Safety first, privacy second in use of cameras in schoolsPaul Fernhout (109597) writes "Caroline Murray reports for the Sacandaga Express: "Just this year, the Broadalbin-Perth Central School District completed Phase 1 of a plan to install high-tech security cameras in every school across the district. For the first time, high school and middle school students started off the school year with security cameras pointed at them from every direction, including hallways, staircases, and public rooms, such as the cafeteria and gymnasium. For some veteran students, the cameras feel a bit invasive. "It is like '1984' with big brother," senior Hunter Horne said while walking down the hallway.
One question not addressed in the article is whether forcing a child to submit to total one-way surveillance is a form of bullying or in some other way a vandalism of privacy or democracy? See also David Brin's "The Transparent Society" for another take on surveillance, where all the watchers are also watched."
Link to Original Source
Debian Votes Against Mandating Non-systemd Compatibility
"You are personally going to migrate your employer's systems because you personally do not like something, something every single major distro is moving too, and the top kernel developers are already using?"
No, AC, he said he is going to migrate his *personal* systems and those of an apparent volunteer organization he is affiliated with. Read more carefully next time before launching into the personal insults...
Machine-Learning Algorithm Ranks the World's Most Notable Authors
"Ben Franklin and others who owned printers realized that copyright didn't apply to them, so they promptly began making copies of everything - books, sheet music, etc."
I had know that for much of US history there was no respect for foreign copyrights (from other countries). I never saw anyone connect this to Ben Franklin's success before. Interesting!
Now that I look:
"Benjamin Franklin, Copyright Pirate"...
And:
"Benjamin Franklin, the first IP pirate?"...
Rooftop Solar Could Reach Price Parity In the US By 2016
I agree we may well see cheap compact nuclear fission reactors in the 2020s like from Hyperion., Also, it is a sad truth that we could build much safer reactors if engineers had been asked to prioritize safety over other things (Freeman Dyson's TRIGA design being one example) and if the USA has not focused on a Uranium nuclear cycle that intentionally could be easily weaponized (instead of Thorium).
Still I'd expect solar will actually continue to fall in price by the 2020s too. It would not surprise me if PV was in the 15 cent per watt range by 2030 (or even less) other things remaining constant. Consider how "cheap" used "solar collectors" in terms of tree leaves are in the Fall in the USA. Solar panels potentially could be printed as cheaply as aluminum foil using advanced nanomaterials and special inks.
We haven't really seen anything like the amount of research in PV we will probably see when it reaches grid parity everywhere and people really invest in it in a huge way equivalent to previous investments in fossil fuel production and research. Some people (myself included) have been predicting this turning point for a long time, and it has been dismissed and ignored. It is easy to say PV progress will never get to grid parity until it actually happens. That has been true even though the trends for decades show a clear line towards zero cost (no doubt it will go asymptotic at some point to just be dirt cheap though).
Unfortunately, in our short-term-oriented society in the USA, until PV is cheaper than the grid it is only a niche thing for special circumstances or motivated environmentally-minded people. That has been what has been funding it as only a relative trickle of investment. Once PV is cheaper than the grid, assuming a good solution to energy storage exists (fuel cells with nickle-metal hydride storage, Lithium ion batteries, molten salt batteries, compressed air, or something else), it will be economically foolish to use anything else to generate power than PV. And then, sometime after the stampede, we will see enormous sums of money flow into PV research and production. Electric utilities may collapse all over the place as his happens because grid power becomes too pricey once the cost of delivery exceeds the cost of on-site production. Except for the value of their right of ways as internet conduits, and maybe the value of their copper wires, I would guess that most utilities if properly accounted for, given decommissioning costs and outstanding long-term debt in sunk costs, most utilities may well have a negative net worth right now given any forecast that includes these trends.
Personally, I still think it possible that hot fusion or cold fusion will displace PV (as well as nuclear fusion) in the near future. Those could potentially be really really cheap. Even if fission gets cheaper and better (including potentially as small batteries), I don't see it could compete with workable fusion (and probably neither could PV for most applications).
We'll likely also see energy efficiency increase greatly. The current best construction in Europe is to build passive solar superinsulated houses without furnaces; search on "no furnace house".
I'd love to see the solar roadways thing work out... Or even just for parking lots or driveways.
Still, as I said elsewhere, the same reasons PV s getting cheaper (cheaper computing leading to cheaper collaboration and better designs by cheaper modeling and newer materials and so on) are the same sorts of reasons we will also see much cheaper nuclear power. Of course, there are other trends that all interact with that as well... A post by me from 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"...
Interviews: Ask Malcolm Gladwell a Question
In the Tipping Point you advance the argument that it was better policing against minor infractions that reduced crime....
"Economist Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and "Fixing Broken Windows" (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number of police officers trained and deployed on the streets and hiring Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner (thanks to the efforts of former mayor David Dinkins) and 2) a decrease in the number of unwanted children made possible by Roe v. Wade, causing crime to drop nationally in all major cities -- "[e]ven in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing"."
However, it looks like the drop in crime is most closely correlated with the fall in environmental lead (mostly from reducing the used of leaded gasoline). Since other places have seen their crime rate fall without drastic changes in policing, what do you think of the lead and crime connection? See also:
"America's Real Criminal Element: Lead; New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "...
R. A. Montgomery, Creator of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" Books, Dead At 78......
I've been thinking about translating it to JavaScript...
Thanks for being an (indirect) inspiration, Raymond. Hope you are on to even better things!
Group Tries To Open Source Seeds "Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds. Since 1975, our members have been passing on our garden heritage by collecting and distributing thousands of samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners. "
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Looks like we turned down the wrong path a few decades ago...
When Lessig argued "Eldred vs. Ashcroft" there was some point where the justices said, essentially, well no one has ever complained about copyright extensions before in terms of that being a taking something of value from the public (breaking the previous bargain struck at the time the work was produced), so extensions must be OK. That was probably not true, but Lessig did not have much of an answer for that. My memory of that may be a bit fuzzy, but I think that was the gist of an important point in the case as far as precedent.
More craziness and the law regarding the "owners" of so many copyrights these days:...
". "
How Alibaba Turned November 11 Into the World's Biggest Online Shopping Day...
"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed. (William Gibson)"
What a revolution for global education (similar to the OLPC hope)!
Americans Rejoice At Lower Gas Prices
to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits):......
That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.
See also:....
"Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."
Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970."
Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Good points. How is copyright for any computer software then justified, at least for most software that is intended to be a "useful" tool, like Microsoft Word?
Joey Hess Resigns From Debian
From what I read here, systemd is a lot less modular by bundling in a lot of services. Linux has had the virtue of modularity at is core, as exemplified by narrow-focus command line tools piped together to get work done. Modularity is something like cleanliness. If you leave crumbs all over your kitchen all the time, it generally isn't itself the problem. The problem is when roaches and mice move in and you can't get rid of them due to the crumbs you still leave everywhere. Granted, cleanliness (and modularity) can perhaps go too far (the person who scrubs the kitchen flour every five minutes). So, what is a healthy balance here? I don't know enough about the details to weigh in on that. You ask for specific problems, and while a reasonable sounding request, that is also a bit like asking people to send pictures in of specific roaches and mice. The specific problems are important of course, but what is at stake is the bigger picture, not stamping out each individual roach. What matters is increased risk. The more general issue is the management of risks from complexity, whereas modularity is one of the best (but not the only) approach for doing that.
I've seen how lack of modularity can damage other software communities -- particularly the early Squeak community, like I wrote about here
:-). Anyway, I had related frustrations to yours many years ago and they are why I ended up doing a lot in Python and Jython on the JVM in the last decade, even to the point of working on PataPata. ... I think the most important single issue in maintaining any large system is managing complexity (documenting intent maybe comes next, including well-named variables and methods and functions). This has never been a priority for Squeak IMHO. .......
"I sympathize. I think the biggest issue of Squeak is issues with modularity and managing complexity. These issues translate to frustration for maintainers (and users
There are several ways to manage complexity, which include:
* modularity (namespaces, packages like Java or GNU Smalltalk or Debian, letting someone else do that hard work by leveraging libraries or VMs or languages, like Squeak does by using a C compiler to generate the VM)
* cleverness (brilliant redesign, like traits was hopefully going to be)
* laissez faire, and also to each his or her own image (that is what we have now, and it is not that bad an idea, if the *core* is small and well thought out, like Spoon, so the *image* instance becomes the *module*. But alas, it is not, witness how confusing Morphic is to unravel).
Modularity is the one way to manage complexity which seems to work best in practice, although the others have their role. However, if Squeak images could easily talk to each other and share some state, and we had Spoon-like remote debugging and development, then we could have just one application per image, and that would be easier to maintain (it would be modular to a degree but in an unusual way). But I would still suggest such a system built on well-though out (clever) modules would be more powerful and easier to use than a mess of spaghetti code, even if we had only one application per image."
With roots back to here in 2000:
... "....
"Squeak complexity in 2.8 has become a complex cat from the simple kitten complexity of 1.13(?) in 1996. Back then, Dan Ingalls wrote on 10 Nov 1996 those prescient words: "The Squeak team has an interest in doing the world's simplest application construction framework, but I suspect that we will get sucked up with enough other things that this won't happen in the next two months (but who knows...)."
Squeak 2.8's complexity is now quiet (in terms of walkbacks) and stealthy (in terms of growing between releases without a complaint). And the complexity could be deadly. Witness the recent issue Stefan raised about some Squeak fonts possibly violating a Microsoft EULA. The question should never even arise of the legal integrity of the core release. We might as well just leap right into those jaws of complexity.
Granted, Squeak has finally much improved since those years -- but the cost to the community as enormous from all the missed opportunity... Squeak limps along, and is a better and better system, and spinoffs like Amber Smalltalk and Pharo are awesome, but so many other systems grabbed Squeak's mindshare that Sqeuak faces big uphill struggle at this point. It never got to be the Flash replacement it could have been in browsers, or the Java-killer, or lots of other thing it could have been (the alternative to Python...).
For its own flaws (including those inherent in JavaScript), NodeJS seems to have gotten modularity right and can support that picture I painted above for Squeak of special-purpose application-focused servers talking to each other:...
"All you people who added node_modules to your gitignore, remove that shit, today, it's an artifact of an era we're all too happy to leave behind. The era of global modules is dead."
Maybe what frustrates so many Linux developers is to see such an obvious problem going ignored, like for a master chef to have a new restaurant owner come in who is intentionally throwing bread crumbs all over the floor because is "looks nice"? Or, for another analogy, like an experienced firefighter being forced to live in a wood house overflowing with years of un-recycled newspapers supposedly protected by some funky new smoke detector system that is unproven and behind the scenes is implemented using a rat's nest of unlabelled wires?
That said, again, I don't know enough about systemd to know if it does indeed make good overall tradeoffs. I'm just building on the complaints about it I've read here. Things can be too clean. Humans need bacteria to survive. Evolution tends to produce odd efficiencies of unexpectedly interacting systems. So, I'll continue to watch how this plays out...
But Joey's biggest complaint seems to be about the social process. It seems to me that all social systems tend to attract parasites and rent seekers eventually. It can be hard to manage that sometimes without moving on and just waiting for the inevitable collapse before recolonizing. As Clay Shirky says:
..."
"A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"...
.
So, systemd sounds nice in practice -- let's bundle all the important services together and finally get all the bugs fixed *this* time -- but in practice, experienced developers worry that the bundling creates a big technical and social problem of maintenance and debugging and related discussions and management.
I might have succeeded in 2000 with rallying Squeakers to make a better system back then, sparing years of frustration and bit rot for so many people, but there were several people (including a "lawyer") who claimed Squeak was just fine as it was, that the quirky non-open-source-recognized license did not matter and that modularity was not an import priority and so on... I'm glad those issues have been mostly fixed for Squeak in something lie Pharo, but it took many years of painful reality for the community as a whole to wake up to them become priorities, losing many good people along the way -- even losing Dan Ingalls to JavaScript......
Berlin's Digital Exiles: Where Tech Activists Go To Escape the NSA
Granted from 2005:...
...
."
What has really changed from the Bush years of great significance in that regard?
See also:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933."
Jews who moved to Israel seem to me overall to have interpreted "never again" in terms of who has the most guns. But there is another perspective on that, which is to think that "never again" should be about militaristic bureaucracy getting out of control. A culture like the USA (or Israel for that matter) can be full of guns and people who know how to use them, but still infested with militarist bureaucracy infesting every aspect of life (including via perpetual full-surveillance "schooling"). Like bureaucracy, humans have had a long association with fire, and fire is useful to warm our homes and cook our meals, but it is a terrible thing when it rages out of control.
That said, how should we behave when we are essentially trapped in the middle of such a (currently) slow moving disaster? It seems always possible it could turn around instead of get worse. The USA is a different country than Germany, with a different history and different traditions. And social and economic life often sucks for immigrants in new countries, like shown by Michael Ruppert's experience moving to Venezuela (ignoring how I think "Peak Oil" is a non-issue given Solar PV and likely fusion):...
."
The USA still has the strength, as exemplified by a true "Promised Land" of NYC (rivaling Israel for Jewish resettlement), of being a place where diverse people have learned to live and work together, perhaps better than anywhere else on the planet.
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"...
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
AC, thanks for the insightful reply! Indeed several Nobel-prize winning economists have supported the basic income for some of these sorts of reasons.
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Great points!!! I've made similar ones on scope, suggesting the Java API is derivative of Smalltalk's class libraries. Also, one can look at the FSF's claim the calling GPL'd code even via dynamic linking creates a derived work.
Copyright has many absurdities built into it when applied to programs, and this is one of them. I agree that in practice, if APIs were extensively protected, then people would gravitate towards freely licensed ones. And people might go back decades to find the origins of various software expressions related to interfaces in decades old code (independent invention wold be the only defense, and might be hard to prove). Although, the freely licensed APIs would probably be used by everyone else who argued they copied something from it... One can hope that the SC ruling for Oracle might push copyright for software to the point where copyright for software is show to be so absurd it is abandoned, but somehow I doubt even that would get copyright for software repealed.
Reminds me of the same kind of nonsense as is now happening with patents and smartphones. It's one thing when you are producing machinery in the 1800s and devices are covered by at most a handful of patents. But a Smartphone may be covered by literally thousands of patents (both hardware and software). How do you begin to keep track of that when designing something, let alone negotiate rights to each patent? How are patents then promoting the useful arts when in practice all they do is get in the way? Contrast with the US Fashion industry which in general is not covered by copyrights or patents.
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect".
:-)...
Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job).
:-)...
"Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."
I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.
Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech
... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ..."...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.
Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.
BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source)....
Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them?...
But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including community good will and everyone's investment in learning that API and making software that was dependent on it (even if much of the better part of Java down to aspects of Swing's API and the hotspot compiler was a rip-off of Smalltalk, with Sun hiring a bunch of ex-Smalltalkers).
Just because a system needs multiple parts to work does not mean one part of it (the API) can be dismissesed as unimportant or uncreative. Interfaces are very important, even if many people don't appreciate that fact.
Still, it is true that good interfaces hopefully become standards, and proprietary standards are very problematical in a supposed free market. Proprietary standards can ultimately be very costly to a society. The internet and the web succeed in large part because it was an *open* standards.
However, by contrast, due to marketing power from IBM and many other factors, Microsoft succeeded in dominating the desktop with a proprietary standard. I'm actually surprised how far WINE has gotten given Microsoft; parallels there to this case would be of interest (same with Mono)....
"Microsoft has not made public statements about Wine."
Related by Manuel De Landa:
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"...
. "
As a developer, years ago I rooted for Apple to lose the look-and-feel lawsuit that threatened to make creating good user interfaces impossible -- but, I would never say creating a good user interface was not a creative act involving a lot of hard work and researcher and inspiration and reflection and trial-and-error.....
 [under copyright law]...".[2] In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's.[3] The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's.[4],[2] and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied."
However, that may have been a rare bit of sanity about copyright in the courts. Copyright rulings generally are pretty adhoc. There is little consistency to them according to people like Alan Kay who have been expert witnesses in a variety of cases. This amicus brief is rolling the dice, and we don't know who will win. If APIs get ruled as proprietary, which they might considering the Google presentation I linked to, then the whole computing landscape may change overnight generally much for the worse.
Copyright has become overly broad IMHO, and, for example, right now try to popularize a story using the characters from Harry Potter or Frozen and see how far you get (if you are financially successful) before getting sued. Granted, some places look the other way about fan fiction, but if you make serious money, you can expect a legal attack by copyright owners claiming under US law to control things like character names and related concepts. What real difference is that from API names and expected exceptions and structure contents and so so as a large body of interrelated stuff like the Java API?
... Exploitation of fictional characters is a crucial source of revenue for entertainment and merchandising companies. Characters such as Superman and Mickey Mouse are the foundations of massive entertainment franchises and are commonly protected under both copyright and trademark law."...
"Fictional characters can be protected separately from their underlying works as derivative copyrights, provided that they are sufficiently unique and distinctive--for example, James Bond, Fred Flintstone, Hannibal Lecter, and Snoopy.."
That's an example of why I feel the Supreme Court may side with Oracle.
I'm not saying that situation is morally right or good public policy or good for "progress of the useful arts"; I feel it is not. But I'm suggesting that what many people are saying here, including the amicus brief, seems inconsistent to me (including denying the creativity of API design, which is at the heart of much good software development), and thus the outcome is risky. And rather than address the issue and accept that a well-designed interface is a creative act while admitting overly-broad copyright has become counter-productive (at least to the average software developer), people try to dismiss that, as you seem to me to be doing here.
Let me put it another way to show how API design is at the heart of much good software development. Forth exemplifies incremental modular design, where you build generally from the bottom up, creating Forth words that are usually a composite of just a few other words, and then building new words with the previous words you made. So much of the value created in a Forth program is in the way you create words as an API for the words in layers above, and designing useful words is the supreme art of Forth development. But how can you disentangle the act of Forth programming from API creation?...
"What's interesting specifically about Forth."
Solving problems by making APIs that define mini-languages in terms of internal functions is of course true for almost any computer language, but the emphasis on creating an API to create solutions in a problem space may be less obvious in some cases than Forth. To say API creation is not creative is ultimately to deny the creativity needed for much of real programming. In practice, any significant "implementation" to solve a complex problem is built on layers of custom-made APIs almost all the way down... Granted, how you sequence API calls is not making an API, but invariably that sequence of API calls becomes itself an PI endpoint for some other layer. You just can't neatly separate making an API from making a sequence of instructions in practice in any significant piece of software; the two are intertwined in the creative act.
The public policy of whether other people should be able to call that code without your permission (GPL and derived works), or duplicate the function names and expected behaviors without your permission even with clean room implementations (this case with Oracle vs. Google), is ultimately a political question of "fair use" and should be independent of the issue of "creativity" IMHO. I'm still saddened to see how little appreciation many slashdotters seem to have for programming as a craft generally requiring a poetical mindset to do well..........
"My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules."
By me: "[unrev-II] Poetry and Knowledge Management (was Jack's Use Case)".... [â¦])"
Choice of words to express emotions and ideas is a poet's stock in trade, just like picking good names for methods of doings things is an essential part of the creative act of programming. I've read of one person who hires programmers who always asks programmers who their favorite poets are...
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.......
Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished....
Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,
I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that....
 games."
Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:...
."
And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:...
" reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.
Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a regime, people tend to gravitate to doing the minimum to get the reward, avoiding risks when possible.
I'm not saying in our system in the USA that software developers don't need money to develop software. They do because otherwise they will have to take unrelated jobs. FOr example, my wife and I went way into debt to create a garden simulator and then spent years doing unrelated work to pay the debt off. That was sad because we were all tooled up to write great educational simulations and similar related things in that domain and that capacity pretty much all got lost over the years of doing unrelated coding. But something like a basic income could solve that issue instead of raising funds speculatively via artificial scarcity and a hope of winning the copyright lottery with a copyright that pays off (most code gets thrown away fairly soon). As for other tasks related to software, the FOSS movement especially GNU/Debian/Linux has shown what is possible, Maybe it is not perfect, but it shows another way is possible,
Apple and Microsoft may have won the mindshare hype game, but there were alternatives -- some of them better. Another example:...
"Announced in June 1982. Based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, this personal workstation was intended for interfacing with laboratory instruments to acquire and analyze experimental data. In addition to a regular PC keyboard, it had a touch panel for controlling experiments. It had a custom realtime multitasking operating system called CSOS, and could be programmed in Pascal, Fortran, or Basic. The 128KB memory could be expanded up to 5MB. Up to 4 10MB hard disks could be installed, as well as various combinations of 5.25- and 8-inch floppy disks. The screen had 80 columns Ã-- 30 rows in text mode and 768 Ã-- 480 pixels in monochrome graphics mode. I/O interfaces included serial, parallel, IEEE-488, and analog, with an integrated color printer -- a big package in a small footprint. I attended a nondisclosure presentation of this product by IBM in 1980 or '81 and recall commenting that if they stripped away the instrument control panel and interfaces, they'd have a desktop computer that was miles ahead of anything else on the market. Wrong division, I guess."
Personally, I think a Commodore pet with embedded Forth might have taken the computing world by storm (compared to slow BASIC and hard to use assembly) especially if it had included bitmapped graphics (which was an add-on board I bought):...
"The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) is a home/personal computer produced in 1977 by Commodore International.[2]..."
For reference:...
."
Minitel in France might theoretically have been the winner:...
"The Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. Rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout France in 1982 by the PTT (Poste, TÃ©lÃ©phone et TÃ©lÃ©communications; divided since 1991 between France TÃ©lÃ©com and La Poste).[1] From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet."
Still, the first interactive computer system I played with (for like a minute or two) was probably some kind of early computer running lunar lander software with an oscilloscope for display at Brookhaven National Labs around (guessing) 1975? So, government funded... A lot of people wanted such things. People were building from kits. Someone was gong to do a premade system. 3D printing is in the same flux right now that PCs were in the later 1970s. Someone is going to be a big winner there -- but there are lots of small players right now, some of which are attracting capital, plus a few big ones (like HP) that seem to just be misfiring somehow when they should have already owned the market (like IBM messing up by licensing DOS instead of using existing in-house software, inclusion a Forth made by David Frank).
If aspirin is everywhere even without a patent on it, and fancy clothes are everywhere without copyrights on them, why not personal computers and software? Does nature need copyrights and patents to produce oak trees or hummingbirds or blue whales or lactobacillus? Do (real) apples need to be copyrighted or patented so farmers will grow them?
Meanwhile, in the *real* world, millionaire (then) Bill Gates dumpster dives to learn how to write software:...
"Allen credits his basic programming skills to Lakeside School, the Seattle preparatory school where he met Bill Gates. "We were the only high school in Seattle with a (computer) terminal. The teachers wrote a three-line base code on the blackboard and gave us the manuals, and that was it. We were hooked," said Allen. That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus -- sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all -- down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Quoting a small snippet from a larger work with attribution in the USA is generally fair use. But in any case, how can the Free Software Foundation claim that code that links to GPL libraries even *dynamically* is a derived work if APIs are not copyrightable? As much as I am against excessive copyright, people can't have it both ways.
Others disagree though, although I think they are probably wrong (but its up to the courts etc...):
... Florian Mueller, who provides indispensable analysis of various intellectual property issues in the mobile industry, believes that whether an API is copyrightable can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. He is certainly right that the overall design of a system of APIs can show "creativity," in the same sense that a brilliant mechanical invention is creative. But that does not mean that copyright is the proper way to protect that creativity, if at all. Copyright extends only to "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression," and a system of API calls does not meet that test. It is not a "fixed" work in the same way that an actual computer program is. I will not address whether a system of APIs is patentable, but certainly the creativity that a well-designed API scheme might show is closer to the creativity that a concise mathematical statement (not patentable) or a new design for an engine (patentable) might show. In any event, simply because something is "creative" in some sense does not mean that it deserves legal protection, unless it can be shown that some desired level of creativity would not happen without such protection. I do not see any evidence that the dynamic and innovative software industry requires copyright protection for APIs to maintain its current high level of creativity. ..."...
"There's a dangerous meme going around that if Oracle loses its novel copyright claims against Google that suddenly the GPL will become unenforceable. This idea hinges on a misunderstanding about the difference between linking to a code library and merely using an API.
Some people also suggest the dynamic linking issue for the GPL would not hold up in the Supreme Court...
To add to the confusion, from Richard Stallman:...
."
How can he say that and still argue that dynamic linking to a GPL's library makes something fall under the GPL?
... The Free Software Foundation (which holds the copyright of several notable GPL-licensed software products and of the license text itself) asserts that an executable which uses a dynamically linked library is indeed a derivative work. ..."...
"This key dispute is whether or not non-GPL software can legally statically link or dynamically link to GPL libraries. Different opinions exist on this issue. The GPL is clear in requiring that all derivative works of code under the GPL must themselves be under the GPL. Ambiguity arises with regards to using GPL libraries, and bundling GPL software into a larger package (perhaps mixed into a binary via static linking). This is ultimately a question not of the GPL per se, but of how copyright law defines derivative works. The following points of view exist:
So, while they are at it, why not get the Supreme Court to rule on that dynamic linking issue? Of course, if GPL code could be dynamically linked to, then in practice the GPL become unenforceable as it was intended...
If the FSF can argue dynamic linking to GPLd code, which requires referencing API function names creates a derived work, why can't Oracle claim that an API gives them control over who uses it as creating a derived work? And further, if that API is "creative" enough to be copyrightable in that sense, when someone else intentionally makes a complete copy of that API, is that not copyright violation?
As I say elsewhere, I think copyright is now excessively long and broad, but I don't think this lawsuit is going to fix that problem. I think it likely it will make it worse if Google looses. Of course, Google may still "win" if it "loses", because suddenly it may have so much greater legal control over anyone who accesses its APIs for its web services and it may be able to prevent competitors from creating similar services (even if just by legal intimidation) or clients to its services without payment and so on... Could that have been Google's plan all along (to lose the lawsuit)? Which if so would seem to be greatly departing from "don't be evil" so I hope not.
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
See my other comments here clarification about it being hard "creative" work.
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Top down programming is a recognized form of design. With a bigger initial team, you could imagine Linus might have never written any implementations of APIs as other team member could have filled that in, but he still have made an enormous creative contribution by good design. Example:...
"A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition). Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into smaller segments."
What seems to me to be going on in the discussion here which disturbs me greatly as a software developer is that, in order to try to help win a political argument about interoperability, people are dismissing the creative aspect of naming things well and making good choices about module partitions. That is really really sad. It has taken me *decades* to get better at those tasks, and they remain hard, and I can still see how much I could improve on them. One pet project (the Pointrel system) I've been thinking about APIs for for thirty+ years trying to simplify and clarify the design. Maybe that is to excess
:-) but in any case, an essential part of a good design is good names and good abstraction layers, and that can IMHO take a lot of effort and creativity.
But rather than, as I do, people here saying, yes good APIs demand effort and creative understanding of the problem domain, and the issue is that copyright is (or has become) a bad idea because it would restrict interoperability, people here tend to be saying, no, APIs aren't creative because it would be inconvenient if they were given how broad copyright now is. I think the end result of that is going to be:
1. Pissing off software designers
2. Losing the Supreme Court case too.
3. ???
4. Profit for those purveying artificial scarcity
(my half-ironic site on that: )
Personally, I'm coming around just now to the thought that maybe most people on Slashdot really have never tried very hard to design great software API interfaces? Which fits the facts that most APIs I've ever had to deal with were fll of gotchas and confusing aspects. Contrast with, say, ObjectWorks Smalltalk, which in general had great APIs for streaming and such.
Maybe this discussion is an example of?
"When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem"...
The "solution" here (implied by Oracle) is that APIs are controllable by the copyright owner, and the problem is that APIs take a lot of hard creative work to get right? I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.
If APIs were not hard to write and required creativity to do well, why are their articles giving advice on how to do it better? Example:...
"Here are the main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:
Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
Easy to use ; single entry point, standard parameters
Hard to misuse ; explicit error message suggesting parameters values
Appropriate to audience ; I talked about such a service with several users, and looked at what the competition was offering"
Perhaps on that page is a link to (sad to point it out as I like Google more than Oracle) the "smoking gun" that might lose the case and leave us worse off than with ambiguity:
"How to design a good API and why it matters?" by Joshua Bloch, Principal Software Engineer, *Google*...
"
And the damning evidence goes on from there on how hard it is to write good APIs, and how important it is to do so, and, to my mind, how much creativity the process takes to do well. I would be surprised if Oracle does not submit that in their court case, so the EFF etc. better get on it now... Seriously, how can anyone read that document by a Google engineer outlining all the complexity involved in writing an API well and turn around and say writing a good API is not a creative act?
Of course, the fact that much of the better parts of the Java API were "borrowed" from Smalltalk is another layer of complexity here.
:-) But that doesn't really resolve the issue for Google to prove Oracle inherited a liability from overly broad coprygith -- unless, say, Google was right now to buy the assets of old Smalltalk vendors like ParcPlace-Digitalk (currently owned by Cincom), which I'd advise them to do this instant, but who listens to me?). ..."......
"This image seems appropriate talking to the new folks at the former ParcPlace-Digitalk Inc, of Sunnyvale, California; for it seems the $45m (in stock) July 1995 merger of Smalltalk powerhouses ParcPlace Systems Inc and Digitalk Inc was in fact as unholy and ultimately dangerous an act of constructive surgery as anything Victor Frankenstein did, at least to their investors; and just like in the old Karloff sequels, along have come a new team of eager re-animators, convinced this time they have the right therapy to make the revived old boy behave himself. Our tale begins in 1987 when Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (Parc) helped alumnus Adele Goldberg set up a company, ParcPlace, to exploit her work in the pure-play object-oriented programming language Smalltalk.
Then maybe Google would open source VisualWorks Smalltalk and I could start using it again (after paying about $9K for a license for it plus ENVY server back in the 1990s but not keeping up with expensive upgrades and anyway not liking runtime fees). Although, realistically, I'd still probably keep plugging away in JavaScript when not posting on Slashdot due to ease-of-installation...
Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas"...
But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?
Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for creative works (or sometimes even has a negative correlation of causing artists to just rehash more of the same old thing). Lot of studies are cited in these works by Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink to support my point:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"...
Also: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"...
A better answer to the issue of people having enough time to do quality work (including learning to do it) is to have a "basic income" for everyone (so, for example, monthly Social Security payments in the USA from birth, not just for those 65 and older)....
There are plenty of reasons copyrights stifle creativity these days, because artists can't easily remix....
Most, as in 99%+ (my guess), of artistic people are only held back by copyright, because very, very few people can make a living at licensing creative works as authors or composers or whatever, but they instead generally have to pay for access to contemporary novels and music and such. Some of that is discussed here:...