Slashdot Mirror

Further, SCO has not helped itself by issuing numerous public statements that contradict their representations in court.

As far as Groklaw goes, as a lawyer I cannot emphasize enough how innovative and unique that website is. Sure, Pamela Jones has a distinct bias, but at least you know up front where she stands so you can evaluate her opinions accordingly. The real value of that site is the sheer comprehensiveness of the public statements and filings organized in its database. A resource like that would cost someone tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of dollars to compile privately, and yet here it is offered to the public for free. It's like open source litigation, and I hope that Groklaw or sites like it continue in the future for other legal/political/social issues (software patents anyone?).

I think that these stories on SCO are so one-sided because after more than a year on this story, it has been thoroughly exposed to the point of ridicule. It's sort of the way that the public responds to other types of lawsuits that seem frivolous at first glance; it's possible that a seemingly frivolous lawsuit may have have merit, but that doesn't stop the public from being highly sceptical.

SCO's problem is that they decided (highly unwisely from a litigation viewpoint) to spin their action in the press. This is completely contrary to standard practice when it comes to lawsuits ("No comment, the matter is before the courts"). All of their ill-informed, contradictory and bombastic press quotes are coming back to haunt them, as you can be sure that IBM will use any prior inconsistent statement to cross-examine and impeach their evidence now.

one IM client supporting all widely used standards

It seems they let just about anybody post to Slashdot these days.

It seems they let just about anybody post to Slashdot these days.

To quote Bruce Perens, if security really matters, you should base it on three things

Did you perhaps mean Bruce Schneier? He would be more relevant to security than Bruce Perens is.

Get real. djbdns' source is 100% available for you to look at and patch to your hearts content. If you find an error, send a fix to DJB and he'll add it after review.

"Available Source" !== "Free Software".

You can't redistribute changed, patched DJBDNS. You can't fork it if you figure something requires a fundamental change in design philosophy. You cannot distribute binaries. DJB release a new version every millenium or so - so when you set up Qmail or DJBDNS, you spend a week applying patches and testing them just to get things like Qmail-ldap to work.

You'll never, ever find a pre-made RPM for DJB-DNS. Thus, things like "yum update" can cause all sorts of grief, and will certainly NEVER result in an updated QMail!

Where in ANY of this did you get the idea that just because you can download DJB sources, that it's "Open" or "Free"?

If you were SERIOUS about "Open Source", perhaps you should read a bit on what it actually means?

Failing that, as most of us do, the next best practice is to program defensively: anticipate where problems might occur in your code and include assertion checking and logging (yes, print statements) to illuminate those problem spots. Generally, I include debugging flags on the command line that allow me to control the level of assertion checking and logging (0=no logging, except for errors (the default), 1=log all branches, 2=log branches and variable values, 4=log everything).

This defensive debugging strategy works quite well. First, it forces the programmer to think harder about both the algorithms they are using, and their implementation. I catch about a quarter of my programming errors just in the process of adding assertions. Second, the program will tend to abort as soon as a problem is detected, rather than running on for a couple billion instructions, dumping crap into the output file or database and then either aborting mysteriously on some marginally related condition, or, worse, completing without any reported errors! Finally, when errors are detected, the debugging can usually be done simply by inspecting the soure and following actual execution from the log file.

All debugging comes down to one, fairly simple, idea: show me the program status at crucial points in the flow of control (generally at every branch and return). A few other tools are of some use under special circumstances: Purify, Electric Fence or Valgrind for detecting problems with dynamically allocated memory, or something like ddd for examining linked structures (though I prefer to just write a validation function for my data structures, see my AVL-tree code for an example). Defensive programming works because it answers the important question that usually forces you into using the debugger: what the hell just happened?!? Defensive programming gives you a way to examine program states without invoking an outside tool.

The only class of bugs that doesn't succumb well to this approach is race conditions. Unfortunately, anything that changes the timing of the program (such as stepping instruction-by-instruction in a debugger, or writting log messages out to a disk file) will change the behavior of the race condition. I'd be really interested in tools or techniques that could address this class of bugs.

licensing or no licensing, you can't say that AAC isn't a standard

What we all need are proper open standards.

Here's the text of the article to relieve the stress from the site. Slashdot operators: please link to it from the feature.

Introducing the RMS-Lint

Introduction

A new tool aims to revolutionize the way people communicate with the famous free software evangelist Richard M. Stallman, (also known by his initials - "RMS"). Its project leader Shlomi Fish has more to say of it:

"RMS-Lint is called RMS-Lint because like most lints it warns on many things that are obviously not errors, because there's a chance that they are. RMS-Lint is an interactive speller that runs over the document word by word with a sophisticated look-ahead and look-behind and warns the user over any word or combination of words that may irritate Stallman, or otherwise will be frowned upon by him."

RMS-Lint's Rules

In accordance to the Free Software Foundation's list of words to avoid and other documents available on the FSF Site, the following rules are recognized by RMS-Lint:

• Warns on every use of the term "Linux" not preceded by "GNU/". This is due to the fact that Stallman advocates using "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux" to refer to the entire operating system. It especially warns on "the Linux kernel" (because the kernel part is redundant as Linux is just the kernel).

  Legitimate use of the term "Linux" to refer to just the kernel are also warned about, but can be overridden.

• Warns on every use of the term "open source" and even the word "open". Replacements are "free software", "free", "revealed", "viewable", and the bootload of synonyms from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary". Also warns on the terms "closed-source" or "closed".

• Warns on every use of the term "free" for fear it may be used to imply costlessness. As for legitimate uses of the term ("free as in free speech"), it should be noted that being a lint, RMS-Lint attempts to cover every possible error, not just the ones that actually are such. Replacements are "liberal", "libre", "costless", "gratis", and you also have an option to ignore it.

• Warns on every use of the term "pirate" or "piracy". It is our belief that when talking to Dr. Stallman, people won't usually wish to talk about the sea-faring robbers, but instead on illegitimate copying of one form of media or another. Thus, RMS-Lint warns on every such use and suggests the alternatives of "illegal copier/copying", or "bucanneer".

• Warns on every use of "Intellectual Proprety" or "IP" (a common short form of it). The developers of RMS-Lint realize that IP can also mean the "Internet Protocol" (as in "IP address", "my IP is '192.168.1.1'"), but we believe that when corresponding to RMS, such use will be relatively uncommon, and does not justify risking mentioning "intellectual property" to him.

• And much, much more...

Opinions on RMS-Lint

Eric S. Raymond, a long time friend of Stallman, and the chief leader of the open source movement, expressed a great deal of content from the availability of this tool. "I've been waiting for such a thing all my life. Communicating with Richard has become more and more difficult, and RMS-Lint can easily make it much better."

Raymond's long time collaborator Bruce Perens also expressed happiness that RMS-Lint has become available. "Modern-day open source enthusiasts find it more and more difficult to communicate with Richard Stallman due to his terminological whims. RMS-Lint is just the tool that can help them validate their E-mails for RMS' correctness."

Meanwhile, Richard Stallman himself expressed dismay from this project: "RMS-Lint is an unsatisfying symptomatic cure for a big problem.

Bruce

The Linux experiment of Pixar was the sole caused by the field of Bruce Perens, no?

btw, for those of you who don't know already, Bruce Perens has written an article on the whole SCO/MyDoom thing, available here.

Yet again - I want to turn the community back to Bruce Perens letter on the matter.

Any virus is abhorent - no matter who it targets.

Lest we forget - on some scale - the plight of Linux Users is the same experienced by Muslims trying to denounce 911. The largest percentage of Linux users have no love for spammers and virus writers, and hope such unpleasant wasters do not turn their eye on linux.

As for the programmer/open source community, lets not forget that the virus's were written in the style of the scummiest - most denounced group - script kiddies.

Lets face it - our distaste for losers who regularly type d00d and l337 via AolIM/IRC, when advertising their vbasic/virus toolkit skills - certainly outshines the community distaste for MS and SCO.

After all of the SCO FUD, I'm not suprised so many people were taking enjoyment out of SCO's misfortune. Unfortunatly, people are looking for someone to blame and this does make for a good story. I've seen slashdot members' comments quoted on stories about this virus, so people are looking here for a response. I know it's been talked about before, but here is Bruce Perens letter to the OSS community again. Everyone's certainly entitled to their opinions, but he makes a good point.

It would seem on the surface that the many customers who do not, or can not pay big money, will have to use Gnome (or another distribution), even though many of them really want KDE. The key info in the article says that if you pay a third party support company (Perens LLC for example) you can have KDE supported. A shame since I was looking forward to a viable alternative to Redhat and Suse.

• From the posting by Mr. Perens:
• I already have a customer asking for Perens LLC to provide commercial support for KDE on the UserLinux platform. And we will do so, even though KDE is not the chosen GUI of the UserLinux project. This is an option for any UserLinux service provider.

As was mentioned, if the customer wants it, why is it not supported directly? Is it because it is not lucrative to do so. Call me cynical but maybe it is more profitable to make a product that is almost what the customers want, and then use your consulting company to support the missing pieces? At least that is how it appears to me. If I am wrong, I take it back and apologize. But after all, it looks like Mr. Perens is saying User Linux still does not support KDE. However, the troubling part is that at the same time, while he is one of the chief architects (if not the chief architect) of UserLinux, and is the person responsible for excluding KDE in the first place, he is saying he will support KDE on UserLinux on the side, via his consulting company, for a price. (I think I am making a safe assumption that he will charge a pretty penny for this support.) Hey, we all have to eat, so I guess in the end it's OK for Mr. Perens to do this. But I am a bit cynical of the whole thing too.

Remember, if people don't like the distro because they can't afford the time or money to have a GUI they like installed, then they won't use it. Then it will fail. End of story. Otherwise it will either run or limp along.

I wonder how specific the "Microsoft Human Rights Abuser 2003" software and the Cisco stuff mentioned really is. It doesn't really take esoteric tools to keyword search sites, monitor net usage, and filter them out with proxies and firewalls.

After all, companies have been doing this for years on their internal networks, is this just a scaled up version?

From the article:

Amnesty believes Microsoft is in violation of a new United Nations Human Rights code for multinationals which says businesses should 'seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights'.

Does this imply that a free OS, for example, must try to make sure their software can't be used to keep lists of people targeted for oppression?

From An earlier version of The Open Source Definition

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups. The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. A license provided by the Regents of the University of California, Berkeley, prohibited an electronic design program from being used by the police of South Africa. While this was a laudable sentiment in the time of apartheid, it makes little sense today. Some people are still stuck with software that they acquired under that license, and their derived versions must carry the same restriction. Open Source licenses may not contain such provisions, no matter how laudable their intent.

Is there a central page listing the books in your series?

I did find perens.com/Books, but it doesn't look to have been updated recently. Also, I found the links to the actual books somewhat cryptic--the link text should be the title of the book, not a strange URL like "http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnI nquiry.asp?isbn=0130354732".

It is likely that this virus has been assembled for the purpose of defaming the Linux developers by spammers, SCO, or others. Your behavior will influence whether or not it succeeds in this mission.

Thus, I urge all persons who have sympathy for Free Software, Open Source, and Linux:

• Do not cheer on attacks on the SCO site. By doing so, you falsely implicate our community in the attacks, in the eyes of outsiders who read your words. Our community believes in freedom of speech, not silencing our opponent's speech through net attacks. We will defeat SCO using the truth, not by gagging them.
• Publicly deplore the attacks as an attempt to defame us, and not an effort of our community. Show others this notice.
• Continue to fight SCO, using all legal means at your disposal. Show others the analysis of SCO's ongoing fraud at Groklaw.net and elsewhere, and explain to them your own experience as a participant in the Free Software community.
• Continue the visible presence of Free Software as a force for good in the world by producing excellent original software for everyone's free use and deploying it wherever possible. Promote these projects to the press and public as you carry them out. Do what you can for other public-good projects such as schools and non-profit organizations. FreeGeek.org is an excellent example of how to carry this out.
• Show others by example that our side always takes the high road. When they see a low-road sort of action like denial-of-service, spam, or stock fraud, they'll know who to blame.

Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community.

As a further example that this attitude is/was running rampant, take a look at this letter written by Bruce Perens. I love open source and it pains me to see so many people in the community cheering on the attacks -- but sometimes it takes a hard medicine, like reaction articles, to bring us to our senses.

Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com> (U.S.) 510-526-1165
Version 2, January 27, 2004.

The master version of this notice is at http://perens.com/Articles/SCO/DOS/
Please check that location for a more recent version. You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion.

On January 26, 2004, a new virus became rampant. I have read reports that the virus payload has two purposes: to install a remote-execution back-end of a type commonly used by spammers to redistribute email, and to perform a denial-of-service attack on SCO's web site.

Denial-of-service attacks via virus have been a common trick of email spammers. They were first used to take out some of the anti-spam blacklist sites. Several of those sites had their (non-spam-related) business so heavily disrupted that they closed the doors of their anti-spam projects rather than be attacked again.

The Open Source developers are a target of spammers. We are the creators of most high-profile anti-spam technology. For example, SpamAssassin started out as, and remains today, an Open Source project. The predominant mail delivery programs of the Internet are Open Source projects such as Sendmail and Postfix, and thus most efforts to spam-proof those programs are Open Source as well. This is important, because it gives spammers a reason to defame us.

SCO also has a reason to defame us, as part of their stock-kiting scheme. We have assembled ample evidence that they have lied under oath in court. Such a company would not balk at attacking their own site in order to paint their opponents in a bad light.

Thus, it is likely that this virus has been assembled for the purpose of defaming the Linux developers by spammers, SCO, or others. Your behavior will influence whether or not it succeeds in this mission.

Thus, I urge all persons who have sympathy for Free Software, Open Source, and Linux:

• Do not cheer on attacks on the SCO site. By doing so, you falsely implicate our community in the attacks, in the eyes of outsiders who read your words. Our community believes in freedom of speech, not silencing our opponent's speech through net attacks. We will defeat SCO using the truth, not by gagging them.
• Publicly deplore the attacks as an attempt to defame us, and not an effort of our community. Show others this notice.
• Continue to fight SCO, using all legal means at your disposal. Show others the analysis of SCO's ongoing fraud at Groklaw.net and elsewhere, and explain to them your own experience as a participant in the Free Software community.
• Continue the visible presence of Free Software as a force for good in the world by producing excellent original software for everyone's free use and deploying it wherever possible. Promote these projects to the press and public as you carry them out. Do what you can for other public-good projects such as schools and non-profit organizations. FreeGeek.org is an excellent example of how to carry this out.
• Show others by example that our side always takes the high road. When they see a low-road sort of action like denial-of-service, spam, or stock fraud, they'll know who to blame.

Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community.

Many Thanks

Bruce Perens

Interesting info relating to recent threats against Linux on BBC News Online. An interview with 'open source advocate' Bruce Perens about software patents, not the SCO lawsuits, being the biggest threat in the future.

Bruce Perens has also used the now famous phrase '...2004 - the year of Linux on the desktop...', but it seems quite interesting exploring the ramifications of the flood of software patents for pretty much anything (e.g. FFII v Amazon Gift Ordering patent ).

Is the philosophy of "The Big Lie". Basically the idea is that if you repeat a falsehood stridently enough and often enough then even your detractors will start to argue about to what degree it is true rather than whether it is true at all.

Right now is a bad time to worry about hypothetical secrets up SCO's sleeve. If they have any evidence more compelling than the slide show fiaSCO, we'll all find out next week after the judge's deadline for them to present it has passed. What's more, since IBM was wise enough to include all of SCO's wild accusations (and not just the limited set they've actually risked saying to a judge instead of a reporter) in their counterclaims and discovery requests, next week we should be able to take a nice long look at everything based on the facts rather than on our trust (or lack thereof) in Blake Stowell and Darl McBride.

Of course, this all depends on SCO being unwilling to try and weasel out of a court order, but if I'm wrong and they have that kind of chutzpah I think it will speak for itself too.

Errm, pardon me, but who in holy hell are these UserLinux people and who's this Bruce Perens guy?

If you don't know that Bruce Perens is a former Debian Project Leader and the primary author for the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (which was reworked into the OSI's Open Source Definition, a group he co-founded), or that UserLinux is his attempt to provide an DFSG-compliant reference distribution to high-priced Enterprise Linux solutions that can be developed and extended by Linux vendors, then why should I care who you are or why you felt the need to mindlessly babble on /. about a topic you admit you know nothing about?

I'm a GNOME user, but to be honest, I'm not losing any sleep over UserLinux's decision to pick GNOME over KDE because I'm not the target market for the distribution (although the use of GNOME means I may be more likely to look at early builds and see if I can contribute); Bruce has his goals, they're clearly outlined on the UserLinux site, and if can't come to some kind of accomodation with that, you're welcome to not contribute to the project.

Jay (=

What we have here is another case of SCO publicly venting their 'infractioned' code. Last time this happened, analysis was quick. The only downside was that the code snipped was so small. This time they need to show everything.

Closed court or no, somethings bound to leak, publically or not ...

Too much of the objection over stem cell use is concerned with the origin of some stem cell cultures in aborted fetuses.

Bruce

Re:Whats UserLinux (Score:-1)
by .Bruce Perens (150539) Neutral on 06:51 PM -- Tuesday November 18 2003 (#7507893)
( http://perens.com/ )

You may want to check out my website then:

Bruce Perens homepage

From the Article, Quote by Chris Sontag: (about 4/5th down the page):
Later some of the Linux people said that code shouldn't have been there, Bruce Perens said it was development problem and 'we've taken it out.' My analogy is [that's] like a bank robber with posse in pursuit swinging back by the bank and throwing the money back in...

From Bruce Perens website:
of the two examples, one isn't SCO's property at all, and the other is used in Linux under a valid license. If this is the best SCO has to offer, they will lose.

Where did Bruce Perens say "we've taken it out"? On the contrary, he points out that SCO didn't own one block of code and the other is under a valid license.

So is Chris Sontag lying, or am I in error?

I'll be off Slashdot for a few hours now, time to give Stanley his bath and put him to bed.

Bruce

You may want to check out my website then:

Bruce Perens homepage.

Here are a few good representatives to mention if you want someone to debate on intellectual property issues:

Bruce Perens, former Debian project leader.

Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Chair of the Creative Commons project, author of several books on intellectual property...

and,
you. Seriously. You are the best person to represent your own views. Then we know what you think. Just make sure that you know who you are speaking for - I am sure you can represent your views well, but I don't know if you represent my views very well.

If you want someone more local, start asking librarians at the local library if any of them have viewpoints on IP and DRM issues.

please post other such 'potentially good' representatives in reply.

But really, if you want someone with a suit and a long list of credentials to represent the people in a debate on intellectual property, pick the Professor of Law at Stanford, Lawrence Lessig. That's who I would pick. I like his views and his ideas. I publish some of my work under a creative commons license, and tried to follow the Elred case.

----

Oh, I had the exact same idea as you! Except the year was 1996 and the site was Altavista. Couldn't live without it. Thank Goodness the government didn't nationalize and subsidize them making the emergence of Google as a successful, profitable, private, limited liability corporation next to impossible. But now that we have Google maybe we should reconsider your plan, I mean, nothing could ever get better than this, right?

Sure, Google may have come from nowhere to become profitable while providing a huge amount of value not only to the people who risked piles of time and money on the enterprise, but also to the public at large and their customers. But of course mutual benefit through voluntary association and private property just usually isn't possible in a capitalist system, this is an anomaly and it must be protected.

I also rely on Debian daily for job related activities; I know a lot of people who do. Maybe final decision making power for Debian should be removed from the technical committee and developers and transfered to an appropriations committee of the US Dept of Commerce. I mean, can we really risk such an important piece of technology to a bunch of private individuals. I even heard that one of the former DPLs played a major role at a major corporation in the motion picture industry, while he was involved with Debian!. We all know how greedy and untrustworthy that type is; there is no way of telling how he may have subverted Debian when he had control of it.

Ok now that I've pulled my tongue out of my cheek, could I ask you to put down the Adbusters and spend time every day really thinking about these wonderful things that we rely on and where they came from? Also think about the real freedom to innovate and how that could start to be lost.

And if you do the honourable thing and keep your emigration pact with Alec Baldwin, please don't come to Canada.

What are you wasting our time for? What could you possibly know about Debian?

BTW, your picture on your site makes you look much more sane than you did in Revolution OS.

But I was reffering to the mindset behind the whole dot-com era, which involved vague notions of advertising and half-cocked revenue 'concepts' such as basing businesses on giving away products and services for free [eg. gnu].

It was when the investors saw that they were being scammed by madmen and scammers and pulled out that the economy collapsed.

learn your history, it was only a couple years back, dumbass.

In response an unprecedented gathering of the free software/open source development leaders actually agreed on a single statement in reply

The Craig Mundie speech is old news by now, so hopefully this is the last word. A number of the free software evangelists, in informal discussion, felt that the proper response to Microsoft would be to stand together. Mundie's speech shows that Microsoft's strategy is to keep us divided and attack us one at a time, until all are gone. Thus, their emphasis on the GPL this time. While we didn't try to represent every group and project, many major voices of Open Source and Free Software have signed this message. We took a while, because we're not used to this, but we'll be better next time. So, please note the signatures at the bottom of this message - we will stand together, and defend each other.

Bruce Perens

We note a new triumph for Open Source and Free Software: we have become so serious a competitor to Microsoft that their executives publicly announce their fear. However, the only threat that we present to Microsoft is the end of monopoly practices. Microsoft is welcome to participate as an equal partner, a role held today by entities ranging from individuals to transnational corporations like IBM and HP. Equality, however, isn't what Microsoft is looking for. Thus, they have announced Shared Source, a system that could be summarized as Look but don't touch - and we control everything.

Microsoft deceptively compares Open Source to failed dot-com business models. Perhaps they misunderstand the term Free Software. Remember that Free refers to liberty, not price. The dot-coms gave away goods and services as loss-leaders, in unsuccessful efforts to build their market share. In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.

The success of the Open Source model arises from copyright holders relaxing their control in exchange for more and better collaboration. Developers allow their software to be freely redistributed and modified, asking only for the same privileges in return.

There is much software that is essential to a business, but which does not differentiate that business from its competitors. Even companies that have not fully embraced the Open Source model can justify collaboration on Free Software projects for this non-differentiating software, because of the money they will save. And such collaborations are often overwhelmingly successful: for example, the project that produces the market-leading Apache web server was started by a group of users who agreed to share the work of maintaining a piece of software that each of their businesses depended on.

The efficiency of this cooperation is in the best interests of the user. But Free Software is also directly in the user's interest, because it means that the users control the software they use. When they do business with Open Source vendors, the vendors do not dominate them.

With very little funding, the GNU/Linux system has become a significant player in many major markets, from Internet servers to embedded devices. Our GUI desktop projects have astounded the software industry by going from zero to being comparable with or superior to others in only 4 years. Workstation manufacturers like Sun and HP have selected our desktops to replace their own consortium projects, because our work was better. An entire industry has been built around Free Software, and is growing rapidly despite an unfavorable market. The success of software companies like Red Hat, and the benefits to vendors such as Dell and IBM, demonstrate that Free Software is not at all incompatible with

I'm pretty sure that ESR was just getting pissy because Perens made his objections to the Apple Public Source License v1.0 public without contacting ESR or OSI first. OSI was working with Apple on the APSL at the time.

A very well thought out and presented response. Someone buy this guy a beer!

Damn, I'm sure Eric didn't post the source himself. He must have trusted this in the same guy who produced SCO's slideshow. He should be more picky about his collaborators.

Analysis of SCO's Las Vegas Slide Show, http://perens.com/SCO/SCOSlideShow.html

SCO's legal theory fails, because they ignore the fact that if a work doesn't contain some portion of SCO's copyrighted code, it is not a derived work.

the code regarding the supposed "obfuscated copying" was actually "a clean-room re-implementation ... sharing none of the original source code, but carefully following the documentation of the Lab's product."

since bruce is active on slashdot (uid 3872),
it's only a matter of time before he responds to these allegations more directly,
both here and to mcbride.

In doing this we angered some in the Open Source community by pointing out obvious intellectual property problems that exist in the current Linux software development model.

It's not obvious to me that there are intellectual property problems in the current Linux software development model. In particular, there are no problems that don't exist in traditional closed source development either. If anything, Linux developers have a greater incentive not to copy code, because their work is available for public scrutiny. Had Microsoft, for example, "infringed" on your copyrights, you wouldn't even know about it!

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).

You have misquoted Perens. He certainly did not claim that "Unix System V" code was in Linux. He said there was code in Linux that is "very similar" to System V, but has a traceable open-source origin:

The code is from Unix version 3, the oldest known version of Unix that still exists in machine-readable form. The complete source for that system can be found here on the net. In 2002, Caldera released this code as Open Source, under this license. Caldera is, of course, the company that now calls itself SCO. The license very clearly permits the Linux developers to use the code in question.

It is also worthy of note that this code was removed from the kernel for technical reasons before it was shown at SCOForum, and that, as part of the ia64 port, it was never even a part of any major commercial Linux distribution.

To date, we claim that more than one million lines of Unix System V protected code have been contributed to Linux

To arrive at a number remotely close to "one million lines", you must not be referring to Unix System V code itself. This is probably why you used the phrase "Unix System V protected code". You seem to think that NUMA, RCU, and JFS--technologies copyrighted and patented by IBM--somehow now belong to SCO thanks to your contract with IBM. IBM disputes this, of course.

In any event, your contract claims give you absolutely no right to collect license fees from end-users over these technologies. IBM holds the copyrights on the code; it was IBM's to give to Linux. If doing so breached IBM's contract with you, you are within your rights to seek damages from IBM. However, the contracts between SCO and IBM simply cannot apply to end-users who are not a party to the contracts.

Bruce Perens addresses this issue here, at the end of same the article from which you misquoted him earlier in your letter.

You draw some pretty serious conclusions from this one weak example of infringement: "In fact, this issue goes to the very heart of whether Open Source can be trusted as a development model for enterprise computing software." Closed source software is not immune from the same kinds of problems. Take a look at the recent patent lawsuits against Microsoft. Can Closed Source be trusted as a development model for enterprise computing software?

You mentioned that the aforementioned code copying issue damaged the open source community's credibility, but I find it telling that you didn't mention the other code copying example given at SCOForum. This example intended to show that SCO owns the Berkely Packet Filter code (which is, of course, part of BSD), and that an implementation of the BP

"Nothing can change the fact that a Linux developer on the payroll of Silicon Graphics stripped copyright attributions from copyrighted System V code..."

Nothing, except, inconveniently, that it is not a fact. The fact is that SGI did extensive due diligence before contributing any code to Linux, and the code in question long precedes the development of Unix System V.

Quotes from Perens:

The oldest version of this code we've found so far is in Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, published in 1968.

The implementation shown in the slides was written by Dennis M. Ritchie or Ken Thompson at AT&T, in 1973. You can see the 1973 version of the function in this file, originally called dmr/malloc.c. The code is from Unix version 3, the oldest known version of Unix that still exists in machine-readable form. The complete source for that system can be found here on the net. In 2002, Caldera released this code as Open Source, under this license.

Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

And finaly Perens argues:

AT&T was actually found to have lost its copyright to the code in question during the lawsuit, because the code was published without a proper copyright notice.

Consequently, I find that Plaintiff has failed to demonstrate a likelihood that it can successfully defend its copyright in [Unix version] 32V.

The result is that between the judge's finding and 1996, when there were additional changes to the Berne copyright convention that would have made the AT&T code copyrightable, the code was essentially in the public domain.

the version that was included in Linux seems to be from System V.

So, yes, SGI could have copied the 32V code, but they didn't.

Or they could have copied the Unix Version 3 code, if they'd included the copyright and license notices, but they didn't.

But they had no right to copy the System V code at all.

Perens is right:

In this case, there was an error in the Linux developer's process (at SGI),

It turns out that we have a legal right to use the code in question

Here in fact is the complete analysis on which the computer wire article is based. Apparently, as can be seen a few paragraphs below the quoted text, Bruce meant that the code duplicates a function allready in the linux kernel elsewere, is only applicable to one specific SGI system, and thus should never have been in the Linux kernel distribution in the first place, "for technical reasons".
All the same, the code was released years ago under an open source license in 2002 by Caldera, now SCO, and that even if it had still been in the kernel, the developers would be completely in their right.

I call bullshit. You need to go RTFWebsite

ESR has already stated how he feels about being the guidon holder for open source.

1. Take my job, please.

2. Understand my job, please.

Further, if you can find someone who will do all of that, and perhaps more, you need to send him an e-mail, because he wants to know about it. Why not use this as a starting point when you're looking.

As for what ESR has done for the Open Source Community-at-large, ponder this, batman: You need the idealists, the pragmatists, and yes, even the more wild. Why? Because the community they're speaking in the name of, and the communities they're speaking to are just as diverse. It will be these men, and the relevant foundations that write the amici curiae in support of Linux, the GPL, or Open Source in general, when the time is necessary.

When was the last time you said thanks?

I call bullshit. You need to go RTFWebsite

ESR has already stated how he feels about being the guidon holder for open source.

1. Take my job, please.

2. Understand my job, please.

Further, if you can find someone who will do all of that, and perhaps more, you need to send him an e-mail, because he wants to know about it. Why not use this as a starting point when you're looking.

As for what ESR has done for the Open Source Community-at-large, ponder this, batman: You need the idealists, the pragmatists, and yes, even the more wild. Why? Because the community they're speaking in the name of, and the communities they're speaking to are just as diverse. It will be these men, and the relevant foundations that write the amici curiae in support of Linux, the GPL, or Open Source in general, when the time is necessary.

When was the last time you said thanks?

A major step forward occured on July 5, 2003, when WRC-03 adopted changes to the ITU Radio Regulations that remove the international requirement that all administrations require Morse tests, leaving that determination to the individual administrations, but the work does not end there.

Other countries are already moving in this direction, so it sounds like it's just a matter of time before morse code is removed entirely or reduced even more.

More details here and here and here.

For the sake of completeness, I'm KD5YRD, just Technician class. I've passed the General and Extra tests, but failed the Morse code test when I tried it (yesterday!) ... so I'll need to work on it bit more (perhaps in two weeks I'll try again.) The written tests are quite simple, especially since you have access to all possible test questions, but the morse code part can be a lot harder for many people, even though 5 wpm is extremely slow.

In any event, don't get the idea that you need to know morse code to do ham radio, even today. You absolutely do not -- the Technician class license does not require it, and gets you access to many (most?) of the `fun' things that ham radio has to offer. But you may want to learn it eventually -- you'll hear a lot of it even mixed in with voice communications.

A bit of trivia: Bruce Perens of Open Source fame founded No-Code International, "a norganization dedicated to the abolition of the Morse code testing requirement as a prerequisite for any class of Amateur Radio license." I didn't see NCI mentioned anywhere in the article, but they're pretty much responsible for the last overhaul of Morse requirements.

A good article summarizing his No-Code work is Bruce's own article,"No-Code: The End-Game".

A bit of trivia: Bruce Perens of Open Source fame founded No-Code International, "a norganization dedicated to the abolition of the Morse code testing requirement as a prerequisite for any class of Amateur Radio license." I didn't see NCI mentioned anywhere in the article, but they're pretty much responsible for the last overhaul of Morse requirements.

A good article summarizing his No-Code work is Bruce's own article,"No-Code: The End-Game".

If the malloc.c code was written by dmr/ken in 1977 for AT&T and thus copyrighted by them, and that copyright was transferred to SCO and given to SGI under non-disclosure agreements of some kind, wouldn't it be wrong for SGI to distribute that code without a contract explicitly allowing them to do so?

I suppose SGI can say "we snagged that malloc.c from a BSD distribution who invented each line and variable name independently". But they cannot hold the typical alternate defense that AT&T illegally copied the code from BSD, since dmr/ken are apparently the progenitors.

And if SGI snagged it from BSD while BSD copied it, while it may be BSD's fault, SGI would remain legally liable as far as I can tell (IANAL). We'll see.

It took some time to explain to the government that the "bad guys" already have access to strong encryption.

Perhaps this is in response to Bruce Perens' analysis of the "stolen" code that SCO had obfusticated.

"Oh no they got though our Greek Font encryption! IBM HAS to be behind it!!"

You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion.

An SCO presentation shown in Las Vegas on August 18th alleged infringement by the Linux developers. The presentation, in Microsoft PowerPoint format is here, and an conversion of the presentation that can be viewed using a web browser is here .

SCO released the presentation to Bob McMillan, a reporter for IDG News Service, without any non-disclosure terms. Bob asked me to comment upon it. here's his story.

I will start with SCO's demonstrations regarding "copied" software. It is likely that SCO would present the very best examples that they have of "copied" code in their slide show. But I was easily able to determine that of the two examples, one isn't SCO's property at all, and the other is used in Linux under a valid license. If this is the best SCO has to offer, they will lose.

Slide 15 shows purports to show "Obfuscated Copying" from Unix System V into Linux. SCO further obfuscated the code on this slide by switching it to a Greek font, but that was easily undone. It's entertaining that the SCO folks had no clue that the font-change could be so easily reversed. I'm glad they don't work on my computer security :-)

The code shown in this slide implements the Berkeley Packet Filter, internet firewall software often abbreviated as "BPF". SCO doesn't own BPF. It was created at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with funding from the U.S. Government, and is itself derived from an older version called "enet", developed by Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon Universities. BPF was first deployed on the 4.3 BSD system produced by the University of California at Berkeley. SCO later copied the software into Unix System V.

The BPF source code is here on the Lab's web site. A paper on its design, published in 1993, is here

BPF is under the BSD license. That license allowed SCO to legally copy the code into Unix System V in 1996, but since SCO doesn't own the code, they have no right to prevent others from using it.

So, in this case the SCO "pattern-recognition" team correctly deduced that the Linux and SCO implementations of BPF were similar. But I was able to determine the origin of BPF after a few minutes of web searches on google.com . Why couldn't a "pattern-recognition team" do the same? It's difficult to believe they simply didn't bother to check. It's also likely that SCO dropped attribution of the Lab's copyright from the System V copy of the BPF source code, or the team would have known.

The Linux version of BPF is not an obfuscation of the BPF code. It is a clean-room re-implementation of BPF by Jay Schulist of the Linux developers, sharing none of the original source code, but carefully following the documentation of the Lab's product. The System V and Linux BPF versions shown in slide 15 implement the same virtual machine instruction set, which is used to filter (allow, reject, change, or reroute) internet packets. And the documentation for that VM even specifies field names. Thus Schulist's and the Lab's implementations appear similar. Had Schulist chosen to directly use the Lab's code, it still would have been legal. But the version in Linux is entirely original to the Linux developers. There is no legal theory that would give SCO any claim upon it.

Slides 10 through 14 show memory allocation functions from Unix System V, and their correspondence to very similar mat