Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Nemesis6 on February 25, 2010, 05:49:26 pm
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The US copyright lobby has long argued against open source software - now Indonesia's in the firing line for encouraging the idea in government departments
It's only Tuesday and already it's been an interesting week for the world of digital rights. Not only did the British government changed the wording around its controversial 'three strikes' proposals, but the secretive anti-counterfeiting treaty, Acta, was back in the headlines. Meanwhile, a US judge is still deliberating over the Google book settlement.
As if all that wasn't enough, here's another brick to add to the teetering tower of news, courtesy of Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh.
Guadamuz has done some digging and discovered that an influential lobby group is asking the US government to basically consider open source as the equivalent of piracy - or even worse.
What?
It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they use open source software.
What's Special 301? It's a report that examines the "adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights" around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure - often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods - to try and force governments to change their behaviours.
Now, even could argue that it's no surprise that the USTR - which is intended to encourage free market capitalism - wouldn't like free software, but really it's not quite so straightforward.
I know open source has a tendency to be linked to socialist ideals, but I also think it's an example of the free market in action. When companies can't compete with huge, crushing competitors, they route around it and find another way to reduce costs and compete. Most FOSS isn't state-owned: it just takes price elasticity to its logical conclusion and uses free as a stick to beat its competitors with (would you ever accuse Google, which gives its main product away for free, of being anti-capitalist?).
Still, in countries where the government has legislated the adoption of FOSS, the position makes some sense because it hurts businesses like Microsoft. But that's not the end of it.
No, the really interesting thing that Guadamuz found was that governments don't even need to pass legislation. Even a recommendation can be enough.
Example: last year the Indonesian government sent around a circular to all government departments and state-owned businesses, pushing them towards open source. This, says the IIPA, "encourages government agencies to use "FOSS" (Free Open Source Software) with a view toward implementation by the end of 2011, which the Circular states will result in the use of legitimate open source and FOSS software and a reduction in overall costs of software".
Nothing wrong with that, right? After all, the British government has said it will boost the use of open source software.
But the IIPA suggested that Indonesia deserves Special 301 status because encouraging (not forcing) such takeup "weakens the software industry" and "fails to build respect for intellectual property rights".
From the recommendation:
The Indonesian government's policy... simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.
Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.
As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.
Let's forget that the statement ignores the fact that there are plenty of businesses built on the OSS model (RedHat, Wordpress, Canonical for starters). But beyond that, it seems astonishing to me that anyone should imply that simply recommending open source products - products that can be more easily tailored without infringing licensing rules - "undermines" anything.
In fact, IP enforcement is often even more strict in the open source community, and those who infringe licenses or fail to give appropriate credit are often pilloried.
If you're looking at this agog, you should be. It's ludicrous.
But the IIPA and USTR have form here: in recent years they have put Canada on the priority watchlist.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/opensource-intellectual-property
So when you use open source, you're an enemy of capitalism, just like when you download music, you're a communist (http://mythstified.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/communism.jpg), and when you drive alone, you're a Nazi (http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/powers_of_persuasion/use_it_up/images_html/images/ride_with_hitler.jpg). Hooray for the MPAA, the RIAA, and the corporations ideals they stand for! :)
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Dooooomed.
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The proletariat shall rule!
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Freedom is merely privilege extended. Unless enjoyed by one and all.
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You are free to do what we tell you.
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Not sure how much of this is ****. The US government already uses a lot of OSS because of the fact that many times it can be better than closed source alternatives and is also either cheaper or free.
Also, if the government used just closed source software, that would be a bad idea. OSS tends to get bug fixed and security holes plugged faster than closed source alternatives. Just imagine if a government just used macintoshes with macosx. Given apple's record for being slow on the up take for fixing problems in it's software, that'd be a bad idea.
Or imagine if a government relied upon microsoft's bitlocker (****locker) hard drive encryption (the one with the back door built in that gives police access to your encrypted stuff, which also equals eventually hackers being able to use the back door).
Not all closed source software is bad. If this is true information what nemesis posted, then it's extremely anticompetitive and would be hypocritical most likely. OSS tends to be linked with socialist ideals? I guess in the article it does, stupid trash; in an article you can view and link anything you like together for stirring up attention and feelings.
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:wtf: :wtf: :wtf:
This...is insanity!
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you think nasa runs windows :D
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you think nasa runs windows :D
Nah! they still use MS-DOS! ;7
:lol:
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you think nasa runs windows :D
Nah! they still use MS-DOS! ;7
:lol:
Reaching for the stars with a pinky finger, huh? :D
I'm sorry, Dos! Don't ever change, you're perfect the way you are. They're just jealous!
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You know, DOS is a good OS. It just isn't user-friendly from the get-go.
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You know, DOS is a good OS. It just isn't user-friendly from the get-go.
DOS is like Linux-lite? :P
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It's obviously a stupid point, corporations do not fail to sale a product because of Free software taking their share of market, they fail because their products are not worthy the price, they have two options: Adapt or declare bankruptcy.
Till they decide I'll apply my own life philosophy:
It's ok, Until they f* with me.
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:wtf: :wtf: :wtf:
This...is insanity!
This is SPARTA!!!!!!!
But yeah, your right. Its nuts.
I love open source. Using it for charity work with computers in parts of Africa and Asia
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It's obviously a stupid point, corporations do not fail to sale a product because of Free software taking their share of market, they fail because their products are not worthy the price, they have two options: Adapt or declare bankruptcy.
Which is, ironically, what you're supposed to do if you really consider yourself a capitalism supporter.
Some businessmen and enterpreneurs need more courage.
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Off-topic, glad to see I'm not the only spanish speaking person around here.
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:wtf: :wtf: :wtf:
This...is insanity!
This is RIIA!!!!!!!
Fixed that for you.
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Ugggh. Lobbying.... you wanna know what's wrong with America? Looky there.
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You are free to do what we tell you.
I love that song. We want your soul remix in 'as heard on radio soulwax' too many DJ's.
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Off-topic, glad to see I'm not the only spanish speaking person around here.
:nod:
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Adapt or declare bankruptcy.
Better to do either of these instead of being a whiny *****.
Whiny *****es in this case be the RIAA and the MPAA which are totally useless today. They possibly can't just stick to movies and music?
Makes me wonder if in the future they'll use software patenting to help further their argument. Software, something that should never be able to be patented.
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imma palming ma FACE!
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Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.
intellectual creations > $
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Anyone want to check if the RIAA servers are running on linux or using apache? It would only make things funnier if they were.
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Yup, you guessed it. Linux and apache. Found here (http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/graph?site=www.riaa.com&range=86400&collector=all).
EDIT: Just think of the license management and the cost it would be to move over to windows server 2008 :ick:
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Still, in countries where the government has legislated the adoption of FOSS, the position makes some sense because it hurts businesses like Microsoft. But that's not the end of it.
:wtf:
And that's wrong? So, some fool somewhere over the mole-hill is whining about the fact that collaboratively written, free software, which is willingly released by its authors for the benefit of whomsoever finds it useful, might possibly harm massive developers that often don't live up to their expectations?
If that's not a massive pile of excrement, I don't know what is. The question/statement now should be, "Where the Hell did I put my meltagun? I need to vaporize some SOBs..."
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Well I can see the argument against legislating that FOSS must be used. If the alternative to FOSS is better for the job at hand it should be considered even though it costs money. But there is nothing wrong with the government suggesting that FOSS alternatives are looked at first.
For instance Open Office vs MS Office. If you are taking on staff (with a high turnover) who are all highly experienced with Word it might not be a great idea to force them all to learn Open Office as it will cut their efficiency while they learn and they aren't sticking around long enough to make it worth it. On the other hand if you're taking on staff who haven't used either it doesn't seem sensible at all to pay for licenses.
So forcing the situation in either direction is stupid. But managers should definitely be reminded to check if they can save the taxpayer money using FOSS.
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You know, DOS is a good OS. It just isn't user-friendly from the get-go.
Is this a joke?
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You know, DOS is a good OS. It just isn't user-friendly from the get-go.
Is this a joke?
Doesn't look like one to me. I have never had the experience of DOS crashing... ever. Now I have had applications running in DOS crash but never DOS itself. :lol:
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What about the 1MB memory limit?
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You know, DOS is a good OS. It just isn't user-friendly from the get-go.
Is this a joke?
Doesn't look like one to me. I have never had the experience of DOS crashing... ever. Now I have had applications running in DOS crash but never DOS itself. :lol:
too bad applications that crash running in dos, crash dos
What about the 1MB memory limit?
dos has a 1mb memory limit? news to me, I thought it was limited to 15MB.
how did they play descent?
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I remember when 16mb was an elite config.
You spoiled kids! Frontier only needed 512k of system memory. . . . . I miss you himem.sys.
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No such limit. Ran DOS on systems with 512 meg of ram (probably more as most were dual booted DOS/Win9x or XP and some were P4 systems). The only limit was the memory between 640k and 1meg was reserved for interrupts and system memory addresses. By the time P3's came around that limit was even smaller giving you 520k if you were lucky and had a good memory manager. 32bit extensions still let you use all the memory you had above 1meg. Same with Win 9x. It was just DOS 7.0 with the 32bit Windows layered on top.
Now you do have a 2gig file size limit and the FAT32 size limits to deal with.
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(pure) DOS's memory handling scheme really was kind of primitive, plus it was 16bit with no plug and play support at all, making adding new hardware annoying (on top of all the jumper and dip switch configurations you had to get right because ISA also didn't support plug and play).
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I would love to be able to still configure cards by jumpers instead of all this plug and play BS. Or at least configure what they use in the BIOS. Too many times do resources on motherboards step on each other with no good way to correct it. One of my servers I have to keep 2 extra cards in to keep SCSI cards from using the same INTs and running at crappy speeds when more then one drive is used on different controllers. Why? Plug and play assigns them that way and there is nothing you can do about it. Seen it too many times. More like plug and pray.
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Now you do have a 2gig file size limit and the FAT32 size limits to deal with.
4gb file size limitation with fat32, not 2. But, you can have a lot of fun with fat32. Try taking one of your dvd movies and ripping it to a fat32 partition (make sure it's a dvd9 movie), it sort of funny what happens and what doesn't happen with fat32 and an over 4gb iso.
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Believe me I do images using DOS all the time and the biggest it will let you do is 2gig. Do a dir on any drive over 2 gig and it will return 2 gig free so if you try to write more then 2 gig the size returned is negative and you get a disk full error. May not be a FAT32 limit but defiantly a DOS file size one.
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(pure) DOS's memory handling scheme really was kind of primitive, plus it was 16bit with no plug and play support at all
Memory handling was primarily done by drivers and 32bit extenders pretty much bypassed that problem completely.
16bit? Only if you coded your apps in 16bit. There are plenty of 32bit apps that run in DOS and I wouldn't be surprised if 64bit apps in DOS were possible.
Plug and Play? Again in DOS that's a job for the drivers not DOS itself. I haven't looked into this kind of thing much but I do know that there are a set of plug and play USB drivers for DOS.
Making adding new hardware annoying (on top of all the jumper and dip switch configurations you had to get right because ISA also didn't support plug and play).
My plug and play PCI based Soundblaster Live! laughs at this comment. :drevil:
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(pure) DOS's memory handling scheme really was kind of primitive, plus it was 16bit with no plug and play support at all
Memory handling was primarily done by drivers and 32bit extenders pretty much bypassed that problem completely.
16bit? Only if you coded your apps in 16bit. There are plenty of 32bit apps that run in DOS and I wouldn't be surprised if 64bit apps in DOS were possible.
Plug and Play? Again in DOS that's a job for the drivers not DOS itself. I haven't looked into this kind of thing much but I do know that there are a set of plug and play USB drivers for DOS.
Making adding new hardware annoying (on top of all the jumper and dip switch configurations you had to get right because ISA also didn't support plug and play).
My plug and play PCI based Soundblaster Live! laughs at this comment. :drevil:
ISA was facing extinction before we hit the mid 90s, I think by the time windows 9x took over I was mostly on PCI I think the exception was a 10mb BNC NIC, anyway the jumpers and dip switches mostly handled CPU and memory settings on the mobo,
hands up if you lost flesh and blood to an AT era case :D
/me puts his hand up
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I don't think there has ever been a computer I've worked on that doesn't have some of my blood on the inside of the case somewhere. The fun part of AT cases were the live power connections when you forgot to unplug them. Got a few good jolts out of that.
PCI was in way before the win 9x series. EISA and VESA where the in between steps that came into being around the 486DX2 era. Had a server board that supported PCI,VESA,EISA and ISA. 32 1 meg chips for memory. Ran 51 CD drives off that sucker for my BBS.
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My plug and play PCI based Soundblaster Live! laughs at this comment.
PCI was awesome and a huge improvement in everyway. What MCA tried and failed to be.
Memory handling was primarily done by drivers
Plug and Play? Again in DOS that's a job for the drivers not DOS itself.
Source?
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My plug and play PCI based Soundblaster Live! laughs at this comment.
PCI was awesome and a huge improvement in everyway. What MCA tried and failed to be.
I don't dispute that fact one iota, but it dosen't mean that ISA can't do plug and play either or my ISA SoundBlaster AWE64Gold and a large number of the later ISA NICs wouldn't exist.
Memory handling was primarily done by drivers
Plug and Play? Again in DOS that's a job for the drivers not DOS itself.
Source?
For the memory handling I quote a MS Knowledgebase article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/95555)
This article contains an overview of how expanded memory that conforms to the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS) and extended memory that conforms to the Extended Memory Specification (XMS) is created and managed in MS- DOS versions 5.0 and later by the device drivers HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE.
Before you say 'they are a part of DOS' then think again as there have been for a long time a number of third party DOS memory managers.
For the plug and play issue I quote a section of the USBINTRO.DOC found in the DOS USB driver package on Bret Johnson's Home Page (http://bretjohnson.us/).
These DOS USB Drivers are "Plug-and-Play". It doesn't matter if the software is installed before the hardware, or vice-versa. For instance, you can leave a USB joystick plugged in all the time, and just load the joystick driver immediately before you load the game that uses the joystick, and unload the drivers as soon as the game is done. Or, you can load the disk drive software through your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, leave it running all the time, and just plug and unplug your flash drives when you want to use them (just like you do with floppy drives). The program architecture allows the correct hardware and software to "find" each other, no matter which one gets installed first.
Ultimately a lot of people dismiss DOS because they expect DOS to do a lot of things 'out of the box' that a more featured OS is capable of doing. But step back for just a moment, what is DOS? It is a Disk Operating System. Not a memory operating system, not a peripheral operating system (to any meaningful extent) or suchlike. All DOS has to do is perform disk operations and load executables into memory and execute them. The app then does the rest with the help of drivers to access needed peripherals and calls DOS for any disk accesses, unless it does it itself by banging the metal.
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AWE64, Soundblaster... reminds me:
HMI MODULE ALPHA HUMANA ON APPROACH TO SPACE STATION MERCURY, anyone?
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Elite?
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back in the dos era pretty much every piece of hardware had its own standardized memory address. sound cards were rather shaky though, to use them in a game you usually had to run a setup program that would either try to find the address to your sound card's registers or youd have to enter it yourself (usually selecting it from a short list, there werent many places for them to go). dos had tsr (terminate-stay resident) programs which were usually utilities but were sometimes used as drivers for some hardware. but most of time you usually had to compile the drivers right into the application itself. good example of this is the many dos games designed to work with voodoo cards (though they may have had memory-resident drivers, im not sure). just back then if a dos game had voodoo support, generally you had to download an executable capable of running it.
dos is still evolving. freedos now supports 4gb of ram, you also have freedos 32, which is aimed at being an embedded plaform. 64 bit dos is just around the corner no doubt. dos is very useful for not-multitasking applications. car audio is a good example. mpxplay is a nice little mp3 jukebox that runs in native dos and can make use of many soundcards. get an old computer some flashcards and a small lcd with touchscreen, amp and some speakers and you got a nice car mp3 player system.
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isn't DOS owned by microsoft? how is it evolving?
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MSDos is. Lot's of other versions of DOS weren't. Windows originally could run on those as well.
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MS-DOS is owned by Mickysoft. There are several other versions most of which are free. Not sure how many are still around but there was APPLE-II DOS (1980ish) DR-DOS, PC-DOS, FREEDOS, IBM's version (can't remember the name), Novell had one but dropped it when bootable CD's came out for I think DR-DOS. Heck even Tandy, Commodore, and Atari had a version of DOS. Come to think of it the only machine that I can think of that didn't have a DOS was the old Texas Instruments thing and that was because it didn't have disk drives just cassette tape. Even most of the mainframes I worked on had a version of DOS although they don't call it DOS.
So yea there are a lot of DOS versions probably still out there. Boot a HD Diag disk and it will probably boot DOS then load some extensions or another OS.
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AWE64, Soundblaster... reminds me:
HMI MODULE ALPHA HUMANA ON APPROACH TO SPACE STATION MERCURY, anyone?
Ahh! I remember that one! Some soundcard setup progs used that soundbyte to test if you had selected the right options.
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MS-DOS is owned by Mickysoft. There are several other versions most of which are free. Not sure how many are still around but there was APPLE-II DOS (1980ish) DR-DOS, PC-DOS, FREEDOS, IBM's version (can't remember the name), Novell had one but dropped it when bootable CD's came out for I think DR-DOS. Heck even Tandy, Commodore, and Atari had a version of DOS. Come to think of it the only machine that I can think of that didn't have a DOS was the old Texas Instruments thing and that was because it didn't have disk drives just cassette tape. Even most of the mainframes I worked on had a version of DOS although they don't call it DOS.
So yea there are a lot of DOS versions probably still out there. Boot a HD Diag disk and it will probably boot DOS then load some extensions or another OS.
the ibm version of dos was just called PC-Dos. i used to own the manual for it a long time ago. its technically the only os ive ever had that came with a complete manual.