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At home I also use IMAP, it is just great, it's a shame its so hard to find a good graphical (I come from windows world so I do like my graphical app sometime) imap client for linux (sylpheed I tried and don't like, which leaves mozilla-mail and that is what I call heavy taking 2mins just to check mail, I use it anyway, but I can't wait for minotaur).

Hard? No, I wouldn't say that. Kmail, which has won various awards, fully supports IMAP. Screenshots are here.

Evolution, which is basically a feature-for-feature clone of Microsoft Outlook, also supports IMAP. Screenshots are here.

I've used both and they are both excellent GUI mail clients. I've also used IMAP with both, and their support of IMAP is very good. Evolution is nice because it is a total PIM/Groupware solution, while kmail is a nice "just-a-mail-client" app (it's a lot like Eudora). Both support nice filtering options for POP3 mail. With IMAP you really need server side filtering, though as there is no standards for filtering mail on IMAP. Both support multiple mail accounts and servers and multiple protocols. Both apps support all standard Unix mail formats, including mbox and maildir. In addition, Evolution supports Eudora, Netscape and Outlook Express mailboxes.

Both are nice apps, each has their strengths and weaknesses, but both are open source and run on many Unix platforms and of course Linux.

IANAL either, but I don't believe this is true. See Softman vs Adobe, where Adobe's "not for individual resale" statement was found to be meaningless. Adobe tried and failed to argue that the defendant "licensed" the software instead of purchasing it. We're getting closer, but we haven't quite reached the point where the law is whatever a publisher says it is.

This is separate from the issue of EULAs which restrict the usage of software, which I also believe are invalid in most cases as there is no consideration (you lose rights and get nothing in return).

Is there an equivalent of Wine for running Mac OS X applications on Linux/PowerPC? How many of the libraries in Mac OS X have equivalents in Linux (how close is GNUstep to Apple's stuff, etc)?

GNUstep works okay with Apple stuff although there are some compile issues because of Aqua. Linux Journal has a neat article about this. You can view the TOC here

Now wait just a darn minute here..

Using color to reflect the state of an object?

Color-reactiveness?

Oh wait, thats only for insane people! ;)

IANAL.

I would've thought the answer was simple in that the GPL states that you can't do this - there is, in short, no copyright issue under the GPL.

As far as trademarks is concerned, some of us may remember William Della Croce, a Boston attorney who attempted to enforce trademark on Linux in 1996. Last I recall, the TM was overturned.

Your management's decision on this is extremely confusing. If above and beyond this there are still issues, one is best advised not to use software that they are concerned about, and make sure one reviews any TOU documents with a fine toothed comb belonging to an attorney.

One of the major gripes of SCO is that Linux would not have been able to have SMP support if it weren't for IBM lifting SCO Unix code and handing it out for the kernel developers.

Perhaps they should read this article at IBM DeveloperWorks. This page pretty much explains why IBM decided to go the way of the fat penguin.

It should be worth pointing out this quote from the article:

One of the areas where Linux has an advantage on the FreeBSD community is in SMP, or multiprocessor support. Linux has supported SMP for about five years while FreeBSD has supported it for about two years. As a result, the Linux's support for SMP is considerably more mature than FreeBSD. Due to the open source nature of both systems, this will not be the case for long. FreeBSD developers have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the Linux developers.

Plus there is also the fact that a year before IBM adopted Linux, they (among others)made large hardware available to Linux developers for testing and benchmarks.

0xB00F disappears in a puff of smoke...

I was partially mistaken, the cover had the "Help! My Boss Made Me Install..." The article (and the cover picture) are online at Lj's site

To quote The Actual Article:
An employee who is asked to perform an illegal act and refuses to do so is protected from retaliation in many states. An employee who reports illegal acts to more senior management or to an appropriate government agency is often protected by ``whistle-blower'' laws. A company can be ordered to pay substantial damages, including back pay, for retaliating against whistle-blowers.

And the author wasn't Eben Morgan, it was Lawrence Rosen in his IAAL column.

I was partially mistaken, the cover had the "Help! My Boss Made Me Install..." The article (and the cover picture) are online at Lj's site

To quote The Actual Article:
An employee who is asked to perform an illegal act and refuses to do so is protected from retaliation in many states. An employee who reports illegal acts to more senior management or to an appropriate government agency is often protected by ``whistle-blower'' laws. A company can be ordered to pay substantial damages, including back pay, for retaliating against whistle-blowers.

And the author wasn't Eben Morgan, it was Lawrence Rosen in his IAAL column.

Eric S. Raymond has written one of the better Python advocacy articles. His experiences with Python are similar to Frater's. Python has replaced C as my general purpose language of choice.

There has been a lot of posting about Linux on the XBox, but I am much less adventerous and way too cheap to buy a brand spanky new xbox. But Simcountry has an incredibly in depth and hopelessly nerd centric game that I can play with the glories of Opera/IE/Netscape. They simulate an entire world right down to each country's roadmap and social security payments...and they do it on linux. It takes almost 12 full hours of processing to make each world go thru one month of activity. I wonder where they fell on this list of favorite linux games. All servers are dual processor units running everybody's favorite free operating system:linux. You can see how it all works. And see me.

I went to the link you provided, clicked one of the articles at random (http://www.linuxjournal.com/print.php?sid=6299), and saw this quote:

If you have been making the move to wireless lately, most likely you are working with the microwave, high bandwidth frequencies of 802.11b. If so, you know that on a clear day you maybe can get a line-of-sight connection out 10 miles or so.

Italics are his, not mine, so he's certainly not in support of your argument. Can you be more specific on your sources?

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4657

You might also want to see Mike Surran's article in Linux Journel, Linux from Kindergarten to High School. It is a good read about the specifics of his journey in switching over to Linux. He brings up some good points in the article, for example he talks about how he had to buy a whole bunch of Linux books to prep himself for the switch. That is one of the hurdles of implementing Linux, learning how to use it. But of course that can be said about any new solution. Anyone know if Redhat or others have support options for schools? -Jonathan Hughes

"But lets not forget that as of a little while ago, Linux is on more desktops than MacOS is! [...] [Apple] dying a slow painfull death? Maybe."

Uhh... No.

While Linux desktop market share is slowly increasing, it would still have a way to go before it catches up. An IDC analyst recently predicted that in 2003/2004 Linux desktops would outnumber Mac desktops, but even with this liberal estimation Linux has yet to surpass the MacOS current shipments & installed base. Further, estimations like these do not take into account that more Linux success means more Mac success - the more people considering Liunx, the more are willing to consider MacOS X too (and vice-versa). The "momentum hump" for switchers to get over is the willingness to seriously consider an alterative to Windows; once they make that decision they are often willing to experiement with many systems.

There is also the recent phenomenon of what Tim O'Reilly describes as the migration of the alpha geeks. He has noticed over the last year that many of the influential core developers and stakeholders (the alpha geeks) in the open source movement especially are "choosing Mac OS X." Linux Journal Senior Editor Doc Searls seems to agree, and - will wonders never cease? - there's evidence of IT types now considering Mac solutions.

The reason that these influential adopters are important beyond their mere numbers is that often where they go, much of the industry goes too. Not necessarily resulting in huge market share, but in mindshare and driving a core part of the industry. In fact, contrary to what many people in this forum think, the almighty goal of market share is usually not a worthwhile central objective for a company such as Apple; read Dave Minter's The Myth of Market Share: Why Market Share is the Fool's Gold of Business for some much needed common sense in operating system market share discussions.

Capitalism should have no problem eliminating overzealous, opressive DRM

As long as we can count on congress to pass no law abridging people's right to use general purpose computers. Imagine substituting palladium for the broadcast flag. As the existence of the broadcast flag advocates indicates, there are people working hard to use the power of law to limit your rights. These people must be drooling all over themselves at the prospect of a virtually unbreakable technological solution. "Imagine, all the advantages of the broadcast flag, without the drawback of requiring vigilant surveillance and massive enforcement action! It's a jackboot that looks like an Oxford!"

The specs of the Virtex-II Pro FPGA on this board
are in this Linux Journal article by Peter Ryser and Michael Baxter.

The Virtex-II Pro FPGA family offers up to four hard-core PowerPC 405 processors, 16 Rocket I/O 3.125Gbps serial transceivers, 3.8Mb of block RAM (BRAM) and four million system gates. ...

Because FPGAs can be reconfigured dynamically you can even switch the number and type of devices while the system is running.

EULAs usually are not worth the paper their printed on. Just BUY the software and the EULA does not apply. If you go to Microsoft and LICENSE software it will apply. Check it out here

Yes, as you mention a book making a very strong case for the open source model has already been published. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Marting Fink, HP's Linux evangelist and author of "The Business & Economics of Open Source" when he gave the keynote speech to the OSW/Business of Open Source Conference in Ottawa two weeks ago. Mr Fink's book sounds very similar to parts of the one the NZOSS is trying to create; perhaps they could ask him to write the Economics and When not to Migrate sections?

BTW, Mr Fink was an engaging speaker and there was good Conference attendance all 'round, even though this was only the first year for the OSW event (2nd for BOSS). Perhaps because it was in Ottawa, there seemed to be many more government/business types than computer types at the Conference. Good sign or Bad sign? Maybe it's time Canada considered more of a paltform-neutral stance à la other governments?

As far as Dreamworks you have to make the distinction between Feature Animation (in Glendale) and PDI (in Silicon Valley). Actually not much of a distinction since both use off the shelf and propietary software. PDI is mostly propietary but htye do use Maya and I believe Shake. Feature Animation has also written quite a bit of propietary software for Linux:

DreamWorks Feature Linux and Animation

The case of Pixar is a bit more subtle. Yes they do make movies but they don't distribute them (Pixar might be looking for a new partner after their last picture on their current deal). Disney distributes them. The big studios like Disney, Sony, Paramount and the like, control the distribution channels and it's them that are members of the MPAA. VFX studios are service providers, much like the food caterers or the ones that provide trained animals. If a company that provides animals, say a film like The Bear, Bethoven, Dr. Doolittle, etc. in essence it's because of them that that movie is possible. Would the animal company be an evil member of the MPAA? No of course they provide the service much like Imageworks, ILM and others. Pixar is kinda borderline, they do make films but are not part of the big mafia of movie studios, they still need to get someone to distribute the movies. Heck you could even see their deal as being screwed, after all Disney only distributes and promotes, but after expenses they split everything right down the middle. Pixar could be doing a ton more money. I see why the argument for Pixar = MPAA = bad could be made, but it's a nebulous argument at the best.

Also, companies with hundreds or thousands of machines to administer will probably start buying large-scale third-party automated patch deployment systems. A system like Everguard or Patchlink or Bigfix will let you know where there are unpatched vulnerabilities on your network, help you patch them, and check that they've been patched.

Most of these systems are cross-platform and at least one uses a linux-based server.

I seem to remember an article in a LinuxJournal a while back talking about uploading the entire Debian archive onto freenet and then using apt-get to download it. If that's the case, then you just have to point it to the correct freesite and let apt-get do the rest for you. I'm sure that a similar program, if not apt, can be created to automatically download and update new opensource programs. So maybe instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, they could just do that. Plus, maybe then, there'd be a decent number of people with semi-permanant nodes on freenet.

Just my $0.02,
La Camiseta

Linux Journal had an article covering this in its Jan. edition.

Linux Journal had an article covering this in its Jan. edition.

This piece was actually written by Michael Surran, the man who was featured on Slashdot last week. It is available here

1) Linus Torvalds is one hunky piece of gourmet man-candy.
2) Richard M Stallman cannot say "GNU/Linux World" three times fast.
3) This year will feature the first shooting spree in Linux World history.
4) As a result, next year's Linux World will be devoted to the memory of Bill Claybrook of the Aberdeen Group, gunned down while interposing his body between the shooter and the visiting school children from Greater Houlton Christian Academy.
5) This will cause all Linux users to be branded as terrorists, even though the shooter is a disgruntled BSD user, because the authorities don't even know the difference.
6) When MS memos surface planning a publicity stunt / shooting spree at one of their own trade shows, no one will even care.
7) MS has secretly rented a theatre to showcase their line of Linux apps, including a Windows/GUI that runs on top of the Linux kernel.
8) No such products exist. Those entering the theatre will be brainwashed.
9) The Society of Women Engineers is sponsoring a special recruitment event for high school aged future women engineers in my hotel room; any woman aged 15-19 with an interest in pursuing a four year degree in engineering or the applied sciences is welcome to attend. Dress should be informal and not too complicated as I intend to be blasted.
10) Despite the best efforts of the conference organizers, funding was unavailable to spike the drinking water in the hotel with acid. Your generous donations could help make next year's Linux World that much more surreal.
11) Spinal Tap will play a free concert in front of the Expo on the last day. Yes, the volume will be turned all the way up to 11.

I think there is some reasoning behind it.

"Imagine a cluster of these?" you say?

That's what I'm doing here.

You can find the full details of the testing announcement here and here

Of course, no discussion of CVS's strengths and weaknesses vs. Subversion would be complete without mention of the third contender, arch. Link 1, Link 2.

A good discussion of this was in Linux Journal recently.

Briefly, CVS lacks version control across file renames, has some issues with binary files, and the CVS code base has serious design issues.

Other Linux security book authors, on the other hand, clearly are in it for more than just books. Brian Hatch of hacking linux exposed writes a free hacking newsletter every week (archives)
as well as Security Focus stuff. Michael Bauer of
Building Secure Servers with Linux writes articles for O'Reilly and is the security editor for Linux Journal.

Especially in the area of Linux, I expect to have experts. I've read RWLS 1, and was very dissapointed in the amount of fear mongering vs useful security info.

Linux Journal -- They used Linux for the special effects in Nemesis.

I have yet to see an ATM machine running any type of Linux install.

That's because you haven't looked here . :)

You agree to be bound by the terms of this EULA by installing, copying, or otherwise using the product. If you do not agree, do not install or use the product; you may return it to your place of purchase for a full refund.

Ouch.

I'd seriously contact a Lawyer and get a stipulation to your employment that removes responsibility for anything that happens to your network as a result of not having *some* type of encryption/authentication on your WiFi segment.

Then you and your boss sign it.

Maybe then he'll trust your expertise, 'cause that's why he hired you, right? (sarcasm)

At the very least you should investigate FreeS/WAN or some commercial VPN solution. The VPN client is as simple as a double click. After bringing up the VPN if you authenticated correctly, you'd have access to the internal network resources

Linux Journal and Linux Format have had articles recently on setting up FreeSWAN. Specifically the latest Linux Journal on the newsstands now has an article introducing FreeS/WAN.

If you have the cash then you can splurge and just buy something from CA or Cisco. :)

But you really need to convince your boss that this is a bad idea. Find something from Gartner Group or some marketroid publication... Something!!! :)

BTW. Glad you gave no hints about your geographical location in your posting. That would have been bad.

BTW... get encryption or get a signature!

Ok here you go The Proof

• Linux Kernel 2.2 (with low memory i would recommend 2.2..) or a really stripped-down 2.4 kernel, running a modern distro which is rather slick in itself, like Slackware or Debian. This will help you avoiding numerous security holes in older distros.
• There has been an article which focusses on small yet functional destop programs.
• If you want to go with really stripped-down distros, which are suitable (or optimized) for embedded computers, check this link.
• I have to agree with some of the other posters that one of the *BSD derivates can be and feel a lot smaller than full-featured, KDE3-based Linux distros...
• If security is not much of an issue for you, for whatever reason, you might want to go for an outdated Linux distro. Watch out for a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel, and libc5 instead of glibc2/libc6, or you might not gain much from the old stuff... Or even Minix? VSTa?

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>

Much has been written about what's wrong with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After all, it's been used to jail programmers, threaten professors, and censor publications, and because of it, foreign scientists have avoided traveling to the U.S. and prominent researchers have withheld their work. In a white paper about the unintended consequences of the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the DMCA chills free expression and scientific research, jeopardizes fair use, and impedes competition and innovation. In short, this is a law that only the companies who paid for it could love.

<http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_conseq uences.html >
<http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html>
<http://anti-dmca.org/>

Just who are we talking about here? Primarily the large movie studios and record labels, who own the copyrights on vast quantities of content and who have been working with one another and via their industry associations, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), to control how we are allowed to interact with that content. Their unity of purpose and storm-trooper tactics have led some to dub them the Content Cartel.

<http://www.riaa.org/>
<http://www.mpaa.org/>

However, the DMCA is merely one link in a chain that's being used by the Content Cartel and many others to restrict access to the shared cultural heritage of the world, and in the process, extract money from our pockets, stifle innovation and competition, and protect entrenched interests.

DMCA and Trusted Systems -- I recently attended a talk by Professor Tarleton Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> of Cornell University in which he made a compelling argument for how the Content Cartel is using the legal force of the DMCA to direct us down a path where content cannot exist outside of a trusted system, which is a set of hardware, software, and file formats that all agree on what the user is allowed to do with a piece of content. (The trust here is between the pieces of the system, because the content owners don't trust their customers at all.) The trusted system's goals are simple - to eliminate all unauthorized uses and create a situation where we pay more for the content we consume.

A trusted system could prevent you not only from copying a CD or DVD, but also from listening to the CD more than a certain number of times in a day or skipping commercials on a DVD or on broadcast television. Along with requiring us to buy new hardware to play such content and buy new protected versions of the content we already own, a trusted system could have another ill effect. That's because it could prevent us from working with content we would create, using tools such as those Apple kindly provides in iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto. In the worst case scenario, Apple could lose not just the Mac's current digital media advantage in the marketplace, but the ability to work with digital media at all. See Cory Doctorow's article on the broadcast flag in TidBITS-642 for more on this disturbing possibility.

< http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06901>

Professor Gillespie illustrated how this could happen with a discussion of the awkwardly named Content Scramble System (CSS), used to prevent people from copying DVDs, and the DeCSS software created by a Norwegian teenager with help from others on the Internet to build a Linux DVD player.

(A brief aside: DeCSS violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, which ban devices or services that are designed primarily to circumvent copy prevention technologies, that have only limited commercially significant purpose other than circumvention, or that are marketed for circumvention. The DMCA was signed into law in large part to bring the U.S. into compliance with a pair of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties that require anti-circumvention protections in the copyright law of signatory nations. You might think Norway would be included among the nations signing these WIPO treaties, but in fact, only 37 countries have signed on, including the U.S. and Japan, along with the likes of Kyrgyzstan, Gabon, and Paraguay. We're not talking about full international support here, especially in contrast to the 149 signatories to the more general and long-standing Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.)

<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/ip/wct/>
<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/ip/berne/>

In particular, Professor Gillespie focused on three defenses used in the court case filed against Eric Corley, publisher of the hacker magazine 2600, by eight movie studios to prevent 2600 from publishing the DeCSS software. Although Eric Corley didn't create DeCSS, he made it available on the 2600 Web site. His lawyers' defenses focused on ways DeCSS might escape the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA, which was the law under which the case was being tried.

Let's look at these defenses, all of which the court eventually dismissed in ruling for the movie studios and enjoining 2600 magazine from posting the DeCSS code. A subsequent appeal also failed, and the defendants chose not to appeal again to the Supreme Court (probably a wise move - this particular case struck me as fairly weak).

<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/2000 0830_ny_amended_opinion.pdf>
<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/200111 28_ny_appeal_decision.html>

Create a Linux Player -- The primary defense that Eric Corley's legal team, funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), advanced was that CSS was reverse engineered and DeCSS written to further the development of a DVD player for Linux, which allegedly had no way of playing DVDs at the time (four players are available now; see the Linux Journal review linked below for details). Unfortunately, the judge deemed the defense utterly irrelevant because the DMCA offers no relief based on motivation. In short, if a technology violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, the purpose for which that technology was created simply doesn't matter. The judge also wasn't impressed with the fact that DeCSS is actually a Windows program, so although it could be argued that it was a necessary step in the creation of a Linux DVD player, it's a weak argument.

<http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=564 4>

The obstacle that actually lies in the way of creating a DVD player is the lack of a key to decrypt the CSS encryption used on DVDs. The only way to come by such a key is to sign a contract licensing CSS from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), a group made up of companies representing the movie studios, consumer electronics companies, and the computer industry. At $15,500, the licensing cost is not usurious, but the contract effectively prevents individuals and small organizations from licensing CSS. For instance, in the event of a material breach of contract, the licensee is liable for $1 million, and damages can grow to a maximum of $8 million. In addition, the contract prevents licensees from reverse engineering CSS or working in any way counter to the goal of CSS's protection of DVDs.

Put simply, the CSS license is the sort of thing only large companies can reasonably sign, so it's clear that the effect of the DVD CCA contract is to keep newcomers out of the cozy little club. Perhaps that wasn't a likely concern before the age of the Internet, but the rise of Linux and the open source movement shows that small, informal groups organized over the Internet can produce software that threatens the largest of companies.

The end result here is that innovation is stifled. Companies that license CSS cannot, even if they wanted to, produce products that consumers might like to buy, such as DVD recorders that could copy a DVD. That keeps new companies, niche players, or even independent programmers from competing with the consumer electronics giants with innovative features that in any way run afoul of CSS. So although the consumer electronics companies might not have minded consumers copying DVDs, since they would sell the equipment to make that happen, it's worthwhile for them to abide by CSS to eliminates potential competition.

Equally as problematic is that the CSS license's numerous requirements force the consumer electronics firms to be technologically responsible for regulating our movie viewing and copying behaviors for the studios. Signing this draconian contract is an all-or-nothing deal, so the movie studios have cleverly managed to pass off the dirty work of technological regulation on everyone else (they just produce the content; the DVD and player manufacturers must implement CSS). It's a big step toward a trusted system in which all the parties are bound by the CSS contract.

(As an aside, another effect of the CSS contracts is also to move the entire issue from the world of copyright law, where there is at least some presumption of needing to benefit the public, into the world of contract law, which doesn't give a damn about the public good. If this continues to the logical extreme, the concept of copyright, and unauthorized access to any content, could be locked up forever in simple contracts that lie underneath a trusted system's technologies, all backed up by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.)

Perform Encryption Research -- Another defense that Eric Corley's lawyers put forth was that DeCSS was created as research into the CSS encryption method, since the DMCA does allow copy-prevention technologies to be circumvented for encryption research. However, the DMCA specifically requires that the encrypted copy be obtained lawfully and that the person performing the research make a good faith effort to obtain authorization in advance. In addition, the decryption tools from such research may be shared only with collaborators for good faith research purposes - in other words, distributing these tools publicly isn't kosher.

Note the words good faith above. In determining whether encryption research is good faith, the judge said the court must determine whether the results are disseminated in a way that advances the state of knowledge of encryption technology, whether the person is engaged in legitimate study of work in encryption, and whether the results are communicated to the copyright owner in a timely fashion. Deciding that none of these tests were true of Eric Corley, the judge dismissed out of hand the claims that DeCSS had protection under the encryption research exception to the DMCA.

Looking past the specifics of this case, consider the ways in which encryption research is considered to be in good faith. You must be a legitimate researcher, have a goal of advancing the state of knowledge, and have at least made an effort to get authorization from the copyright owner. Now think about how these requirements completely disenfranchise the interested individuals and the Internet technical geek community. What does it take to be considered a legitimate researcher - a white coat, thick glasses, and a job with a university, corporation, or government body?

What we're seeing here is how the DMCA in essence props up the status quo, denying that legitimate research could be done outside the halls of academia or a company's R&D department. Left on the outside are the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers... oh hell, go read the rest of Here's to the crazy ones from Apple's Think Different ad campaign for yourself. Whether we're talking about Apple's target audience or the open source community that has had Microsoft running scared is immaterial. The point is that the DMCA, supported by this court ruling, prevents that sort of person from doing anything that's not sanctioned.

<http://www.apple.com/thinkdifferent/>

Report as a Journalist -- A third defense that Eric Corley's lawyers offered was that posting DeCSS was protected by the First Amendment's protection of the press, and by the First Amendment in general. It took the judge significantly longer to dispose of this defense, since free speech issues are notoriously tricky, but in the end, he concluded that the speech in this case is content-neutral due to the functional nature of the DeCSS code. He then went on to note that regulation of content-neutral speech is acceptable if it advances the government's interests and that preventing the copying of digital works is a government interest due to the existence of the Copyright Clause in the U.S. Constitution and the importance to the U.S. economy of exporting copyrighted materials.

If you haven't looked at the Constitution recently, the Copyright Clause reads, To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Personally, I come down on the side of copyright existing to benefit society through the progress of science and the useful arts, and only secondarily to give authors and inventors exclusive rights. By my reading, the government interest thus lies in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, and there's no question that the DMCA eliminates progress.

<http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constit ution.articlei.html>

But I digress. The final result of the case was that Eric Corley and 2600 may not post DeCSS on their Web site or knowingly link their Web site to any other site on which DeCSS is posted. The decision was worded carefully so that linking in general would not be affected by the DMCA, but only in cases where those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

In other words, it's acceptable to link to DeCSS if your intent is not to disseminate DeCSS, but merely to report on its availability, a fact I proved to my satisfaction with a trivial Google search on download DeCSS that provided over 17,000 hits, many of them still functional. You can verify this for yourself; just remember that DeCSS is only for Windows.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=download+DeCSS>

Here's where Professor Gillespie's argument becomes a bit more speculative. Although the court went no further in this case, he suggested that in any future cases in which the legitimacy of linking was called into question, he felt that the court would include in its deliberation the nature of the publication in question. For example, if the New York Times chose to link to DeCSS or some other technology that violated the DMCA (as in fact the San Jose Mercury News and Wired News have, in making the point that a ban on linking is seriously problematic), he felt that the court would have little trouble accepting the journalistic intent of the link. On the other hand, if some silly little electronic newsletter aimed at Macintosh and Internet users were to perform the same action, he was concerned that it would be more difficult to make the same defense. And if TidBITS wouldn't match up to the journalistic level of the New York Times in the eyes of a theoretical court, what about a blogger?

The end result would be that this court's interpretation of the DMCA could have the same effect of stabilizing the large news organizations in favor of the small newsletters and bloggers who are redefining what journalism means in today's Internet-enabled world. Speaking as someone who has done some of that redefining over the last 12 years, that worries me.

Regime of Arrangement -- In the end, Professor Gillespie argues that the true power of the DMCA is not so much related to its effect on copyright but these ways it weaves established organizations like large manufacturing corporations, research universities, and media conglomerates into what Professor Gillespie calls a regime of arrangement.

Don't assume that these established institutions are necessarily being co-opted against their will. Apple's Think Different campaign reads like a manifesto for the very people who are disenfranchised under this regime of arrangement, and yet Apple is a member of the DVD CCA, and, obviously, a licensee of CSS for the DVD hardware and software that comes with the Mac. The open source community has proved the power of teams of independent programmers as an alternative to the traditional software development model, not to mention the ivory towers of research institutions. Distance education hints at the decline of the traditional university, and entrenched media organizations have struggled for years with the way the Internet lets anyone be a publisher.

If there's one theme we take into the 21st century, it's decentralization, and you can see it everywhere. The PC overtaking the mainframe, Napster changing the face of music distribution despite the recording industry's best efforts, DeCSS causing the movie studios conniptions, Linux successfully challenging the mighty Microsoft's server operating systems, even the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - all are examples of the power of decentralization and the ever-increasing clash between these forces of decentralization and the centralized power structures that control everything about our world. I have no answers here, but I'd note that despite the awesome power of both systems, I'm seeing the forces of decentralization making significant inroads.

What Can We Do? I've been attending a number of talks on copyright and intellectual property issues at Cornell over the last year. Almost without exception, the talks are warnings of dark times ahead (obviously, most are slanted toward the academic and library worlds), but at the same time, none have offered any suggestions for how we can work to reverse the efforts on the part of the Content Cartel to lock up our cultural heritage and stifle innovation for the future.

At a recent talk by Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), I chatted with Alan afterwards about this problem, and he agreed it was a concern, but had no silver bullet to prevent the hordes of well-funded Content Cartel lobbyists from having their way with our elected representatives. I, too, have trouble knowing what will be effective, but I offer these possibilities.

<http://www.cdt.org/>

• Spread the word to everyone you know. In most cases, the best argument is probably that the entire situation is a move on the part of big business to make everyone buy new consumer electronics and new copies of all of their content. If the Content Cartel gets their way, it will cost you. In some situations, making the intellectual commons argument - that our culture needs access to its cultural heritage to grow - can be effective, though it's generally too abstract. Try to avoid sounding like a zealot (I know it's hard: every time I hear of the latest attempt on the part of these companies to criminalize their customers, it makes me want to spit.)

• Support civil liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and CDT that are working to protect our rights. As you'll see in the PayBITS block at the end of this article, I plan to donate all the proceeds from this article to the EFF to help do my part.

<http://www.eff.org/>

• Between 19-Nov-02 and 18-Dec-02, write to the Library of Congress with any evidence you can provide on whether non-infringing uses of certain types of copyrighted materials are likely to be adversely affected by the DMCA's anti-circumvention mechanisms. To get an idea of what they're looking for, I highly recommend reading Dan Bricklin's Copy Protection Robs the Future essay, in which he talks about his efforts to post an original copy of VisiCalc, the ground-breaking spreadsheet program he created.

<http://www.copyright.gov/1201/comment_forms/>
<http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm>

• Express your concerns to your elected representatives whenever appropriate. EFF maintains an action center that makes it extremely easy to write your appropriate representatives. While you're at it, you might ask how it is that an entire industry is allowed to create a restrictive technology like CSS, require highly limiting contracts, and influence legislation (the DMCA). One of the industry witnesses in the Corley case testified that this three-pronged approach was exactly what the movie studios aimed at creating. Ironically, given that the end goal is a trusted system, this sounds a whole lot like the legal definition of a trust, which is a combination of corporations for the purpose of reducing competition and controlling prices throughout an industry.

<http://action.eff.org/>

I have to admit, I'm worried that none of this will be enough. The Content Cartel has the aura of celebrity on their side - they're protecting the rock stars and movie stars who sit at the pinnacle of today's society. They're the cool kids, whereas the people who campaign for civil liberties are often considered dull and overly earnest. My main ray of hope is that the reason most of the software industry voluntarily gave up copy protection technologies - primarily that consumers hated copy protection - will rise again, but unless we speak out now, all of our content may be locked up in a trusted system protected by the DMCA.

I would agree that if all you want to do is run Maya on a single system for a single user with nothing special except what comes out of the box, Windows isn't a bad choice. Running Maya with a complex set of custom plugins and other special integration pieces across a 300+ artist show *does* make Windows a bad choice. And good Linux workstations dramatically outshine IRIX workstations these days. For any scalable environment where you want to have control over your production pipeline, Linux (or some mix) is a popular answer.

As far as the competitive advantage of the workstation configurations at a place like Dreamworks, studios are happy to share their hardware configs with pretty much anyone - it's the customized and highly integrated software and the movies themselves that are the competitive advantage that no one can really discuss.

Dreamworks's current Linux workstation has been advertised in various venues, as Dreamworks has a vendor relationship with HP. It's the same X4000 workstation that was reviewed in Linux Journal, with 2G of memory, two 2.4G P4 Xeon's, 18G and 36G 10K RPM U160 SCSI drives, with an NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL 900 graphics card running RedHat 7.2 and the publicly downloadable NVIDIA drivers. They aren't exactly cheap, but they're still twice as fast as an SGI that costs twice as much.

My views and opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

Linux Journal October 2001 GFX column
has a good description of Maya on Linux "from the source"

"My installation won't be on the typical Red Hat but rather on Debian Woody with kernel 2.4.7. My hardware configuration is a homebrew Athlon 1.2GHZ, ASUS A7A266 motherboard, 256MB DDR, with 100GB of 7,200RPM IDE disk drives. For graphics we're running XFree86 4.1.0 with its accelerated open-source DRI driver on an ATI ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON. Building and installing 4.1.0 with the accelerated RADEON driver is a story of its own--to be covered next month. "

" What that means in English is that it has every feature you can think of for an animation package and then some. "

That's why he needs it.

rcb

Uses Maya on Intel boxes...they are currently one of the many graphics houses in Hollywood that are switching over to Linux...

They are using high-end nVidia cards ...and all told, the advantages of using Linux just far outweighs the advantages of using SGI hardware.

IBM or GNU

kdesh

Though you were probably making a joke with all that 32million minimum stuff, but DtKsh?

Pixar has only deployed 15 stations in production and 25 in software development, but VP of Technology Darwin Peachey says the studio is on the verge of a major purchase and deployment of desktops to replace their current SGI desktops.

I agree that chroot isn't the best sandbox out there. I prefer Virtual Machines, although they're a little more resource intensive (& not free).

I've been considering running a machine with two interfaces but not assigning it any IP addresses, at least for the "host" OS. Then, I could run one or more servers within virtual machines. For instance, the firewall VM would have access to both interfaces, and have IP addresses on them both. DNS and DHCP servers would only need a LAN interface.

I'd need a decent processor with lots of RAM to pull this off, but imagine the possibilities. Running snort in the host OS on the WAN port would give me stealth IDS capabilities. Running it on the LAN port listening for packets on port 514 would give me a stealth syslogger. Since there's no IP addresses to access the host OS, there's no target to hack!

Now, lets take it a step further and imagine this scenario: The stealth IDS detects with some certainty that my BIND DNS server was once again compromised and a hax0r l0ser is launching a DDoS attack from it. Since the IDS is running on the host OS, it shuts down the offending VM, restores the VM's disk to a known good one and restarts it. Insta-restore!

One other method I've been contemplating that I consider somewhere between VMs and chroots is running the servers under User-mode Linux. I haven't had a chance to play with that yet, so don't know the security imiplications. I can't imagine it would be worse than chroot, and it wouldn't tie up resources as much as VMs do.

Such non-transferable license agreements will never stand up in court.
Reselling licensed software is no different than transfering ownership of a legally purchased music CD.
Last time I looked, second-hand record shops have been alive and well for decades.

US Court says buyers can unbundle EULA-covered software.

Also take a look at this very well argued thesis on the same issue. Same paper in HTML format

Without necessarily getting into either advocating it or deriding it, Helix claims to be an end-to-end media delivery platform with plenty of space for open source as well purely proprietary plays. Take a look at this conversation between Rob Glaser (of Real) and Doc Searls (of Linux Journal) for more information.

There does seem to be efforts afoot to use Linux in the telecom arena, maybe slanted towards embedded Linux, but evidence here.

There has been a lot of Linux buzz over at Ericsson for quite some time now. They are betting the shop that the underlying JAMBALA architecture will run on Linux Clusters. The lab that is working on this initiative is located in Montreal, Canada.

I didn't get _any_ problem that she mentionned in the review... WindowMaker works for me and everything else! She also mentions "nano" which didn't run correctly. But Nano is not even part of Mandrake 9.0!!! To my understanding, she has something against MandrakeSoft, that's all...

I find Mandrake 9.0 just *great* and beautiful, the best Mandrake ever actually. Even on the desktop, SuSE & Red Hat are not as powerful as Mandrake. When I plug a USB scanner or camera under Red Hat 8.0, I don't have any icon showing up on my desktop...

By the way, there are two (really) interesting news about Mandrake today:

1) Mandrake was awarded "best distro of the year" by Linux Journal Readers (read on http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6380)

2) MandrakeSoft today published their new results (for latest fiscal year), which show an increase of nearly 30% for revenues!
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/news letter/sn021017