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WSIS to Consider Internet Governance Under U.N.
penciling_in writes "The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) starting
next week in Geneva is expected to attract more than 50 heads of state and
6,000 delegates who will address issues from the digital divide to Internet
governance. It will be addressing the broad range of themes concerning the
Information Society and adoption of a Declaration of Principles and Plan of
Action, which reportedly includes a recommendation to place the governance of
the Internet under the United Nations. In response to issues leading up to this event,
CircleID has been running a number of articles including Karl Auerbach's piece, 'Will
ICANN Reveal Its True Self To WSIS?' and an extensive Interview (Part
I | Part II) by Geert
Lovink with Milton Mueller,
author of 'Ruling the Root', one of the first detailed investigations into the
Internet domain name policies." There's a Reuters story on this conference.
k5 is better
Spirit of America has come loose from its mooring
Gone limp -- deflated
Nosedived into a pile of crap
I won't give away anything here that can single me out.
When I started at SCO in the late 90s it was a fun, vibrant place to work. The coffee was free as was lunch most Fridays. It was replete with friendly competition to write the best code we could while finding problems and fixing the code of others. It was sheer joy.
Then, in late 2001, several of the core systems people were told we had to attend a meeting (we later started calling that meeting "Salem Tuesday" after the witch hunts) in which we were told that effective immediately our job functions were to change.
One man, who I'd just seen around the office recently, announced himself as an intellectual property attorney from Washington. He said that Linux, which we all knew about of course, was infringing on SCO's IP. We couldn't ask questions during this meeting, it was strictly a one-way conversation. We were told of how the GPL was bad for business and bad for America (remember that this was just after Sept. 11 and patriotism was still on a high). Free software, we were told, was killing the 150 billion dollar software industry. In effect, by supporting Linux we were cutting our own throats.
None of use believed that, we had some great sales lined up for our server software and support contracts were bringing in loads of cash. The lawyer continued on about how Free wasn't and how we would be unemployed if we continued to give away Linux.
He sat down (interestingly, I never saw this man again), and another lawyer stood up and gave us our plans: from that moment forth we were to dissect the Linux kernel source and compare it with our own internal code. If things looked close we were to try getting our code into the Linux tree through our contacts at IBM and SGI. The funny thing is that much code that did the same stuff was replicated but with out unique comments in there it was obvious that our internal source had to be the initial source for the code.
The rest is history.
Here we are, 10 months after the rocks started flying: IBM didn't bite and buy us out, SGI is fighting back, Sun and MS bought licenses. That wasn't how it was supposed to go I guess. The atmosphere here is thick with paranoia. We're no longer systems coders in a software company, we're inventing evidence in a litigation firm.
Oh, for the record: SCO monitors outgoing connections to sites such as Groklaw and Slashdot. We've had a handful of job terminations for people saying things that may hurt SCO on various forums. A single AC posting on
I'm ssh'd out through another machine I have access too. Keep the fight going. Hopefully the board will turf the pirates that took over and let us get back to what we love: programming.
An Anonymous Coward at SCO.
McDonald's to Consider Fastfood Governance Under Mayor McCheese.
Mexico to Consider Nevada Governance Under France.
George Costanza to Consider Jerkstore Governance Under they're running out of you.
In Soviet Russia U.N. to Consider Internet Governance Under WSIS.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.