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SCO Roundup
Time to clear out the bin of the taint of SCO, hopefully we haven't posted these already... The Economist has a piece titled Face Value -- Of Monkeys and Penguins. The EFF is pushing an email campaign about SCO. An anonymous reader submits this completely unverified claim that SCO needs to change the password on their mail server: sco.txt. And another reader presents a theory about SCO's stock performance.
I just read Rob and Eric's long, well-written rebuttal to SCO's complaint but missed any remarks from them on paragraph 141.
To me, it seemed too important to be not commented. Has it been commented upon since?
...should be McBride's mantra.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
and it was rejected.
I'm not grousing.
The Economist has captured the issue very well, and in a way that any businessman (your boss, your clients, for instance) will understand.
It has also defined the core of this issue, namely the realignment of the IT industry from old to new, with SCO/MS on the old side, and IBM/OSS/Linux on the new.
I never thought I would see IBM on the right side of IT, but there we have it.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If you feel like lowering yourself to their level, keep that sco.txt link there.
I thought the whole point was to take the high road?
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
...when the EFF is coming after you. The EFF is not light-handed on the legal representation side, and if they're coming down on the side of Linux against SCO, then SCO has problems.
What I want to see happen, however, is an injunction that holds all funds paid for "Linux licenses" in an escrow account until this matter is settled permanently.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
They run Linux... SMP version even. So I guess Linus can sue them for copyright infringement if they won't follow the GPL? Assuming this is a valid text log. Would a Netcraft report count as evidence?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
"SCO Stock Goes Up After SCOForum Code Revealed as Baloney... Does This Make Sense?"
No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
What this tells me is that maybe business folks/investors think the Linux/open source community is sort of just a group of whiners and will always be dogging SCO no matter what. Although SCO seems to be clearly just looking for a buyout offer and the execs, a runup in stock price, I think this tells me that maybe we need to start trying to be a little more objective so that we can get more respect from the people with lotsa money... I'll believe it when I see a posting on Slashdot that says, "newest version of redhat sucks" or something to that effect... :-)
There and I was starting to get withdrawal...
What the hell will I do with my time when SCO is finally buried?
What am I supposed to say here that hasnt been said a million times? Is this any new insight that scos stocks are rising for no apparent (until you dig then you know) reason?
Commies? Is that how he views us Linux users? Well in this current environment he better watch out we commies turn into vigilante mob pretty quickly. I mean no physical threat at all, but we arent about to sit still and watch some lame ass company come at us.
The best thing I can say is an old quote:
"The cats out of that bag" and it aint going back in. Linux is here to stay.
the1:/home/the1# john sco.shadow Loaded 1 password (Standard DES [24/32 4K]) guesses: 0 time: 0:00:00:20 (3) c/s: 5150 trying: 1951 - stanney guesses: 0 time: 0:00:00:22 (3) c/s: 4688 trying: stephes - sunnette guesses: 0 time: 0:00:00:24 (3) c/s: 4334 trying: samart - bunny guesses: 0 time: 0:00:00:26 (3) c/s: 4021 trying: 1182 - carison guesses: 0 time: 0:00:00:46 (3) c/s: 3196 trying: chammen - mady157 . . .
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Anyone run crack on that yet. I wanna know if the root password is "k00lDarl". Or more likely, "Darlsuxx".
Of course you probably shouldn't post it if they haven't fixed it yet. Better check first (er, I mean, don't do that). For that matter, did the Czech poster mean to imply that they were able to log in directly as root from a remote site?
I'm considering short-selling SCOX stock on Tuesday. Bad idea? Good idea? Thoughts, please. I don't particularly feel like blowing through more money on the market.
I imagine he is using 'we' in the royal sense meaning 'he.' It's a little shocking to me that so many people are devoting so much time to this. Wouldn't we be better off to just ignore him and let IBM squash him and his claim unnoticed as a something as unsubstantiated as his is should be.
Instead we spend an awful lot of time and energy talking and reading...and making SCO a household word. And worse, making people nervous about linux and open source software in general for (so far) no reason at all. This seems to be a guy who likes to make his money suing people and is getting some free publicity at everyone's expense. Until they are willing to pony up with some real evidence let them slither back to the obscurity more fitting companies that have nothing good to offer.
Do you suppose they're doing some preventative maintenance? Anyone care to fill us in on the fun they're having with that sco.txt file?
but after months of this SCO bullplop... I wonder why i am up at 12:57 in the morning reading this stuff. is it just me, or has development on this story slowing down?
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
Please translate the message at root.cz
(it seems to suggest that the sco.txt file has been there since at least the 28th)
The fact that SCO stock increased while there case was shown to suck, really shows we are not kicking SCO in the right place. We need to hit them where it hurts.
We finally got to see what was presumably their best evidence, and it was a steaming turd of donkeyshit. They were either lying or were unbelievably negligent. While this was all over geek websites, it didn't make much of a ripple in the business press, and as the last article points out, SCO stock actually got pumped in the business press after the bogus code was released. And the business press is the place to hit SCO -- all they care about is their stock price, and the corporate hacks who determine stock prices don't read Slashdot.
Playing on the defensive as the EFF is doing is good, but we also need to go on the offense more.
People and organizations should contact biz journalists, or write letters to the editors. Send out press releases. Post the information at stock sites -- wherever. If stock traders know how bogus SCO's claims are, it will hurt the fuckwads at SCO. While the SCO story may not be of interest to the general public, it is of interest to the business community. I am sick of seeing unbalanced articles in businessweek or whatever, which contain no viewpoint from the free software software community.
And hackers can go on the offensive by filing lawsuits or threatening such. Send out cease and desist letters and make it public with a press release. Specific people and development teams have been libeled. They have accused the kernel team of theft. Now that code snippets have been made public, further lies by SCO can even be considered as slander against the specific people who contributed that code. And those who are the public face of the kernel team can claim damages as well. While the damages one could claim would not be enough to retire on, it can damage SCO's stock price with the publicity. SCum needs to be told to put up or shut the fuck up.
Stick it to the bastards!
Deconstruct the State
Sorry to point this out, but it's spelled D-A-I-L-Y ;)
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
"I guess your own dogfood doesn't apply for /. editors ?"
You're just begging for another dupe-fest on 04-01-04.
Yeah, I'll believe that "sco.txt" link when SCO releases every last one of those allegedly misappropriated snippets of code to the LKML.
Well, I take that back. I wouldn't be surprised if SCO released that themselves in the hopes that they could catch a OpenSource supporter breaking into their server...
You know you have to watch out for them sneaky commie bastards!
Interestingly, the economist article says that Darl is a devour mormon. Don't they have a bible that some guy allegedly dictated from behind a wall? Doesn't it infringe the trade "secrets" of the normal bible in some ways?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
In case the SCO.TXT file gets /.'d, here is a copy of it, along with a rough Czech -> English translation. I will post an exact translation when my Czech buddies wake up :)
:-)
:-)</b>
/ /boot /home /tmp /usr /var /dev/shm
----------
Subject: schvalne jestli ve SCO ctou ceske servery
From: root <root@mail.sco.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 05:59:24 -0600
To: redakce@root.cz
jestli ano,
urcite se budou lepe venovat svym serverum.. a nejen tomu nasledujicimu
<b>if yes,
it will be better to get the whole server.. trace/follow the server
mail:/usr/share # hostname -f; uname -a
mail.sco.com
Linux mail 2.4.19-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Fri Feb 7 16:29:22 UTC 2003 i686 unknown
mail:/usr/share # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2068160 1997756 70404 0 210712 1527008
-/+ buffers/cache: 260036 1808124
Swap: 2097136 0 2097136
mail:/usr/share # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 2.0G 410M 1.5G 22%
/dev/sda1 99M 10M 84M 11%
/dev/sda8 3.3G 33M 3.1G 2%
/dev/sda6 1012M 35M 926M 4%
/dev/sda5 3.0G 1.6G 1.3G 55%
/dev/sda7 325G 905M 308G 1%
shmfs 1010M 0 1010M 0%
root:6X7liA1zmJhyA:12255:0:10000::::
----------
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Geez, if you're going to spend lots of time doing some silly report (the speculation on SCO's stock) - add nice purty graphs (like that fella who projected the release of the linux kernel)!
But I did think that the articles were pretty well written. They were not polarized and edgy(as I would have written it...something along the lines of 'those lying cheating @#$% call my @#$# code @#$@theirs??'.
I also, just for kicks, tried to telnet into the mail.sco.com server. No luck. They don't accept telnet links. That would have been fun ehh?
At first I didn't think they were up, still DDoS...but I was able to ping them. Ping Ping Ping. I only did it once, but I'll bet you guys could ping them too...just to make sure they were still up of course. Purely curiosity.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
root:6X7liA1zmJhyA:12255:0:10000::::
non-shadow passwords, does any linux distribution still do this? unsalted crypt encryption? if i understand this file correctly, root is userid 12255, group 0? has no home dir, and no login shell? not a very useful account, even if you do crack the password.
more likely this is some sort of distributed authentication system based file, and the hash is just some component of that. the password will be useless if you get it.
I read that as "it is time to clean the taint of sco"
yup. bedtime. I swear I haven't been watching porno.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
You're definately not reading it right. This is what shadow files look like. This is a shadow'd password.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
nmap tells me... ... ...
# nmap -O mail.sco.com
Remote operating system guess: Linux Kernel 2.4.0 - 2.4.18 (X86)
why linux - what's SCO unix, then?
Computers are like air conditioners.
- They stop working when you open Windows.
They obviously did imply it, just check the From: header ( dunno if the log's real though ). What else could it be, a mole at SCO ? Hell, I wish
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Just when I thought I'd suffer from withdrawl, another SCO article appears just in time to save my sanity.
$ man 5 shadow
Would you like a McBride with that?
Why, if it bothers you so much, do you come here JUST TO COMPLAIN.
Jesus.
I thought I was going to have to go Cold turkey. I was starting to get delerious from SCO story withdrawals.
Yes I can't spell and often leave out whole words let alone the endings of words. Some place I lost 20 IQ points. I am only a slightly above average 120 now. maybe I should have some more to drink.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
Unfortunately, the Slashdot editors always seem to forget to verify that there's a link to the SCO website somewhere in the stories. Does anobody knows what their URL is ? I'm Google-impaired and it would help me a lot to go and buy a Linux license for my Debian box. Thank you guys.
*wakes up* AAAAAAAAAAH ! What the hell was THAT ?!
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Suppose:
...
1. I am a small time kernel contributor. I have about 10-20 lines of code in the linux kernel.
2. SCO distributes the linux kernel in binary form only.
3. My copyrighted work is available to SCO for distribution only under the GPL (which is a licence - a contract).
4. SCO breaches the GPL as follows:
4.a. Section 3 - SCO does not make the source code to the program available.
4.b. Section 4 blah blah - SCO is licensing Linux.
4.c. Section 6 somewhat disputable - accompany with SCO press releases - especially when they threaten to sue GNU/Linux users - again licensing.
4.d. Section 7 - SCO continues to distribute although it seeks to apply additional retrictions through yet unfounded copyright claims - the key term of secton 7 is "believe" - SCO "believes" additional restrictions apply.
Claims:
I want 20$/loc + court expenses. Nothing else.
Questions to lawyers out there
1. Can this be done through small claims court because it's a contract breach?
2. If I'm outside US can a lawyer do this?
Lokking at the password line, you will notice that the password is stored as a standard crypt password.
I can't remember how many years ago it became standard to use MD5 sums instead, which are way harder to crack. The only reason to use crypt passwords today is because you had to carry hundreds of users forward, and was not willing to re-issue a new password.
I have now put john the ripper at the job to crack the password, so I can see if the password looks likely to be true.
jestli ano, :-)
...meaning:
:-)
...which means that the mail.sco.com server isn't the only one compromised.
urcite se budou lepe venovat svym serverum.. a nejen tomu nasledujicimu
if yes,
they will take better care of their servers.. and not only of the one mentioned bellow
neat.
Darl McBride, capitalist crusader against the commie horde of Linux users
There is nothing "capitalist" or "fundamentalist" about McBride--his is a campaign of lies and stock manipulation, and McBride's company is apparently engaging in intellectual property theft. Like so many other dishonest people before him, he is hiding his misdeeds by accusing his opponents of being un-American and communists.
There is nothing "communist" about Linux. Linux has thrived in free market economies because it's a highly efficient way for commercial entities to develop software. Linux is about free markets at their best: goods being produced at marginal costs, which, in the case of software, happens to be zero.
Please.. Do you know what that will look like to the rest of the world? Maybe Michael should read the Linux Advocacy FAQ, or at least what not to do!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Threatening lawsuits is dangerous! Don't threaten them, just do it.
If you decide to sue SCO for extortion, go to
the courthouse and ask the judge to issue
declerative judgment saying that SCO cannot
require payment since you are just an end-user
(and not a Linux distributor) and you have
never shown proof why SCO should demand money
from someone they have never had a prior business relationship.
If a few hundred/thousant linux users win
a declarative judgment just like that, then
we should be in a better shape.
(As for me, I am still waiting for SCO to sure me. SCO,
if you are listening, and I have posted it at least
5 time on slashdot already, please contact me
via ntro at earthlin dot [NET] . Let's get started!)
I've created a random comment generator for stories about SCO, with Slashdot in mind. All you geeks with no ability to write +5 Funny articles, here's your savior. Have fun!
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
Damn it, I swear I read this as:
All as it takes is one sanguine penguin to turn the tide...
And this bizarre mental image of a sanguine penguin explaining to Mr Gerstner what the future looked like and why it involved lots of ice and fish.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Take a test... How about a short test on your thoughts about the SCO matter? The test can be found HERE.
Suppose my copyright is registered.
If the password line is true, they know they have been cracked, so they probably have changed the pass anyway.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Wooo!
It's *spelled* S C O, but it's pronouned "ass hats". I can't decide which is funnier - the point about IBM orchestrating all the outrage, or the point that SCO is somehow more "relevant" to the tech community because they've filed a bunch of press releases!
Anyone have a guess as to who these McBride sources are? My hunch is Miss Cleo. And we certainly don't want to mash the SCO executives into a bloody pulp, either. I pictured an IBM semi-trailer rumbling down the highway, with an SCO chicken (looked like Darl with feathers) standing at the other end of a straight, squaking furiously at the oncoming behemoth. The chicken doesn't stand a chance.
http://www.rageagainst.net/links.php
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
If we obtained unauthorised access to SCO's mail server, then we would be CRACKERS.
One of Gerstner couselors said to him years ago "if we don't start to care about (work on) Linux now, we are making the biggest error in our company life".
Man, it's more like coffeebreakly (Geek Code grammar qualifier: g----, I am GWB). Like someone already put it a few weeks ago - morning coffee break, morning SCO story; lunch coffee break, lunch SCO story etc.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
lawsuit and will be very sad if it stops.
Eric Raymonds is a good example.
Eric: SCO claims there was not DoS last Friday. (See GrokLaw
yet you blame it on Linux without providing evidence,
then declared yourself general. No comment.
The last article looks like it'd be of interest to the SEC, though I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
The GPL is an agreement so I do not claim copyright infringement but violation of this agreement.
SCO has been infiltrated by Scientology. They see potential in the three letters S, C and O.
Shhh! You are breaking my concentration! I'm trying to shed a bitter tear for them. Anyone have a guess as to who these McBride sources are? My hunch is Miss Cleo. Oh SCO would just claim the virus code was their IP all along, and claim license fees from everyone who's still running it - people whose IP they can get easily as it keeps contacting their website!
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I think SCO have two strategies here. The main payoff is the licence money paid to them by Microsoft. If they want to safeguard they're only reliable source of income, they need to keep the FUD coming. That means slow development, but a constant sense of threat for IT managers thinking of investing in Linux. The second string, of course, is that they manage to distort the facts enough that they get awarded the rights to linux and can start selling it.
Now then, for the first strategy, going to court would be a disaster. They have _no_ case apart from FUD, and as they are rapidly learning, the open-source community are not so naieve or so inept as to let themselves be brushed aside in the legal arena. If it comes to court they'll lose - and that's the end of their income stream.
On the other hand, it it goes to court and they win, and adopt strategy two - then Microsoft crushes them like a bug, takes the rights to linux and embraces and extends it into oblivion. Once again - end of income stream, and end of SCO. Which isn't to say that Darl McBride won't get some sort of reward from Little Willie Microsoft, but it'd be a bad move for SCO, and bad for SCO investors.
Meantime, we have to keep countering the FUD without dropping the ball, image-wise; a tesk that gets harder as time moves on and peoples attention spans start to time out.
Meanwhile, IBM are playing the game cautiously. They may as well - SCO aren't hurting them, but may yet have a trick or two to play. IBM's best strategy is to emulate the mills of the gods and grind "slow, but exceedingly fine".
Nope, I can see this one might run and run.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Ok, I'm not an economist, but am I the only one thinking SCO's business plan looks something like:
1. ???
2. ???
3. Profit!
?
Seriously, when I saw the title, SCO Roundup, my first thought was that somebody rounded up all the SCO executives and were now patiently waiting for someone else to come up with a suitable way of disposing of them.
/. poll in there somewhere.
There's a
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Am I the only one who feels pretty calm about this whole thing when SCO has David Boies as their lawyer? Government vs. Microsoft, Gore vs. Bush, Napster vs. RIAA ring any bells? The guy never seems to win, and if he ever does win, the wins dont accomplish anything.. When a guy who wouldnt even score with a $5 prostitute is representing them, at least I am sleeping pretty well. Disclaimer (just as well, when talking about a lawyer): I am not claiming Boies would ever even think about trying to score with a prostitute, it is just a metaphor for his "successes" in high profile cases..
I hardly think a company planning on outsource 15,000 jobs is on the right side of US IT
Yep. Everyone knows it's in the interests of US IT to use the most expensive labor they can find and thus inflate their product prices. Sure, this is the exact same stupidity that has destroyed so much domestic industry in the past but, hey, the interests of US IT is not in surviving long term but in giving YOU a job short term, right?
The only reason to use crypt passwords today is because you had to carry hundreds of users forward, and was not willing to re-issue a new password.
Even then, there are ways to convert many users without them ever knowing. If they use POP3, FTP, or anything else that sends the password in the clear, rip open the daemon and add a bit of code. After the part where it does the pw auth and succeeds, check to see if it's an old DES hash.
If it is, take the known-good plaintext that's in your buffer and make a MD5 crypt of it right there. You're obviously running as root since you just checked the passwd file, so create a script somewhere safe that does the right usermod call and let the admin (that's you) run it later.
Your most active users will get converted right away, and any stragglers will eventually filter through. After a few weeks or months, anyone who still has a DES password probably isn't using their account. For those people, you can just lock their account and it'll work itself out through the usual "I forgot my password" channels. In many cases you end up deleting people who slipped through the cracks of the personnel list.
I did exactly this when converting a box from BSD/OS to Slackware. My users never noticed.
Because ESR is a publicity-hound troll. "Um,
./), and then there are the moochers, who contribute very little, but talk alot, giving lip service to the ideals without understanding them in the least (ESR, Anonymous Coward, "Open Source" advocates -- WinCE is "Open Source").
yeah, so, like, I heard from the guys who were doing it. I told 'em it wasn't cool 'stop, yo,'and they were like, 'okay.'" Ummhmm. Right. I wonder if he'll stick to the story when the FBI comes looking for the e-mail. DDoS is a crime, remember. ESR, last time I checked, isn't a priest or a reporter....
McBride is mistaken -- Free Software users and producers aren't Communists. There are a few idealists who swallow everything like RMS. There are the pragmatists who use GNU/Linux or the BSD's because there's nothing better commercially (IBM, The Debian project, the BSD's), there are the enthusiasts who just dig computers (me, probably 90% of the rest of
Oh well.
So is the SEC investigating Cohen or what? Seems like he's spreading the shit to push up the stock price.
Is he still employed by CNBC? It seems like a huge conflict of interest.
Suppose:
1. I am a small time kernel contributor. I have about 10-20 lines of code in the linux kernel.
2. My copyrighted work is available to SCO for distribution only under the GPL (which is a copyright licence).
3. Caldera/SCO sold my code for 4 years (and complied to the agreement) - attach press releases detailing Caldera/SCO contributions to the kernel - including their praise of the GPL.
4. As of May Caldera/SCO has breached the GPL as follows:
4.a. Section 3 - SCO does not make the source code to the program available.
4.b. Section 4 blah blah - SCO is licensing Linux.
4.c. Section 6 somewhat disputable - accompany with SCO press releases - especially when they threaten to sue GNU/Linux users - again licensing.
4.d. Section 7 - SCO continues to distribute although it seeks to apply additional retrictions through yet unfounded copyright claims - the key term of secton 7 is "believe" - SCO "believes" additional restrictions apply.
Claims:
They breached contract. My hourly consultant fee is 200$. It took me one hour to write it. I want 20$/loc + court expenses. Nothing else.
Their guy:
This is an obvious copyright dispute.
Me:
What do you mean? Do you mean you didn't break the GPL and you stole my copyrighted work?
Their guy:
We never agreed to the GPL.
Me:
If you didn't agree to the GPL then how come you sold my code for four years? Did you simply steal it?
Well, Joe Smith claimed he had found tablets of gold with holy writings -- he claimed that his "Book of Mormon" was a translation of these. Of course these tablets somehow "disappeared" before anyone but a few devotees actually had a chance to verify their existence. Perhaps that's the problem with SCO. The infringing lines of code were written on similar tablets....
Who cares? Laws are upheld by people with guns, not by people doing the *right* thing because it is implied by law. If you respect IP law (or fear it) then you are controlled by virtual concepts - ideas controlling ideas. If you subscribe to this then what can (know how to) you do when they HUNT you down?
If you have read anything you find an elegant (or otherwise) expression then feel free to use it as you see fit - to aid all or yourself, any language is to be spoken (compiled, heard, etc).
Maybe if we stopped fearing concepts we could give the real world a better try.
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
WTF does this have to do with the US ? This is about open source and closed source. I think IBM are a bit more involved than the US. In fact they are on the right side and the US has decided to back M$. Good for IBM, India deserve their support far more than the US, but that is not the issue.
As pointed out in the one article, SCO stock has gone up from under a dollar a share to over $15.00 (see for yourself). Sooner or later, either SCO will lose in court, or the hype from the spin-doctors will dry up, or both. Now would be an excellent time to sell SCO stock short and make a killing.
Ok, so the line "and is a devout Mormon" caught my attention. Isn't there some kind of ethical code even in their branch of religion along the lines of "thou shalt not lie" or "thou shalt not extort"?? Either he's unaware of what he's doing or he's knowlingly paving his own path to the hell he believes in.
I plan to plan / Dutch course in The Hague
Nah, they'll just leave the server down for the weekend. It's cheaper than paying overtime for a tech. They need the money for lawyers.
If they even know they've been cracked.
Right story, wrong consortium product. VESA is not a bus, it's a standard for a Super VGA BIOS. The EISA bus was defined by IBM's rivals.
Hopefully any victory over SCO will leave a smoking hole in the ground and no one will admit to ever having had the slightest thing to do with them--but that's just my little hope and dream. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
OSS is noting like a barn rasing or bake sale, both of which I agree are nothing like communism. OSS however is very left and very much like communism. OSS and free software in general provide everyone with the code and the vast majority of OSS software is released with very little restriction on the redistribution (think GPL, Apache, and BSD licences). Changes for the most part are made by the community for the benefit of the community.
I would just like to point out here that the reason communism and community sound a look similar as words is they share a common root, one of them is the root or something similar. Go find a linguist and ask them for the real low down, I'm just stating the obvious and cant be bothered to look it up.
When you raise a barn for someone they get the barn, you get a warm feeling, maybe a meal, maybe even a pig come fall. As for the bake sale analogy, it is just ludicrous and I think you miss the point of communism. It's not about the lack of a sale, or the fact that the sale of the item goes to the betterment of the community, well it is, but more than that it's about the infrastructure and the means of production being owned by the community as a whole not being owned by a company. OSS is effectively just that. When you or anyone adds code to an OSS project you get the code, they get the code, we all get the code, and while not completely true to communism in that the code doesn't belong to the community and the author does maintain his or her copyright, the community is given very broad rights in it's use and dissemination. Effectively the code is owned for the benefit of the community, much as roads are owned and maintained by the government for your ease of travel, and as factories would be owned and maintained by the government in a communist society.
McBride was right when he said that it is communistic, is sure is, it works, and the world and software in general is a better place for it. His use if the word communism was intended to spread FUD about linux and OSS by conjuring up the cold war demons, and playing off the western cultural mindset that communism is evil. It's not the corruptible people given absolute power were. Linux, and OSS in general is a shining example of the principles of communism applied and functioning.
If they have multiple Unix flavours and/or and NIS setup then they are most likely using crypt and not MD5.
-- Leeeter than leet
Awww, come on, they fileshare porn sometimes. You gotta admit, that helps open source programmers!
There is a Wired article quoting Darl McBride. Notably, "We're trying to work through issues in such a way that we get justice without putting a hole in the head of the penguin."
I think maybe he overestimates the size of his gun
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
>> Hit them in the pocketbook, as that is all they understand.
:-)
What is with SCO's last really big costumer McDonalds?
Write your McDonalds representative to change their systems to Linux.
The fallout of such a step from McDonalds should go through every business paper
in the world and should be something the guys from IBM may know how to handle.
Than let's have a look on the SCOX again.
--
'They are smoking crack.' --Linus Torvalds about SCO
How about changing the Caldera icon to appear rotten? Make it symbolize the zombified state of Caldera/SCO.
I can't remember how many years ago it became standard to use MD5 sums instead
You mean common practice in Freenix land, not standard. POSIX standard Unix is DES.
Communism is a system where it's illegal for me to choose my own license. The essence of communism is that I can take your property whether you ocnsent or not.
The current world of OSS is not at all communist. I can write my code under any license I choose. I respect the right of other people to hold copyright in their creations and to choose their own licenses. And I honor the licenses of all copyrighted materials that I use.
Almost every bit of OSS is legally copyrighted by specific people and corporations and nonprofits, not by a vague community. (Some bits are too small or too constrained to be copyrighted, and a few OSS authors actually do abandon their work to the public domain). I think this is natural and good and right.
To draw an analogy, maybe you don't see a difference between the primary use of Napster -- copying other people's work without their consent -- and the primary use of mp3.com -- copying other people's work with their consent. In both cases, gigabytes of mp3's fly across the wires. But I see a huge difference. So do the copyright laws of almost every nation, per the Berne convention. And so do almost all business users of computers.
It's all about consent.
At a more general level (and surprisingly for a Linux distributor), he (McBride) found the entire free-software trend "communistic", he says: "We don't get the whole free-lunch thing."
,a notch on their CV for them to earn bread with and the support of users who pay their way by submitting feedback, bug reports etc.
I still don't get the constant references from Gates, McBride et al about Linux being communist.
In Soviet Russia which was communist in name if not nature, the provision of all goods an services was centralised in the hands of a few, huge agencies. These agencies excercised a vast amount of power over those it "served" and generally with property being theft and all that no-one could truly be said to own their their property, e.g. house, car etc. This basically constitutes the large organisations licencing the use of "their" property to the members of the society and as many dissedents found, these licences could be revoked along with the issue of a new one way licence to Siberia.
The free enterprise west on the other hand, benefitted from competition between many decentralised comapanies, organisations and individuals that in some cases formed alliances and co-operated when it would benefit.
If anything, the behaviour of the vast corporations bears more resemblance to the overpowering Soviet interpretation of communism than Open Source. On the other hand, open source follows the free market evolutionary pattern with projects popping into existence all the time with the weaker pointless ones falling by the wayside and the stronger useful ones maturing.
The open source system negates the need for money as developers receive the kudos of a job well done
In the meantime, please stop giving us this shit about open source and communism. The one thing it offers is freedom of choice and action. I don't remember the Russian people having much of that before the wall came down and I don't see that in any EULA from Microsoft, SCO or any other proprietry software company for that matter.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
At a more general level (and surprisingly for a Linux distributor), he found the entire free-software trend "communistic", he says: "We don't get the whole free-lunch thing."
Communistic? I'd like to show Darl McBourgeoise what communism is all about!
Who's with me?
Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen
This post (-3, Troll) is brought to you by the letters 'i' and 'nformative'.
http://www.sec.gov/complaint/cf942sec9570.htm is the form to use. If we flood their mailbox with these what happens. It only took a week for the SEC to go after Martha Stewart - why so long for Darl?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
The article has it wrong. The open sores people are like the fundamentalists, thumping their copy-left bibles and ranting about "freedom."
they released their own distribution of linux? Ie. the right hand is saying 'yes the GPL is good, here's a copy of linux' and the left hand is saying 'GPL bad, it's infringing on our copyright'. There's gotta be a problem with that somewhere
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Say, didn't we all ask them some questions a while back? I thought there was supposed to be an interview. Where's our interview! I want my interview! Were our questions too hard for them?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bill Gates : McBride let me give some more humping since you are helping my crappy windows survive against linux. My son you will rewarded by the dark forces. You will bear the evil of M$.
Hold on my www layers is protected by linux. Fuck you McBride.
Nah, they'll just leave the server down for the weekend. It's cheaper than paying overtime for a tech.
They will leave the server down for the weekend not due to cost issues, but due to PR issues. They want as much PR as they can get.
Tuesday, September 2, 2003.
At SCO headquarters this morning, SCO's CEO Darl McBride was quoted as saying: "Those evil hackers are still attacking SCO's superior Unix servers!". He then added "...and it's all IBM's fault!" "We know that IBM is behind this whole affair, including our poor security. We have evidence that proves it -- but we can't show it to anyone."
"If we were to prove that IBM were behind the attacks on SCO, then the attacks would stop."
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
The whole SCO thing is set up only to divert the focus of the open source community away from the real issue, the European Patent law. That is going to be the real disaster, which is going on almost unnoticed while US open source people are just discussing the ridiculous SCO/IBM case.
and /home so small in comparison?
please mod this up - this is exactly what came to mind as soon as I saw this.
conspiracy theorists may even put forward that this is a honeypot designed to lure "linux hax0rs" into committing an illegal intrusion on their "system" to use as PR gimmick to further besmirch the image of Linux users as a bunch of free-loading, copyright-stealing, malicious subversive evil hackers bent on running legitimate software companies out of business.
It certainly explains who has been buying SCO stock.
I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
I wish that people would stop equating OSS with communism, because it is not the same thing at all. OSS is actually a development of capitalism, where the brutal facts of reality have converged:
* Operating systems are not rare.
* It costs very little to reproduce software.
* It costs relatively little money to develop original software.
* Capitalism says competition will drive price down.
I would say that OSS is the ultimate result of capitalism: lowest cost goods.
Reality is that OSS software is simply where the old artificial property economy (read: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY MONOPOLY RIGHTS)has failed. Darl is much like the monkey (or single celled organism) where OSS is simply species link or two up the evolutionary chain.
Value is generated in IT by deploying a technology configuration to achieve a goal, such as reduced costs or enabling higher capacity. Software is one component of that value. Hardware is another. And the ability to converge technology, people and process to yeild value is where the real money is at. OSS lowers cost and provides better tools for building value. Period.
$G
-- $G
If Bill Gate's bucks are really behind SCO, you'd be shorting into someone with $50 billion to buy up SCO stock.
You'd wind up taking it in the shorts if you did that....
This is michael we're talking about. You're aware of his cybersquatting on censorware.org, aren't you? Seriously.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Following is an opinion - all Speculation & conjecture - could SCOX = BRE-X?
BRE-X was a struggling small town Canadian mining company.
SCOX is a struggling small town Utah software company.
Midland Walsh, one of the principals of BRE-X was famous for suing a former employer and getting a settlement for an undisclosed sum.
Darl McBride, one of the principals of SCOX is famous for suing a former employer and getting a settlement for an undisclosed sum.
BRE-X suddenly said they found these incredibly huge gold deposits in a mine in Indonesia. This despite considerable prior evidence that this mine never contained gold before.
SCOX suddenly says they found these incredibly huge illegal UNIX code deposits in Linux. This despite considerable prior evidence that Linux never contained illegal UNIX before.
BRE-X brought in well-known outside experts (Kavanagh and Francisco) which made their claims of gold found, look more credible. Investors didn't know if these outside experts were directly involved in the search for gold - it later turned out that they weren't.
SCOX brought in well-known outside experts (Boies and Heise) which made their claims of gold found, look more credible. Investors don't know if these outside experts were directly involved in the search for UNIX code - how will it later turn out?
BRE-X said they had their own secret teams of experts, whose identities they couldn't reveal, supporting their claims (assaying of core samples for gold).
SCOX says they have their own secret teams of experts,whose identities they couldn't reveal, supporting their claims (finding illegal UNIX code in Linux).
Industry experts criticized the BRE-X techniques for assaying which were unorthodox, which they say didn't follow industry standard practises, and lacked concrete details.
Industry experts criticized the SCOX techniques for code search which were unorthodox, which they say don't follow industry standard practises, and lack concrete details.
BRE-X's reports (with incredible claims) were criticized by industry experts for the same reasons. The industry experts were ignored.
SCOX reports (with incredible claims) are criticized by industry experts for the same reasons. The industry experts are ignored.
BRE-X kept issuing new reports, with no verifiable concrete details, upping and upping their claims of gold found.
SCOX keep issuing new reports, with no verifiable concrete details, upping and upping their claims of UNIX code found.
Despite the obvious reasons to doubt, media and stock analysts preferred the BRE-X version of events to that of the industry experts. Some stock analysts (Bianchini of Nesbitt Burns) really pushed the stock hard.
Despite the obvious reasons to doubt, media and stock analysts preferred the SCOX version of events to that of the industry experts. Some stock analysts (Cohen of JHC Capital Management) really pushed the stock hard.
As more and more discrepencies in the BRE-X story came to light, the company produced a series of increasingly unsatisfactory explanations, and more outrageous claims, which were disputed by industry experts too.
As more and more discrepencies in the SCOX story come to light, the company produced a series of increasingly unsatisfactory explanations, and more outrageous claims, which were disputed by industry experts too.
The BRE-X stock prise rose and rose on the Toronto Stock Exchange, driven by massive relatively uncritical media coverage.
The SCOX stock prise rose and rose on the NASDAQ, driven by massive relatively uncritical media coverage.
BRE-X insiders cashed out millions of stock. It was a tiny fraction of the total company stock, but still a lot of money to them, especially considering their prior investment in the company was worth a relative pittance.
SCOX insiders cash out millions of stock. It was a tiny fraction
Well, given that they are quoting code from 1979 and earlier as infringing, how many good techs do you think still work there?
I wonder how many people are removing thier time at SCO from thier employment history at this moment?
Now that I've seen those words, my time at Slashdot is done. I can move on. They're working for SCO! You're just too goddamn stupid to admit that you're digging your own grave.
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
My Blog
my fav quote: "The world is moving to a Unix operating environment, and SCO owns the intellectual property rights to it"
SCO to rule the world then? heh!
"if i'd known it was harmless, i'd have killed it myself"
...on that shiny new HP cluster, supplied by a Canopy Group lackey. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah? Go read Exodus 20:8-11 and tell me why none of them obey it. Dollars to doughnuts some odd corner of BoM or PoGP claims to supercede it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The converse is also true: almost any political system will work (including dictatorships and anarchies) if you postulate 100% altruistic and sane participants.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ripped from Yahoo's RHAT message board:
===
Possible explanation of SCOX price
by: heimdal31 08/29/03 04:34 pm
Msg: 98717 of 98729
I've tried to put some of the information I've gleaned from the SCO board into more easily digestible form.
I think the most interesting one is
http://www.threenorth.com/sco/cohen.html
but all 4 are linked from
http://www.threenorth.com/sco
I'm SO tired of that load of low-IQ FUD. Let's drop that bullshit already, goddamn it. (I mean the parent posts here, not you, eniu!uine).
/.ers would resort to such underhanded tactics. If at *least* it had any chance to hurt SCO, I'd understand, but it's not even the case!
Canopy has absolutely *NO* control over Trolltech, much less KDE. They don't own more than 5% of Trolltech. Do you know how much decision power 5% gives them? Zero. None. Zilch. Got it? Going against them will absolutely not hurt SCO. Only Linux. Want to hurt SCO? Keep using Linux and whatever your fav desktop environment is. That's *it*.
Just let the bitter anti-KDE trolls swoop as low and underhanded as they'll want, and let the rest of us move on and actually work on improving software, alright?
The only thing that this bullshit (sorry for the language again, but I absolutely LOATHE liars and hypocrites) would achieve is 1) make the people who haven't managed to beat Trolltech on technical value gloat, and 2) push the Linux desktop development back a year or two. I am absolutely appalled that some
Damn it, as if the industry's state wasn't embittering enough as it is, do we *really* need such backhanded moves among our ranks?
(And yes, I know, at least a few of the parent posters believed in all honesty that this would somehow hurt SCO, but -- come on, people... Shooting yourself in the foot hurts the foot, not the podiatrist...)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I'd like to see a letter that I could send to my state attorney general (and/or US attorney general), asking him to consider investgating SCO for possible extortion.
I'd like to see this issue tackled from the executive branch as well as the legislative branch.
thinks a cracker is either:
A) a kind of baked good;
or
B) a white boy.
The rest of the world thinks "hacker = guy who breaks into computers and stuff". this is how the language has evolved. deal with it. you can't force people to change something like this (even though it hasn't stopped people from trying, a la "couriel" or "thru").
my pet machine
Most daemons these days don't have to run as root just to lookup passwords because of PAM. On the other hand, you could consider modifying PAM.
The problem is we're continually keeping SCO in the press all by ourselves. We don't even need Darl(ing's) encouragement anymore. All they have to do is sit back and laugh. Remember, this is a company who, six months ago was getting no press at all.
:(
My prediction is, when the smoke clears, SCO's employees, users, and vendors will be screwed but their execs will be sailing off the gold coast. There's really nothing that can be done about it I suppose.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
According to this program, the password from
root:6X7liA1zmJhyA:12255:0:10000::::
is "Cracking".
Could we organize a distributed effort to buy all the SCO stock and do just that?
The GPL removes the owner's ability to control the distribution, and grants that right to anyone who wants it. I will never do that with MY software code.
If you buy something (a book or a magazine,) in good faith, you're not liable to be sued for infringement. The distributors are liable. And Caldera is a Distributor.
Suing the customers would victimize them TWICE.
SCO is trying to do the impossible and switching stories fast enoung in the hopes that nobody notices that they have the bull by the end incapable of facial expression instead of by the horns.
To continue with the metaphor, they're going to get gored like a slow runner dressed in Red at Pamplona.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
...can be found here.
So far, I've just parsed McBride's SEC filings, but the rest of the SCO crew -- Broughton, Bench, Olson, Wilson, Hunsaker, and Opinder -- will be joining him on the page shortly.
One thing protracted litigation -- and can there be any other kind with Boies on one side and IBM on the other? -- does for McBride is keep the market buzz around SCOX going. Each additional month of FUD puts another 8,333 price-inflated shares in his pocket. That number jumps to 12,500 a month in April of 2004. The FUD also gives his executive staff an opportunity to dump options that were essentially worthless a year before. Reginald Broughton, for example, has moved $670,000 (55,000 shares) of SCOX since June 20th.
Almost all of the insider trades this year have been made pursuant to 10b5-1 plans, which purport to insulate insiders from liability by disposing of stock according to a fixed, predetermined schedule. My guess -- and that's all it is -- is that these plans were put in place recently, in anticipation of exactly what has transpired. It doesn't take an MBA to figure out that SCO's current course of action would generate an increase in the price of SCOX. For whatever reason, investors seem to respond to the sizzle first, and check to see if it's steak later. If that's the case, SCO's executives are gaming the system, and doing a pretty good job of it.
All in all, the whole mess reeks of stock manipulation, but, given the current regulatory climate (whatever happened to Kenny Lay?), the relatively small amounts of money involved, and the steps the principals have taken to protect themselves, I doubt if there's much the SEC can or will do about it.
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. -- Will Rogers
My translation was even worse than I thought :)
:-)
:-)
OK, from the mouths of 3 native Czechs, this is the closest to an exact translation as it gets:
jestli ano,
urcite se budou lepe venovat svym serverum.. a nejen tomu nasledujicimu
if yes,
they will definitely pay more attention to their servers.. and not only to the following one
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I'm too lazy, but can someone post a link to how much SCO stock is shorted right now? And maybe how much those put contracts cost?
And maybe as a funny little comparison, see how much call contracts are going for.
They sure as hell don't make $599 per Solaris license or per *BSD license. If a fleet of space penguins came to Earth and took every copy of Linux with them when they left, a more likely scenario than SCO winning, then I would recommend a switch to Solaris or FreeBSD over OpenServer, which I knew sucked before this whole fiasco.
If they did succeed in driving businesses from Linux, they couldn't hope to drive them to SCO. This way they at least get the $1 for a Microsoft Blanket License for use in MS-LINUX
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I amazed crafty Darl would miss this obvious profit opportunity!
Q: Why are SCO suing everyone? A: SCO is run by a bunch of vicious, lying, cowardly, greedy, sociopathic lawyers.
Looks like Dennis' check from IBM finally cleared. I pictured an IBM semi-trailer rumbling down the highway, with an SCO chicken (looked like Darl with feathers) standing at the other end of a straight, squaking furiously at the oncoming behemoth. The chicken doesn't stand a chance. Actually that doesn't sound any more nonsensical than their current machinations.
great ap mod parent up
Thanks for pointing out that item. Groklaw has performed quite a feat of research and analysis this time.
SCO is vulnerable to suits for defamation, tortious interference with contract, and false advertising, as a minimum. Extortion would be a stretch.
I'm SO tired of that load of low-IQ FUD. Let's drop that bullshit already, goddamn it....
[rest of rant cut]
So yeah, there's probably some Gnome people getting a chuckle out of all this, so what. This is bigger than Gnome vs KDE. The point isn't to punish Trolltech, it is to put pressure on them so that they, in turn, complain to Canopy. This applies to all Canopy group companies. If Canopy hears enough of it, they just might get the message
That KDE has a better desktop than Gnome is completely irrelevant. I like KDE, I don't like Gnome. I've switched to using IceWM for the time being, and sent KDE/Trolltech letters telling them why. According to you that makes me a "low-IQ, lying hypocrite"? Oh *you* come on.
-
Let's Put SCO Behind Bars
Also, in the day and a half since posting the link a Google search for "Let's Put SCO Behind Bars" went from 2190 to 3250 matches.The article is under a Creative Commons license. Please copy it to your website, your weblog, or other message boards. The markup is very simple and the page completely self-contained to enable easier copying.
There is a UBB code version for message boards that use that format. When I get some time I'll make a plain-text one suitable for email and usenet news.
Thank you for your help.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
See the news here.
Disclaimer: If I disagree with you I'm probably trolling...
There is nothing in current or past SEC filings which suggests MS or Sun are supporting SCO.
... and it still doesn't work. You're full of shit. I busted your first post wide open with a direct link to sec.gov. Now I'm gonna bust your second post, too -- same 10-Q, same page.
There's no suggestion in the filings that either of those companies is paying SCO anything on an on-going basis.
"The two licensing agreements signed by us to date resulted in revenue of $8,250,000 during the April 30, 2003 quarter and provide for an aggregate of an additional $5,000,000 to be paid to us over the next three quarters."
Extra credit, since you can't read a 10-Q even after the link is shoved in your face:
"These contracts do not provide for any payments beyond 2003, except that Microsoft was granted the option to acquire expanded licensing rights, at its election, that would result in additional payments to us if exercised."
Still under a DDOS :P
:)
The Slashdotting will continue until the DDOS improves.
The Economist story claims that SCO is pronounces "skoe" - is this true? I've been pronouncing it "ess-see-ohh" ...
Hey... I don't know about you, pal, but I don't want to know anything about SCO's taint...
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Could it be said that this is the worlds first non-automated DDOS attack? :)
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus
Why don't IBM, and anyone else he has sued just make Darl McBride sleep with the fishes? How about a re-enactment of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre on SCO's whole executive and legal staff? Business just isn't done like it was in the 1920s any more.
How ya like dat?
The BBC posted this comment on the SCO issue
Linux community told to 'get real'
It seems to pretty well miss the point(apart from being inaccurate,apprently SCO never had a linux distribution, doh!).
I've sent my comments to the author. I would suggest others do the same
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Speaking of lawyers, now that the SCO execs dumped stock already, the lawyers are the only ones left making money on this miserable situation. For example, SCO's main law firm and especially their Partner-In-Bed (is that an official term?) w/ SCO, Mark Heise in the Miami office.
closed minded is as closed minded does
I can't agree that The Economist captured the issue all that well. I am glad that they were clear that SCO refuses to detail the violations because then Linux would quickly be rewritten around it because Linux people WANT to fix it. However, I found the heavy editorializing, like calling Mr. Perens an evangelist, to be clouding the issue.
I was also disappointed by this:"Roughly as apes and humans allegedly have common ancestors, several operating systems can trace their lineage to UNIX, including Linux."
That is just plain incorrect, isn't it? Linux was written cleanly, it doesn't have any parents, right? More like it sprung whole from Mr. Torvold's head, like Athena out of Zeus, if one has to have an analogy. It is a workalike to Unix, but that is a different thing.
I'm glad the economist at least covered the fact that SCO distributes Linux and in being sued for copyright violation on that account, but I still hope that the mainstream press will get it right, and not resort to generalizations or incorrect simplifications.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Had to dash a note off to the guys on Squawk Box on CNBC, a favorite of mine in the morning. They usually comment on stuff like this. Perhaps they'll give it some air time. They have been seriously anti stock weasel with the Jack Grubman types. Hope I can stir things up a little.
I seriously think this one got by someone there.
sig mind freed
Seems like someone forgot to mention... Not only did Suse take this to court already, but they also shut down SCO's actions in Germany. Guess that missed the article
p24t
> The point isn't to punish Trolltech, it is to put pressure on them
Okay. Let's put it that way. Are you a paying customer of Trolltech? Most Linux users (us!) aren't. If we aren't paying customers, how the HELL do you mean to 'put pressure on them'? I mean, seriously? Even worse -- let's assume we email them relentlessly, etc. Good, now we've annoyed them. What does it change from Canopy's side? Absolutely *nothing*. Trolltech has not lost a cent, and that's the only thing that matters to a holding like Canopy. If Canopy was interested in Trolltech at a controlling level, they'd invest for way more than 5%.
But then, I may perfectly have overlooked something, alright. How do you think the using another toolkit rather than Qt will help us against SCO?
Note that the whole debate is based on the premise that Trolltech could get away from Canopy at a whim if they wanted to, which is quite a big assumption to make, and goes straight against my experience of how investment works over here in the old world (though once again, YMMV, I guess).
Oh, to answer other people: yes, I'm making a special case of Trolltech, because of all the companies listed in the earlier post, they're the only one who have been extremely supportive of Linux and have helped and are still helping us making it progress on the desktop. Once again, not matter how firmly you believe you should shoot yourself in the foot, the primary consequence will STILL be a broken foot.
> That KDE has a better desktop than Gnome is completely irrelevant.
Agreed, and I wouldn't even say that KDE is better than Gnome. Just that I'd MUCH rather see them compete on technical merits.
> I've switched to using IceWM for the time being, and sent
> KDE/Trolltech letters telling them why
I'd be interested in any answer you got, I must say. That case is a very tough one to make without sounding like, well, someone with a somewhat naive outlook on relationships with investors maybe... I know I sure wouldn't have found the arguments to make it sound any more pertinent than, say, "I'm ostracizing you because I once saw Bad Guy smile at you, and I want him down!" *g*
> According to you that makes me a "low-IQ, lying hypocrite"?
> Oh *you* come on.
Agreed. Those were harsh words. I was way pissed, still am to an extent.
However, I still cannot see how that will lead to anything but hurting Linux. I have no idea how your IQ compares with the rest of the world, but I can only urge you to concentrate all of it on the issue for a moment -- and especially those two points: 1) Is Trolltech likely to have any kind of say or influence about what Canopy does with other entirely unrelated companies? In the real world, I mean. 2) Once given that hurting Trolltech will do strictly nothing against SCO, why would people bother attacking them?
It might very well be that people seriously think it is actually possible to get to SCO through Trolltech. But honestly, I think not. Did you notice that the URL linked in the earlier post did NOT suggest to write to Canopy-owned companies about your concerns, for example, but urged to simply replace their products with others? In Trolltech's case, how will replacing a freaking *GPL*ed lib with another even remotely hit Canopy's radar? Does that make any sense to you, frankly?
Don't let your good feeling and honest willingness to help Linux against SCO (which I acknowledge and respect!) blind you. This is not about hurting SCO. Hurting SCO is the pretext.
And it's already working. Just look at your reaction and eniu!uine's.
This is sick.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Noticed the "mail your representatives" page was written in ASP
AHEM
talk about freedom...
It doesn't matter if someone wins or loses in small claims court, it sets no precedent. It's not like higher courts where it sets a precedent that's as good as law.
...Agent Orange, which seems strangely appropriate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's wrong.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I tried that. My machine said "Password:".
I guess that's because Mandrake's installer prompted me for a LILO password when I set the machine up, and I bothered to supply one. "Oh, the security of it all!" (-:
If you want real instant root without password, leave the root password blank when setting up, then tick the box that asks you to confirm that you're criminally negligent, and click on Next. Be sure to set the security level to "Welcome to crackers" (I believe they call it "Low" these days) and select sshd for installation so that this effect can be used remotely.
If you think that's disturbing, I know of an OS which has no such protections: a QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) derivative which was in turn a CP/M clone, called Microsoft Windows. "Instant root, all the time" (and unless you're fully patched, "from everywhere").
Try a tagline that says "This would be a witty tagline but I haven't developed that far yet".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Sorry, are you telling me that there are Seventh-day Mormons?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and D'ohl's money is saying, "Wow, what a dedicated, professional Mormon guy this dude is"? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Another possible approach: send him an invoice for USD$31,000,000 being royalties for his use of your code during August, available otherwise only under the GPL. Terms 7 days.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Get a life, asshole. Shooting babies is funny. Obviously some people are stupid enough to license.
This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.
It isn't about shooting yourself in the foot, it is about not giving your money to people who wish to damage GNU/Linux.
While Trolltech does not fall into that category (I am sure that not many of the Canopy companies do), the fact is that when they profit, Canopy profits. Canopy uses those profits to launch spurious lawsuits against other companies. That is their business model - IP patent warfare and abuse.
Trolltech isn't required to obtain financing via Canopy. They are perfectly capable of obtaining financing through other VC firms or other means completely.
The fact is, would you give money to Canopy directly? Then why would you do so indirectly?
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
We finally got to see what was presumably their best evidence, and it was a steaming turd of donkeyshit.
We have barely seen any facts yet. Is it wishful thinking or what else makes everyone believe they have nothing better to show in court?
While many of their allegations sound bizarre and seem to be wrong, I for one am not convinced they're all baseless. Consider SCO is undisputable spreading FUD. Making themselves appear to be a bunch of morons which need not be taken serious could be another tactic.
> It isn't about shooting yourself in the foot, it is about
:)
/was/ true -- only, now, it's too late. It might have been poor judgment at the time, but they did. And you can *NOT* just give the investors their money back and say "Well, bye". Excuse me for asking this, but do you realize that if companies could walk away from their investors on a whim, then they would ALL do so the moment they turn a profit? :) Investment contracts do NOT allow you to do that, because investors base their business on the assumption that most companies won't make it, BUT a few of them will turn a profit large enough to cover the other companies and more. This is why they CAN'T and DON'T let go companies that begin to turn a large profit.
:)
> not giving your money to people who wish to damage GNU/Linux.
I've understood that already, but thanks for trying to clarify.
My point is that even if you're really trying to aim somewhere else, as long as the bullet goes through your foot, well, you've shot yourself in the foot, and the fact you did it on purpose or not is irrelevant. I *do* know that a broken foot is not your immediate goal, of course.
> Trolltech isn't required to obtain financing via Canopy.
This is true. This
If you want to achieve anything fruitful wrt/ Trolltech and Canopy, then go after *Canopy*, and have them let Trolltech go. I fear that's all we can do about it. Yes, I know, it sucks. No, I don't like it any more than you do, you know. Trolltech is one of the poster childs of successful open source business models. It's a fucking pity to see them involved in all this shit.
> The fact is, would you give money to Canopy directly?
No way. I don't, and I wouldn't.
> Then why would you do so indirectly?
I don't, and I wouldn't, *WHICH IS WHY* I'm using the GPL'ed Qt. How does Canopy make any money from people using the GPL'ed Qt? Frankly? Better yet: do you really thing that if a company like Canopy had any say in this, there would be such as thing as a GPL'ed version of Qt?
Maybe you're worried about things such as 'mindshare' and things like that, which is an arguable point, I guess. Or at least, it would probably be if Qt wasn't where it already is. Did you now that in kernel 2.6 the 'make xconfig' system is now Qt-based?
The Qt cat is out of the proprietary bag for the time being. Neither you nor Canopy can reverse this. Only commercial Trolltech customers can hurt Trolltech financially (and commercial Trolltech customers can't go for GNUstep or GTK, as you suggest, because what commercial Trolltech customers are after is seamless cross-platform portability).
And even so, they'd hurt us Linux users more than Trolltech themselves, and Canopy 20 times less still (5%, remember).
It's over, DashSl0t. I'm sorry. I want to hurt SCO every bit as much as you do, but shooting Trolltech is not the way to go. Trolltech IS one of our feet. Even if it unfortunately stepped in a turd at some point in the past.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I can't remember how many years ago it became standard to use MD5 sums instead
Could it be that they are using an old derelict OS verion on their server...
...like OpenServer or UnixWare? :-)
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
Infinite Number of Monkeys Write UNIX, Sued by SCO
You just revealde the most heavily guarded secret of the Linux kernel hacking team!!!
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
Enuff frickin' SCO and Linux!! Install FreeBSD and be done with it for fsck sakes!
Pooped in nappies Linux geeks...
DEAR SIR/MADAM:
I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.
MY ASSOCIATES HAVE RECENTLY MADE CLAIM TO COMPUTER SOFTWARES WORTH AN ESTIMATED $1 BILLION U.S. DOLLARS. I AM WRITING TO YOU IN CONFIDENCE BECAUSE WE URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE TO OBTAIN THESE FUNDS. IN THE EARLY 1970S THE AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH CORPORATION DEVELOPED AT GREAT EXPENSE THE COMPUTER OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE KNOWN AS UNIX. UNFORTUNATELY THE LAWS OF MY COUNTRY PROHIBITED THEM FROM SELLING THESE SOFTWARES AND SO THEIR VALUABLE SOURCE CODES REMAINED PRIVATELY HELD. UNDER A SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT SOME PROGRAMMERS FROM THE CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF BERKELEY DID ADD MORE CODES TO THIS OPERATING SYSTEM, INCREASING ITS VALUE, BUT NOT IN ANY WAY TO DILUTE OR DISPARAGE OUR FULL AND RIGHTFUL OWNERSHIP OF THESE CODES, DESPITE ANY AGREEMENT BETWEEN AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH AND THE CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF BERKELEY, WHICH AGREEMENT WE DENY AND DISAVOW. IN THE YEAR 1984 A CHANGE OF REGIME IN MY COUNTRY ALLOWED THE AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH CORPORATION TO MAKE PROFITS FROM THESE SOFTWARES. IN THE YEAR 1990 OWNERSHIP OF THESE SOFTWARES WAS TRANSFERRED TO THE CORPORATION UNIX SYSTEM LABORATORIES. IN THE YEAR 1993 THIS CORPORATION WAS SOLD TO THE CORPORATION NOVELL. IN THE YEAR 1994 SOME EMPLOYEES OF NOVELL FORMED THE CORPORATION CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, WHICH BEGAN TO DISTRIBUTE AN UPSTART OPERATING SYSTEM KNOWN AS LINUX. IN THE YEAR 1995 NOVELL SOLD THE UNIX SOFTWARE CODES TO SCO. IN THE YEAR 2001 OCCURRED A SEPARATION OF SCO, AND THE SCO BRAND NAME AND UNIX CODES WERE ACQUIRED BY THE CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, AND IN THE FOLLOWING YEAR THE CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL WAS RENAMED SCO GROUP, OF WHICH I CURRENTLY SERVE AS CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER.
MY ASSOCIATES AND I OF THE SCO GROUP ARE THEREFORE THE FULL AND RIGHTFUL OWNERS OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARES KNOWN AS UNIX. OUR ENGINEERS HAVE DISCOVERED THAT NO FEWER THAN SEVENTY (70) LINES OF OUR VALUABLE AND PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODES HAVE APPEARED IN THE UPSTART OPERATING SYSTEM LINUX. AS YOU CAN PLAINLY SEE, THIS GIVES US A CLAIM ON THE MILLIONS OF LINES OF VALUABLE SOFTWARE CODES WHICH COMPRISE THIS LINUX AND WHICH HAS BEEN SOLD AT GREAT PROFIT TO VERY MANY BUSINESS ENTERPRISES. OUR LEGAL EXPERTS HAVE ADVISED US THAT OUR CONTRIBUTION TO THESE CODES IS WORTH AN ESTIMATED ONE (1) BILLION U.S. DOLLARS.
UNFORTUNATELY WE ARE HAVING DIFFICULTY EXTRACTING OUR FUNDS FROM THESE COMPUTER SOFTWARES. TO THIS EFFECT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE MANDATE BY MY COLLEAGUES TO CONTACT YOU AND ASK FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE. WE ARE PREPARED TO SELL YOU A SHARE IN THIS ENTERPRISE, WHICH WILL SOON BE VERY PROFITABLE, THAT WILL GRANT YOU THE RIGHTS TO USE THESE VALUABLE SOFTWARES IN YOUR BUSINESS ENTERPRISE. UNFORTUNATELY WE ARE NOT ABLE AT THIS TIME TO SET A PRICE ON THESE RIGHTS. THEREFORE IT IS OUR RESPECTFUL SUGGESTION, THAT YOU MAY BE IMMEDIATELY A PARTY TO THIS ENTERPRISE, BEFORE OTHERS ACCEPT THESE LUCRATIVE TERMS, THAT YOU SEND US THE NUMBER OF A BANKING ACCOUNT WHERE WE CAN WITHDRAW FUNDS OF A SUITABLE AMOUNT TO GUARANTEE YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THIS ENTERPRISE. AS AN ALTERNATIVE YOU MAY SEND US THE NUMBER AND EXPIRATION DATE OF YOUR MAJOR CREDIT CARD, OR YOU MAY SEND TO US A SIGNED CHECK FROM YOUR BANKING ACCOUNT PAYABLE TO "SCO GROUP" AND WITH THE AMOUNT LEFT BLANK FOR US TO CONVENIENTLY SUPPLY.
KINDLY TREAT THIS REQUEST AS VERY IMPORTANT AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. I HONESTLY ASSURE YOU THAT THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL AND RISK-FREE.
http://saveie6.com/