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To me it seems that, yes, anything that has a BSD license with the advertising clause will need to be removed...but that yields no damages to SCO.

Umm actually it yields *actual damages* to SCO. Trouble for them is it's going to be real hard to show *any* actual damages at all, let alone enough to offset the legal fees involved.

Going after copyright violations is usually only wourthwhile when you have cases where you can ask for *treble* damages and *punitive* damages, and IANAL but it seems to me that this is clearly not one of those cases.

And, either way, the people they can sue for this are the people that contributed the code improperly. Everyone else that used it in good faith is immune to action, as long as it gets removed in a timely fashion once they reveal what code they're whining about.

That just means that if anyone who contributed GPL code to the system objects, one of the pieces of code will need to be removed before distribution can proceed.

Ummm huh? It's the people that hold the copyright to the BSD code that need to object, not those who have copyright on the properly GPLd code. In the cases revealed so far that doesn't appear to be SCO, although it's certainly possible that they can find a few cases where they do have standing. Am I misunderstanding you? This, and the last paragraph of your post as well, seem to indicate you have this all backwards.

Now SCO does have some GPL code in there, but AFAIK (which isn't far, I admit) most of it is to allow GNU code to work with SCO systems.

GPL code in where? In Linux? As Caldera, they contributed quite a bit, ironically much of it in areas they are now suing IBM for contributing to. See this note for example.

Or if you mean in their Unix, there's every reason to believe their LKP, and possibly other modules they claim as proprietary, contain extensive copying of GPL code contrary to license, but the source code will have to be subpoenad to determine the full extent of this.

gcc may be a special case, and might need to be moved to a "non-free" section, or even have new distributions halted until a revised version could be issued. (So hold onto your old CDs. You may need to pull gcc off them.)

Umm wtf are you talking about? You've completely lost me here. AFAIK there is no issue whatsoever concerning GCC.

No, seriously. Process creation under Linux was time-similar to thread creation on other OSs. That's because Linux was as fast at creating *a process* as other OSs are at creating *a thread*. IIRC, threading was initially implemented in Linux from the process-creation methods, so it was similar in speed (the main advantage in Linux from threads was the shared memory space if your application wanted that sort of thing). That's why Apache 2.0 is bringing NT performance more in line with Linux 1.3 performance: NT's threading speed is a lot closer to Linux's forking speed. Again, I'd like to underscore I'm not an expert on this, and it's possible I'm mistaken about relative benchmarks (is NT w/Apache 2.0 a little faster than Linux w/Apache 1.3? Could be...) but I'm very confident of the basic underlying point, that Linux process creation is essentially comparable to other OSs' thread creation, perhaps even faster.

See, for example, http://www.linux.cu/pipermail/linux-prog/2001-Febr uary/000027.html, just one of the first Google links that popped up when I went looking for proof that I'm not on crack: "Linux newcomers often are unaware of the substantial differences between Linux and other operating systems. To implement concurrency, they use multithreading exclusively, mistakenly assuming as high an overhead associated with Linux multiprocessing as on other platforms." In fact, knowing how fast Linux's process creation is relative to other systems' thread creation makes this even more impressive in my mind. This isn't just a bug fix; much like with process creation before it, Linux is doing something fundamentally better than its counterparts.

Don't forget: Just because this is /. doesn't mean I'm just a Windows-hating troll. I try to make sure all my Windows-hating-troll-posts are at least backed up by facts. ;)

Dammit.. I'm sorry bad linking. References to it's use can be found here and here.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

http://www.linux.cu/

Libya has a TLD: try "whois ly4-dom". I don't know whether they actually have any machines. Usually ISPs in countries in Europe sell net connectivity to countries that the US forbids trade with.