[thelist] GNU / GPL

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 16:27 -0700, Joel D Canfield wrote:
    [responding to my original post where I wrote:]
> > Suggested reading: <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml>

> I don't accept the argument that it's intrinsically confusing or
> inaccurate to lump these things together, because, as a creator of the
> kinds of things in question, I see them as very much related, whether I
> need a patent, copyright, or trademark to legally represent my ownership
> of said item.

I've seen people mistakenly refer to something as being "copyrighted"
when in fact it was subject to either trademark or patent restriction,
which at first seems like nothing but in reality can cause all sorts of
confusion.

> If I use certain words to mean a thing, and the person I'm speaking to
> understands those words to mean the same thing I mean them to, I don't
> care what the dictionary or the lawyers say my words meant.

There is a bit more to it than that. As said at that URL:

"The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking
about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights
for physical objects. ... These laws are in fact not much like physical
property law[.]"

Now, looks like I owe a tip:

<tip author="Shawn K. Quinn" subject="Unix clock setting">
If your Unix (or Unix-like) system's clock ever goes completely out of
whack enough that, say, NTP doesn't want to touch it (or you don't have
NTP as an option for whatever reason) you can do something like this
from a root shell, assuming ssh and the availability of a trusted clock
on a remote system:

# date -u `ssh user at remote-system date -u +%Y%m%d%H%M.%S`

The -u option specifies UTC and works on both GNU date and BSD date, it
may need to be adjusted for others. (If you are absolutely, positively
sure the remote system is in the same time zone it can be omitted from
both date commands.)
</tip>

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>