Slashdot Mirror
The SCO Trial Through A New Lens
An anonymous reader writes "On Yahoo! News they've got an article by Paul Murphy entitled, SCO, IBM and Outcomes-Based Circular Reasoning. Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'. He writes, 'By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily.' And that, 'Although SCO hasn't formulated its complaint in this way, I believe it could meet these, or similar, requirements quite easily and therefore has every reason to be confident that the court will eventually enforce its stop-use order against IBM.' He also goes on to insult Linux advocates by stating that, 'the position being run up the flagpole by what Stalin famously called "useful idiots" is first that the lawsuit itself is no longer a real issue and secondly that its consequences have been generally positive.'"
uhuhuhuhuh
Words of a bright disciple: "If you have to ask, my young friend, then you will never know."
The author uses some fallacies of his own. He shows how Linux said "you've got X,y,Z, and that is UNIX" and then goes on to say that the Linux community says "Linux is not UNIX". He's keying off two different usages of the term UNIX, which isn't a valid point.
OK, so this guy might have a valid point that SCO does not need to provide a line-by-line code comparison in order to prove their case but, if this is really the situation, how come they have failed so miserably to provide anything substantial in their favor? All of their claims seem so utterly ridiculous that I can't imagine them ever getting anywhere with this in court. The outcomes so far support this view. They seem to get bitch slapped out of court every time they actually bring something in front of a judge. Does anyone know of ANYTHING real that SCO has shown to prove their case? So far it just seems like they're spreading a bunch of BS and trying to scare people into buying licenses from them. Is it possible they still have an ace up their sleave?
Something else I found interesting in the article...
To some, the fact that SCO sees Linux as a Unix clone not only makes holding that view morally wrong but requires the immediate repudiation of nonbelievers and indeed the remarketing of Linux as "not Unix" -- a move that would replace the academic and open-source heritage powering its development with a lie and thus destroy it.
We've all heard this stuff before. Nothing to see here.
"Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'."
Man, Darl's got more personalities than a Sweeps Week episode of "The Love Boat".
Shall we add this guy to the long list of SCO shills?
Admittedly, the word "idiots" may not be totally inapplicable in some of those cases (and "useful" is also debatable) but the benefits were certainly there.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Copyright and Patent law can only be enacted to promote science and the useful arts. And congress should promote science and the useful arts as cheaply as possible. Therefore Congress should be protecting Open Source, not feeding it to the Proprietary dogs. http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/
The crux of the matter is this: IBM does not have to prove previous processes were uncontaminated to win the case -- rather, the burden is on SCO to prove that they were, and they don't appear to have come up with anything substantial. Perhaps this is a wake-up call to open source developers to vet submitted code carefully, but I don't believe the wishful thinking is coming from the Linux camp.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
If the two teams have no contact except through the specifications documents, and neither team is contaminated by knowledge of the original engineering, then the new product is considered just that: a new product and not an illegal copy. It's possible, therefore, to recast SCO's basic claim as saying that IBM was contractually obligated to ensure that this type of "chinese wall" existed between those of its people who had some contact with the protected Unix knowledge or code and those of its people who contributed to the Linux development effort in the run-up to the 2.4 kernel release, but failed to do it. What a stupid argument. You don't need to do a "Chinese Wall" to be legal, you do it in order to prove that what you did was legal. The IBM ROM-BIOS was likely going to have a lot of code in common with the Phoenix bios that Compaq purchased. In other words, if the data is physically identically, then you're going to need some pretty strong proof that what you did didn't involve copying. On the other hand, Linux and SCO didn't contain any identical duplicate code. There were some pieces that were similar, IIRC, but those were lists of variables out of a book and had to do with meeting standards. And secondly, the "Chinese Wall" is all about preventing copyright infringement. This was a contract dispute, not a copyright case, because Linux wasn't a copy of SCO. offensive tshirts
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How on Earth is it even close to being a troll? The piece is an insightful commentary on the case (regardless of whether or not your agree with it - which I don't.) This is what's wrong with slashdot - people moderate down valid but opposing viewpoints.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
The reason Tannenbaum apparently gave Linus a "C" for his kernel hack probably wouldn't have been that the code was bad or derivative, but that he disapproved of sacrificing design elegance for a performance benefit available only on the x86.
Here is what Tannenbaum really said:-I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)
Note the smiley.Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
The lens that the author is using was stolen from my circus!! It was in the house of mirrors!
It was the 'Darl Special'.. you stand in front of it and it changes you to a piece of shit.
I find it hard that you have to negotiate to settle an issue when you are completely in the clear by the terms of the contract.
SCO's interpretation of the contract is so overbroad that it is absurd. The definitions they are using for the terms are completely different from the normal usage of the same terms.
For example, a derivative work incorporates the original work or elements of the original work. But SCO takes the view, with nothing in the contract to support them, that developing your own code to run under their UNIX makes it a derivative work even though it has never contained any element of the original work.
God I really fucked up that formatting.
Accept my appologies.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's getting awfully close to put up or shut up time for SCO.
Where are the millions of lines of infringing code?
Where are the MIT "rocket scientists"?
Those are just two of the reasons my bet is that SCO will finally shut up as it passes into oblivion.
Surely SCO has enough lawyers, and I bet all of them know more about IP law than Paul "Who the fuck am I, again?" Murphy.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
If you read the beginning of the article, it sounds like the author assumes that SCO is in the right, but that has yet to be proven. I thought that's what courts were for.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
And I haven't seen this stressed enough. Not only is there at best a disputed issue over if "new" SCO (aka Caldera) even has the rights to sue over this due to the wording of the Novell agreement selling "old" SCO the right to license the code (note the code itself was not SOLD in the first place by Novell), there isn't anything showing exactly what "old" SCO actually sold to "new" SCO, as apparently that paperwork was lost. To claim what "new" SCO claims, they have to have a clear authority over the code they are claiming, and they don't. The ONLY way the license issues will ever be resolved is if a) "new" SCO goes out of business, b) Novell reverts to being the owner based on their agreements, and c) Novell open sources the code under a dual GPL/BSD license, so that any contamination that MAY have occured is no longer in dispute by any party, and everybody can live happily ever after. The end.
Anyway, he ain't smokin' the same Unix I knew...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Would you hire this consultant? it is better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So if the people looking at the positive side for Linux are Stalin's useful idiots. Then in his story, it seem he has poisitioned himself as Stalin?
... and I use Linux. Maybe I am a useful idiot, but that's better than a useless smarty. :)
I can't say I agree with him. This is a bit more complicated on the contract side of things. I think that this is more a projection of how he would like things to be.
I know more than a few Unix admins from the 80's that wish for the old days. Most like the comfort of a large company to provide software. Software like food is better when someone makes it quotely in different room behind closed doors.
I follow Growklaw(www.growlaw.com) and get the facts
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
I just always wanted to say that. ;)
I RTFA maybe too quickly, but one point. It is in dispute if SCO even has IP rights to Unix code. I didn't see any mention of Novell's case against SCO. So his is drawing his own conculusions?
I modded him up :)
Even assuming that SCO actually owned the copyrights to Unix (which they don't), that the "similar code" wasn't already in the public domain (which it probably was), and IBM used this kind of methodology to create their own code (which they probably didn't), SCO has no case. There is no concept in Copyright that allows holders to make broad claims over concepts and ideas. That's what Patents are for. The so-called "ladder" theory is barely a crude legal supposition on SCO's part - a plea for the worst sort of Republican judicial activism in the Utah courts.
Here is the way established law actually works. I can buy a copyrighted book, change every sentence and chapter in it until there is nothing left of the original work, and then release it as my own. By that point, it is my own. You cannot copyright people's inspiration. It is silly to try.
Ouch.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Software reverse engineering requires two teams
Says you. I can see how an entity might be on firmer legal ground if they adopt the procedure you've outlined. However, to say that legal reverse engineering "requires" two teams is a total fabrication.
What a troll article.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I mean really this is a bad opinion piece by someone that has no legal training about a law suite. If you print any story about SCO will it end up on Slashdot? Great way to drive up your ad income.
Next week at Playboy on line. The women of SCO.
The suite has been setup by SCO as Linux is evil and belongs to us and we will sue all the users that do no pay us.
There are no Linux advocates involved with the court case it is Freaking IBM that is involved.
Here is what happened.
Someone convinced SCO that Linux could only have gotten so good by stealing SCO's code. SCO was going down fast and grabbed that straw with the hopes that IBM would just buy them to shut them up.
IBM knew that SCO did not have a case so it decided to make an example of them.
SCO trying to get more people to pony up attacked any deep pockets that it could. Autozone and other show the court that SCO had nothing so that backfired.
Frankly at this point I really want to believe that McBride really did believe that IBM had stolen the code. I would like to think that he has just backed himself into a corner and can not see anyway out. The only other answer is he is delusional.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It is more commonly attributed to Lenin, but it seems that he didn't really say it either:
"Lenin, it is said, once described left-liberals and social democrats as 'useful idiots,' and for years anti-communists have used the phrase to describe Soviet sympathizers in the West, sometimes suggesting that Lenin himself talked about 'useful idiots in the West.' But the expression does not appear in Lenin's writing. We get queries on 'useful idiots of the West' all the time, declared Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, in the spring of 1987. We have not been able to identify this phrase among his published works."
The source of this passage is a work entitled "They Never Said It: a Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions", authored by Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, published by Oxford University Press in 1989. The text goes on to explain that the phrase apparently first appeared in a John Birch Society pamphlet labeling President Ronald Reagan a "useful idiot" because of some agreement he had negotiated with the Soviet Union.
btw, most of Lenin's writings are available for searching at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/
specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues
...another "specialist" in "management issues" professing his expertise....
Just what the world needs
The United States of America says that a being is innocent until proven guilty; this right definitely extends to corporations. If SCO cannot prove that IBM is guilty of violating copyright (which I believe is true), then IBM wins the suit.
By the same logic he uses, I can accuse him of performing while he was drunk and say that his defense of 'You can't prove it!' is fallacious.
Quoth the article:
"According to SCO, it is the legal successor to AT&T..."
That is a fact in dispute. It seems the rest of the article is founded on this premise.
If SCO does not "own" Unix, then the arguments in the article fall flat.
Cracked lens more like. Seriously, who's paying this guy to write this? He's just rehashing old fud giving it a new twist.
Not really a bad analysis, and the most interesting point is "what if you copy something, then replace all its components?"
Still though, if that were true (that there was significant "contamination") why can't SCO prove it publicly?
I think the main ridicule of SCO is that they have not shown proof of something that should be pretty easy to prove.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
It's not "circular" reasoning. I could have told you that SCO losing would make the whole thing positive for Linux. But, I was too busy being enraged at the fact that, with the US legal system, it was possible (still is possible) for companies like SCO to win.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I remember SGI did its own comparison of SystemV and Linux source code, and found only trivial similarities.
Does anyone know of a similar comparison by IBM comparing AIX and Linux?
If they haven't done one, perhaps it's time for one. While they couldn't publish examples of the code, but they could do a similar comparison and post the results only.
It was Lenin who said that and he actually didn't say it. It was invented by the John Birch Society to describe Ronald Regan.
Source
There is much more evidence that Lenin referred to them instead as "Deaf Mutes" which is much less of a marketable term for the anti-communists to use in describing how communists view their dupes.
Article that Makes Reference to the Deaf Mutes Quote. This quote was also referenced by Theodore Radzinsky in his Stalin Biography as being authentic.
"The so-called cultural element of Western Eurpoe and America are incapable of comprehening the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes and treated accordingly....
(The Lufkin News, King Featurers Syndicate, Inc., 31 July 1962, p. 4, as quoted by the Freeman Report, 30 Sept. 1973, p. 8).
If IBM had contributed UNIX system V functionality to Linux, the comparison to the IBM/Compaq court case might be valid. However, IBM didn't do that. It contributed stuff that originated in OS/2 that they later put into AIX. Regardless of whether they build a "Chinese" wall in the development process, they had the right to do that. That is, unless you buy into SCO's peculiar derivative work theory.
He's getting destroyed by readers on his very own forum.. Also, from his website, are a bunch of his other writings on the SCO case.
Me, I've read the correspondence filed with the Court on the subject. IBM asked what they were supposed to have done wrong so that they could remedy the problem, SCOX told them they'd see them in court.
Yeah, that's bad faith on IBM's part all right. Here we are more than two years later and IBM is still trying to get the Court to make SCOX tell them what IBM is supposed to have done wrong, so far with no luck.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This guy is making a totally specious argument, by comparing the Compaq vs. IBM case to the Linux case. I stopped reading after that, because it was quite stupid. In another mal-formed post below I elucidated this, but here's a summary: Compaq V. IBM was about copyright infringement. Any re-implementation of the BIOS was likely to have identical code, since we're talking about optimized assembly. Compaq had their "Chinese wall" in place to be able to prove that they didn't copy anything. There was no contract dispute, either.
On the other hand, all you need to do to prove that Linux is not a copy of SCO is compare the source. They're different. Linux does not infringe SCO's copyright, and it never did.
He also confuses Trademarks and Copyrights. He says "Linux is Unix" because it does what Unix does. But when people say "Linux isn't Unix" they're talking about trademarks.
Imagine if Coca-Cola sued pepsi for violating their trade secrets or something. You wouldn't say "Pepsi is Coca-cola because it tastes kind of like Coca-cola.". No, Pepsi is a Cola (that's the name of the flavor of Coca-cola, pepsi, RC-cola and so on). You can't make the argument that Pepsi tastes like coke, and because you want to call it Coca-cola, then Pepsi is violating Coke's trademarks. That would be retarded. This isn't a "new" perspective, it's just some retards musings.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
He states an argument then defeats it, then states it again, then concludes with nothing.
Very informative !
1. I think it censors it to read as nuts, when it's probably should be "shit"
2. To the mods, no, I don't feel that way about Linux, I just put what some troll put on another board. Personally, I think Linux is great.
3. I encourage all Linux lovers to go over and dispute this "as long as it's not a GNAA or
SCOX is sueing IBM for violating their copyright.
Novell have a contract with SCOX saying they never bought that copyright, and that even if they did, Novell can prohibit them from sueing people.
Novell told SCOX to quit, SCOX didn't.
Looks pretty clear-cut to me.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
and one hell of a chess player...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
This could be of interest to PJ at Groklaw.
Re: SCO V. IBM -Thursday April 28/05
Author: Robert Weiler (204.247.40.---)
Date: 04-29-05 16:45
Dear Paul,
I have over 25 years in the software business, most of it on Unix systems and I have worked for two SVR4 licensees. It was very clear at both of these companies that code that we created belonged to us and that AT&T did not control it in any way. The only copright notices that we placed in our code was our own, not AT&T's. This is explicit in IBM's agreement, and it was made explicit in the $echo newsletter. The notion that SCO controls the subsequent work product of everybody that has ever seen Unix source is complete nonsense and would in fact be illegal restraint of trade in most states. Your notion seems to be even more expansive than SCO's; as I read your argument, any code that ever ran on AIX and was subsequently ported to Linux would belong to AT&T. This idea is so silly it doesn't even merit a response, so I'm asuming that I've misinterpreted what you wrote.
SCO's notion of what constitutes a derivative work is not only completely at odds with the SOFT aggreements, it is at odds with copyright law. If the only thing that SCO has is a few suggestive emails and the 'mental tainiting' argument that you espouse, then IBM will win on summary judgement as a matter of law. And according to Judge Kimall, that is apparently all they have.
Finally I should note that even if SCO were to prevail on their contract dispute with IBM, it means absolutely nothing to Linux. At worse, the offending code is removed, any liability is IBM's.
I would greatly appreciate it if you would inform yourself on the issues of this case and write a followup article. Every CIO should be evaluating a migration from Windows and proprietary Unix to Linux as the cost savings are dramatic. It would be very, very unfortunate if any CIO delayed a transition to Linux based on misinformation about SCO's legal propects which are virtually nonexistant.
This guy is way out there
Here is how to read the article without sending them any additional money in the process:
Print Version
As the Simpsons so nicely put it:
Hutz: Mr. Burns, we've got witnesses, precedent and a paper trail a mile long.
Burns: Yes. But I have ten high-priced lawyers.
Hutz: Ya, ya, yaaa!!! [runs out of office]
Homer: He left his briefcase. Hey, it's full of shredded newspaper.
exactly, someone who has been blackballed in the industry as ineffective and worthless is trying to get noticed s ohe will get hired by publishing a wild ass story that will get attention.
Nice to see that scumbags that are worthless can still astroturf with the best of them.
he knows NOTHING about linux and I bet NOTHING about unix.
SCO issued a stop-use order with the 100-day hiatus required under the contract, but IBM neither changed its behavior nor embarked on good-faith negotiations to settle the issue.
And what really happend:
SCO issued a stop-use order with the 100-day hiatus, but failed to include in that order an explanation of what IBM did wrong, or how they could correct it as required under the contract, and so therefore IBM neither changed its behavior nor embarked on good-faith negotiations to settle the issue, because SCO never gave them that option.
He also goes on to insult Linux advocates by stating that, 'the position being run up the flagpole by what Stalin famously called "useful idiots" is first that the lawsuit itself is no longer a real issue and secondly that its consequences have been generally positive.'"
Who is this guy, Joe McCarthy?...
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
CIO Today is full of his idiotic preception.
He has one story on how Free open source software is... and he just does not get the concept.
So, among other things, it was harder for Phoenix to explain away any similarities in source code than if the only available BIOS code was binary.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Well it seems that his basic premise for his arguments are that Linux could not be a World Class OS W/O all the code from his precious Unix That he is a 20 IT Veteran using. By his definition Macintosh should sue Microsoft for the "idea" of Windows. That Novell should Sue Microsoft for the "idea" of a word Processor. He makes large generalizations that a concept is copy write. So Mercedes should sue every car company for the concept of a horseless carriage? Please this "20 year veteran in IT" needs to unplug from his Unix Box and except change. He cannot re-write the understanding of copy write because he doesn't want to change. His whole point is that Linux can be a good "school" OS but can not be re-sold for commercial purpose. BS BS.
The parent post captures precisely the difference between copyright and patent. SCO is not making a patent claim but a copyright claim. This is the same sort of claim that IBM lost with their PC back in 1982 when Phoenix reverse-engineered the BIOS and sold it to Compaq to allow them to sell an IBM clone. IBM did not hold a patent over the ideas in the BIOS but a copyright and Phoenix developed an alternative BIOS (a variation of which is still used today) that did the same thing but didn't use any IBM code. The courts agreed that the Phoenix BIOS did not infringe on the IBM BIOS copyright and the rest is history. IBM gave a copy of their BIOS source code to every IBM PC buyer in the 'technical reference manual' (I still have mine) so Phoenix needed to establish that they didn't copy any portion of the IBM code which was why they did the locked-in-the-windowless-room thing with their development team but that isn't strictly required for IBM since there is a major difference between Linux with its millions of lines of code and the IBM BIOS with its hundreds of lines of code. If SCO wants to win their copyright case, they need to show that IBM copied their code, nothing more, nothing less.
The stance of the community is that you don't need a clean room to "reverse engineer" unix. So much of the basics of Unix were already placed in the Public Domain before Linux existed, that this can NOT be considered copyright infringment.
Is Linux Unix? - I have this discussion at work all the time. In the huge company where I work, Solaris is called UNIX, and linux is called linux. This causes all sorts of problems in the reviews of documentation I right for software that runs on Solaris and Linux. I now have a boilerplate paragraph I insert into documentation explaining that neither Linux or Solaris are UNIX. UNIX is a trademark currently owned by SCO. There are many Operating Systems similar to UNIX, they go by their own trademarked names of Solaris, AIX, OS X, Linux, etc.
Think Deeply.
I'm not calling Mr. Graham a troll or shill. Just wrong. Consistently wrong on this issue.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
is a more appropriate title to the tripe the FA has in it.
The man makes wild assumptions based on loose guesses he himself made, where-as 20 minutes with google would have produced facts to write an article that would have had some merit. Most of what he rants on about are flat-out wrong. He knows nothing about linux and I strongly suspect his claims about Unix experience.
I am very interested in how supposedly linux supporters are suddenly claiming that Linux is not unix as he mentions in the article? From what I remember this has been the norm cince 1994 when I started dabbling in it and I bet that if someone looked they would find even earlier evidence of that fact.
that article tarnishes not only the writers reputation but the publication that carried it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you think Groklaw is a stupid name, you must not care much for Heinlein. And if you think PJ ever sold insurance, you haven't been following the story at all. It was precisely that sort of FUD that caused PJ to resign her job rather than have people pick up that misconception.
Rumour had it that he started as an entry level sysadmin and wrecked so much stuff they made him a manager. This is the Peter Principle at work boys and girls... Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.
The Peter Principle is where you get promoted because you're good at what you do until you become incompetent at your new position and stagnate.
The Dilbert Principle is probably what you mean. You're a total dumbass, therefore you get promoted to management.
well, the cute women that is ...
and all I can say is that just because a lawyer or someone presenting a legal case or opinion thereof says that "Such and Such is the Case" doesn't mean it actually is.
They tend to present forceful arguments, or words that you think are something but aren't, to intimidate you. Then you poke holes in the arguments and all the air goes out.
This argument sounds like it's a lot of hot air in very puffed up balloons. It doesn't matter how many balloons there are, or how much hot air, it's still a lot of hot air in balloons, and a decent lawyer should poke all of the balloons or enough as to make it obvious that that's all they are.
Heck, I could claim I'm Emperor of the World. I could show you documents I made up attesting to that, links to websites I put up pretending to be official sources - but I still wouldn't be Emperor of the World.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The last thing that MS wants is a standardised programming base for doing things. For instance the use of code to distribute processes over multiple processors is not patented, or who ever holds that patented would have already sued Microsoft and/or IBM.
What we are down to is the court having to decide differences between coded methods. The same as if someone coded a spreadsheet that did the same functions as Excel then Microsoft sued the programmers.
I am supprised that MS has not gone directly after Gnumeric for some of the interface cloning that the coders have achieved. Thank God the people who invented the spreadsheet had the foresight not to patent it!
Lets face it Unix is dead and it is a legacy system. Microsoft, Linux, IBM and most other software institutions and corporations owe their existence to Bell labs and the coders like Richie that came up with the code base in the first place.
The article is out to lunch and obviously biased toward keeping the advancement of computing locked up in Redmond. The Sco law suit is a side show.
It's a moment of meta instantiation!
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
I need to rememeememember my password so I can log in again.
Only other answer? It could be that he is
Think Deeply.
Yahoo News is dispaying it as a current item.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
n/m
From reading some of the columns on his website, http://winface.com/, he certainly seems very intellegent, not just some SCO goon. BUT he does seem to have an axe to grind against this lawsuit. Check out some of his regular linuxinsider columns. http://winface.com/insider.html/
He wrote an published his own book ("available only in PDF"). Tell me he didn't steal his cover layout from O'Reilly: The Unix Guide to Defenestration. Oh and by the way, I in no way encourage anyone to actually purchase it for any purpose other than defenestrating the book.
Looks like the article was published yesterday.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
intellectual property... property rights. isn't about being capitalist, it's about being able to own something.
If you can't give something away freely without being labeled a communist, then you don't really own it in the first place.
As far as I can tell this is about a corporate entity all the sudden deciding to take intelligent control (put to the profit motive) something which has been seized by mindless barbarians (given away freely)
IBM DID copy thousands of lines into linux. Look!
{
}
There are THOUSANDS of these in the Linux code!
In Darl's infamous open letter, he clearly defines the combatants:
Despite the raw emotions, however, the issue is clear: do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support "free" - as in free from ownership - intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others? There really is no middle ground. The future of the global economy hangs in the balance.
This is not a disinterested "I'm just thinking about my shareholders" approach. After bringing in discussion about competing interpretations of the Constitution, Darl ends the monologue with this:
We take these actions secure in the knowledge that our system of copyright laws is built on the foundation of the U.S. Constitution and that our rights will be protected under law. We do so knowing that those who believe "software should be free" cannot prevail against the U.S. Congress and voices of seven U.S. Supreme Court justices who believe that "the motive of profit is the engine that ensures the progress of science."
The stated intent of SCO is to eliminate free software, because SCO views the mere existence of free software as incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. To me that's about as extreme a position as you can take, given that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that creators are not free to give away their works as they see fit.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)
Tannenbaum was merely ahead of his time. We're already almost in an age where the operating system overhead is pretty minimal, and the latest advances in microkernels put message passing almost on a par with direct context switching anyway.
What this means is that, at some point in the not too distant future, the monolithic kernel will be seen as a really bad idea on all counts, and with no performance benefit at all. And we all know that loading graphic binary drivers into our kernel images is compromising our uptimes, so the realities of "a bad idea" are with us already.
It was just his 1991 time frame that didn't match up to reality all that well. The substance was good.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Since MOG, Didiot, and Pretenderle have shot their collective bolt; it sounds like SCO and MS need a new shill.
that it's not butter.
Arbitrary sig
The author ignores a number of inconvenient facts.
First, and foremost, SCO's bluster about Linux and copyright infringement predates their lawsuit against IBM. Whether or not IBM violated its contract with SCO is not the community's beef with SCO; the community is up in arms because SCO had the gall to suggest that Linux was a big ripoff of SCO's proprietary unix code and began to do things like sell linux licenses, as if it had some right to collect that money. So this is not merely a "simple contract dispute".
Moreover, he is skewing the origin of Linux. Regardless of the author's qualifications, the two people most able to state whether or not Linux was or was not dervied from Minix or contained Minix code would certainly be Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum said, "I told [Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution] that MINIX had clearly had a huge influence on Linux in many ways, from the layout of the file system to the names in the source tree, but I didn't think Linus had used any of my code." Eric Raymond may have been citing this to make a point, but when Linus and Andrew both are clear on the point that Linux did not use Minix code, then I believe take their assertions on that point.
The assertions about due diligence are equally off-base, as the Open Source Risk Management company is offering insurance against claims of copyright infringement. It is basically absurd to suggest they could get millions and millions of dollars of insurance underwritten without due diligence against the product they were insuring - which, in this case, is the code that comprises Linux.
Finally, the author completely ignores how unclean SCO is with its own source management. They distributed a version of Linux for quite some time, and continued to distribute it even after they had made public claims. If they had discovered claims but continued to distribute the code, one could quite easily argue (and surely IBM will) that they have themselves have placed whatever code is in question under the GPL.
This only touches on the number of issues he manages to gloss over in a few brief pages. By no means do I think that David Boies would have been involved on contingency unless he felt he had some chance of winning, but the fact is, SCO is bleeding money like tomorrow's bacon, and it is hard to imagine how anyone would care to purchase a real product from SCO in the future, given their propensity to do things like, say, sue their customers.
Certainly, at this point, Canopy can only be hoping that the payoff from the lawsuit against IBM and other actions will be sufficient to justify flushing the company. But even *if* SCO managed to prove IBM contributed tainted code, there's a mountain of counterclaims to deal with and SCO has to try to establish damages, and it's hard to see how SCO can justify damages that are a significant multiple of its own market capitalization at the time the offense occurred. It would be like Harold Welte suing Asus for $2B or such. It may sound like a nice round number, and SCO can say that it wants "infinity times infinity" for damages, but that doesn't give it a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing such damages.
Got Graham on my mind for some reason.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues"
Since he has an opinion that is not shared by the Slashdot poster, his qualifications must be qualified by the word "claims". If he were anti-SCO his qualifications would be accepted automatically.
I will first state that I go read Groklaw, but I read more than just the posts. I have read a large percentage of the filings.
I feel the writer ignores or is incorrect on these points:
1: Novell (who at the time believed they had the final say on matters of this nature (via the contracts drawn up from the sale of unix to SCO)) specifically told SCO to back off and allow/ignore whatever transgressions theoretically occurred. SCO ignored Novell and this caused the legal battle to grow.
2: The writer mentions that SCO needs to find any patches that were rejected as a result of an AIX centric development mindset. The writer ignores the fact that someone working at IBM may have been an application programmer writing software for AIX and not a kernel hacker. Additionally, I do not believe that the writer takes into account the fact that someone may have worked on AIX years ago and now works on Linux. It isn't believable that someone who once worked on AIX in the past would be forever limited/tainted on all future development projects until the day they died.
3: The writer initially tries to show SCO to be somewhat of a victim and yet admits that after the Boies law firm took over the case expanded and the legal battle heated up. He also mentions the code that he believes does exist in Linux. Darl McBride also mentioned that code 2 years ago, but to this date, no actual code has been released in court documents that support that remark. Darl initially said that there were thousands (or tens of thousands) of lines that were copied and could be traced to Unix. Amazingly, SCO has asked (and received) AIX source code from IBM. If SCO had identified that source 2 years ago and in the legal battle wants more source, why would the writer make the statement that he believes it is there. He should have expanded his reasoning for that remark. SCO said they already identified it. We (as a community) would like to know:
"Where is it?".
4: The writer talks uses the terms "mislead the public", "focus attention on irrelevancies", and "Anti-SCO hysteria". Admittedly, many Linux users are passionate about the operating system and have said some wildly inaccurate things about SCO (and Microsoft), but there have also been a lot of intelligent and thoughtful discussions about the case. Strangely enough, the writer does NOT talk about the wildly inaccurate and misleading statements from SCO and their legal team over the past 2 years.
Neither side in this case is perfect, but I am surprised that this article has such a one sided feel when there is so much information available (from sites like Groklaw and SCO's own legal filings page) that give a much clearer view of things over the article itself.
that New Lens seems to be smeared with Vaseline.
My keyboads not woking popely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Legend is the supposedly in development update of OpenServer. You can check it the feature list here:
http://www.unidos.com/legend.html
Remove all of the Open Source from one of these machines and you remove a big whack of the new features they are touting. Since Open Source is so eeeeevvvvvvviiilll, I suppose they'll be purging it out of their red-blooded capitalist operating system. They only need to write a cifs implementation, a desktop, a web server, a graphical mail client, a web browser, a desktop environment, a java application stack, a database, and several script interpreters. It shouldn't take their army of developers (snort!) more than a month or two to re-implement all of that.
You say that it is useless. Yet, SCO claims that PJ is changing the outcome of the trial and is now after her. In fact, the Norda family of Caldera/SCOX fame appears to have more respect and trust for her, that they wrote about their sisters death there rather than some local rag.
Paul seems to be lacking on much of his logic and knowledge, so it is only appropiate that this is a miss as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First among these is something that I think of as the myth of immaculate conception, according to which Linux sprang forth, fully formed, from nothing at all.
What does Mary's birth have to do with something springing from nothing? I'm amazed at how many people think the Immaculate Conception has to do with Jesus's birth. Of course, since no one claims Linux sprang forth from nothing, it's a bad analogy to begin with. A much better analogy would be what to say it's wrong to claim that Linux was born without the original sin of contamination from Unix coders. It wouldn't make SCO's claim any more true, but at least it's a logical analogy.
I think the confusion is that Mr. Murphy, being out of ideas, meritable or not, re-hashed his sys-con.com 2003 article for publication at CIO Today today. Is it possible to plagarize onself? Regardless, he should only get 1/5 of the money he was paid since he merely removed reference to the June 13, 2003 ultimatum date. There's no change in his thinking.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The entire article looks suspiciously like what the public relations firms call a "press hit", meaning that the public relations firm feed factual background information to one of their reporter contacts, which may not be entirely false but almost certainly represents a selected truth (e.g., figures don't lie, but liars sure do figure), who then cuts and pastes the "facts" into an article. The end result is that one news bureau after another reprints the "facts" until the real source of the information in the article, (.i.e., the public relations firm), becomes entirely obscured. The vast majority of the public has no idea that the majority of the articles that they read today, especially trade-magazine articles and technology pieces where reporters have to rely more on outside experts, are "press hits" prepared by public relations firms for their clients. If I were SCO then I would certainly be engaging the services of a PR firm in light of the acrimonious nature of the ongoing litigation. A good PR firm can charge upwards of $20,000 per month for their services, but the really good ones get results and marketers, advertisers, and lawyers everywhere know that.
You're a total dumbass, therefore you get promoted to management. Go easy on him. He was almost right!
...how dare he take a point of view that doesn't align with [our/mine/slashdot/open source] ideas... Sooooooo predictable and so boring, people.
But here is what it actually comes down to: what SCO has done, and is doing -- indeed the only thing they *can* do...
SCO has proved through this absurd circus-show that they are motivated by profit margins, political assassination of FOSS, and spreading FUD about the whole Linux development community.
And what is this whole talk about when Linux "... became a new kernel by March of 1991 and a whole new Unix clone when file system processing was internalized in June." That is the pivot point that makes Linux a "UNIX clone?"
Linux is anything but a "UNIX clone." We could point to a lot of things that linux is *kind of like*. Linux is kind of like BSD, or Minix, or even some parts are like UNIX -- but it is anything but a "UNIX clone" -- linux is a GNU clone, hence whole NotUnix thing (get the acronym?).
The overall article speaks of somebody who has a command over *NIX rhetoric, but very little command over what makes a *NIX and how they work. He shows a little knowledge of AT&T UNIX history, but very little knowledge of a *NIX varient in terms of technology and development.
It is ironic that Paul Murphy references the 1982 IBM legal case. The conclusion that he positing -- potential SCO victory over IBM -- would be the tipping point that would thrust us away from FOSS progress and back into the land of proprietary obfuscation -- the exact opposite from what IBM's defeat in 1982 meant to the tech world. Instead of gaining freedom from proprietary operating systems we would be gaining again the time when one (or at least very few) companies could hold total control over where and what computers do and making us pay for it at the same time. No offense Mr. Murphy, but after being a "20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry..." you would think you would have gained one thing: a clue.
Since no one has seen fit to respond to this so far, let me point out emphatically that this post is making an an outrageous and completely unsubstantiated accusation, and it is a lousy, indecent thing to be doing to Paul Murphy. You may or may not like what he says about SCO, but he most certainly does not deserve an anonymous accusation of attempted rape.
I frankly would like to meet the person who wrote this post, so that I could give him solid kick in the ass. I'm not using a figure of speech here. Far from acknowledging any "obvious reasons", Mr. Anonymous Accuser, I say that you are loathsome coward, and you damn well better come back with something more substantial, or shut your filthy mouth.
As for you moderators who modded the post up to 5 Interesting, I submit that you are among the stupidest morons ever to visit Slashdot. If anything deserves a -1 Troll, this is it.
As for the question of whether or not the accusation is true, in the absence of any verifiable evidence there is no reason at all to consider such a possibility. To make any such assumption about Paul Murphy on the basis of an anonymous accusation is so unfair as to be utterly indecent.
I never thought I would attack someone for an anonymous post, because I'm often irritated by all of the pithy sigs about how anonymous posters cannot be believed. In almost all cases, that's a logical fallacy, because the merit of post in a discussion group lies solely in the strength of the evidence and arguments it presents, which usually has nothing at all to do with the identity of the poster. The only situation in which the anonymity of the poster detracts from his credibility is when his identity is one of the issues addressed in his post.
But this is precisely that kind of situation. Someone here is saying that he knows Paul Murphy personally and is accusing him of a crime, but the accuser won't tell us who he is and how he supposedly knows these things. That kind of crap deserves no credibility until the poster comes back and tells us why we should believe anything he says.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
The article gives SCO too much credit.
IBM claims the following:
1. SCO is not the successor in interest of AT&T.
2. IBM did not contribute copyrighted AT&T code to Linux.
3. IBM did not contribute AT&T 'derived' code to Linux, whatever derived means.
4. Had IBM contributed derived code to linux, it would be legal.
5. Had IBM contributed AT&T's code to Linux, it would be legal.
So far, SCO has not succesfully beaten any of those claims. In fact, SCO has had a great deal of difficulty producing any evidence whatsoever regarding these claims. IBM only had to win one of those claims in order to get the case dismissed.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I would guess that the annoying reality of binary graphics drivers taking down the kernel are going to drive them being put into a separate I/O space before long, and from there it's only a small step to put every single driver into its own kernel-mode process.
That wouldn't be a full microkernel design by any means, but it would overcome the main practical objection to the current monolithic one. People don't like their machines crashing, but binary drivers show no sign of going away, so the forces are pushing in that direction.
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'.
and translated it
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry', so it's been 20 years since he's done anything but produce fluffy white papers for non-technical management.
Terrible ad hominem attack and malicious slander/libel in that "anonymous" post. I wish Mr. Murphy would get the IP of the moron who wrote the crapflood-style garbage and sue them for all their hind quarters.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Sure, he used some ideas from Minix (and *nix in general), but I don't see how he could have used actual code. Or am I missing some way that he would have had access to the code?
But, margarine is not butter
Hm...a slogan for a new distro? "I can't believe it's not Unix!"
"Paul Murphy" is an odd sort. His real name--or so he says in email--is "Rudy de Haas". Dunno why the pseudonym; but in fairness to him, I must confess that my birth certificate also didn't list me as "Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters."
In any case, as near as I can tell, Paul Murphy is a sock puppet for Sun Microsystems. He chimed in a couple times on the voter verifiable voting issues that I am active in; while he kinda-sorta advocated sensible positions, the punch line was always, "Buy Sun systems"... even though that conclusion was pretty well unrelated to anything else in the article. Likewise, when I followed his writing on other things, it always had the same non-sequitor promoting Sun.
So I guess this is some general subterranean effort to promote his home team over Linux and IBM. Sun ain't SCO, but they're a bit close to the Mormon hordes.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Point stands that if Mr. Murphy feels that he has such an elevated view on the matter maybe he should provide legal advice to SCO.
At this point anything might help them from themselves.
Indeed. Perhas the author can point us to the original "pre-hack" code for Emacs, LaTeX or LyX ?
Where, oh where, does defeatClinton2008.com ask for money? It doesn't. I should know. It's my site.
Maybe this guy is her replacement. The shill-du-jour.
Wait - first of all, who's that Paul Murphy guy? Slashdot is about stuff that matters, and I don't think this whatever Murphy's words matter that much. I myself never heard of his name before.
To sum it in all one words - it is all about credential.
No, he is SCO's consultant.
If you had dealt with SCO (I mean Caldera, actually), they don't really know what they are doing / supporting.
Clean room implenetations are only needed when the object being covered is covered by some for of trade secret.
SCO has declared that there are no trade secret issues with regards to this case. Therefore the claims that IBM needed a chinese wall are absolutly false.
This writer has obviously just picked up this case or was given the notes to it directly from SCOx. This idea of the need for a chinese wall/clean room is SOOO 2003.
n/t
you had me at #!
see AST's home page
you had me at #!
useful idiot.
Did he get paid for being that in print?
If he did visit GrokLaw he's done a good job of concealing it and his culpability is even worse.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
> I never thought I would attack someone for an anonymous post
Well, if slashdotters had responded properly and marked this -1 Troll, you probably wouldn't have. You might not even have seen it.
You're not going to see an end to that sort of particularly nasty trolling, but slashdotters certainly shouldn't promote it as if it's even possibly valid just because they're annoyed with the subject of the troll.
I'm glad you got modded up, but why didn't he get modded down?
He makes several mistakes: First, it was Lenin, not Stalin, who coined the phrase "useful idiots," IIRC.
Second, the lawsuit is a real issue because it is a perfect demonstration of what happens when unnecessary companies, whose business models have been left in the dust by external change, claw at the cliff's edge for their survival by creating lawsuits with no actual merit. These companies are experiencing something that is called Structural Unemployment for individuals. In other words, suppose you make brooms by hand. One day, a broom machine is invented that makes them twice as well in half the time. Your job is going to disappear. Sue the machine all you want for stealing your intellectual property (namely, your methods for making a broom), but you won't get your job back. The right thing to do, instead, is constantly learn new skills and constantly adapt to changes in the external environment. This way, when that broom machine comes out, you'll know enough to be the technician for that machine, and you'll even get paid more. This is what SCO failed to do for many years. The consequences are that their business model is no longer relevant; their software is no longer relevant for the most part; and instead of finding a way to profit through honest business practices, they are trying to steal a living by playing the new lottery: The legal system.
Third, while the consequences for Linux, namely publicity, have generally been positive, the consequences for many of the companies that support Linux, namely IBM, DiamlerChrysler, AutoZone, and perhaps others, have been quite negative and counterproductive.
1) That would totally cripple legitimate anonymous posting on /. -- which this could very well be, mind you.
2) How do you know it's "malicious slander/libel"? The shoe is on the other foot now...
It's interesting the author states, "By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily." If it was so straightforward and should have "been settled quickly and easily", then the judge should have seen that too. So, the fact that the case is still going on shows that it's definitely not a "straightforward" case. (However, as we all know with SCO, that it's never straightforward, or quick and easy.)
Actually, he's got a great point here. It should have been settled quickly and easily. And it's clear that that's what SCO expected.
What neither SCO nor the author have grasped yet is that IBM is betting the farm on Linux, and because of certain FUD spread about the legality of the GPL and the business model they're promoting, it is in IBM's best interest to spend the money and time required to get a ruling on the case. If they fail, they can cut their losses on Linux and proceed elsewhere; if they succeed, they gain a FUD-killing precedent.
What's more, you'll note that SCO cannot withdraw due to the countersuit filed by IBM. By being sued, IBM gained the opportunity to file countersuit, and they filed several, carefully crafted to ensure that the ruling they get is exactly the one they want to support their business model.
And the dairy industry is still alive... Wow! It really can be done!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
God forbid that insults should appear on Slashdot!
Don't you mean 'promote him, he was almost right'? :-)
-fooburger
That's a really nice analogy. But don't suggest it to the dairy council, because they'll probably subpoena the molecular formula for margarine to see if there's any animal protein in it. "Some butter has to be in here somewhere," they'll say. "Margarine couldn't be a world-class toast spread without it."
He also fails to examine what was sold and what was retained in the chain of sales ... USL to Novell to oldSCO to Caldera/newSCO. It's quite suggestive that newSCO has not shown the sales contract between oldSCO and Caldera. They keep showing the contract between Novell and oldSCO, which doesn't appear to have done more than give oldSCO the right to act as an agent for Novell and keep a pittance for the effort.
(Emphasis added.)
"evil" Well I do not like to think that most people are just evil. Even if he is super greedy and or power hungry he would also have to be delusional to think that this will end well for him.
Well, the best definition of evil I have is this: "Willing to fuck over other people for personal gain." Seems like a decent definition.
I think that McBride is in this case to float SCO stock to line his own pockets. Seems like he sold off a lot when SCO's stock went through the roof at the beginning of this ordeal. This trial has already made him a richer man; whatever comes later is pure icing on the cake.
Believe whatever you may want about the basic goodness of humanity. It doesn't change the fact that he and his friends have profited from these shenanigans. If that is the purpose of this (which seems most likely), that makes him evil.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Actually this is an interesting theory with problems. US courts are supposed to operate on the innocent until proven guilty basis, although, that seems to sometimes be forgotten in corporate civil cases. If SCO had proceeded as the article suggests, they might have gotten to the negotiation phase by now - what he says may be the actual basis of the case. His ramblings however, may be tainted by exposure to corporate legal departments. In US civil cases plaintiffs tend to bet on pre-trial settlements since corporations do not like the negative publicity a lawsuit brings. SCO's case seems to be designed using smoke and mirror in some hope that IBM would drag them to the settlement table, not on the primary legal issues. Things are further confused by involving legitimate linux users such as Autozone, in an attempt to likewise intimidate corporate users of linux. In civil cases it sometimes seems that corporations are presumed guilty until proven innocent. There are perhaps a number of reasons for this. In any case legal departments make every effort to protect themselves. If you know you may have to prove you are actually innocent in a reverse engineering copyright case, the "Chinese Wall" is a good way to do it. Paul Murphy seems to have confused this with actual copyright law. Just because it is good corporate legal practice, does not mean it is law. SCO obviously did not realize that IBM has a very good legal department and knows how to use it, which has blown the obvious SCO strategy to bits. How this will effect linux, is anyone's guess. Even if SCO wins, they will probably not survive the apeals process. The Linux guys need to move on however, taking what they have learned, to build a truely next generation operating system.
This was probably one of the most intelligent attempts I've read at trying to rationalize the SCO/IBM lawsuit. Never under estimate your rival, and the more you understand their rationality, the more you can prepare your defense. Considering that little McBride has been quiet as of lately... I wish the author had attempted to converge other aspects of the case, it's not as clear cut as the author or for that matter SCO wishes it were.
Current Issues:
- What does SCO own if Novell says they own the copyrights? If they own it, why royalty payments then?
- They don't even own the word 'UNIX'?
- SCO and Linux are implementations of POSIX standards?
- Prior implementations of AT&T Unix were BSD licensed by old SCO.
- Project Monterey contract's have expired... Why didn't they sue earlier? and in the State where
it's requird by the contract.
"IBM shall have the right to terminate this Agreement immediately upon the occurrence
of a Change of Control of SCO which IBM in its sole discretion determines will
substantially and adversely impact the overall purpose of the cooperation set forth by
this Agreement and applicable Project"
Does new SCO, thus automatically terminate this agreement?
- SCO itself shipping & working on Linux? (Who donated the original computers for Linux to even
support smp? - did they make it enterprise ready) Did they dilute their own IP then? Is this 'the Pot calling the Kettle black' -- all we need to show is just one situation where a SCO programmer contributed code to Linux?
If so does that mean IBM can sue SCO on the same clause of violating the Project Monterey contract?
- What exactly are they fighting about, originally it was 'Million's of line's of code copied' hence
that even the Judge is asking, in that 80's slogan 'Where's the Beef?'.
- IBM's Perpetual license with no sunset clause...
- Groklaw research, mentioning parties were aware Project Monterey was a stepping stone towards Linux?
- RCU, JFS, ELF, etc, etc... The GPL clearly states its viral, as for a reason, was this the intent
of the original AT&T license too? Was their intention 'All your bases belong to us' or the later
clarifications meant to state that all code, other than the OS code, belongs to their copyright holders.
- If this is strictly about Project Monterey, what exact 'ground breaking technology' was merged
into Linux?
- SCO demanding money from companies to 'license Linux', McBride writing a letter to congress about
copyright protection, The GPL is unconstitutional. I thought this was originally about copyrights
your argument, is now its about method's and concepts? If so, then copyright can't protect you, you need
patent's does SCO own those?
Also in the author's own words, Linux using Minix was legal, does that constitute reverse engineering then? If earlier Unix was BSD licensed, does that potentially mitigate the violations of 'concepts' that can be traced back to earlier 'open code' now? I'll give credits to the author though for his more sophisticated English style, clearly he's not McBride, I hope to aspire to one day write like that too...
The article contains factual errors, logical errors, and even spelling mistakes. I think Paul Murphy really needs to get a good editor. (Yeah, nit picking spelling is usually frowned on here, but come on, the guy can't even spell Phoenix right! Speaking as someone who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, I can't believe a professional news publication would let this kind of crap slip through.)
Aside from nit-picky details like the fact that it was Lenin, not Stalin, who coined the term "useful idiots," Paul Murphy quotes Eric Raymond out of context to bolster a fallacious argument, cites one of his own prior articles as evidence to bolster the main argument of his current article, and in fact parrots arguments made by the Alexis de Toqueville Institute in the book Samizdat. The arguments gleaned from Samizdat and AdTI have been widely discredited, and in fact most of the sources cited in Samizdat have repudiated the book and the manner in which they were represented in the book.
For example, Mr. Murphy claims that the Linux kernel was begun as a hack to the Minix kernel, then grew into its own kernel (which he at some points seems to confuse with a full-blown operating system). This is patently absurd for several reasons. For starters, the two kernels have completely different architectures: Minix is a microkernel written for wide portability, and Linux is a monolithic kernel originally written to take specific advantage of features in the 386 instruction set. Tannenbaum and Torvalds both agree that Linux never contained a shred of Minix code, although Linus clearly learned a great deal from examining the Minix source.
(It's also of note that Torvalds was never Tannenbaum's student, so the whole bit about Tannenbaum giving Torvalds a "C" is a distortion of actual events. Tannenbaum's comments were made in the hypothetical, and were tongue-in-cheek.)
Others have already pointed out that clean room techniques are not a prerequisite for legal reverse engineering. Furthermore, it should be obvious that reverse engineering was entirely unnecessary: Linus had the POSIX specification to refer to, a published and public specification. And the source code for UNIX could hardly be considered a secret, since the Lions book has been passed around as a samizdat manuscript for a number of years before it became fully legal for everyone to own and reference. In short, the entire "Myth of Immaculate Conception" section is bogus.
The entire "Meeting the Requirements Easily" section has been refuted multiple times, and is based upon an already discredited legal theory.
When Mr. Murphy sums up his argument, he is only half right in much of what he says. Consider:While it's strictly true that a lack of misappropriated code in the Linux kernel today doesn't mean that it wasn't there in the past, we know from past experience that due dilligence has been exercised, and is continuing to be exercised to this day. It's not just that the current kernel source code is widely available for public scrutiny; we also have the entire history of the kernel source tree to examine. Milestone snapshots have been archived practically since day one. And in fact, I can recall at least one incident where inappropriately contributed code in the Linux kernel was in fact removed, and this happened well before the SCO lawsuit. So the process works.
For all of his claims that this is a simple case and implying that it will easily be settled for SCOXe, he completely ignores (or is ignorant of) the fact that Novell has waived any contractual claims on SCOXe's behalf based on the contract between Novell and SCOXe. So yes, this guy is correct, this is a simple case, but not for the reasons he thinks, and not for a SCOXe victory.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
What's wrong with us "Usefull Idiots?" Personally I'd like to know.
SCO's basic claim against IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) is simple. According to SCO, it is the legal successor to AT&T (NYSE: T - news) with respect to licensing of the AT&T Unix source code and its derivatives.
Isn't that still in dispute or did the Novel vs. SCO case for who actually own the copyrights to SysV get settled? To me, SCO really shouldn't be allowed to progress on any case, until it can prove that it really is the legal owner of the copyright.
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
They're full of crap hacks, but they still managed to get published.
I'm in the wrong business.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The problem is that Murphy probably obtained his information by reading SCO's legal briefs. Here's a quote from a declaration of John Harrop, submitted by SCO:
... based on and derived from UNIX,"
"... Mr. Torvalds had been studying an operating system that one of his professors [Andrew Tanenbaum]
IBM, in a later brief, pointed out that Tanenbaum teaches in Amersterdam, while Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
after reading the article, it's clear to me that to at least some extent /. is a major source of FUD on this issue. the author is correct on one issue at least: according to what i've read from /., i thought the lawsuit was dead and baseless. quite the contrary, it's just getting started. i guess that's my fault for listening to armchair lawyers.
applying a little common sense to the situation, completely ignoring the facts, would SCO even be fighting this is there was no chance in hell as almost every post here states? SCO has lawyers. those lawyers are not stupid. i'd wager they know a little more about this case, and law in general, than the average poster in this thread. they do not want to lose money. SCO does not want to lose money, or at least take a very bad risk on this.
back to /., i post every so often. a few times i've posted what apparently came across as anti-apple, or at least not pro-apple. what happens? -1 flamebait. well i suppose that's true. anything anti-apple, anti linux, pro MS, pro Sun, is flamebait here.
congrats /.'rs, you've formed a perfect community that tells you exactly what you want to hear.
Paul Murhpy's website is winface.com?
I sent him an email asking for the explanation - but I don't really expect a response.
Just seems rather out of step with being a so-called Unix guy.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
SCO are a stock scam, no more, no less.
Actually, that IS part of the Peter Principle. Can't remember which corollaries these are, but:
1. To an incompetent manager, superincompetence is indistinguishable from supercompetence.
2. Since everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence, the managerial staff will eventually be composed entirely of incompent people.
Therefore, at some point superincompetence will always be cause for promotion.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
Quoting Stalin as an authority in matters of jurisprudence is not a good tactic to employ in order to get people to take your arguments seriously.
After all, if what you say is true, you'll be right at a time when the market and the consensus among the informed is wrong... and your savings will suddenly multiply in value as IBM and the other companies SCO has taken legal action against start paying the license fees they owe plus punitive damages as per the forthcoming court order. I mean, look what happened to AutoZone!
So when are you going to find yourself a chunk of SCOX for yourself? Your fortune's a waitin'! Don't you believe what you're telling the public?
DISCLAIMER: I am not a registered financial adviser and this is not investment advice.
Tech Public Policy stuff
After RTFM and most of the comments, the phrase that came unbidden to my mind is:
So far as I know, this phrase is original. I think it describes Paul Murphy's use of his soapbox fairly adequately, given as how he probably could not have achieved his current position without having digested some knowledge along the way. Which he is now putting before us, sort of.
Anyway, I hereby put the phrase "to sing (out of | from) (his | her | your) netherhole" in public domain. Use it as it you will.
The post actually accusing the man has been modded down, but the post defending him has been modded up. I would hazard a guess that just defending or even discussing the accusation gives it a sort of credibility. Politiicians do this, "Just ask my opponent why he likes to kick puppies." Or "I am sure my opponent can't really want to bankrupt our country.
What is most glaring about it is the way he seems to think he's smarter than everyone on both sides, while at the same time he's so clearly not done his homework. What was he thinking?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
an article by Paul Murphy entitled, SCO, IBM and Outcomes-Based Circular Reasoning. Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'
Mr. Murphy starts with saying reverse engineering is good.
Then he mentions about Linux came from Minix, mimicing "personality" of Unix.
Later leading to point saying IBM is in contract with terms of UNIX license, and claims SCO could argue that IBM violated that contract by porting Linux on 390.
Lastly he goes on saying about due diligence, unfounded, blah blah blah, outcome-based circular reasoning by Linux community blah blah blah
So pretty much his point is that Linux is illegitimate kernel and nothing more than Unix spinoff, a Unix knockoff at best, if not by source, but by merit of origin and supposely "unknown" shady activity by IBM.
I can't write as good as Mr. Murphy, but it seems his entire article is nothing more than rhetoric and drawing irrelevant conclusion.
Look below and tell me if this Mr. Murphy, the Unix expert guy, should be writing articles with fancy title, "outcome-based circular reasonning".
(curtesy of Cygnus Group)
http://www.cygnus-group.com/CIDM/reason.html
Reasoning Crib Sheet
Break arguments down into easy-to-understand steps of the A=B, B=C variety. If arguments seem too complex to be broken down, treat them with caution.
Be careful about drawing firm conclusions when the premises include words like "some", "many" or "most." These words signal the use of inductive reasoning, which means that conclusions are based upon probabilities, and are not certain.
Be sure that premises using the word "All" are true and not merely hyperbole. Also, clarify statements that lead you to assume the word "All", such as "Trees need lots of light." It's possible that some trees can grow well in the dark, making airtight conclusions impossible.
Avoid other overly conceptual generalizations, such as "science has discovered that..." or "from history, we have learned that..." No one person can speak for all of science, history, medicine, etc.
Appeals based upon emotion, not facts, are cause for skepticism. The lack of hard data or evidence indicates that the presenter is on shaky ground.
Make sure that authorities are speaking within their areas of expertise. An economist is not an expert on ecology any more than an ecologist is an expert on the economy.
Make sure that authorities truly are authorities. Like the rest of us, actors, musicians, politicians and sports figures cannot usually be counted upon to truly understand fields outside of their own. Unless talking about their particular expertise, their opinions are worth no more or less than yours.
Be wary of claims stating that if a little of something is good, than a lot will be great; or if a lot of something is bad, a little of it also will be bad. There are very few linear relationships in the real world. Complex interactions are characterized by thresholds of change and not by ongoing, straight-line projections.
Trust your instincts. If the presented case doesn't seem to make sense, or defies common sense, get more information or ask to have the argument restated.
Ask for help. Very few people can effectively think through complex issues by themselves. Don't be afraid to get additional help or advice!
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
This dick sucking idiot doesn't understand that,
since he sucked Darl McBrides dick, he becomes
the idiot.
Just another fagget-in-the-vinyard.
Toodles.
It is associated with CIO magazine. While those with clues rightfully dislike CIO magazine, it is a fact that CIOs at many large corporations are non-technical and use CIO magazine as their bible.
Therefore business decisions will be based on this piece of crap.
joke aside, the keyword here is "rumor" as he explicitly stated.
rumor
1. A piece of unverified information of uncertain origin usually spread by word of mouth.
2. Unverified information received from another; hearsay.
the anonymous poster's guilty of being "off-topic" at best, not troll.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
SCO has claimed copyright on public domain header files that are mandated by the POSIX standard and therefore open, lists of values and therefore not copyrightable, and also public domain because they were publicly distributed by AT&T without copyright notice in their binary distributions. The only other code they've shown is from their employee Sandeep Gupta, which was not properly compared, rearranged, not protectable by copyright, and flawed in other ways, and which SCO later claimed they weren't intending to show infringement but just that infringement was possible and they needed more discovery.
In contrast, IBM has had two heavy hitters to REAL code comparisons and neither of them found infringement between SYSV and Linux. Brian W. Kernighan (of K&R C, one of the inventors of the language and the first workers on UNIX at AT&T) tore apart Mr. Gupta's testimony.
Randall Davis also did a code comparison for them and he didn't find any infringing code. If you don't know who Randall Davis is, he's been involved in computer copyright cases before... One of the first copyright cases involving computer code in the 10th circuit was Gates Rubber Co. v. Bando Chem. Indus. Ltd. The court didn't understand computer code and didn't know how to compare it to see if it infringed copyright. The court itself (not the parties) hired an expert to come up with the abstraction-filtration-comparison test that has been used since to determine if one computer program infringes another. Yes, that expert was Randall Davis. The very test the 10th circuit uses to determine copyright infringement was developed by Dr. Davis and now used by him to determine that Linux does not infringe SCO's purported copyrights.
Despite their complaint being littered with references to copyright infringement and IBM dumping code straight from SYSV into Linux, they now claim their lawsuit isn't about copyright. Despite sending threatening letters to fortune 500 companies demanding licensing fees for Linux, they have avoided confronting a leading Linux distributor for copyright infringement. When RedHat brought a suit for declaration of non-infringement, SCO had it stayed by claiming that the IBM suit was about the same thing.
Instead of taking RedHat to court, they sued one of their customers, Autozone, for copyright infringement. If a magazine article infringed the copyright of something you wrote, would you sue the magazine or would you sue some schmo that bought that magazine at the newsstand? Would you say "Paragraph 3 of the article is very similar to paragraph 2 on page 203 of my novel." or would you say "Whole parts of the article are lifted word for word from my books.", yet fail to give any examples after 4 lawsuits and years of discovery?
People, this just doesn't make any sense. I don't see how they can avoid going to jail for fraud when this is over.
Also, IBM specifically has the right to develop and market products employing ideas and concepts in UNIX:
One has to ask the question "What exactly has IBM done in violation of the contract?" SCO has yet to answer with ANY specificity. They have yet to point out a single idea, method, concept, or line of code that would be protected by the contract and that IBM misued by putting into Linux.Even in Civil suits, the defendant is "innocent until proven guilty". The plaintiff must show that the defendant's actions injured them in some way. The bar could be set very low, for instance in small claims court you can (sometimes) succeed automatically if your opponent fails to show. If you say they did something and they don't dispute it, that could be good enough. In this case, the defendant did show up and did dispute the plaintiff's allegations.
In copyright cases (Is the case about copyright again? I'm losing track :)), the plaintiff must show evidence of copying. In cases where the plaintiff sues for a declaration of non-infringement (RedHat v. SCO and IBM's 10th Counterclaim for Declaration of Non-Infringement), the defendant must show that the plaintiff's work infringes their copyright.
That may appear backwards at first glance (the defendant having the burden of proof), but it isn't. Suits for declaration of non-infringement can't just be brought on a whim. The plaintiff must show that the defendant has made remarks and that there is a possibility of a lawsuit by the plaintiff in the future. In this case that was a barrier that was easily met. SCO had been publicly saying that Linux infringed their copyrights since early 2003 and that they were going to sue people. And even though they now claim their complaint against IBM isn't about that, it is full of references to copyrights, and specifically IBM "missappropriating" and "copying" SYSV code into Linux.
The point is that with copyright you don't have to prove that you didn't infringe, there has to be some evidence of infringement.
There appears to be some doubt. Links welcome.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"When you have task-switching, a file-system, and device drivers, that's Unix" -- or at least its kernel. Linux was born."
That not only describes the process, but makes the point that Unix is fundamentally a set of ideas, not a bunch of computer code -- and exactly how you implement those ideas isn't all that important.
Virtually every operating system created since around 1980 has a file system that is functionally equivalent to the UNIX file system. Maybe it has enhancements or maybe it's implemented differently or has different data structures, but it provides the same kind of files and the same kind of operations on files. The only exceptions I can think of are the original pre-HFS Mac file system, and MS/DOS before 2.11. All the rest: NT, OS/2, AmigaDOS, Windows, BeOS... they have all copied the UNIX file system.
Multitasking? There's a FEW more exceptions there - you can add GEM to the list, for example - but again virtually every OS has that.
Device drivers? Guess what?
UNIX is more than those things. Now, I personally consider it to not be a whole lot more, but that's because I'm only interested with whether I can treat the OS as basically UNIX (perhaps with frills) and from that basis successfully use it, configure it, write code for it, and so on. I don't know what Linus' definition of UNIX is, but I can't imagine it's as broad as Mr. Murphy implies.
But that's not the domain we're in here. We're in the domain of the law, and in that domain UNIX has a specific definition, one for which this fragmentary comment of Linus (presented out of context) has no relevance even if it was meaningful.
And Murphy is making a much stronger claim than that:
The reason Tannenbaum apparently gave Linus a "C" for his kernel hack probably wouldn't have been that the code was bad or derivative, but that he disapproved of sacrificing design elegance for a performance benefit available only on the x86.
The reason Tannenbaum gave Linux a metaphorical C was that the design of the Linux kernel was radically different, from the ground up, from Minix. There was not only any Minix code in it, there was nothing in the design that contained any elements of the design of the Minix kernel. Claiming that Linus based Linux on the Minix kernel because it provided the same basic functionality is like claiming that an electric car must be using a gasoline engine because it has four wheels and a driver's seat.
The microkernel-versus-monolithic-kernel distinction, which was the basis for the infamous Torvalds-Tannenbaum debate, is probably the biggest distinction you can make between kernel implementations in an OS today. There is no easy way to take a kernel of one kind and turn it into the other. The best one can do without doing far more work than simply starting from scratch is to embed one in another, the way single-server Mach-based kernels like Tru64 or Mac OS X do it, like a kind of hybrid gasoline-electric car.
And Linux isn't any such thing. The most casual inspection of the design, even if you weren't aware of the contempt Linus holds for such schemes, would tell you that.
No, there's far more similarities between the OS/2 kernel and the Linux kernel than between the Linux kernel and Minix, and yet nobody would claim Linus based Linux on OS/2. The similarities between Linux and Minix are all in the sheetmetal and steering wheel, the wheels and tires. NOT the engine.
Torvalds was working in an open, academic environment within the scope of both Tannebaum's intent and the Prentice Hall source license for Minix.
This is irrelevant: if Linux was a derived work of Minix it would still be subject to the Prentice-Hall license, which did not permit unlimited redistribution.
Murphy argues Linux is a derived work of Minix because (he claims) Linus started with the Minix source tree and modified it until he had removed every piece of original code, but that this relationship is irrelevant because of Prenti
So, in some ways, you could say "Linux is a UNIX clone". In the same ways, you could say "Margarine is a Butter clone".
...
... ;-)
That's a really nice analogy.
Actually, it's a really false analogy. Like much of the media and political noise about the cloning issue, it mostly illustrates the total lack of understanding what the term "clone" means.
For X to be a clone of Y, X must be primarily derived from pieces of Y. You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant. To clone an animal, you take a cell (or a nucleus) and grow it into a new animal. In both cases, the clone is genetically identical to the parent because its primary material (its DNA) was taken from the parent.
Linux is not in any meaningful sense a clone of unix, because its code wasn't taken from unix. The correct biological metaphor would be convergent evolution. That's how you describe two things that are physically and functionally similar, but of independent derivation.
Of course, we could view this as yet another case where a precisely-defined technical term is misused in a vague, sloppy fashion by the media and general population. But we're supposed to be tech nerds here, right? So we shouldn't be using the sloppy, fuzzy, media meaning of "clone". We should be using the technical meaning, insofar as it's applicable to software.
(Yeah, I know; chide, chide, chide
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Actually, it doesn't. It shows that the term "clone" has meaning outside of biology. Perhaps you've heard of old IBM-compatibles being IBM-clones? Did you think there were little pieces of IBM in there?
For X to be a clone of Y, X must be primarily derived from pieces of Y. You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant.
That's a graft, not a clone.
Linux is not in any meaningful sense a clone of unix, because its code wasn't taken from unix. The correct biological metaphor would be convergent evolution. That's how you describe two things that are physically and functionally similar, but of independent derivation.
As I said, the term clone exists outside biology, and the term in this case is not meant to evoke biology at all. Webster's agrees, the second definition of clone: "one that appears to be a copy of an original form ."
Linux is not in any meaningful sense a clone of unix, because its code wasn't taken from unix. The correct biological metaphor would be convergent evolution. That's how you describe two things that are physically and functionally similar, but of independent derivation.
See dictionary definition above, it fits. Note the "appears" here. Linux was developed to look like a unix system - hence, clone.
For what it's worth, I'm a scientist, I fully understand whhat clone means in a biological setting, and don't care. You want scientific terms that are incorrectly used, try "quantum leap." The popular usage is actually a complete antonym to the scientific usage. "Clone" has multiple accepted usages. Mine is one of them.
Before you correct people, you generally want to make sure they're actually wrong. A dictionary might help you out in that regard in the future. Even if you were right - and you're not here - no one likes a pedant.
You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant.
."
That's a graft, not a clone.
Huh? Since when? A graft means taking the cutting and attaching it to a different plant, where it becomes a branch of that plant. A "clone" is a cutting that's grown into a separate plant. Anyone who has ever grown fruit trees knows the difference. (Of course, lots of commercial fruit trees are both clones and grafts, but that's getting a bit too detailed for this discussion, and verges on off-topic.)
Webster's agrees, the second definition of clone: "one that appears to be a copy of an original form
Then, by that definition, linux is not a clone of unix. Linux was not in any sense a copy of any existing unix system. It was an independent implementation of the POSIX standard. This is pretty well documented, and (partly because of the SCO story) lots of people have compared the code looking for overlap. They haven't found any. So there isn't even an appearance of copying, at least not to anyone who actually takes a look.
Their surface appearance is similar, of course, but that's because they both implement the POSIX standard. If this constitutes cloning, then any company that makes a meter stick or metric tape measure can be accused of cloning another company's product. That's stretching the concept to meaninglessness.
Linus did his own implementation partly because he didn't have access to AT&T source code. The license was far too expensive for a poor grad student like him. This was essentially the same motive behind prof Tanenbaum's minix system a few years earlier, which Linus did use somewhat in the earliest versions of linux. He couldn't copy unix, because he didn't have access to the code.
A curiosity here is that nobody calls linux a clone of minix, although in the early stages there was some code borrowing. This is because, although their surface appearance is similar (POSIX), the implementations are radically different. Also, there has been a rather public discussion of the difference, which has got a fair amount of publicity in computer-geek circles. What's strange is that people will see cloning from unix to linux, although linux is much less directly derived from unix than it is from minix.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Thus, "appears to be" unix. You're still botching the accepted (and dictionary) non-biological definition of "clone." Go look at the unix certification standards as well. To be classified as a Unix(TM), you do NOT have to have Sys V code.
Slander? Why, no. You are the slanderer, here, as indicated by your subject "Wow, you really are an asshole!" Our mule-loving friend (or whatever the name was supposed to mean, I don't really know) said one thing which is indisputably true: you have offered no evidence (even including your more recent post) that your vicious accusations are true. That is not slander. That is an irrefutable fact. In fact, you are a liar. But not because of your accusations (we can only say that the accusations are PROBABLY false, not definitely), but because you accuse him of calling you a liar. That is irrefutably untrue. He merely said that we have no reason to believe you UNTIL you show some proof of your claims. If you'd like to do so now and make us all eat our words, then you go right ahead and do so; if not, stop crying and get a life.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
SCO has already had to drop all copyright claims to avoid being held in contempt. They don't have a copyright claim at this point. They are going to need to show a specific violation of the Monterey contract, even if their were a violation of copyright law at this point (which there isn't) they still lose.
I think the majority of people on this forum are smart, capable and probably interesting people. So, it occurs to me. What the hell are you all so afraid of?
And it's not just this one guy's article I'm talking about, it's the vehemence with which you respond to anything pro SCO. Don't you realize that the very attention you give to this matter validates it and creates a space for it to exist.
The fact that so many people feel compelled to blast the guy who wrote this article on everything from his "facts" to very personal and unprofessional things can but make me wonder why? I doubt that I am the only one, whatever this forum would lead one to believe.
I started to write a reasined response to Mr Paul Murphy's piece, and got sidetracked somewhere as i was reading it...
;-) Now, it's linux for me. I am enjoying the Linux experience more than i can say. One thing to notice however, is that i have not mentioned anything to do with the law or lawyers or lawsuits etc.
When i started programming in the mid-60's, I did it because i truly enjoyed it. I got a real kick out of getting computers to do ever more complicated things (think NASA types of things). As time went on I found the whole process to be fun, and i kept up with the current paradigms and languages as much as i could. Sometimes i jumped on the right bandwagon (C, OOP, C++, Java, UP and UML) and sometimes not (I became a real Turbo Pascal expert
Now, Mr. Murphy, I am not sure if i am worthy of the title "useful idiot", but here is the position i take. I could care less about your stupid f'ing lawsuit, nor am i interested in some suits opinion of me or my coding mates. I have written more code than you have written english, and i will continues to write any code i want in any way i want for the rest of my life, lawsuits not withstanding. I am sick to death of having half of any technical conversation being taken up with the
legalities of the thing. Lets get back to what we love doing, and maybe if we ingore these fools they will go play with each other.
Thomas J. Bigford (in case someone wants to sue me!)
Hell, let him convince as many investers as possible that SCO is on to something. The more investors that lose some $$$ by jumping on this doomed bandwagon, the more investors will be wised-up, and communicate that wisdom to others in future, and the more dire the financial risk from fleeing investors preventing mercenary corporations from attempting this kind of stunt against OSS again.
A victory for the legitimacy of Linux will be that much bigger if it's sensationalised by making speculators and commentators, especially movers and shakers that the financial gamers look up to, eat their words and open their walletbooks.
Who's funding this guy's mouthpiece?
Would be very interesting to know who is funding his soapbox.
grandparent - "For X to be a clone of Y, X must be primarily derived from pieces of Y. You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant." parent - "That's a graft, not a clone." wrong. a graft is where the cuttting is *grafted* onto a different plant so that it can be feed off of that plant sap. the word clone a clone is originally from the greek word kln (meaning twig), and it was used by horticultralists to refer to a plant which was grown from a cutting into a genetically identical copy of the original plant. so the grandparent post was right i'm afraid.
grandparent - "For X to be a clone of Y, X must be primarily derived from pieces of Y. You clone a plant by taking a cutting and growing it into a new plant."
parent - "That's a graft, not a clone."
wrong. a graft is where the cuttting is *grafted* onto a different plant so that it can be feed off of that plant sap.
the word clone a clone is originally from the greek word klon (meaning twig), and it was used by horticultralists to refer to a plant which was grown from a cutting into a genetically identical copy of the original plant. so the grandparent post was right i'm afraid.