There are several things to consider before deciding that it would be wise to donate corporate IP back to an Open Source project. These particular decisions can usually be made either way without incurring the wrath of even the FSF:
First factor:
Are your patches merely bugfixes, or are they
added functions?
If they are mere bugfixes, I can't see where
your management would object to releasing
them.
OTOH, if you have added new and significant
functionality to the program, you might want
to move on to consideration #2.
Second factor to consider:
In the case of new functionality, is there any
reason to distribute it outside your company?
If the modified program only has meaningful
application within the context of a company
similar to your employer do you think it
would be wise to give your work to the
competition?
OTOH, if it is something that you need to
distribute, say... to your customers for
their use, I would agree with the previous
poster who wrote that contributing your
patches back to the project might be necessary
to prevent a lawsuit.
As for protection from a lawsuit for having contributed your patches, I recommend you refer your corporate counsel to the language of the license that covers the package. The disclaimers in most OSS/FS licenses are much more protective of developers/contributors than even Microsoft's EULA is.
Further, NO ONE is allowed to supress the free speech rights of another person.
Not so... the First Amendment ONLY applies to Congress (and by extension under the Fourteenth Amendment, the states) and it ONLY prohibits suppression of speech by force of law.
It does not apply to purely private entities at ALL, therefore, it is perfectly legal for the terms of a contract (such as a license agreement or an NDA or an ISP's Terms of Service) to impose limitations on the use and/or disclosure of information.
Keep in mind there are two different sanity defenses:
1) being insane at the time of the act
2) being insane at the time of the trial
Errrrrmmmm... no.
The insanity defense goes to the existence of a culpable mind state at the time of the alleged offense, ONLY. It is an affirmative defense to criminal liability (which means that even if the defendant did the deed exactly as he is accused of having done, he cannot be guilty because he was insane and, therefore, lacked a culpable mind-state).
Insanity at the time of the trial is "lack of competency to stand trial" and merely postpones the proceedings until the defendant can be rendered competent by therapy, drugs, ECT, whatever the psychiatric community's "silver bullet du jour" might be. It does nothing to keep you from going to prison.
As I see it, this guy is merely showing his complete contempt for the law, the proceedings and the court. That being said, I hope he likes coveralls, because the attitude he seems to display is going to have him wearing them for quite a while.
Obfuscating C Code
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Personally, I think this would be a rather easy case to prove if anyone chose to pursue it.
A context diff of the "obfuscated" code against the code it's derived from would rather quickly show that the only changes from one to the other was symbols and the lack of comments. Unless, that is, they resorted to some rather serious Obfuscation like operator and function overloading, or trick use of preprocessor errors, in which case, a diff of the preprocessor output from the two code trees would also damn the offender pretty quickly.
I AM a (recovering) Lawyer (I am non-practicing) and I would advise your company that they are playing with fire by trying this. You didn't reveal which GPL Code your company finds so useful, but there are MUCH smarter ways to play this game, especially if the authors of the code you like so much HAVE assigned their copyright to the FSF. (See, FSF v. NeXT Computer, (over gcc) for instance).
I question the degree of "tech-savvy"-ness of your company's counsel if he's advising them to go "full speed ahead" on such a transparent, bad faith abuse of the GPL (can't call it a violation... technically, at least).
However, if Microsoft becomes aware or has any patent(s) and/or pending applications that are essential to implement this specification, Microsoft will grant you a royalty-free license under applicable Microsoft intellectual property rights essential to implement this specification for the sole purpose of implementing this specification.
Read that to say "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing... but if we find out you've gotten a hand job by relying on this, we won't try to charge you anything... "
"OTOH, if somebody else has a patent/copyright we've infringed, you're on your own (read 'hosed'), Bubba, because our IP rights are zero."
Another option is to allow plugins to handle how the data is stored.
That's a goodish idea but there are interfacing issues. By "plugins" are you suggesting one could write their parser in C or C++ or Perl? At what point do you normalize on a common language? Keep in mind this has nothing to do with *file* formats.
No need to "normalize on a standard language"... back in the 80's I wrote utility modules for Autocad Lisp programs in C... and neither I, nor the developers of the AutoLisp programs needed to worry about glue code. It is up to the authors of the plug-in API to write the bindings for the various languages that might be used for parsers.
Personally, I would expect that a Universal Unix Configuration Tool(TM) would come with a plugin interface supporting C, C++, pascal, fortran, Java, perl, php (maybe... gotta keep webmin in mind), Tcl/Tk and Python before it could hit a 1.0 release. Your program needs a different parser and you don't like any of those those languages? It's your itch... scratch it... write the parser and contribute to the project.
IMNSHO, The Universal Unix Configuration Tool and the Kernel Janitors project, comprise the KEY component in the World Domination Project(SM).
Unix (and Linux IS a "u" Unix) IS user-friendly... it's just a little more picky about who it's friends are than the monopoli^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompetitor is.
Sounds like a reason to fix the shitty broken clipboard, then. I'll be grateful when I can at last paste from KMail into Mozilla.
"shitty" broken clipboard? Use the X clipboard (works on every Unix I've tried it on) to copy and paste from Kanything to anythingelse. Swipe with the left button down to mark, change focus and middle-click where you want to paste... maybe I'm missing something badly off the wal, but I haven't found a case where it doesn't work.
Instead of citing security of their protection algorithms, I think they ought to be working WITH the bnetd people -- they need to find a way to allow copy protection while still allowing user-operated servers.
This thought crossed my mind too. Instead of shutting down the project, why not cut a deal where bnetd would query Blizzard's validation servers to find out if a license is valid and drop the connection if it isn't.
All things considered, I think it would be to Blizard's advantage to lighten the load on battle.net by allowing other servers. As other posters have already said, it would definitely improve the playing experience which would most likely lead, in turn, to increased sales for Blizzard.
I think I'll completely stop putting replyable email addresses on news posts.
I did exactly that. If you find one of my usenet posts, you'll see the From: header is ninewands@127.0.0.1... I NEVER get spammed from a usenet post, but the spammers do.. hehehe HaHaHa.
Look here for tools for Windows/Linux and just about every other Unix variant. No Mac support, but the freeware packages you've found that run on Windows/Mac should suffice as long as they adhere to the standard protocols supported by the UCL tools.
Believe it or not, the ads we view in fast forward mode are still effective, according to some studies. I can't recall the details, as it has been 10+ years since I read about this (back in college), but we actually studied some research about "compressed-time" commercials, as they were called. In the compressed-time commercial studies, the researchers analyzed name brand recall and preference after allowing subjects to view TV shows at normal speed and fast-forward through the commercials. Many modern commercials are made based on the results of these studies.
Oh My God!!! Calling Max Headroom... the blip-verts are coming the blip-verts are coming!
And before you slam me for being a marketing dweeb - we studied this in my second semester of statistics. I was a computer geek then, just like now.
You don't fool me for one minute... I know a marketdroid when I hear one!;-)
Conspiracy theories aside. This sounds like just the thing THEY would study... you know... the THEY that must remain nameless.
"We have to get away from the ethos that knowledge is good, knowledge should be publicly available, that information will liberate us," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "Information will kill us in the techno-terrorist age, and I think it's nuts to put that stuff on Web sites." (emphasis added)
I am appalled, troubled and deeply dismayed that a person who would utter such a remark would be referred to as a "bioethicist". Simply put, these are the words of a Luddite spreading anti-scientific FUD.
One does not control the effects of scientific progress by hiding them from public view, but rather by examining them, discussing them and understanding them in the full light of day.
If you want to really drive home the relevancy of a book like Fahrenheit 451 in this day, I think the most important issue to address is the fact that the majority voluntarily disdained books and independent (read free) thought in the hope of maintaining their "safe, stress-free" babyfood life.
In view of the number of people I hear advocating the sacrifice of civil liberties in the name of "homeland security" I think this is one of the most relevant issues raised by the book.
There once was a time when Americans were a courageous people who resisted any attempt to force-fit them into a mold. Now, I fear the bulk of "We, the people" have become sheep ready to be led to slaughter by the first figurative goat to come along. I don't know how to reverse the trend, but America must return to the way of thinking that lead the founders to believe that:
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither.", and
"The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
if this noble experiement in participatory government is to survive.
Best of luck with your class. Although some of the images the book raises are somewhat dated, I personally believe Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most important books in American political literature.
I do wish you luck. I'm an admin in the Engineering Computer Center at the University of Houston. Fortunately the College of Engineering was one of the 10 buildings that escaped flood damage during Tropical Storm Allison last suummer.
Even though out Telecomm Department was able to pull enough equipment out of the Telecomm Engineeing lab to get the network sort of back up, we were without full connectivity for almost a month. It took about 4 days to get the electricity back on to our undamaged building and we didn't have phone for about 2 weeks. There are a few buildings on campus that are still unusable.
Best of luck. It sounds like your situation is going to be more tedious than difficult, though.
Actually, I think you are mistaken. The gnumeric spreadsheet uses XML files as it's native format even though it supports both reading and writing.xls files.
Remember LZW/GIF, with the patent held for many years by Unisys.
Actually, the Unisys patent was on the LZW compression algorithm that produced the data stored in the file. The GIF file format itself was developed and owned by CompuServe, and it was NOT patented.
I would submit that if one developed a different algorithm (NOT a reverse-engineered implementation of LZW) that produced the same output data stream LZW compression does and wrote the data out to a GIF formatted file, you would have nothing to fear from Unisys because all their patent covers is the LZW algorithm.
I'm the lead developer of SciGraphica, an open source application for scientific graphics that runs under Linux, and is based on Microcal Origin, the commercial application for Windows. When we contacted this company, they let us know that a port for Linux or other operating systems was not in their plans, and that they were not willing to make their proprietary file format available.
Normal... dumb, but normal...
However, we realized that it is in fact easy to reverse engineer to create a filter that would allow our program to read Origin files. Are we walking into a case of patent infringement, or this is a legitimate solution?
File formats are not patentable nor are they copyrightable. If they were there would be no interoperability between word processors and WordPerfect would still be the standard for WP software because MS couldn't have wedged into the market without being able to interoperate. Yes, reverse-engineering the file format is perfectly legitimate. Do you think Star Division licensed the MS Office file formats from Microsoft?
If this is problematic, is there a way to allow people to legally have access to the filter?
Filter? What filter... just write your program to use the Origin files as their native file format... and don't be surprised if the company changes the format to break interoperability... it's been done before.
As for giving others access to the "filter" you DID say this was an Open Source app, right? Just GPL whatever solution you create and then give it away. However, make sure that the ONLY thing you examine is the data files... don't go poking around in the binary with a debugger or hex editor. The file format may not be protectable but the code itself damn sure IS.
Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions, fraud is considered an action in tort, which usually carries a 2 year staute of limitations.
If I were designing a document retention policy for a legitimate company, I would have counsel prepare a schedule of all statutes of limitations that could reasonably apply to each of the company's activities. Documents would be classified according to which activity(ies) they were relevant to, and then set the retention period according to the longest statute of limitations for that activity + 2 years (or whatever statute of limitations governs general tort claims in the jurisdiction) for each classification.
This would cover not only the possibility that we might need the docs to prosecute a lawsuit, but also that we might have to defend a tort claim brought under the "discovery rule." (i.e., the statute of limitations doesn't begin to run until the harm is discovered).
Finally, with regard to electronic documents and e-mail, I would try to ensure that users were trained to delete e-mail of a purely personal nature as soon as they read it (small disk quotas for/home help with this on Unix systems). Backups of business e-mails, word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases and the like would be retained just like their paper counterparts.
With a policy like this in place, the company could rest assured that they would always have all the evidence necessary to protect their rights and to defend themselves should it become necessary to do so.
A company operating on the shady side of the bleeding edge of what is and is not legal, like Enron seems to have been doing, would be another question entirely...
For that REALLY retro look and simpler conversion
on
Retro-Futuristic Computing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Checck around at hamfests and other sources for old and ancient electronic gear. See if you can find an old Model 14 teletype machine. It was current high-tech during the period you're interested in.
If you can live with a rather limited character set, all you have to do is interface it to your serial port and write a small (almost trivial) daemon to convert the 5 bit Baudot code to ASCII.
Compaq's Tru64 already does this, so why should it NOT be possible under Linux. I think SGI's Irix might do it too, but I'm not positive because of limited messahes during installation.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several things to consider before deciding that it would be wise to donate corporate IP back to an Open Source project. These particular decisions can usually be made either way without incurring the wrath of even the FSF:
... to your customers for
First factor:
Are your patches merely bugfixes, or are they
added functions?
If they are mere bugfixes, I can't see where
your management would object to releasing
them.
OTOH, if you have added new and significant
functionality to the program, you might want
to move on to consideration #2.
Second factor to consider:
In the case of new functionality, is there any
reason to distribute it outside your company?
If the modified program only has meaningful
application within the context of a company
similar to your employer do you think it
would be wise to give your work to the
competition?
OTOH, if it is something that you need to
distribute, say
their use, I would agree with the previous
poster who wrote that contributing your
patches back to the project might be necessary
to prevent a lawsuit.
As for protection from a lawsuit for having contributed your patches, I recommend you refer your corporate counsel to the language of the license that covers the package. The disclaimers in most OSS/FS licenses are much more protective of developers/contributors than even Microsoft's EULA is.
Just my US$0.02
Further, NO ONE is allowed to supress the free speech rights of another person.
... the First Amendment ONLY applies to Congress (and by extension under the Fourteenth Amendment, the states) and it ONLY prohibits suppression of speech by force of law.
... and I AM a Lawyer.
Not so
It does not apply to purely private entities at ALL, therefore, it is perfectly legal for the terms of a contract (such as a license agreement or an NDA or an ISP's Terms of Service) to impose limitations on the use and/or disclosure of information.
Oh
Keep in mind there are two different sanity defenses:
... no.
1) being insane at the time of the act
2) being insane at the time of the trial
Errrrrmmmm
The insanity defense goes to the existence of a culpable mind state at the time of the alleged offense, ONLY. It is an affirmative defense to criminal liability (which means that even if the defendant did the deed exactly as he is accused of having done, he cannot be guilty because he was insane and, therefore, lacked a culpable mind-state).
Insanity at the time of the trial is "lack of competency to stand trial" and merely postpones the proceedings until the defendant can be rendered competent by therapy, drugs, ECT, whatever the psychiatric community's "silver bullet du jour" might be. It does nothing to keep you from going to prison.
As I see it, this guy is merely showing his complete contempt for the law, the proceedings and the court. That being said, I hope he likes coveralls, because the attitude he seems to display is going to have him wearing them for quite a while.
slashdotted already ...
Personally, I think this would be a rather easy case to prove if anyone chose to pursue it.
... technically, at least).
A context diff of the "obfuscated" code against the code it's derived from would rather quickly show that the only changes from one to the other was symbols and the lack of comments. Unless, that is, they resorted to some rather serious Obfuscation like operator and function overloading, or trick use of preprocessor errors, in which case, a diff of the preprocessor output from the two code trees would also damn the offender pretty quickly.
I AM a (recovering) Lawyer (I am non-practicing) and I would advise your company that they are playing with fire by trying this. You didn't reveal which GPL Code your company finds so useful, but there are MUCH smarter ways to play this game, especially if the authors of the code you like so much HAVE assigned their copyright to the FSF. (See, FSF v. NeXT Computer, (over gcc) for instance).
I question the degree of "tech-savvy"-ness of your company's counsel if he's advising them to go "full speed ahead" on such a transparent, bad faith abuse of the GPL (can't call it a violation
However, if Microsoft becomes aware or has any patent(s) and/or pending applications that are essential to implement this specification, Microsoft will grant you a royalty-free license under applicable Microsoft intellectual property rights essential to implement this specification for the sole purpose of implementing this specification.
... but if we find out you've gotten a hand job by relying on this, we won't try to charge you anything ... "
Read that to say "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing
"OTOH, if somebody else has a patent/copyright we've infringed, you're on your own (read 'hosed'), Bubba, because our IP rights are zero."
Another option is to allow plugins to handle how the data is stored.
... back in the 80's I wrote utility modules for Autocad Lisp programs in C ... and neither I, nor the developers of the AutoLisp programs needed to worry about glue code. It is up to the authors of the plug-in API to write the bindings for the various languages that might be used for parsers.
... gotta keep webmin in mind), Tcl/Tk and Python before it could hit a 1.0 release. Your program needs a different parser and you don't like any of those those languages? It's your itch ... scratch it ... write the parser and contribute to the project.
... it's just a little more picky about who it's friends are than the monopoli^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompetitor is.
That's a goodish idea but there are interfacing issues. By "plugins" are you suggesting one could write their parser in C or C++ or Perl? At what point do you normalize on a common language? Keep in mind this has nothing to do with *file* formats.
No need to "normalize on a standard language"
Personally, I would expect that a Universal Unix Configuration Tool(TM) would come with a plugin interface supporting C, C++, pascal, fortran, Java, perl, php (maybe
IMNSHO, The Universal Unix Configuration Tool and the Kernel Janitors project, comprise the KEY component in the World Domination Project(SM).
Unix (and Linux IS a "u" Unix) IS user-friendly
Sounds like a reason to fix the shitty broken clipboard, then. I'll be grateful when I can at last paste from KMail into Mozilla.
... maybe I'm missing something badly off the wal, but I haven't found a case where it doesn't work.
"shitty" broken clipboard? Use the X clipboard (works on every Unix I've tried it on) to copy and paste from Kanything to anythingelse. Swipe with the left button down to mark, change focus and middle-click where you want to paste
Instead of citing security of their protection algorithms, I think they ought to be working WITH the bnetd people -- they need to find a way to allow copy protection while still allowing user-operated servers.
This thought crossed my mind too. Instead of shutting down the project, why not cut a deal where bnetd would query Blizzard's validation servers to find out if a license is valid and drop the connection if it isn't.
All things considered, I think it would be to Blizard's advantage to lighten the load on battle.net by allowing other servers. As other posters have already said, it would definitely improve the playing experience which would most likely lead, in turn, to increased sales for Blizzard.
Just my US$.01 ($US.02 adjusted for inflation)
Of course, if you did that on all 80 positions, you got a lace card...
... lace cards ... slip one into someone ELSE's deck ... hehehe
mmmmmmmm
I think I'll completely stop putting replyable email addresses on news posts.
... I NEVER get spammed from a usenet post, but the spammers do .. hehehe HaHaHa.
I did exactly that. If you find one of my usenet posts, you'll see the From: header is ninewands@127.0.0.1
Look here for tools for Windows/Linux and just about every other Unix variant. No Mac support, but the freeware packages you've found that run on Windows/Mac should suffice as long as they adhere to the standard protocols supported by the UCL tools.
Believe it or not, the ads we view in fast forward mode are still effective, according to some studies. I can't recall the details, as it has been 10+ years since I read about this (back in college), but we actually studied some research about "compressed-time" commercials, as they were called. In the compressed-time commercial studies, the researchers analyzed name brand recall and preference after allowing subjects to view TV shows at normal speed and fast-forward through the commercials. Many modern commercials are made based on the results of these studies.
... the blip-verts are coming the blip-verts are coming!
... I know a marketdroid when I hear one! ;-)
... you know ... the THEY that must remain nameless.
Oh My God!!! Calling Max Headroom
And before you slam me for being a marketing dweeb - we studied this in my second semester of statistics. I was a computer geek then, just like now.
You don't fool me for one minute
Conspiracy theories aside. This sounds like just the thing THEY would study
"We have to get away from the ethos that knowledge is good, knowledge should be publicly available, that information will liberate us," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "Information will kill us in the techno-terrorist age, and I think it's nuts to put that stuff on Web sites." (emphasis added)
I am appalled, troubled and deeply dismayed that a person who would utter such a remark would be referred to as a "bioethicist". Simply put, these are the words of a Luddite spreading anti-scientific FUD.
One does not control the effects of scientific progress by hiding them from public view, but rather by examining them, discussing them and understanding them in the full light of day.
In view of the number of people I hear advocating the sacrifice of civil liberties in the name of "homeland security" I think this is one of the most relevant issues raised by the book.
There once was a time when Americans were a courageous people who resisted any attempt to force-fit them into a mold. Now, I fear the bulk of "We, the people" have become sheep ready to be led to slaughter by the first figurative goat to come along. I don't know how to reverse the trend, but America must return to the way of thinking that lead the founders to believe that:
if this noble experiement in participatory government is to survive.
Best of luck with your class. Although some of the images the book raises are somewhat dated, I personally believe Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most important books in American political literature.
I do wish you luck. I'm an admin in the Engineering Computer Center at the University of Houston. Fortunately the College of Engineering was one of the 10 buildings that escaped flood damage during Tropical Storm Allison last suummer.
Even though out Telecomm Department was able to pull enough equipment out of the Telecomm Engineeing lab to get the network sort of back up, we were without full connectivity for almost a month. It took about 4 days to get the electricity back on to our undamaged building and we didn't have phone for about 2 weeks. There are a few buildings on campus that are still unusable.
Best of luck. It sounds like your situation is going to be more tedious than difficult, though.
Well thought-out shot ... cheap shot, bit insightful ...
Actually, I think you are mistaken. The gnumeric spreadsheet uses XML files as it's native format even though it supports both reading and writing .xls files.
I'd like to see some case law upholding a patent on a data file format rather than on the algorithm that produced the data stored therein.
Remember LZW/GIF, with the patent held for many years by Unisys.
Actually, the Unisys patent was on the LZW compression algorithm that produced the data stored in the file. The GIF file format itself was developed and owned by CompuServe, and it was NOT patented.
I would submit that if one developed a different algorithm (NOT a reverse-engineered implementation of LZW) that produced the same output data stream LZW compression does and wrote the data out to a GIF formatted file, you would have nothing to fear from Unisys because all their patent covers is the LZW algorithm.
I'm the lead developer of SciGraphica, an open source application for scientific graphics that runs under Linux, and is based on Microcal Origin, the commercial application for Windows. When we contacted this company, they let us know that a port for Linux or other operating systems was not in their plans, and that they were not willing to make their proprietary file format available.
... dumb, but normal ...
... just write your program to use the Origin files as their native file format ... and don't be surprised if the company changes the format to break interoperability ... it's been done before.
... don't go poking around in the binary with a debugger or hex editor. The file format may not be protectable but the code itself damn sure IS.
Normal
However, we realized that it is in fact easy to reverse engineer to create a filter that would allow our program to read Origin files. Are we walking into a case of patent infringement, or this is a legitimate solution?
File formats are not patentable nor are they copyrightable. If they were there would be no interoperability between word processors and WordPerfect would still be the standard for WP software because MS couldn't have wedged into the market without being able to interoperate. Yes, reverse-engineering the file format is perfectly legitimate. Do you think Star Division licensed the MS Office file formats from Microsoft?
If this is problematic, is there a way to allow people to legally have access to the filter?
Filter? What filter
As for giving others access to the "filter" you DID say this was an Open Source app, right? Just GPL whatever solution you create and then give it away. However, make sure that the ONLY thing you examine is the data files
Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions, fraud is considered an action in tort, which usually carries a 2 year staute of limitations.
/home help with this on Unix systems). Backups of business e-mails, word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases and the like would be retained just like their paper counterparts.
...
If I were designing a document retention policy for a legitimate company, I would have counsel prepare a schedule of all statutes of limitations that could reasonably apply to each of the company's activities. Documents would be classified according to which activity(ies) they were relevant to, and then set the retention period according to the longest statute of limitations for that activity + 2 years (or whatever statute of limitations governs general tort claims in the jurisdiction) for each classification.
This would cover not only the possibility that we might need the docs to prosecute a lawsuit, but also that we might have to defend a tort claim brought under the "discovery rule." (i.e., the statute of limitations doesn't begin to run until the harm is discovered).
Finally, with regard to electronic documents and e-mail, I would try to ensure that users were trained to delete e-mail of a purely personal nature as soon as they read it (small disk quotas for
With a policy like this in place, the company could rest assured that they would always have all the evidence necessary to protect their rights and to defend themselves should it become necessary to do so.
A company operating on the shady side of the bleeding edge of what is and is not legal, like Enron seems to have been doing, would be another question entirely
Checck around at hamfests and other sources for old and ancient electronic gear. See if you can find an old Model 14 teletype machine. It was current high-tech during the period you're interested in.
If you can live with a rather limited character set, all you have to do is interface it to your serial port and write a small (almost trivial) daemon to convert the 5 bit Baudot code to ASCII.
Compaq's Tru64 already does this, so why should it NOT be possible under Linux. I think SGI's Irix might do it too, but I'm not positive because of limited messahes during installation.
that Mother Nature's decorating tastes are stuck in the 1950's.