An Open Source Legal Breakthrough

Good day for the OpenSource movement : 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.'

Here is the Slashdot story and the original court content can be found at JMRI Defense: Court Papers (http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/index.shtml).

This is only in the US but as they are the most litigious for frivolous reason this should protect most of the open source community :D

What is frightening is that Katzer patented and started sending invoices to Jacobsen for work that Jacobsen did! And it took a whole court procedure to defend Jacobsen...

It should be obvious in this case that Katzer should be condemned for extortion!

However the most pertinent comment in my opinion is the following:

"This was an appeals court decision. The appeals court doesn't decide all those things. The legal issue was whether the license was enforceable under copyright law, or whether it was a "mere covenant," meaning that Jacobsen would get nothing because he was not making money off the software. The lower court had ruled that it was a mere covenant. On appeal, the Federal Circuit vacated that ruling, which means it now goes back to the trial court to apply the "correct" law as announced by the Fed. Cir.

Two takeaway lessons, one for Big Business, and one for developers. For Big Business, you can't infringe on the copyrights of open source developers with impunity. For developers, even if you are doing open source software, REGISTER YOUR COPYRIGHT. If you register your copyright up front, you can get statutory damages and attorney fees if some idiot from Big Business decides to try this kind of stunt. Those damages are almost always more than the "actual" damages you'll get for software that you give away for free (as in beer). If you wait until after somebody infringes before you file your copyright, it's too late. And registering is cheap and easy [copyright.gov]. In many cases, you don't even need to get an attorney involved (although if you need a patent or trademark or help with a copyright, I know this really great IP attorney who also posts on Slashdot and is clued in on open source. [jw.com]

And despite the stuff above that may look like 'advice" to the untrained eye, this post absolutely, positively is NOT legal advice."

Fortunately for OGE we have a dual license and we intent to get payments for the commercial license :)

More depressing is this following comment implying that this "Breakthrough" is very limited in scope.

Dystopia Studios

Wow big day.

I created my company: www.dystopiastudios.com

What can I say?
It seems a bit surealistic that I did it after the ages I dream of it.

I think I deserve my last calm evening for the next few years :D

Btw I trademarked the name "dystopia studios" :D

Now I must think about a nice logo.

Zfone makes your VoIP phone secure

Interesting project.

I heard about it via an article in "The Economist" that Skype is already so encrypted that spy agencies have difficulties with it (only the NSA has the means to crack it). And that Zfone would be even more difficult to crack.

http://zfoneproject.com/prod_zfone.html

Zfone is a new secure VoIP phone software product which lets you make secure encrypted phone calls over the Internet.
...
Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux. Zfone runs on Windows XP and Vista, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Zfone will encrypt audio and video for Apple iChat calls on Mac OS X. Zfone has been tested with these VoIP clients: X-Lite, Gizmo, XMeeting, Google Talk VoIP client, Yahoo Messenger's VoIP client (for audio), and SJphone. It does not work with Skype.


I wonder if we could support it at some point in OGE via the sdk:
http://zfoneproject.com/prod_sdk.html

It had a dual license (GPL & commercial) but it seems we could discuss with them as we are an open-source project and it would anyway be a plugin: http://zfoneproject.com/lic_policy.html

Jamendo - Free music

Jamendo for those who don't know this site has this simple motto:

On Jamendo artists allow anyone to download and share their music. It's free, legal and unlimited.

Try it there are some great musics.
I really wonder how an artist is now able to make money from its profession...

Game: Stars Wars - The Force Unleashed

This video of the making of "Game: Stars Wars - The Force Unleashed" shows that the major challenge of this game was to integrate three middleware engine: Havoc + Euphoria + DMM (Digital Molecular Matter)

Plus d'infos sur ce film

Check the second video on this french article:
http://www.allocine.fr/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18423291.html

The first one is the new movie based between episode 3 and 4.
The fourth being the first of the old StarWars.
I have a mixed feelings about the quality of the movie.
Shouldn't they redo it using the game engine? The image quality would be far superior!

Oge needs some work to do to catch Stars Wars :)

Why reinvent the wheel again and again?

Reading this post "Get that job at Google" on Stevey blog's made me wonder why we always reinvent the wheel in the software industry.

At one point he says the interviewers usually ask to implement a well known basic algorithm (tree, sorting, ...). Why?

Do they expect that rooting learning existing algorithms makes a good programmer?


Said differently: Do you really ask a Chief how to build pans, knifes or an oven? Wouldn't it be better to test if he is able to select appropriate ingredients or use bad ingredients to make tasty dishes?

As most of us I studied how sorting, hashtable, trees and other statistics methods where implemented. And I quickly realised that only very few mathematical genius would be able to ameliorate them hence I forgot how to code them as soon as possible to leave place for useful stuff.

Such as which of the available implementations (Boost::graph, Poco, std,...) is the best in a cross-platform implementation, which one is thread-safe, which one is fastest, etc.

Anyway very informative post.
I wonder how much time he uses to write those rants :)

PS: If I made interviews one of my question would be to use so-called "advanced" statistical methods to prove a relationship among data then change the chosen method parameters to disprove it!

Cpu usage going to 100% when pc idle

Since months each time I let my pc idle it would go in idle mode. Nothing special here.

However some process was doing something in the background when my pc should have been idle. This didn't bothered me because each time I used my pc again this process would stop. Hence I thought it was a "normal" Windows process doing some small maintenance.

Recently I began to have doubts.

To pinpoint the problem I used the excellent free must-have tool ProcessExplorer. (At least grab it before Macro$ begins to charge for it ;)

After lauching ProcessExplorer I waited until my pc got idle and this mysterious process began (= gone taking a cup of coffee). When I cam back it was running so I looked at ProcessExplorer and saw that it was a SVCHOST.exe running at 80-100% cpu!! Ouch!

That's much badder than I thought but strangely the pc didn't seem to heat so much - hence the fan didn't turn like mad and the reason it didn't realise the problem sooner.

ProcessExplorer told me numerous services are associated with this SVCHOST and my suspicion quickly turned to the "System Restore Service".

Some browsing helped me found this trick which indicate that some infinite loop was happening:

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showthread.php?t=81209

• Open a dos shell window. By clicking “Start/Run”, type in “cmd.exe” and hit enter.
• Stop the Windows Management service: "net stop winmgmt"
• Delete the Repository folder: "rd /s /q c:\windows\system32\wbem\Repository\"
• Restart the Windows Management service: "net start winmgmt"
• Recompile all the "Managed Object Format" files (*.mof,*.mfl):
• a - "cd /d c:\windows\system32\wbem\"
• b - "for %i in (*.mof,*.mfl) do Mofcomp.exe %i"
• Verify the folder "c:\windows\system32\wbem\Repository\" has been recreated. If not, restore your system and try again or look for another solution. :-)

This trick worked for me.
I should have done this a long time ago.


I didn't need to try this other trick: "Problem with High CPU Usage with SVCHost.EXE : cpu, usage, high".

If none work for you you will probably need to use ProcessExplorer and stop one-by-one the programs linked to the SVCHOST.exe to find the culprit and decide either to leave it stopped or correct it by reinstalling it.

Also don't forget to update you anti-virus, spyware etc as it could be a corrupt service.

Good luck