Slashdot Mirror
New Survey Finds No Linux 'Chill' From SCO Suit
daddywonka writes "According to this article at internetnews.com, an upcoming survey from the Robert Frances Group shows that 'cost-savings and the General Public License, or GPL, are trumping any concerns about SCO Group's claim of copyright infringement within parts of Linux.' The survey only covers 15 companies. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me. Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
The reason the SCO heat is not affecting Linux deployments all that much is simple - most Linux admins are knowledgeable enough to gather that it's only a matter of time before the entire SCO thing blows over. Armed with this knowledge, they are able to make a convincing argument to management that there is nothing to worry about, and any Linux projects on the table are able to move forward as planned.
I am sure there are exceptions, but my guess is that this is the overall trend.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Which means you dont have a clue about how he feels about the whole thing.
If he would know about the lawsuit, he might think/act differently...
I had the owner of the company i work for ask me about it, but he did so with a chuckle. i think most halfway-intelligent people will understand that without proof and without trial, SCO is just trying to make a buck before they go out of business. I think in (american) football, they call that a hail mary. They have nothing to lose by talking the talk, and walking the walk, and they have everything to gain. Their product is still stuck in the 80's and they have no money to bring it up to date.
money (or lack of) does strange things to people.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Since they have plans to decommission a few hundred servers in the upcoming year it looks like their decision will grow the Linux footprint there.
Now this is an important matter: although the rate of Linux adoption is not slowing down (in fact, it is speeding up), the fact that your company (and presumably others) have gone with business other than Linux means that Linux adoption would have been speeding up even faster.
In terms of the Red Hat law suit, this is demonstrable damage to the Linux Business.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
I think all of a sudden, *BSD won't be dying :)
I kind of guessed it may be something like that. Hey you're employed, you're doing better than many and I figure there are employers who've done far worse things in the world than take what look like big risks, to save the company.
While there are companies that have hired slave labor (BWM, Bayer), and those that continue to employ near-slave labor (Nike), and even those that have killed en masse (Union Carbide, Monsanto), trying to steal the hard work of tens of thousands of people and claim it as your own, then force the creators to buy their own work back at extortionate prices (or any price, for that matter) is still pretty damn low. About as low as one can get without doing actual, direct physical harm to others.
Frankly, anyone willingly working at SCO, recession or no, deserves the low self esteem they undoubtably enjoy and the difficult job prospects their current employment on their Resume post-law-suit will almost certainly bring. This notion that earning a living justifies doing what is unequivocably wrong is complete and utter bullshit. Evil isn't defined by the difficulty of doing good, it is defined by the harm it causes others. The fact that doing the right thing would be difficult for those foolish enough to be working at Caldera/SCO has absolutely no bearing on the fact that what they are doing all those long hours they put in each day is wrong both morally and ethically, nor does it absolve them of one iota of their part in it all.
I'm sick to death of "my employer made me do it" or "I fear unemployment so I have no ethics" crap this formerly great nation seems to have instilled in so many of its drones. It rings a hollow as the famed defenses of the Nuremburg trials, or the death-bed repentences of dying Christians. (cue Godwin-Law pundits)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't think the courts would be particularly impressed with this suggestion. It is somewhat analagous to the idea that if I distribute a dictionary with a remarkable similarity to the Oxford English Dictionary but with a little disclaimer stating that it is up to the copyright owners to notify me within a set timeframe, then I get an implicit right to distribute their work. Ain't gonna happen. Copyright holders get until the copyright expires to protect their work, which is as it should be. (The question of how long the protection should last is a different matter.)
The simple solution if any packages are found to contain unauthorized copied code is just to remove those packages from distributions until they are fixed. One of the great benefits of the "duplication of effort" that goes into GNU/Linux, and which is often criticized on in this forum, is that there is no shortage of packages if alternatives need to be found quickly.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
If anything is found in Linux that doesn't belong there, swarms of Penguin lovers will remove it and replace it with working original code. Darl has already said that's what he's afraid of. Probably weeks, at most a few months.
That's how it's always been.
That's how it always will be.
If even the tiniest shred of improper software is found, Linux will be fixed faster than Microsoft can fight an anti-trust suit.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
...and those of us who have chosen ethically in the past, even to our own financial disadvantage, quite rightly look down on those who do not.
Nice view, from way up there on your high horse, but put yourself in the same situation. The economy is in the shitter. You quitting wouldn't change a damn thing.
"Yeah, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. If I hadn't, someone else would have." I cannot believe that an adult would even field such an answer in public, much less accept its veracity.
It's not like they're committing genocide - it's a fucking law suit.
No one ever suggested it was genocide. However, what so is doing is much more than a lawsuit. Indeed, it is a lawsuit in name only.
Were it merely a lawsuit, it would not entail the vast amount of public FUD, misdirection, deception, and outright lies (including lies that contradict one another) that has come from SCO's management. Indeed, attorney's strongly discourage such statements, as they are destructive to their client's case. The fact that SCO shows no such restraint (and that SCO's lawyers apparently feel no need to reign them in or insist upon such restraint) demonstrates prima facia that this isn't so much a lawsuit as something very, very different.
At its heart it is an attempt to defraud thousands of free software out of their hard work, to defraud third parties by charging licensing fees for things that do not belong to them, and to defraud their investors by pumping up their stock value through deceit and market manipulation.
They may be within the limits of the law in the United States (or they may not). They certainly are not within the limits of the law in Australia, Germany, and numerous other countries.
Either way, they, and those who support them, are unethical, and I for one would never hire an HR person who would knowingly hire unethical people and open my company up to the potential of such behavior within my own ranks. Nor would I hire an HR who would staff my company with weak-minded people who put a paycheck ahead of any ethical considerations, or who cannot recognize a lost cause when they see one.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It's a shame that you need to equate SCO employees trying to feed their families to Nazis, seeing as I don't remember anyone at SCO killing 12 million people in concentration camps, or did I miss a history lesson?
Nope. You missed a logic lesson.
I did not compare SCO employees trying to feed their families with Nazis trying to feed their fmailies. I did compare the justification "I am only doing my job" used by an alleged SCO employee with the justification "I was only following orders" used by famed war criminals in years past.
The crimes being justified couldn't be more radically different from each other, indeed they utterly unrelated. However, the justifications used by both parties are virtually identical. The latter ("I was only folling order", ie. "I was only doing my job") has been formally and resoundingly debunked; the former ("I am only doing my job"), being semantically identical to the latter, is likewise nonesense.
The only similiarity between this troll posing as a SCO employee and war criminals of centuries past is that they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy