Slashdot Mirror

Also worth reading the groklaw article on this, which is available here.

See also Groklaw's coverage of the Ballmer email

The header of this fella's article is the same as groklaw... is that a template or a blatant ripoff?

I don't dispute that the man seems to me like he has a screw loose (and that just from the posts I've seen by him--there are plenty of others who offer evidence that would tend to support the idea that he's clear out of his mind).

Anyhow, if you read this Groklaw story, you'll see that there may be a SCO lawyer connection here. That might be bad, because when they talked to O'Gara, they sure went on a lot about the privilege log and such concerning that privileged document SCO tried to read into the public record (which is *bad*). In other words, it *really* looks like SCO is leaking things it ought not to the media. Now, I can't prove any of that, but I would say that it's certainly beyond the appearance of impropriety to even discuss that with the media.

As for Merkey, here, I doubt he was behind the O'Gara stories here--I suspect O'Gara and a source close to SCO were. Expect IBM to be on the ball here and to start seeing just *what* all SCO has told the media. Now then, you're probably right about him coming up with more wild stories (buying Linux for $50,000 and putting it under a BSD license to "save" it... after he removes all the "SCO-owned" bits).

In other words, we can expect a LOT of crazy stuff before this story is over :] Damn, someone ought to make a movie out of it, though I guess it'd be hard to explain the importance of it to people who didn't follow this...

where did the rumor that IBM said it couldn't find the sources come from ?

Ask and ye shall receive

Remember the *other* O'Gara story? About IBM's "discovery abuse"? Funny, that may well have been put out by SCO--see here. Groklaw refutes yet another wild story.

As an aside, though, that sure looks like a direct quote of the article in the story above. I wish submitter had at least put it in quotes... *sigh* :]

what Slashdot's next story will be?

Another blow for journalistic redundancy.

O'Gara's fondness for anonymous sources and unattributed quotes diminishes the corroborative value of the story.

According to Groklaw none of the eye-witnesses to the hearing in question SAW or HEARD any suck claim. In particular, the SEALED transcript is not available and the "reporter" in question *WAS* *NOT* *PRESENT* for the hearing.

You are all victims of FUD and you can stop with the uninformed pro-SCO Astroturf and rebuts there-of.

According to Groklaw none of the eye-witnesses to the hearing in question SAW or HEARD any suck claim. In particular, the SEALED transcript is not available and the "reporter" in question *WAS* *NOT* *PRESENT* for the hearing.

You are all victims of FUD and you can stop with the uninformed pro-SCO Astroturf and rebuts there-of.

Why dosen't everybody just read the response on groklaw?

Read this:
I have not provided a link deliberately. If you wish to read her article, you can find it, I'm sure by a Google search or off of Slashdot, since they made what I consider the unfortunate editorial decision to give the story more widespread readership than it otherwise would have received.

There were 2 folks there who reported to Groklaw what happened. They also report that Maureen O'Gara was *not* at the hearing.

See: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200410231 53851359

Groklaw responds to this inaccurate article.

Reminder: Maureen O'Gara is a shill for SCO/Microsoft. I'd put her in the same mental category as Laura Didio and Rob Enderle.

Groklaw has a rebuttle here.

Basically the whole story is a lie. The judged sealed the transcripts of the hearing (probably because of the confidential email the SCO lawyers read aloud), so the author couldn't have checked her facts. All the witnesses who attended the hearing and reported back to Groklaw say that IBM never said anything about "losing" code.

Just another Microsoft shill.

Don't be so sure ;]

From Groklaw's coverage of the hearing:

SCO had, from their count, about 12 lawyers there, but only three sat at the table and only two spoke, one of the new attorneys on the case, Sean Eskovitz, and Frederick Frei. The silent third was the other new SCO attorney, Edward Normand. Brent Hatch was there and so was Kevin McBride.

I see no mention of Mr. Silver (the SCO lawyer who fell asleep last time), so it's quite possible he was napping elsewhere (e.g. the unemployment line). Of course, the report doesn't really say. They should be glad they don't have a harsh judge--some poor observer (not even a party to either case) who drove her friend to court on very little rest got *jailed* for a few days and charged with contempt for doing just that! (Mind you, that was IMHO a tad harsh for some poor non-lawyer observer who could've just been ejected. Then again, this is why you get to vote judges out of office, rather than into it. You might want to fill in some "no" votes on certain judges this election if you have any bad local judges!)

Good catch.

Speaking of Maureen, here is what I mean by her being on the short list for SCO press releases.

See what I mean?

Right in front of my eyes, some of the comments left on that site have disappeared, it went down from 8 to 5 comments in just a second.

So, the truth hurts, and the truth in this case is - everyone who goes to read this article hates what is written there but most likely does not understand the entire issue at hand about the SVR4, leaves a comment of this sort: "This site is ugly and ad-ridden, and Maureen is a SCO shill" and the editor removes the comment. The entire issue is like that SCO was allright with this move by IBM and there is a story to support this at groklaw. The story goes like this: there was a document on the SCO's site for a while that talked about how great it will be that IBM will have SVR4 code in their Power design... But the article was remove from SCO site.

here is the link

I left this as a response to that horribly written, ad and idiocy infested article.

The best part of the whole thing is he couldn't even be bothered to put together his own site layout and graphics, he ripped it from Groklaw. Here's his site for comparison.

So how does that differ from the 1-Click patent? There are tons of other "obvious" non-software patents out there.

Software patents are pathetic since they are purposly broadly written so that pretty much anything done with a computer (even if it already exists in the non-software world) will infringe.

First of all, all patents are generally written as broadly as possible. Any good patent lawyer will tell you that. In one patent seminar I was at a few months ago, the main lecture was on the biggest mistakes in patenting and #1 was patent claims that are too narrowly focused. Inventors tend to focus on the functionality of their invention rather than the innovations of all the components. Even a nut and bolt can be patented if it is used in a new way or has a new feature. (I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is what patent lawyers do.) So, your complaint isn't specific about software patents, it's a general problem as well.

Second of all, there are a multitude of genuinely useful and innovative algorithms (implemented in software) that deserve patenting as much as any useful and innovative device. Some examples include algorithms for high-performance mass spectrometry and target recognition.

I think there's been a lot of hype about software patents, but so far the arguments seem to have nothing to do with software specifically, just an outdated patent system and poorly applied rules. A good starting point to fix this was recently presented on Groklaw.

So how does that differ from the 1-Click patent? There are tons of other "obvious" non-software patents out there.

Software patents are pathetic since they are purposly broadly written so that pretty much anything done with a computer (even if it already exists in the non-software world) will infringe.

First of all, all patents are generally written as broadly as possible. Any good patent lawyer will tell you that. In one patent seminar I was at a few months ago, the main lecture was on the biggest mistakes in patenting and #1 was patent claims that are too narrowly focused. Inventors tend to focus on the functionality of their invention rather than the innovations of all the components. Even a nut and bolt can be patented if it is used in a new way or has a new feature. (I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is what patent lawyers do.) So, your complaint isn't specific about software patents, it's a general problem as well.

Second of all, there are a multitude of genuinely useful and innovative algorithms (implemented in software) that deserve patenting as much as any useful and innovative device. Some examples include algorithms for high-performance mass spectrometry and target recognition.

I think there's been a lot of hype about software patents, but so far the arguments seem to have nothing to do with software specifically, just an outdated patent system and poorly applied rules. A good starting point to fix this was recently presented on Groklaw.

To get the truth about SCO vs IBM, we should go to prosco.net?.

Ok.

Sound like they're trying to get a Groklaw+Tuxrocks+Yahoeuvre+Legal Scorecard, but without the commentary.

Losers.

Oh, well. Guess it could get hilarious if they add their spin to things.

So there will be no comments allowed on the site.

Nothing but a group of no-good,god-damned litigious bastards.
I'll say it again: litigious fuckin' bastards.

Nothing like a little karma-whorin' to make the time pass. ;)

prosco.net
The SCO group

etc. etc.

prosco.net
The SCO group

etc. etc.

There was a bit about Jeff Merkey on Groklaw recently. Seems that he's associated with the Canopy Group, SCO's parent company. It should be extremely obvious why *they* would want a non-GPL fork of Linux. There's also been a lot of discussion about him on the Yahoo SCO board, and you can find a lot of those comments here.

• It provides a working example of the patent as a clear indication of what it does, and by so doing,
• It puts the engineer/inventor back in the drivers seat rather than the patent lawyer.

• Patents are granted frivolously.
• Litigation is heavily weighted in favor of large corporations; in fact, individuals and small companies simply can't litigate.
• It is almost impossible for an innovator to know if there is a patent already covering his/her innovation.
• Patents can be used to block use of an innovation rather than encourage its use.
• Holders of "submarine" patents can deliberately lurk, predator-like, waiting for honest, unsuspecting innovators to invest huge amounts of time in already-patented technology. Straightforward and fair changes to patent law would completely change the landscape of patent litigation and innovation.

The article argues that the patent system is not broken and that the only problem is the implementation. That's not a consistent argument because the way it's implemented is part of the system. Even his opening example, where an individual programmer comes up with an innovative algorithm and wants to patent it, contradicts the premise. The way the current patent system is written, the ante for playing the patent game (in terms of lawyers and fees) is too high for most individual players or small businesses. Before patenting software can even be considered, the patent system itself needs fixing. There is a good alternate proposal for this on Groklaw.

Well, with Novell now throwing its substantial patent portfolio behind open source, and Microsoft having promised they won't use their patents to crush open source, I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.

it would be infinitly better for these companies to release their patents into the public domain

They would still have to worry about litigation, and you are asking them to give up a weapons useful in defense of potential patent litigation directed against them.

Until software patents have been removed or brought under control, patent portfolios and the threat of a countersuit are the best defense against patent claim assertion.

That doesn't seem like they are going to fight once litigation is started. That words leads me to believe that they would start litigation if anyone even brought up the idea that their IP was being used w/o permission in the kernel.

Red Hat sought a clarification of SCOX's copyright as a pre-emptive measure against the good grounds they felt they have that SCOX was going to initiate a suit against them. This is the same thing, but Red Hat didn't act unilaterally, they thought there was a very good chance they would end up in court with SCOX based on McBride's palaver to the press.

Novell is merely recognizing that may be a necessary measure for them, as well. In fact, SCOX did sue them in anticipation of such a pre-emptive move by Novell in such a way they could still deny there was a controversy regarding copyright ownership of Unix SysV (which would, as has been shown at Groklaw erode their multiple cases against various Linux users, present their shareholders with evidence they didn't have sufficient control over the copyrights that were central to their fiscal plan and the justification for investment in SCOX's legal plans, and is the reason they sued for "Slander of Title" instead of something actually legally tractable.)

That's all that might implies.

According to the Groklaw discussion, the jury trial came from a town where Kodak is one of the two main employers. One can only suspect that this may have swayed the jury.

This is definitely a case for PubPat to tackle. There has got to be significant prior art on these patents.

To anyone thinking of looking, prior art must fulfil the following requirements (IANAL):

1. It must precede the submission of the patent.
2. It must be published. Open source should do fine. So should any kind of academic textbook or paper. Closed source doesn't count unless the technique was specifically described in the documentation or some similar published work.
3. It must be specific. Saying "Unix had this in 1980" doesn't count. Saying "This was described in section 3.4 of Programming Objects in FOO by J Random Academic in 1980" does count.
4. It must cover the same ground as the claims. Suppose that the candidate prior art had been published today. Would it infringe the patent? If so, then its prior art that invalidates the patent. Otherwise its irrelevant.

   Paul.

Hmmm... previous link got cropped. My bad. Groklaw also has the story: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200410071 64855587

Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, August 30. It's rather more technical philosophy than pure technical. However, the really deep problems in computers have an extensive social component. It's important to think about WHY we approach problems the way we do, and what may or may not be right or wrong with them, if we want the solutions to be real-world useful ones, rather than stupid, ill-considered things that are equivalent to overclocking a 486 to 300MHz: vaguely interesting, but pointless. While you may be familiar with most of the issues covered in F&F, you might not think about them that often... and the issues Glass presents are a good thing to periodically reconsider.

The reviews used to be of really in-depth books that might be interesting, or of hardcore SF.

I can't answer as to the in-depth tech stuff. As far as "really" Hard SF goes, there really aren't many writers doing it these days. The field may be fading, for reasons that have been discussed. Of the living big names that spring to mind... Turtledove does alternate history. Niven is getting soft and lazy in his dotage; plus, his best pieces were always his short stories, rather than the his novels. Stephenson is on a historical SF jag... and has been reviewed anyway. Bujold does brilliant space opera, although she does glance at some of the social implications of apparently minor (to the first glance) future breakthroughs in biomedicine and other fields. Modesitt does interesting social SF with a fairly hard science (and social science) background, and is the best of a poor lot these days for hard SF; however, he spends more time on his fantasies, his characterization tends to be cardboard and dialog wooden (although he continues to improve over time), and I do not recommend his books to most freinds. Vernor Vinge is still ---ing brilliant... but publishes about as often as we change presidents.

If you think there's something out there that ought to be reviewed, buy it and review it. Those that can, do; those that can't, kvetch.

I've wondered what the deal was with "the Piquepaille content filter" /. occasionally applies to article postings.

Roland's penchant for lifting text is legendary. It appears he has diversified and now rips-off graphics and layout from other popular sites as well.

I, for one, welcome our shameless plugging overlords..at least when they have something interesting to say like Xamlon.

PJ has an excellent analysis of this case and what software pantents mean for the industry over at Groklaw this morning.

PJ has an excellent analysis of this case and what software pantents mean for the industry over at Groklaw this morning.

Actually, I believe such a derived work is automatically GPL'd.

A lot of people seem to believe this, but it isn't so. The problem stems from the idea that the GPL has some kind of contractual power to cause something to happen to derived code and it does not. It's just a license, and a license grants extra rights to someone that follows its stipulatons. It tells you how you can gain the ability to redistribute some code without violating its copyright (by following the GPL and choosing to license derivative changes under the GPL as well), but it has no power to force that to happen.

So, what happens when someone takes a GPLed work, modifies it, and distributes the changes with a license that says "This work is under the GPL except for the changes made by Joe Bloe, which are proprietory and not for redistribution except by Joe Bloe"? What happens is that the copyright holders of the GPLed code have had their copyrights violated. No code is ever automatically GPLed because the GPL doesn't have the power to coerce anything -- it's just a license that conditionally grants rights.

To read about this in greater detail, see PJ's excellent article on Groklaw entitled The GPL is a license, not a contract.

No-one gets any benefit directly from the fact that there are a large number of distros.

1. Different distributions have different goals. Debian by itself would probably never have developed automatic hardware detection.
2. Different distributions have different development and testing methodologies. This diversity of methods leads to stabler and more diverse software.
3. Experimentation. Do I want to compile all my software from source? Hell, no! Do I want someone else to try it, fix the problems that arise, and note where it gives real improvements? Hell, yes!
4. Security through diversity. Exploits written for Red Hat systems frequently don't work out-of-the-box on Debian. It buys me a little more time to get them patched.
5. Suckage insurance. Even the best projects sometime become teh suck. Should Debian take a detour down that well-trodden path, I know there are other cool alternatives I could switch to.
6. In the case of commercial distributions, you also get insurance against your vendor going insane (cf. Caldera)

In this case, they chose the IBM-developed Common Public License, or CPL. What is the CPL? Here is what the Wikipedia says. Note this section:

"The CPL is a copyleft license, broadly similar to the GNU General Public License in its terms. The main addition is a patent clause designed to prevent unscrupulous contributors from contributing code which infringes on their patents, and then attempting to charge royalties; in such a situation, the CPL requires the contributor to grant a royalty-free license to all recipients. This additional requirement renders the CPL incompatible with the GPL (in the opinion of Eben Moglen)..."

Hmm..incompatible with the GPL. Let's see what Groklaw has said about the CPL. All right, call me paranoid, but with Microsoft's history, I would tread cautiously. This may be altruistic of them, and maybe they are really nice guys, and trying to be good corporate citizens. Or maybe there is another motive that will become clear in the future. Time will tell.

Does anyone else detect a certain similarity between the blog at the 'read more' link from the original post, and Groklaw?

Is this a third-party template that they both happen to use, or did somebody just rip Groklaw's design?

• The idea that people would actually keep it in their own homes is not realistic, though

• Whether you agree with the justification or not, the military did a nice job of disciplined strikes. There were some accidents, but that happens.

• I believe that one of the largest tragedies of 9/11 aside of the loss of life from so many victims was the assault on our civil liberties from our own government that soon followed.

1. Was the Monterey contract between IBM and Caldera?

   Well, actually, it was between The Santa Cruiz Operation (Old SCO) and IBM. The unsold part of Old SCO is now known as Tarentella.

2. Did it include a Change of Control clause?

   Yes. See the full text of the Monterey contract for details.

   ... IBM shall have the right to terminate this Agreement immediately upon the occurrence of a Change of Control of SCO which IBM in its sole discretion determines will substantially and adversely impact the overall purpose of the cooperation ... or will create a significant risk or material and adverse exposure of IBM's confidential and/or technical proprietary information....

3. Did control change from Caldera to The SCO Group?

   Well, actually, control changed from Old SCO to Caldera International, Inc. , which later renamed itself The SCO Group (SCOX). For most of the gory details of the transfer, see the Agreement and Plan of Reorganization between Caldera and Santa Cruz Operation. Don't forget the ammendments, which were made prior to close. Old SCO contributed all of the stock of certain of its subsidiaries to Caldera International. It certainly looks like this transaction would trigger the Change of Control clause, so that IBM would have the right to terminate the agreement. I don't know if IBM did terminate the agreement. I suppose that "immediately upon" means "immediately upon or anytime after" rather than "immediately upon, but not more than X days after..."

4. Case closed.

   Actually, the cases aren't over, and won't be for quite a while. Even the Dalmer-Chrysler case is dragging on. Keeping the cases undecided seems to be the whole point of the exercise.

1. Was the Monterey contract between IBM and Caldera?

   Well, actually, it was between The Santa Cruiz Operation (Old SCO) and IBM. The unsold part of Old SCO is now known as Tarentella.

2. Did it include a Change of Control clause?

   Yes. See the full text of the Monterey contract for details.

   ... IBM shall have the right to terminate this Agreement immediately upon the occurrence of a Change of Control of SCO which IBM in its sole discretion determines will substantially and adversely impact the overall purpose of the cooperation ... or will create a significant risk or material and adverse exposure of IBM's confidential and/or technical proprietary information....

3. Did control change from Caldera to The SCO Group?

   Well, actually, control changed from Old SCO to Caldera International, Inc. , which later renamed itself The SCO Group (SCOX). For most of the gory details of the transfer, see the Agreement and Plan of Reorganization between Caldera and Santa Cruz Operation. Don't forget the ammendments, which were made prior to close. Old SCO contributed all of the stock of certain of its subsidiaries to Caldera International. It certainly looks like this transaction would trigger the Change of Control clause, so that IBM would have the right to terminate the agreement. I don't know if IBM did terminate the agreement. I suppose that "immediately upon" means "immediately upon or anytime after" rather than "immediately upon, but not more than X days after..."

4. Case closed.

   Actually, the cases aren't over, and won't be for quite a while. Even the Dalmer-Chrysler case is dragging on. Keeping the cases undecided seems to be the whole point of the exercise.

1. Was the Monterey contract between IBM and Caldera?

   Well, actually, it was between The Santa Cruiz Operation (Old SCO) and IBM. The unsold part of Old SCO is now known as Tarentella.

2. Did it include a Change of Control clause?

   Yes. See the full text of the Monterey contract for details.

   ... IBM shall have the right to terminate this Agreement immediately upon the occurrence of a Change of Control of SCO which IBM in its sole discretion determines will substantially and adversely impact the overall purpose of the cooperation ... or will create a significant risk or material and adverse exposure of IBM's confidential and/or technical proprietary information....

3. Did control change from Caldera to The SCO Group?

   Well, actually, control changed from Old SCO to Caldera International, Inc. , which later renamed itself The SCO Group (SCOX). For most of the gory details of the transfer, see the Agreement and Plan of Reorganization between Caldera and Santa Cruz Operation. Don't forget the ammendments, which were made prior to close. Old SCO contributed all of the stock of certain of its subsidiaries to Caldera International. It certainly looks like this transaction would trigger the Change of Control clause, so that IBM would have the right to terminate the agreement. I don't know if IBM did terminate the agreement. I suppose that "immediately upon" means "immediately upon or anytime after" rather than "immediately upon, but not more than X days after..."

4. Case closed.

   Actually, the cases aren't over, and won't be for quite a while. Even the Dalmer-Chrysler case is dragging on. Keeping the cases undecided seems to be the whole point of the exercise.

Quoting the article:

GCC is, of course, released under the GNU Public License, and I own a commercial license for the Intel compiler.

Actually, the name of the license is the GNU General Public License. It is "General" because when the GNU project began there was no single license used throughout the project; .

[...] while GCC has not quite reached the performance of its commercial competitor [...]

GCC can be commercial too -- many firms distribute copies of GCC for a fee. I believe the author should have said "proprietary" meaning that what the Intel compiler program does, exactly, is secret. As RMS said when describing a proprietary web video streaming application he didn't want MIT to use to distribute a feed of his talk on copyright and globalization:

"What it does is secret. You can't study it; you can't change it; and you certainly can't publish it in your own modified version. And those are among the freedoms that are essential in the definition of "free software."

GCC, by contrast, is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License. Getting back to the article:

These "coyote" benchmarks provide an excellent example of the advantages of "open" software development.

Here I don't think "open" was the best choice of words, I think "free" would have been more accurate. The GNU Compiler Collection was originally the GNU C Compiler and first written by RMS. I guarantee you that RMS did not and does not now do work for the open source movement. He makes effort to make that point clear (like when he corrected Mike Uretsky who made the same mistake). The FSF asks you not to lump their work in with the work of the open source movement. Eben Moglen spoke at Harvard some months ago and also made this distinction. Prof. Moglen makes it clear why they are so adamant on this point:

"We need to keep reminding people that what's at stake here is free speech. We need to keep reminding people that what we're doing is trying to keep the freedom of ideas in the 21st century, in a world where there are guys with little paste-it labels with price tags on it who would stick it on every idea on earth if it would make value for the shareholders. And what we have to do is to continue to reinforce the recognition that free speech in a technological society means technological free speech. I think we can do that. I think that's a deliverable message."

I don't think he's overstating the case.

Finally, there's a common misunderstood myth repeated in the end of the article:

"Choice" is the key word here -- choice is good, be it in democracy or software. Intel provides a useful alternative to GCC for development on ia32 systems. One compiler might have a great environment for developing GUI code; another compiler might generate fast code. GPL-like freedom may be important -- or not -- as individual circumstances dictate.

Many people believe this, I've even heard a variant of this myth being repeated by a representative of the Mozilla Foundation. Choice is no substitute for software freedom, in fact they speak to different aims entirely and in computer software choice is not as important as software freedom. If all we have are three web browsers to choose from (say, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera) choice is satisfied. B