Welcome to the LinuxFocus September/October 2003
issue
Patents in general are a very
bad idea because they promote monopolies and block the scientific and economic progress.
In other words they are good for a few individuals but very bad for the
society as a whole.
So why do we have patents at all? Well, the answer is easy: governments and
patent offices make a lot of money in short run. Of course a lot
more money would be made in the long run without the patents but a few dollars directly
into your pocket seem always more attractive than millions made over many years.
A good example of how a patent free environment can promote business is
the Internet. If TCP/IP was patented then your computer at home would certainly
not be network capable and of course the Internet would not exit.
So far the situation in Europe is that "mathematical methods, methods of doing business and programs for computers are non patentable inventions". This may change.
Software patents are especially bad because they cover ideas. Ideas can be
general and broad. So instead of patenting a specific shape of an air-plane
wing you may patent "any means to fly". You can block complete technologies
and things that you did not even dream of when you wrote the patent.
We must definitely avoid such a situation. Otherwise you might
soon find yourself being prosecuted for publishing texts or
software you wrote yourself. To draw more attention to this problem
web sites are now being closed down by their owners. Join the protest:
http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/index.en.html and close your
web site!
LinuxFocus.org Articles
Software Development
-
![[translated]](../../common/images/frame_tux.gif)
The MySQL C API
, by
Özcan Güngör
In this article you learn how to use the
C-API that comes with MySQL.
Graphics
-
Photo magic with Gimp
, by
Katja Socher
In this article we give you some basic ideas how to improve on your digital
photos with The Gimp.
Community
Applications
UNIX Basics
-
Automail for fli4l
, by
Stefan Blechschmidt
How to fetch e-mail with a dial-on-demand router
from www.fli4l.de.
The LinuxFocus Tip
You don't need nessus or other scanners to
check all open ports on an ordinary computer without firewall.
It is enough to just run "netstat -a". The output will look
similar to the one below and you can see imediately in the column "Local Address"
which ports are available for connections:
netstat -a
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 *:login *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:shell *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:pop2 *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:pop3 *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:imap2 *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:www *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *:domain *:* LISTEN
...printout continues here...
You can even go one step further and check which program
opens a port with the command socklist (normally
part of a package called procinfo):
socklist
type port inode uid pid fd name
tcp 513 1007 0 448 5 xinetd
tcp 514 1006 0 448 4 xinetd
tcp 6000 1133 0 680 0 X
tcp 80 1076 0 643 16 httpd
...printout continues here...
netstat works on any Unix system but socklist is a Linux specific
feature.
![[LinuxFocus-icon]](../../common/images/logolftop_319x45.gif){kind=small}
Patents in general are a very
bad idea because they promote monopolies and block the scientific and economic progress.
In other words they are good for a few individuals but very bad for the
society as a whole.
![[]](../../common/images/linuxgazette_button.png){kind=small}