Leading items and editorials

From:	 "Robert A. Knop Jr." <rknop@pobox.com>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: The Boston CD Party
Date:	 Thu, 13 Sep 2001 07:18:48 -0500

If the SSSCA, the law mentioned in the September 13 issue of Linux
Weekly News which would require all computer hardware and software to
have federally regulated copyright-protection measures, does get
introduced in any form to the House or the Senate, free software
advocates across the USA should gather in Boston to throw CDs, DVDs,
eBook readers, and other products of the "digital copyright industry"
into Boston harbor.

Given the environmental and waste management problems that this would
cause, I am not seriously advocating this.  But we need to do
*something* to raise public awareness of what is going on.  Most people
in this country don't use free software, and won't think a law like this
(which would effectively outlaw Free Software) is such a big deal.  They
read in the newspapers the copyright industry's outlandishly inflated
estimates about the losses which "piracy" is causing them, and
misguidedly think that anybody who would object to this law is probably
just a thief anyway.  The digital copyright industry has many,
well-funded lobbyists in Washington, D.C. pushing their dangerous point
of view, while the best most of the rest of us can do is write letters
to Congressmen which will be filed and ignored by staffers.  Only one of
our legislators (Rick Boucher) seems to have a clue.  It really sounds
like there is no hope, and that soon the only real option that people
such as myself will have will be to flee this country.

How ironic and sad would it be if, after the terrible events on
September 11 we refuse to let the fear of terrorism weaken our resolve
for freedom, yes we let one industry's fear of *possible* copyright
violation sell out our freedom?  It would be a direct insult to the
memory of the people who gave their lives on September 11.

Anybody who cares about these issues and understands them needs to write
letters to Congressmen and Senators now.  A few will make no difference,
but if they get enough letters, especially from constituents, it will
start to matter.  We all have to do our part by writing our one small
letter, knowing that even if one won't matter, we have to write it for
there to be any hope of there being enough letters.  We also need to
write letters to the editors of newspapers.  Heaven knows that most
people don't read such letters printed in newspapers, but perhaps the
editorial staff of local newspapers will begin to see how significant
this issue is if they receive a large number of letters on the issue,
and will begin to run articles accordingly.

The time for action is now.  We have to make ourselves heard.  The DMCA
is already a terrible law, a law which may have future historians
looking back on 1998 as the year in which the USA finally started
dismantling its experiment with freedom.  That real Senators are
planning to propose a law which is many, many times worse should chill
us all to the bone.  If we do not want to lose the computational
freedoms we take for granted now, we all have to start doing something.

For those of us out there who may not be experienced programmers, or
don't know how to break into the large Free Software projects, this is
our opportunity to make a real contribution to Free Software.  Any
efforts made in convincing our lawmakers not to pass laws such as the
SSSCA will be just as an important and valuable contribution to free
software as the programming performed by the core developers of projects
such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and countless others.  This cannot be
overemphasized.  Indeed, I would like to see publications such as
LWN.net and Linux Journal begin to recognize the efforts of people who
perform such political activism right alongside the recognition of the
efforts of Free Software's programmers.

-Rob Knop

-- 
-=-=-= Rob Knop =-= rknop@pobox.com =-= http://www.pobox.com/~rknop =-=-=-

   Free Skylarov!  Repeal the DMCA; preserve free speech in the USA
              http://www.freesklyarov.org

Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters See also: last week's Development page.	Development projects News and Editorials GPL Licensing Turmoil Last Friday, the Free Software Foundation issued a press release, claiming that Victor Yodaiken, CEO of FSMLabs was violating the GPL by imposing restricted distribution on the Linux component of RTLinux, a real-time Linux implementation. Fortunately, as of this Tuesday, the FSF and FSMLabs managed to resolve the issue quickly with the FSMLabs RTLinux Open Patent License being modified to be fully GPL compliant as a result. In the Linux Devices coverage of the issue, Victor Yodaiken said that they: "were happy to have this settled and go back to our business. There seems to have been some miscommunication, and it's good to see that we can get past it." The quick resolution was very fortunate, the GPL software world can do without a nasty court battle right now. For a good view of the Free Software Foundation's stance on GPL, see GPL counsel Eben Moglen's paper on Enforcing the GPL, Part One and Part Two. Software developers who are mixing proprietary and GPL software should make it their business to be informed on the issues here. Audio New RPMs available for Ogg Vorbis. The Ogg Vorbis site lists some updated RC2 RPMs that replace broken RPMs which were built with a funky version of GCC. Databases New SapDB available. A new release of SapDB is available. From the release notes, this appears to be version 7.3.00.15, which includes numerous bug fixes. Education SEUL/edu report for September 17, 2001. The September 17, 2001 edition of the SEUL/edu Linux in education report is out, with stories about Linux in Greek and Australian schools, Guatemalan and Belize school systems who are looking at Linux. The long list of software projects listed this week include some utilities for tracking student enrollment and accounting information, schedule planning, and much more. Embedded Systems Embedded Linux Newsletter. A new issue of the Embedded Linux Newsletter is out, this edition includes a review of leading Embedded Linux toolkits, news of Lineo's downsizing, and Red Hat's choice of RTLinux. Robots marching into open source (IBM developerWorks). Darrick Addison gives an overview of robot technology in an IBM developerWorks article. "The word "robot" originates from the Czech word for forced labor, or serf. It was introduced by playwright Karel Capek, whose fictional robotic inventions were much like Dr. Frankenstein's monster -- creatures created by chemical and biological, rather than mechanical, methods. But the current mechanical robots of popular culture are not much different from these fictional biological creations." Filesystems Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Part 3 (developerWorks). In part 3 of this series from developerWorks, titled " Using the virtual memory (VM) filesystem and bind mounts", the author looks at the advantages of tmpfs and bind mounts now available with kernel 2.4. Part 4 of the series is also available and covers devfs, the Device Filesystem. "These days, Linux supports a lot of different kinds of hardware. This means that most of us have literally hundreds of special files in /dev to represent all of these devices. Not only that, but most of these special files don't even map to an existing device on our system (but they need to be there just in case we eventually add new hardware/drivers to our system), making things even more confusing. From just this one aspect, we can see that /dev is in need of an overhaul, and devfs was created with the express purpose of whipping /dev back into shape." Games SDL Game Contest. No Starch Press is running another Linux game developer's contest. Entries should be submitted by December 1, 2001. Interoperability Wine Weekly News for September 12, 2001. The September 12, 2001 edition of the Wine Weekly News is out. Topics include a discussion on implementing the advapi32.dll crypto api, dealing with bugs in Specmaker and with keyboards, and more. Printing Systems Omni version 0.4.3 released. A new version of the Omni printer driver was recently released. Version 0.4.3 adds patches for ghostscript 6.51 and 5.50, and brings with it the latest Foomatic enablement code. Science Introduction to Quantum Computing (IBM developerWorks). Brad Huntting and David Mertz discuss quantum computing as a way to solve a certain class of difficult computational problems. "In the next few decades, quantum computers are likely to move out of science fiction and research labs (largely at IBM) and into practical applications. A class of problems surrounding complex combinatorics that plague deterministic computers can be solved efficiently on Quantum Computers (QCs). This article, which builds on a basic knowledge of the mathematics of vectors, gives an introduction to quantum computing." Web-site Development The MEMS Exchange Architecture. Andrew Kuchling has written a paper describing the web architecture used in the design of the MEMS Exchange, a project in distributed microfabrication. The latest Zope News. The latest news from the Zope project includes news of release 0.9.2. of My Media Manager, release 4.2.0 of ZStyleSheet, with support for Konqueror and MS IE6, and more. Convergence of Peer and Web Services (O'Reilly). Jeff Schneider looks at similarities between Peer and Web Services in an O'Reilly article. "Two of the hottest topics in computing in the new millennium have been peer services and Web services. Although these concepts have a significant amount of overlap, their current manifestations remain very different. In reviewing the types of problems that these systems solve and their method for solving them, it is very possible that the two will converge, producing a single hybrid solution." Window Systems XFree86 DRI team released by VA Linux. The members of the DRI team, including Brian Paul who authored the Mesa OpenGL-clone library, have been laid off from VA Linux. While this won't stop development, it may slow it for a time while developers find their way into new employment. (Thanks to Guido Guenther.) Miscellaneous Software Carpentry Spin Offs (O'Reilly). Even though The Software Carpentry project seems to have fallen by the wayside, some of the projects that were inspired by it live on. Stephen Figgins examines several of the successful software engineering tools that resulted from the project. Section Editor: Forrest Cook	September 20, 2001 Application Links GIMP Mozilla Galeon High Availability ht://Dig mnoGoSearch MagicPoint Wine Worldforge Zope Open Source Code Collections Berlios Freshmeat OpenSourceDirectory Savannah Le Serveur Libre SourceForge Sweetcode

	Programming Languages Caml Caml Weekly News. The September 12 through 19 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include the Ensemble distributed communication system, a tutorial on phantom types, and a new FORT mailing list. FORTRAN Progress continues on G95. The G95 FORTRAN compiler project continues to make progress towards a working compiler. A binary parser for Linux X86 is currently available for download. Java Java-GNOME 0.7.0 Released. Java-GNOME 0.7.0 has been released. "The Java-GNOME team is pleased to announce the next release of the bindings. This release delivers native compilation using gcj 3.0 or higher." Clustering with JBoss/Jetty (O'Reilly). Bill Burke looks at JBoss/Jetty for the development of a scalable e-commerce site and discusses workarounds for some missing features. Lisp OpenMCL 0.7 has been released. Version 0.7 of OpenMCL has been released. This release features a BSD sockets interface, primitives for manipulating shared libraries and doing multiple i/o, and bug fixes. OpenMCL runs under LinuxPPC. Perl Perl 6 Porters for September 8, 2001. The September 8, 2001 edition of Perl 6 Porters is out. This issue covers the new %MY:: interface, runtime prototype checking, new documentation, and progress on the Parrot interpreter. Python Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. This week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! includes the first discussion on the Python language newsgroup on what .Net means to Python. The Architecture of Python. Jim Jackson and Kar-Han Tan have written The Architecture of Python, an online overview of the Python language. Python 101 (part 8): An Exceptionally Clever Snake (Developer Shed). Vikram Vaswani Melonfire examines Python exceptions in part 8 of his series on Python. "Normally, when a Python program encounters an error, be it syntactical or logical, it exits the program at that stage itself with a message indicating the cause of the error. Now, while this behaviour is acceptable during the development phase, it cannot continue once a Python program has been released to actual users. In these "live" situations, it is unprofessional to display cryptic error messages (which are usually incomprehensible to non-technical users); rather, it is more professional to intercept these errors and either resolve them (if resolution is possible), or notify the user with a clear error message (if not)." Ruby Ruby Garden News. The latest news from the Ruby Garden includes an announcement for Ruby 1.6.5, Jruby, a pure Java implementation of Ruby, discussions of various Ruby language features, and a new Visual Tk interface for Ruby. Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!. Tcl-URL! this week covers topics such as the use of canvases and scaling, Tk fonts under Windows, and more license questions. Section Editor: Forrest Cook	Language Links Caml Caml Hump Tiny COBOL Erlang g95 Fortran Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) Gnu Compiler for the Java Language (GCJ) Guile Haskell IBM Java Zone Jython Free the X3J Thirteen (Lisp) Use Perl O'Reilly's perl.com Dr. Dobbs' Perl PHP PHP Weekly Summary Daily Python-URL Python.org Python.faqts Python Eggs Ruby Ruby Garden MIT Scheme Schemers Squeak Smalltalk Why Smalltalk Tcl Developer Xchange Tcl-tk.net O'Reilly's XML.com Regular Expressions

Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions On the Desktop Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Linux History Letters See also: last week's Letters page.	Letters to the editor Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them.	September 20, 2001

From: "Robert A. Knop Jr." <rknop@pobox.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: The Boston CD Party Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 07:18:48 -0500 If the SSSCA, the law mentioned in the September 13 issue of Linux Weekly News which would require all computer hardware and software to have federally regulated copyright-protection measures, does get introduced in any form to the House or the Senate, free software advocates across the USA should gather in Boston to throw CDs, DVDs, eBook readers, and other products of the "digital copyright industry" into Boston harbor. Given the environmental and waste management problems that this would cause, I am not seriously advocating this. But we need to do something to raise public awareness of what is going on. Most people in this country don't use free software, and won't think a law like this (which would effectively outlaw Free Software) is such a big deal. They read in the newspapers the copyright industry's outlandishly inflated estimates about the losses which "piracy" is causing them, and misguidedly think that anybody who would object to this law is probably just a thief anyway. The digital copyright industry has many, well-funded lobbyists in Washington, D.C. pushing their dangerous point of view, while the best most of the rest of us can do is write letters to Congressmen which will be filed and ignored by staffers. Only one of our legislators (Rick Boucher) seems to have a clue. It really sounds like there is no hope, and that soon the only real option that people such as myself will have will be to flee this country. How ironic and sad would it be if, after the terrible events on September 11 we refuse to let the fear of terrorism weaken our resolve for freedom, yes we let one industry's fear of possible copyright violation sell out our freedom? It would be a direct insult to the memory of the people who gave their lives on September 11. Anybody who cares about these issues and understands them needs to write letters to Congressmen and Senators now. A few will make no difference, but if they get enough letters, especially from constituents, it will start to matter. We all have to do our part by writing our one small letter, knowing that even if one won't matter, we have to write it for there to be any hope of there being enough letters. We also need to write letters to the editors of newspapers. Heaven knows that most people don't read such letters printed in newspapers, but perhaps the editorial staff of local newspapers will begin to see how significant this issue is if they receive a large number of letters on the issue, and will begin to run articles accordingly. The time for action is now. We have to make ourselves heard. The DMCA is already a terrible law, a law which may have future historians looking back on 1998 as the year in which the USA finally started dismantling its experiment with freedom. That real Senators are planning to propose a law which is many, many times worse should chill us all to the bone. If we do not want to lose the computational freedoms we take for granted now, we all have to start doing something. For those of us out there who may not be experienced programmers, or don't know how to break into the large Free Software projects, this is our opportunity to make a real contribution to Free Software. Any efforts made in convincing our lawmakers not to pass laws such as the SSSCA will be just as an important and valuable contribution to free software as the programming performed by the core developers of projects such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and countless others. This cannot be overemphasized. Indeed, I would like to see publications such as LWN.net and Linux Journal begin to recognize the efforts of people who perform such political activism right alongside the recognition of the efforts of Free Software's programmers. -Rob Knop -- -=-=-= Rob Knop =-= rknop@pobox.com =-= http://www.pobox.com/~rknop =-=-=- Free Skylarov! Repeal the DMCA; preserve free speech in the USA http://www.freesklyarov.org

From: Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Re: Would LiVid be safe from the DMCA Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 13:16:58 -0700 Richard Corfield asks whether projects like LiVid are safe from the DMCA because they are non-commercial. I think he's misunderstood what others were saying. The DMCA provides for both criminal and civil penalties. In a criminal case, the government is the plaintiff, and the penalties can include jail; in a civil case, a private party can be a plaintiff, and the penalties are normally money damages or injunctions. The DMCA's criminal penalties apply only to commercial infringement (although the definitions of "commercial" may be quite broad); the civil penalties apply to any infringement. That's why previous DMCA cases and threats, before Dmitry Sklyarov's case, have been civil matters. A civil lawsuit is still extremely serious; it's easy for defendants to lose everything they own. Until recently, no part of U.S. copyright law provided criminal penalties for any non-commercial infringement. In 1997, after the acquittal in criminal court of David LaMacchia, who was alleged to have infringed copyrights from non-commercial motives, Congress passed the "No Electronic Theft Act", which provides criminal penalties for both commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. Its name also misleadingly suggests that copyright infringement is like theft, a view which has been seeping into popular culture, possibly doing much more damage than NETA itself. The court in LaMacchia's case suggested that Criminal as well as civil penalties should probably attach to willful, multiple infringements of copyrighted software, even absent a commercial motive on the part of the infringer. [...] But, it is the legislature, not the court, which is to define a crime and/or ordain a punishment. Many people felt that LaMacchia had escaped punishment because of a loophole, which NETA was supposed to close. However, the DMCA still draws a distinction in this area. See http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1203.html http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1204.html -- Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> \| Its really terrible when FBI arrested Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ \| hacker, who visited USA with peacefull down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) \| mission -- to share his knowledge with http://www.freesklyarov.org/ \| american nation. (Ilya V. Vasilyev)

From: "Zenaan Harkness" <zen@getsystems.com> To: <letters@lwn.net> Subject: licenses Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 16:41:43 +1000 Hello, I would like to request that you make a greater effort to distinguish between Open Source and Free Software. When you use the phrase "open source" (no capitals), eg in todays LWN: "On2 Technologies open sources VP3 codec. On2 Technologies announced that the source code and open source license for their VP3.2 video compression algorithm can now be accessed at www.vp3.com. According to the press release, both RealNetworks and Apple have added support for VP3.2 in their video players." it is not possible to know whether you mean proprietary or Free, as both can be open source. Open Source with capitals should imply a license compatible with the Open Source Definition (also DFSG) as defined by the Open Source Foundation (and Debian, for DFSG). But even this may confuse some people. This would be appreciated and would certainly add to your excellent publication. Regards Z

From: Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Bleak? Blerk. What you lose on the swings you get back on the roundabout. Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 21:44:11 +0800 DOOM AND GLOOM >From various part of the 13 Sep 2001 LWN - front page: > With the Linux world crumbling around us, due mostly to a > difficult economic condition and companies finding it difficult > to make business plans function, we began to wonder just what > could make it worse. Front page again: > In other words, this is a law that would ban free software. Front page again: > The real fear is that the next layer of struggle, at the > network layer, will have a profound tilting effect away from > open source projects. If that is true then open source won't > continue to provide an opportunity to check improper power. Security: > security advisors are recommending that now is a good time to > be on the lookout for cyber attacks, which have reportedly > increased by an order of magnitude. This all looks doom and gloom, but conside this: * Linux does not exist to make money. Linux exists as the result of scratching an itch. Linux will not go away even if all of the money goes away, if RedHat and Mandrake and SourceForge and so on all die, Linux will continue. There is Debian, and most distributions are entirely open source, so it's not difficult for Joe Random SysAdmin to pick one up from a mirror, enlist a few dozen good (wo)men and keep it current. * Business tried to adopt the GPL as if it were just another business method. Oops. Businesses failed, but neither Linux nor the GPL have done any less than they expected to. * The bottom is falling out of the entire IT market. In the light of that, Linux's doom and gloom can be seen to be relative. * So cyber-attacks are on the rise. Who has the best track-record of surviving this, among the ``world domination'' candidates? * If the US government is sufficiently hell-bent that it outlaws Open Source, more fool them. The rest of the world is out there and will continue to spin without the US until after the economic collapse resulting from an inability to compete in any IT market. I think the French would be delighted to firewall off the entire US to block the storm of outbound probes and trojans when CodeRed-n hits within a 100%-Microsoft network monoculture. BTW, This is an argument Microsoft use: that the world would practically stop spinning if we were inhibited from cheating. How does it look when it's turned around like this? Also, in amongst the sadness there were a few gleams of promise as well. Even in the business world. Kernel: > Linus has suggested [...] that, once the merge with Alan > is complete, the 2.5 series will begin Commerce: > IBM says Linux is "Ready for Business". ..and other reports in today, including HP shipping Mandrake-Linux preinstalled on workstations and some maniac mathematician fitting a live ELF32 executable version of the DeCSS broken-encryption-decoder software into a prime number. LUNATICS WITH KNIVES, GLOBAL COMMUNITY I think that for many US citizens, the NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard] bubble has been devastatingly burst. Some are learning, at an enormous cost, that all is not smiles and open arms outside their view of the universe. That there is much more to the story than they have ever been told, and some of it is very unpleasant. However, they also see that in their first time of great need in a long while, there are also many in the world who will rush to help them, history be damned. The few who get to read Uwe Thiem's message of support might think a bit better of us than the ``computer vandals'' association which the name ``hackers'' normally provokes. Print it out, post it on noticeboards, get it read. The readers might think even more about how well this brotherhood based on a common purpose rather than manipulation works. Yes, we do bicker. Yes we do have hard-heads in our midst. Yes, it all works in ways that the commercial world can't imagine, that politicians can't imagine, primarily because it's not all caged in and forced along and regulated into the ground. Yes, we have Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Atheists, all manner of faiths; we have a rainbow of skin colours; we have a Babel of languages; we have girl geniuses and great-grandfathers on our programming teams - and generally we don't care. It doesn't matter. Hackers are doing what the UN cannot. There's a message in that. (See http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-09-11-014-20-NW-CY-KE for a copy of Uwe's post) BROADCAST 2000 > Unfortunately, due to DMCA lawsuit issues, Broadcast 2000 > is no longer available for download I have a copy of Broadcast 2000c from a recent Mandrake SRPM and will upload it to a project named hev-E (High End Video Editor) on SourceForge, if they approve my application, with an eye toward picking up development of it (it's GPL). Given the way things are going, at least one mirror would be good. Volunteers...?

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