OT: click license (was Re: Software Licensing and Sanity (was...))

[Bill Vermillion]

Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Mon, Aug 02 18:39  
Fairlight missed achieving immortality when he said: 

> On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 01:39:30PM -0700, after drawing runes
> in goat's blood, Anthony Terrible cast forth these immortal,
> mystical words:

> > Basically you can challenge anything. I think most software
> > licensing is illegal and wouldn't hesitate in challenging
> > it if I had a reason to. You go to a hospital for surgery
> > or cell phone contract, you sign a contract that says if
> > there is any dispute you have to go to arbitration. Well that
> > clause is illegal and won't stand up in court. That amount's
> > to taking away your right to trial in a court of law which
> > no one can take away any of your rights. If the contract is
> > illegal it doesn't matter if you sign it or not it's still
> > illegal. If those "contracts" you sign before surgery would
> > stand

> Well, it may or may not be ruled entirely legal. I've seen
> contracts that state that if any clause is deemed illegal, the
> remaining portions will remain in full force.

First one I saw like that was back in 1966 or 1967 - for a group I
was trying to get signed to Polydor records.   Written by German
lawyers and it was one of the tightest contracts I'd seen.
One clause did specifically state than if any clause was illegal
only that clause was void and the rest of the contract was in
force.

...

> > long as I'm not copying their product and reselling it what I
> > do with it is my business. I can change it modify it any way
> > I want.

Not since the DCMA went into force.  Now you can look at the code
without violting the law let alone modifying it.  There are
software engineers from from foreign countries who will NOT travel
to the US for fear of being arrested and imprisoned for DCMA
violations.

> > I also think I could modify software and resell it as
> > modified software as long as I bought an original copy every
> > time I made a sell. There are too many instances of this in
> > many many industries and it's not illegal so I find it hard
> > to believe that it would be with software.

But almost no software is sold anymore - you get a license to us it
and the $$ you pay is for that license and use of the media.

...

> There could be legitimate reasons (besides legalese) why
> someone would not want you doing that, and would actually sue
> to keep you from doing that. Basically, if you take someone's
> product, modify it, and then for whatever reason disappear,
> then they might try going back to the original company for
> support. Some companies barely support their own products, much
> less 3rd party modifications. They don't want to deal with it.

And if it was like one manufacturer I contacted where a customer
had bought software that was bootlegged, the company offered to
make him legitimate.  It only would cost him the difference between
what he paid and the cost of the new product.  That didn't sound
too bad.  But he also needed to provide invoices with the name and
address of the person doing the selling - and he didn't want to get
drawn into litigation.

I found another local vendor who had sold the same copy of SCO
Xenix to three different sites I got called in to fix.  One had the
manuals, the other had the disks.  And all three showed no serial
number when booted up as he had erased any traces of that by
modifying the code.

None of the sites was willing to provide information for the person
to be prosecuted.  And that person had the gall to post on the SCO
newsgroup one time and mention he was an authorized reseller.

> Which is about the situation I'm in now with BellSouth. My
> phone line went wonky on Friday afternoon. I have a continuous
> loud hum, I have to use multiple devices going off-hook to
> actually clear the line to get a dial tone,

That sounds like one of your devices may be loading the line too
much.  You don't see problems like this much anymore but in the
past - before all the transistorized logie - you'd see a number on
the bottom of the device that was the ringer equivalence. I forget
the number that was 'magic' but if you totalled up the devices and
they went past the magic number you'd probably wind up with nothing
working.

The hum sounds like you may have a stray ground or capacitance.
If BS comes and it's our problem not theirs you get to pay for the
service call.

You could have had a spike somewhere that caused a device to go bad
that would cause this.

> and I can hear jackhammering that I've correlated to
> ring-signals, pulse dialing sounds, as well as modem
> noise, depending on when I am on during a call. The last
> representative I talked to even heard the jackhammer sound
> repeatedly, and all have said they can hear the hum on their
> end.

And if you have had a lot of rain recently then maybe the ground is
wet enough to cause some a slow leak to let moisture in and you are
getting crosstalk from other users.

> (Keep in mind this is a -completely- external problem--they
> have it traced and it has nothing to do with access to my jacks
> or anything even on the building...I'm told it's on the main
> cables somewhere, and they've verified this four times.)

It's 'somewhere' on the main cable.   You must have a backwoods
telephone company.  If there is a problem on the line they can use
time delay measurements and can usually pin-point the spot on
the the line where it is bad within about a foot - on a line that
is 1000+ feet long.  

> -again- at 5:45pm and they said that it was noted as a "could
> not fix" but with a first-thing-in-the-morning dispatch to be
> fixed no later than 10am tomorrow.

In that case you may find them with a little machine to drill under
the earth and pass you a new cable.  "could not fix" often means a
new cable run, so they have to schedule a truck with cable to do 
a reinstall.

> Sorry. I know it's even further OT. I'm soooo frustrated right
> now. The -only- good part about this is that my DSL is working
> fine. Go figure.

That's not hard to figure if you look at how things are handled.
Voice is basically carried on bare copper and must be able to carry
a current.  DSL is more like RF.  Not a great analogy but I hope
you get the idea.   

> When I first got it, I had -no end- of trouble until I put
> microfilters on the other jack in here because just bridging
> the voice circuit was killing DSL due to a rogue Caller ID box
> throwing the entire circuit.

That was putting  a load on the line and acting like a low-pass
filter diverting the high-frequences [DSL works above 10K] to
ground.  Whoever installed that did you a dis-service by NOT
putting in the micro-filters.  When our micro-ISP was reselling DSL
we MADE SURE that filters were everywhere.   Best way to handle
DSL is to split the line where it enters the building, and put the
microfilter there and make sure nothing else gets on the line you
run to the DSL modem.

> Oh, and as a sidebar that may actually be relevant to some
> here, I recall Tony Ryder having problems with VPN over his
> DSL a few months back. I -think- we traced that to his circuit
> being PPPoE and the extra encapsulating layer making VPN not
> viable, when it would work fine from his colleague's bridged
> DSL. When I asked someone more knowledgeable about it, I was
> told that the PPPoE encapsulation may in fact affect that and
> probably would, it pretty much verified it as far as I was
> concerned.

That's all SW not HW. :-)

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com