Frank Roberts - SOTL wrote:
>
> >
> > M$ is advertising for you to BUY XP, not lease it, not rent it.
>
> Best read your shrink wrap license. What you are buying is a rental license
> that allows you to use the soft ware not the rights of ownership.
>
Believe me I understand the "shrink wrap license" and its terms of use.
But I'll use car advertising for the analogy. Somewhere on the face of
the ad (in mostly readable) print is the word lease and elsewhere on the
ad are an outline of the terms (usually in unreadable print). But in
grabbing a few trades off the shelf I see truth in advertising doesn't
hold true for M$ and all the others that use "shrink wrap agreements.
> The method of transformation of shrink ware software was a big issue when
> such packages first appeared. If the software company sold you the software
> as they once did then you had the legal right to modify it or not modify it
> and then resell as many copies as you wanted. You would also have the right
> to stop anyone else from using the software and to charge them a fee for
> doing such. It was yours to do with as you please just like any
> physical property. If a software company sold the same software to two
> different people then the software company would be committing fraud because
> in the second sale they would be selling something they did not own. That is
> the basic definition of ownership.
>
> The solution to this problem was the rental license agreement. You do not buy
> the software but you rent the right of usage for perpetuity for an up front
> total payment of the what most people would call the purchase price. The
> difference in the 2 points is moot in most cases but there is one major
> significant difference. Since you are renting the software then the owners do
> have the right to modify, inspect, place restrictions on usage, or use it at
> their will. The software belongs to them.
>
They have the right to protect their copy written assets, but until the
M$ XP stuff came out they did not have the right to modify without
notice. You were always allowed to beg off the patch or update you were
offered, again not so with XP it just updates itself. I don't know how
everyone does their updates but I like them to age for a day or so to
see if they work. And as far as inspection goes what exactly is in
thoughts 100's of packets that head off to Redmond whenever we boot our
test pig up? Don't I have the right to know what my property (hardware)
is doing? The only answer we received was that it was some type of
debugging info and that they don't know if that "feature" would be in
the public release.
> This in many ways is similar to the GPU license. You do not own Linux; you
> only have the right to use Linux and any improvements you make belong to the
> public. If you owned Linux then you could forbid anyone else from using it or
> charge them a fee to do such. Major difference is not in terms of usage but
> in who the owners are and the rights the owners allow the users to exercise.
>
> These are settle points with major implications.
>
But with GPU license if I go and tweak the kernel to make some little
weird nic card work,the Tux wearing Linux UberSecurity Force is not
going to lock down my business or my personal computer by remote. If I
chose to share the patch good for me. But if I decide to be a couch
potato,watch a ol' Tom and Jerry, and run my little dental floss farm in
Montana, so be it. When did our personal property become his test bed
without any recompense? When exactly did we become a sharecropper to Mr.
Bill and M$ ?? When did tearing a bit of cellophane shrink wrap become
the equilivent of a major contractual obligation with all of the
liability on our side? The "shrink-wrap license" was allowed by the
courts because it was the only easy way to establish their assets by
copy write. M$ is distorting the whole ideal of copy write.
Off my soapbox now
Tony
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