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This case isn't about GPL.

What is the title of IBM's Sixth Counterclaim?

Skip down the page to the text that reads "SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM" almost halfway down the page.

What is the content of that claim?

Now do you notice mention of the GPL elsewhere? How about the seventh counterclaim? How about the eighth counterclaim?

This case is about the GPL very much, because IBM made it about the GPL. That's also why this case isn't going away.

I have a question for any legal geeks out there. Why are civil suits allowed to proceed at all without any evidence from the prosecutor?

I'll think that you'll get much better informed answers elsewhere. The major focus of Slashdot is to sell advertisement, and this is very evident in the tabloid style stories. Groklaw.net quite simply wants to inform and have thoughtful threads,

Implications/Postmortem report at Groklaw
Attorney Reactions to the Kimball Order

Implications/Postmortem report at Groklaw
Attorney Reactions to the Kimball Order

Actually, if you go to Groklaw and read the material yourself, the judge wrote this in the context of denying IBMs motion. The Judge is describing why he was so tempted to grant the motion. Since he dismissed it without prejudice, IBM can re file the motion later, after discovery is complete.

Actually, if you go to Groklaw and read the material yourself, the judge wrote this in the context of denying IBMs motion. The Judge is describing why he was so tempted to grant the motion. Since he dismissed it without prejudice, IBM can re file the motion later, after discovery is complete.

Hence "general purpose" and "comodity". Still, the car brake software, were it ported to and running on a GP computer would not be infringing. The exposure is not significant there. Also, given the whole rest of the braking system being a necessary part of the invention, the patent would hold just fine as the braking system would not be commodity.

The definition works (and I have written about it several times in more detail in groklaw posts as "BitOBear" no "I") to protect software as a necessary sub-system in an invention while ruling it out the possibility that someone can steal a program using a hardware patent.

I think I have also brought it up here at slashdot before.

Hence "general purpose" and "comodity". Still, the car brake software, were it ported to and running on a GP computer would not be infringing. The exposure is not significant there. Also, given the whole rest of the braking system being a necessary part of the invention, the patent would hold just fine as the braking system would not be commodity.

The definition works (and I have written about it several times in more detail in groklaw posts as "BitOBear" no "I") to protect software as a necessary sub-system in an invention while ruling it out the possibility that someone can steal a program using a hardware patent.

I think I have also brought it up here at slashdot before.

I think this is brillant, couldn't have come from a more knowledgable person at a better time. Especially given that in the past day or two a nice little article got published up on Groklaw about the SMB / CIFS protocol and what legnths they have to go to, to reverse engineer / pull it apart on the wire. It's essentially a slightly intelligent brute force method.

Take a look. I couldn't have made the timing for this article any better if I tried.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200502050 10415933

I second Tridge's motion that when Microsoft really wants to come to the party on interoperability, let me know. I want to be there.

Personally, I think the major reason why they are going through what they are doing for interoperability now, it's all because of market pressure with the rise of open source, and the open standards which it follows. See what's happening with all the governments demanding open standards for documents etc?

*sigh* when will they learn?

Or be like the OSI (the guys behind the failed Open Source trademark who essentially stacked their board and management with a bunch of spokespeople from Sun.

Licensing

The SFLC is directly involved in its clients' FOSS license development efforts, including development of the GNU General Public License v3 by the Free Software Foundation, and offers licensing assistance, particularly license development and implementation consulting, to FOSS developers other than its clients. The SFLC is also available to provide community-wide license review and compatibility analysis, for the purpose of identifying and addressing the causes of unnecessary FOSS license proliferation.

Did you note the Center will be working on the next version of the GPL, for starters? So, what do you think? Is this not a grand idea? Here is the press release: [...]

he's saying that the people who give away their products under the Gnu license have absolutely no right to retroactively attempt to restrict the use and distribution of a product to which they have already waived their rights.

So tell me, how's the weather like in your bizarre alternate reality where SCO is winning all its lawsuits? And where Eben Moglen was kicked out of Columbia for academic fraud?

Not only are your arguments looney on their face, but they are also completely opposed to how business is actually conducted today in the real world. You make as much sense as claiming that Saddam Hussein has an arsenal of nuclear missiles.

for the time being EU will remain free of software patents

more info on groklaw

happy to live in EU :)

Given that Slashdot has posted two or three stories bashing Sun's patent release but have not posted the new Groklaw article indicating that Sun is clarifying their patents release, worries me about Slashdot's interests.

Sun Begins to Respond to Patent Questions (Groklaw article)

Bruce Perens, where are you, ol' buddy? Sun says they aren't going to sue anyone, so you might not sell as much insurance, now!

The biggest issue, as mentioned both on /. and on groklaw is

that it would be possible for developers co-developing Open Solaris to someday find themselves blocked from distributing code by a Microsoft patent infringement claim, while leaving Sun, because of their cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, free to continue to distribute the contributed code.

Now software that only Sun and Microsoft may distribute might count as OSI approved Open Source[wannabeTM]; but it's certainly not Free Software.

[Sorry for the repost, but /code didn't like my poorly formated HTML, so reposting. Yes, I should have previewed too; but at least I didn't call the OSI board a bunch of kooks.]

The biggest issue, as mentioned both on /. and on groklaw is

that it would be possible for developers co-developing Open Solaris to someday find themselves blocked from distributing code by a Microsoft patent infringement claim, while leaving Sun, because of their cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, free to continue to distribute the contributed code.

Now software that only Sun and Microsoft may distribute might count as OSI approved Open Source[wannabeTM]; but it's certainly not Free Software.

[Sorry for the repost, but /code didn't like my poorly formated HTML, so reposting. Yes, I should have previewed too; but at least I didn't call the OSI board a bunch of kooks.]

that it would be possible for developers co-developing Open Solaris to someday find themselves blocked from distributing code by a Microsoft patent infringement claim, while leaving Sun, because of their cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, free to continue to distribute the contributed code.

Now software that only Sun and Microsoft may distribute might count as OSI approved Open Source[wannabeTM]; but it's certainly not Free Software.

The FSF has repeatedly told us that words matter. "Free" versus "open" makes a difference because they don't mean the same thing and they don't have the same implications.

The open source movement's philosophy focuses on technical superiority in their aim to benefit businesses. This is an incredibly weak philosophy which means open source proponents end up sometimes stumping for software that doesn't qualify as "open source"--proprietary software, in particular (because there is proprietary software that does a job better than the "open source" equivalent). Free software proponents argue for software freedom for all computer users, and thus never end up in an ironic position of stumping for non-free software. This means that proprietary software is treated two different ways: for open source proponents, proprietary software is an acceptable, if less technically efficient, means to an end. For free software proponents, proprietary software is anti-social and wrong.

The state of Massachusetts will end up watering down their concepts in a similar way: they'll accept Microsoft's proprietary formats as "open formats", and they'll fall back to quibbling about the "terms of usage". Which means Microsoft has either exploited an extant weakness in "open formats" or blown a new one open. Will Massachusetts state government end up placing public documents in a proprietary format? Do they still care about OASIS' OpenDocument? It looks like interoperation for the purpose of helping to keep government documents readable and changeable without losing information is lower on the priority list than it was before.

The Future Is Open: What OpenDocument Is And Why You Should Care ~ by Daniel Carrera

They have released sol10 with really nice features, cool.
They set it not hardcore-GPL, but at least Sun-defined opensource. Alright.
But what the hell is this about giving the 1600 patents only for CDDL projects?

They show supporting Linux, support the opensource-community, but they cannot/dont't want to move? Could someone explain pls?

...as "The Road Ahead" was. Go read PJ's rant on "I want to be an analyst" - it applies even more directly to Trey, here.

I personally would rather own a separate camera that does a good job, plus a separate 'phone which is damn near indestructible, plus a separate highly capable PDA than the latest flashy but fragile phone with sucky camera and really cramped PDA features jammed into it. IPOF, I do own a capable camera and indestructible 'phone, and if I had a PDA it would be something like a Zaurus.

And who wants to cram their delicate home stereo system into their car?

If this man had any more foresight, he'd need a white cane.

The Future Is Open: What OpenDocument Is And Why You Should Care ~ by Daniel Carrera

The GPL license provides freedom for the code. The freedom for the code provides future freedom for programmers (including the originator of the code). The BSD licens provides a little bit of extra freedom for the programmer (or more to the point for the company who hired the programmer) in the form of the freedom to 'enslave' the code (make it proprietary).

In the case of a large market beomoth like Microsoft, this means that they can now take that code, make minor (but incompatible) changes to it, and make their proprietary modifications the 'standard' by dint of their market force. At that point, you could be forced to pay for acccess to what is,. in fact, 99% your own code because your (free) version has been made irrelevant by MS's market force (even if the incompatible changes actually make the code inferior to your free version).

MIcrosoft did that with the BSD TCP stack, and the Kerberos code (and, I'm sure, other code with similar licenses). Apple came close to doing that with the entire BSD OS. If you like the ego bost of having a company like Microsoft take your code, close it off to you and make big money charging you (among other people) for access to your own code under their onerous EULAs, -- and if that ego boost is way more important than having your code free and useful to the entire community that uses it (and able to come back to you), then the BSD license is for you.

If you wish to ensure that everybody (including yourself) will have access to whatever version of your code people produce, then the GPL is probably a better kind of license for you.

Yes, there are other licenses, and people have investigated and used them. Some, like Sun's license force people to feed changes back to the original author so that they can make proprietary versions. This may seem good for the original author, but subsequent contributors may be wary of what will happen with their code and this may discourage contributions.

The reason why the GPL is so rampant is that it is carefully crafted to strike a very distinct balance, and it's done a good job of it so far. If a better license comes along, people will (hopefully) flock to it instead. In the menatime, the GPL is king, and I think that that's a good thing.

If you read the brief (which is a rather long read, especially by /. standards), that is one of the core issues discussed by the VSDA. They argue that in the Betamax case Sony won largely because there was no remedy that could reduce the probability and gravity of copyright infringement without creating an unduly large burdon on others. Although not specifically addressed in Betamax, VSDA noted these burdons included First Amendment issues (stifling the free speech of copyright holders who want to permit use of the technology for their expressions), expanding the rights of copyright holders beyond beyond those legislative provided (control over the products on which their copyrighted works are performed), and competion issues (copyright holders suppressing the works of other copyright holders by limiting the technology for distribution).

The VSDA tries to differentiate P2P by pointing out that it need not be an "all-or-nothing" remedy, that the infringing and non-infringing uses need not be "enjoined". They don't specifically say that such technology exists to separate infringing from non-infringing (though they imply it), but rather they state that none of the lower courts examined this possibility largely because they erroneously only viewed the software as it currently existed and not some hypothetically different software that could tell the difference. (For the reasons why they only considered the current software, checkout the transcript of the 9th Circuit arguments or listen it in one of the available formats.)

Generally, the answer seems to be no, you can't take away the rights of the innocent to prevent the illegal activities, but really it is a balance of probability, level of harm caused by the activity, and the burdon such a remedy would impose. It's seems it's not a black-or-white issue but one of balance, though thankfully tilted towards the freedom side.

Though VSDA's arguments seem to be well research and argued (though IANAL), I see one major flaw. Their argument seems to rely on the fact that the types of remedies available if Grokster is found guilty should have bearing on whether they should be found guilty. Though they discuss this briefly it seems to be glossed over without much focus. It is my understanding that remedy can only be considered after a finding of liability. It's analagous in criminal law to finding someone innocent or guilty based on what punishments are available to punish them, which just doesn't make sense.

In civil law it seems a little less clear to me. They argue (with precedence) that liability depends on whether or not there was an ability to prevent the infringement, and this ability goes beyond the existing structure (e.g., software) to hypothetical actions. They cite the other big case (after Betamax) in which a swap-meet organizer refused to stop a vendor from selling infringing works and was held liable because he could have added to the contracts that vendors must not be infringing copyrights, which was the remedy.

Overall, and interesting read. They want Grokster overturned (found liable), but clearly want the remedy to require P2P to separate infringing and non-infringing works. They want to make use of P2P for business purposes, or at least don't want it shut down. That doesn't mean it's possible, or can be done without undue burdon. I still find Grokster's arguments much more compelling, though I'm admittedly biased.

So, bottom line appears to be that all SCO really needs is to do a direct source-code to source-code comparison then weed out stuff they can't possibly claim ownership (such as BSD code added to SysV.)

Of course that wouldn't keep the case in the courts for a prolonged time and it wouldn't require any of the stuff they are asking for in discovery these days. (Not to mention the fact that those who have compared the code can't find any line-for-line copying... not even the millions of lines of line-for-line copying SCO claimed were in Linux when they started this whole mess.)

Even if their claim of viral licensing terms were correct, there is still the question of whether SCO actually even owns ANY of the code it claims it does. Novell (most recent undisputed owner) says that they never sold SySV to SCO... just the right to sell licenses. Even that right was tempered by Novell retaining rights to control the termination of any such license... which they did regarding IBM saying that no SCO could not terminate IBM's license.

SCO has an agreement in place with their legal counsel, whereby SCO pays a fixed amount of $ to the firm, and anything over that amount is covered by the legal firm. Can't recall the amount where the legal firm is on their own dime, or, if SCO were to (ha ha) win the case, if the firm would receive additional compensation. Hmm... better go check on Groklaw...

So the waiting game is actually not that difficult for SCO - from the perspective of having resources to pay for legal costs. In fact, the single most used tactic by SCO has been delay delay delay...

What IBM needs to do is give them SO MUCH info that SCO simply cannot make heads or tails of it, forcing them to go back to the judge and cry "waaah, there's too much info and it's so confusing... make IBM explain it to us!" At which point the judge will (hopefully) say something along the lines of "bite my shiny metal ass (or the equivalent) and either do it yourself or I'll dismiss."

SCO succeeded in delaying even more by requesting more code. The judge granted some, but not all, of what SCO wanted -- e.g. they wanted every revision from IBM's AIX and Dynix source revision control system along with all programmers notes, but instead just got more code and some notes. While this is in part a "victory" for SCO as their request was partially granted, the judge noted that she was doing this so as to prevent any further complaints that IBM has not supplied enough code. In other words, this is the end of the line as far as code discovery goes.

Groklaw of course has more.

You can find a transcript of the order here on IP-Wars.net. Groklaw has an article about the ruling.

I think the order is outrageous personally. IBM's being ordered to produce all versions of AIX and Dynix along with notes, whitepapers, and all that fun stuff. This is going to be a mountain of code and documents considering that AIX is 20 years old.

--
Join the Pyramid - Free Mini Mac

sPh

Is it just me or is Groklaw 404'd? http://www.groklaw.net/

Of course, it can be used as an argument, and judging by SCO vs. IBM case you would be amazed what else can be used as arguments (including, for example, such as some statement in the contract actually was meant to mean its opposite and the current statement is a "scrivener's error.") However, being a very circumstantial argument akin to 'the reason we can not find Iraq's WMDs is because they are hidden very well,' it can hardly stay on its own.

The problem is that MOG is really smart. She deliberately writes her stories so that all the facts are true or attributed to an anonymous source so you end up with the wrong conclusion.

Look at this story on Groklaw.

PJ refutes one of MOGs stories but what PJ didn't notice is that every sentence in the article was true when taken by itself. The fact that they combined to give you a false impression that was the opposite of what happenned is a problem for the reader to deal with.

Ah, this explains. Her latest reports i can remember of were heavily criticised by Groklaw and with that she lost all credibility. She did such poor job on even lieing that it was painful even to read.

PJ over at Groklaw has a nice write up on this. Is it just me or is Maureen O'Gara just part of the FUD-machine funded by SCO?

Hmmm... I wonder how much reporter integrity goes for on the open market?

PJ at groklaw has a good read on this at
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200501141 8070774.
The devil is in the licensing details, but maybe Microsoft has [decided|been forced] to play nice in order to not be excluded.

Heres the link to the GrokLaw story. Very informative reading (as always).

I dispute the notion that somehow visual and music artists are a different breed to the "artistic" programmer.

To demonstrate this fallacy: I am all three. Here are my free pictures. Here is some free music. And here is some free software.

There is a bunch more personal expression out there than you know. What do you make of this story, for instance? Or this site?.

I'm certain there are more and better examples out there.

The real question that you need to ask is what state of law most promotes the progress of science and of the arts. Sometimes it's to allow rapid innovation upon discovery, and sometimes it's to "protect" that discovery from being used competitively against the discoverer.

The projected gain by allowing people to copy your jumper prematurely may be negative, but to allow general jumper copying still allows an advantage in producing an original sufficient to allow plenty of innovations to take place (since you can advertise originality). The balance of cost and benefit, in the case of jumper manufacture is almost certainly of the side of copiers, although perhaps a better state of affairs would be to have an innovation tax on non-originators (increasing the price differential); a "default licence", if you will.

An explicit recognition of the incentives, and blocks to creativity would give us better laws. The view of having an absolute moral right to one's one work is one that is ignorant of the mechanism of creativity. I couldn't find the study, but a brain scan of creative types as against normal people shows that the former group make heavy use of memory in the process of creation. Thus "total originality" is a myth.

...here is a Gloklaw story about a patent (U.S. Patent number 6,836,883, titled "Method and system for compiling multiple languages", described as a method or "process involving the parsing and analyzing of more than one source language to produce a common language file that may then be read by the same or another front end system.") that was awarded to Microsoft. Says PJ, "The patent cites the Free Software Foundation's GCC in the prior art section." Microsoft's motivation for applying for this patent is: "The protection and licensing of intellectual property allows companies and individuals to obtain a return on investment, sustaining business and encouraging future rounds of research and investment in the IT industry."

...here is a Gloklaw story about a patent (U.S. Patent number 6,836,883, titled "Method and system for compiling multiple languages", described as a method or "process involving the parsing and analyzing of more than one source language to produce a common language file that may then be read by the same or another front end system.") that was awarded to Microsoft. Says PJ, "The patent cites the Free Software Foundation's GCC in the prior art section." Microsoft's motivation for applying for this patent is: "The protection and licensing of intellectual property allows companies and individuals to obtain a return on investment, sustaining business and encouraging future rounds of research and investment in the IT industry."

I seem to remember that (one of) the first lawsuits over GPL compliance was in Germany. See:
http://www.netfilter.org/news/2004-04-15-sitecom-g pl.html
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200406260 11624480

What effects, positive or negative, do you think sites like the popular Groklaw [groklaw.net] have/will have on corporate technology litigation? Do lawyers pay any attention to the research and opinions of amateurs and the general public? skp

What effects, positive or negative, do you think sites like the popular Groklaw [groklaw.net] have/will have on corporate technology litigation? Do lawyers pay any attention to the research and opinions of amateurs and the general public? ydb

the sco case is not about software patents, it's about ownership of unix in general

There's a lot more information at groklaw

I don't know about the US court cases, but the The 1994 USL-Regents of UCal Settlement Agreement might prove useful, especially section 3c.

It basically says the USL (SCOX's claimed successor in interest) agrees to not sue anyone who is not a licensee who uses "methods and concepts" (i.e. non-literal copying), which is what SCOX's allegations against Linux are based on.

IANAL, and my .sig says what I am, so talk to one in your area, etc.

The theft claim comes from the idea that part of the value (in the form of potential profits) is removed.

"Potential profits"? If it were thrue, you could sue casinos over loosing money because the "potential profit" is high but failed to materialise.

A lawyers going in court complaining about "potential profit loss" is the exact same thing as complaining for not winning at a casino. They are gaming the system. They don't want to talk about the good parts, like free publicity, nor do they want to talk about the fact that US high management tend to lie about futur "potential profits". SCO conference call is a good example of their lact of reality in financial planning. But SCO is merely doing an established business practice. I have seen worse. Pirates? One of the many scape goats available to hide their lies, as a bonus you can even sue them with partial evidence and frivolous claims. After all, if the fact that they pirated is true, the claimed loss must be also...

The sad part is that those who should be making a profit from the material ( producers, writers, staffs, ... ) are NOT the ones loosing money here. It's the distributors ( studios ) and retailers. Guess who is overchaging for these products? Hint: not the ones who are making a profit. The internet makes their distribution model obsolete and their control over ideas void. Them complaining in courts about their "rights to make money" and winning only makes a joke of the US legal system.

IMHO the thing to do is avoid this argument and concentrate on the Founders' original one: That copyright is a TEMPORARY PRIVILEGE intended to INCREASE the amount of creative material FREELY available in the middle-distant future by letting authors and their publishers make money on it without competition from copiers for a SHORT TIME after its creation.

Short, accurate and complete. A real work of art. (sorry couldn't resist :) ) I fully agree with your position on this.

Nice try but I'm amazed at the misconceptions of all the posters so far. geekwench came the closest but in court as in horseshoes, close doesn't count.

The real problem is that he was charged with a crime he probably didn't commit. he -WASN'T- charged with the crime he did commit which is "Unauthorized Access". See:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200412170 91956894

for an article by a real lawyer about it. Further links are provided at groklaw.net.

In this case I think the judge is right and the prosecution screwed up royally. They need to charge him with the crime he committed and not some other crime that may have been committed by his customers or associates.

But one thing I -DO- agree with in many previous posts is that the CAN-SPAM act is simply legalizing spam and making it harder to prosecute.

You can legally send spam advertizing teen sluts and action wives as long as the pictures they send you really do confirm that they look like teen sluts and action wives. Then just have an opt-out list and you're perfectly legal. There is no requirement that the opt-out list actually works other than that list can't email you again. No problem there. Just start up a new list every day and name your new business $RAYDAYenterprises.com or something like that so you get 21enterprises or 351mustang or 23skidoo or whatever. As long as its a different list you're covered under the law because the law says nothing about removing "removees" from any other list or not giving or selling "removees" email addresses.

The CAN-SPAM act is basically a call-to-arms for spammers to march headfirst into battle. And your spam filter is the only thing between you and the spammers and the law that protects the spammers.

There is also more coverage there. There are some very fine points explained in this article.

Send a thank you note Here

I'ts probably worth pointing out the whole thing about middleware platforms here, and in particular why Microsoft doesn't want other people making them for Windows.

If you read this rather long Groklaw post containing the details of the Novell 'WordPerfect' complaint. It's a long read, however, so I'll paraphrase the issue which stands at the root of this case:

WordPerfect, as a suite of application (in the same was as Lotus SmartSuite, in fact) was becoming a middleware platform. It provided a certain amount of programmability, and it was therefore possible to impement 'business logic' using the WordPerfect desktop suite. This means that it's possible for businesses to 'program' WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, etc. with all the repetitive parts of their day-to-day tasks (anything from a mail merge up to a custom database/spreadsheet UI for the bean counters). This makes WordPerfect a powerful platform, since companies can built solutions on top of it and sell those solutions.

So, what caused WordPerfect to be singled out (more so than Lotus, at least) ? WordPerfect was available for many different platforms, and due to their implementation, software developed for the 'WordPerfect Platform' would run on any of those.

This presented MS with a problem. If people can build their business-operation software on top of WordPerfect, then there's nothing really stopping them from switching to UNIX, Mac, or Linux. Their critical business applications will run just as well on WordPerfect for any of those platforms. So, Microsoft (allegedly) did all sorts of nasty things to make people use MS Office instead. That platform wasn't available except on Windows, so people who used Windows+Office to build their business apps would not be able to switch to a different OS later-- unless they re-wrote alltheir business apps. Since no-one really wants to go through all that again, it's a much better situation for Microsoft.

"Yes," I hear you cry, "But is there any danger of you mentioning KDE any time soon?" Indeed there is, a veritable Damocles' Sword-ful of it, right here:

KDE on Windows is middleware. Okay, it's potentially a little more complex that scripting WordPerfect or MS Office, but that's beside the point (especially when you consider that scriptable apps for KDE exist -- at least, I presume so). The idea here is that application written for KDE on Windows are portable to KDE on Linux. In fact, they could need little more than a recompile, depending on the breadth of the KDE APIs.

And therein lies the Good Thing about this idea. If the folks who use software were to standardize on this platform, then it doesn't matter what operating system they run, so long as that operating system has the KDE software platform available. Business solutions developed using KDE (or KOffice, say) on Windows will still run on KDE/KOffice for Linux. With no changes.

All of a sudden, people aren't going to lose their investments the instant they walk away from their current supplier. Admittedly, it goes both ways, but we're not here to put Microsoft out of business, we're here to make Good Software That People Can Use And Enjoy. There is a difference, you know, however small it may seem right now...

Disclaimer: I don't actually use KDE, I use a Mac. Although I have read about KDE and like it (KDEParts & suchlike seem like Good Stuff), and back in my Linux days I preferred KDE to Gnome. If I've made any obvious errors when referring to KDE-type things above, I can only apologise & claim semi-ignorance.