Re: GPL and Court Procedure (was Re: Adobe open source ...)
Raul Miller wrote: On 1/27/06, Alexander Terekhov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... A question of law is addressed by likelihood of success on that portion breach of contract claim that concerns its trademark Which question of law is are you talking about here? What do you mean by portion breach? And why are you talking about trademarks? Do you really enjoy stringing words together without concern for their meaning? Like, say, ordered set of instructions to mean computer program If you won't write something that means anything, is there some reason I should continue replying? Feed the troll? -- Raul -- prof. Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende /\ Computacao - Universidade de Brasilia / \ - Libertas quae digitos desiderat - /\ |http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/sd.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: object code in the GPL and printed copies
Alexander Terekhov wrote: On 1/18/06, Pedro A.D.Rezende [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alexander Terekhov wrote: Object code is a well established term. GNUspeak is irrelevant. The Copyright Act defines a computer program asa set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result. 17 U.S.C. § 101. The copyright act is WRONG. A computer program can NEVER be a SET of statements or instructions..., a computer program has to understood as a SEQUENCE of statements or instructions Feel free to submit a patch inserting the word ordered. Is this the only grief GNUspeakers have with copyright on computer programs? No. But this one is enough to expose the incompetence of self-aggrandizing, sophist, self-serving lawyers and lawmakers. Not required to accept the license in order to receive a copy of the program (no contract is created, still) 183 contract law schemes in the world...can't standardize globally...RMS statement against global copyright system. We use it because its there. BERN + WTO not a good thing. The fellow really needs to go to clinic. regards, alexander. In the world GNUspeakers are set to build, you are the one who needs to go. If you want nothing to do with such endeveour, go troll somewhere elese. -- Prof. Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende /\ Ciencia da Computacao (61)3072702-212 / \ Universidade de Brasilia, DF, Brasil /\ ?http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/sd.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: object code in the GPL and printed copies
Frank Küster wrote: Pedro A.D.Rezende [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alexander Terekhov wrote: Object code is a well established term. GNUspeak is irrelevant. The Copyright Act defines a computer program asa set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result. 17 U.S.C. § 101. The copyright act is WRONG. A computer program can NEVER be a SET of statements or instructions..., a computer program has to understood as a SEQUENCE of statements or instructions I wouldn't be too sure that set doesn't have a different meaning to lawyers than it has to mathematicians or computer scientists. Anyway, I doubt whether sequence is correct, too - unless you redefine sequence to include conditional execution and loops. Apologizing in advance for the length of this reply, I may say I'm afraid this thread is only getting noisier. Lawyers and lawmakers ought not pretend to be writing words for which meanings have been settled for millenia ( SET, SEQUENCE), to mean differently in their writings just when their incompentence to use them gets exposure. About the above doubt, please consider: An instruction, whether jumpable (such as 'goto', 'if', 'loop') or non-jumpable (such as 'move_data', 'add_integers'), is an element from a finite set of instructions defined by a model of hardware or by a lower level language. That is, defined by objects that give expression to a computer program in their corresponding object code. Such a set of instructions is defined by rules on how instructions can be coded by bits (syntactic rules), and rules on how instructions cause the object (in case of low level language, an interpreter program) to behave while interpreting instances of these instructions (semantic rules). The syntax for a jumpable instruction is just like the syntax for any other instruction: it says that an instance of the instruction is to be formed by a certain sequence of bits, the identity and lengtht of which can be determined from inspection. An object code is formed by the finite set of instructions (sequence of bits) obeying the object's syntactic rules, plus the semantic rules. The semantic rules are those rules which tell how instances of such instructions shall be interpreted by one such object. An instruction is determined to jump, or not to jump, only at the semantic level, by semantic rules. If a semantic rule dermines that some instance of a jumpable instruction, while being interpreted, is not to jump, the next instructon to be interpreted shall be, like with non-jumpable instructions, the following instruction. The concept of 'following instruction' comes as a feature of the von-Neumann architecture, used to build the commodity hardware in use since the begining of digital programmable computers. Thus, for the purpose of this discussion (author's right to distributable software), the rules of an object code assume that a program is formed by a SEQUENCE of instructions. Since the semantic rules for jumpable instructions have to refer to positions where they are to jump if the instance's context so determines, this can only be achieved by references to marks or distances (in bytes) over the sequence of instructions. Therefore, in the formation of an object code, adherence to syntactic rules, which determine those marks and distances through the sequence, have to precede the interpretation of semantic rules, which refer to them. Therefore, in the von-Neumann architecture (today's commodity computers) the sequencing of instructions can not be extricated from the concept of 'computer program', a fact that can be tested as follows: what happens if I show you a bag filled with bits (a lawyer's definition of 'SET of instructions'?), and tell you this is a program in object code, and ask you show me the jumps!. What can you do? Without knowing what object that code is for, you (or anyone else, for that matter), nothing. You can not tell which instances of instructions in that bag may cause, or not cause, the execution of the program to jump when intepreted. In fact, you can neither tell if an instruction is jumpable or non-jumpable. Actually, you can not even tell where an instance of instruction begins or ends. You, or any object, can only hope to do any of these things if the bag's content is first parsed into a sequence of instances of well-formed instructions, if the object is a commodity hardware or computer language used at large since the begining of digital programmable computers. Thus, in such a context, any object code pressuposes, at a minimum, that a program written to be interpreted by its objects shall be construed as a (finite) sequence of instances of instructions, from the (finite) set of syntactically well-formed instrucions. Refering to computer programs by its form or expression, that is, as sequences of instances of instructions from some object
Re: OT: How I learned to stop worrying and love software patents
Michael K. Edwards wrote: ... On 7/24/05, Nathanael Nerode [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... I invite you to question the assumption that algorithms are mathematics. My preferred US dictionary (American Heritage, third edition) has it that an algorithm is a step-by-step problem solving procedure, and goes on to describe the computational specialization of this idea. That's not really theoretical mathematics any more than a titration technique is theoretical chemistry. Algorthms are, in a general sense, semiotics, for the step-by-step problem solving procedure processes data. When the processing is to be done by a digital computer, the instruction set in which the algorithm can be encoded sets and encloses, since Alan Turing's seminal work in the 1930's, the procedure into the realm of theoretical mathematics. And until Alonzo Church's thesis (cathegorizing this enclosure) is disproved, this enclosure is definite. Either way, whether specifically as theoretical mathematics (via computers), or generally, for being semiotics, algorithms are in the domain of laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas (refer to Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Sausurre or Umberto Eco going back to 1867, only foourteen years later than the oldest quote allegedly paraphrased from Diehr) -- Prof. Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende /\ Ciencia da Computacao (61)3072702-212 / \ Universidade de Brasilia, DF, Brasil /\ ?http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/sd.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: MP3 decoder packaged with XMMS
Michael K. Edwards wrote: On 13 Jul 2005 07:50:44 GMT, MJ Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michael K. Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Even so, Mr. Ravicher appears to be on the saner end of the range of FSF associates. [...] Isn't defaming a lawyer rather a stupid tactic for someone in the US? I have no wish to _defame_ a lawyer (or anyone else for that matter), and have tried to be careful to distinguish between things that I know personally (very little when it comes to the FSF) and conclusions that I have drawn from public evidence (which I try to flag as such and cite completely and accurately). Much of what I write reflects only how it appears to me, and I try to disclaim authority accordingly. How do you classify your knowledge that some of them smoke crack? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: On the debian-legal Summary of Creative Commons 2.0
MJ Ray wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Evan Prodromou) wrote: On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 12:12:44PM +, MJ Ray wrote: About Creative Commons: I feel this needs a paragraph on CC's decision-making, but I do not feel qualified to write it. I have no way of finding that out, and I don't see why it's necessary. If you can dig up some information, I'll include it. Sadly, Creative Commons (as an organisation) seems to lack the transparency of Software in the Public Interest or Free Software Foundation Europe. I don't know whether you already know some of the details from the contact so far. For example, are we dealing with their board of directors or their technical advisory board or others? How do they make decisions? There is a cc license discussion list, and it is open. The decision process may use the discussions, at least in it there is talk about. There is also one in portuguese I know of, also open. For the main cc license discussion list, please read Send cc-licenses mailing list submissions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Prof. Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende /\ Ciencia da Computacao (61)3072702-212 / \ Universidade de Brasilia, DF, Brasil /\ ?http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/sd.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: non-free firmware in kernel modules, aggregation and unclear copyright notice.
Sean Kellogg wrote: On Wednesday 13 April 2005 06:55 am, Raul Miller wrote: On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 11:28:59PM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: Failure to have a click-through license means that there is no acceptance, which is a fundamental part of contract law. No acceptance, no contract, no exceptions. False. For example, you can indicate acceptance of the GPL by exercising the rights it grants. While I certainly appriciate the simplicity with which you view the law, I'm going to have to stand by my earlier comment and restate, once again, that the authors of the GPL claim it is NOT a contract, but rather a grant/license. Now, I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again, lots of reasonable minds differ as to whether the GPL is actually a contract or not. This question pertains also to legal definitions that may differ among distinct jurisdictions. For exemple, AFAIK under Brazil's legal tradition any licence is a contract, a software user license classified as atipical and/or as of adherence (contrato de adesão). Furthermore, licences such as there GPL are better categorized as beneficial contracts (contrato benéfico), to avoid restrictions regarding adherence contracts. But if it is a contract then we need to start looking at acceptance by performace. Did the party who failed to make explicit acceptance act in a way as if he did accept? -- Prof. Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende /\ Ciencia da Computacao (61)3072702-212 / \ Universidade de Brasilia, DF, Brasil /\ ?http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/sd.htm
