B). Huttler does make some interesting points, though, including that authors are still entitled to compensation even from someone protected by the Orphan Works Act and that registration isn't compulsory.
Openmoko, developer of the first open mobile computing platform today announced that on Friday, July 4, it will open the online store for purchase of the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner, a mobile device that the company says will help to enable ubiquitous computing for the 21st century. Shipping to customers will commence on July 7, 2008.
The Openmoko Neo FreeRunner utilizes GNU/Linux and comes with core software for dialing, SMS and recording contacts. Openmoko will supplement these features with periodic downloads beginning with a software suite that takes full advantage of the phone's hardware platform. The new software, debuting at Linux World in August, will provide exciting new location based applications.
In addition to my Mac Pro, I now have a 12" Powerbook that I use on the go. Having two computers introduces the hassle of keeping them in sync. Since .Mac comes with a 60 day trial, I decided I'd give it a try. For what it does, it does it well: it kept my mail, bookmarks, calendar and address book in sync, but nothing else.
However, .Mac costs $100 a year and it didn't meet all my needs. It did, however, offer a whole bunch of solutions (in the form of cloud computing) that I didn't want because rather than used someone else's cloud, I'd rather roll my own open source cloud. I don't use flickr, gmail or wordpress.com for this very reason, so why would I want .Mac email, webhosting, galleries, etc? All I really want to do is keep to Macs in sync, including all my documents. I googled and the best I found was Geek Throwdown: How to sync two or more Macs?.
Enter Unison. Here's a quick guide:
- I turned on remote login in system preferences on the PowerBook. This lets me SSH into it, which is a good thing because Unison operates over SSH.
- Installed the OS X binary of Unison onto both machines. (Downloaded the GUI universal binary and then launched the application, from there, within the application I was able to install the text version. Again, I did this for both machines.)
- Logged out of the PowerBook, then SSHed into it from the Mac Pro. I then deleted my entire home directory on the PowerBook (
rm -rf).
- I exited all running programs on the Mac Pro except a terminal.
- Created a directory
.unison in my home directory on my Mac Pro. Inside that directory, I created a file sync.prf. Here's the contents of that file, annotated to explain what each line means:
# Roots of synrchonoization
# I want to sync my entire home directory of the Mac Pro, the local machine with
root = /Users/brianpuccio
# ... my PowerBook, hostname beta, the entire home directory
root = ssh://brianpuccio@beta.local//Users/brianpuccio
# This synchronizes file modification times
times = true
# This turns off logging
log = false
# This tells unison to ignore some files and paths
# http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/wiki/index.php?n=Main.WikiSandbox
ignore = Name .FBCIndex
ignore = Name .FBCLockFolder
ignore = Name {Cache*,.Trash*,.VolumeIcon.icns,.HSicon,Temporary*,.Temporary*,TheFindByContentFolder}
ignore = Name {TheVolumeSettingsFolder,.Metadata,.filler.idsff,.Spotlight,.DS_Store,.CFUserTextEncoding}
# ~/.fseventsd/ is owned by root, don't have privledges to this, so ignore it
ignore = Name .fseventsd
# Unison is also the name of a usenet client http://www.panic.com/unison/
# This ignores its very large and often changing cache, which is fine since I don't use it on the Powerbook
ignore = Path {Library/Application Support/Unison/news.usenetserver.com}
# This is Mail's cache of my IMAP accounts, since this was large and I kept having Unison crash on the
# first few syncs, I omitted this path figuring Mail on the PowerBook would sync once it went online
# It worked, so I left it alone and in here
ignore = Path {Library/Mail/IMAP-*}
# This is my aperture library and it is too big to fit on my PowerBook (and the PowerBook too slow to run Aperture)
ignore = Path {Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary}
# It seems like Unison should automatically ignore its own config folder, but it didn't for me, so I added this
ignore = Path .unison
- I ran Unison by issuing the command
unison sync (sync because that is the name I cave the preference file, sync.pref.
- The GUI launched, asked me for my password on the PowerBook, which I entered. It did a quick comparison (since the PowerBook should have a completely empty home directory) and then listed all the files and directories.
- I made sure that Unison was set to sync each file and directory from the Mac Pro to the Powerbook (Unison uses left and right terminology, e.g., sync file from left to right).
- I clicked Go and it churned along.
For the most part, it worked. All my files were moved over, my keychain and all its passwords, my browsing history and bookmarks, my Adium settings, accounts and chat histories, my Colloquy settings and chat logs, my dock, my background ... quite literally everything.
There are a couple of issues:
- Window positions are copied over. Going from a 1920x1200 screen to a 1024x768 means some windows were too large. A quick window, zoom command fixed those. (But they then get synced back to the Mac Pro, where everything will now launch in the top left of the screen.) I'm just going to accept this.
- Several files (such as
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plistand ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist) are constantly modified by the OS and the very act of logging in to both machines means they both have their timestamps changed, which means Unison doesn't know which one you want to sync to the other, so it displays a ? instead and the default is to do nothing. Of course you can go through each of these one by one (or even en masse) and set that sync to be a Left to Right or Right to Left sync. I'm going to try using the force option and either favor a root explicitly or use the newer option.
- Dropping to a terminal to do this (and I do it a few times a week, whenever I shift from one machine to another) is annoying. I'm created an Automator script to run Unison and added it to my dock.
- Typing in my password for every sync is annoying. I now use an SSH key.
- I have only tried this where UIDs and GIDs were the same. Good luck to you if they're different!
I will update this as I make improvements.
You might be surprised to learn that Microsoft licenses are nearly twice as expensive in Brazil in absolute terms. I imagine Microsoft charges about the same and Brazil's brutal tax burden makes up the rest (the taxes are built into the price). But the interesting result is the relative price of licenses in each society, captured as % of GNI per capita. As a proportion of national incomes, business licenses are nineteen times more expensive to Brazilian society and home licenses are fifteen times more expensive. While GNI per capita is not a perfect figure, it reflects the incomes people make, how much they spend to live, and how much they pay in taxes. It is a crucial number when it comes to public policy; it's not hard to understand why rational policies must dodge licensing costs when possible. If there's any hope of widespread computer access, then surely we can't expect people to spend 7.8% of their annual income on Microsoft software licenses alone. The burden on small businesses is also prohibitive. This order-of-magnitude difference is a fundamental problem that can't be solved by piecemeal license giveaways. Suppose Microsoft gave out Windows and Office wholesale to all schools. Then what happens if those kids need a computer at home or in their parents' business? License costs are simply out of whack with respect to most of society. Using Linux in public schools, rarely attended by richer kids, seems inescapable.
- MySQL 6.0's pending backup functionality will be open source,
- the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
- the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,
where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.
Today, vb reported on the Drupal Forums, the SMF Forums and on his own website that he will no longer maintain the Drupal SMFforum Integration module.
According to vb, SMF's Project Manager Michael "Oldiesmann" Eshom told him he was in violation of SMF's proprietary license because he failed to obtain SMF's permission to distribute or change a file named smf_api_subs.php containing SMF functions, some of which had been modified to work with Drupal.
...
Sadly, this story is far from over. I think SMF is starting to realize they are in a bit of a pickle. There are dozens of other SMF bridges leading into GPL environments that have been initiated, discussed and distributed (by sharing links) right inside of the SMF forums in the *exact* same way the Drupal bridge was done.
Sounds like an awful lot of foot shooting going on.
We had just closed the acquisition of MySQL, so before I wrapped up, I asked, "And would you like a quick update on the newest addition to our family, MySQL?"
The CIO responded categorically with "we don't run MySQL, we run [name withheld to protect the proprietary]." The CISO said, "We can't just let developers download software off the net, you know, we've got regulation and security to worry about." The CTO smiled. Everyone else appeared to be sitting on their hands. I was going to leave it at that. Thanks for the business.
Until a (diplomatically) assertive Sun sales rep piped up, "Um... no, I connected with a buddy of mine over at MySQL, and had him check - you've downloaded MySQL more than 1,300 times in the last twelve months."
After a profoundly awkward silence, one of the individuals from their internal development team piped up, "Actually, everybody uses it. Why bother hassling with license agreements when MySQL's got you covered. We're stoked you bought them."
Things like this, plus all the embedded linux devices out there, mean that open source will be ubiquitous, even if people don't want it to be.
MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model -- previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.
Also, a clarification on slashdot.
Allie and I talk about joining the Peace Corps (one of these days) and I keep saying that while there, I'd like to wire up the place. I thought about proposing to the OLPC project, but this Open-Mesh initiative looks really interesting, too. The fact that the hardware is cheap is mainly what I'm looking at (cheaper than a bunch of soekris boards), but the fact that they're open source friendly is even better.
Besides, I think I'd get rather cranky after a few months (days, really) of no internet.
_at_hope.square thumbnail.jpg "Adam Savage Talks About His Dodo (And His OCD) At HOPE")
