Mail Archives: djgpp/1995/04/19/04:09:26
This is my last post on this thread. I apologize for the original
post's testy tag line. I should have been more polite. The tone of
*this* post I do not apologize for. Protecting CopyLeft in its
various forms requires protecting copyright of profit-grubbers, too.
I think discussion of Copies Right and Left is relevant to this list.
Flames to poster, not to list (except for Mr. Appleyard, who of course
has public right of reply if he wishes).
From A.APPLEYARD:
I wrote:-
> May I suggest another way, cheaper than setting up a FTP server?
[Technical nitpicking moved to end.]
I wrote:-
> Let the site (university or whatever) keep djgpp etc on a notebook PC,
> already unzipped if there is hard disk room for it; and also LAPLINK. If
> Mr.X wants djgpp (or whatever), someone takes the laptop, and a laplink
> connecter cable, and a floppy with LAPLINK on it ...
Stephen Turnbull replied:-
> When I first looked into LapLink, I believe it had the standard
> idiotic licensing, which required you to buy LapLink for each
> computer you wanted to transfer to. Have they fixed this bug? ...
Must I bother with such fiddle-de-dees?
No, I can't force you and I'm not going to report you to the
manufacturer of LapLink. I said what I think of that kind of behavior
in my previous post. If that doesn't bother you, don't worry.
Who's going to bother?
Me. I told you, I didn't buy LapLink. Must I state explicitly that I
did not because I could not imagine myself resisting the temptation to
violate the license as I understood it? I care. If you don't, that
and my opinion of you are your problem.
If
I have a licenced copy of Laplink, and I temporarily copy it to the
receiving computer, who's going to bother?
Noone. However, you're violating the license, as far as I am
concerned. But that is *not* what you are talking about. See below.
Surely it's in the
nature of Laplink and similar that it must be on 2 PC's for it to
work!?!?
So what? The manufacturer can offer a two-for-the-price-of-one
license if he wishes. She can offer a temporary-copying-OK license if
she wishes. As I understood the LapLink license, it did not.
OK, so if I undertake to delete the Laplink off each
^^^^
So you *do* realize that you are massively doing something. I think
that something violates the license.
receiving PC afterwards: etc etc: but in the real world, at least
in England, there is a legal Latin saying "De minimis non curat
lex" = "The law does not concern itself with trifling matters".
This is not an individual, trifling matter. You are talking about
buying *one* copy of LapLink (or did you borrow it from a friend in
the first place, and get some techie buddy with a lot of scrap
connectors to make you a cable?) and making it organization policy to
use it to copy to multiple machines---otherwise it's not a
server-in-a-backpack. Simple computation by Microsoft's algorithm:
value of theft = (price of LapLink) X (number of machines served).
I wrote:-
> to Mr.X's office, and thus copies in as much or little of djgpp (or
> whatever) as Mr.X wants. A file server in a backpack!
Stephen Turnbull replied:-
> If "someone" isn't on call within the same amount of time as for
> the original installation to provide Mr.X with the sources, this
> is a copyright violation ...
DJ and Bob Babcock pointed out that this is probably not required. I
stand corrected.
When the server-man goes to Mr.X's office, he then laplink copies
in Gnu C only, or all of djgpp, or whatever Mr.X wants out of djgpp.
As regards the risk of Mr.X getting the minimal set quickly, and
later wanting the full form but the server-man is at coffee or off
scuba diving or whatever: it is a delay indeed: but when I got a
bigger PC and wanted to get the full form of djgpp by FTP it
certainly wasn't `on call within the same amount of time as for the
original installation'!, the net was dead slow and the server was
logged-in full, and I had to come in to work early one weekend
morning to get the full djgpp.
Give me a break. We're talking about policy, not the conditions on
the day in question. All I asked was that the sources be available on
that server-in-a-backpack, and that the policy state that requests for
sources have the same priority as requests for binaries. The former
either requires a much bigger hard disk, or that the attendant spend
lots of time reloading packages. The latter means somewhat more
delays, but is not required per DJ and BB.
If your local net is dead slow, that's your problem: spend more money
and get a faster net. If the remote host is congested, I suggest
archie -h archie.au <package>
archie -h archie.fortune.co.jp <package>
for a good shot at finding servers which *won't* be congested during
British office hours. The CopyLeft clearly does not make the server
responsible for network congestion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technical nitpicking follows:
Stephen Turnbull replied:-
> Um, what's cheaper than free?
Erh???? FREE!?!?!? First I'd have to buy a PC to dedicate as the
Nope; you are already supplying a laptop. It's tight, but you can run
Linux on a 386sx/20 laptop with 4MB RAM and 40MB HDD (I've done it as
proof of concept, but returned to DOS+DV/X for everyday work since
Linux didn't have a driver for my banana-flavored Japanese screen). I
bet your laptop is bigger than that.
FTP server, to run day and night, and PC's cost. Then find the
Does your server-in-a-backpack run day and night? If the server were
a 8MB RAM, 350MB machine it could easily multiboot Windowze and Linux.
Or it could run DESQview/X (although I don't know for sure that DV/X
is good about accepting incoming connections over a modem or other
serial line).
What's the time cost of the server-in-a-backpack's Boy Friday? Let's
say it's student part-time labor at 500 yen (= 6 dollars = 4
pounds)/hour. The system above can be had for well under $1500, or
250 hours. Will your Boy Friday do 250 hours of running around over
the useful life of the server?
If there are people on-site whose applications do not involve
Windowze, but only text (such as programming), they can run Linux +
DOSemu and serve 100MB of FTP and HTTP archives in the background.
(This wouldn't be worth thinking about on the 386sx/20+4MB+40MB, for
sure; I'm guessing at the minimum machine size above.)
space for it. And connect it to the internet. To run a PC as an
FTP server, would it need any extra boards or chips? My
If it has a modem, you're in (slow) business. You only need one
connection. Why do you have to connect to the Internet? You're
serving internally I thought. That's certainly the application I was
describing; I didn't ask you to compete with SimTel.
department's two Novell server PC's have to have extra boards.
Novell servers AFAIK don't have to have extra boards to be a server.
If you want to connect a Novell network to the Internet the easiest
most efficient way is to let the Novell network run IPX internally and
have the server act as a gateway to the Internet running on the IP
standard. This can be avoided, at a severe cost in performance I
believe (have no experience myself, this is just from reading Crynwyr
packet driver docs).
Stephen Turnbull replied:-
> Get Linux. OK, if yer runnin' Maxen you can't run Linux (or *BSD, is that
> right?)
Excuse my ignorance, but what are Linux & Maxen & BSD? I only use
#define Maxen pluralize(contract("Macintosh"))
Linux is a CopyLeft Unix kernel written specifically for the 80386 and
compatible processors. *BSD = NetBSD | FreeBSD | 386BSD are freely
redistributable implementations of the Berkeley Systems Distribution
version of Unix. 386BSD obviously was written for the Intel iAPX
family of processors, but I believe at least some of the *BSD kernels
have been ported to other processors (although not to the Macintosh
AFAIK).
PC's, not Unix. My PC has the Clarkson FTP system on it (but it is
not configured as a server).
--
Stephen Turnbull / Yaseppochi-gumi / <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ anon FTP: turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
Check out Kansai-WWW, too ------------> http://pclsp2.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
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