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An additional problem with a good number of the earlier "Anonymous" posts is that they were originally owned by and identified to their copyright owners with the use of the Groklaw User IDs. In 2004, PJ went through a purge of a number of folks she disagreed with, deleted their users accounts, and all of their comments were instantly anonymized with no chance of recovery.

PJ's essentially removing the copyright identification from those thousands of posts caused a bit of upset from those who felt that by removing the only copyright information from the posts by replacing the name in the headers with "Anonymous" overstepped ethical bounds.

My standing with those who felt she had overstepped by doing that is the reason my original "Tomas" ID ( http://www.groklaw.net/users.php?mode=profile&uid=2502 )was banned from Groklaw. I've done very little posting under my replacement ID.

--Tomas

[Microsoft] should put more energy into creating good products. Then they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics.

Groklaw's input:
'It's over. The jury has found that the copyrights did not go to SCO under the APA or anything else. The verdict is in. Novell has the news up on their website already, but I heard it from Chris Brown also. Here's the brief Novell statement:

"Today, the jury in the District Court of Utah trial between SCO Group and Novell issued a verdict.
Novell is very pleased with the jury’s decision confirming Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux. Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on the intellectual property front.

This decision is good news for Novell, for Linux, and for the open source community." '

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100330152829622

Reasonable people understand that PJ works for IBM. Reasonable people understand that there is no "PJ", that IBM spun up a screen name and went to town.

Yes, but intelligent people at least look stuff up before spouting unsubstantiated claims.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS7673520174.html
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-621-E19.pdf

The coverage of record on this story, from the beginning, through the dark days and the brighter days, and on until the very end, has been Groklaw. I highly recommend taking a look there for more commentary.

"this collection of exhibits consists of emails from EU's Philip Lowe, who is Director General, Competition, Commission of the European Communities, in Belgium, to MS' Brad Smith, and back, such as this snip from October 1, 2005 email from Lowe to Smith (there are also also emails back and forth between Smith and Commissioner Neelie Kroes and a letter from Steve Ballmer to Lowe offering free technical support to licensees blah blah in the collection):"

" Microsoft is lobbying hard to ensure that open standards and open source are excluded from that policy - and is on the brink of succeeding in that aim"

"The big problem with Google is privacy. Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do?"

Why not just delete your cookies ?

"windows is a heck of a lot more open than the iPad"

You're kidding here aren't you.

"all they want is to catch up so they can turn the same screws on us that Apple and Google turn"

A single company monopolizing the desktop and online commerce, is a good thing? And I don't see either Apple or Google ever engaged in the sharp practices out of Redmond. Microsoft Litigation

More links for you, because I'm feeling generous (and bored):

Tones of links at groklaw, more than a few that take the "software is math" angle
A very blunt, and to the point page from End Soft Patents.

I did not just make this argument up off the top of my head. I promise you I'm not that creative. It is a very common argument, and generally considered to be very strong, since it's a pretty damned simple logical statement: A = B, B != C, thus A != C. You could find elementary school students to explain it to you I'm sure.

Not to mention OpenSolaris, which because of the SVR4 code, Sun had to ask permission from SCO in 2003 before they could open source. After the ruling that Novell really owned the SVR4 code, Judge Dale Kimball wrote that: "In this case, Sun obtained the rights to opensource Solaris, and SCO received the revenue for granting such rights even though such rights remained with Novell. If the court were to declare that the contract was void and should be set aside, the court could not return the parties to the same position they were in prior to the 2003 Agreement. Sun has already received the benefits of the agreement and developed and marketed a product based on those benefits. There was also evidence at trial that OpenSolaris directly competed with Novell’s interest. The court, therefore, cannot merely void the contract."

1. Since settlement was not disclosed at the time, BSD development continued with 4.4-Lite, that was specifically created to exclude everything that was disputed with USL.

2. This can of worms WAS opened during SCO saga, and resulted in the whole thing being disclosed to the publuc. Basically, USL secretly agreed to stop being a bunch of assholes.

The jury portion of the trial started on March 8 (link is to a PDF).

I give the guy credit for his mea culpa, which is more than we got from some of the other "journalists" that covered SCO. They all thought it was the bee's knees when it presented no evidence at all and then expected IBM to pay it $1B ... no, $3B! ... no, $5B! ... all while giving lame non-excuses for why they couldn't reveal their evidence. Dan Lyons was a valid target of our criticism at the time, but admitting he was wrong changed my impression of him. I actually read his articles.

Now, there are plenty of journalists we can still make fun of for their evidence-free SCO cheerleading. First in line: Maureen O'Gara. She not only hasn't admitted she was wrong like Lyons did, but was recently revealed to have got an e-mail from the SCO brass asking her to trash PJ of Groklaw. This came out in court documents and might get interesting. No need to keep harping on Lyons.

Novell owns the copyrights to Unix. That's $4B right there.

I like Novell, for the most part.
But before evaluating the $ value of their copyrights for Unix, ask yourself (and the BSD guys, for one) just how much of Unix copyrights are held by Novell. (warning: there's no easy answer)

Novell owns the copyrights to Unix. That's $4B right there. Once their court case is over and they're cleansed of the SCO debacle Unix will see a resurgence and Novell will ride it for all it's worth. Don't count them out yet - the jury will come back in a week or two. Unix has some serious proper respect in the geek community, and in the business community that has been deferred due to these ridiculous legal actions. Once they're over, they're over and Unix will reclaim its rightful place at the peak of the IS pantheon.

I like Linux, and BSD, and OS-X, and in some ways they're Unixes. But they're not Unix. Unix is the grand-daddy of modern OS's. It's the shit that other OS's hope to emulate and for the most part do it badly.

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

- Dave McIlroy

In the words of Hank Spencer: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

It may yet not be time to write off Unix, and so, to write off Novell. Novell lost the war for the network architecture, but there's some hope they can rise like a phoenix from the ashes and reclaim their place.

A lot of the strong dislike about Microsoft products comes from these strategic decisions to lock in users, move them along to the next product, and prevent uptake of competing technologies. There's a lot here on /. about the persistent security issues that Windows suffers as Microsoft persists in choosing features and ease of use over security.

This whole issue persists and is so hot precisely because knowledgable people in the industry know that achieving compatibility and higher security is absolutely possible because it's done by other platforms like Open Office and BSD. It would never occur to me to claim that Office can't be made compatible, that Windows can't approach Unix in levels of security. Obviously that is possible because anything one program can do, another program can do. But then we read the Comes documents and the Halloween documents and see that these things are not only seen as "not worthwhile," but anathema to the Microsoft monopoly. They are deliberately avoided as a matter of policy - and that's what fuels the frustration - that Microsoft deliberately denies us this great boon because they see it as not in their best interest to do so, and then they field proxies who claim the things themselves are not even possible. That's rubbish.

Now in TFA it appears that some PFY on the Explorer team stumbled across w3.org and they're investigating what parts of this "web standards" nonsense might be worth embracing and extending. That's cool in a way, but most of us just assume that Microsoft will only keep the Explorer team alive (again!) long enough to reverse their market share losses and retain "ownership" of the web in the minds of common users. It's assumed that as soon as they've rebuilt their share they'll extend the standards in non-compliant ways to prevent compatibility by other browers - perhaps defending that turf with patents and patent licensing. This is what that whole HTML5 H264 vs Ogg Theora thing is about. Then once they've got their share built up again and the threat is extinguished, off to the slag heap once more with the Explorer team until their monopoly is threatened by innovation again, as their users languish in an abyss of incompatibilities and insecurities (again!). This is the song that never ends.

To come out in front of God and Everybody and say that compatibility and security are not possible is an outright lie, and I'm going to call out that lie ever time I see it. Maybe I could be nicer about it, but we've seen this nonsense for so long now that somebody who would claim to know something worth sharing should be mindful of it.

Thanks to the always entertaining Darl McBride, Definitely!

Historically, Microsoft licensed the Unix code from AT&T in 1980 to make its own version of Unix: Xenix. At the time, the plan was that Xenix would be Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system. Microsoft quickly found they couldn’t do it on their own, and so started work with what was then a small Unix porting company, SCO. By 1983, SCO XENIX System V had arrived for 8086 and 8088 chips and both companies were marketing it.
It didn’t take long though for Microsoft to decide that Xenix wasn’t for them. In 1984, the combination of AT&T licensing fees and the rise of MS-DOS, made Microsoft decide to start moving out of the Unix business.

So why did MS suddenly decide they needed to buy $ 10M worth of old Unix licenses in 2003?
BTW, Novell claims they're entitled to 95% of those licenses SCO sold, in their 2005: breach of contract counterclaim. We'll soon see how this all plays out because the SCO-Novell case is finally in court now (the part that's still going on, whether Novell has or hasn't sold the Unix copyrights to SCO, is moving forward because SCO is sueing Novell with Novell's own money :-) ). If it turns out Novell owns the copyrights, all other SCO court cases should quickly collapse, which *might* in turn get people to understand that this whole SCOsource anti-Linux FUD was in fact a scam to scare potential customers away--but I digress.. sorry..
2004: Baystar connection (warning: by Enderle), and here in 2006 new info
I quote:

Buried in IBM's recent motion for summary judgment against SCO is a Declaration from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb. Near the beginning of the long-running legal soap opera, BayStar invested $50 million in SCO. In exchange for their investment, BayStar received 20,000 shares of preferred stock in SCO.
In his declaration, Goldfarb testifies that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed "a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment." Goldfarb then said that after BayStar committed the $50 million to SCO's cause, Microsoft "stopped returning my phone calls and e-mails, and to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Emerson was fired from Microsoft."

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Westorinon; Ben Fathi
Cc: Carl Stork; Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

Linux ACPI support would probably be even better than it is now were it not for Microsoft.
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2010011422570951

You can find it here:

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/USLsettlement.pdf

Enjoy.

Groklaw has the BSD settlement here.

Actually, SCO *does* have people looking to invest in it. Yarro, as proxy for other unnamed investors.

But what THAT's about, is "who gets the first cut of the SCO corpse"? (They want it, of course!) The terms they want for the loan are outrageous.

It's a long and sordid history. Start here Or if you prefer the short story, here. Hanlon's razor does not apply.

It's a long and sordid history. Start here Or if you prefer the short story, here. Hanlon's razor does not apply.

Yes, software patents are broken. Yes, Linux has lots of patent vulnerabilities. Beyond that, I can't really understand your point.

Legal issues are all about perception, and in this case, "Linux Hackers" and distros cloning a Microsoft technology with well-publicized patents creates an entirely different perception in the wild-west of the patent-law courtroom than a troll like SCO popping up and trying shake down IBM.

This is the entire point of Microsoft paying de Icaza for his work on Mono and Gnome. Novell's crooked patent deal with Microsoft ties in to the same strategy.

It's quite simple really. By the way, a lot of the supposed credulity about these issues on slashdot is a paid service. :)

Now, regarding "Miguel never tried to embrace GNOME with Mono. You can't show me any mail/blog post regarding with that." This sounds so obviously and totally untrue that I think this must just be a misunderstanding.

"We hope that the tools that we will provide will be adopted by free software programmers including the GNOME Foundation members and the GNOME project generally."

MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1]

[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software

steveha

Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did. And they open sourced their plugin for MS Office. What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs.. but I'm really curious. And it would appear I guessed right.

MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1] So, if ODF is chosen as the standard in Norway, the Norwegian government is still free to buy copies of Microsoft Office, as long as it can do a good job of reading and writing ODF files.

Of course, Microsoft will still view this as some kind of defeat, because they would prefer their own standard be adopted; OOXML will be just as much of a lockin trap as the older binary Microsoft formats. If OOXML is adopted, everyone has to buy Microsoft Office; if ODF is adopted, everyone can choose from among many alternatives, several of which are completely free.

It is obvious why Microsoft would prefer OOXML adoption for government (and everywhere else). It is less obvious why government should adopt OOXML instead of ODF.

[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software

steveha

That might seem obvious to you, but pretending algorithms aren't "computer calculations" is what entire software patent law hinges on.
The thing is that mathematical ideas are ineligible for patenting, so it's important to convince courts that that's what algorithms really are. Knuth himself felt obligated to point this out: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090603224807259

That's just because they want a piece of every cake - just in case. Nothing new there (remember Zune?). I'm talking about getting everyone used to their technology hoping that they convert to their platform (see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100124111743687).

The amateur radio operators are absolutely essential in a place where most of the communications structure has failed, and they didn't have much to begin with.

The fact that these guys are being fired upon just shows how much trouble Hatti is in right now. If there's no law enforcement left, just how are the emergency supplies that are moving all to slowly going to wind up in the right hands?

If they knew who these people were... why are they trying to scare away people who are rebuilding communication structures? If they didn't know who these people were... are they attacking anybody in a moving vehicle hoping they've got supplies they an steal for themselves without waiting in line like everybody else?

Ok. I'll bite regarding this media circus on Haiti. The country even down to the culture is an irreparable mess.

Just compare it to the Dominican Republic. If the US really wants to help, they'll send in the Air Force. However, I suspect that there may not be adequate amounts of napalm on hand to take care of the problem in a relatively human manner. When I see current Haiti news, I ask myself two things: How is that different then every day Haiti in months past? What 'liberal' issues on TV are being displaced by this drivel?

Answer to the first question: It's not.

Answer to the second question: I don't know. There are recent events that give strong indication that the election in Massachusetts could warrant some investigation in regards to media influence and especially in regards to electronic voting machines. The latter are the most problematic, because the same company is behind those as is behind the ongoing attacks against the Massachusetts government. Getting obedient politicians in office would make the latter easier.

"Just take the high road, fight the good fight, and take care of business .. Don't try and take on MS just write better code and better systems .."

'Linux' isn't trying to take on Microsoft, it's the other way around. A company with a long time enmity towards anything open source and not adverse to using any dirty trick to get its own way.

Comes v. Microsoft

Microsoft EDGI: How It Works

You're all brave now that the thread is old and nobody who watches this stuff will read it. That's a clue that I need to be alert to debunk your crap in current threads, so thanks for the heads up.

I made no mistake. I'm quite aware of the "somehow". It's called evangelism. It's a recognized part of the strategy, immoralized in the Halloween documents and the Comes documents.

This mind bending is actually the entirety of Microsoft's value add. Everything else they bought - and ruined. In terms the average slashdotter will understand: it's the dark side of The Force. In more common terms it's Power Selling - the art of convincing somebody that your brand is worth paying extra for when it adds nothing - in fact, when it subtracts much from security, reliability and utility - and in fact actually restricts the freedom of users to use innovations that would benefit them because they are outside the scope of commercial software.

How Microsoft makes the ability of enterprises to maintain their data over the long term a complete impossibility and then sells that as a valuable feature is a ridiculous example of the power of persuasion over observable facts. Yet they continue to do it over and over again, turning my preferred career path into a theatre of the absurd.

Apple products: I'm looking for a mainstream PC product that I can buy that equates in performance, app compat, battery life, media flexibility and utility to my 2 year old iPod Touch. I'm not seeing it. W7 doesn't run on ARM and it never will. WinMo looks like Windows 3.1 and relies on vendors to build the interface because apparently all the WinMo developers with UI experience were let go. They rebooted the WinMo team last March, and it's likely they'll be a couple years before the new team is ready with a product that's worthy of the name WinMo 7. Redmond may come out with a product by that name, but we'll only enjoy a good laugh over it.

And then when our slates, our phones and many of our PCs are "powered by" non-MS technologies and they're powerful, useful and reliable, then what? Every patch Tuesday, every morning while our W7 machines boot, every time our systems freeze or shut down unexpectedly we'll get our hero points by whipping out our iPad, Nexus Two, LiMo Slates and getting the job done under adverse conditions. Big win for those with foresight and a Darwin moment for those without. We'll look back at our PC's with Windows as the slow cousins we have to encourage to finish the race so they can get a trophy in the special olympics.

Nevermind

Or the newspapers will all just fold and die. Or be banned because they pollute too much.

Why should I bother reading about what the NYT has to say about Haiti when there are people there right now who are blogging about it in more detail than any non-local reporter ever could?

Now extend that to every news story. ALL news is ultimately local to somebody - and there are going to be people who are going to write about it because it's important to them, not because "it's their job." And if you say it can't work, just look at groklaw - far better coverage than any of the paid media.

In 10 years newspapers will be gone, completely bypassed. Same as AM Radio (and many of the "Talk Radio" airheads) is dying out because nobody's buying radios that can receive AM any more. I don't read the free newspapers that get dumped on my doorstep every week because the format sucks, the stories suck, its one-way, not interactive, and it's mostly advertising - sites like groklaw have spoiled me.

So no, I won't miss the newspapers, and I won't miss their presence on the web - something else WILL take their place - it's the nature of the beast.

Comes exhibit 3020 (PDF):

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Westorinon; Ben Fathi
Cc: Carl Stork; Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

The slide is a manufactured one stemming in direct link from Microsoft. If you look carefully at the bloggers, commenters, journalists etc you will start seeing a pattern. Its the same exact nicks/people lambasting Linux, dancing in joy over any new or old Microsofts product that badmouths Google. Sometime in september -09 Microsoft started a orchestred effort into throwin FUD at Google. Since finding dirt on Google is about as easy as getting a picture of Bill Gates using Linux most of it consists of lame attacks about privacy.

I dont know what Google does about this but at some point they will have to take this up into the open. No company that has tried to ignore Microsofts criminal activities and not take an open fight has ever survived.

PS. I do understand i sound like a raving lunatic to some people but please, read this and come back and tell me Microsoft is your everyday normal corporation. DS

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720190018
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/

(Let's try that again with the correct link.) http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-cyber-czar23-2009dec23,0,6636463.story

Has the current Cybersecurity Czar even made a statement about the recent hacking invasion from the Chinese government?

Hell no. A former C-level executive at Microsoft is not going to touch that, it's an international incident that he helped cause. Look instead for smoke and noise about some other happy horseshit. It's bizarre how he could squeak past the employment interviews. Any background check should have turned up his employment at Microsoft, so either none was done or there is some serious corruption and a serious breach:

Has the current Cybersecurity Czar even made a statement about the recent hacking invasion from the Chinese government?

Hell no. A former C-level executive at Microsoft is not going to touch that, it's an international incident that he helped cause. Look instead for smoke and noise about some other happy horseshit. It's bizarre how he could squeak past the employment interviews. Any background check should have turned up his employment at Microsoft, so either none was done or there is some serious corruption and a serious breach:

You know your product's reputation is in trouble when a government advises the public to dump it.

Dude, that was the case back ten years ago, too. Facts and technical data don't play a role in situations where Microsoft products get deployed.

You know you have a cult-like following when governments, research universities and a handful of computer magazines advise the public to dump your product and it still retains market share. Having EULAs that prohibit benchmarking doesn't hurt either. Nor does it hurt to have insiders paid for by the victim's own budget.

How long must this go on? Put a dollar value on the damage and then put out warrants for Microsoft executives and interns, past and present.

That's exactly what does happen, even at border control. Pay a little extra, and you can preserve a little more dignity. Ask any billionaire.

Then you get to decide how far this fact (paying money for different treatment by authorities) offends your ideology.

The dirty tricks squad is out in full force to nip this in the bud. There'll be the usual pans from Ina Fried and Mary Jo Foley and other puppets in the press. Then the arm twisting begins.

They might as well just record the meetings and copy the DOJ and Pamela Jones on the transcripts and emails. It's not like we're all not going to read it on Groklaw after the Attorney General subpoenas it as part of the antitrust lawsuit.

Microsoft did nothing "nice". They were dragged, kicking and screaming, into court and had their fingers slapped to the tune of over one billion US dollars by the EU for their misbehavior. And they attempted to poison the well by inserting patents into the published documents, patents incompatible with GPL software such as Samba. There are plenty of references to the court cases, but the interview with such developers of Samba as Jeremy Allison at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070919214307459 are particularly enlightening.

The Samba site also has this note about the patent encumberment and GPL incompatibility Microsoft tried to slip in: http://us1.samba.org/samba/ms_license.html.

And if you think there's anything "nice" about their efforts, go read the documentation. It was apparently written by monkeys trying to produce Hamlet, and bears little if any resemblance to how the protocols actually work.

can easily squash PostgreSQL by just 'buying out' the top 20 developers

... like Sun quashed MySQL when Monty "sold out" ... oh, wait, it's still around ...

what a troll - and that was lying about what Stallman said

Can we get him put on some terr'rist list or something?

He's just pushing a straw-man argument, having unwisely made it for MySQL, and after embaressingly being caught twisting RMS's words (see groklaw, http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100108114314405).

I fear he's strictly in this for himself and his friends, a certain well-know monopolist with a "Codeplex" Foundation...

Bother! I wanted this to be over months ago, so I could get more consulting from Sun's (Now Oracle's) customers.

--dave

Richard Stallman has clarified that he believes the GPL is necessary and sufficient protection for MySQL, in direct contradiction to Widenius' call that the license should be changed and copyrights rest in some entity other than Oracle.

Stallman: One thing that makes no sense at all is the idea of changing the license of MySQL to something non-copyleft. That would eliminate the possibility of selling exceptions, but allow all sorts of proprietary modified versions. Wherever MySQL should go, it isn't there.

Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center defend the GPL even more strongly:

"The GPL was designed specifically to ensure the permanent freedom of software, and the ability of everyone to improve and share their improvements to the program, no matter who acquires the copyrights to the code," Moglen said of the argument he presented to the Commission. "The whole point of GPL as a copyright license is to deal with every contingency that could result in hobbling or destroying the freedom of code shared under it. The drafters of GPL versions 2 and 3 considered scenarios very similar to the ones that the Commission is concerned about now. The design of the license, and the experience we have had using it, show that it can be counted upon to operate as intended in situations like this one."

Programs released under the GPL, including Linux, Samba, and the GNU Compiler Collection, have continually proven to be resistant to anti-competitive conduct in the marketplace. "GPL’d programs competing effectively against offerings of the richest and most powerful monopoly in the history of information technology have resisted the efforts of the monopolist to find a chink in its armor," Moglen writes.

Why am I so certain you've read Atlas Shrugged in the last three years.

Don't worry: when you regain the capability for independent thought, you'll realize the world is not black and white, and not everyone who doesn't want to give free reign to manipulative, anti-competitive, privacy-intruding, innovation-stifling, cartelizing corporations (Pt. 2, 3) wants to steal your soul. They may be looking to fix our problems, too, you know.

Example: OLE vs. OpenDoc

The Old Strategy

• Direct competition on tech details
• Press, pundits LOVE this!
  • Conflict!
  • Underdog!
• ISVs are confused, so they do nothing
  • "I'll wait to see who wins"
  • OpenDoc's FUD worked
• Complete disaster
  • Delayed the widespread adoption of OLE

The New Strategy

• Allies
  • Apple, Novell, IBM
• Strategy
  • Disrupt the alliance
• Tactics
  • Reposition OpenDoc as an OLE dev. tool
  • Put OLE in the enterprise
  • Pits Apple against IBM & Novell
• Help Claris & WP support OLE in Win95
  • pits part of an ally against itself

(From: How to Get Your Platform Accepted as a Standard - Microsoft Style)

(Don't despair if it's been longer than three years. You can always hope for a lightning strike to work its magic.)

this?

• Monty made MySQL; licensed it under a dual license (GPL + MySQL Commercial License)
• dual license structure worked well for MySQL AB - prevented commercial competitors, fostered community around GPL version
• Monty sold MySQL AB to Sun for $1B without changing the license. No compliants; he worked for Sun.
• Sun seems to be under the gun and going to get sold off - Monty quits, tries to fork MySQL as MariaDB. Wants to build a new "MySQL AB" under another name; but the dual license prevents it.
• See opportunity to force Sun to change the license so he can keep his money from the sale, while still getting all the code, possibly also the commercial code, and redo MySQL AB
• Monty's looking to do a "rinse-repeat".

Background: MySQL is an open-source database used by millions. Originally developed by closely-held Swedish company MySQL AB, it was sold to Sun Microsystems Inc in January 2008. Sun is now in the process of being acquired Oracle Corporation. The deal is still awaiting European regulatory approval.

Not happy with selling MySQL AB to Sun for a cool billion, Monty Widenius is now trolling regulators, the media, and anyone who will listen in his efforts to get back control of "his" database (without having to give back the money).

European regulators still don't "get" the open-source software model

The Europeans are holding up their approval of the Sun-Oracle deal because of concerns that the acquisition will reduce competition in the database industry. Oracle Corp, which is already the dominant player in large-scale corporate databases, already "controls" several open-source database products such as Oracle Berkeley DB and the InnoDB transactional storage engine for MysQL

The reason I put "controls" in quotes is because it's very difficult to actually exert full control an open-source project, especially one that is licensed under the GPL or similar open-source license. It would probably be more accurate to say that Oracle "sponsors" both BerkeleyDB and InnoDB.

It's all about being an unabashed hypocrite

Widenius was originally able to control MySQL by insisting that the copyright for all code contributed by outsiders be assigned to MySQL AB. By doing this, Widenius was able to "dual-license" MySQL, with both a free GPL version and a paid commercial version.

This licensing scheme was good enough when Widenius was in control of MySQL AB, but now that Oracle is buying Sun, suddenly Widenius wants both the licensing scheme changed to something that would allow his new company to sell modified copies without having to release the source code for their changes, and to have Oracle turn over control of MySQL to someone other than Oracle - perhaps the EU should consider (nudge nudge, wink wink) his new company, Monty Program AB?

Calls the GPL licensing scheme an "infection", wants the EU to violate international treaties

You can read more about the attempt to get the Europeans to retroactively change the licensing scheme from the GPL to something more "Monty Widenius-friendly":

We would like to draw attention to the fact that some major concerns about the effects of the proposed transaction could be somewhat alleviated by requiring that all versions of MySQL source code previously released under the GPLv2 license (whether in a General Availability, Release Candidate, Beta, Alpha release, or as public bazaar or bitkeeper revision control trees) must be released under a more liberal open source license that is usable also by the OEM users and would also create an opportuity for other service vendors to compete with offerings comparable to MySQL Enterprise.

In other words, he wants the European Union to violate Articles 9 and 12 of the Bern Convention on Copyrights and retroactively change the license from the GPL, which requires him to share any changes he makes to source code covered by the GPL, to a license that would let him take from the original authors, but not give back anything in return.

The "copyleft/infection" principle of the GPL license represents a particular obstacle not only to revenue generation by the fork vendor but also to the overall adoption and market penetration of MySQL, MySQL forks and MySQL storage engines....

When we were kids, our parents told us "share and share alike." The authors who contributed source code under the GPL adhered to this principle. If you don't want to share your changes, simply don't "borrow" their

Taking Monty at face value he seems to be saying Mysql was such a dynamic open source poject because of the way it was funded (a GPL codebase with a propriety licence for any one willing to pay), giving it lots of cash to develop (enabling full-time developers to work on the code base). Mysql (in Montys view) was not like Linux that had a distributed development effort behind it.
Taking him at face value this seems to be a weekness in Mysql development model, the Oracle buy out is a case in point.
Not taking him at face value however is Groklaw I think her assessment is a little harsh (not because I know Monty personally, I dont) as there is a reasonable explanation for his actions outlined in the Groklaw artical. He's trying to stop Oracle from Buying Sun and therefore mysql, as he can not see Oracle supporting mysql. Why would a company buy out a competitor, whose product makes less profit than theirs, and support it, even though it will take customers from their more lucrative products.
I say this because with the accusations against Monty are strong and need to be proven in non contradictory ways.

I don't know why I bother reading the comments.

Maybe it's the favorable ranking Slashdot has in my Firefox awesome bar. Maybe it's the arbitrary and Skinnereque reinforcement that comes from being modded up. Perhaps it's just a bad habit. Regardless, arguing here is like wrestling a fifth grader. Between the ultra-individual libertarian ideologues and the clueless teenagers (never mind the considerable overlap), it's hard to find anything challenging.

As another poster mentioned a few weeks ago, Slashdot has become a site for "computer janitors" --- i.e, the bored and easily amused who have no real ideas, power, or authority. The comments section has become a showcase for naivety. Oh, there's sound and funny and fury, but there's no creativity, even among the trolls: does anyone remember OOG_THE_CAVEMAN? Now we're left with copypasta that aims to offend in the most superficial way.

Frankly, reading Slashdot has become an embarrassment. I mention it with the same tone and trepidation I might use to admit I'd purchased a Big and Rich album. Remember when we used to talk about technology? Now we mainly argue about people talking about technology.

If I want interesting stories, fair and timely news, or probing analysis, I know where to find it. Still, there's nothing that can replace the Slashdot of yore.