Slashdot Mirror
Groklaw Sends A Dear Darl Letter
Ralph Yarro writes "The Inquirer is carrying the text of an open letter sent to Darl McBride from members of the open source community at Groklaw. This is a lengthy and detailed response to the open letter Darl sent a while back."
I have noticed that they have not FILED any copyright infringement actions, despite their numerous allegations that Linux infringes on their copyrighted code and mentions of the rights of copyright holders in their legal pleadings and press releases. No matter how loudly they proclaim infringement of copyright, they aren't willing to use the appropriate federal laws (USC-17) to protect this supposedly infringed upon "IP". I wonder why.
If SCO has copyright material that has been infringed upon, they have to go to the INFRINGER (whoever has access to their code and copied it, meaning the code and not just a work-alike clean-room code, into the kernel) for damages. End users and unwitting publishers of infringing materials are not listed in USC-17 as liable for infringement. You can't get damages from a publisher if one author of a short story collection lied about the authorship, nor can you collect from the bookstores and purchasers.
If they have proof that Red Hat is distributing infringing material, they first have to notify RH what the infringing material is. As the innocently infringing publisher, RH has the chance to double check the material, and either remove it or check its pedigree dispute the infringing nature of it.
The only time a publisher can be nailed for damages is if the plaitiff can prove they knew, or could reasonable have been expected to know, that a work was copyright. This covers sleazy anthology publishers who don't bother to get permissions and pay royalties, and anyone stupid enough to accept a well-known work of fiction from anyone but the real author.
There are not a lot of stories that claim SCO might be right -- other then SCO press releases off of PR Newswire.
/. has linked almost ALL SCO stories, pro or con. It is just there are a lot more con than pro.
SCO has not presented any proof, and only made unsubstantiated claims. Until they substantiate, everything they say is open to question. The few times they *DID* try and present proof, it was demonstrated to be incorrect and they tried to spin their way out of it.
Finally,
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's been floating around for a while, and The Inq has a companion research link where you can verify all the assertions in the Groklaw letter.
If you look at the groklaw site you will get a list of some of the places the press release was sent.. Click Here to and scroll down about 3/4 of the page!
Publicly traded companies automatically get their ticker symbol included in every release they issue. This is required so the releases will index properly on the hundreds of Web sites and databases carrying PR Newswire copy. The use of ticker symbols NOT belonging to the company issuing the news release will only be permitted if the news involving the second company is determined to be "material" by PR Newswire or if the ticker belongs to the issuing organization's parent company or subsidiary. If applicable, please list additional tickers and respective exchanges: For releases that contain ticker symbols that are not materially-related or do not fit the above criteria, the use of the second party's ticker symbol is allowed only with the written permission from that second party. Please attach authorized permission from any such companies.
If you want to get your release onto a company's financials, you need to get it onto Reuters, AP, or Bloomberg.
*sigh* why does this always get modded up?
It was resolved by being disproved. The complaint was based on the mistaken view that the only way to get those structures was from Soren when in fact the author of those headders had gotten the documentation from the manufacturer.
The similarities are easilly explained by the fact that the structures use standard variable names and are in a layout dictated by the hardware.
In short: there was no coppying.
Uh, actually, that person got no karma, but actually Lost karma because some idiot decided to Mod the Great-Grandparent post as a troll, but others have modded as funny, and as we all should know, a funny post gets no Karma, but getting modded down on the same post actually can take karma away.
In other words, if you get modded up to +5 Funny, then 6 Moderators mods you down, then get modded back up to +5 Funny, then 6 more moderators mod you down again, rinse and repeat. You could in theory have Terrible Karma.
How about here?
Note the file called rpm-4.1.tar.gz.
Go to the rpm.org website where, on the front page, there's a link to the ftp site. At the ftp site, you can find all of the current source and binaries in both rpm and .tar.gz formats.
This took me all of 2 minutes to locate.
RPM is just a CPIO archive with a bunch of metadata pasted on the front. All you have to do is strip off that metadata and feed the remainer to any decent implementation of CPIO. This is straightforward, and there's several utilities to do it, including this one written in perl.
Do you remember that the (GPL'd) libreadline
library was released (I think under BSD) by
Tom Cr. a few years ago and also mentioned on
slashdot. And of course, all the BSD idiots
of slashdot applauded the act that a piece of
code was converted to BSD despite the wishes
of the libreadline authors.
(The name of Tom Cr. is intentionaly left
uncompleted. Very many of you already know
his name.)
You should know that this person is taking highly rated comments from the Yahoo finance message board and posting them on slashdot without proper attributions. I wrote the text in the above comment on the Yahoo finance message board as jqtechworker. You can see the original post here. I do not mind that my words have been copied. But fucking christ, at least reference the link and author.
Here is the original post.