See also: last week's Letters page.

Letters to the editor

From:	 "Donald J. Barry" <don@isc.astro.cornell.edu>
To:	 rms@gnu.org
Subject: Sklyarov's character
Date:	 17 Dec 2001 15:05:37 -0500


Hi Richard,

You'll be pilloried for your principled criticism of Sklyarov -- but I
entirely agree with your assessment.

That said, I can't help but notice the parallels with Bertold Brecht,
who told HUAC "I am not a communist" in 1954 and then boarded the next
plane for East Germany, never to return.  In some ways, the act itself
rubbed the committee's nose in their mess.  We certainly can't count on
the media, however, to recognize irony as a rebuttal to the acts whose
interpretation they are fully adept at orchestrating.  And if Sklyarov
does indeed return like a puppydog at the call of his new masters, the
abasement will be entirely complete.

In Brecht's (and Sklyarov's) case, the tagline may be a phrase from the
former's _Life of Galileo_, "whatever you or I do, the world will keep
on turning."  It's an entirely defeatist point of view, but that seems
to be the favored response to the increasingly unprincipled and random
acts by our corporate-controlled leadership, who put the Bill of Rights
in the vault 50 years ago and now don't even remember its guarantees. 

Thanks again for your long-standing principled stand of conscience on
issues in which I find myself in almost total agreement with you. 
You're a rarity -- a man of integrity with the courage to act his
convictions through to the end.

Don Barry,
Cornell Astronomy

From:	 Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
To:	 dmitry-boston@lesser-magoo.lcs.mit.edu, free-sklyarov@zork.net,
	 dmitry-plan@eff.org, dmarti@zgp.org, gnu@toad.com, poole@allseer.com
Subject: An apology and an affirmation
Date:	 Tue, 18 Dec 2001 14:17:57 -0700 (MST)
Cc:	 letters@lwn.net

When I read Seth Finkelstein's message saying that Sklyarov had agreed
to "cooperate with the United States in its ongoing prosecution", and
showing damaging-looking statements he had agreed to make, it appeared
that he was giving the US government exactly what it wants in order to
nail ELCOM and put a nail in the coffin of our freedom.  I commented
based on that understanding of the nature of the deal.

Since then, people have told me that the situation is more
complicated; that his testimony won't necessarily help the prosecution
much, and that the deal will make it easier for ELCOM to argue its
case.  I'm glad to hear that things are not as bad as they looked.  So
I withdraw my criticism of Sklyarov for making the deal, and I
apologize if I misjudged its nature.

The truly important issue is not one programmer, one company, or one
case; it is the DMCA and our freedom.  On this issue, I stand by what
I have said.  We must put the strongest pressure on Adobe, on movie
companies that make encrypted DVDs, and on any other companies that
now or in the future use the DMCA weapon against our freedom.  We must
teach them to regret their arrogance.

From:	 Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Withdrawl previous letter please 'On RMS's comments regarding Dmitry'
Date:	 Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:47:22 -0800 (PST)

    Oh my god!  Stallman actually apologized for something!  Good for you!
    I'd like to withdrawl my previous nastygram please.  If you want to post
    this one instead that would be fine.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@backplane.com>

From:	 Nathan Myers <ncm-nospam@cantrip.org>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Microsoft Remedies
Date:	 Thu, 13 Dec 2001 08:07:45 +0000

To the editors, 

There's only one remedy for Microsoft's crimes that I'd enjoy seeing:
take them at their word, and keep the Feds out of their business.  

More precisely, keep the Feds out of copyright, trade secret, and
patent enforcement wherever MS properties are involved.  Let MS compete 
as well as they can manage in the truly free market for, oh, five years.  
Let them draw down their cash reserves, and try to retain what market 
presence they can for when their penalty expires.  After some time they 
might begin to recognize benefits of a government presence.

My question is, when do the perjury trials begin? 

Nathan Myers
ncm-nospam@cantrip.org

From:	 Myrddin Ambrosius <imipak@yahoo.com>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: WRT "LynxWorks responds to Microsoft attack"
Date:	 Tue, 18 Dec 2001 08:35:49 -0800 (PST)

Hi,

    I've just finished reading the article on
LynxWorks responding to Microsoft's attack on embedded
Linux. I also read Microsoft's original article. I was
horrified.
   Microsoft's comments are, for the most part,
totally inaccurate. Where there is some accuracy, it
is presented in a misleading way. This is FUD at it's
very, very worst.

   I strongly urge LWN readers to submit Microsoft's
claims, along with proof of inaccuracies, to the DOJ
and the trial judge in the Microsoft case. This is
some of the clearest evidence yet that Microsoft will
not tolerate ANY competition, no matter how marginal,
in ANY market, and that they WILL leverage their
monopoly on the desktop to destroy that competition,
using fear, uncertainty and doubt.

   If a criminal is caught on bail, commiting the SAME
offence, they are usually treated with considerably
less mercy. I believe Microsoft has done some good in
the world, but that makes this all the LESS tolerable,
in that we -and they- know that they CAN be both
tolerent and profitable. There is no excuse, and -we-
have no business letting this go.

Jonathan Day

From:	 "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Galeon release announcement
Date:	 Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:54:39 -0500

Ok, maybe I'm just in a grumpy mood today (I am).  And maybe I've
turned into an appliance operator over the years (not really).

But the announcement in last week's LWN that Galeon 1.01 is out really
doesn't do me much good.  Because, you see, when I download the RH6 RPM
to my 6.2/KDE 1.2 machine, and try to install it, what do I find?

I find that it depends on about a dozen other things I don't have
installed.  And no one bothered to mention this.  Luckily, that 2MB
download only took a minute; broadband is great.

But, still; c'mon, guys: if it's a research item rather than a software
product, just let us know that, ok?  It's not an unreasonable
expectation: Mandrake is derivative of RH, but it's complete.  NS6 is a
derivative of Moz, but *it's* complete, too.

It's fine that Galeon is an erector set to *build* a browser out of
other parts... but just *tell* me that.  'k?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
     -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")

From:	 Peter Corlett <abuse@cabal.org.uk>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: Aargh, the tentacles
Date:	 Wed, 19 Dec 2001 18:59:48 +0000

In LWN of October 25, 2001 you reported on the release of Emacs 21 and said,
apparently in jest that

  "On the other hand, the rumor that one can now boot directly into emacs
   from LILO or GRUB, and thus avoid the need for an operating system
   entirely, proves to be unfounded."

because it would be absolutely inconceivable that Emacs could ever get that
bloated, could it?

Well, roll on QNX. QNX apparently has a rather neat feature where one can
statically link an application with the kernel, giving you a kernel image
with said application embedded in it but without kernel features that are
not required. This means you have a lean and fast kernel that is perfect for
an embedded system.

I was recently informed that Emacs will quite happily combine with the QNX
kernel in this fashion. The result is that not only can Emacs be bootable
from LILO or GRUB, but Emacs' aim of using all the CPU and memory in the
system would finally be achieved.

From:	 "J. Lasser" <jon@lasser.org>
To:	 Eric Kidd <eric.kidd@pobox.com>
Subject: More on mutt and ~b
Date:	 Thu, 13 Dec 2001 14:32:23 -0500
Cc:	 letters@lwn.net

Eric,

You can do some (more) of what you complain about in Mutt: Rather than
/~b use the (L)imit command to limit to messages containing that
pattern. Of course, you can combine more of Mutt's search features to do
more complex searches of folders.

One Mutt-compatible solution, one which will help performance, is to
switch away from mbox-format mail to any of the one-file-per-message
systems. This will improve the performance on that front.

As far as searching 100,000+ message archives, using maildir or a
similar format in combination with Glimpse (or any other full-text
search solution that indexes in advance) will provide search speed far
in excess of what even Evolution can do. :-)

The virtual-folder piece can almost be done in Mutt: what I would do is
to write these searches as standard Mutt searches (for example, all
messages from 1998 with the word 'linker' in the body would be '~d
1/1/1998+1y && ~b linker' and to associate this as a macro (ie the F4
key). Then you can simply L<F4> to achieve the effect of virtual
folders.

Of course, if Evolution meets all of your needs, use it. The right tool
for the job is always the right solution. :-)

-- 
Jon Lasser	
Home: jon@lasser.org		|    Work:jon@cluestickconsulting.com
http://www.tux.org/~lasser/     |    http://www.cluestickconsulting.com
   Buy my book, _Think_Unix_! http://www.tux.org/~lasser/think-unix/

From:	 Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.ne.mediaone.net>
To:	 Eric Kidd <eric.kidd@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Searching big gobs of e-mail
Date:	 Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:52:21 -0500
Cc:	 letters@lwn.net

I'm sure you're getting lots of advice on mutt, but let me try to
add to it:

> * The aforementioned /~b feature walks me through search results
> one message at a time.  But some of the queries I need to perform
> return hundreds of hits (say, digging through
> automatically-generated CVS e-mails from years ago).  So when I
> most need /~b, it turns out to be nearly useless.

The "limit" feature does exactly what you want.

> * Mutt has no ability to save search results in a virtual folder 

"limit" seems to be the same feature as "virtual folder" (unless I
misunderstand).  The only lack in mutt is that you can't name and
save your limit patterns (although you could simply define a macro
for each limit pattern).  This would seem to be an easy feature to
add.  You could put in your configuration

    pattern "conversation with Bob" ~f bob | ~C bob

Then when you use limit or any other command taking patterns, you
could press tab to see a menu of predefined patterns.  Maybe someone
will do this. :-)

Andrew

From:	 Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
To:	 Eric Kidd <eric.kidd@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Searching big gobs of e-mail
Date:	 Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:17:37 -0500
Cc:	 letters@lwn.net

> Don't get me wrong; I love mutt.  It's just breaking under the strain.

When I find myself in this situation, I reach for grepmail
(http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/). It is an elegant little program that
can do quite powerful searches of mail, and it spits out a valid mbox to
stdout. You can even chain grepmail calls to do more complicated
queries. There's a wrapper that can feed the result into mutt. It's a
good example of the unix tools philosophy, as opposed to the monilithic
program philosophy.

-- 
see shy jo

From:	 Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>
To:	 <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: The MS DRM Patent and Freedom to Speak and Think
Date:	 Fri, 14 Dec 2001 23:08:13 -0500


In his November 6 essay "You're Free to Think,"
(http://davenet.userland.com/2001/11/06/youreFreeToThink),
Dave Winer comments that whatever else happens in the
ongoing, increasing trend towards policing of the public's
right to use information and information technology, we are
still left with the freedom to *think* for ourselves.  He
seemed to me to be offering this comment as a bare source of
solace against the government's increasing intent to control
the prospects of communications technology.

Microsoft's favorable treatment of late caused him to wonder
what kind of deal Bill Gates must have worked out with the
Bush Administration.  He wondered what Microsoft might have
given the government in return for the highly favorable
terms of the settlement that's currently on the table in the
court proceedings against the company, for monopoly
practices in the operating systems arena.

He commented specifically on the current ramifications of
Microsoft's increasing position of power in the operating
systems market:

> Now, they have to get people to upgrade to
> Windows XP -- that's the final step, the one that
> fully turns over the keys to the Internet to them,
> because after XP they can upgrade at will, routing
> through Microsoft-owned servers, altering content,
> and channeling communication through government
> servers. After XP they fully own electronic
> communication media, given the consent decree,
> assuming it's approved by the court.

Now, it has just come to light that Microsoft has been
awarded a software "patent" for a "Digital Rights
Management" operating system.

This development shows us exactly where we stand now. 
Microsoft doesn't have to offer anything to the government;
it has only to hold possession of a patent covering the
"DRM" elements of its latest OS, thereby providing an almost
absolutely assured trajectory toward establishing the terms
by which the public's ability to communicate digital
information will be controlled.

Please see the message I am posting below, from the CYBERIA
email list, which quotes from the patent.

The real kicker is right here:

> The digital rights management operating system
> also limits the functions the user can perform on the
> rights-managed data and the trusted application, and
> can provide a trusted clock used in place of the
> standard computer clock.

The ability to use information freely is now going to be
policed at the most intricate level, in the name of
exclusive rights and to the detriment of the most
fundamental Constitutional principles of our society.

Whereas the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution assures
that every American citizen has the full right to freedom of
speech, we see here the ultimate legislative and technical
trappings by which the public will be demarcated as mere
information consumers.

Facts and ideas are not contraband and may never be
copyrighted or otherwise constrained under the terms of
intellectual "property," whether they are bound up in an
expressive work or not; and the computer is a *logic* device
that now sits on nearly every citizen's desktop -- it is
*not* a consumer appliance.  From both the standpoints of
speech and thought, so-called digital "rights management" is
a utterly desolate *dead end.*

Whether we speak of the constituent pieces of expressive
works, or the nature of the computer itself, so-called
digital "rights management" marks the beginning of a grand
rollback of the means by which the promise of our
participation in and advancement of civil society have
lately been greatly augmented.

Rather than facing the simple, plain truth that the power
given in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to grant (or
deny) to authors and inventors "exclusive right" to their
works, was intended to cover products that do not
intrinsically bind up the very means of communication and of
our participation in civil society, we instead are
experiencing a social condition wherein monopoly interests
exploit the fluidity of logical products to evade the very
terms of antitrust law and to assure that the public's
ordinary rights do not gain purchase against their
interests.  Antitrust law is all about competition in a
particular product, but software is as amorphous in its
possibilities as our own vaunted power to think.  Thus
Microsoft easily maintains it is not in the browser market,
competing with Netscape; it is, rather, in the market for
"innovative operating systems."

We are now seeing just how "innovative" that operating
system can really be.

If we do not confront the ludicrousness of the idea of
holding a patent of this nature, and the outrageousness of
our courts' failure to confront the truth about what holding
market power in the field of informatin products really
means, we will soon be free to speak and think -- only so
long as we don't use our computers to do it.

Thus, in the name of exclusive rights, Microsoft is serving
old world publishing interests, acting by means of legal
fictions to assure that citizens who seek to further the
prospects of information technology, will be inexorably
locked into the role of information consumers, blocked from
exercising their own tools in full accordance with the
rights that our Constitution supposedly guards.

We are *all* information producers, whether we manifest this
as a routine, inalienable part of the ordinary rights we
exercise in our everyday lives, or whether we engage
ourselves in the present, increasingly desperate and furtive
struggle to guard commercial interests by restricting the
use of information delivered in digital form.

We have always been information producers, and we must not
accede to the interests of those who do not regard the
public at large as full and equal citizens, but rather as
mere consumers.


Seth Johnson
Committee for Independent Technology
December 14, 2001

Information Producers Initiative:
http://RealMeasures.dyndns.org/C-FIT