10 ms·

Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation

509 points by mcantelon 15y ago

dendory 15y ago
Every day we see bat-shit-crazy lawsuits over patents and trademarks that have a huge impact on society, for no good reason but corporate greed. If the company follows through it means any computer system that lists possible time zones would be at risk since the original data came from a source that this company bought. Not surprised one bit by this.
- jbooth 15y ago
  Look, these intellectual property companies are job creators. I'm sick of all you hippies who want free access to a timezone database. As long as they keep up the lobbying and donations, they're doing a lot more for the world than silly concepts I've never heard of like "unix" and "java".
  - marshray 15y ago
    Yeah, they teach us in business school that "time = money". Only a pinko commie would think that privately-owned intellectual property like this should be free.
  - tomp 15y ago
    Mafia and drug cartels create jobs as well. That doesn't mean they are good for the society, and that the people employed by them could not produce more value doing something else.
    - jbooth 15y ago
      Guess I needed the snark tag. Thought the unix and java line would be a dead giveaway.
      - aw3c2 15y ago
        I missed it too and so I downvoted your post. HN being a site full of entrepeneurs I often see concepts about society and rights where I feel sick in my stomach, so your post did not seem very unusual to me.
      - wladimir 15y ago
        Yes, I'm sorry I downvoted you too before I realized you were making a joke (no way to undo it, though I upvoted this post to make up for it). I guess it wasn't over-the-top enough, there are people that would mean that seriously, and defend copyright and patent trolls.
    - lanstein 15y ago
      You can't be serious.
      - tomp 15y ago
        I wasn't :)
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I'm sick of all you hippies who want free access to a timezone database Seriously. Who came up with the moronic idea that people somehow "deserve" to know what time it is?
    - Duff 15y ago
      Right on! It is about time that computer users buck up and take some personal responsibility. It's not like you can just look up at the sky and figure out what time it is! The hard work of innovators who figure out complex issues like the time need to be compensated!
      - Cushman 15y ago
        It'd be funnier if it weren't so, so true.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        Indeed. It's not like knowing what time it is, is not valuable. Just think of all the interviews you could make on-time! Of course, if you want to show up on time, on the correct day, you'll also need to license out access to our date server, in addition to the time server.
    - kapitalx 15y ago
      We can totally crowdsource time. If everyone inputs what time they think it is by looking at the sky, we could just take the average of all those inputs and know the absolute time [wisdom of the crowd]
      - gord 15y ago
        +1 for absolute relative social local time!
      - nknight 15y ago
        Statistically, it will always be just about lunch time, so I think we can just dispense with clocks.
      - 15y ago
  - DenisM 15y ago
    Kindly lay off sarcasm. I understand the temptation, but succumbing to it will cause HN to become a place for wenting anger. I mean just look at the thread of comments below yours. Is that what you want HN to be? Let's make it a place for civilized discourse instead... shall we?
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      I don't mind the occassional visit to sarcasm and humor on HN, especially when it is relatively high-brow, poignant, and relevant. Not that I would claim I always manage to instill poigniancy into my jibes.
    - cosgroveb 15y ago
      Is satire, which often makes very heavy use of sarcasm, to be considered uncivilized?
      - kelnos 15y ago
        In this case it just wasn't funny. (Yes, I know, subjective, blah blah blah. I don't care.)
      - moultano 15y ago
        Unless it's exceptionally good then we're better off without it. The problem with sarcasm is that it insulates you from having to make an argument yourself. All you have to do is mimic your opponent and make them sound ridiculous. It's almost inherently a straw man fallacy unless it is exceptionally careful. If you can't use sarcasm you're forced to state what you believe in positive terms, which makes for much more fruitful discussion. It's like the "passive voice" of argumentation. There are some cases where you just have to, but your writing gets better if you categorically avoid it.
      - MrMan 15y ago
        there is no room for satire on HN.
  - derleth 15y ago
    Sarcasm and satire only work when you aren't saying something you might actually believe.
- jtwb 15y ago
  Publicly held corporations are greedy by definition. The objective of such a corporation is simply to make as much money for its owners as possible. Our laws create an environment where intellectual property abuse has proven to be a profitable venture. The solution is not to redefine corporations as non-greedy entities.
  - kevinh 15y ago
    Not necessarily. Generally, the purpose of a corporation is, in fact, to maximize shareholder wealth, but all a corporation is supposed to do is to represent the interests of the shareholders, which do not have to be financially motivated. In theory, corporations are not solely profit-seeking. In practice, they tend to be.
    - JamesPeterson 15y ago
      I'm not sure if this is an Australia-only thing - and I was under the impression that if was far from being so - but here the responsibility to shareholders of a corporation is solely fiscal. The reasoning behind this is that shareholder needs tend to differ. If shareholders wish to engage in philanthropy, the corporation is not the ideal (shared) vessel for doing so. Instead, individual investors may receive their asset's rent and choose to distribute their earnings as they please; management is employed to run the Corp and not make decisions for the shareholders' philanthropic activities.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - dendory 15y ago
    Not true. Corporations are supposed to bring long term value to share holders. In many cases we see lawyers go for a quick buck at the cost of a tarnished image, which is very debatable whether that's good long term.
    - foxylad 15y ago
      Exactly. Case in point: Google. Imagine if they started pulling stunts like this - the goodwill they depend on would evaporate overnight, the whole "I don't mind Google owning all my data because they aren't evil" balance would become paranoia about everything they touch, and they would lose billions. I believe that Microsoft's myopic focus on short-term profit at the expense of doing the right thing is one of the major causes of it's recent decline towards obscurity. In today's world of abundant choice, companies have to provide good products AND provide them ethically. Back on topic, look at what Astrolabe have done - taken something they probably couldn't make much money from anyway, and got the unix-derived world very pissed off with them. Their employees will feel down and it'll be harder to hire, and they'll have to endure snide remarks for years. I know I'd be selling their shares today, if I had any - I don't like investing in jerks. Instead, they could have come out and said "We're pleased to donate our IP towards this amazingly useful service", and got a pat on the back from the world. And I'm guessing most of their shareholders would have been happy their investment was making the world a better place.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  In the end, this is Astrolabe, Inc. http://alabe.com/photogal.html http://alabe.com/photogal.html I don't think they are going to take the computerized world into the timezone dark ages. I suspect this will all be resolved reasonably, especially if companies who ship this data get involved (e.g. every *nix vendor, Oracle (Java), etc).
  - microtherion 15y ago
    Well, as a company making its living from peddling Astrology, taking the world into the dark ages would arguably be in their self interest...
  - dendory 15y ago
    Actually I wouldn't be so sure. Very often it's the legal people who push for that stuff and the founders are told to not worry, everything will be fine, until they are left with a PR disaster.
    - caf 15y ago
      It seems likely that the interest of an Astrology company in historical timezone data is in being able to determine the precise position of the stars and planets in the sky at the moment of someone's birth (which obviously involves knowing what local timezone was in effect at that place and time). I am sure they see great value in being the only Astrologers who can do this, which means that they need to suppress access to this data.
      - gcp 15y ago
        I am sure they see great value in being the only Astrologers who can do this, which means that they need to suppress access to this data. It's amazing to think that people might actually care about this kind of "accuracy" in Astrology, but unfortunately, you might just be right. Geez, maybe in a year or so, they're calling the other astrologers phonies because they can't possibly have the right data.
      - jeza 15y ago
ig1 15y ago
The problem is that Olson is clearly derived from a copyright source and it's not clear that's it's protected by any of the fair use clauses. The timezone data should have been derived from primary sources (legislation in the particular countries, etc.), by deriving from a secondary source which may have used editorial judgement in compiling that data there is potentially a genuine copyright issue. It should be possible to rewrite Olson without using a secondary source (if it's not then it would imply that there is a clear copyright violation) and that's what the community should attempt to do.
- jerf 15y ago
  Facts can not be copyrighted. See Feist v. Rural: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural It is difficult to imagine what data this database contains that is somehow of a creative nature, that comes from the source in question. Though I do recall there being some actual text in the comments it didn't strike me as pulled straight from an almanac.
  - kapitalx 15y ago
    There is arguably some creativity in the naming of the time zones, such as "America/New_York" or "America/Los_Angeles". Though I have no idea if this is part of the litigation or not.
    - marshray 15y ago
      So is it the slash or the underscore that's the creative part?
    - tomp 15y ago
      This is basically the only readable naming convention that uses well-known geographical names and is computer friendly (Unix-like separators, lack of spaces). I see no creativity here.
      - kapitalx 15y ago
doc_larry 15y ago
We rely on heavily on timezone databases and when designing our app had a a lot of debate on what would be the best way to go. We opted for a hybrid solution implementing several options with redundency Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that the Unix TMZ database would be compromised in such a a way. Just goes to show that you can never think of all contigencies, but good planning and foresight is essential.
- marshray 15y ago
  I wonder if even some GNU software has gotten caught up in this. Those guys are pretty darn careful. Talk about justifying your paranoia!
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Each time something like this comes down the pipe, I click over one notch more GNU/FSF.
squeed 15y ago
Interestingly enough, the database is definitely copyrighted work in Europe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right.
- nknight 15y ago
  No, it's not "definitely" anything in Europe, the database copyright issue is much more nuanced and has assorted exceptions, limitations, and requirements that normal copyrighted works do not, and courts tend to write small novels on the subject whenever an applicable case comes up. (Not defending it, the concept of database copyright is mostly stupid, but you can't just say "databases are copyrightable", because that's not how the law actually works anywhere.)
- nemoniac 15y ago
  The European database right lasts for only 15 years from each "substantial modification" of the database. The work in question dates from 1991 and contains mostly historical data so presumably those rights have expired.
varikin 15y ago
Can someone explain how this will affect me? Will my code break because the server is down or is this more of an issue for populating the time zone data for OS and language libraries?
- ra 15y ago
  Essentially, your OS provider, if it uses this database, will likely choose to cease distributing tzdata until the disputed data is removed / replaced. Very short term, no big deal. Longer term, it could be a big deal if this leads to fragmentation and inconsistencies in tzdata.
- dsl 15y ago
  Your operating system (and likely your programming language too) have local copies. You just won't get updates until this is all sorted out.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  This would only affect people right now if a timezone change was made by some government somewhere in the world and a change needed to be made to the database files and published so all the software which embeds it could update. If the site remains down, mailing list members would simply discuss and post the change that needed to be made and software embedding the files and OS vendors would need to update manually. tl;dr Nothing is going to change anytime soon.
- damoncali 15y ago
  It won't.
- jholman 15y ago
  Your code won't break. And you probably won't even have any difficulty populating the database on new installs, since your OS provider is probably mirroring the current database. But there are "between 20 and 100" changes to the worldwide timezone-set per year. So three weeks from now, someone's gonna change their timezone rules, effective perhaps 2013. Maybe it'll be Bolivia. And then three weeks later, someone else, maybe some part of Indiana. Then three weeks later, maybe a civil war in some ex-SSR or something finally resolves, and the two different halves end up using different time zone plans (one of them uses DST, the other doesn't, and neither of them use the USSR regime they had last year). So now a year passes, it's 2012, what're you doing? Is your software using a database that's a year (and maybe 50 events) out of date? Or did you hand-maintain it, because you care about Indiana, and you got 10 of the 50 events? Or maybe you used the Debian fork of tzdata? And what am _I_ doing? Probably not the same thing as you. And now when my software and your software try to interoperate (maybe our iCal calendaring, maybe our enterprise order management integration bus service routing frameworks, maybe we just want to agree when your mother's flight will land), guess what. Sooner or later a relevant event happens in one of the altered timezones, and someone misses a flight, and we get a very very difficult-to-track-down bug. Actually, it's not that terrible, as long as every time event you care about takes place in a big important time-jurisdiction that'll be maintained by every tzdata fork that every software you care about will use. Which I guess could theoretically apply to me or you. I don't actually care about Indiana, so I don't care if time events that take place there don't synchronize.
apaprocki 15y ago
Not sure if any IP lawyers are reading and could comment. Would it be helpful to a case like this to crowd-source finding prior published art for the specific ACS references in the files? This would be ideal for something like Groklaw to pick up.
dsl 15y ago
Uh oh. Hopefully someone made a copy! :)
- dsl 15y ago
  What? HN can't take a joke?
  - tef____ 15y ago
    someone did make a copy http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006 http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-2011...
muuh-gnu 15y ago
Can somebody explain what benefits we have from having time zones _at all_? They are an absolute mess: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Time_Zones_2011_%28October_2011%29.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Tim... Wouldnt it be easier to have one time for the whole planet, like we have one date for the whole planet? Is there some reasoning behind it or is it just another case of historical baggage? There seems to be no other rationale behind it than allies and trading partners wanting to have the same or comparable time display.
- stoney 15y ago
  If everyone used UTC you'd still have many of the same problems, just in reverse. For example, you can reasonably guess that in any country, an office will be staffed on weekdays from roughly 9-5 local time. If we all operated on UTC, then you'd need to look up in a big table what times the Sydney office operated. It is useful to have a shared understanding of where in the day you expect an event to happen. E.g. 1pm is going to be around lunchtime whether you are in Sydney or New York. Also, dates have exactly the same problems as time zones - the date starts at midnight local time. If lcoal time changes, then for part of the day, so does the date.
- kevinpet 15y ago
  Right now it's tomorrow in Australia. I find it convenient to talk about things I did "on Thursday" at work, rather than the things I did on the local day that spanned Thursday night to Friday morning.
- Anechoic 15y ago
  I'll refer you to this Slashdot discussion on the matter: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-could-we-deal-with-the-end-of-time-zones http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-...
  - hartror 15y ago
    The first time I have gone onto /. in years and the first comment reconfirms my decision to leave: Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone? And it is scored 5 "Insightful" sigh /me hugs HN and will never compare it to Reddit again.
quellhorst 15y ago
If this continues, we'll need a pirate bay for open source.
- vetler 15y ago
  Good idea! It could be called "openbay"... Hmmm...
alinajaf 15y ago
Slightly off-topic but here's a question about patents that I just can't wrap my head around. Could you patent the contents of an RFC? If so, is it possible for a company to patent the contents of all RFC's pertaining to TCP/IP and then essentially own the internet?
- derleth 15y ago
  It's completely off-topic (this is about copyright law) but here's an answer anyway: Patents are ideally about new inventions, which means that if someone can find 'prior art' (evidence someone was doing it before you) they can get your patent thrown out. (Ideally, extant prior art prevents the patent from being issued in the first place.) An RFC, pretty much by definition, is very good evidence of prior art, especially if it's a very well-known one, as all of the ones relating to TCP/IP are. In the real world, things get not so much more complex as a whole lot stupider. Still, I think the courts could muddle through that one with minimal problems.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
civilian 15y ago
Just tell Astrolabe what you think of them on their facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-Software-and-Services/52527078715 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-Software-a...
- Iv 15y ago
  I did, was removed.
  - brazzy 15y ago
    You and dozens of others, with no statements from their side at all.
antihero 15y ago
Why are they shutting it down? Why don't they just update those entries to use a different source?
sp332 15y ago
If you need the latest version, Archive Team got a backup and put it on the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006 http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-2011...
jeza 15y ago
You can vote for the second review here.... ;-) http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas-Expanded-5th/dp/0935127380 http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas-Expanded-5th/dp/0935127... edit: whoops direct link should be: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0935127380&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode= http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...
guard-of-terra 15y ago
I'm surprised that their (astrolabe) website is still up. Where's anonymous with their LOICs when they are needed desperately?
larrik 15y ago
Serious question: Why do we need the old almanac entries anyway? I can see current and future, but the almanac's data seems worthless to me.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  Many computer programs need to deal with historical dates. Without these tz rules captured into one place, it would be very difficult to determine when an event happened in another timezone. Also, most data is either going to be stored in UTC or in some domain-specific alternate "center" (New York time, for instance), forcing conversions if a user wants to view the data in their local time. A contrived example: Say I'm in London and I want to know what time the NYSE opened up in London-local time on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. That requires looking up the opening time in NYC and then converting the time to a different timezone, possibly taking into account DST in both locales.

509 points by mcantelon 15y ago

Every day we see bat-shit-crazy lawsuits over patents and trademarks that have a huge impact on society, for no good reason but corporate greed. If the company follows through it means any computer system that lists possible time zones would be at risk since the original data came from a source that this company bought. Not surprised one bit by this.

jbooth 15y ago
Look, these intellectual property companies are job creators. I'm sick of all you hippies who want free access to a timezone database. As long as they keep up the lobbying and donations, they're doing a lot more for the world than silly concepts I've never heard of like "unix" and "java".
- marshray 15y ago
  Yeah, they teach us in business school that "time = money". Only a pinko commie would think that privately-owned intellectual property like this should be free.
- tomp 15y ago
  Mafia and drug cartels create jobs as well. That doesn't mean they are good for the society, and that the people employed by them could not produce more value doing something else.
  - jbooth 15y ago
    Guess I needed the snark tag. Thought the unix and java line would be a dead giveaway.
    - aw3c2 15y ago
      I missed it too and so I downvoted your post. HN being a site full of entrepeneurs I often see concepts about society and rights where I feel sick in my stomach, so your post did not seem very unusual to me.
    - wladimir 15y ago
      Yes, I'm sorry I downvoted you too before I realized you were making a joke (no way to undo it, though I upvoted this post to make up for it). I guess it wasn't over-the-top enough, there are people that would mean that seriously, and defend copyright and patent trolls.
  - lanstein 15y ago
    You can't be serious.
    - tomp 15y ago
      I wasn't :)
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I'm sick of all you hippies who want free access to a timezone database Seriously. Who came up with the moronic idea that people somehow "deserve" to know what time it is?
  - Duff 15y ago
    Right on! It is about time that computer users buck up and take some personal responsibility. It's not like you can just look up at the sky and figure out what time it is! The hard work of innovators who figure out complex issues like the time need to be compensated!
    - Cushman 15y ago
      It'd be funnier if it weren't so, so true.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      Indeed. It's not like knowing what time it is, is not valuable. Just think of all the interviews you could make on-time! Of course, if you want to show up on time, on the correct day, you'll also need to license out access to our date server, in addition to the time server.
  - kapitalx 15y ago
    We can totally crowdsource time. If everyone inputs what time they think it is by looking at the sky, we could just take the average of all those inputs and know the absolute time [wisdom of the crowd]
    - gord 15y ago
      +1 for absolute relative social local time!
    - nknight 15y ago
      Statistically, it will always be just about lunch time, so I think we can just dispense with clocks.
    - 15y ago
- DenisM 15y ago
  Kindly lay off sarcasm. I understand the temptation, but succumbing to it will cause HN to become a place for wenting anger. I mean just look at the thread of comments below yours. Is that what you want HN to be? Let's make it a place for civilized discourse instead... shall we?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    I don't mind the occassional visit to sarcasm and humor on HN, especially when it is relatively high-brow, poignant, and relevant. Not that I would claim I always manage to instill poigniancy into my jibes.
  - cosgroveb 15y ago
    Is satire, which often makes very heavy use of sarcasm, to be considered uncivilized?
    - kelnos 15y ago
      In this case it just wasn't funny. (Yes, I know, subjective, blah blah blah. I don't care.)
    - moultano 15y ago
      Unless it's exceptionally good then we're better off without it. The problem with sarcasm is that it insulates you from having to make an argument yourself. All you have to do is mimic your opponent and make them sound ridiculous. It's almost inherently a straw man fallacy unless it is exceptionally careful. If you can't use sarcasm you're forced to state what you believe in positive terms, which makes for much more fruitful discussion. It's like the "passive voice" of argumentation. There are some cases where you just have to, but your writing gets better if you categorically avoid it.
    - MrMan 15y ago
      there is no room for satire on HN.
- derleth 15y ago
  Sarcasm and satire only work when you aren't saying something you might actually believe.
jtwb 15y ago
Publicly held corporations are greedy by definition. The objective of such a corporation is simply to make as much money for its owners as possible. Our laws create an environment where intellectual property abuse has proven to be a profitable venture. The solution is not to redefine corporations as non-greedy entities.
- kevinh 15y ago
  Not necessarily. Generally, the purpose of a corporation is, in fact, to maximize shareholder wealth, but all a corporation is supposed to do is to represent the interests of the shareholders, which do not have to be financially motivated. In theory, corporations are not solely profit-seeking. In practice, they tend to be.
  - JamesPeterson 15y ago
    I'm not sure if this is an Australia-only thing - and I was under the impression that if was far from being so - but here the responsibility to shareholders of a corporation is solely fiscal. The reasoning behind this is that shareholder needs tend to differ. If shareholders wish to engage in philanthropy, the corporation is not the ideal (shared) vessel for doing so. Instead, individual investors may receive their asset's rent and choose to distribute their earnings as they please; management is employed to run the Corp and not make decisions for the shareholders' philanthropic activities.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- dendory 15y ago
  Not true. Corporations are supposed to bring long term value to share holders. In many cases we see lawyers go for a quick buck at the cost of a tarnished image, which is very debatable whether that's good long term.
  - foxylad 15y ago
    Exactly. Case in point: Google. Imagine if they started pulling stunts like this - the goodwill they depend on would evaporate overnight, the whole "I don't mind Google owning all my data because they aren't evil" balance would become paranoia about everything they touch, and they would lose billions. I believe that Microsoft's myopic focus on short-term profit at the expense of doing the right thing is one of the major causes of it's recent decline towards obscurity. In today's world of abundant choice, companies have to provide good products AND provide them ethically. Back on topic, look at what Astrolabe have done - taken something they probably couldn't make much money from anyway, and got the unix-derived world very pissed off with them. Their employees will feel down and it'll be harder to hire, and they'll have to endure snide remarks for years. I know I'd be selling their shares today, if I had any - I don't like investing in jerks. Instead, they could have come out and said "We're pleased to donate our IP towards this amazingly useful service", and got a pat on the back from the world. And I'm guessing most of their shareholders would have been happy their investment was making the world a better place.
apaprocki 15y ago
In the end, this is Astrolabe, Inc. http://alabe.com/photogal.html http://alabe.com/photogal.html I don't think they are going to take the computerized world into the timezone dark ages. I suspect this will all be resolved reasonably, especially if companies who ship this data get involved (e.g. every *nix vendor, Oracle (Java), etc).
- microtherion 15y ago
  Well, as a company making its living from peddling Astrology, taking the world into the dark ages would arguably be in their self interest...
- dendory 15y ago
  Actually I wouldn't be so sure. Very often it's the legal people who push for that stuff and the founders are told to not worry, everything will be fine, until they are left with a PR disaster.
  - caf 15y ago
    It seems likely that the interest of an Astrology company in historical timezone data is in being able to determine the precise position of the stars and planets in the sky at the moment of someone's birth (which obviously involves knowing what local timezone was in effect at that place and time). I am sure they see great value in being the only Astrologers who can do this, which means that they need to suppress access to this data.
    - gcp 15y ago
      I am sure they see great value in being the only Astrologers who can do this, which means that they need to suppress access to this data. It's amazing to think that people might actually care about this kind of "accuracy" in Astrology, but unfortunately, you might just be right. Geez, maybe in a year or so, they're calling the other astrologers phonies because they can't possibly have the right data.
    - jeza 15y ago

ig1 15y ago

The problem is that Olson is clearly derived from a copyright source and it's not clear that's it's protected by any of the fair use clauses. The timezone data should have been derived from primary sources (legislation in the particular countries, etc.), by deriving from a secondary source which may have used editorial judgement in compiling that data there is potentially a genuine copyright issue. It should be possible to rewrite Olson without using a secondary source (if it's not then it would imply that there is a clear copyright violation) and that's what the community should attempt to do.

jerf 15y ago
Facts can not be copyrighted. See Feist v. Rural: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural It is difficult to imagine what data this database contains that is somehow of a creative nature, that comes from the source in question. Though I do recall there being some actual text in the comments it didn't strike me as pulled straight from an almanac.
- kapitalx 15y ago
  There is arguably some creativity in the naming of the time zones, such as "America/New_York" or "America/Los_Angeles". Though I have no idea if this is part of the litigation or not.
  - marshray 15y ago
    So is it the slash or the underscore that's the creative part?
  - tomp 15y ago
    This is basically the only readable naming convention that uses well-known geographical names and is computer friendly (Unix-like separators, lack of spaces). I see no creativity here.
    - kapitalx 15y ago

doc_larry 15y ago

We rely on heavily on timezone databases and when designing our app had a a lot of debate on what would be the best way to go. We opted for a hybrid solution implementing several options with redundency Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that the Unix TMZ database would be compromised in such a a way. Just goes to show that you can never think of all contigencies, but good planning and foresight is essential.

marshray 15y ago
I wonder if even some GNU software has gotten caught up in this. Those guys are pretty darn careful. Talk about justifying your paranoia!
- pnathan 15y ago
  Each time something like this comes down the pipe, I click over one notch more GNU/FSF.

squeed 15y ago

Interestingly enough, the database is definitely copyrighted work in Europe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right.

nknight 15y ago
No, it's not "definitely" anything in Europe, the database copyright issue is much more nuanced and has assorted exceptions, limitations, and requirements that normal copyrighted works do not, and courts tend to write small novels on the subject whenever an applicable case comes up. (Not defending it, the concept of database copyright is mostly stupid, but you can't just say "databases are copyrightable", because that's not how the law actually works anywhere.)
nemoniac 15y ago
The European database right lasts for only 15 years from each "substantial modification" of the database. The work in question dates from 1991 and contains mostly historical data so presumably those rights have expired.

varikin 15y ago

Can someone explain how this will affect me? Will my code break because the server is down or is this more of an issue for populating the time zone data for OS and language libraries?

ra 15y ago
Essentially, your OS provider, if it uses this database, will likely choose to cease distributing tzdata until the disputed data is removed / replaced. Very short term, no big deal. Longer term, it could be a big deal if this leads to fragmentation and inconsistencies in tzdata.
dsl 15y ago
Your operating system (and likely your programming language too) have local copies. You just won't get updates until this is all sorted out.
apaprocki 15y ago
This would only affect people right now if a timezone change was made by some government somewhere in the world and a change needed to be made to the database files and published so all the software which embeds it could update. If the site remains down, mailing list members would simply discuss and post the change that needed to be made and software embedding the files and OS vendors would need to update manually. tl;dr Nothing is going to change anytime soon.
damoncali 15y ago
It won't.
jholman 15y ago
Your code won't break. And you probably won't even have any difficulty populating the database on new installs, since your OS provider is probably mirroring the current database. But there are "between 20 and 100" changes to the worldwide timezone-set per year. So three weeks from now, someone's gonna change their timezone rules, effective perhaps 2013. Maybe it'll be Bolivia. And then three weeks later, someone else, maybe some part of Indiana. Then three weeks later, maybe a civil war in some ex-SSR or something finally resolves, and the two different halves end up using different time zone plans (one of them uses DST, the other doesn't, and neither of them use the USSR regime they had last year). So now a year passes, it's 2012, what're you doing? Is your software using a database that's a year (and maybe 50 events) out of date? Or did you hand-maintain it, because you care about Indiana, and you got 10 of the 50 events? Or maybe you used the Debian fork of tzdata? And what am _I_ doing? Probably not the same thing as you. And now when my software and your software try to interoperate (maybe our iCal calendaring, maybe our enterprise order management integration bus service routing frameworks, maybe we just want to agree when your mother's flight will land), guess what. Sooner or later a relevant event happens in one of the altered timezones, and someone misses a flight, and we get a very very difficult-to-track-down bug. Actually, it's not that terrible, as long as every time event you care about takes place in a big important time-jurisdiction that'll be maintained by every tzdata fork that every software you care about will use. Which I guess could theoretically apply to me or you. I don't actually care about Indiana, so I don't care if time events that take place there don't synchronize.

apaprocki 15y ago

Not sure if any IP lawyers are reading and could comment. Would it be helpful to a case like this to crowd-source finding prior published art for the specific ACS references in the files? This would be ideal for something like Groklaw to pick up.

dsl 15y ago

Uh oh. Hopefully someone made a copy! :)

dsl 15y ago
What? HN can't take a joke?
- tef____ 15y ago
  someone did make a copy http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006 http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-2011...

muuh-gnu 15y ago

Can somebody explain what benefits we have from having time zones _at all_? They are an absolute mess: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Time_Zones_2011_%28October_2011%29.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Tim... Wouldnt it be easier to have one time for the whole planet, like we have one date for the whole planet? Is there some reasoning behind it or is it just another case of historical baggage? There seems to be no other rationale behind it than allies and trading partners wanting to have the same or comparable time display.

stoney 15y ago
If everyone used UTC you'd still have many of the same problems, just in reverse. For example, you can reasonably guess that in any country, an office will be staffed on weekdays from roughly 9-5 local time. If we all operated on UTC, then you'd need to look up in a big table what times the Sydney office operated. It is useful to have a shared understanding of where in the day you expect an event to happen. E.g. 1pm is going to be around lunchtime whether you are in Sydney or New York. Also, dates have exactly the same problems as time zones - the date starts at midnight local time. If lcoal time changes, then for part of the day, so does the date.
kevinpet 15y ago
Right now it's tomorrow in Australia. I find it convenient to talk about things I did "on Thursday" at work, rather than the things I did on the local day that spanned Thursday night to Friday morning.
Anechoic 15y ago
I'll refer you to this Slashdot discussion on the matter: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-could-we-deal-with-the-end-of-time-zones http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-...
- hartror 15y ago
  The first time I have gone onto /. in years and the first comment reconfirms my decision to leave: Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone? And it is scored 5 "Insightful" sigh /me hugs HN and will never compare it to Reddit again.

quellhorst 15y ago

If this continues, we'll need a pirate bay for open source.

vetler 15y ago
Good idea! It could be called "openbay"... Hmmm...

alinajaf 15y ago

Slightly off-topic but here's a question about patents that I just can't wrap my head around. Could you patent the contents of an RFC? If so, is it possible for a company to patent the contents of all RFC's pertaining to TCP/IP and then essentially own the internet?

derleth 15y ago
It's completely off-topic (this is about copyright law) but here's an answer anyway: Patents are ideally about new inventions, which means that if someone can find 'prior art' (evidence someone was doing it before you) they can get your patent thrown out. (Ideally, extant prior art prevents the patent from being issued in the first place.) An RFC, pretty much by definition, is very good evidence of prior art, especially if it's a very well-known one, as all of the ones relating to TCP/IP are. In the real world, things get not so much more complex as a whole lot stupider. Still, I think the courts could muddle through that one with minimal problems.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

civilian 15y ago

Just tell Astrolabe what you think of them on their facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-Software-and-Services/52527078715 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-Software-a...

Iv 15y ago
I did, was removed.
- brazzy 15y ago
  You and dozens of others, with no statements from their side at all.

antihero 15y ago

Why are they shutting it down? Why don't they just update those entries to use a different source?

sp332 15y ago

If you need the latest version, Archive Team got a backup and put it on the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006 http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-2011...

jeza 15y ago

You can vote for the second review here.... ;-) http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas-Expanded-5th/dp/0935127380 http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas-Expanded-5th/dp/0935127... edit: whoops direct link should be: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0935127380&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode= http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...

guard-of-terra 15y ago

I'm surprised that their (astrolabe) website is still up. Where's anonymous with their LOICs when they are needed desperately?

larrik 15y ago

Serious question: Why do we need the old almanac entries anyway? I can see current and future, but the almanac's data seems worthless to me.

apaprocki 15y ago
Many computer programs need to deal with historical dates. Without these tz rules captured into one place, it would be very difficult to determine when an event happened in another timezone. Also, most data is either going to be stored in UTC or in some domain-specific alternate "center" (New York time, for instance), forcing conversions if a user wants to view the data in their local time. A contrived example: Say I'm in London and I want to know what time the NYSE opened up in London-local time on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. That requires looking up the opening time in NYC and then converting the time to a different timezone, possibly taking into account DST in both locales.