That is truly childish. The real assholes at SCO are the suits and money-grubbing lawyers responsible for this charade. A code monkey in the trenches who needs a job to pay the bills isn't necessarily an enemy of open source.
We do not know for a fact that the "real" assholes are solely SCO's money-grubbing suits and lawyers. It has been speculated before on what the possible ramifications would be if a SCO or a Microsoft were to deliberately seed the community with Trojan programmers who deliberately lace the kernel with illegal code. While pretty much everyone with an understanding of the free software and open source approach agrees that the very openness of the process, and the traceability of every line of code through historical archives provides a high level of protection and auditability of most free software projects (including the Linux kernel), a private company such as Red Hat, Mandrake, or Joe's proprietary Linux Apps might not enjoy the same level of robustness when faced with that particular kind of denial of service attack.
That being the case, not hiring anyone who has ever worked at SCO (either since X date, as these folks have chosen to do, or ever in their career), does provide some level of protection against such a racket. I think we all know that this scenerio isn't beneath SCO... frankly, I don't think it is beneath Microsoft either, though for now they seem to be content to fight their battles by proxy.
I certainly wouldn't risk hiring someone who had continued to work at SCO since Darl McBride took over. And that ignores the risk of gratiuitious litigation, which is another SCO characteristic that could very justifiably lead one to believe that hiring anyone who had ever worked at SCO, nee Caldera, puts the company at an unacceptable level of risk.
You may disapprove of their caution, or spin it as "childish," but IMHO I think the caution here is quite warranted, for at least the two reasons cited above, and probably others as well.
Guilt by association is a slippery slope, remember Joe McCarthy?
Yes it is, as we are being painfully reminded of beneath the heels of Baby Bush's administration. But, lest we forget, ignoring the reality of associated people often sharing similiar agendas is tantamount to living in denial and yields terrible consiquences as well. Keeping potential SCO trojan workers, or innocents who become a pretext for litigation because they once worked at SCO, at arms length is arguably both wise and called for. And while that wisdom, or its effectiveness, may be debated, such caution is certainly not "childish."
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
Then you expect to work for felons. Opening a piece of US Mail not addressed to you is a felony, whether the envelope is sitting in your private home mailbox or on your bosses desk. Even the worst libertarian excesses of the 1980s War on Drugs, as presided over by Edwin Meese never changed that particular aspect of the law. These excesses, which encouraged such nonsensical interpretations of property rights to include invading the privacy of anyone who happens to be on said property (taken to its logical conclusion, your employer should have the right to strip search you on "his" property), are in fact in opposition to 200+ years of statutory and common law in the United States.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy on your person (and, thankfully, our only somewhat brainwashed culture continues to agree...so your boss cannot order you strip searched on suspicion of hiding company documents...yet).
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your snail mail correspondence, backed by federal law enforcing that privacy with downright draconian penalties should it be violated.
You have a reasonable expection of privacy when speaking on the phone... alas, that privacy has become a victim of 1980s anti-drug hysteria and the radical right agenda that has followed, one that now interprets a private communication as being 'property' of one's employer merely because it happened to be conducted using a piece of company equipment (the telephone)... at one end.
You should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in conducting correspondence via email, but again, the same flawed logic has been applied to extend property rights over the medium to include property rights over the content (your correspondence), merely because the medium is new (a computer network) and ignoring two centuries of precedent to the contrary in every other communications medium (including, until the 1980s, telephony).
It is unfortunate that you expect no privacy at work. You are certainly entitled to it... and your expectation shows that you have been unfortunate enought to swallow a particularly radical right-wing agenda hook, line, and sinker, to your own, and everyone elses, detriment.
So what happens when God messes up on bounds checking, or memory allocation for strings?
The universe uncurls from its current 3+1+6 configuration to a simple ten dimensional space-time continuum of lower overall energy. Depending on the divide error, one may end up with a simple 9+1 (9 spatial, 1 temporal dimension) universe, but for particularly eggregious errors we end up with 8+2, 7+3, 6+4, and even 5+5 configurations.
What one would want with 5 temporal and 5 spatial dimensions I don't know, but 5 temporal dimensions might allow me enough time to get my neighbors' Windows boxes free of SoBig and other sundry worms while at the same time allowing me to get that new Gentoo box built. Alas, at that point the universe will probably have to be rebooted anyway (which should be a comfort to those acquaintances forced to run the Redmond OS), but I digress.
It is true that a lot of software patents were already granted by the EPO. However, they were granted clearly against the letter of the current directive.
The EPO should be held financially accountable for any legal costs incurred by both sides (the patent holder AND the defendent), as well as any costs incurred as a result of lost or stifled business resulting from their violation of law in issuing these patents.
Then perhaps they would deign to obey the laws the rest of us are expected to.
I would say the same about the USPTO, but alas, our laws on this subject are in such disarray that the USPTO can wreck untold damage on the economy and not be in violation of a single statute, more's the pity.
Brazil is generally considered a third world country, as is Thailand.
Nowhere in the post was it remotely implied that Germany was third world.
Keep in mind third world != Sarajevo during mid-sieg (though Serbia, Bosnia, etc. certainly placed themselves firmly in the third world as a result of Milosevich's wars). There are plenty of modestly thriving third world countries whose standard of living is only low in comparison to the excesses of the affluent west (or affluent portions of the middle east).
This is the silliest thing I ever expected to read in a spam story...
pamcop's Haight theorizes that the increasingly sophisticated attacks suggest a link with organized crime, but admits he hasn't a shred of evidence.
Anyone else have a wilder guess?
Yes. It's Aliens launching a denial of service attack in advance of their assimilation of the human race. This is clear and obvious to the most casual observer, although I don't have a shred of evidence to support this notion.
and the pervasiveness of the mindset that ignorance and laziness should be pandered to, rather than fixed through education, epitomises this.
1) That's like saying when you design a car, you should make its operation as complicated as possible in order to force the user to learn how it works. Most people - not to mention engineers - will say that this is an insane design methodology.
No, its like saying when you want to drive a car, you should learn the basics on how to drive and the rules of the road. If your car breaks, either because of a mechanical error or because you ignore that funny eight-sided red sign you didn't understand, you have the option to learn to fix it yourself, or take it to a mechanic, or call AAA.
What is being proposed in the article is that we encourage people to drive without learning how, without knowing the rules of the road, and that we weld the hood shut so no one has the option of fixing, much less modifying or improving, their car...in the hopes that this will somehow obviate the need for people to learn a necessary skill.
Indeed the analogy can be taken further: there are distributions that do offer a dumbed down interface, support, etc. Just as a taxi or bus might convey one to their destination who hasn't bothered to learn to drive, so too might a Mandrake, Red Hat, or Knoppix allow someone to use GNU/Linux who can't be bothered to learn the basics. However, that is no reason to call for the rest of us to give up our customized cars and start taking the bus as well. It is enough that such distros are availabe to those who need the requisite crutches, and keep out of the way of those of us who do not (to mix my metaphors a bit).
How many times have Linus or others said that the goal for Linux is NOT to attack Microsoft's monopoly, but simply to provide a freely usable and stable UNIX-like operating system for anyone who wants it.
Exactly. This entire rant (the Article itself) is basically a characterization of the "People are confused by choice. We should get rid of democracy and diversity, and have one leader, one people, and one empire." Oops, guess I just ran afoul of Godwin.
All of this exemplified the "dumbing down of America" (which is really the dumbing down of the developed world, something Europeans are just starting to wake up to, I think, as this phenomenon is certainly no longer limited to the United States, if it ever was), and the pervasiveness of the mindset that ignorance and laziness should be pandered to, rather than fixed through education, epitomises this.
The point being that, yes, freedom does entail the responsibility and the requirement that you think for yourself. And yes, thinking is WORK. In other words, is Freedom antithetical to laziness? Absolutely. But it is far better to give up the allegiance of the lazy and illiterate than it is to give up our freedom of choice simply to make their lazy lives a little easier.
Of course, the reality is that this false dichotomy is exactly that: false. GNU/Linux neither requires, nor would benefit from, having less choice ("one desktop"), nor does failing to do so make it impossible to appease the lazy and illiterate if that is one's goals (and there are distributions which aim to do exactly that)... it is sufficient to have one or two defaults (KDE and/or Gnome), which is exactly what we have. I give my friends and family KDE and they are happy with it. I myself generally use KDE, but sometimes I get bored and decide to try out Gnome, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Flux, or something else. I enjoy that freedom, and I'm not going to give it up (or negate it) just to pander to the illiteracy or laziness of some reluctant ex-windows convert.
A default is enough, and almost every distribution under defaults to one desktop or another. Beyond that, the user can educate themselves and make a choice, or stick with the default, but the idea that those of us who prefer something other than the default (whatever it is... KDE or Gnome most likely) should give up our projects and devote our energy to working on or testing what others have chosen "on our behalf" is utter and complete nonsense.
1) We aren't out to destroy Microsoft, we're out to enhance our own freedom. Microsoft has become the enemy because they are out to destroy us, and to take away our freedom. 2) It isn't our responsibility to pander to the ignornance or laziness of others. It is their responsiblity to learn, or not, as they see fit. 3) Freedom has built into it responsibility... it is neither designed for, nor applicable to, those too lazy (or uninformed) to excersize it.
Then again, I always thought changing the verbiage from "Infammible" to "flammible" to appease the ignorance was a profoundly idiotic move...
This is all pretty amusing stuff, but I can't believe they left this story out:
I just wish the slashdot editors would check the submitted blurbs against the content of the articles, even superficially.
HP Doesn't appear to claim or remotely imply they might have bought licenses from SCO, or that they recognize SCO's outrageous claims in any sense whatsoever. Indeed, this article seems to indicate that they are ignoring SCO, as everyone else ought to as well (the trial will determine this, and the judgement, while virtually a foregone conclusion -- SCO loses, will determine what, if any, licensing fees anyone should pay.
HP LAST WEEK claimed that it doesn't infringe on the copyrights SCO claims it owns on Linux, according to a special edition of Terry Shannon's Shannon knows HPC newsletter.
The newsletter quoted Linux business strategist Mike Balma as saying at HP World that while HP didn't comment on law suits, HP "has found no infringement issues" using Linux.
The same newsletter claimed that HP has 3.2K Linux boxes installed throughout HP.
It seems rather clear that management at SCO talked to legal, who probably advised them that SCO's claims are frivolous and will not hold up in court, and not to pay. Ergo, HP claims it does not infringe on SCO's copyrights.
Or SCO looked at the Heise images, realized that they do not use the hardware platform the alleged infringing code is in, but rather Intel. (As an aside, since almost everyone uses Intel, Power PC, Alpha, or ARM architectures, that includes HP and 99.999% or more of all GNU/Linux deployments everywhere.)
HP certainly would have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by going along with SCO, so in light of this article it seems the blurb's innuendo is more than a little misplaced (hardly a first for slashdot, but still...). Indeed, quite the opposite is happening here: HP evaluated SCOs claims and likely filed their "invoice" right where it belonged, either under "pending litigation against litigious thugs trying to shake us down" or the more general Circular File.
In the interests of "full disclosure", how about signing your name to an accusation like that? At the very least, support it with something.
He (or she) did support their allegations with something: a reference to the web page of the fink project (who are making the accusations and presenting their evidence).
As to identifying themselves, in these days of barrotry and letigiousness, why the hell should they?
I on the other hand have no opinion on the veracity of these claims against OpenOSX... but, as no open or free project really has anything to gain by throwing around baseless allegations, it does bear watching.
I'm be interested to see how Microsoft react to this. E.g. Counter offers, as per the City of Munich decision to go with Linux desktops: Munich spurns Ballmer's rebates
Microsoft really screwed the pooch on this one.
A plethora of countries announce various free software and open source initiatives, emphesizing a transition away from foreign proprietary software to home-grown, or at leat home-enhanced, free and open software.
Microsoft panics, sends Balmer et. al. down to buy off politicians and entice officials with obscenely cheap ("dumping" prices) licenses, no activation requirements, and liberal sitewide licenses that expire in a few years.
Microsoft clearly believes it has offered these foolish governments something akin to "sucker lines" of cocain: a free (or very inexpensive) hit followed by the client paying through the nose for additional fixes.
Instead, all of these countries obtained the right to legally use Microsoft, for pennies on the dollar, for the time they needed to transition to a free and open environment. During this transition these countries would have had to run Microsoft products anyway, either dealing with piracy accusations or paying full price for licenses. It isn't like one can switch an entire country over to GNU/Linux overnight! Microsoft foolishly gave these governments extraordinarilly cheap licenses to run their products during this critical (and expensive) transition phase.
Now Microsoft cannot go after them and harass them for "piracy", or even earn a one-off full licensing fee for the duration of the transition (which almost certainly will require a year or two to complete, during which time these countries still have to have Microsoft licenses: licenses Redmond was so good to give away for pennies in their institutional panic).
Whether this is an example of third world brilliance outthinking their arrogant American counterparts (getting Microsoft to effectively subsidize their move to free software by selling them such inexpensive, limited time licenses, thereby decreasing their costs of transition dramatically), or just countries getting incredibly lucky as a result of Redmond's panic, I don't know. Probably a combination (not to mention examples of outright corruption, with corrupt politicians being replaced by less corrupt ones who revive these initiatives, examples of short sighted politicans balking when it comes time to pay the piper and renew licenses, instead renewing the free software initiatives they tabled earlier, and who knows how many other variations on this theme).
In any event, the irony is delicious. We as a community lamented the short sightedness of so many third world countries selling out to Microsoft in exchange for cheap licenses that would expire in a few years, when in fact Microsoft was being far too clever for their own good, helping to underwrite all these nations' transition to freeer platforms. They squandered their last chance to get licensing fees from these nations, and effectively did nothing to prevent them from transitioning away from their product anyway.
Or at least some of these nations, like Thailand and Brazil. Who knows how it will play out elsewhere, but for now I'm chortling with delicious glee.
I'm not sure it can be correctly called censorship - that requires a governmental entity.
That is a fucking myth, and I am sick and tired of hearing people parrot that nonsense. Saying a business can't censor because it isn't a government is akin to a black man saying he can't be racist because he is black. These are both examples of the same logical fallacy: just because a behavior is traditionally associated with one entity or group doesn't mean it is impossible for another entity or group to begin behaving in exactly the same behavior.
Obviously, anyone of any ethnicity is capable of becoming a racist, just as anyone with any power or influence over others is capable of engaging in censorship.
Responsible parents routinely censor what their kids see and hear. We as a society, by and large, find this to be an acceptable form of censorship.
Many religions routinely censor what their congregations are and are not allowed to see and hear (the Catholic church has had a censorship office for centuries, but they are hardly alone. The Mormons censor what they deam inappropriate for their membership, just as the Jehovah's Witnesses do, and I really don't need to cite example after example for Islam, do I?).
And finally, yes, many, many companies engage in censorship, both the obvious 'media' companies that bury stories they don't like or can't be bothered with, as well as other more subtle businesses (like Monsanto pressuring Fox News into not running a news story on how their hormone saturated milk was actively harmful to the health of children, an action that resulted in Fox News firing two reporters who refused to disavow their story, and said reporters winning a lawsuit against Fox News under Florida's whistleblower laws).
Anyone with any form of power over another, be it parental, religious, corporate, or governmental, has the power in some capacity to censor information available to those less powerful. It is a telling, and appalling, commentary on our culture to observe just how common this sort of censorship is, and how eager we have become to silence those with opposing viewpoints, rather than to argue the counterpoint (as I am doing here, for example).
Your Libertarian Newspeak definition of censorship is plain wrong. You may have the right to censor what comes across your network, and you may chose to excersize that right, but don't think for a moment you aren't engaging in censorship, or think you can convince the rest of the world (a few gullible moderators aside) you are not simply by trying to spin your verbiage.
And lest there be any doubt as to what censorship is:
censorship n.
1. The act, process, or practice of censoring.
2. The office or authority of a Roman censor.
3. Psychology. Prevention of disturbing or painful thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness except in a disguised form.
censor
1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.
2. An official, as in the armed forces, who examines personal mail and official dispatches to remove information considered secret or a risk to security.
3. One that condemns or censures.
4. One of two officials in ancient Rome responsible for taking the public census and supervising public behavior and morals.
5. Psychology. The agent in the unconscious that is responsible for censorship.
tr.v. censored, censoring, censors
To examine and expurgate.
(source: dictionary.com)
You will notice, that with the exception of historical references to Rome, none of these definitions presuppose governmental authority over just plain authority, indeed, quite the contrary.
No. They bought it very quietly, and kept the fact that they did so very close to their chest for quite some time.
Microsoft, in contrast, held a news conference. (slightly toung in cheeck... they at the very least issued a press release, and may well have contented themself with that).
Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are the two backers of the SCO FUD and Fraud, but Sun was considerably quieter about the fact than Microsoft was. Not quiet enough, probably, as that little stunt may well push their business further into the toilet as well, whereas Microsoft will likely come out of it relatively unscathed, at least until we have an administration in Washington interested in upholding the law again.
What we need is for someone to force SCO to reveal the allegedly infinging code - in public, not under NDA. Cannot someone get a ruling that, since it will have to be disclosed in court, it should be disclosed now?
Que Red Hat... oops, already done. This is all in the works, and the court will amost certainly require the alleged code be revealed publicly within a few months. End of SCO.
There is almost certainly no infringing code whatsoever. But, in the extraoridinarilly unlikely event (statistically indistinguishable from 0.0, I suspect) there is infringing code, it will be removed immediately upon revelation, and $CO will be able to collect on $0.00 damages, as they have done the exact opposite that the law requires (work to mitigate the damages), trying through deception and secrecy to maximize any damages. Which does not fly, even in these dismal times. Never has, probably never will, and certainly won't for SCO. Their hands are "dirty," the code they reference has already been declared public domain by a court of law in an earlier AT&T v. BSD case IIRC, and if not, comes from so many textbooks (including at least one that places no restrictions on reuse of the code) as to be common knowledge. Their "trade secrets" case is dead in the water, and they have no copyright case.
Red Hat has filed to force them to reveal the alleged code... they will have to do so, and failure will result in contempt of court and/or fraud charges. I.e. if they don't reveal it to red hat when so ordered, and then try to use it in another court case, Darl et. al. will be having a deep, meaningful relationship with Bubba, compliments of their own contempt of court charges. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.00.
I've always thought it strange that the kernel is in the portage tree. I understand that certain packages depend on certain kernels, but I usually just download the kernel and install like I always did.
You can certainly do that if you like, with no ill effects. Gentoo is highly standards compliant where it makes sense, and makes reasonable extentions/extrapolations where the standards fall short. It is certainly easier to integrate a vanilla kernel into Gentoo than it is, say, Mandrake or Red Hat (though to be fair I'm sure they'll have their own, patched versions of 2.4.22 out very soon).
However, when one is administering fifty or a hundred identical Gentoo boxes (or just 20, for that matter), it is nice to use the distribution's internal package management tool to manage software revisions for everything, including the kernel. This has advantages of, for example, being able to quickly deploy a new kernel ('sh myglobalscript.sh emerge vanilla-sources', where myglobalscript.sh does an ssh into all of the requisite boxes and runs the command I pass it), and manage it along with the rest of the software on the system in one seamless manner.
This certainly isn't the only way to do it, but when you're managing in-house software, kernel revisions, and dozens of other important packages, having one interface (portage) to manage all of it is very handy. And, unlike many packaging systems, portage simply installs the tarball and gets out of the way (meaning one doesn't have to jump through lots of non-standard hoops in actually compiling and deploying the kernel). YMMV of course, but I find having the kernel, even the vanilla kernel, in portage to be quite useful.
I ditched SendMail because it made me uncomfortable as an administrator. Yes, I could get it working "good enough" that I wasn't a relay, but because of the arcane command file structure I wasn't satisfied that it was tuned the way I wanted it. (BTW, I had hand-coded a sendmail.cf from scratch before, and made it work, but that was when I had a whole day to spend on the project.)
I agree, sendmail has a steep learning curve, and I don't have to change mail settings often enough for it to sink in and become instinctual knowledge the way most other things have. For that reason, as well as the security issues others (and the article) have raised, I too have switched to postfix.
However, a friend of mine who administers numerous networks for clients swears by sendmail, and claims that it is far easier to learn and administer than the one, thick O'Reilly book on sendmail would have you believe. Indeed, he accuses the book of actually obfuscating administrative techniques for sendmail, to the point of calling it a "crime against sendmail and humanity." (He is sometimes prone to the melodramatic).
I haven't delved as deeply into sendmail as he has, so I cannot personally confirm that, once the epiphany hits, sendmail becomes dramatically more straightforward than the Sendmail book's coverage, but I do concur that, with my moderate knowledge and a copy of said book on my bookshelf, the current state of the software and documentation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of getting things going fairly quickly and simply, which programs like qmail, postfix, and others address nicely.
It is, however, IMHO a shame to give up some of the more advanced features of sendmail (and its amazing flexibility), such as milters, so here's hoping they either work their way into postfix et. al. in a more accessible fashion, or that (assuming my friend is accurate in his allegations) someone writes a more accessible book on the subject of sendmail.
In the meantime, the O'Reilly book seems to be the only book on the subject, so if it is really the reason so many of us get discouraged with sendmail and move on to easier, if less flexible, MTAs, then perhaps a second book covering the subject would be in order.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
On the contrary, the way the BSD attribution of the malloc code was removed from Linux is exactly the same as the way the BSD attribution of the BPF code was removed from SCO Unix
I am a little skeptical that that is true. The examples provided are text book examples (literally), and may not have been copied from BSD at all (though I suspect they were in fact cribbed, based upon comments embedded in them). Even if they were, they may (I do not know this to be true, but it is certainly plausible) licensed under the current BSD license, which would get both SCO and SGI off the hook for this particular infraction. However, SCO has apparently is alleged to have been copying other code rather profusely and without regard to license, including GPLed code (according to one former employee)... this is indeed a horse of an entirely different color.
This is in contrast to SGI, as far as I know, and certainly in direct opposition to Linux, BSD, and other free software projects, which have been very conscientious in avoiding copyright violations wherever it is even suspected.
However, you are correct that SGI could, concievably, also be in trouble if they inappropriately removed copyright notices and attribution. That is, if the BSD folks chose to prosecute them, which seems unlikely as SGI has been a pretty good 'citizens' of the free software community. In contrast to SCO, who has been anything but. And since copyright, unlike trademark, can be selectively enforced... well, I'd just like to say "Thank you for Playing, SCO. You do not pass go, you do not collect $200, you go directly to jail, and you do not even get a lousy copy of our home game." I don't think SGI has a lot to worry about (particularly if they correct it now)...SCO on the other hand is absolute, complete, and total toast.
SGI might get into trouble over it. Linux developers and distributors who accepted the code from SGI in good faith, and removed it as soon as they noticed it was old Unix code (before it was revealed by SCO), would not be any trouble.
Absolutely. That was my point. The use of any infringing code within Linux (if there ever was any infringement) was entirely accidental and, based upon what has been revealed thus far, has long since been removed.
I mean, this isn't about just "voice over internet".... it's about a phone service that happens to use the net.
So... either they should have to follow regulations like any other phone company..... OR... the phone companies should be released from their regulatory obligations, at least with respect to the voip providers, so they can operate on equal footing.
You ignore a fundamental difference. Local telcos own a monopoly over the local copper cable running to people's homes. As a monopoly they must be regulated, nationalized into a public works, or we are left with a monopoly market running amock (remember, monopoly markets are the least effecient... even more ineffecient than government and arguably more ineffecient than communism itself).
There is a huge difference between a company that essentially offers a software (or firmware) service over the internet that happens to transmit and receive electrically encoded voice data, and one which owns the local DSLAMS, the local copper running into your home, and can leverage that local infrastructure monopoly in an anticompetative manner if they are not regulated.
The idea that the regulations designed to hold a local telco monopoly in check should apply to a competely unrelated business that provides what is essentially a software service via an entirely different infrastructure (one that entails no monopoly, at that) is ludricous.
One hopes the law is written such that (a) this is a federal, not a state matter and (b) such that telco's are targeted, and broader software services are not.
Otherwise you'll see AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber, and other services targeted the moment they can provide audio and video conferencing, and seamless communication with old POTS phones.
And that would really chill innovation, as much as any Microsoft monopoly could ever dream of.
Now, reading the replies on this article, I find it remarkable no-one has noted this. No offence, but even when code is licensed under the BSD license, that license has to be obeyed. You can't remove copyright claims because you think that's necessary.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
Second, it depends on WHICH BSD license you look at. The old one with the advertising clause wasn't GPL compatible, and if that is the only free license the code was licensed under, then Linux had a (very mild) problem. If, however, it has also been released under the current BSD license, then Linux never had any problem to begin with.
Either way, Linux has no problem now. The offending code, it turns out, has long since been removed for reasons of ugliness. It is not a part of the current 2.4.2x kernels, nor of the 2.6 series.
If there is a licensing issue (and mistakes can happen) it has been cleared up in record time... negative severa scores of days, in fact. Try doing that in the proprietary world... with or without a time machine.
It doesn't matter if you knew it was stolen because the law assumes that you did. Same thing here, "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" has been quoted so many times i couldn't even tell you who said it first
If you buys stolen goods without the knowledge they were stolen, you foreit the goods (which is just if not entirely fair to you they buyer, as they do clearly belong to someone else).
Once again, I will reiterate. Ignorance of the law is never an excuse ("I didn't know hitting him on the head with a baseball bat was illegal!" doesn't fly), but ignorance that something was done ("I didn't know John Wayne Gacy buried the corpse on my property!") almost always does equate to innocence. Clearly, "I didn't know I was buying stolen goods" as a criminal case should fall in the second category (you had no idea you were buying something that was stolen), and just as clearly it should fall into the first with respect to civil law (you don't get to keep the stolen good: it belongs to someone else and they deserve to have it back).
Copyright, as it turns out, is murkier (and IMHO pretty unjust: what if someone knowingly insinuates their code into your project, then sues you for accidentally violating their copyright? Under the law, for civil charges, it sounds like they win even though your intention, and any reasonable interpretation of your actions, was innocent). For civil damages you don't even have to know you've done anything wrong (I still have yet to see a clear answer on whether charges of contributing to someone else's violation of copyright can be unwitting and still lead to monetary sanctions or not), but for criminal charges you must in fact have meant to commit the act.
If in fact you are guilty of a crime for having unknowingly bought stolen goods, and if in fact the law is written to pressupose guilt automatically, then the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" is simply untrue on its face. Even in these disgusting times I doubt that is the case, and if it is, I doubt it would hold up to constitutional review. If it in fact does hold up to constitutional review (given the current surpreme court, as packed from the radical right, it wouldn't surprise me all that much), then everything, and I mean everything, that this country purports to stand for is an utter, complete farce.
Now I admit, most likely, she was downloading copyrighted music, and therefore in trouble, but if she claims she didn't, and can explain away her sharing as the legal kind, then the onus shoud be on the RIAA to prove otherwise, if they can't, and the judge isn't just another coporate worshiper, then she may just get away with this and set a very nice precident, something along the lines of, you actually have to file a suit and ask the judge to let you subpeona those records before getting them.
The thing is, she is entitled to due process whether or not she is innocent or guilty.
The fact that she is very plausably innocent (though quite possibly not) should serve to underscore this point to the unwashed masses whose kneejerk response is to scream for the pirate's head on a platter hours before the court papers are even filed, but it should have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on her contention that subpeanas being issued without court order identifying individuals for acts of potential barratory by a cartel are inappropraite and probably unconstitutional.
Copyright law is appalling in that one can be put into prison for 5 years for doing something utterly unwittingly and unknowingly. If in fact one can go to prison for utterly unwittingly and unknowingly contributing to someone elses violation of the law (who themselves may be doing so utterly unwittingly and unknowingly), then we really are living in a police state the awful powers of which we are just now waking up to.
It has been rather obvious to anyone in the digital world that copyright is the tool for oppression and censorship of those in the developed world (in the latter 20th century and 21st centuries, at least), but to think that people can be imprisoned for events to which they are peripherally bound without their knowledge is truly unthinkable. I'm not talking about ignorance of the law, which has never been an excuse, but ignorance that an action has even been committed (by oneself, or someone one has a connection to that makes them an unwitting contributor).
Certainly if this woman didn't know Kazaa was sharing her files with others on the internet, she not only wasn't aware of the copying that was going on, she wasn't even aware that she was contributing to the potential act.
Any system that would hold someone in such circumstances guilty of anything or hold them accountable for even one penny of damages, much less imprison them, is a system that needs to be scrapped immediately and, if necessary, forcefully. (to my knowledge, however, contributory copyright infringement does require knowledge of the fact, or at least "any sensible person should have known", but IANAL and I could be wrong. If I am, it is past time to emigrate or take up arms, and the former is a much higher percentage game than the latter, so I'm outta here)
Copyright is a strict liability offense. This means that civil copyright violations do not have to be willful. A willful violation is more serious than a non-willful violation. Copyright law raises the maximum salutatory damages from $30K to $150K if the action is shown to be willful.
Good God that's appalling. You are correct... copyright law is far more evil and perverse than even I believed. The idea that someone can sneak into your office, use your copy machine to illegally copy and distribute a book, and then get you thrown into jail for up to five years and fined $250,000 per offense is utterly and completely unjust, and worthy, quite frankly, of a violent change to the system (if need be).
Or is this limited to the copyright violator? If so, my point stands. It is not the unwitting user who has accidentally, and unknowingly, made a file accessible to others to download who has violated copyright law, it is the person actually doing the dowloading.
So, unless contributing to another's act of copyright violation doesn't require knowledge (which means the scenerio I outlined above is possible, in which case we should all be polishing our revolutionary guns [toung in cheeck, folk, toung in cheek. Holster those handcuffs, Mr. Spook.]), then the unwitting Kazaa user whose files someone else is copying is still off the hook.
Otherwise, quite frankly, any use of any computer within the boarders of the United States carries with it an unacceptable level of liability, and we should all either relocate to a saner jurisdiction or go back to using abicusses.
this person knows how to rip her own music from CD. She's not using Kazaa to listen to her collection.
This isn't Joe Blow downloading songs and thinking that he has to use Kazaa to listen to them.
"This person knows how to drive a car. She's not using her Corvett to drive down the highway."
Did you even think to semantically parse the statement you just made?
Of course she knows how to rip her own CDs. A friend probably showed her this nifty program to rip her CDs onto her hard drive (for convinience... I have almost all of my music on my hard drive in ogg format because it is easier and more pleasant to have all of my music at my fingertips than to fish around for CDs every 42 minutes, and NO, I absolutely do not under any circumstances engage in illegal file sharing), and then showed her another (or the same) nifty program to play them back. That program happened to be Kazaa, and it is perfectly likely that she had no idea it was making a chunk of her hard drive (and all of her music) available for others to copy.
Umm... since the last decade of the 18th century (in the USA, anyway).
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance of the activity almost always is.[1] It goes to intent, it goes to motive, it goes to opportunity. If someone buries a body on your property without your knowledge, you are generally not tried for collusion with the murderer. If you are, and you can demonstrate that you didn't know it was happening, you are most certainly acquitted.
If many people are using Kazaa because they believe they need it to play back their own, legally ripped mp3s, then the RIAA doesn't have much of a case. Copyright violations have to be willful and intentional to receive most of the punitive rewards, and with computers things are even murkier, as trojan horse programs (which Kazaa arguably is, in this context), worms, and viruses often hijack people's computers to do things they have absolutely no idea are being done.
Or are we going to arrest everyone whose computer has been comprimised by SoBig.F or whatever it's latest iteration is, for DOSing Microsloth's web services? After all, "ignorance is no excuse..."
[1]Willful, or negligent, ignorance of course is an exception. Having a good idea someone is doing something neferious, but saying "I don't want to know!" isn't enough to get one off. However, true lack of knowledge that something bad is going on, even on one's own property, is in most cases a valid excuse. However, a computer user not understanding what a trojan or trojan-esque program is doing on their computer hardly qualifies... until we have licensing for the use of a computer system, with basic computer-education to insure everyone is expected to have a certain level of knowledge, it is clear the law does not require that people know (or necessarilly be responsible for) anything their computer is doing without their knowledge.
And I don't see even this government stooping to licensing computer use anytime soon.
The only thing Windows does reliably is fail. Whoever decides to run a nuclear plant's safety monitoring system or a civil rail's monitoring and safety system on a Windows platform should be dragged into the street, shot, burned, pissed on, disemboweled and then hanged.
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That is truly childish. The real assholes at SCO are the suits and money-grubbing lawyers responsible for this charade. A code monkey in the trenches who needs a job to pay the bills isn't necessarily an enemy of open source.
... frankly, I don't think it is beneath Microsoft either, though for now they seem to be content to fight their battles by proxy.
We do not know for a fact that the "real" assholes are solely SCO's money-grubbing suits and lawyers. It has been speculated before on what the possible ramifications would be if a SCO or a Microsoft were to deliberately seed the community with Trojan programmers who deliberately lace the kernel with illegal code. While pretty much everyone with an understanding of the free software and open source approach agrees that the very openness of the process, and the traceability of every line of code through historical archives provides a high level of protection and auditability of most free software projects (including the Linux kernel), a private company such as Red Hat, Mandrake, or Joe's proprietary Linux Apps might not enjoy the same level of robustness when faced with that particular kind of denial of service attack.
That being the case, not hiring anyone who has ever worked at SCO (either since X date, as these folks have chosen to do, or ever in their career), does provide some level of protection against such a racket. I think we all know that this scenerio isn't beneath SCO
I certainly wouldn't risk hiring someone who had continued to work at SCO since Darl McBride took over. And that ignores the risk of gratiuitious litigation, which is another SCO characteristic that could very justifiably lead one to believe that hiring anyone who had ever worked at SCO, nee Caldera, puts the company at an unacceptable level of risk.
You may disapprove of their caution, or spin it as "childish," but IMHO I think the caution here is quite warranted, for at least the two reasons cited above, and probably others as well.
Guilt by association is a slippery slope, remember Joe McCarthy?
Yes it is, as we are being painfully reminded of beneath the heels of Baby Bush's administration. But, lest we forget, ignoring the reality of associated people often sharing similiar agendas is tantamount to living in denial and yields terrible consiquences as well. Keeping potential SCO trojan workers, or innocents who become a pretext for litigation because they once worked at SCO, at arms length is arguably both wise and called for. And while that wisdom, or its effectiveness, may be debated, such caution is certainly not "childish."
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
... alas, that privacy has become a victim of 1980s anti-drug hysteria and the radical right agenda that has followed, one that now interprets a private communication as being 'property' of one's employer merely because it happened to be conducted using a piece of company equipment (the telephone) ... at one end.
... and your expectation shows that you have been unfortunate enought to swallow a particularly radical right-wing agenda hook, line, and sinker, to your own, and everyone elses, detriment.
Then you expect to work for felons. Opening a piece of US Mail not addressed to you is a felony, whether the envelope is sitting in your private home mailbox or on your bosses desk. Even the worst libertarian excesses of the 1980s War on Drugs, as presided over by Edwin Meese never changed that particular aspect of the law. These excesses, which encouraged such nonsensical interpretations of property rights to include invading the privacy of anyone who happens to be on said property (taken to its logical conclusion, your employer should have the right to strip search you on "his" property), are in fact in opposition to 200+ years of statutory and common law in the United States.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy on your person (and, thankfully, our only somewhat brainwashed culture continues to agree...so your boss cannot order you strip searched on suspicion of hiding company documents...yet).
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your snail mail correspondence, backed by federal law enforcing that privacy with downright draconian penalties should it be violated.
You have a reasonable expection of privacy when speaking on the phone
You should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in conducting correspondence via email, but again, the same flawed logic has been applied to extend property rights over the medium to include property rights over the content (your correspondence), merely because the medium is new (a computer network) and ignoring two centuries of precedent to the contrary in every other communications medium (including, until the 1980s, telephony).
It is unfortunate that you expect no privacy at work. You are certainly entitled to it
So what happens when God messes up on bounds checking, or memory allocation for strings?
The universe uncurls from its current 3+1+6 configuration to a simple ten dimensional space-time continuum of lower overall energy. Depending on the divide error, one may end up with a simple 9+1 (9 spatial, 1 temporal dimension) universe, but for particularly eggregious errors we end up with 8+2, 7+3, 6+4, and even 5+5 configurations.
What one would want with 5 temporal and 5 spatial dimensions I don't know, but 5 temporal dimensions might allow me enough time to get my neighbors' Windows boxes free of SoBig and other sundry worms while at the same time allowing me to get that new Gentoo box built. Alas, at that point the universe will probably have to be rebooted anyway (which should be a comfort to those acquaintances forced to run the Redmond OS), but I digress.
It is true that a lot of software patents were already granted by the EPO. However, they were granted clearly against the letter of the current directive.
The EPO should be held financially accountable for any legal costs incurred by both sides (the patent holder AND the defendent), as well as any costs incurred as a result of lost or stifled business resulting from their violation of law in issuing these patents.
Then perhaps they would deign to obey the laws the rest of us are expected to.
I would say the same about the USPTO, but alas, our laws on this subject are in such disarray that the USPTO can wreck untold damage on the economy and not be in violation of a single statute, more's the pity.
Brazil & Germany are hardly 3rd world countries.
Brazil is generally considered a third world country, as is Thailand.
Nowhere in the post was it remotely implied that Germany was third world.
Keep in mind third world != Sarajevo during mid-sieg (though Serbia, Bosnia, etc. certainly placed themselves firmly in the third world as a result of Milosevich's wars). There are plenty of modestly thriving third world countries whose standard of living is only low in comparison to the excesses of the affluent west (or affluent portions of the middle east).
This is the silliest thing I ever expected to read in a spam story...
pamcop's Haight theorizes that the increasingly sophisticated attacks suggest a link with organized crime, but admits he hasn't a shred of evidence.
Anyone else have a wilder guess?
Yes. It's Aliens launching a denial of service attack in advance of their assimilation of the human race. This is clear and obvious to the most casual observer, although I don't have a shred of evidence to support this notion.
and the pervasiveness of the mindset that ignorance and laziness should be pandered to, rather than fixed through education, epitomises this.
1) That's like saying when you design a car, you should make its operation as complicated as possible in order to force the user to learn how it works. Most people - not to mention engineers - will say that this is an insane design methodology.
No, its like saying when you want to drive a car, you should learn the basics on how to drive and the rules of the road. If your car breaks, either because of a mechanical error or because you ignore that funny eight-sided red sign you didn't understand, you have the option to learn to fix it yourself, or take it to a mechanic, or call AAA.
What is being proposed in the article is that we encourage people to drive without learning how, without knowing the rules of the road, and that we weld the hood shut so no one has the option of fixing, much less modifying or improving, their car...in the hopes that this will somehow obviate the need for people to learn a necessary skill.
Indeed the analogy can be taken further: there are distributions that do offer a dumbed down interface, support, etc. Just as a taxi or bus might convey one to their destination who hasn't bothered to learn to drive, so too might a Mandrake, Red Hat, or Knoppix allow someone to use GNU/Linux who can't be bothered to learn the basics. However, that is no reason to call for the rest of us to give up our customized cars and start taking the bus as well. It is enough that such distros are availabe to those who need the requisite crutches, and keep out of the way of those of us who do not (to mix my metaphors a bit).
How many times have Linus or others said that the goal for Linux is NOT to attack Microsoft's monopoly, but simply to provide a freely usable and stable UNIX-like operating system for anyone who wants it.
... it is sufficient to have one or two defaults (KDE and/or Gnome), which is exactly what we have. I give my friends and family KDE and they are happy with it. I myself generally use KDE, but sometimes I get bored and decide to try out Gnome, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Flux, or something else. I enjoy that freedom, and I'm not going to give it up (or negate it) just to pander to the illiteracy or laziness of some reluctant ex-windows convert.
... KDE or Gnome most likely) should give up our projects and devote our energy to working on or testing what others have chosen "on our behalf" is utter and complete nonsense.
... it is neither designed for, nor applicable to, those too lazy (or uninformed) to excersize it.
Exactly. This entire rant (the Article itself) is basically a characterization of the "People are confused by choice. We should get rid of democracy and diversity, and have one leader, one people, and one empire." Oops, guess I just ran afoul of Godwin.
All of this exemplified the "dumbing down of America" (which is really the dumbing down of the developed world, something Europeans are just starting to wake up to, I think, as this phenomenon is certainly no longer limited to the United States, if it ever was), and the pervasiveness of the mindset that ignorance and laziness should be pandered to, rather than fixed through education, epitomises this.
The point being that, yes, freedom does entail the responsibility and the requirement that you think for yourself. And yes, thinking is WORK. In other words, is Freedom antithetical to laziness? Absolutely. But it is far better to give up the allegiance of the lazy and illiterate than it is to give up our freedom of choice simply to make their lazy lives a little easier.
Of course, the reality is that this false dichotomy is exactly that: false. GNU/Linux neither requires, nor would benefit from, having less choice ("one desktop"), nor does failing to do so make it impossible to appease the lazy and illiterate if that is one's goals (and there are distributions which aim to do exactly that)
A default is enough, and almost every distribution under defaults to one desktop or another. Beyond that, the user can educate themselves and make a choice, or stick with the default, but the idea that those of us who prefer something other than the default (whatever it is
1) We aren't out to destroy Microsoft, we're out to enhance our own freedom. Microsoft has become the enemy because they are out to destroy us, and to take away our freedom.
2) It isn't our responsibility to pander to the ignornance or laziness of others. It is their responsiblity to learn, or not, as they see fit.
3) Freedom has built into it responsibility
Then again, I always thought changing the verbiage from "Infammible" to "flammible" to appease the ignorance was a profoundly idiotic move...
This is all pretty amusing stuff, but I can't believe they left this story out:
I just wish the slashdot editors would check the submitted blurbs against the content of the articles, even superficially.
HP Doesn't appear to claim or remotely imply they might have bought licenses from SCO, or that they recognize SCO's outrageous claims in any sense whatsoever. Indeed, this article seems to indicate that they are ignoring SCO, as everyone else ought to as well (the trial will determine this, and the judgement, while virtually a foregone conclusion -- SCO loses, will determine what, if any, licensing fees anyone should pay.
HP LAST WEEK claimed that it doesn't infringe on the copyrights SCO claims it owns on Linux, according to a special edition of Terry Shannon's Shannon knows HPC newsletter.
The newsletter quoted Linux business strategist Mike Balma as saying at HP World that while HP didn't comment on law suits, HP "has found no infringement issues" using Linux.
The same newsletter claimed that HP has 3.2K Linux boxes installed throughout HP.
It seems rather clear that management at SCO talked to legal, who probably advised them that SCO's claims are frivolous and will not hold up in court, and not to pay. Ergo, HP claims it does not infringe on SCO's copyrights.
Or SCO looked at the Heise images, realized that they do not use the hardware platform the alleged infringing code is in, but rather Intel. (As an aside, since almost everyone uses Intel, Power PC, Alpha, or ARM architectures, that includes HP and 99.999% or more of all GNU/Linux deployments everywhere.)
HP certainly would have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by going along with SCO, so in light of this article it seems the blurb's innuendo is more than a little misplaced (hardly a first for slashdot, but still...). Indeed, quite the opposite is happening here: HP evaluated SCOs claims and likely filed their "invoice" right where it belonged, either under "pending litigation against litigious thugs trying to shake us down" or the more general Circular File.
In the interests of "full disclosure", how about signing your name to an accusation like that? At the very least, support it with something.
... but, as no open or free project really has anything to gain by throwing around baseless allegations, it does bear watching.
He (or she) did support their allegations with something: a reference to the web page of the fink project (who are making the accusations and presenting their evidence).
As to identifying themselves, in these days of barrotry and letigiousness, why the hell should they?
I on the other hand have no opinion on the veracity of these claims against OpenOSX
Microsoft really screwed the pooch on this one.
Whether this is an example of third world brilliance outthinking their arrogant American counterparts (getting Microsoft to effectively subsidize their move to free software by selling them such inexpensive, limited time licenses, thereby decreasing their costs of transition dramatically), or just countries getting incredibly lucky as a result of Redmond's panic, I don't know. Probably a combination (not to mention examples of outright corruption, with corrupt politicians being replaced by less corrupt ones who revive these initiatives, examples of short sighted politicans balking when it comes time to pay the piper and renew licenses, instead renewing the free software initiatives they tabled earlier, and who knows how many other variations on this theme).
In any event, the irony is delicious. We as a community lamented the short sightedness of so many third world countries selling out to Microsoft in exchange for cheap licenses that would expire in a few years, when in fact Microsoft was being far too clever for their own good, helping to underwrite all these nations' transition to freeer platforms. They squandered their last chance to get licensing fees from these nations, and effectively did nothing to prevent them from transitioning away from their product anyway.
Or at least some of these nations, like Thailand and Brazil. Who knows how it will play out elsewhere, but for now I'm chortling with delicious glee.
I'm not sure it can be correctly called censorship - that requires a governmental entity.
That is a fucking myth, and I am sick and tired of hearing people parrot that nonsense. Saying a business can't censor because it isn't a government is akin to a black man saying he can't be racist because he is black. These are both examples of the same logical fallacy: just because a behavior is traditionally associated with one entity or group doesn't mean it is impossible for another entity or group to begin behaving in exactly the same behavior.
Obviously, anyone of any ethnicity is capable of becoming a racist, just as anyone with any power or influence over others is capable of engaging in censorship.
Responsible parents routinely censor what their kids see and hear. We as a society, by and large, find this to be an acceptable form of censorship.
Many religions routinely censor what their congregations are and are not allowed to see and hear (the Catholic church has had a censorship office for centuries, but they are hardly alone. The Mormons censor what they deam inappropriate for their membership, just as the Jehovah's Witnesses do, and I really don't need to cite example after example for Islam, do I?).
And finally, yes, many, many companies engage in censorship, both the obvious 'media' companies that bury stories they don't like or can't be bothered with, as well as other more subtle businesses (like Monsanto pressuring Fox News into not running a news story on how their hormone saturated milk was actively harmful to the health of children, an action that resulted in Fox News firing two reporters who refused to disavow their story, and said reporters winning a lawsuit against Fox News under Florida's whistleblower laws).
Anyone with any form of power over another, be it parental, religious, corporate, or governmental, has the power in some capacity to censor information available to those less powerful. It is a telling, and appalling, commentary on our culture to observe just how common this sort of censorship is, and how eager we have become to silence those with opposing viewpoints, rather than to argue the counterpoint (as I am doing here, for example).
Your Libertarian Newspeak definition of censorship is plain wrong. You may have the right to censor what comes across your network, and you may chose to excersize that right, but don't think for a moment you aren't engaging in censorship, or think you can convince the rest of the world (a few gullible moderators aside) you are not simply by trying to spin your verbiage.
And lest there be any doubt as to what censorship is:
censorship
n.
1. The act, process, or practice of censoring.
2. The office or authority of a Roman censor.
3. Psychology. Prevention of disturbing or painful thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness except in a disguised form.
censor
1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.
2. An official, as in the armed forces, who examines personal mail and official dispatches to remove information considered secret or a risk to security.
3. One that condemns or censures.
4. One of two officials in ancient Rome responsible for taking the public census and supervising public behavior and morals.
5. Psychology. The agent in the unconscious that is responsible for censorship.
tr.v. censored, censoring, censors
To examine and expurgate.
(source: dictionary.com)
You will notice, that with the exception of historical references to Rome, none of these definitions presuppose governmental authority over just plain authority, indeed, quite the contrary.
Sun Microsystems? :)
... they at the very least issued a press release, and may well have contented themself with that).
No. They bought it very quietly, and kept the fact that they did so very close to their chest for quite some time.
Microsoft, in contrast, held a news conference. (slightly toung in cheeck
Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are the two backers of the SCO FUD and Fraud, but Sun was considerably quieter about the fact than Microsoft was. Not quiet enough, probably, as that little stunt may well push their business further into the toilet as well, whereas Microsoft will likely come out of it relatively unscathed, at least until we have an administration in Washington interested in upholding the law again.
What we need is for someone to force SCO to reveal the allegedly infinging code - in public, not under NDA. Cannot someone get a ruling that, since it will have to be disclosed in court, it should be disclosed now?
... oops, already done. This is all in the works, and the court will amost certainly require the alleged code be revealed publicly within a few months. End of SCO.
... they will have to do so, and failure will result in contempt of court and/or fraud charges. I.e. if they don't reveal it to red hat when so ordered, and then try to use it in another court case, Darl et. al. will be having a deep, meaningful relationship with Bubba, compliments of their own contempt of court charges. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.00.
Que Red Hat
There is almost certainly no infringing code whatsoever. But, in the extraoridinarilly unlikely event (statistically indistinguishable from 0.0, I suspect) there is infringing code, it will be removed immediately upon revelation, and $CO will be able to collect on $0.00 damages, as they have done the exact opposite that the law requires (work to mitigate the damages), trying through deception and secrecy to maximize any damages. Which does not fly, even in these dismal times. Never has, probably never will, and certainly won't for SCO. Their hands are "dirty," the code they reference has already been declared public domain by a court of law in an earlier AT&T v. BSD case IIRC, and if not, comes from so many textbooks (including at least one that places no restrictions on reuse of the code) as to be common knowledge. Their "trade secrets" case is dead in the water, and they have no copyright case.
Red Hat has filed to force them to reveal the alleged code
I've always thought it strange that the kernel is in the portage tree. I understand that certain packages depend on certain kernels, but I usually just download the kernel and install like I always did.
You can certainly do that if you like, with no ill effects. Gentoo is highly standards compliant where it makes sense, and makes reasonable extentions/extrapolations where the standards fall short. It is certainly easier to integrate a vanilla kernel into Gentoo than it is, say, Mandrake or Red Hat (though to be fair I'm sure they'll have their own, patched versions of 2.4.22 out very soon).
However, when one is administering fifty or a hundred identical Gentoo boxes (or just 20, for that matter), it is nice to use the distribution's internal package management tool to manage software revisions for everything, including the kernel. This has advantages of, for example, being able to quickly deploy a new kernel ('sh myglobalscript.sh emerge vanilla-sources', where myglobalscript.sh does an ssh into all of the requisite boxes and runs the command I pass it), and manage it along with the rest of the software on the system in one seamless manner.
This certainly isn't the only way to do it, but when you're managing in-house software, kernel revisions, and dozens of other important packages, having one interface (portage) to manage all of it is very handy. And, unlike many packaging systems, portage simply installs the tarball and gets out of the way (meaning one doesn't have to jump through lots of non-standard hoops in actually compiling and deploying the kernel). YMMV of course, but I find having the kernel, even the vanilla kernel, in portage to be quite useful.
I ditched SendMail because it made me uncomfortable as an administrator. Yes, I could get it working "good enough" that I wasn't a relay, but because of the arcane command file structure I wasn't satisfied that it was tuned the way I wanted it. (BTW, I had hand-coded a sendmail.cf from scratch before, and made it work, but that was when I had a whole day to spend on the project.)
I agree, sendmail has a steep learning curve, and I don't have to change mail settings often enough for it to sink in and become instinctual knowledge the way most other things have. For that reason, as well as the security issues others (and the article) have raised, I too have switched to postfix.
However, a friend of mine who administers numerous networks for clients swears by sendmail, and claims that it is far easier to learn and administer than the one, thick O'Reilly book on sendmail would have you believe. Indeed, he accuses the book of actually obfuscating administrative techniques for sendmail, to the point of calling it a "crime against sendmail and humanity." (He is sometimes prone to the melodramatic).
I haven't delved as deeply into sendmail as he has, so I cannot personally confirm that, once the epiphany hits, sendmail becomes dramatically more straightforward than the Sendmail book's coverage, but I do concur that, with my moderate knowledge and a copy of said book on my bookshelf, the current state of the software and documentation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of getting things going fairly quickly and simply, which programs like qmail, postfix, and others address nicely.
It is, however, IMHO a shame to give up some of the more advanced features of sendmail (and its amazing flexibility), such as milters, so here's hoping they either work their way into postfix et. al. in a more accessible fashion, or that (assuming my friend is accurate in his allegations) someone writes a more accessible book on the subject of sendmail.
In the meantime, the O'Reilly book seems to be the only book on the subject, so if it is really the reason so many of us get discouraged with sendmail and move on to easier, if less flexible, MTAs, then perhaps a second book covering the subject would be in order.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
... this is indeed a horse of an entirely different color.
... well, I'd just like to say "Thank you for Playing, SCO. You do not pass go, you do not collect $200, you go directly to jail, and you do not even get a lousy copy of our home game." I don't think SGI has a lot to worry about (particularly if they correct it now)...SCO on the other hand is absolute, complete, and total toast.
On the contrary, the way the BSD attribution of the malloc code was removed from Linux is exactly the same as the way the BSD attribution of the BPF code was removed from SCO Unix
I am a little skeptical that that is true. The examples provided are text book examples (literally), and may not have been copied from BSD at all (though I suspect they were in fact cribbed, based upon comments embedded in them). Even if they were, they may (I do not know this to be true, but it is certainly plausible) licensed under the current BSD license, which would get both SCO and SGI off the hook for this particular infraction. However, SCO has apparently is alleged to have been copying other code rather profusely and without regard to license, including GPLed code (according to one former employee)
This is in contrast to SGI, as far as I know, and certainly in direct opposition to Linux, BSD, and other free software projects, which have been very conscientious in avoiding copyright violations wherever it is even suspected.
However, you are correct that SGI could, concievably, also be in trouble if they inappropriately removed copyright notices and attribution. That is, if the BSD folks chose to prosecute them, which seems unlikely as SGI has been a pretty good 'citizens' of the free software community. In contrast to SCO, who has been anything but. And since copyright, unlike trademark, can be selectively enforced
SGI might get into trouble over it. Linux developers and distributors who accepted the code from SGI in good faith, and removed it as soon as they noticed it was old Unix code (before it was revealed by SCO), would not be any trouble.
Absolutely. That was my point. The use of any infringing code within Linux (if there ever was any infringement) was entirely accidental and, based upon what has been revealed thus far, has long since been removed.
I mean, this isn't about just "voice over internet".... it's about a phone service that happens to use the net.
... even more ineffecient than government and arguably more ineffecient than communism itself).
So... either they should have to follow regulations like any other phone company..... OR... the phone companies should be released from their regulatory obligations, at least with respect to the voip providers, so they can operate on equal footing.
You ignore a fundamental difference. Local telcos own a monopoly over the local copper cable running to people's homes. As a monopoly they must be regulated, nationalized into a public works, or we are left with a monopoly market running amock (remember, monopoly markets are the least effecient
There is a huge difference between a company that essentially offers a software (or firmware) service over the internet that happens to transmit and receive electrically encoded voice data, and one which owns the local DSLAMS, the local copper running into your home, and can leverage that local infrastructure monopoly in an anticompetative manner if they are not regulated.
The idea that the regulations designed to hold a local telco monopoly in check should apply to a competely unrelated business that provides what is essentially a software service via an entirely different infrastructure (one that entails no monopoly, at that) is ludricous.
One hopes the law is written such that (a) this is a federal, not a state matter and (b) such that telco's are targeted, and broader software services are not.
Otherwise you'll see AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber, and other services targeted the moment they can provide audio and video conferencing, and seamless communication with old POTS phones.
And that would really chill innovation, as much as any Microsoft monopoly could ever dream of.
Now, reading the replies on this article, I find it remarkable no-one has noted this. No offence, but even when code is licensed under the BSD license, that license has to be obeyed. You can't remove copyright claims because you think that's necessary.
... negative severa scores of days, in fact. Try doing that in the proprietary world ... with or without a time machine.
First, it is very clear that if any license was violated by Linux it was an accident. It was not willful and deliberate. In contrast to SCO, which has been willfully and deliberately removing BSD copyright notices from their code right, left, and center.
Second, it depends on WHICH BSD license you look at. The old one with the advertising clause wasn't GPL compatible, and if that is the only free license the code was licensed under, then Linux had a (very mild) problem. If, however, it has also been released under the current BSD license, then Linux never had any problem to begin with.
Either way, Linux has no problem now. The offending code, it turns out, has long since been removed for reasons of ugliness. It is not a part of the current 2.4.2x kernels, nor of the 2.6 series.
If there is a licensing issue (and mistakes can happen) it has been cleared up in record time
It doesn't matter if you knew it was stolen because the law assumes that you did. Same thing here, "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" has been quoted so many times i couldn't even tell you who said it first
If you buys stolen goods without the knowledge they were stolen, you foreit the goods (which is just if not entirely fair to you they buyer, as they do clearly belong to someone else).
Once again, I will reiterate. Ignorance of the law is never an excuse ("I didn't know hitting him on the head with a baseball bat was illegal!" doesn't fly), but ignorance that something was done ("I didn't know John Wayne Gacy buried the corpse on my property!") almost always does equate to innocence. Clearly, "I didn't know I was buying stolen goods" as a criminal case should fall in the second category (you had no idea you were buying something that was stolen), and just as clearly it should fall into the first with respect to civil law (you don't get to keep the stolen good: it belongs to someone else and they deserve to have it back).
Copyright, as it turns out, is murkier (and IMHO pretty unjust: what if someone knowingly insinuates their code into your project, then sues you for accidentally violating their copyright? Under the law, for civil charges, it sounds like they win even though your intention, and any reasonable interpretation of your actions, was innocent). For civil damages you don't even have to know you've done anything wrong (I still have yet to see a clear answer on whether charges of contributing to someone else's violation of copyright can be unwitting and still lead to monetary sanctions or not), but for criminal charges you must in fact have meant to commit the act.
If in fact you are guilty of a crime for having unknowingly bought stolen goods, and if in fact the law is written to pressupose guilt automatically, then the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" is simply untrue on its face. Even in these disgusting times I doubt that is the case, and if it is, I doubt it would hold up to constitutional review. If it in fact does hold up to constitutional review (given the current surpreme court, as packed from the radical right, it wouldn't surprise me all that much), then everything, and I mean everything, that this country purports to stand for is an utter, complete farce.
Now I admit, most likely, she was downloading copyrighted music, and therefore in trouble, but if she claims she didn't, and can explain away her sharing as the legal kind, then the onus shoud be on the RIAA to prove otherwise, if they can't, and the judge isn't just another coporate worshiper, then she may just get away with this and set a very nice precident, something along the lines of, you actually have to file a suit and ask the judge to let you subpeona those records before getting them.
The thing is, she is entitled to due process whether or not she is innocent or guilty.
The fact that she is very plausably innocent (though quite possibly not) should serve to underscore this point to the unwashed masses whose kneejerk response is to scream for the pirate's head on a platter hours before the court papers are even filed, but it should have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on her contention that subpeanas being issued without court order identifying individuals for acts of potential barratory by a cartel are inappropraite and probably unconstitutional.
Copyright law is appalling in that one can be put into prison for 5 years for doing something utterly unwittingly and unknowingly. If in fact one can go to prison for utterly unwittingly and unknowingly contributing to someone elses violation of the law (who themselves may be doing so utterly unwittingly and unknowingly), then we really are living in a police state the awful powers of which we are just now waking up to.
It has been rather obvious to anyone in the digital world that copyright is the tool for oppression and censorship of those in the developed world (in the latter 20th century and 21st centuries, at least), but to think that people can be imprisoned for events to which they are peripherally bound without their knowledge is truly unthinkable. I'm not talking about ignorance of the law, which has never been an excuse, but ignorance that an action has even been committed (by oneself, or someone one has a connection to that makes them an unwitting contributor).
Certainly if this woman didn't know Kazaa was sharing her files with others on the internet, she not only wasn't aware of the copying that was going on, she wasn't even aware that she was contributing to the potential act.
Any system that would hold someone in such circumstances guilty of anything or hold them accountable for even one penny of damages, much less imprison them, is a system that needs to be scrapped immediately and, if necessary, forcefully. (to my knowledge, however, contributory copyright infringement does require knowledge of the fact, or at least "any sensible person should have known", but IANAL and I could be wrong. If I am, it is past time to emigrate or take up arms, and the former is a much higher percentage game than the latter, so I'm outta here)
Copyright is a strict liability offense. This means that civil copyright violations do not have to be willful. A willful violation is more serious than a non-willful violation. Copyright law raises the maximum salutatory damages from $30K to $150K if the action is shown to be willful.
... copyright law is far more evil and perverse than even I believed. The idea that someone can sneak into your office, use your copy machine to illegally copy and distribute a book, and then get you thrown into jail for up to five years and fined $250,000 per offense is utterly and completely unjust, and worthy, quite frankly, of a violent change to the system (if need be).
Good God that's appalling. You are correct
Or is this limited to the copyright violator? If so, my point stands. It is not the unwitting user who has accidentally, and unknowingly, made a file accessible to others to download who has violated copyright law, it is the person actually doing the dowloading.
So, unless contributing to another's act of copyright violation doesn't require knowledge (which means the scenerio I outlined above is possible, in which case we should all be polishing our revolutionary guns [toung in cheeck, folk, toung in cheek. Holster those handcuffs, Mr. Spook.]), then the unwitting Kazaa user whose files someone else is copying is still off the hook.
Otherwise, quite frankly, any use of any computer within the boarders of the United States carries with it an unacceptable level of liability, and we should all either relocate to a saner jurisdiction or go back to using abicusses.
this person knows how to rip her own music from CD. She's not using Kazaa to listen to her collection.
... I have almost all of my music on my hard drive in ogg format because it is easier and more pleasant to have all of my music at my fingertips than to fish around for CDs every 42 minutes, and NO, I absolutely do not under any circumstances engage in illegal file sharing), and then showed her another (or the same) nifty program to play them back. That program happened to be Kazaa, and it is perfectly likely that she had no idea it was making a chunk of her hard drive (and all of her music) available for others to copy.
This isn't Joe Blow downloading songs and thinking that he has to use Kazaa to listen to them.
"This person knows how to drive a car. She's not using her Corvett to drive down the highway."
Did you even think to semantically parse the statement you just made?
Of course she knows how to rip her own CDs. A friend probably showed her this nifty program to rip her CDs onto her hard drive (for convinience
Regardless, since when is ignorance an excuse?
... since the last decade of the 18th century (in the USA, anyway).
... until we have licensing for the use of a computer system, with basic computer-education to insure everyone is expected to have a certain level of knowledge, it is clear the law does not require that people know (or necessarilly be responsible for) anything their computer is doing without their knowledge.
Umm
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance of the activity almost always is.[1] It goes to intent, it goes to motive, it goes to opportunity. If someone buries a body on your property without your knowledge, you are generally not tried for collusion with the murderer. If you are, and you can demonstrate that you didn't know it was happening, you are most certainly acquitted.
If many people are using Kazaa because they believe they need it to play back their own, legally ripped mp3s, then the RIAA doesn't have much of a case. Copyright violations have to be willful and intentional to receive most of the punitive rewards, and with computers things are even murkier, as trojan horse programs (which Kazaa arguably is, in this context), worms, and viruses often hijack people's computers to do things they have absolutely no idea are being done.
Or are we going to arrest everyone whose computer has been comprimised by SoBig.F or whatever it's latest iteration is, for DOSing Microsloth's web services? After all, "ignorance is no excuse..."
[1]Willful, or negligent, ignorance of course is an exception. Having a good idea someone is doing something neferious, but saying "I don't want to know!" isn't enough to get one off. However, true lack of knowledge that something bad is going on, even on one's own property, is in most cases a valid excuse. However, a computer user not understanding what a trojan or trojan-esque program is doing on their computer hardly qualifies
And I don't see even this government stooping to licensing computer use anytime soon.
The only thing Windows does reliably is fail. Whoever decides to run a nuclear plant's safety monitoring system or a civil rail's monitoring and safety system on a Windows platform should be dragged into the street, shot, burned, pissed on, disemboweled and then hanged.
You are far too kind.