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Hey, the quote's from Rob Enderle. I'm willing to believe anything he says; he's so objective.

My opinion may be incorrect. After all, I formed it only after reading some of Enderle's quotes and writings here and there. But he made enough of a negative impression that I remember him by name.

Anyway, I decided to glance around on the internet for a few anti-Enderle web pages. See here, here, here, and here. Here's a good quote from the second to last link:

Enderle's presence is a warning sign. I see a quote from him I get the message. The reporter is out of ideas and has decided to cut corners.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= usercss+firefox

yields as its first result:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=8817 3
which talks about usercss
and http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?co ntentid=181195
talks about EditCSS plugin which apparently makes it easier to edit Usercss, but Firefox isn't exactly promoting this ability.

More: Remember Ed Curry!

Very good, I suspected as much from one of my previous posts. Face facts, when an Internet Idiot like Orion Blastar can figure out your plan, it isn't a very good one. Then again, maybe I am not so much of an idiot? Take that IWETHEY'ers! I figured it out before they did. Who is the idiot now?

Cool. I'll add them here.

1. If you are the directly-listed ISP, you kick every single indicated spam source off your network, make the relevant DNS/Whois changes, and post these facts to NANA*. Assuming you are not a repeat offender, you should be removed within days or even hours.
2. If you are a customer of the offending ISP, you either convince them to do #1 above, or leave them.
3. There is no step 3. TINLC. TINS3.

In the question and answer session at the end of the keynote (44:30 minutes into the videostream), Love was asked about the possible confict over Monterey and Linux IA-64. (A mp3 capture of the transcribed portion)

"Q: What happens about Project Monterey, because that conflicts with the IA-64 Linux, 64-bit Linux?

"Love: OK. I don't -- if we do our job right in making Linux scale over like UnixWare to the degree that everybody, that we know we can... May I ask, some people have said, "Well, people have tried this in the past, but they haven't been that successful," may I suggest: we don't have any ulterior motives for not making it successful. Technologically has not been the reason why it hasn't done it before. There's always some other motive, right? And so to talk about Monterey, clearly we want to make sure we have the same level of Linux integration on Monterey that we would have in our Unixware product. Now, we don't control, I mean, we have a great relationship... it's a joint development relationship with IBM which we intend to preserve ... but they have similar interests and so this is really a very synergistic, uh, this transaction is great for all of the major partners as they have already wanted to embrace Linux moving forward.

"Now, let me address one other aspect of your question, which is that the Monterey Project is in conflict with the IA-64 Linux Project. I don't believe it's in conflict at all. Now, clearly, we have tremendous vested interest in the IA-64 Linux Project and with the acquisition of SCO, they've been doing a lot, so you combine those, and we've got one of the more comprehensive offerings, I believe, on the IA-64 Linux. So that's clearly an area that we're very committed to. But like Unixware, there's elements of the Monterey kernel that are more scalable, OK? Now, on the IA-64 platform, I don't know how long of window that is, but today, it's a little bit more robust and more scalable than the IA-64 Linux is today. Now, I'm not saying that over time that won't change.

"But, and let me address one other thing. Sorry, (laughs) you're getting all of it through one question. But clearly we are going to add components back to the Linux kernel on both IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. We'll work with Linus and everyone in order to make that available. That will take some time. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't know that over time you can have a single kernel -- in fact I know you can't -- that will scale, you know, the breadth of IT technology needs. So I think we're looking, in the Linux community, at having multiple kernels, so...

"Q: Multiple Linux kernels? Or multiple UNIX kernels?

"Love: Multiple Linux kernels as well, over time.

"Q: Thank you.

"Love: You bet.

If you haven't heard of her, you're doing well.

Perhaps the best summary:

http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/Laura DiDio

Or for a more broad-brush approach, here's the output of a search for her name on groklaw

http://www.groklaw.net/search.php?query=Laura+Didi o&keyType=phrase&datestart=&dateend=&topic=0&type= all&author=0&mode=search

And some articles specifically discussing her:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200404221 15008560&query=Laura+Didio
or http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200401030 40251888&query=Laura+Didio

True. Documentation for Linux is still pretty sparse in distributions.

Um. 27,000 pages of documentation (typical install) isn't sufficient? 60,000 manpages (all of Debian unstable) is "sparse?

I call massive bullshit.

Under Debian (or Debian-based distros: Ubuntu, Linspire, Lycoris, Xandros, Progeny, etc.), install dwww and you'll have a system documentation browser at http://localhost/dwww, including a menu. Oh, and search. Need more? your /usr/share/doc/ directory is also accessible. By the way, this stuff is also available online, for those readers not fortunate enough to be reading on a Debian system. The point I'm hammering home here is that the information is on the system.

Sure, but that's the raw stuff. How about books or guides? Well, there's HOWTOs (that's your TLDP, BTW), Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition, and hundreds of other docs.

Bugs? Your distro should have a queryable bug-tracking system.

PDFs suck for online readability. Web content is far more accessible, and it's somewhat ironic that manpages actually translate well to HTML (better than info pages).

Yes, I've harped on man pages a lot. Arcane, difficult to read, you have to know what you're looking for. But (under Debian), Policy requires every system executable have a manpage. What's the value in that? Well... I've watched a $50/15 min Windows consultant try tracking down processes on a suspect Win2K server. By typing the names from the Task Manager into MSIE and looking them up on Google. You want to know what something is in Linux? man command. No manpage? If it's a system command, file a bug. If it's not, you've got something to look at -- a possible security exploit. Note too that other distros and projects, GNOME and GNU in particular, deprecate manpages. This is not only wrong, but dangerous.

Your MP3 player should should show up in an apropos query: apropos mp3. And yes, users should know how to search for things, though the system should also assist in this. Though if you're not accessing the commandline:

• Accessing an MP3 file should launch your MP3 file player.
• Linux app design tends not to be format-specific as Windows tools are. Your audio player should be indifferent to MP3s, Oggs, WAVs, AUs, or other sound formats.

Hope that helps.

As with the marketing of cars and TVs, it is the vendor's high end leading edge models which sells the standard models, from which most of the sales and profit is made. For the enterprise server market today, that high end is multi-headed 64-bit SMP systems, never mind the fact that single 32-bit processors provide more than enough power to do most jobs. For all intents and purposes, it is the ability of the core OS to scale on 64-bit SMP systems that defines "enterprise scalability". Other enterprise feature are effectively just add-ons, which in the case of Linux, have been freely contributed from many vendors and developers.

Since version 2.0, Linux was more than just a 32-bit x86 operating system. With the insistence and assistance of Jon "Maddog" Hall, Linux was already ported to the 64-bit Alpha processor, which delivered great performance and stability. Just like the traditional AT&T UNIX source base, the ownership of the Alpha chipset passed though many hands, suffering the same fate of a thousand cutbacks. Even Alpha's "native" OS, VMS, has been ported to Itanium by HP/Compaq.

Since 1997, Intel has been promoting the Itanium line as the inevitable successor for every other server processor on the market. Despite the early vaporware status, Intel has been very successful, at least in terms of marketing. With the exception of its mainframe systems, even IBM ships Itanium systems that directly compete with their own Power processors.

For what The SCO Group has to offer with SCO Unixware 7,the Itanium line is the only 64-bit option. The problem for The SCO Group is that modern Linux can compete so well in that same market that the value of Unixware is rapid deteriorating to a historical curiosity. I suspect that The SCO Group (at that time called Caldera) executives were well aware of this before they acquired the server part of Old SCO in August 2000, or they would have known, if they spoken to the right executives and technical staff.

So how did Linux get scale on Itanium? The SCO Group would have you believe it was all IBM's doing, which isn't as interesting as the real story. The web of history weaves to encircle and entangle a much more diverse group of conspirators, including many of The SCO Group, Caldera, and old SCO's own former executives and other employees.

In October 1998, IBM, Old SCO and Sequent teamed up to collectively develop parts of Unixware and AIX into scalable 64-bit-ready ports for IBM's Power processors and Intel's AI64, or Itanium, under the banner of Project Monterey. But by then, it was already too late.

In February 1998, well before even the first prototype IA-64 chips were available, a skunkworks team at HP, with some assistance from Intel, began the work toward porting Linux to IA-64. By October 1998, around the same time that IBM, Old SCO and Sequent had finished negotiations, HP had completed the build toolchain. By January 1999, the Linux kernel was booting on an IA-64 processor simulator, months before the actual Itanium processor was available. In March 1999, at Intel, Linux was booting on the actual Intel Itanium processor. In April 1999, CERN joined the project for the port of the GNU C library and VA Linux Systems joined the project and rapidly improved the stability and performance.

In May 1999, the Trillian Project was founded and HP, VA Linux and Intel collectively provided their source patches to the Linux kernel for the Itanium port under the GNU general public license.

A bootable kernel alone however does not make an OS make. HP supplied the patches for the toolchain (initial GCC C/C++ compiler, gas assembler, ld linker). Intel supplied the test platforms, apache, EFI, FPSWA, SCSI, SMP, libm (the old Linux C libraries). VA Linux ported E, E-Term, XFree86, utilities

Actually, it's slightly more complicated.

Document stylesheet trumps user. Unless the user specifies the "!important" modifier, in which case user trumps document. I find this very useful, and use it to override a lot of b0rkeness on the Web.

Also, in some browsers (Galeon among them) it's possible to create a set of stylesheets which can be applied to any arbitrary page, only when specified. I actually use this to tweak the "light" Slash code to format it more like the default. Fun thing is you can apply it to default websites. Screenshots linked from http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/2005-Januar y/048897.html

This and other userContent.css tricks at UserContentCSS TWikIWeThey page.

There's also the greasemonkey Firefox extension, which extends this concept somewhat.

PEBuilder (and 911 Rescue CD) are among the only legacy MS Windows-based rescue bootable CDs I'm aware.

Both of them suffer from a number of disadvantages compared with Linux-based bootable CDs:

• Unlicensed. Despite some unconvincing fast footwork by Bart on his website, the fact remains that BartPE is an unlicensed copy of Windows, using files extracted from MS Windows installation media.
• Build tools, rather than images. While Knoppix, LNX-BBC, DSL, and other Linux bootable systems are available as complete, self-contained images which can be downloaded and burned to disk, the Windows based PE builders assemble a set of local tools onto the disk. Which means you need copies of the utilities to install. As 911 Rescue points out, that's well over US$700 worth of software.
• Severely limited environment. BartPE allows no more than six simultaneous processes, and 24 hours continuous operation, 800x600 max resolution, and you can't legally duplicate and distribute the disks. Linux bootable disks allow unlimited processes, users, maximum supported video resolution, and of course, you can burn as many of 'em as you want to distribute to co-workers, friends, clients, or the public. I've literally left Knoppix systems running for a week or more while using systems for recovery, demo, repair, installation, etc.

Sure, there are Windows-related repair and recovery tasks best accomplished from within a Windows environment. But the tools are far more limited than the equivalent Linux tools.

More on this at WindowsRescueDisk.

Um, userContent.css.

AstroDab, nice concept. I've corrected the allignment and posted results here.

You're welcome to post these to your own site, crediting DigitalGlobe (as you should your own work) and myself.

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

Back in the early to mid 90s, I was hooked on Windows. I'd be up late rebooting, two, maybe three times a night. It got bad. Real bad. I couldn't score a clean install no matter who I asked. Even Nancy couldn't get me to Just Say No.

It was beginning to impact my life in a bad way. I fell in with a bad crowd: more than 100 users. They called me all day long looking to score a fix for why their system went down. I went to my supplier, he put the squeeze on me. Said I needed to "upgrade." I scraped up all my money and bought untold kilos of the stuff. It's all the same, man. You're flying high, then, bam! You crash and burn. This new stuff I'm on, this "XP?" Yeah, it's good shit. But sometimes you still crash hard and your day goes to hell.

I've been freebasing Unix for a while on the servers. Yeah, the real deal's pricey, but there's this other stuff out there if you know where to ask, it's called Linux, ok? Keeps me flyin' high all day and night long. Just watch out, some dealers will cut you down if you don't buy from them. Others are just messin' with your mind.

Well, why not link SCO to something the reader gets real value from? Some page where they can learn something about SCO? After all, since those pages indeed tell something about SCO and therefore contain the word SCO, it should even be more effective.

Oddly, the word "misdirection" is all I can think of just now. For
those who do not know, it is a fundamental principle of illusionists to
misdirection with flashes and loud noises so that you will miss where the slight
of hand is actually going on. By managing the attention of the crowd, focusing
it on something noisy and exciting, one misdirects them so that they are
surprised when the magic happens.

It was Enderle who gave me this idea, of all people. You may remember him, for
all his claims about "Linux terrorists" and then trying even to
provoke Linux vs. BSD flamewars in a snotty aside at the end of one of his
articles.

You see, it should be obvious to anyone that this is all designed as flamebait.
One would expect people to react vociferously, as is the nature of flamebait.
But what is its use? For our "analysts" in the institute here, it
means money, either in donations from the like-minded, or even hype for their
book. Even those who hate it might be tempted to read it, simply to find out
what they say in it.

As for Microsoft, what do they gain from negative PR, you might ask? I suspect
they want to make themselves out to be a victim. Oh, of course, we certainly
won't buy it, but if voices like Enderle's prevail... well, that's another
matter. The general public, and thus many of Microsoft's customers, probably
won't hear about all this, but they might hear the news Microsoft helps put out,
say on MSNBC or other channels...

How might they become a "victim" you ask? By portraying us as
"reactionary" (even when there may be no "us" to speak of)
and trumping up those who come up with the crazy conspiracy theories to
discredit those who can envision more plausible scenarios. I suspect that they
would simply say that their funding of this group was innocent and incidental,
then some up with some wildly inaccurate conspiracy theory from some random
person on the internet, and use that to discredit all those who see any
significant involvement between the two.

Worse, if (God forbid) anyone got upset enough to do something illegal, we would
all be maligned for it. In such a hostile environment, they may blame even
unrelated misfortunes (such as one's server crashing, or random hardware
failures) on unknown "hackers" ...

So don't get distracted by patent nonsense. Refute it, yes, but always with a
level head, knowing that there are "journalists" like Daniel Lyons of
Forbes who will even stoop to quoting random anonymous comments off the internet
to make it look as though everyone with a differing opinion is a moron, while
SCO has invented fake protesters with fake signs claiming to support communism,
among other things.

So remember, they're not trying to convince us of anything. They're trying to
convince those who know little about these issues and who haven't taken sides
yet.

I've seen that solution in use here and it works very well.

So what if some responses are out of date? Anyone can see that an edit happened, and can guess what happened.

Furthermore people who try to "edit history" in particularly egregious ways can't do it without being obvious. (Particularly when some aggrieved person points this out to the moderators.) So that pretty much self-regulates.

I mean, we wouldn't want to /. SCO, would we? ;-)

Stephen Evans's February 5 filing -- I can't tell if it's intended to be commentary, news, or an original submission to the Beeb's hitherto unknown short-story section -- makes wholly unwarranted and unsubstantiated accusations against the free software and GNU/Linux communities.

Evans's smear is in the same light as tarring all African-Americans on account of the crimes of one, all Muslims on account of the terrorsism of a few, or all Brits on account of their cooking.

It's certainly true that a large element of schadenfreude comes into play when "The SCO Group", a/k/a Caldera Linux Systems, one of the first distributors of a commercial GNU/Linux system, on its last legs as a $10m and falling company, claims $50 thousand million dollars in damages on the basis of a $4 million purchase and an avalanche of contradictory statements and outright lies. Certainly Microsoft, whose software defects have severeley compromised global Internet operations four times in the past year, and remains an illegal, but unpunished, monopoly (with, I'll note, ongoing EC investigations of Microsoft's European activities), is unpopular to many.

Moreover: there's no indication that the MyDoom worm wasn't commissioned by parties with an interest in making either the Utah or Washington state dens of theives appear to be aggreived parties. This certainly wouldn't be the first time an alleged "attack" has appeared at a very opportune time for Caldera/SCO, nor that same has failed to take well-known, accessible steps to avert the potential adverse effects of a known-in-advance distributed denial of service attack, rather than cueing the violins for a heartbreak tearjerk moment.

The BBC owes the GNU/Linux and free software communities an apology, its readers, listeners, and viewers truthful rather than fabricated reporting, and Mr. Evans a severe dressing down.

Karsten M. Self
Maintainer, SCO vs IBM TWiki: http://sco.iwethey.org/

"3. Regarding Section 2.01, we agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you are owned by you. However, ownership of any portion or portions of SOFTWARE PRODUCTS included in any such modification or derivative work remains with us."

It is noteworthy to point out that the one Linux kernel tree support all architectures and scales from small embedded to multiproccessor monsters. This dispite the August 2000 claims of the then SCO CEO Ransom Love.

SCO's legal case against any end users of the Linux kernel 2.6.X+ is further screwed.

It is noteworthy to point out that the one Linux kernel tree support all architectures and scales from small embedded to multiproccessor monsters. This dispite the August 2000 claims of the then SCO CEO Ransom Love.

SCO's legal case against any end users of the Linux kernel 2.6.X+ is further screwed.

Have a look at this. I think everyone already figured the infamous list of files wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. Well, here's some of that scrutiny.

Last time this issue came up, I ran a check based on Alexa's top site listings, and Netcraft's assessment of what these sites were running.

Results. Of the top 100 English language sites, there were: 44 GNU/Linux, 25 Microsoft Windows (NT, 2K, XP, 2K3), 13 Sun Solaris 8, 7 Sun Solaris, 4 unknown OS, 4 FreeBSD, 1 Sun Solaris 9, 1 Apple MacOSX, and 1 HP-UX operating systems.

Webservers were: 43 Apache, 26 Microsoft-IIS, 13 Netscape-Enterprise, 3 GWS, 3 AOLserver, 2 Zeus, 1 unknown, 1 thttpd, 1 Stronghold, 1 Squeegit, 1 Roxen, 1 Resin, 1 Rediff, 1 Bellsouth PWP server, 1 AV, and 1 Apache Tomcat.

If you like tabular layouts and want to see methods and scripts (Slashdot's crapfilter prevents this), look here.

Point: for high-volume sites, Linux or FreeBSD and Apache are preferred 2:1 over Microsoft solutions.

Did you have to link Groklaw? Its not fair to /. the happy fun (para)legal site.

For your information, the text of the letter has been available here for a few months.

The only reason this is news is that its a document attached to the court docket for the December the 5th hearing on the motions to compel discovery.

Yes, there's a good site collecting all the information relevant to the SCO cases: SCOvsIBM. They've got an executive summary, analysis, a time-line, and links to almost every SCO article out there. The 2 other good sources are Groklaw and SCO's page, which has the actual legal documents pertaining to the case.

The author of the piece, one Rob Enderle, is developing something of a reputation as a quote whore amongst the bloggers. Google will reveal more and there's a page of Enderle-watching here.

Flamebait is the right word for this sort of thing.

Ahh, Found the answer in a court transcript, here.

In sum, SCO's campaign is designed both to slow the growth of
LINUX, and to reverse its failing fortunes by convincing LINUX users
that they need to pay SCO a license fee to use the lower-cost LINUX
operating system. As SCO's own representatives have proclaimed, if SCO
is successful at this effort, it can add "billions" of dollars in
undeserved revenues to its declining bottom line. Additionally, SCO's
campaign is designed to further what, upon information and belief, has
been referred to as the "LINUX Lottery" -- the ability to reap personal
profit by carefully timed purchases of SCO stock.

No kidding. See one man's adventure in trying to give SCO money, part one and part two.

Sorry, screwed up the link

Xix.

You can try the timelines at http://sco.iwethey.org/ and one on linuxonline They don't contain all the news from slashdot, but they have a good deal of it between them.

...page, I can unequivocably say I've had more direct support and contact from Caldera/SCO (whose actions I vigorously oppose) than I have had from IBM. Hell, I can't get IBM or Red Hat to talk to me officially, and frankly don't want them to other than providing publicly available materials. While Blake Stowell and his office have sent several audio files of Caldera/SCO's press conferences in personal email.

http://sco.iwethey.org/ is a fully self-funded and volunteer effort. We've had no external funding or support (not that we'd mind, you know).

As Eric Raymond says, there's a lot of contact and communication between those who oppose Caldera/SCO in this case. This is motivated largely by self interest, not external funding or manipulation. I certainly haven't talked to anyone who'se owned up to this. Journalists, hackers, and companies legitimately concerned and outraged? Absolutely. Vast, right-minded conspiracy? Hardly.

We might be far better advised to ask who is backing Caldera/SCO in its efforts. There are people and companies who have been suspicously involved in pimping and making direct payments to Caldera/SCO. Some very close analysis of involvment and motive is called for.

More Caldera/SCO lies....

...page, I can unequivocably say I've had more direct support and contact from Caldera/SCO (whose actions I vigorously oppose) than I have had from IBM. Hell, I can't get IBM or Red Hat to talk to me officially, and frankly don't want them to other than providing publicly available materials. While Blake Stowell and his office have sent several audio files of Caldera/SCO's press conferences in personal email.

http://sco.iwethey.org/ is a fully self-funded and volunteer effort. We've had no external funding or support (not that we'd mind, you know).

As Eric Raymond says, there's a lot of contact and communication between those who oppose Caldera/SCO in this case. This is motivated largely by self interest, not external funding or manipulation. I certainly haven't talked to anyone who'se owned up to this. Journalists, hackers, and companies legitimately concerned and outraged? Absolutely. Vast, right-minded conspiracy? Hardly.

We might be far better advised to ask who is backing Caldera/SCO in its efforts. There are people and companies who have been suspicously involved in pimping and making direct payments to Caldera/SCO. Some very close analysis of involvment and motive is called for.

More Caldera/SCO lies....

...page, I can unequivocably say I've had more direct support and contact from Caldera/SCO (whose actions I vigorously oppose) than I have had from IBM. Hell, I can't get IBM or Red Hat to talk to me officially, and frankly don't want them to other than providing publicly available materials. While Blake Stowell and his office have sent several audio files of Caldera/SCO's press conferences in personal email.

http://sco.iwethey.org/ is a fully self-funded and volunteer effort. We've had no external funding or support (not that we'd mind, you know).

As Eric Raymond says, there's a lot of contact and communication between those who oppose Caldera/SCO in this case. This is motivated largely by self interest, not external funding or manipulation. I certainly haven't talked to anyone who'se owned up to this. Journalists, hackers, and companies legitimately concerned and outraged? Absolutely. Vast, right-minded conspiracy? Hardly.

We might be far better advised to ask who is backing Caldera/SCO in its efforts. There are people and companies who have been suspicously involved in pimping and making direct payments to Caldera/SCO. Some very close analysis of involvment and motive is called for.

More Caldera/SCO lies....

Dr. Stefan Hildemann claims to have had a chance to see SCO's code show without having to sign the NDA; he has posted his impressions (in German).
http://forum.golem.de/phorum/read.php?f=44&i=1774& t=1716
Thanks to Robert Taylor this English translation of the posting

... The crunch, however, is a function of the scheduler, which is, over a length of about 60 lines, indeed identical except for slight differences. In this section, there is also a whole lot of corresponding comments...

This raises more interesting questions. Since the SMP scheduler in question was specifically written directly for Linux kernel, and both Caldera/SCO employees only added patches, does it not seem more likely that if there is common source and comment then it is likely that the source in question was copied from GPL'ed Linux source to The SCO Groups own Unix?

No, it's not. The greatest thing about Debian is Policy. It demands that packages meet the highest standards of quality. It makes sure that packages work together. It brings us things like the Debian Menu system, where every X-based package register's with EVERY window manager's app menu. It means that packages will upgrade smoothly, and (via the DFSG) that EVERYTHING is freely modifiable and re-distributable. Linkage: about Policy, why it rocks, more Debian policies.

No, it's not. The greatest thing about Debian is Policy. It demands that packages meet the highest standards of quality. It makes sure that packages work together. It brings us things like the Debian Menu system, where every X-based package register's with EVERY window manager's app menu. It means that packages will upgrade smoothly, and (via the DFSG) that EVERYTHING is freely modifiable and re-distributable. Linkage: about Policy, why it rocks, more Debian policies.

The SCO v IBM Twicky.

CNet is running a peice on the Open Source And Industry Alliance an advocacy and lobbying group sponsored by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

This is indeed great news. Now perhaps the OpenSource community can get behind this effort to politicise itself and vigorously advocate where it most counts, the halls of the U.S. Congress.

In its statment of principles and purpose, the OSAIA states:

Business, government and private individuals must be free to choose software and technologies that best suit their needs, independent of the methodologies or licenses used in their development.

The marketplace must be free of prejudice against open source software, whether through law, regulation, defamation or other means. OSAIA will act to achieve this goal."

This is a good start. The CCIA boasts a formidable stable of memebers including AOL, Kodak, Oracle, Fujitsu, Verizon, Yahoo and others.

There are several good resources on the web that are acting as clearinghouses for information that can be drawn upon as resources in this fight. Notably are TWikIWeThey , the Open Source Initiative , the Free Software Foundation.

Numerous weblogs are available as resources most notably Groklaw.
Pam has amassed an incredible wealth of links and facts surrounding the SCO v IBM issue. Another good site for legal info is the Daily Whirl which is a legal blog site index devoted to lawyers for lawyers covering among other subjects, copyright. GrepLaw and A Copy Fighter's Musings are two good places to start.

Finally, for those of you who want to develop good arguments against intellectual monopolies visit Boldrin and Levine's, Intellectual Property Page .

The Linux kernel has a lot of code that THEY developed and spent money on.

Count 1 of the request for declaratory judgement is the most relavent. It asks the judge to declare that "No LINUX version sold, used or distributed by Red Hat, or used by Red Hat's customers, infringes any right SCO may have pursuant to Section 106 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 106.

If the judge decides that, for some bizzare reason, SCO can violate the terms of the GPL which they are subject to, then RedHat can immediately declare SCO in the same violations. By going through the list of software developed by RedHat and included in the Linux kernel and ancillary code, there is significant code that RedHat can clearly say was not derived from System V. So no matter which way Count 1 goes, the second and third counts are immediately proved true. Either the information is public -- in which case SCO has falsely claimed trade secrets and false advertising (thereby damaging RedHat) -- or all the contributor's sources remain private -- in which case SCO is illigally distributing RedHat's (and every other contributor's) trade secrets, and is making false claims in advertising thier ownership.

Go RedHat Go!

frob

And in this article he mentions "contract" 12 times, but only mentions copyright once, and that's only in regard to removing copyright statements. It's almost as if he is being coy -- making it sound as if there is copyright infringement without ever directly saying it. In other interviews, he also avoids the word, choosing instead words such as "infringing" and "Intellectual Property". The SCOvsIBM page makes a similar observation:

Uncertainty is sown by much discussion of the case in terms of vague or broad terms such as "intellectual property" or "all rights", rather than addressing specific contractual, copyright, patent, or trademark claims. On specific grounds, Caldera/SCO's complaint seems quite limited.

Do you really want to give SCO a new avenue by which to sue you? Given that SCO has not shown any evidence that anyone has infringed their copyrights, I don't see why you'd want to do that. SCO hasn't been exactly acting in good faith recently; I don't know if I'd trust any contracts they write up. Here's what Darl McBride says about SCO's use of contracts against their partners and customers:

Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.

And in this article he mentions "contract" 12 times, but only mentions copyright once, and that's only in regard to removing copyright statements. It's almost as if he is being coy -- making it sound as if there is copyright infringement without ever directly saying it. In other interviews, he also avoids the word, choosing instead words such as "infringing" and "Intellectual Property". The SCOvsIBM page makes a similar observation:

Uncertainty is sown by much discussion of the case in terms of vague or broad terms such as "intellectual property" or "all rights", rather than addressing specific contractual, copyright, patent, or trademark claims. On specific grounds, Caldera/SCO's complaint seems quite limited.

Do you really want to give SCO a new avenue by which to sue you? Given that SCO has not shown any evidence that anyone has infringed their copyrights, I don't see why you'd want to do that. SCO hasn't been exactly acting in good faith recently; I don't know if I'd trust any contracts they write up. Here's what Darl McBride says about SCO's use of contracts against their partners and customers:

Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.

It was originally linked from this website, but I can't find it anymore ;-(

I'm a big Galeon fan, have been since early days, but am currently running 1.2.5, so I haven't seen the 1.3 problems. I also keep a fairly popular Nix Browser Reviews page.

I'm not much of a GNOME fan, and note the extensive GNOME deps as a misfeature of Galeon -- recently rediscovered as it turns out that some user.js prefs are ignored and need to be set through gconf instead (user-agent). Though I can see some benefits in principle, the results of GNOME in terms of the actual desktop are not to my personal liking. Fortunately, this doesn't get in the way of running WindowMaker instead.

There's a lot of assumed knowledge about the 1.3 issues in the interview. Could someone point to where this has been discussed?

Pitching my own $0.02: I've got lightweight browsers. I'm not looking for that in the niche Galeon currently fills. I'm also not looking for the fscking kitchen sink (browser, mail, news, composer...). A browser, but a solid browser, with user-friendly preferences, giving solid user control over presentation, privacy, security, with stability and decent performance. But wait, I already covered that rant....

If Galeon's seriously fscked up (and its slavish devotion to GNOME has always been more a detraction than a benefit), I'll be happy to move on. Pity losing a few years of accomodation, configuration, and utility.

Strongly recommend the core team listen to its users.

I'm a big Galeon fan, have been since early days, but am currently running 1.2.5, so I haven't seen the 1.3 problems. I also keep a fairly popular Nix Browser Reviews page.

I'm not much of a GNOME fan, and note the extensive GNOME deps as a misfeature of Galeon -- recently rediscovered as it turns out that some user.js prefs are ignored and need to be set through gconf instead (user-agent). Though I can see some benefits in principle, the results of GNOME in terms of the actual desktop are not to my personal liking. Fortunately, this doesn't get in the way of running WindowMaker instead.

There's a lot of assumed knowledge about the 1.3 issues in the interview. Could someone point to where this has been discussed?

Pitching my own $0.02: I've got lightweight browsers. I'm not looking for that in the niche Galeon currently fills. I'm also not looking for the fscking kitchen sink (browser, mail, news, composer...). A browser, but a solid browser, with user-friendly preferences, giving solid user control over presentation, privacy, security, with stability and decent performance. But wait, I already covered that rant....

If Galeon's seriously fscked up (and its slavish devotion to GNOME has always been more a detraction than a benefit), I'll be happy to move on. Pity losing a few years of accomodation, configuration, and utility.

Strongly recommend the core team listen to its users.