How exactly is this extortion?
Any future employer is not going to want an employee that has sent negative letters to the customers of a previous employer. Period. Debate it, bring in a lawyer, litigate it, fine. The moment you go after the customers, you are no longer hireable.
So what if someone's "no longer hireable"? Debate it all you want, but that still doesn't mean he committed extortion. Extortion is a specific crime.
If the work was done in the US, than the assumption should be that if he had no agreement with the company retaining his rights to the work for himself than the copyright remains with the company, not the author.
Nope, totally wrong. US copyright law dictates only that works are considered "made for hire" in the employer-employee case when they are prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment (see www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf) Which is why companies have to state explicitly in the contract WHEN they consider a work to be done within scope of the employment (e.g., "All development work done using company property", etc.). If the work contract doesn't state it, his reprieve is:
The court left unclear which of these factors must be present to establish the employment relationship under the work for hire definition, but held that supervision or control over creation of the work alone is not controlling.
So, no, there's no default assumption that works for the company and against the author -- it's all case-to-case.
He was fired, THEN he discovers this GPL violation of his own code without his employers ever approaching him about licensing issues. Do you really think he will start out being reasonable? I'd say the employer was being a jack-ass to begin with.
The fact that he was ASKING around first (before even attempting to do any legal action) is a sign of sanity. If you really feel strongly about being reasonable, go tell him, but be reasonable in how you tell him too.
From Wikipedia:
Extortion (also called shakedown, outwresting, and exaction) is a criminal offence which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion.
Call his actions whatever you want (I suggest "blackmail"), but it's definitely NOT extortion. Again, the assumption was that it was likely his property to begin with. (The "likely" part is debatable, sure, but now that depends on how the court will see this. He seems to be claiming that he was not employed in the usual work-for-hire manner and that it was not in his contract that he has to pass any rights off. IF that's true, then he has a case.)
Furthermore, just because something is dealt with "outside of the established legal system" does not automatically make it illegal (see: settlement). For all we know, he may have already done what you have suggested and the employer's being even more of an ass afterwards, leading to his plea with the rest of the community, and (maybe in a fit of rage) the "threat" pronouncement in his blog. Note that such "threat" hasn't actually been made yet.
The OP also said, in response to the first guy who asked pretty much everything that has been asked here in the slashdot thread:
Hi Llama, I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license. I think the tricky part is compelling them to abide by the license
Assuming this is all true (that he had no agreement with the company to cede over his rights to work done on his own time), I seriously doubt that it is legal for the company to do this. It seems to me that he was pretty careful from the outset to ensure that no such agreement was in the contract -- and in that case, by default, the copyright remains with him as the original author.
I’m going to report this to GNU project and warn them that if they don’t bring to code back in-line with the license, that I will send a letter to their customers to make them aware of the situation.
To me, that reads an awful lot like extortion.
How exactly is this extortion? Mere coercion is not extortion. He's not asking for money, property or services in exchange for all of this -- he just wants the source code (assuming it's rightfully his) to be licensed properly and that the company may not sell it as proprietary.
why the hell did they change it?
Because "WinKey, U" does not always work, especially in WinXP. Run any start menu program that starts with the letter U and you've overridden it. (On earlier Windows versions you need to manually pin a program that starts with the letter U on the start menu.)
The "WinKey, Right, Enter" solution is much better and never gets overridden by anything else you've run.
That doesn't explain why each apple store has new stock every single day.
Not where I live, no. Just weeks ago I was already planning on getting one (because of GarageBand) but every day I asked, all the retailers said they don't have it.
(Now they do have stock, but in the interim my phone got stolen so I ended up buying a new phone instead.)
Where I currently live (Singapore), the iPad 2 was advertised as "available now!" for several days, but if you ask for one the store will tell you they're out of stock.
Meanwhile we got so many ad promotions with the magic words "win a free ipad 2" everywhere we turned, from restaurants to supermarkets to banks.
Long story short: People who wanted them can't buy them for weeks because they've been snapped up by companies intending to give them away instead of selling them. I think Apple is simply preventing this situation from happening again.
Right. And that involved actual banning of legitimate users, I presume? Show me where you found that info and then we'll talk.
Maybe I'm cynjical, or maybe its the theory surrounding computer system architecture, computer programming, throbbing in my brain, but NEVER say anthing is outright impossible.
The word "impossible" exists because it has correct uses, and despite your argument, the usage here is correct. It IS outright impossible for a legitimate customer to get banned. I already covered the part where false flagging CAN happen, and banning of a *legitimate* user cannot result from this. A *human* checks the purchase records and does the banning. If the human decides to ban anyway, the human has already deemed the customer *illegitimate*, for all intents and purposes.
You may argue at this point that the human himself can be a point of failure, but then your cynicism is nothing more than misplaced pedantry, because that issue is not related at all to the theory of computer system architectures nor computer programming.
RTFA:
"Making the situation even sweeter, the number which appears in brackets after the error statement is in fact the gamer’s 64-bit steamid.
Y’see, Steam keeps a list of which accounts have actually forked over the $9.99 for a legit copy of GMod – so it’s a simple matter of checking ids and turfing out the pirates."
1. There's no way a legitimate customer will get banned. They don't ban you outright for reporting the error message, only when they have proven that you indeed did NOT buy it.
2. There's probably a (very unlikely) chance for a legitimate customer to be affected with the error message due to an actual bug in the copy protection code, but in that case how is that different from the Michael Jackson game? At least with the error message, Valve can help you fix it (e.g., if their records show that you didn't pirate the game, Valve tech support can ask you to reinstall the game, etc.) No such reprieve for the MJ game -- if the copy protection triggered on a legitimate copy, well, it's definitely no fun anymore is it?
The only hole now is that the steam ID is probably unencrypted, so malicious users can probably troll others by posting the error message on Steam tech support with their victim's steam ID. But since Valve has the balls to release this info, they probably already have some mechanism in place to prevent these trollers from doing so.
To describe it as "getting in the way" is a gross misrepresentation of the theory of computation and the theory of algorithms.
Yes, it does not really get in the way, much in the same way that OO does not really get in the way of algorithm analysis any more than imperative programming does. The real question is whether it is always a good idea to replace one abstraction with another, especially given that the replacement has greater problems with fidelity to the actual machine. More on that after I zoom in on your relevant statement:
nor is it generally the case that algorithms expressed in imperative languages are more efficient or easier to analyze than those expressed in functional languages.
It was never a question of whether it is more efficient or easier to analyze its running time. Again, it was a question of fidelity--does the abstraction faithfully model the actual implementation, and does discarding this abstraction in favor of a simpler-to-understand abstraction pose any real benefit to understanding? The problem, as the GGGP is pointing out, is that most systems in actual use are imperative in nature, and along with it comes assumptions that do not hold in functional languages, assumptions that can *hinder* understanding if students are not aware of them.
Also, as a side note, the Wikipedia article's assertion about false lower bounds is misleading. There are a variety of different delays associated with memory access, which may be address dependent (e.g. seek times on hard drives if you are using swap, cache misses, etc.). If these costs are polynomial in the amount of memory used by the program (assuming some sort of locality effects), then the algorithm will still be a polynomial time algorithm.
Actually it's not at all misleading--the article was talking about a specific machine model, and the assumption holds true for *that* model. On the other hand, your assumption that there are different delays in memory access (due to seek times and whatnot) *was* misleading--you are now effectively trading the RASP model for a more general one that does not assume constant access time to memory. Of *course* there's going to be a difference in the lower bound running time than in the RASP model, and depending on the actual difference you propose, it may or may not equalize it in memory access performance with that of the Turing machine. But that *still* doesn't mean that this alternate model is completely equivalent to that of the Turing machine--not in terms of running time complexity, because they depend on mechanisms that are *not* common between them. (For that matter, have you ever seen a real system that has *infinite* memory? The Turing machine assumes that.) The Church-Turing thesis, after all, only states that similar machines CAN compute the same decideable problems, not that they can compute them with the *same* running times.
Some abstraction must be fixed before an algorithm can be analyzed; a Turing machine is a convenient abstraction, but it is not the only such abstraction.
But is the actual proposed abstraction--functional instead of imperative--an adequate (not just "convenient") abstraction? I agree with the GGGP here -- in terms of algorithm complexity analysis, it is not, just as the Turing machine is not an adequate replacement of the RASP machine in terms of theoretical performance.
In fact, if you are talking C++ specifically, having access to the STL mostly eliminates having to write your own fundamental data structures for any type of data, so I spend even less time and space on boilerplate and more on implementing specific algorithms that work with my data types.
I hope you don't mind me pointing this out, but the STL is mostly *not* based on an OOP mindset. Template programming is a different animal from object-oriented programming; it is in fact a counter-methodology to the use of inheritance and virtual methods that pure OOP prescribes (among other things).
In other words, you have been indirectly advocating the use of a mix of programming methodologies -- "the right tool for the right job", which is exactly the GP's point.
See: Church-Turing thesis.
Hmm, Wikipedia says:
In simple terms, it states that "everything computable is computable by a Turing machine."
and it also says:
A limitation of Turing Machines is that they do not model the strengths of a particular arrangement well. For instance, modern stored-program computers are actually instances of a more specific form of abstract machine known as the random access stored program machine or RASP machine model
... The RASP's finite-state machine is equipped with the capability for indirect addressing (e.g. the contents of one register can be used as an address to specify another register); thus the RASP's "program" can address any register in the register-sequence. The upshot of this distinction is that there are computational optimizations that can be performed based on the memory indices, which are not possible in a general Turing Machine; thus when Turing Machines are used as the basis for bounding running times, a 'false lower bound' can be proven on certain algorithms' running times (due to the false simplifying assumption of a Turing Machine). An example of this is binary search, an algorithm that can be shown to perform more quickly when using the RASP model of computation rather than the Turing machine model.
So, hmm... that clearly supports the argument of the GP:
Functional and logic programming get in the way of some aspects of algorithmic analysis too
So what's your point again?
But those giveaways are definitely not a sign of high morale in themselves
Nor are they a sign of low morale in themselves. But the post that was modded troll makes a point -- he's HAPPY with the toys and bonuses. Does that look like low morale to you? (Of course we don't know if he's really from google, but if I worked there myself I'd be pretty happy too with those bonuses.) Heck, it even points to a possibility that they are happy with the products of their OWN work so much that they like having those products as rewards -- if they had low morale, there's a high probability that they won't want to see those products ever again.
they are, in fact, something companies do when they need to boost morale.
Yes, but not in Google's case. It was an annual thing that they do. They've been documented to give away phones three years ago, and that was before the boom of Android. So the case that you are making, that it was intended to boost morale, is pretty weak compared to the alternate explanation.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
