Comment Re:What the heck? (Score 0) 292
IBM's claim in their case v SCO, was that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
IBM's claim in their case v SCO, was that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
IBM's claim, which was upheld, what that those specific headers were not copyrightable because they were in the public domain. IBM did not claim that header files in general are not copyrightable.
Header files implement an interface. That interface is a fact, not subject to copyright.
The fact "strcpy takes as arguments two character pointers, and returns a character pointer", is not copyrightable. This does not change if I express it in C as "char *strcpy(char *d, const char *s);"
A minimal C or C++ header file is just a collection of such facts.
The point Nimmer, an acknowledged authority on IP law, makes is that when you aggregate such "facts" the resultant text, essentially becomes an expressive description of how a whole system works, and therefore is copyrightable. Otherwise one could argue that each individual word in a book is such a "fact," and that copying a book is just copying a series of facts and therefore not a copyright violation.
Whether a work is copyrightable is a matter of examining the whole work in the context of its use, not just determining that individual lines are not copyrightable and concluding that the whole work is therefore not copyrightable.
So no, it is not yet a settled matter of law that header files are not copyrightable.
That quote is actually misattributed. It was the person writing to Steve Jobs who wrote that, not Jobs.
Here's what the site in question says: "UPDATE: The last line in the email exchange was actually not said by Mr. Jobs; rather it was by “Tom.” We corrected it as soon as we were made aware."
Jobs closed his half of the email exchange with "You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it."
BTW, I'm not in any way condoning Apple's de facto classification of home screen web apps as second class iOS citizens.
The Wikipedia page is still in google's cache.
Maybe someone would like to mirror it?
You can't imagine your way out of a paper bag.
...
a tablet isn't going to be your only computer.
Wow! The contradiction is mind boggling!
Can't you imagine a future where tablets are powerful enough to be many people's only computer?
TFA mentions an accusation of tax fraud.
How much of the science we do today is based on experiments that are so ill specified that no other researcher can even attempt to repeat them, much less actually repeat them?
That's right - none.
These guys aren't just claiming a novel observation - they're claiming a novel observation and they're not telling anyone else what they're doing. This failure to provide a clear, repeatable description of their experimental work makes their "discovery" scientifically meaningless.
Not so. Unexplained phenomena are the evidentiary basis of science.
What science abhors are unrepeatable phenomena.
It is not required that an experiment have a complete theoretical explanation for it to be worthy of publication. It is required that an experiment be repeatable for it to be worthy of publication.
False dichotomy. They could publish a paper detailing everything and simultaneously file a patent for it. Other researchers could verify the phenomenon (if there is one) and they would still hold the patent.
Remember, the word "patent" means "public." There is no contradiction between a money making patent and scientific publication.
The hypothetical Indian accountant would need to hold a US certification as a CPA, not an Indian one. This could be problematic.
The author of the linked study appears not to have considered that a universe more dense with galaxies would be a universe with many more planet-sterilizing gamma ray bursts, which would not be terribly conducive to life.
You were not running a modern Mac OS X desktop with millions of colors @ 1200 x 800 (or larger) resolution and antialiasing, doing animated GUI transitions over a 14.4 kbps modem in the 90s.
My question is always this: "What does Apple have to win by locking down OS X the way they locked down iOS?". Even a single good argument would surprise me. The only thing people can come up with is 'make more money by selling applications through the Apps store'. Meanwhile Apple barely breaks even on the iOS app store, while they make billions selling hardware and selling music (DRM free, by the way). Somehow it doesn't really make sense introducing reasons for people not to buy Apple hardware, such as restricting what they can install on it.
People made the same argument you're making about dumping Classic (i.e., dumping Classic effectively restricts what can be installed on a Mac OS X machine), but Apple did it anyway. They did it to force user base migration to the new technology (i.e., Mac OS X).
Apple wants to move most or all of its user base to a unified OS that is more like iOS than Mac OS X. We know this because of what Apple themselves have called "Back to the Mac," i.e., bringing features of iOS, such as full screen apps, a home screen like the iOS home screen with app buttons, and an App Store to the next version of Mac OS X (a.k.a. Lion).
Why do they want to do this?
Because over the past decade, Mac OS X product revenue has gone from 90+% of Apple's revenue to less than 30%, and Apple sees this trend continuing. Like it or not, iOS is now the dominant Apple platform, not Mac OS X, and Apple would like to move as many customers as possible to iOS. They'll transition them by making Mac OS X more like iOS, then they'll unify iOS and Mac OS X. Most customers will buy iPads or variations thereof; others will buy iBooks running iOS not Mac OS X; only a few dinosaurs and developers will continue to run Mac OS X.
The Mac App Store is not a plot to take over the Mac software market, though it will be a small profit center for Apple. The Mac App Store is part of a long term plan to accustom Mac OS X users to using iOS, because in the future, they will mostly be iOS users, not Mac OS X users.
I know someone who use photoshop for resizing and cropping pictures, yes literally just resizing pictures, nothing fancy whatsoever... He won't even consider using any of the many free programs that would do the job, and his reason was "they're not professional", so instead he uses a pirated photoshop.
1. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
2. The core of Adobe's professional market is not composed of people as dopey as your friend. It is composed of people who make a living using Adobe's software. For these people, the many free/low-cost image editors just don't cut it - most likely because the vast majority of them do image manipulation significantly more complex than simply cropping images (who'd have thought?!).
3. If there existed a professional quality image editing suite fully feature equivalent with Photoshop but half or a quarter the price, don't you think professionals who do this sort of thing 8 hours a day, 200+ days a year for a living might have heard about it and already be using it?
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn
