Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent) - <AUTHOR> https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping-and-technically-prohibited-it/ <comment><USER3> Linkedin is taking this to the Supreme Court: [https://www.law360.com/articles/1237505/linkedin-will-go- to-...](https://www.law360.com/articles/1237505/linkedin-will-go-to-supreme- court-over-data-scraping)

No ultimate decision was ever made, and no, this doesn't make web scraping 100% legal. Wake me up when there's a new announcement because anyone interested in this already know this old news.

<comment><USER4> This is a really big deal. Currently (IMHO) the US Supreme Court is a wholly- owned subsidiary of multinational corporations due to the shenanigans that happened with Obama, McConnell and Garland, so will likely side with LinkedIn since it's the larger corporation:

[https://www.npr.org/2018/06/29/624467256/what-happened- with-...](https://www.npr.org/2018/06/29/624467256/what-happened-with-merrick- garland-in-2016-and-why-it-matters-now)

I feel like siding with LinkedIn here would open up the web to extortion though, like troll companies that would send cease and desist letters to all scrapers (even search engines). I think it could be argued that letting one company scrape when another is denied is discrimination.

Then again, I don't know how conservative and republican-leaning courts decide corporate law. Maybe in this case since so much money is at stake, they might worry that banning scraping would infringe on something like free speech and ruffle the feathers of some of the wealthier contributors in their base. Especially on the media side since I imagine they use bots in one form or another to find newsworthy stories.

IANAL (obviously!), I just find it entertaining/dismaying to ponder these things in these times.

<comment><USER5> The thing is, this is still all about a preliminary injunction. Even if the injunction is found to be without merit, that still doesn't provide a final answer to of if LinkedIn can successfully sue HiQ to force HiQ to stop scraping under the CFAA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "HiQ only takes information from public LinkedIn profiles. By definition, any member of the public has the right to access this information. Most importantly, the appeals court also upheld a lower court ruling that prohibits LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ's web scraping of its site."

Surely I'm not reading this correctly. This would seem to suggest that websites are not legally allowed to prevent bots from crawling their sites. Lots of sites have ToS preventing such things, are those legally void now? Are captchas on public pages illegal, even if you request the page 8000 times in a second?

"In this case, hiQ argued that LinkedIn's technical measures to block web scraping interfere with hiQ's contracts with its own customers who rely on this data. In legal jargon, this is called" malicious interference with a contract", which is prohibited by American law."

This is almost weirder. If LinkedIn wanted to force users to sign in to view profile info, would they be not allowed to do that because some company had signed a contract that implicitly assumed access to that data? If someone writes a web scraper for my site, and I unknowingly change my site in a way that breaks that scraper, can a court force me to revert the change?

Seems to imply that every business is somehow beholden to every contract signed by anyone.

<comment><USER7> > Lots of sites have ToS preventing such things, are those legally void now? > Are captchas on public pages illegal, even if you request the page 8000 > times in a second?

ToS are subservient to the law; you can (probably) terminate a service account from a user that breaks your ToS, but if the user does not have a service account (as is the case for HiQ, it doesn't seem they were using accounts for it), then your ToS does not apply, since you've technically not entered a binding legal contract with them.

> This is almost weirder. If LinkedIn wanted to force users to sign in to view > profile info, would they be not allowed to do that because some company had > signed a contract that implicitly assumed access to that data? If someone > writes a web scraper for my site, and I unknowingly change my site in a way > that breaks that scraper, can a court force me to revert the change?

IANAL, but I believe that'd fall on intent, and intent is often difficult to prove at a personal level, but not necessarily at a company level. If your intent for putting up barriers that happen to impact scraping, whatever they may be, was indeed to knowingly prevent scraping from a particular company, then you may be liable under this decision. This is the only part of the decision I'm torn on, since it's a bit messy to really prove such things. I'd be much more comfortable with allowing companies to take whatever measures they feel necessary to prevent scraping, and also allowing scrapers to legally circumvent those measures without threat of prosecution, assuming they didn't actually hack into anything.

<comment><USER8> > but if the user does not have a service account (as is the case for HiQ, it > doesn't seem they were using accounts for it), then your ToS does not apply, > since you've technically not entered a binding legal contract with them.

Are you sure about this? I am not a lawyer, but I believe that the Terms of Service applies to all users, not just those that explicitly set up a user account.

I have interpreted the LinkedIn ruling to mean that scraping public data is no longer _criminal_ activity but it still leaves you open to _civil_ lawsuits for violating the ToS of the website you are scraping.

<comment><USER9> > Are you sure about this? I am not a lawyer, but I believe that the Terms of > Service applies to all users, not just those that explicitly set up a user > account.

How would that even work? If I browse to any random public page of your website, it's served to me before you've even transmitted the terms of service. How could I be bound by those terms of service when I haven't even seen them?

<comment><USER8> As an engineer, I agree with what you are saying, but I think normal people and the courts disagree.

I think these sorts of contracts are called Adhesion Contracts ([https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adhesion- contract.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adhesion-contract.asp)) and we interact with them all the time. For example, if you valet your car, the valet will hand you a piece of paper with a number printed on it to retrieve your car. On that paper you will find an adhesion contract that is valid and real (although not as powerful as the types of contracts that you sign)

<comment><USER10> This does not work at least for software licensing based on precedents for shrink-wrap contracts, so again would not work for licensing use of data.

A paper served you by the valet is not an immediate contract as you can deny agreeing to it and service does not happen.

You cannot do that with a publicly visible website, unless you show ToS and require agreement before first use. If you allow a non-transferable license then said data cannot be used by a search engine. If it's transferable you just pushed the problem towards scraping a different bot. (Well, you could have a direct agreement with a few major search engines.)

Caveat emptor: not a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The toxicity towards web-scraping is really what makes me lose hope in the current web. People want their data to be public and all of the benefits that comes with public data but then they want to chose who gets to see it - it's a complete and utter paradox.

This precedent doesn't really mean much but is definitely step in the right direction.

<comment><USER12> One of my clients is involved in property tax collection and reporting. Property Tax records are public info, and their website allows looking up the records for any property without a login. However, the data behind this website it the _source_ of the public records, and not the public records themselves (which would be local government databases).

For years now we've been in an arms race with someone using a botnet to scrape all of the account information for a particular county. My client doesn't care so much about the data; it's the server load that's a problem. Normal activity for this site is a few dozen account searches per minute, but when the botnet gets through our blockade it sends hundreds of search requests per second, overwhelmimg the site. The operator of the botnet has NEVER tried to contact my client to ask for an efficient api to access the data, which they'd probably provide for a minimal fee.

Data hosting isn't free, even if the data is.

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't the solution be to offer a streamlined download (maybe even as a torrent if you're worried about bandwidth) of all the data then?

<comment><USER14> I work on a fully open data repository. The website has the API linked in 3 places, so when I find inappropriate scraping I block it with "HTTP 420 ... see <API link> or contact <email>".

Some people probably switch to using the API, but no-one has ever contacted us. They either give up, or run their scraper on a different computer -- I've seen the same scraper move between university computers, departments, then (in the evening) to a consumer broadband IP.

<comment><USER15> I really don't understand why anyone would bother writing and using a web scraper when an API exists. Does the API not provide all the same data/functions as the website? Scrapers are a big PITA compared to just using an API: they're much harder to write to be reliable, and they can break at any time, whenever the site makes even the smallest change. APIs avoid all that mess, and make performance far better too (on both sides), since you're only downloading the data you want, not a ton of Javascript and HTML that you don't.

<comment><USER16> APIs are often not as complete as the web interface, since the customer sees the web interface and normally the customer is what drives the revenue model of the company.

If pages are driven via an API, then the API is preferable, but publicly facing websites are often a mix of server-side HTML generation and API enrichment, for caching if nothing else.

<comment><USER15> In that case it seems that the webmasters complaining about scraping need to make sure their APIs actually provide access to all the same data, if they want people to use the APIs instead of scraping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The title of this post is misleading. The Court's decision related to HiQ's attempt to obtain a preliminary injunction. It's clearly an initial victory for hiQ in that the Court affirmed granting an injunction based on a significant likelihood that hiQ would ultimately prevail and that HiQ would suffer irreparable damage if the injunction was not granted. However, the Court never actually dealt with the merits of the case and, accordingly, stating that the case has precedential value is misleading. The Court itself noted:

"At this preliminary injunction stage, we do not resolve the companies' legal dispute definitively, nor do we address all the claims and defenses they have pleaded in the district court. Instead, we focus on whether hiQ has raised serious questions on the merits of the factual and legal issues presented to us, as well as on the other requisites for preliminary relief."

</comment><comment><USER18> German copyright has the concept of a "Datenbankwerk" (since the 90s).

E.g. the telephone book contains lots of boring facts that are each in themselves not copyrightable. However the collection in itself is copyrightable, as it required substantial effort to create.

It seems odd that US copyright law wouldn't have a similar provision, or that it doesn't apply here?

<comment><USER19> It does, and the result is that phone books and maps get fictional entries inserted in order to prove copying -- because it is perfectly legal to do your own work to amass the same data set.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry)

<comment><USER20> Like a Paper town or that time that Genius caught Google stealing their lyrics by playing with straight and curly quotes and writing a tool that watermarked songs by interchanging those quotes on the site. It was brilliant.

<comment><USER21> You might even say it was Genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Now many site owners are trying to put technical obstacles to competitors > who completely copy their information that is not protected by copyright. > For example, ticket prices, product lots, open user profiles, and so on. > Some sites consider this information "their own", and consider web scraping > as "theft". Legally, this is not the case, which is now officially enshrined > in the US.

Does this mean we can now scrape e.g. YouTube videos, Amazon reviews, IMDB reviews, Facebook events ... ?

<comment><USER23> Yes you can scrape them, no you cannot repubilsh them. Everything you listed is protected by copyright. You cannot infringe on copyrights because of this ruling.

>hiQ argued that LinkedIn's technical measures to block web scraping interfere with hiQ's contracts with its own customers who rely on this data. In legal jargon, this is called" malicious interference with a contract", which is prohibited by American law

Does this mean that Google's random recaptcha check is interference?

<comment><USER24> I think any ruling that says LinkedIn can't put in protectionary measures against automated requests is doomed to be overturned, as long as they're not doing it discriminately. Captcha, rate limiting, user agent testing, etc are all common tools to protect against malicious/unintentional denials of service. The question is what was LinkedIn doing, and did it specifically target hiQ while permitting others of the same class of traffic.

<comment><USER25> Why would it be an issue if it is discriminatory? Linkedin can use its servers any way they like, unless they ve promised their users that their data can be scraped indiscriminately

<comment><USER26> Because of the court case. This is just an injunction pending an actual decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm glad scraping isn't criminal. Applying the CFAA here is ridiculous. But saying LinkedIn can't put technical measures in place to prevent scraping seems like a huge stretch to me. Why should they have to pay server costs for persistent scraping, particularly from a company that is actively trying to harm them?

</comment><comment><USER28> So many ideas start to come to mind if scraping is legal.

Can we start to scrape Google Search in order to bootstrap building an alternative to Google Search? Search is a really hard problem (that somebody should tackle), but if we can leverage what Google has already scraped from the web and associated with popular search terms, we can use that to help train and validate our search model.

Can we scrape Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook in order to stand up a competing service that strips out all the ads? It's hard to bootstrap a social media website, but if you can import all the content from the existing giants, your site is no longer a wasteland.

Can we finally scrape and get rid of IMDB? I'd love to put all of their content on a wiki and be done with it.

<comment><USER29> > Can we scrape Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook in order to stand up a competing > service that strips out all the ads?

How are you going to pay for it? Subscription model doesn't work for search/social networks.

<comment><USER28> Ad-free Reddit would be sustainable if:

\- Comments are ephemeral, expiring after two weeks (no growing storage costs)

\- "Reddit Gold" helps to offset costs

\- Run Wikipedia-like donation drives yearly

\- Write everything in bare-metal Rust so that CPU is cheap. Likewise, make intelligent choices about schema and service design for scalability.

\- Don't continue to drive unnecessary feature work (that is usually just to drive ad engagement and growth).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> IANAL - but also ran afoul of LinkedIns data scraping blocks (and got a cease and desist letter) but what they said was it was a violation of the TOS.

This decision doesn't seem to affect that?

</comment><comment><USER31> >> _Most importantly, the appeals court also upheld a lower court ruling that prohibits LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ's web scraping of its site. This fundamentally changes the balance of power in dealing with such cases in the future._

This, I don't agree with. I agree that it's not fraud to send a bot to scrape public info but the site should every right to block a bot or person.

<comment><USER32> This doesn't sit well with me either. However, LinkedIn are trying to redefine a fundamental principle of the web, i.e. easy access to publicly available information, and they're doing it simply to protect their commercial interests.

It would be terrible to see the web compromised by a spat between two (in my opinion) scummy companies, and I think we could do with some hard push-back against attacks on the web generally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One question to those who dislike web scraping as they deem it infringes copyright laws.

Given that Google scrapes LinkedIn public profiles and add data from it to it'd index and when presenting search results, is it then not discrimination that Microsoft tries to block HiQ and not google?

</comment><comment><USER17> A link to the actual decision:

[http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/09/17...](http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/09/17-16783.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER34> I strongly disagree that not allowing scraping protection on social network is a good thing (reasons mostly from this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22182144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22182144) )

What I would do on Linkedin side is:

1\. Split public setting into 2 settings: public for everyone including scraping, and second choice that make it public for Linkedin users (aka banning scraping [1])

2\. Everyone on Linkedin who have current setting public would go though dialog to choose which one, with default setting to ban scraping (which is hard to criticize, since that option is protecting privacy more).

3\. If you allow scraping, the form should warn you about consequences, and make you to acknowledge them (which is again a good practice, if you want to expose your information to EVERYONE on the internet).

4\. Now you have users consent to protect their data from scraping.

Sounds like dark pattern? Kind of yes, but for good thing and it's hard to argue against it, since it increases privacy.

[1] Idea here is that I can allow anyone on Linkedin to see my profile, whether it is potential employer, or someone who met me at the conference (i.e. to improve my Linkedin experience). But I do not want that data to be harvested, by third party for any reason (specially, because they would then use it to to send me spam / advertising / prefill my profile on different website / ...).

edit: formatting

<comment><USER25> Scrapers can just create a user account then. They still seem to be covered by this injunction

<comment><USER34> Legal: It will be hard to argue in court that you have right to create fake accounts. That is definitely against TOS, and at that point Linkedin can sue the company instead, so I believe it would scraper would not be successful at court.

Technical: This is actually what you want, as limiting scraping per user is easier than per IP, since IP can be shared by users, so your rate limits have to be higher for IP address than for individual user. Additionally, creating fake account is more work which will in the end making scraping more expensive.

<comment><USER25> a real account could scrape tons of stuff given time

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is phenomenal timing for Clearview AI who in the last week was exposed by the NYTimes for working with law enforcement to identity suspects via their database of web scrapped images of individuals.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22173899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22173899)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083775)

</comment><comment><USER36> So, if company sells a product based on scraping google search results, google trying to block scraping would constitute "malicious interference with a contract"?

<comment><USER37> This is interesting to to think about, considering Google gets its own results from scraping...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I ran a company based on web scraping for a couple years and I heard never ending comments about how what we were doing was illegal. Thank god that conversation is over.

<comment> foxx-boxx You are abusing other people's websites without intention to buy something. It's a lot like stealing.

<comment><USER39> So... Google are the world's most successful criminal syndicate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Let's not pretend this is a pure win. There are good uses of web scraping, like Archive.org trying to preserve the web. But what HiQ is doing is looking at public LinkedIn profiles and then snitching to employers if they think an employee is searching for a new job.

It's easy to blanket say "web scraping is legal, do what you will". The tricky part is protecting people's public data while not giving a huge moat to giant corporations who control it.

<comment><USER41> That's the thing. Web scraping isn't really the problem here. It's what companies are doing with personal information. If LinkedIn started doing the same thing as HiQ, it would be just as bad (probably worse), but the legality of web scraping is irrelevant to that.

<comment><USER40> That's a good point, and we certainly should write our data protection laws to prevent LinkedIn from doing the same thing — but there's a crucial difference between the two.

I've consented to give my data to LinkedIn, and I can withdraw my consent and data if they start doing something I don't like. On the other hand, hiQ has vacuumed up my data _without_ my consent, and there's really no way for me to stop them other than retreating from my public profile. Certainly the legality of web scraping is relevant to _that_.

<comment><USER41> I guess that's the issue. We need laws to control what companies can do with personal information, even if it happens to be publicly available. I don't think scraping itself is really the issue. If you used mechanical turk to hire a bunch of people to go look and user profiles and write down information about them, you'd have the same problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This case does not make web scraping legal or illegal, it just sets a precedent that Computer Frauds and Abuse Act (CFAA 1986) cannot directly be applied in web scraping of public data for fair use. Web scraping can be legal with caveats which is, as long as you are just scraping a public information and do not re-sale it for profit without significant transformation and value addition i.e. a fair use doctrine is applied.

If you use bots to login using a username and password and than scrap the information, it's still wrong and infringement, as action of login binds you to an implicit contract with this website and by logging in you accept those terms. The ruling on HiQ vs LinkedIn is quite nuanced and if you are crawling and than repackaging that information and selling it somehow then there is a highly likely chance the precedent in this case won't apply.

Technical barriers like rate limiting and captcha are legitimate way to guard against not just web crawlers but denial of service (DoS) attacks, so it's about how it's been put forward by lawyer. So in general website can still continue to block like google, facebook, amazon and all the big sites are doing it. It's not illegal, I found a better deep understanding of this case based on explanation from a EFF. [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq- v-l...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin- protects-scraping-public-data)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/document/hiq-v-linkedin-ninth-circuit- de...](https://www.eff.org/document/hiq-v-linkedin-ninth-circuit-decision)

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone ever read any stories about the concept of "agents" where everyone had their own computer agents that did all the work and talked to other agents do all the steps like book your flights, tickets, order your food, collect/collate data for your purposes, etc?

We need to make the internet "Agent" friendly.. we should stop assuming the end user (end human?) will ever see any webpage on the internet.

<comment><USER44> Having an agent proxy for you won't last long. If that agent has connections to your friends' agents, your place of work, etc., then the protection provided by the proxy whittles away quickly.

To find you, all anyone would need is a photo of you, match it to an existing photo tagged as your agent, and your agent's online presence is clearly identified.

You could rotate to a new agent every time you go online, or randomly while online, but forget about making purchases, maintaining friendships or building "cred".

The only sure way to separate you, the person, from your online presence is to not have an online presence. For the company in question above, the only way to isolate yourself from their "running to tell Mom" business model is to simply not put your resume up on LinkedIn.

This ruling is troubling in many ways. HiQ can scrape the web, and now, apparently, so can every other personal information brokers out there. (Ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_broker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_broker), which naively suggests this information is only important to advertisers; it is also of interest to governments, police, employers, even the parents of the S.O. you intend on marrying, or the S.O. themselves.)

Is there a company that will track your online posts while you are supposed to be working, and "run and tell Mom" that you were doing something other than work? As an employer, would you pay for such a service?

I'm not even convinced that air-gapping your person from the internet would work in this new world. A lack of online presence, while not damming in itself (yet), could indicate "something to hide."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > The CFAA is adopted to prevent deliberate intrusion on someone else's > computer — in particular, computer hacking

 _hacking_ is commonly used to mean different things, and we imply from the context what the author really meant. Do any lawyers know if _computer hacking_ has a legal definition, or if this decision will lead to a specific legal definition of the term?

<comment><USER46> From what I understand it is very loose and can mean "you accessed our systems legitmately but we didn't want you to".

I think it was last year that facebook went after fake likes / fake followers companies who were logging via the login page and they liking / following. Companies in China / New Zealand and I think NY? got threatened with the CFAA (unsure if it went further) but it made the tech news at the time.

I don't think anyone hear would call writing a bot that logged in with actual details and performed an action (the same a real person could) as hacking, but facebook were saying as it broke the TOS, it was unauthorised, thus hacking laws apply. With their budget, I guess they get to decide what hacking is

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The EFF has a writeup on this decision from September that I found more helpful than the linked article: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq- v-l...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin- protects-scraping-public-data)

</comment><comment><USER48> So, the whole Google's search is based on scraping publicly accessible information from public web-sites. Nothing to be surprised about that the practice is declared legal. Otherwise they should have demand for Google to basically liquidate Google search unless it signs an agreement with every single site in the index.

</comment><comment><USER49> IANAL, but IMO LinkedIn goofed by using the CFAA. eBay and BiddersEdge had a similar case, and eBay won, preventing scraping of its website using trespass:

[https://casetext.com/case/ebay-v-bidders- edge](https://casetext.com/case/ebay-v-bidders-edge)

I can see both sides of this, and am not sure which is better. If a site is not allowed to block traffic, does that mean blocking a DDOS attack is illegal? What if the company doing the scraping is so aggressive about it that they are impacting performance?

One fair way (to me) would be to figure out how many pages a typical user looked at per month, and if a company is scraping the site, they are limited to accessing it like one customer; they can't launch 100 threads to scarf down data as fast as possible. This probably wouldn't work for most scrapers' businesses, but it seems reasonable from the origin web site's POV.

Another possibility would be to require web sites that accept and then publicize user submissions to give users a choice about whether they want to make their information public. If they do, the hosting site has to include the information in a publicly-accessible feed, like a daily compressed download. This seems reasonable to me, because the hosting site is getting all kinds of information for free from users. It's not like it would take a lot of effort to do a streaming JSON dump of the stuff that changed every day, and if necessary, they could throttle the download rate, but not so low that the data for a day couldn't be downloaded in a day. Ie, a competitor might be a day behind, but no more. Of course, the competitor would have to publish a feed too, allowing other people to lunch off of them just like they are lunching off other sites.

With LinkedIn, all of the information they obtain and publish is submitted by users, so for LI to say they "own" this information makes no sense. At least with eBay, the current auction price is not not something the user submitted, assuming it has bids.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ugh, this is yet another poorly written coverage of a court case that is more complicated than simple snippets and one liners allow.

This absolutely does not say that web scraping is legal (the ruling specifically notes other ways that it could be illegal).

It doesn't even say for sure that web scraping isn't illegal under the CFAA. This is a ruling about a preliminary injuction and as such all it determines is that HiQ has a good enough arguement and valid enough concerns that a preliminary injuction is warranted until LinkedIn wins a suit against HiQ to force them to stop scraping.

Take the time, and read the linked ruling. Don't trust poorly written and researched articles from companies that stand to gain from a particular interpretation.

</comment><comment><USER50> I have a question about the company in the article, HiQ. Their website says they identify flight risks. Does that mean if your company has a contract with them, then they will notify your boss if your LinkedIn looks like you are job hunting? Haters.

</comment><comment><USER51> I guess this means the web is lawfully seen as belonging to the public which seems both good and bad, because while it might be publicly accessible as a whole, each individual site is privately owned.

I'm pretty sure with any brick and mortar business, as a business owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without having to provide a reason.

That would be the equivalent of allowing to block bots / unwanted traffic on your site, except the brick and mortar case is way easier to prevent. If the person won't leave your physical business, you can have them removed by the police but to prevent a bot the burden is fully on you as a site owner.

<comment><USER52> > as an owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without > having to provide a reason

as a website owner you absolutely have the right to limit who does or doesn't visit your site, but that's up to you to enforce. Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal?

<comment><USER51> > Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and > writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal?

If you treat the website you're visiting as a privately owned business then you're trespassing on private property by scraping their site, assuming that site is trying to prevent that behavior.

If you don't treat the website as a privately owned business, then what do you classify it as? It can't be considered in the public domain because someone owns, operates and pays for the resources to make the site work. It is the site owner's private property IMO. By having the site public, they are inviting the world to check it out but they should have the right to disallow service.

Also, if the internet is supposed to be distributed and each site is an independent node on the system, how is that any different than an independently owned brick and mortar business operating in some location? In this case the physical world is "the internet".

It's not a clear cut thing, and I hate the idea of censorship, but I can't see this case's outcome becoming the norm. There's too many loop holes. Like, is going to your site 50 thousand times a second hoping to get new information from the public billboard a legal move?

Or, to put it another way, I'm pretty sure if you were able to mind control people and you commanded a billion people to flood a physical business so that it could not operate and serve its customers this would be quickly seen as an unlawful move in the physical world. You would probably get shut down by the state or government too for disrupting service for neighboring businesses and citizens.

<comment><USER53> You treat it as a public-facing building storefront, with you standing outside and taking pictures.

As long as there are big glass windows, the patrons and the information gained from looking inside are not subject to privacy, and are thus freely accessible to anyone walking by.

What you're not entitled to is the backend workings of the website - <USER2> application/code/databases, and credentials. It would be akin to going into a restaurant and forcing yourself into the food prep area and stealing the owner's keys, and contaminating the food that patrons eat.

Scraping too often would be something akin to setting up a camera tripod right in the building entrance, hindering the influx of new customers. While not explicitly illegal, it does hinder the operation of the business, and you will probably be physically removed at some point (this is banning abusive bots, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This makes me think of Aaron Swartz. If he had the strength to keep from harming himself, his whole sentence would have likely been vacated. This is a reminder to those of us with suicidal thoughts: things can always get better.

</comment><comment><USER55> Please not that I am personally more pro scraping that anti. However, this article's interpretation of this ruling (which is from September 2019) is overblown and suspect:

1) This is the 9th circuit only. The 9th circuit is known for being very liberal in these kids of rulings. There is a high likelihood that this ruling could be interpreted differently in other circuits and when it goes to the supreme court.

2) Saying "it makes it legal" is more of a technicality with this ruling and NOT practicality. There is still a LOT open to interpretation with this ruling (see 1, above). And lot of what it's saying just isn't found in the case. And again, it doesn't apply everywhere.

3) This is actually a much better summary of the case: [https://www.natlawreview.com/article/data-scraping- survives-...](https://www.natlawreview.com/article/data-scraping-survives- least-now-key-takeaways-9th-circuit-ruling-hiq-vs-linkedin) In fact, there's a number of better summaries are out there by people who actually understand both technology and law from when it happened (again, back in September 2019). Here's some others:

[https://www.cooley.com/-/media/cooley/pdf/reprints/2019/2019...](https://www.cooley.com/-/media/cooley/pdf/reprints/2019/2019-10-28-linkedin- data-scraping-case-shows-9th-circ-shift-on- cfaa.ashx?la=en&hash=38E87A1CB3C711D3112D127C687F2C26)

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190909/17571342951/big-n...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190909/17571342951/big- news-appeals-court-says-cfaa-cant-be-used-to-stop-web-scraping.shtml)

Honestly, it comes back to a lot of existing issues, like whether facts can be copyrighted (e.g., this is why recopies alone can't be), whether logins imply privacy, etc.

I personally think the ruling is in the right direction but again, I don't think this source deals with any of the complexity or the reality of what the ruling does (or still doesn't) mean.

</comment><comment><USER56> Finally some common sense. I'm also somewhat impressed that it "only" took 3 years from the initial lawsuit to reaching this precedent. I expected this to go on for a lot more time.

</comment><comment><USER57> This only affects the ninth circuit—which includes the tech hubs San Francisco, Seattle, LA, and Portland. It would only apply to the rest of the country if the Supreme Court affirmed it. Even then, a well-funded company or zealous prosecutor could say that it doesn't apply in your case because of some technicality. In that case you would need hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and a few years to litigate the issue with no guarantee of the outcome.

<comment><USER58> Is that how really circuit court rulings get applied?

I always understood each ruling on the rungs up the ladder to the supreme court applied across the land until a final ruling was determined.

<comment><USER59> Across the land within their circuit, over matters within their jurisdiction. Elsewhere the ruling is merely advisory in nature.

It gets tricky with nationwide actors though.

Besides some specialized topics like patents and international trade, nationwide orders and injunctions are the sort-of exception, which are based on a courts local jurisdictional power over a non-local nationwide actor.

I'm not sure what the generalized name of the principle (beyond injunctions) is called (I've heard it as a type of jurisdictional overreach), but the presumption as applied here is that LinkedIn, being in the 9th circuit's jurisdiction, also adhere to the ruling outside the circuit, absent a contradictory ruling by a different circuit.

(One of the usual requirements for the Supreme Court to even hear a case is that different circuits have conflicting rulings on a matter.)

But it looks like the Supreme Court is about to seriously reign that nationwide power back soon, at least for judges issuing orders to departments/actors of the executive branch.

<comment><USER60> > One of the usual requirements for the Supreme Court to even hear a case is > that different circuits have conflicting rulings on a matter.

That's not a "usual requirement", it's one of many factors that can weigh in favor of the Supreme Court exercising discretionary appellate jurisdiction (and it's one that weighs very heavily in favor of it, even when no other favorable factors are present, since federal law meaning the same thing everywhere is an important principle.)

<comment><USER59> Well of course that's what I meant by "usual requirement."

How else would one read it? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The article's title gives me the cognitive dissonance. Glad it was changed for HN. To add my own interpretation, "US court appears to legalizes X and technically prohibits it" \-- what is this "it" the court prohibits, and why do I want to assume the title's subject, which doesn't make sense at all. You don't "legalize X and technically prohibit X". Was the originally intended title truncated somehow?

</comment><comment><USER62> I always thought scraping was a fun idea, I just couldn't find the right use- case for it. I'm not a sports guy, and the big sites have pretty extensive API's. Something music related would be of interest to me, but I can already get updates on events like concerts (since the monopolies make a fortune selling tickets). I'm not sure what could be useful.

<comment><USER63> I build [https://awardfares.com](https://awardfares.com) together with a friend which scrapes airlines' award seat availability. Airlines' websites are horrible from a UX perspective so scraping the data and presenting it in a better way was a pretty obvious use case.

<comment><USER64> No British Airways?

A quick look shows a lot of award availability to China for some reason...

<comment><USER63> It's coming in the next couple of weeks! Both me and my co-founder had Star Alliance frequent flyer programmes so that's what we focused on first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> In the past the CFAA has been wielded haphazardly and even maliciously [1]. As noted by others these cases are far from over, but hopefully we're shifting towards a healthier balance between open web and private information.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

</comment><comment><USER66> Wonder if this means more native apps that are harder to scrap and less websites from companies that don't want their data scrapped.

<comment><USER63> Native apps are generally a lot easier to scrape since they rely on an API which can't be changed willy nilly without breaking compatibility with older apps. Also you can't do captcha etc on API calls in the same way you can on websites. And of course the data is neatly formatted to be machine readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Why do we have this editorialized title, @Dang? Why not the actual, neutral, title: "US court fully legalized website scraping and technically prohibited it"

BTW: This title is still not factual, but at least it's more neutral. It seems to be an injunction, which doesn't really mean "fully legalized" but what do I know....

</comment><comment><USER68> How does this not apply to e.g. Clearview AI, Cambridge Analytica, and other anti-privacy scraping operations?

</comment><comment><USER69> Anyone know the laws around scraping news article meta-data(image, headline, publisher, url) directly from a publishers website? As long as I'm not scraping the full article, could I have my users share the scraped meta-data between each other?

</comment><comment><USER70> So, Google blocks me from automating my rank checking. Will this apply to google now?

</comment><comment><USER71> Dangerously misleading headline. There is a circuit split on the interpretation of the CFAA, including on what counts as "unauthorized access". If you are sued outside of the Ninth Circuit, you might get very different results.

<comment><USER72> A circuit split? Is there another circuit with a contradictory ruling?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Reading this while heading in to work on a LinkedIn shuttle brought a smile to my face. I've always been embarrassed my company took this position given how much scraping LinkedIn does. Do as I say, not as I do I guess?

<comment><USER74> And as a user of LinkedIn this news is terrible.

I share my personal data with LinkedIn under the terms you promise, which includes not sharing it with third parties for commercial use.

If you can't enforce that then I can't use LinkedIn...

I've already gone through several 6+ month long GDPR chases to find out marketing companies are scraping my data from LinkedIn without permission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This wouldn't supersede any violations of the ToS, though. I guess it would mean they can't sue you (maybe?) but they could still kick you off their service. Could they still go after you for breach of contract?

<comment><USER63> Wasn't the point that they were scraping public profiles, i.e. they never signed up and thereby never signed any ToS?

<comment><USER76> ToS aren't signed. They are terms of service, not license agreements.

ToS merely need to be disclosed, and the site cna decline service if you violate the terms. A license agreement may subject you to penalties for violating the agreement.

<comment><USER75> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> If your site has a substantial amount of crawlers, that's an opportunity to offer an API subscription.

No one wants to "crawl" your data, they just want your data.

No software developer or PM ever said "it'd be great if this broke every couple of days and we had to scramble to figure out how to fix it" or "I'd love to jump through a bunch of hoops to read that H1"

Bot detection and crawling is an arms race. Bots will always win. I've droned on about this here in the past. [1]

Anecdotal evidence: Previous co-founder and software architect of a "crawler" that crawled ~17000 store and deal sites a day (like BestBuy, Gap, RMN). We circumvented all bot detection and were only busted and c&d'd once. By CouponCabin of all people.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182405)

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a feeling this precedent makes Google happy, if not that they helped hiQ. While scraping should be legal, nobody should be preventing server owners from using any countermeasures they like

</comment><comment><USER78> Not sure why bots are guaranteed access _as if they are a normal user_? Can I bar a mechanical bot from entering my open-to-the-public bodega? I think I might.

Maybe there's a need for more law here.

</comment><comment><USER79> Wouldn't be surprised if this is getting pushed through (although with a seemingly favorable outcome) because of gov't projects similar to ClearView.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The topic disappeared from the main page of HN in 1 second, although it had been at the first place for several hours. Can someone say what happened?

</comment><comment><USER80> Since this is probably granted for anyone with a technical understanding, it is nice to see that the legislative powers are on board with this.

<comment><USER81> Just because something is possible technically doesn't make it ok legally. I think there's still various issues though, as per GPDR I don't think another company can just copy that data from Linkedin. That it's easily visible doesn't matter for GDPR.

<comment><USER80> But the offender would be LinkedIn if it exposed personal data, even per GDPR.

The cases were people were convicted by getting certain webpages is addressed here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> IAAL - this case covers CFAA as interpreted and enforced by 9th Circuit. A step in the right direction but not a blank cheque!

</comment><comment><USER83> Does this mean Google can't stop me from scraping their results anymore? If I do it from an US ip address of course.

</comment><comment><USER84> So, when can I force companies to stop blocking my crawlers for their public data, and how do I accomplish this? :-D

<comment><USER76> Like hiQ, you can file a lawsuit and try to win. You might want to wait to see if hiQ wins their case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Strange. Something like allowing a combine harvester into a U-Pick-It farm. Because, its open to the public, right?

</comment><comment><USER85> Does this mean someone can scrape a restaurant directory website and create their own website with this same data?

<comment><USER25> i see lots of business ideas popping up in this thread

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Of course it's legal. Anyone holding other ideas has a fundemental misunderstanding of how the web and public spaces work. If you want something to be private then you make it private. If you make it public for the whole world to see, explicitly going out of your way to send the data to anyone who requests, it's all on you. Just because someone isn't using Chrome doesn't make them unethical.

</comment><comment><USER87> Perhaps linked in should switch to flutter . This type of technology will make it harder to scrape .

<comment><USER88> No, they should switch to _Windows Azure Forms_ [0].

[0]: Clean-room reverse-engineered server-side replacement for Flutter, written in WebAssembly, which compiles source files to an .EXE using a .NET- enabled WebAssembly precompiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I've seen a lot of visual scrapers in the last few years.

Do any of them enable scraping behind a login?

</comment><comment><USER90> Doesn't the ruling only apply in the states covered by California's circuit court?

</comment><comment><USER91> it doesn't look like from this post that web scraping is authenticated to be a legal activity, it's more of what can be scraped by a bot and what cannot.

</comment><comment><USER92> Is a DDOS with a bunch of HTTP GET's just scraping?

</comment><comment><USER93> Does this mean Google can take lyrics from Genius now?

</comment><comment><USER94> Of course it's legal. I don't know how you can make the argument that, if you have a public-facing website, you can arbitrarily make rules concerning exactly how that website is viewed.

</comment><comment><USER95> I hope Google eases up with the captchas.

Their only api as far as I can tell is their "custom search engine", which doesn't appear to match the results of their public search and is ungodly expensive.

</comment><comment><USER96> But When Will it be illegal to block scraping?

</comment><comment><USER97> It's the same concept as public vs private. If you want something private don't blast it publicly.

</comment><comment><USER98> Hmmm.

So, if I'm reading this right:

If it's not behind a login, it's free game for scraping. CFAA only explicitly applies once you (the service provider) enters into an explicit relationship of use with someone else.

I.e. If LinkedIn made an account necessary to even browse the currently "public" data, and set limits as a condition of being a user that would be fine, and may give them a leg to stand on for future claims of misuse of their systems since the behavior is already covered by a default terms of use in creating an account.

In terms of making currently public data more difficult to access in response to scraping, I foresee business evolving even more in the direction through which everything gets locked behind an initial contract step to ensure that people can reserve the right to refuse access.

I'm very wary of the whole malicious interference with a contract reasoning that hiQ employed. Just because you're relying on a public data source to be accessible in a convenient way to you to deliver a service to an unrelated third-party should not obligate the party of the public data source to deliver data in a convenient way to you. That type of thing would lead to ridiculousness like being able to sue the makers of the Yellow/White Pages for instance for changing things up.

Further, I still see grounds for remedy to LinkedIn in that they do still have a right to refuse service to anyone, regardless of outstanding contacts entered into by that person. The only leg to stand on that I can see for hiQ is if the court limited the precedent being set in the event that LinkedIn identified them, notified them and requested them to cease and desist, hiQ refused (or hiQ offered to enter into an alternate business arrangement and LinkedIn refused to accomodate), and then LinkedIn implemented the interfering measure. In that circumstance, I can see a malicious interference maybe being upheld, but I still have very little sympathy for hiQ because whether the pages are public or not, they are imposing a significant cost on LinkedIn to serve that data if his is systematically enumerating the entire public LinkedIn dataset.

To me, hiQ is a guy OCR'ing the White Pages/recording a storefront 24/7\. The details of how the Internet operates changes that a bit, but nevertheless, it is there.

It is a fundamental continuation of a trend I've noticed in Tech in that it is a field where practitioners/the businesses practitioners write code for for whatever reason assume that the platform running/servicing code they write fundamentally "belongs" to them. That any data their program can get access to is free-game.

I don't know where the disconnect is, or if maybe I'm just a freak in that I treat someone else's hardware as if I were entering their home. Even with the code I write.

You don't just waltz into someone else's space and start using all the amenities without asking. It's rude, and grounds to have admittance refused in the future. You don't do things to the system without asking.

It's like... Imagine most people are blind. You're a salesman walking into their space talking a good story or providing some service while completely ransacking their domicile for every shred of info you can possibly take with you. Filming the inside, the layout, rifling through mail and rolodexes, so on and so forth, while all they are aware of is explicitly what you tell them is going on.

As one who writes software, and automates tasks with computers, I feel it to be our duty to _not_ facilitate that sort of behavior. I just wish I could figure out a way to spread that ethos and keep the bills paid.

Otherwise I fear we'll lose any benefit of an assumption of integrity we've managed to build up. Hell, maybe it's too late for that given the way things are going.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm seeing some confusion about how this affects people outside of the West Coasts 9th circuit. It certainly _affects_ you if you are in other circuits. There's no question that this precedent will be brought up in other courts, even if they aren't bound to uphold the decision.

IANAL, but a bit of a supreme court hobbyist. For those unfamiliar, a short lesson on how the federal court system works that I think would be useful for HN readers:

Generally speaking, a case first goes to District Court. There are 94 districts in the country and they tend to consist of small regions. For example, Northern California (note these are for _federal_ courts... each state has it's own state system, which operates differently in each state). So you first go to one of these courts when you bring a lawsuit.

Now, the lawsuit is decided and one side is unhappy with the verdict. In a lot of cases, they might say, "ok, I'm unhappy, but I'm also spending a lot of money on lawyers, so i'll accept the decision and move on". Or they have the right to appeal the decision. If they choose to do the latter, then the next layer of the court system, the Circuit Courts come into play.

The Circuit Courts consist of 11 "circuits" plus the DC [0] and Federal Circuits [1]. When you appeal a case to one of the circuit courts, they _have_ to hear your case. It's your _right_ to appeal. However, if they think the case doesn't have merit, they can issue what's called a "summary judgement" where they issue an opinion without a full trial. In other words, if they think the lower court issued the correct decision and they think it would be a waste of time to go through a trial to appeal it, they can look over the facts of the case and make a decision without a trial.

At the next level up, you have the Supreme Court [2]. Unlike at the circuit court level, you have no right to appeal to the supreme court. Generally speaking, they get to decide which cases they want to take, so if you think that the appeals court screwed up and the supreme court decides to not take your case, there's nothing you can do. Unlike appeals courts, they aren't even obligated to look over the facts of the case at all if they don't want to.

Instead, what happens is that you _petition_ the Supreme Court to hear your case. So you lose your case at appeals court and you basically file paperwork with the SC saying "please please hear my case, here's why i think you should".

The SC turns down a lot more cases than it hears. So what makes them take a case on? One is if the case is super super important. Something like a case against Obamacare or something else of very high national significance. But typically, the SC takes a lot of boring cases too, and for the most part, this has to do with circuit splits. A circuit split is when two of the regional circuit courts issue conflicting rulings. So for example, if every circuit more or less rules the same way on a given issue, there's nothing for the supreme court to decide on. The system is working as intended. But if two circuits disagree, then the SC's job is to resolve the issue so that federal law is applied uniformly.

So in this case, the ruling was issued in the Ninth Circuit (which covers California and much of the West). Technically speaking, I can sue someone over scraping my site in Wisconsin (in the 7th Circuit) and the judge can rule in my favor (that scraping is illegal) since she isn't bound to follow 9th Circuit appeals rulings, whereas a district judge in Colorado or Montana (both in 9th Circuit) are bound by the appeals court precedent. And then they appeal the case in Chicago and the appeals court _also_ isn't bound by the Ninth Circuit ruling. But you can be damn sure that the lawyers for the defense are going to bring up that Ninth Circuit case as precedent. And generally speaking, the precedent does matter (circuits don't _want_ to create circuit splits).

Coming back to this case, does this mean that you have carte blanche to scrape websites anywhere in the country? No, case law is going to need to evolve more to get to the point where you can safely think that way. But, this is definitely an important step in that direction.

[0] Washington DC has its own circuit, even though it's just a city, not a region. This seems odd at first glance, but in fact, a lot of lawsuits against the federal government come through this circuit, which is why DC gets it's own circuit, while for example, NYC does not.

[1] The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a special case. Most of these circuit courts have to do with regions. So if I commit a federal crime in Florida, it gets tried in a Florida District court and then it gets appealed in the seat of the 11th circuit, which is in Atlanta. However, certain cases, based on subject material, don't get appealed in Atlanta, but go instead to the Federal Circuit. These tend to be things with national ramifications. Patents are a prime example, where you really really don't want a patent being enforced in Iowa, but not in Alabama. So for these special cases, we set up a different appeals system.

[2] There are a few times when cases go straight to the supreme court. For example, in disputes between two states or cases involving ambassadors and other public ministers, a case might go straight to the SC and skip the lower courts. But this is the exception, not the rule.

</comment><comment><USER99> RIP Aaron Swartz.</comment>


Don't Waste Time Cutting Emissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/opinion/25lomborg.html?scp=1&sq=lomborg&st=cse

<comment><USER2> Lomborg argues that, instead of spending a lot of money lowering carbon emissions (30 cents returned for each dollar invested), we should concentrate on research on non-fossil fuel energy ($16 returned for each dollar invested) to push the cost of renewable energy below the cost of non-renewable. He states that China and India are not going to invest in expensive energy while they are catching up with the developing nations.

The question in my mind is can we drive the cost of solar and others down fast enough that we can ignore coal? Or will our efforts to cut down carbon emissions be swamped by the developing nations?

Personally, I believe we should push hard on research.</comment>


Throw This Stock Away: TSLA - <AUTHOR> http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/06/30/throw-this-stock-away.aspx?source=ihpsitota0000001&lidx=8

<comment><USER2> sell Tesla and buy Apple: wow, it's almost as if he's front-running. :)

why do I say that (only half in jest)? because i bet Tesla has more room for growth than Apple in the future. my bet on Apple is that in the short-term it's going to continue to get better but in the longer term it will decline, if only because of Jobs age and health issues. I admire the guy but I think he's closer to the end of his career than the beginning, and Apple stocks are currently very very expensive whereas Tesla is stilly relative cheap in comparison. If Jobs leaves, and especially if just a few more people near the top leave, and the top of the company becomes more mediocre/tasteless/corporate-crapitude like Microsoft then I think it will flow downhill from there and they'll lose their "premium"/talent edge over Microsoft.

Of course, none of us can predict the future, but that's how I'm betting.

<comment><USER3> Funny thing about Motley Fool and Apple.

In 2005, I took Motley Fool's advice and sold my Apple stock. Their argument then was that the company had nowhere to go because the Windows PC market was too entrenched, especially with businesses. Maybe they could sell a few more iPods or something, but no real big growth potential. I had gotten about 50% growth to show for my investment, so I cashed out while I was ahead. 30-some bucks a share.

I wish I could find the article, but it's ancient by internet standards, and probably buried by a couple of CMS migrations. My experience is only one data point, but oh wow were they wrong on that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Consumers paid as much as $599 for the first iPhones three years ago. They're paying a third as much for superior devices now."

Investment advisers who can't do the simple maths required for deciphering mobile pricing schemes? Next...

<comment><USER5> _Investment advisers who can't do the simple maths required for deciphering mobile pricing schemes? Next..._

Keep in mind that these are the same people that gave the subprime CDOs AAA ratings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I kind of agree with his F recommendation. They have nowhere to go but up, after all.

I was recently looking at my own company's stock price, and considering whether to buy it. 3 years ago, the share price was about $60. Then the finance problem came along, and now it's $15 (up from $4). I don't think it has anywhere to go but up to its original value; after all, the company is bigger and stronger now. And, 1000 shares is actually affordable, and would give me the opportunity to make something like $50,000 if the company recovers. It almost feels like I'm working at a startup, except one that has billions of dollars in capital.

If only we could get some IKEA furniture :)

<comment><USER6> Sorry if I'm missing the obvious but what company do u work for? I'll put 1k on that bet!

<comment><USER5> If I name the company, it makes the post sound like "investment advice" rather than "random thought going through my head".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like the only meat of the article is the following:

> I think there are economies of scale that will fail to materialize for a > company targeting to move 20,000 of its sedans annually in a couple of > years. Drivers who may be drawn to the novelty may begin to fret over > service and parts.

That is a neat opinion, but it would be more interesting to explain in detail why he believes this. Is there any evidence that this is not possible or is it just a gut feeling without any due diligence? Basically, I think Toyota's massive investment in TSLA carries a little more weight than this article and I'd like to see some actual research before "throwing it away".

</comment><comment><USER8> The Motley Fool is itself a contrary indicator. The real question is should anyone be buying equities right now....

</comment><comment><USER9> _Yes, Tesla is cool, but it's also likely several years away from profitability_

I think an investment advice without a timeframe is not good advice. So for someone who is expecting a capital gain in 10 years from now this is not the best advice.

 _I'm all for buying into Tesla when it's at least closer to proving itself_

This contradicts two rules of stock markets: (1) Buy the rumor, sell the news and (2) Buy cheap, sell expensive.

<comment><USER10> Does it? How exactly do you determine Tesla is cheap (or expensive)?

The business is set to lose $120M this year and according to the prospectus for the stock that I'm flipping through - they are basically betting their future on the $60K model working out.

I'm not saying Tesla isn't a buy, but what I am saying is that the company is next to impossible to value. So when the author says it is good to wait till the company has proven itself a bit - I think he means when we can get an inkling of what kind of money they will earn which is probably after the $60K model comes out.

Being able to value what you're buying is what gets you from speculating to investing.

<comment><USER9> A long bet is not speculation. Nobody knows whether Tesla is going to fail or not. But since it's an IPO you can 'bet' that is the best price to buy in the long term.

And for me speculation is buying BP's stock.

<comment><USER10> Betting is speculating. "Speculation is a financial action that does not promise safety of the initial investment along with the return on the principal sum."

And I agree - speculating is buying BP stock. David Barse of Third Avenue even said so the other day on Bloomberg. Third Avenue's ethos is to invest in companies that are "safe and cheap."

Tesla is similar to BP in that you don't really have any indication of what the future will be like. In BP's case it is because nobody knows the future costs associated with the spill and how that will affect their earnings. With Tesla, the company has such a limited operating history with no history of profits that its future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Setting aside fool.com's slide into arbitrary pop-wall street drivel on the level of Jim Cramer, my main concern about investing in Tesla at this point is the competition. Nissan is going to have it's Leaf all electric vehicle out very soon, and not far behind is the Chevy Volt - both vehicles _significantly_ under cut the Model S in price and will be on the market sooner.

They had an OK if under whelming run with the Tesla Roadster, and I applaud Elon Musk for beating the majors to market with an all electric highway going car - but to bet the company on a luxury electric vehicle is very very dangerous. Something to consider is the recent cool response that Lexus' 200h received compared to the Prius.

I will be watching from the side lines on Tesla whether they sink or swim. If people interested in the electric and alternative fuel vehicle sector, I'd recommend looking into Cummins Inc (CMI) - a company which is actually making good money in this sector, growing nicely - and may be off your radar.

</comment><comment><USER12> I bought a few shares of Tesla, not really to make money, more so to support the company and get in on the first U.S. car maker IPO since Ford in 1956. I've never traded before, and really had no urge to, but this was _interesting_ and I had $100 to burn on a gamble.

I bought at $18.50ish. The following day there was a high of $30. Of course, today, it's back down to about $21, but for that brief moment you could have made a bunch of money. Which explains the dip today.

Personally, I like Tesla as a company and I think any investment in their company should be seen as a gamble, but a long one. This is a car company, something that has to be built and proven, not a stock that will spike due to new iPhones or what not.

If you're going to buy Apple, wait for the lull. We're still on iPhone 4 volatility at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Drivers who may be drawn to the novelty may begin to fret over service and parts."

While Tesla certainly needs to build our a service and parts infrastructure, this will likely be far less challenging than with a normal car. This is because the vastly simplified nature of electric motors as compared to internal combustion, to wit:

"The typical four-cylinder engine of a conventional car comprises over a hundred moving parts. By comparison, the motor of the Tesla Roadster has just one: the rotor."

Such simplicity should, in theory, lead to less frequent, less expensive, and less parts-intensive maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER14> I guess there's a 90% chance he's right (Tesla is overpriced) and a 10% chance Tesla will be worth 50x in a few years. But I don't have the funds to act on that assumption.

<comment><USER15> hmm. 0.10x50x$23 = $115

Given those probabilities it seem like a good investment. Or for the less risky version, dollar cost averaging.

You use something like share builder: Every month invest $100.

1month - $100 price of stock 25.0 Stock own:- 4

2month - $200 price of stock 20.0 Stock own:- 9

3month - $300 price of stock 20.0 Stock own:- 14

4month - $400 price of stock 10.0 Stock own:- 24

5month - $500 price of stock 10.0 Stock own:- 34

6month - $600 price of stock 5.0 Stock own:- 54

7month - $700 price of stock 5.0 stock own:- 74

8month - $800 price of stock 5.0 stock own:- 94

9month - $900 price of stock 10.0 stock own:- 104

10month -$1000 price of stock 20.0 stock own:- 109

Overall value of stock own is 109*20 = 2180. Profit:= $2180-$1000 = $1180

This is an exaggerated example and I only have knowledge of dollar cost average in theory, so anybody have real world experience, jump into the conversation.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging>

<comment><USER8> Dollar cost averaging to zero is still zero. Best to stay away from hot IPO stocks until they have a history of earnings.

<comment><USER15> hmm...Risk a $1000 that can degrade to $0 or go to $50,000. The bottom is capped at $0, you cant do no worst, limited downside and unlimited upside. I think it's worth some disposable income.

<comment><USER16> Um... that's true of buying any stock, right? So I'm not sure the logic allows you to make any kind of comparative decision.

<comment><USER17> Not quite. Most stocks don't have 50x potential. (I'm not saying that Tesla does.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


McDonald's to close all UK restaurants - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51999604 <comment><USER2> It's not Waffle House, so it's not time to panic yet.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/features/if...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/features/if- waffle-house-is-closed-its-time-to-panic/amp/)

<comment><USER3> Please don't perpetuate the web cancer which is AMP.

<comment><USER2> I'm not editing the URL with my thumbs. Is there a convenient way to avoid it on mobile?

Maybe HN should just automatically rewrite AMP links to avoid these inevitable comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this comes to the US my disaster preparedness plans will be seriously compromised...

In theory drive through should be the best possible food mechanism in terms of risk to the workers (and patrons). If they could arrange for contactless payment (already possible, just affix a tap reader to the side of the drive through window), and some way to serve the food while keeping the window closed (a shelf extending out from the window and a policy that they won't open their window until you close yours?), drive through could be a real solution to pandemic food supply.

Sure as hell beats a bunch of people in the same supermarket breathing all over the produce and right on the cashier.

<comment><USER5> >Sure as hell beats a bunch of people in the same supermarket breathing all over the produce and right on the cashier.

going to macdonalds twice a day is definitely riskier than getting groceries at the supermarket once a week. most of the food is packaged, and the stuff that isn't can be thoroughly washed before eating it. even for the stuff that isn't packaged and can't be washed, coronavirus isn't known to last longer than three days, so you can just buy it and let it sit.

contrast that to the multiple different staff preparing your food, which you then immediately stick in your mouth.

<comment><USER6> "which you then immediately stick in your mouth."

Sticking the food into your mouth isn't much of a concern, there's no evidence that covid-19 can transmit "foodborne".

The actual issue is an infected food prep worker contaminating the wrapper or the food itself, you touching the wrapper or the food, then touching your eyes or nose prior to washing your hands.

<comment><USER7> In theory, so long as one does not make contact with their nose or eyes, except in a shower (after washing hands), all infections can be prevented, besides airborne-based intake? Has it been established that infection cannot be caught by consumption of contaminated food?

<comment><USER8> You can't prove a negative.

There's not been any documented occurrences of it. But most people probably don't know how they got infected either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > McDonald's UK boss, Paul Pomroy, said: "Over the last 24 hours, it has > become clear that maintaining safe social distancing whilst operating busy > takeaway and Drive Thru restaurants is increasingly difficult and therefore > we have taken the decision to close every restaurant in the UK and Ireland > by 7pm on Monday 23 March.

A lot of Americans are relying on this method of food distribution. It seems inevitable that closures of drive-thrus will begin happening in the US as well. Food shortages at grocery stores are not uncommon today in many cities. It only takes one positive test to shut down a food distribution center.

I doubt many have considered just how precarious food delivery is at the moment.

<comment><USER10> I'm deeply worried about the US food supply in 4-6 weeks time, not because of availability but because of a lack of healthy people to process, transport and distribute the food. Given the sorry state of migrant farm workers in the US [0], it won't take much for infections to spread.

[0] [http://www.ncfh.org/uploads/3/8/6/8/38685499/fs- migrant_demo...](http://www.ncfh.org/uploads/3/8/6/8/38685499/fs- migrant_demographics.pdf)

<comment><USER8> As ever, it's the vegetable supply that is in question. Calories come from grains and potatoes and such that are heavily mechanized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Arguably this could improve people's health prospects on two fronts simultaneously.

I note that the CEO here basically stepped up because the UK government hadn't -- it's doubtless not easy, but the _best_ thing about this story is that he's said 'we'll match our casual worker's shift pay up until early April' (when the UK relief package for casual workers is meant to be implemented).

I fear a lot of my risk has, and will continue to, come from casual workers who simply can't afford to pay rent or eat if they don't head into work. So far I've heard the UK's the only place so far that's come out with a financial plan to mitigate this risk.

<comment><USER12> The US is currently passing its own stimulus plan that will ship at least $500B to the bottom half of earners. It seems like the ETA for passing the bill is mid-week.

<comment><USER13> > to the bottom half of earners.

Last I heard it was really for middle-income earners, as there was a phase-in income floor at around $50k/yr and a phase-out at around $75k/yr.

Has this changed?

<comment><USER12> The last article I read was this FT article published two days ago: [https://www.ft.com/content/1f8e5a3a-6a58-11ea-800d-da70cff6e...](https://www.ft.com/content/1f8e5a3a-6a58-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3)

The article says the Republicans are proposing $1,200 per individual who earns below a certain income and $500 per child, while the Democrats are proposing $2000 per month to all individuals and $1000 per month to all children.

They're apparently stuck on how the corporate bailouts will work.

<comment><USER14> Seems like scope creep. Just do the corporate bailouts in a different bill. Ship that $$$ for the working class immediately.

And seriously fuck Boeing. They did this to themselves. No bailouts, only loans. $50 billion bailout when they spent billions buying back stocks to enrich their top investors and execs. Should have saved for a rainy month. I'm sure without a bailout they'll learn a lesson and figure shit out. It's not the first time. AirBus is hit just as hard.

Basically we should ensure people have enough to live by and get through this period. Everything else will take care of itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a big deal and something governments should have in their extensive plans they created years ago.

Using McDonalds as distribution points has been talked about because they have the process and infrastructure. People also feel safe there.

But I suspect like everything, it's just what some government officials think today that matters. So they will react on the fly.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is good, right?

<comment><USER17> Not for shift workers in healthcare / transport / retail who were using fast- food outlets when normal shops were closed.</comment></comment>


Apple replaces Samba for Windows networking services - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_10_7_lion_server_apple_replaces_samba_for_windows_networking_services.html <comment><USER2> If they can make it work and well integrated, that would be great. The Samba integration on OSX Server is, IMHO, extremely subpar. I had problems with file permissions and ownership getting set correctly. And that's _just for fileserving_ , which samba has had downpat for years, not things like having it be a DC in a AD setup. I know what the options are to have samba do what I want, but there is no place in the lowest-common-denominator-of-file-sharing- service-configuration GUI to set them. And you really want to avoid hand editing the GUI maintained configuration files because they get overwritten.

<comment><USER3> "Extremely subpar" may be overly charitable from my experience. We had constant problems that have pretty much disappeared since we replaced it with a machine running Windows Server 2008 R2.

My biggest gripe was discovering that for a user foo, you can't just give the user permission to access a file on a network share through the GUI, you must also make sure that foo can access the file at the Unix level. Potentially I guess if they're building from the ground up they can get better integration, though I'm skeptical of their ability to do better than Samba.

<comment><USER2> _"Extremely subpar" may be overly charitable from my experience._

I like to say that anyone who thinks all Apple products are designed well and work as you expect means that person has never used OSX Server.

 _My biggest gripe was discovering that for a user foo, you can't just give the user permission to access a file on a network share through the GUI, you must also make sure that foo can access the file at the Unix level._

In some sense, this is the way samba works (it uses file system permissions for user share mode, once they've been authenticated, unless you override it with things like the _force user_ , _force group_ , or _force mode_ parameters -- which you can't effectively set on OSX). Unfortunately, since the GUI hides actual samba configuration from you, you never find this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To this I say, "good riddance." Samba is a pretty horrible implementation of a pretty horrible protocol. It was originally built by systems administrators, so I'd say that the system is more "accreted" (like a stalactite) rather than really designed. Samba is incredibly hard to extend and maintain and the primary developers are more wankerish and ideologically motivated than commercial vendors would like. Primarily for these reasons, but also for licensing reasons, EMC, NetApp, other storage vendors, Oracle, and now Apple have all switched over to private implementations. I believe Sun's effort started long before protocol documentation was available from Microsoft, but the Samba developers do deserve credit for doing some incredibly painful reverse engineering, even if that reverse engineering is sometimes incomplete.

<comment><USER5> That's an interesting perspective.

I had been under the impression that the concept/implementation was fine, until Microsoft started diddling with the system in order to mess them around.

Specifically: wasn't Samba based on a 'clean room' implementation of some Microsoft protocol or something like that? And when it took off Microsoft were in the middle of their 'kill Linux in the enterprise at all costs' jihad and so they kept changing the protocol that the Samba guys were trying to interface/interact with?

<comment><USER4> In a word, no. Microsoft could not change the protocol because it still had to support the hundreds of millions of Microsoft Windows clients out in the field. With Vista, Microsoft cleaned up the protocol a bit (SMB2), but it was the Samba team's paranoid fantasy that this somehow applied to them. Really, it was a long-overdue revision which helped performance tremendously.

While the Samba team had a huge task, this does not excuse the extremely crappy implementation over the years: corrupt TDBs, lack of change notify, no native ACL support, oplock crashes due to the non-asynchronous, single threaded nature of each smbd, horrible Winbind scalability problems, domain join bugs, no real named pipe abstraction layer, no alternate data stream support, etc. And the code is just horrible to look at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Solaris also replaced Samba with in-house code: <http://blogs.sun.com/amw/entry/cifs_in_solaris>

IIRC this is a lot easier than it used to be now that MS has to publish protocol specs.

<comment><USER7> Cifs is implemented at a lower level in the stack than Samba; the primary upshot of this from my perspective is that you can only export a files in a single file system using cifs. If you have one file system mounted on a path within another, or symlinks that cross file systems, they will appear as empty directories or broken files, respectively. Given that a major reason for using ZFS is the ease with which you can use multiple file systems with different configurations all drawing from the same storage pool, this is a pretty severe drawback.

<comment><USER4> The flipside is that you get coherent oplock and sharemode locking with NFS and local accesses, reasonable ACL/identity management solution across all protocols, efficient support for file change notifications, etc. For these reasons I consider the in-kernel solution to be far superior feature wise as well as performance wise.

<comment><USER7> Oplocks are an optimization I'm not in much need of; 100MB/sec transfers do just fine. That sharemode locking is by and large ignored I consider an advantage of Samba, as in my personal environment, I do not care if some program wants to exclude readers or writers, I prefer to make those choices. I don't have any applications that treat files on a file share as a multi-user database like the era of Paradox etc.; those days are long gone.

I think ACLs are a bug, not a feature. They are too complex to administer both correctly and efficiently; a capability-oriented approach would be better, but that's fantasy, alas. Again, POSIX permission bits do just fine for my use cases.

Reliable FCNs would be nice though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> i have lately been writing a simple "samba" client for iOS (<https://github.com/38leinaD/tango>) and after that experience i must say to the developer doing the samba replacement at apple: poor bastard; you are in for a world of pain!

It is really a horrible protocol where you can see how it evolved and was extended from windows version to version...

<comment><USER9> Setting up a working file server with basic authentication is almost enough to confirm this. There might be valid reasons for all of the configuration options, but the avarage user will never need more than 10% of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The GPL has done a lot of good, but I think it is rather hobbled by being tied so intimately to the concept of 'linking', which has a very clear technical meaning when talking about C/C++, but becomes a lot fuzzier when applied to other languages.

This was fine back when all software was written in C/C++... except that was of course _never_ the case.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm confused, which part of the GPL v3 makes it impossible for Apple to distribute?

<comment><USER11> Nothing prevents redistribution, v3 seems to be equal to v2 in all the code sharing requirements. The two big-ticket additions seem to be the prevention of "tivoization" by having to distribute the keys to sign software to run on the device you distribute with GPLv3 software in it, and the requirement that if you grant some users a license to one of your patents you're granting that to every user of the GPLv3 software you distribute.

One reason Apple would care is it is now shipping a bunch of locked down hardware (the iDevices). Although those probably don't run Samba right now they may have set up a general policy to not have that risk.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Vers...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Version_3)

<comment><USER12> A bigger problem may be licenses to other people's patents. Suppose Apple distributes Samba, and suppose someone _NOT_ Apple owns a patent that Samba infringers. That party sues Apple, and it becomes clear to Apple that they are going to lose. Let's also assume Apple's Samba has some changes, so it is not 100% identical to the upstream.

It looks like GPLv3 only gives Apple the option of stopping distributing Samba, or of finding a way to get a patent license that covers everyone who obtains a copy of Samba that can be traced back to Apple. The latter could get very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I consider this to be a failure of a GPL-licensed open source software project. Samba is not being used by Solaris, nor by Mac OS X.

<comment><USER6> Developers who use the GPL don't want as many users as possible; they want freedom and users can take it or leave it.

<comment><USER14> ...and they have mostly left it in this case. Fine; but lets not pretend open- source GPL projects are significant to the world at large; they are backroom projects with no future.

<comment><USER15> are you kidding me? gcc?

<comment><USER14> I use gcc. Its a constant struggle compared to commercial, supported compilers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What are the chances that the new service is actually samba-tng (<http://wiki.samba-tng.org/doku.php/start>) ? That would be at least interesting. Otherwise - good luck to them replicating what samba project learned over the last 20 years. A new implementation has slim chances of being compatible with systems in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER17> Won't this be easy to get from MacPorts soon enough anyway?

<comment><USER18> The obvious question is: why would anyone want to? Presumably, Apple will replace Samba with something that works well for the vast majority of cases.

To me, this echoes my problems with the GPLv3: how can software be truly free (as in freedom) if it's not free to be used commercially?

<comment><USER19> It is free to be used commercially, if you write it, pay for it, or keep its derived works open source. The only thing GPLv3 keeps you from doing is closed-source commercialization against the wishes of the author.

This seems eminently reasonable to me. If you want to allow people to do closed-source commercial projects with your code, BSD license it.

<comment><USER20> It feels kind of like a semantic game to call free software "commercial." Do you really believe that, in general, consumer software that you essentially have to surrender the copyright to is commercially viable? Are many people actually going to pay for something that's available for free with literally no added benefit _?

(_I am, of course, ignoring support here, because support is really a separate product that could even be provided by a third party.)

<comment><USER19> GPL does nothing to prevent you from selling software. Look what Sleepycat did. Just GPL your code, and put an enterprise-grade price tag on a non-GPL commercial license.

The only people affected by the GPL are people who want to sell software they didn't write. It's hard for me to get worked up about that: the overwhelming majority of all commercial software is _more_ restrictive.

<comment><USER20> I don't think it's fair to call a program that links against a library for some subset of its functionality "selling software they didn't write." I believe Firefox uses zlib and libpng, but I don't think most people would call Firefox a _version_ of zlib or libpng.

Anyway, I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to license their software under the GPL. If you don't want me using your code, that's your right. But if they do GPL it, from my POV as a potential user of the code, it might as well be closed-source. Thus I object to the statement "It is free to be used commercially," when it is actually free for any other use but impractical for commercial use. (Even in your Sleepycat example, it was the non-GPL version that they used in their commercial pursuits.)

<comment><USER19> Help me understand what you're saying. If I write a library, you are free not to use it. My code, my terms, right? That's how commercial licensing works. How does GPL harm that dynamic? Or, should the party with more source code lines dictate terms to the party with fewer?

<comment><USER20> I think I must be saying this very clumsily. I'll try to sum it up explicitly.

I'm OK with the existence of GPL software. I like it when people use a more permissive license, but your code is yours to do with what you will. What bothers me is what people _say about_ the GPL, because I think it's misleading.

There is this common idea in the free software community that it is not hostile to commercial software. That's what I don't like. If people came out and said, "Yeah, my GPL source code has very severe restrictions that make it unsuitable for integration in commercial software," I would agree and wish them happy coding. But they don't say that. They use the misleading banner of "free," and even try to deny that it's incompatible with commercial software.

Based on all the evidence I've seen, I believe commercial software pretty much has to be offered under a proprietary license in 99% of cases. The GPL says I can't do that if I use so much as one line of GPL code written by somebody else. That means that using GPL code in my software renders it unsaleable.

So, when you said, "It is free to be used commercially … if you keep its derived works open source," I objected to that. If you can only release your software under the GPL, you're probably not going to make a lot of money selling it — it strains the definition of "commercial." You can't even use the Sleepycat model, where there's a GPL version and a commercial one.

It's your right to put your software under that license. But I think it's important for people to understand that it completely shuts out commercial use, even if the commercial use is largely original. We shouldn't downplay that.

<comment><USER21> The GPL is clearly _designed_ to be hostile to a certain type of software deployment strategy.

But not because that software is being sold, or because it is profitable, or corporate, or big-business, or commercial or any of those things. It is hostile because it is "proprietary" and that (in the FSF's opinion) tilts the power balance too far towards the vendor, allowing all sorts of abuses.

Where I think you are getting confused is that some of those abuses are highly profitable and so those are the most visible successes to you.

But people like to sum this complicated area up as the GPL being "anti- business" or not "business-friendly", which is highly misleading. You'll note that quite a lot of non-software businesses are quite happy to use GPL code since a) they are not in the business of selling proprietary code and b) proprietary code gives too much power to the vendor. There's plenty of room for businesses to supply GPL software to these companies.

<comment><USER20> I think that you are misrepresenting what I've said. Businesses using GPL software are irrelevant to what I was talking about. My comments have been about selling software for a living, and only about that. (Just to clarify, I am also not talking about providing support for software or making customizations to software. Those are separate kinds of businesses from software products.)

On that topic: Whether or not the GPL was designed to be hostile to commercial software, it _is hostile_ to commercial software in the real world. I don't know of a single piece of GPL software that makes decent revenue on its own.

<comment><USER19> SourceFire IPO'd on GPL software. There are other examples. I feel like this has more to do with ideology than truth-seeking for you.

<comment><USER20> For me, this question is mainly practical. If indie developers could put out GPL software and make good money from it without requiring the support infrastructure of a megacorp, I would think that was the bee's knees and I would promote that business model like crazy. I just don't think it's generally possible. I'm not familiar with SourceFire's story, but a look at their site seems to suggest the "Enterprise tech support company" model. I'll have to look closer.

<comment><USER19> How could it possibly benefit indie developers to give up more of their rights? The rights held back by the GPL --- _for the developer_ \--- are almost exactly those those required by companies to commercialize software. I'm vociferous about the GPL entirely because it _enables_ developers to profit from their labor. The GPL is anathema to megacorps. That's why you dual-license, and charge out the wazoo for the corp-friendly license.

You really, really, really need re-evaluate your take on this. GPL is the most indie-friendly of the licenses. There's a valid gripe against it: it fractures the open source community into "people who can use GPL code" and "people who can't use GPL code". But that has nothing to do with commercialization. Once you BSD license something, it is extraordinarily difficult to commercialize the code itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Will Samba loose out from this? Are Apple an active developer of Samba?</comment>