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A strongly worded Urgent Appeal has been posted for the last 12 hours at LinuxWorld Web site. "DDoS attacks do not promote the Open Source cause, and are not consistent with Open Source values," the LinuxWorld editors say, strongly urging whoever is responsible to stop the attack immediately.

This was just mentioned here on /. the other day, but according to this article on Groklaw, Christoph Hellwig is (was?) a Caldera (SCO) employee.

SCO is going after SGI for XFS, when one of their own employees was working on it.

that was also LinuxWorld's own first choice. They made it last week's "Linux Quote of the Week."

Kevin Mack's Top 10 Linus SCO quotes (in reverse order):

[thanks to Dee-Ann LeBlanc for the link.]

10. Not About IP"None of the SCO accusations have anything to do with IP rights; they're all about contracts between IBM and SCO. All the IP rights blathering by SCO was just that -- blathering"

9. Custody Battle"SCO is claiming parenthood of that child and now wants to make money off the earnings of that child. Even though SCO has refused to undergo the technical equivalent of DNA testing, and even though my (and other people's) DNA is probably all over Linux."

8. Lottery

"we have to sadly decline taking business model advice from a company that seems to have squandered all its money (that it made off a Linux IPO, I might add, since there's a nice bit of irony there), and now seems to play the US legal system as a lottery."

7. Copyright Law"So . . . when he attacks the GPL as being somehow against 'financial gain', that notion that the GPL has of 'exchange of receipt of copyrighted works' is actually EXPLICITLY ENCODED in the US copyright law. It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor."

6. Raelians

"SCO is playing it like the Raelians [the organization backed by Clonaid's founder, known as Rael], saying, 'We'll show you proof in a few weeks, through an expert panel that we trust.' Let's see if there is any baby or not."

5. Jerry Springer"Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. SCO crying about IBM's other women. ... Fairly entertaining"

4. Stealing Cars In Bright Daylight

"Do you steal a car in the bright daylight with a lot of people around? Or do you steal a car, go for a joyride at 4 am in the morning when there aren't a lot of people around. With open source, there is a lot of daylight. A lot of people looking at the code. You don't really go around and steal things."

3. Constitution and Marriage"If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution"

2. Smoking"They are smoking crack."

And number one, according to Mack...

1. Please Grow Up"we find your references to a negotiating table somewhat confusing, since there doesn't seem to be anything to negotiate about. SCO has yet to show any infringing IP in the Open Source domain, but we wait with bated breath for when you will actually care to inform us about what you are blathering about."

What do you think? Join the Feedback to this item.

LinuxWorld Mag has posted this excerpt from an interview with Eben Moglen, the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation. Eben stated: "As to the actual substance of any claim that the GPL is an invalid copyright permission, it's foolish."

That's easy.

Yes, the response is obvious: Linux distributors will treat FAT code just like they do DeCSS today. That's not a satisfactory solution... look at how badly reviewers take the DeCSS situation today.

This may really hurt the adoption of Linux. No longer will you be able to just slip a Linux CD (Knoppix for instance) into a WindowsME box and start reading off of the existing hard drives. No, you've first got to get networking going so it can download the FAT driver from a "pirate" server in Bermuda.

(Nevermind that the easiest way for Linux to automatically establish a network connection would be to read the FAT disk and see what settings Windows(r) is using...)

Mandrake and Suse will do fuck-all, since they're in Europe. Gentoo users will say 'what's a binary package?

And newbies will say "Linux sucks, it can't even read a hard drive! I give up"

Wicked! I get to catch no other than Bruce Perens himself posting a sizeable but subtle fallacy. I suppose that I get to really feel cool now, in a geeky sort of way. Anyway. Apologies, Bruce, for I strongly doubt you did it on purpose, but here it goes!

> One nice thing about GNOME is that a commercial license is not
> necessary to write and distribute a proprietary GNOME application.

*clears throat*

"One nice thing about paper and pencils is that a pricy PC is not necessary to design and write loads of code."

I mean this seriously, and this says nothing either for or against paper and pencils as opposed to computers.

Only, well, in both cases, the right tool will simply save enough time to make the cost well worth it.

And before some excited kid mods me down for daring to disagree with Bruce, let me tell you that if you've never used paper and pencil to design a piece of code you just thought up where no computer was at hand, you don't deserve your /. geek points.

Different tools work well in different circumstances, that's all. Deal.

And in this specific case, it is not unlikely there's a reason why one of the Linux desktop environments has more proprietary companies developping for it than the others.

Food for thought, I hope.

(Having karma to spare is a nifty thing, you get to speak plainly and maybe get people to think. That's way cool.)

Bali out.

James Turner leads off on the "too many itches" syndrome and other problems - Steve Suehring offers his Counterpoint

December 1, 2003, http://www.linuxworld.com/story/38073.htm

Summary
Just as, in the Java world, there are many competing MVC frameworks for JSP development, so many Open Source developers - says LinuxWorld senior editor James Turner - "scratch the same itch." In this week's installment of our "Point-Counterpoint" series, LinuxWorld editors James Turner and Steve Suehring slug it out over that most contentious of issues: does the Open Source community on occasion shoot itself in the foot? James says it does, constantly; Steve disagrees.

By James Turner Steve Suehring

Advertisement
James Turner: 5 problems with the Open Source community

There's no question that the Open Source community has a lot going for it. Besides a staggering amount of developer power that can be turned against important problems, the Open Source movement also has a passion and commitment to its work that the commercial software world often envies. But sometimes, the Open Source community can be its own worst enemy. Here are a few reasons why.

1. Too many developers "scratch the same itch."

We hear that Open Source developers come up with new ideas because they "had an itch to scratch." In other words, there was some need they had for a new application, and they "scratched" it by coming up with a tool. The problem is, it's not uncommon to end up with two or three (or more!) different packages doing the same thing. For a specific example, look at what's happened with the Linux sound systems, where there are now several competing packages that have to be supported by each distribution. Or in the Java world, look at how many competing MVC frameworks there are now for JSP development.

A little competition can be a good thing. After all, Linux is all about offering a competing vision for the operating system domain. But when too many competing visions exist, and aren't winnowed down to a small number of options over a short period of time, you end up with a mish-mash of conflicting standards, and a user community that ends up having to download and install a plethora of different packages that all do the same thing.

A perfect example of the "too many itches" syndrome is the absurd number of Linux distributions that exist out there. There's absolutely no reason for there to be more than two or three distributions. And because each one does things slightly differently, we've ended up with the problem that applications and drivers are rarely made available in binary form, because there are too many versions of too many releases of Linux to support.

As an application developer, you would have to provide 5 - 10 different binary installs, one for each distribution. Now multiply that times the five or more active releases of a distribution that may be in active circulation, and you see why so few packages are available as anything but source (especially the most recent releases of packages that have not been compiled and included into Linux distributions yet.)

The next question to consider is, why don't we see more consolidation of technology? The answer: because...

2. Open Source developers love a good feud.

BSD vs Linux. Gnome vs KDE. Debian vs Red Hat. For every interesting Open Source technology, there are two bitterly feuding camps that spend as much time taking potshots at each other as in improving their own products.

It's hard to imagine how much better a lot of Open Source software would be if these groups cooperated and consolidated their efforts, rather than act like the Hatfields and McCoys. Unfortunately, the downside of personal

I may not entirely agree with a few assertions in the article, but arguing that the difficulty involved in getting an off the shelf laptop to fully support linux (dvd player and all) harms widespread consumer accceptance of the OS is not an unreasonable assertion.

It's a point/counter-point, so don't forget to read the rebuttal linked at the bottom of the page..

(also linked here)

Is it really so hard to put in link text, c'mon, its only 13 extra characters.

like this

This just in... Someone claming to be on the inside is saying that SCO will make Google its next target.

If you didn't notice the subtitle: Industry wags are saying that God invented SCO to give people a company to hate more than Microsoft.

Let the Microsoft conspiracy theories fly.

Worth a look, James Turner and Mark R Hinkle debate either side of the issue.

"Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim." [August 28, 2002]

"This case is not about the debate about the relative merits of the proprietary versus open-source software models. This case is also not about IBM's right to develop and promote open-source software, so long as they do that without SCO's proprietary information." [March 7 2003]

"There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." [April 24 2003] (for fun, contrast to motion to dismiss court filings in Red Hat v. SCO Group, particularily where it claims there is no "actual controversy", and Red Hat has no reason to fear a lawsuit from SCO... Well, at least not until they finish with IBM)

Yeah, I'm sure Darl has a much better understanding of the issues. Lets look at another perspective instead, shall we? When Darl took over, SCO was sinking fast. They needed income, and they needed it soon. Linux was never a moneymaker for SCO/Caldera, but they did have some of these old contracts over SVR4 source code with some pretty big names. As Darl so eloquently put it, "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with." Maybe, just maybe they could rattle some sabres and see what money floats their way to shut them up.

LinuxWorld today notes that one of its editors, Brian E. Ferguson, features prominently in the Forbes story. Ferguson authored the savvy analytical article SCO's IP Gamble in the current issue, which, as Forbes notes, concludes that "SCO's case a long shot."

sorry, forgot the story link

I agree, especially considering the absolutely hilarious bs about the GPL being against the constitution...

Especially considering that there is already precedent that the GPL is perfectly valid.

http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34553.htm

Specifically, In the process, a federal judge deemed the GPL enforceable and binding.

SCO Attempts to Have GPL Declared Void here

You know, GNOME wouldn't be where it now is if people stopped trying to convince themselves that it's as good as KDE, and just freaking *made it happen*, instead.

And this comes from a former GNOME guy. I'm not gonna rant or correct some faulty assumptions in your post, it's just not worth sinking to that level (however, I'll try to point out some of your good points further down, for the sake of fairness). Besides, there are much cleverer people than I with in depth knowledge of both environments that make a much better job of summing up the issues at hand than I could. Interestingly, this guy too used to think that GNOME would become the #1 desktop environment. That was a few years ago.

This being said, you're right about a few things. There's much more to desktop integration than widget appearance. And GConf is indeed not as bad as the Windows registry, mostly thanks to the absence of CLSID and related codes!

As for the rest, this is Slashdot, so I won't bother. Those who care, already know, and those who don't care or don't want to know, won't stop not caring or not wanting to know just because little guy Balinares is busily opening his mouth.

Additionally, your post misses entirely the number one reason why you should be using GNOME:

Because you -like- it.

That's the most valid reason on Earth to be using anything. So please drop the would-be technical comparisons that GNOME can't and won't win because it's just fucking not designed to, dammit. Go back to writing the freaking best code you can, and let people enjoy GNOME if GNOME is what they enjoy. Blind zealotry turns people -away-, you know?

I just wish the GNOME guys would stop phagocyting third-party apps just for the somewhat awkward "this is now a GNOME app so GNOME rules!" bragging rights... People who like to choose based on technical merits have a right not to have GNOME forced into their apps if they don't want GNOME, dammit. We can bitch all we want about the KDE guys, but when they need an app, they code it, they don't go encyst themselves into neutral apps...

You know, GNOME wouldn't be where it now is if people stopped trying to convince themselves that it's as good as KDE, and just freaking *made it happen*, instead.

And this comes from a former GNOME guy. I'm not gonna rant or correct some faulty assumptions in your post, it's just not worth sinking to that level (however, I'll try to point out some of your good points further down, for the sake of fairness). Besides, there are much cleverer people than I with in depth knowledge of both environments that make a much better job of summing up the issues at hand than I could. Interestingly, this guy too used to think that GNOME would become the #1 desktop environment. That was a few years ago.

This being said, you're right about a few things. There's much more to desktop integration than widget appearance. And GConf is indeed not as bad as the Windows registry, mostly thanks to the absence of CLSID and related codes!

As for the rest, this is Slashdot, so I won't bother. Those who care, already know, and those who don't care or don't want to know, won't stop not caring or not wanting to know just because little guy Balinares is busily opening his mouth.

Additionally, your post misses entirely the number one reason why you should be using GNOME:

Because you -like- it.

That's the most valid reason on Earth to be using anything. So please drop the would-be technical comparisons that GNOME can't and won't win because it's just fucking not designed to, dammit. Go back to writing the freaking best code you can, and let people enjoy GNOME if GNOME is what they enjoy. Blind zealotry turns people -away-, you know?

I just wish the GNOME guys would stop phagocyting third-party apps just for the somewhat awkward "this is now a GNOME app so GNOME rules!" bragging rights... People who like to choose based on technical merits have a right not to have GNOME forced into their apps if they don't want GNOME, dammit. We can bitch all we want about the KDE guys, but when they need an app, they code it, they don't go encyst themselves into neutral apps...

Doh. So I'm a dumbass with egg on my face. I guess the one saving grace is the LinuxWorld article dated September 15th...but I guess that isn't even a saving grace as the judge ruled officially today that SCO is an ass I mean contractually right.

why don't they just do the same as the linux kernel
team and keep releasing beta versions until things seem ok?

I would hope the FreeBSD team would have higher standards than that!

I'd say go read about The kernel of pain but it seems it has been removed.

Uh, the original idea _was_ political, as he says right here. Excerpt: "This operating system was launched to be about politics, starting with its announcement 20 years ago this month"

However it's taken 4 generations of windows operating systems (depending on how you count) to make things buisness-friendly as they are in NT/XP

Okay, I've been a system administrator, network engineer, ISP webmaster, security administrator, C programmer and, most recently, a security officer. The height of Microsoft's "business friendliness" was the Win95/NT 4 combination, and that was really on "friendly" to the small/medium business market. Today, with the advent of weekly patch cycles, proprietary document format lockin, Software Assurance, continuous virus/worm threats, lack of appropriate security in the software, and more I would hardly characterize Microsoft as "business friendly". They are universally used because they are a monopoly with a stranglehold on the PC and desktop software market. As for ease of use, Mac has always been easier to use, as was OS/2. Windows didn't win on the desktop because it was better, it won because Microsoft used the VHS vs. Beta approach. DOS and Windows cost less and had more software available for it, and it was ubiquitious as more and more hardware vendors took advantage of OEM pricing.

Unfortunately, most Microsoft based organizations that try to migrate to F/OSS will implement things in the way you are discussing, where the user can "get under the hood". If you deployed Unix (Linux is just another incarnation of Unix) appropriately, with the OS and apps residing on a server and the users connecting via smart terminals this becomes a non-problem. The terminal session is set up to deliver the GUI and apps the user needs to do their job. For office automation workers this makes perfect sense and is extremely efficient from a resource, dollars and cents and people perspective. For more information, read the portion of this article that deals with how Unix in a distributed environment is set up see this story.

There was also recent /. coverage of this approach. Of course most Microsoft shops will try to migrate to Unix in a way that will allow "tinkering under the hood" and all sorts of issues. However, one of my colleagues implemented a Unix/thin client solution in a large data center. Not only did it cost about 60% of a PC solution, but the desktop support dropped to nearly zero. The sys admins, network admins and engineers don't have the lost productivity involved in updating, maintaining and patching desktop PC's. Their "workstation" has the resiliency of a server and they can connect to their desktop from anywhere and have the exact settings they want every time.

But, unfortunately, your scenario is probably more likely after all. Guys who have grown up with the concept of stand alone Windows PC's will try to clone that with Unix/Linux.

Crap, forgot to paste in the link.

Referencing Darl's letter, I guess HfuckingP doesn't consider the trustworthiness and stability of Open Source software to be that big of a problem for enterprise customers. I can't believe they didn't come to the negotiating table.

Nice.

Can I post one of the FUD emails? No. (Besides, it was full of HTML.) But I can point you at this Computerworld story on Sun's attempt to "drop the FUD bomb" as George Clinton might put it.

A quote from the Wall Street Journal ad, as noted in a Linuxworld story: "Unfortunately, our friends in Blue have a problem with licensing contracts that could make things very expensive for anyone running AIX."

Ah! Found the original ad on Sun's own web site! (PDF format)

from the Linuxworld story about SCO and Dupaco
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34018.htm

Imagine his surprise, then, when he received an e-mail last month informing him that in 30 days, the distribution contract would be terminated. According to Monninkhof, SCO is offering their country managers in Europe exclusive franchise arrangements in the countries they handle. This means that the existing distributors are effectively cut out of the picture, not even being given a chance to vie for the franchise rights. Worse, under a marketing program started by SCO several years ago, Dupaco has been providing SCO with their leads and customer contacts, meaning that the new franchise will be primed to raid Dupaco's customer base. Dupaco had felt comfortable doing this because they had been assured by the European SCO management that SCO would never move to a direct marketing model in the Netherlands.

Puzzled to say the least, Monninkhof called his country manager, who basically told him he could remain as a zero-margin reseller, but the termination was a done deal. Since he was going to Lindon, Utah on other business, he called SCO to arrange a meeting. At first SCO agreed to talk, then changed their mind and told Monninkhof that there was no one at SCO to talk to and visitors were not being allowed in the building.

Undaunted, Monninkhof showed up at SCO's doorstep anyway, and within seconds, security had appeared and escorted him off the premises. He was also given a letter indicating that his company was no longer welcome at SCO Forum (which was about to be held in Las Vegas, and was the other reason that Monninkhof was in the country.)

In his own words humiliated, Monninkhof and his partner were halfway to Vegas to make their presence known, when they decided not to burn any bridges and returned to the Netherlands. However, they did decide to take legal action.

This was rejected as a submission, but I thought y'all might find it interesting anyway - SCO looks like they're out to piss *everyone* off, including their distributors, according to this article. Gotta love 'em.

SCO needs an Eric or a Bruce and they can't get one.

Hmm, I didn't think Perens and Raymond's letter was that well done; it didn't address a number of points that it could have. The best response I've seen yet is a comment by "ProgrammerMan" to Linuxworld's posting of McBride's letter. There are some other good rebuttals on that site as well.

Aside from that I am using Cyrus IMAP + Postfix on 2 servers running Gentoo Linux. The minimal install is pretty easy aside from the SASL stuff. Nicholas Petrele has a nice series on setting up CYRUS IMAP starting here. He also mentions Communigate Pro which isn't free but the trade for a no brainer install and maintenance might be worth the purchase price.

CYRUS is nice since you don't have to create system accounts, just IMAP accounts. It's also very fast and can handle a huge mail store without bogging down. The biggest problem is administration. The command line tools are rather simple and the web based systems are a cumbersome to configure. Many assume you're using MySQL instead of SASL for authentication.

I do suggest using SSL with IMAP and SMTP. It makes it nice for people out on the road without opening your server up as an open relay. This takes a bit of tweaking but it's worth it.

Finally, don't even think of doing "emerge -u world" on this box without allowing yourself plenty of down time. Updates should be planned and methodical - usually one ebuild at a time. I got into trouble once when some conf files changed for Cyrus IMAPd and Postfix. This was a while ago and I have not had problems since but I'm very careful with my upgrades now.

Oh yea. Check out Squirellmail. There's an ebuild for it. It takes very little to set it up and it's quite nice for people on the road. People will think you're a real stud.

Well, after RTFA, it has everything to do with the SGI crap which has since been removed for being a kludge. This is the code snippet which we are aware of anyways.

Yes, but according to the submission someone else has already broken it down for us. Essentialy Perens was misquoted in a very deceitful manner (Darl decieve us? NO! :) ) Darl claims Bruce admitted the code was illegally copied. But Bruce had said it was legally copied under the license SCO provided for this code, and that the code was useless anyway and removed from the kernel.

Likewise, Darl is lying outright about ESR as usual. He claims that ESR has admitted that the DOS was from a Free Software developer. But ESR not only said that such a DOS would be wrong but on several occasions

I had to search really hard to find an article which even quoted ESR in a way that Darl could misquote the way he did. Darl was not nice enough to give a reference. Even so, it is clear form the article that despite Darls claims, ESR did not know the hacker and was only guessing by the nature of the attack that it was a Free Software developer who did it. He also had said from the beginning (in the above quotes) that DOSing SCO would be wrong and if it were happening it should stop. This is the source of Darl's quote that ESR asked the attacker to stop. Darl claims ESR knew hwo it was, admitted he knew who it was, and asked the person to stop but did not give him up to the authorities. THis is a complete fabrication as have been most of SCO's comments on Bruce Perens and ESR.

Well, after RTFA, it has everything to do with the SGI crap which has since been removed for being a kludge. This is the code snippet which we are aware of anyways.

Yes, but according to the submission someone else has already broken it down for us. Essentialy Perens was misquoted in a very deceitful manner (Darl decieve us? NO! :) ) Darl claims Bruce admitted the code was illegally copied. But Bruce had said it was legally copied under the license SCO provided for this code, and that the code was useless anyway and removed from the kernel.

Likewise, Darl is lying outright about ESR as usual. He claims that ESR has admitted that the DOS was from a Free Software developer. But ESR not only said that such a DOS would be wrong but on several occasions

I had to search really hard to find an article which even quoted ESR in a way that Darl could misquote the way he did. Darl was not nice enough to give a reference. Even so, it is clear form the article that despite Darls claims, ESR did not know the hacker and was only guessing by the nature of the attack that it was a Free Software developer who did it. He also had said from the beginning (in the above quotes) that DOSing SCO would be wrong and if it were happening it should stop. This is the source of Darl's quote that ESR asked the attacker to stop. Darl claims ESR knew hwo it was, admitted he knew who it was, and asked the person to stop but did not give him up to the authorities. THis is a complete fabrication as have been most of SCO's comments on Bruce Perens and ESR.

Sorry about the cut off sentence about IBM not being a Linux vendor. I was trying to think of the right wording to finish the sentence, but I must have got distracted when I thought of something I wanted to say on another topic.

The sentence was supposed to say some thing like:

IBM partners with Red Hat and SuSE for the distribution of Linux to their customers.
-or-
IBM outsources sales of Linux and has designated Red Hat and SuSE as their preferred partners in this regard.

BTW, the link to my original post is here.

ProgrammerMan

I just posted a similar thing to an individual post, but I think it's more appropriate to this thread

This is nothing new, it's just a repeat of the previous analysis of SCO's slides, but since a lot of people haven't read the whole article in question, they're just getting information from these partial posts people are making here and forming opinions based on that.

Please, everyone, look at the Original Article before posting. Or, if you don't want to register with computerwire, the article also posted on Yahoo. Perens is talking about the code snippets from the slides a couple weeks ago. Nothing new. He's talking about the code that was released into the public domain by Caldera.

SCO's including a partial quote from Perens without context. This is why partial quotes are dangerous. You get to see the included line, but not the context so it makes it look like someone said something completely different, which in this case is McBride's purpose.

So, read the original article from Perens, and read the Letter from McBride. And please, if you're going to make a post using a quote, make sure it represents the whole idea, otherwise it could end up meaning something else from what someone acutally said.

I could only manage the first few lines but some brave soul might be able to read the whole drivel.

Darl has written us an open letter: .

My only comment is that Eric Raymond's attribution of the DoS attacks to "a member of the open source community" is hearsay, even if "the open source community" were well-defined enough to have members.

http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34007.htm

From the above link, this quote:

The second development was an admission by Open Source leader Bruce Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux, and it shouldn't be there. Mr Perens stated that there is "an error in the Linux developer's process" which allowed Unix System V code that "didn't belong in Linux" to end up in the Linux kernel (source: ComputerWire, August 25, 2003). Mr Perens continued with a string of arguments to justify the "error in the Linux developer's process." However, nothing can change the fact that a Linux developer on the payroll of Silicon Graphics stripped copyright attributions from copyrighted System V code that was licensed to Silicon Graphics under strict conditions of use, and then contributed that source code to Linux as though it was clean code owned and controlled by SGI. This is a clear violation of SGI's contract and copyright obligations to SCO. We are currently working to try and resolve these issues with SGI.

This appears to be the ComputerWire article referred to

http://au.news.yahoo.com/030826/20/lfff.html

The paragraph in which the "error" quote reads:

The other SCO code snippet Perens walks through had to do with memory allocation functions in Unix System V and Linux. He says there was, in fact, "an error in the Linux developer's process," specifically a programmer at SGI, and he says while the Linux community had the legal right to this code, it didn't belong in Linux and was therefore removed.

I looked what Perens said in the original (referred to be ComputerWire)

Slides 10 through 14 show memory allocation functions from Unix System V, and their correspondence to very similar material in Linux. Some of this material was deliberately obfuscated by SCO, by the use of a Greek font. I've switched that text back to a normal font.

In this case, there was an error in the Linux developer's process (at SGI), and we lucked out that it wasn't worse. It turns out that we have a legal right to use the code in question, but it doesn't belong in Linux and has been removed.

These slides have several C syntax errors and would never compile. So, they don't quite represent any source code in Linux. But we've found the code they refer to. It is included in code copyrighed by AT&T and released as Open Source under the BSD license by Caldera, the company that now calls itself SCO. The Linux developers have a legal right to make use of the code under that license. No violation of SCO's copyright or trade secrets is taking place.

In this case, there was an error in the Linux developer's process (at SGI), and we lucked out that it wasn't worse. It turns out that we have a legal right to use the code in question, but it doesn't belong in Linux and has been removed.

See the following new letter (dated Sept 9th!):
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34007.htm

One thing you can do is to install the Live CD to a hard drive to get a permanant installation. While this may seem counter productive for a Live CD, I've found it to be really useful. I'm currently using the Knoppix Security Tools Distribution as a "desktop" OS... :-) Knoppix 3.2 (what both these distros are based on) includes a really useful script to install the Live CD to the hard drive. It's the easiest way I've found so far to get a Debian testing/unstable system installed and running - with X configured correctly the first time! That, in addition to having tons of great security tools preinstalled and configured makes for one sweet network-workstation-on-steroids.

...of course, I'm in charge of security where I work, so using this as a desktop OS may get you fired from _your_ work... :)

g00r00?

oops, pressed the wrong button...

Anyway Scott has had a lot of interesting things to say recently including saying of the IT industry "We're down to three - IBM, Microsoft, and Sun. The rest is collateral damage.", of the M$ top brass "Ballmer and Gates are drop outs" and of Redhat "With Red Hat you get the kernel. With Sun you get the application server". Last time I checked Redhat is a little more than that.

I was thinking could all this big talking be a McBride like attempt to raise the stock price of his new 1.5 million shares? Or am I jumping to conclusions because their names both begin with Mc?

Tom.

No, let's put Linus' wife, the expert in karate in the ring with Darl....

This thread that's been simmering over at LinuxWorld for a couple of days now. One poster says: Jeez... this is a hard "discussion"... everybody has varied, valid points, thoroughly thought out and well articulated, I'm impressed with this crowd... Why is everybody so worried? Linux is out here, it's up to us to carry it on, not up to them. They won't (and can't) stop it even if they won and tried it. Why won't (or can't) they? simply because of its nature, the community would just find a way around the restrictions and code them in. Anyway, I'd like to thank everybody for some interesting reading (really)."

OO, or a seperate project also needs a replacement for 'Access'.
There is one it's called mysql, check out the trail of tears article at linuxworld. I find it funny that all his problems are attributable to RedHat's piss-poor package management system (or any Linux distro for that matter). I did it using FreeBSD as the server with no hassles, on a mixed FreeBSD and windows network.

When you have to deal with the culture of their development team and their nazi attitudes. Don't believe me? Look here

Hey!!! My link did not work!!!!

Try this one instead: Linux, GNU, and freedom - Richard Stallman responds to Joe Barr's account of the FSF's dealings with the Austin Linux users group, May 20, 2002