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Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

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Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#101

Post by direwolf20 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #91
kelnos wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the copyright holder can license as they wish. But the quoted terms of the GPL are in the license that the author is distributing with the software, so we can also follow the terms of the GPL and remove the extra restriction they just added. The author is trying to do contradictory things: add extra restrictions, but release under the terms of a license that allow us to remove those extra restrictions. If…

If I have a license that says "you may use this, you may not use this", then can people use it? Honest question, I don't know how self-contradictory licenses work. Do people get to pick and choose what they want to follow, or does the whole thing become invalid?

If you have a license that says "You may not use this. The preceding sentence is null and void. You may use this." then you may use it.

You may also use software without a license, if you don't get caught.

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#102

Post by direwolf20 »

kelnos wrote: post #86
tliltocatl wrote: post #8

IANAL, but the whole thing feels quite problematic. Should we interpret the prohibition as a licensing condition "a resident using our IP is violating the contract" or as an informative note "we are not compliant and we are not ever going to be compliant so a resident using the IP is violating local laws"? I'd expect the intent to be the latter, but would it hold in front of a judge? If the notice is a licensing cond…

> GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility. It's not even just that. The license expressly forbids adding other conditions and restrictions, and says that people who receive software, licensed under the GPL, with added conditions ore restrictions, can just remove those restrictions. If the author really wants to add a restriction like this, they…

Maybe they don't really want to add this restriction. Maybe they want a fig leaf, so when California asks them why they don't comply with the law, they can point to this and state it's not legal to use in California.

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#103

Post by direwolf20 »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #71

What's with the recent push for age verification? This has been around forever but it seems like just recently a bunch of governments are pushing for this.

A large number of entities are facing the same problem at the same time and coming to similar conclusions.

There's also a cabal that wants surveillance, but since the California law doesn't require surveillance, this isn't that. The California law just mandates a parental control feature.

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#104

Post by jolmg »

thayne wrote: post #93
jolmg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure where the line between "hobby" and "professional" lies when it comes to linux distributions. Many of them are nonprofit but not really hobbyist at this point. Debian sure feels like a professional product to me (I daily drive it). "Professional" means you're being paid for the work. Debian is free (gratis), contributors are volunteers, and that makes it not professional.

What about Ubuntu? Its a combination of work by volunteers and paid employees, it is distributed by a commercial company, and said company sells support contracts, but the OS itself is free. And there are developers who are paid to work on various components of linux from the kernel, to Gnome, does that make it professional? Is Android not professional, because you don't pay for the OS itself, and it is primarily sup…

I would argue they're not, because they're not fully under the responsibility of a commercial entity, because they're open source. Companies can volunteer employees to the project, even a project they started themselves, but the companies and employees can come and go. Open source projects exist independently as public goods. Ultimately, it just takes anyone in the world to fork a project to exclude everybody else from its development.

Mint started off as Ubuntu. Same project, with none of the support contracts, no involvement from Canonical needed at the end of the day, etc.

On a practical level, it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers whatever the case may be with regards to the employment of other contributors.

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#105

Post by fc417fc802 »

jolmg wrote: post #104
thayne wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Ubuntu? Its a combination of work by volunteers and paid employees, it is distributed by a commercial company, and said company sells support contracts, but the OS itself is free. And there are developers who are paid to work on various components of linux from the kernel, to Gnome, does that make it professional? Is Android not professional, because you don't pay for the OS itself, and it is primarily sup…

I would argue they're not, because they're not fully under the responsibility of a commercial entity, because they're open source. Companies can volunteer employees to the project, even a project they started themselves, but the companies and employees can come and go. Open source projects exist independently as public goods. Ultimately, it just takes anyone in the world to fork a project to exclude everybody else fr…

At some point it seems to devolve from a meaningful discussion about how things should be done into a semantic argument (which are almost always pointless).

> it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers

I agree when it comes to individuals. But it probably does make sense to hold formally recognized groups (such as nonprofits) accountable to various consumer laws. I think the idea odd that Windows, RHEL, Ubuntu, and Debian should all be regulated differently within a single jurisdiction given that they seem to me largely equivalent in purpose.

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#106

Post by theodric »

parasense wrote: post #24
drnick1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, it does not matter. This legal notice is just theater, as anyone from CA or CO can still download, build and use the program. Linux distributions will just do the same.

Certainly. However, The developer seems to want to avoid the $2,500 per violation by any child who accesses the calculator, and might see a dick pic... because that calculator firmware does indeed allow for image viewing, and application development. It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.

I had a program on my overclocked TI-83 in 1998 that displayed a single pseudo-greyscale dithered photograph of a topless Pamela Anderson, which has left me hopelessly psychologically scarred. Ban this filth

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#107

Post by mghackerlady »

tliltocatl wrote: post #27
mghackerlady wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant the userland specifically. By calling what is fundamentally a GNU system running on a different kernel just "linux" it makes people think linux and his crew made all of the userland, in part because saying a college student made "an entire operating system" is far more profitable for news agencies than acknowledging his important but overall relatively small role in what they call "linux"

Because the kernel is the irreplaceable piece. None of what GNU did is: there are numerous implementations of coreutils and shells and at least one non-GNU production-quality compiler toolchain (clang-llvm), a few alternative libcs. And many distribution do actively use the non-GNU parts. But none of this is useful without the kernel that is compatible with computers people have . And the only usable kernel we have i…

Oh, I don't discount that! That's why I find it important to specify GNU/Linux. Not only is it respectful, but it makes the very important distinction that it is a Linux system running a GNU userland instead of a plan9 one or a busybox one. Usually when people speak of "linux" they're referring to GNU/Linux though

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#108

Post by mghackerlady »

spijdar wrote: post #29
tliltocatl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the kernel is the irreplaceable piece. None of what GNU did is: there are numerous implementations of coreutils and shells and at least one non-GNU production-quality compiler toolchain (clang-llvm), a few alternative libcs. And many distribution do actively use the non-GNU parts. But none of this is useful without the kernel that is compatible with computers people have . And the only usable kernel we have i…

To add to this: I can appreciate the significance of GNU, especially in early Linux distributions, but the position of "GNU was the real OS, Linux was just the kernel" is also deceptive, IMO. Sure, a lot of the userspace was GNU, but a lot of it ... wasn't. Things like PAM, the init system, and the network config tools, off the top of my head. A lot of system-specific tools come from "not-GNU", too. You can't discoun…

On that note, one of these days I want to make the GNU system as it was imagined a reality. Perhaps with the linux kernel as its kernel, maybe with co-official status with the hurd

Re: Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

#110

Post by c3d »

ziml77 wrote: post #6

So DB48X provides a covered application store? (e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an applicati…

DB48x certainly has a GitHub site with freely downloadable pieces of software that can run on the calculator. For instance here: https://github.com/c3d/db48x/tree/stable/library

Some of these include contributions from third parties.

The problem is that the law is written without a precise enough wording that would ensure that there is no risk whatsoever for me. And the penalty is stiff, something like $7500 per child using the software.

As for mandating age verification, it's unclear to me how you think that it's possible to deliver an API giving age bracket info (in the case of DB48x, the idiomatic way would be an RPL command that returns that info) without having a facility to enter age or date of birth or something like that. So yes, everyone who reads the text interprets it as mandating age verification.

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