It has now become clear to me that SCO has a very good chance of winning every single one of their claims.
By observing the public statements made almost daily by SCO and their spokespeople, the secret of their strategy has emerged and I now clearly see it. There is a very real and serious danger here.
Really, I must hand it to SCO. A brilliant legal strategy.
I don't believe the open source community has previously contemplated this particular type of legal attack.
SCO's strategy is simply this: they will win all claims, because IBM's lawyers will be unable to present a good defense, because IBM's lawyers are unable to concentrate, due to their inability to stop laughing. This will be especially unfavorable if this laughing behavior carries over into the courtroom.
how are they going to verify the location of the individual? Despite the US governments wishes, only a small part of the planet is under their direct control and, ergo, their laws. Dubious legality of destruction not withstanding, they sure as hell have NO rights to destroy someones system in Sweden or wherever.
Do you think this would stop them? Is it better to ask permission or forgiveness?
I also think you misunderstand something. The US Govt's master does control the computers used all over the planet.
In Common Lisp and most other Lisp dialects (not Scheme tough), macro's are normal functions that are run at compile-time instead of at run-time. They can do everything normal functions can do, such as calling other functions, doing I/O, etc..
As you pointed out the function runs at compile time. Therefore whatever the macro returns, is the text that gets compiled. That is the end of it.
I want to write a macro so that I can now write syntax like this.....
forEachLockedItem( item in items, foobar( item ) );
The macro function can go through whatever gyrations it wants to to transform the source into the replacement text at compile time. But then that replacement text is statically compiled.
It seems irrelevant to me whether a macro is used in global procedures, or methods of an object.
It might have been 2001. It was definitely awhile ago. I have posted it to slashdot exactly 3 times. Two very recently.
I thought of it in my shower getting ready for work.
I don't really care. I posted it originally for amusement. I'm sure it has made it all over the Internet without any attribution, other than that the original first post of it was by ReelOddeo on Slashdot. I doubt most people would try to credit that.
I'm not really seeking any fame for it. Someone just said "Credit the source." So I did.:-) I know the truth about its origins, and that's all that really matters to me.
>>Quite frankly, by using Microsoft products, you are doing a disservice the the U.S. taxpayers.
>How is it a disservice to use a product that allows [...]
Do you see the disconnect in these two statements?
Using products from Microsoft is the disservice. Not using a certian technology.
Let me rephrase. Using products from a certian vendor is a disservice. It's not the technology that is being complained about. The technology is great.
Our father, who art in Redmond
Microsoft be they name
Thy monopoly come, thy will be done
throughout the earth as it is in the US.
Give us this day, our daily license activation key
And forgive us our bug reports
as we forgive our system crashes
And lead us not into competition
But deliver us from innovation
For thine is the Control, and the Power and the Greed
Forever. Amen.
Okay. I am the source. I wrote this last year.
Copyright 2002 Danny Brewer
Use allowed under the Open Content license. How's that?
It's probably even money that they'll bow to internal pressure to get something out, sort of like a WinME for XP or something, a stop gap to make people buy something.
Otherwise, all those people who paid extra to be in the guarenteed update program will be upset, because it will become obvious that they are not getting very much for their money.
That's kind of the delema that they've painted themselves into. We will ship no software before it's time. But we've already taken people's money so that they can get implied promised upgrades.
Our father, who art in Redmond
Microsoft be they name
Thy monopoly come, thy will be done
throughout the earth as it is in the US.
Give us this day, our daily license activation key
And forgive us our bug reports
as we forgive our system crashes
And lead us not into competition
But deliver us from innovation
For thine is the Control, and the Power and the Greed
Forever. Amen.
How many times has Microsoft been lambasted for getting a half-done product to market and then patching its worst parts? He's saying they're trying not to do that.
He's saying that.
How many times has Microsoft said one thing, but then...
No copyright infringement has occured. Nothing has been copied or reproduced. No protection device has been circumvented either, but moot since no infringement has even occured.
It's kinda similar to books with the covers ripped off, which are not supposed to be sold since they were written off by the publisher.
Having (i.e. posessing) a book that the publisher was supposed to destroy is not a copyright infringement.
Selling such a physical object is not a copyright infringement. (Nothing is being copied or reproduced.)
How you acquired such an item might be in question.
(1) Maybe the bookseller is violating their contract with the publisher, and sells or gives you the book they are supposed to destroy. (Publisher guilty of violating their contract.)
(2) Maybe you use a gun and force the bookseller to give you the book they are suposed to destroy. (armed robbery?)
(3) Or maybe you simply find this physical object in their trash. (tresspassing, if on their property.) If it is in the trash, out at the curb, then it is public domain. Selling or posessing the book is not a copyright infringement as nothing is being copied. You do not have a right to make copies of the book even though you found it in the trash.
If someone is finding old sewing patterns in the trash, then no copyright infringement is taking place. Only the possibility of tresspassing.
However, if they were not legally obtained, McCalls has the right to do this; although they should not have used the DMCA, they have a legitimate clame to the patterns.
McCalls has no claim. There is no copyright violation occuring here. Nobody is "copying" or "reproducing" anything.
The only claim that might exist is that the store (not McCalls) could have a Tresspassing claim against whoever got into their dumpster, depending on where said dumpster is located.
So while DMCA may be hated on Slashdot, I believe McCalls has a right to protect their copyrighted materials, which they want to have removed from the marketplace.
Two points.
1. The DMCA is completely inappropriate then. Cite some other law which has actually been violated.
2. No actual law has been broken. If you put something in the trash, it is public domain. This is already well established. If I take something out of your trashcan and sell it, no law is being broken.
In the case of 2 above, I want to elaborate even more. No copyright is being violated. I'm not "copying" or "reproducing" anything. The act of copying would be a copyright violation (not DMCA though). But I'm not copying.
This is like me selling a physical object that you think has no value and which you put into the trash. No law is broken. If you later realize that the physical object has value, tough. You can't do anything about the fact that 2nd party and 3rd party agree on market value for some object that you put into the trashcan.
People are using the DMCA as a 'catch all' law to make EVERYTHING online illegal.
Not true. Not everything online.
Only stuff that should not be online. That is, stuff which does not benefit megacorps.
If the people who started monsterpatterns.com would spend half as much time consuming content instead of doing things they shouldn't be doing, this would not have happened.
Am I right in thinking that you just said that you use OOo formats primarily in programs you wrote, and do not generally use OpenOffice itself for most of the stuff you do?
Not quite right.
I write programs in Java that do things related to OpenOffice.org. Sometimes I use the Java UNO runtime to make a UNO connection to a running OOo, and then make it generate drawings. Other times, a Java program simply reads or writes an OOo document format, but does not require an actual running copy of OOo. Of course the purpose of reading or writing the OOo document format is for the purpose of compatibility.
For example, run a Java program, enter the number of teeth in the outer ring, number of gear teeth on an inner wheel, pen radius on inner wheel, and it produces a flower-like drawing similar to a plastic toy you might have had as a child that used gear tooth wheels and rings with colored ball point pens.:-) A toy whose trademarked name I won't mention here.
In this case. The drawing produced is for the purpose of viewing / editing / copying / pasting / printing / resizing, etc. using OpenOffice.org.
My programs are for use with OpenOffice.org.
Aside from that, I use OpenOffice.org as my primary productivity suite. Word processing (writing documentation for the aforementioned programs before I eventually find a site to host them as open source projects). I save everything in native OOo formats. No need to save as ".doc", even though I do have access to Word.
The thing about OOo is that it is a WYSIWYG word processor
Yes, but I don't think you understood my meaning. I like to use WYSIWYG word processors. But if needed, I can use standard off the shelf tools to manipulate the OOo document format into other useful current, and future formats. In other words, one big feature of the openness of the OOo doc format is that I will never suffer "bit rot" again or loose documents to obsolete software.
I have abandoned work from several generations of computers, from the TRS-80, Apple ][, Apple///, Lisa, MacWrite, ClarisWorks, etc. So I'm pretty anxious to have an office suite that runs everywhere I want to be, and that will NEVER render my documents inaccessible. No matter what, I can convert my OOo documents into any other future open source productivity suite that may be in vogue this decade or next decade.
Incidentally, if you know jed, you actually know enough of emacs to use that
While technically true, I still find emacs difficult to use and jed easy to use. For whatever reason, jed conforms to fit me, a longtime Mac user and only 4-years ago convert to Linux.
4 years ago, I was pretty much resigned that I would have to learn ancient school tools either vi or emacs. Last summer I suddenly realized that this will never ever become necessary with the state of modern distributions, rescue disks, etc. With jed, via. ssh, I get a nice colorized display with pull down menus. I have not yet found it necessary to use the extensibility scripting capabilities of jed, but I very much appreciate that they are there when and if I need them. From several false starts learning emacs, I definitely recognize the similaraties to jed. This is one of the several things that attracted me to jed. But emacs, like any seldom used, but complex skill, is very difficult to learn.
I could give you piano lessons. But if you only tried to play every few months, you would never quite seem to be able to pick up the skill, even though you could converse well about it.
A 5-person shop now may buy one copy of MS Word, and make 4 copies because they can't afford 5 full copies. That does NOT mean that MS has lost the sales of 4 copies. It means the company was willing to fork over the cost of one copy of Word for 5 users to use it.
Now let's assume that software wasn't copyable at all (BSA and Microsoft just had an orgasm), and compliance with licensing agreements was perfect and the computers themeslves magically enforced them 100% accurately. That same company may now very well buy NO copies of MS Word, and go to a cheaper product because the cost of 5 copies of the product is not an acceptable value for the product they get.
Ah, but by tacitly allowing the one pirated copy, MS, while not making any money, at least prevents a competitor from making money.
the OpenOffice format isn't really preferable to MSFT file formats for any practical reason
Not true. I write Java programs which read and write OOo drawings. Do you think I could do this easily with Microsoft Visio? Since OOo docs are just a zip file of xml files, I can use the java.util.zip.* classes and the jdom.org classes as a foundation for my own library to read/write the OOo docs.
For instance, I have a maze generator in Java. It creates OOo drawing of mazes. Eventually to have crossword and word search puzzle generators.
Some of my tools use UNO to talk to a running OOo and produce drawings. Some read and write the doc formats. Eventually, others will run as a component within OOo (if I can ever figure out how to do that!).
There are many ideas for program produced drawings that have me inspired with more than I can implement right now. Nice drawings of calendars (holidays, vacation days, meetings, etc.), drawings of org charts. A library that takes a nice xml style set of tree structured nodes and produces an org-chart like tree structured multi-page drawing.
Back to your remark. Basically, I see the openness and ease of access to OOo's doc formats as a major practical benefit.
I don't do much with Writer, but with just standard tools, you could script the unzip of a Writer file, and then XSLT that into any other useful format, such as DocBook. All without even having an installed copy of OOo on your machine. All with off-the shelf tools.
Everyone I know who uses OpenOffice only uses it to deal with MSFT files and writes their books, papers, and web pages in plain text or LaTeX with emacs or vi.
I do not. Your experience may be limited to your environment. I use none of the tools you mention (except for plain text). I do not even know how to use the tools you mention. Many times I've started to learn either Latex, emacs or vi. Never actually had enough motivation to overcome the inertia. Many other modern tools are available. (Jed for SSH based remote editing of config files, for instance.) I write documents in OOo Writer and save them in the native formats. When necessary, I export to both ".doc" and ".pdf" for exchange with others.
the knee-jerk "MS is the devil" reaction hurts everyone.
The knee-jerk "Saddam is the devil" reaction hurts everyone.
The knee-jerk "Hitler is the devil" reaction hurts everyone.
Have you considered that although it may be knee-jerk, it is not an irrational reaction? People have this wonderful thing called pattern recognition. Let's say, we're talking. I suddenly punch you in the mouth. Next week, we're talking again. I suddenly out of the blue, punch you in the mouth. Now let's say, again, a few days later, we're talking.... are we learning yet?
No one is engaging MS seriously on this
Yeah. No one is engaging Saddam seriously. No one was engaging Hitler seriously. No one was engaging Stalin seriously. Etc.
Since this is Slashdot, some people [the regular Microsoft shills here] will be distracted by my analogy. I'm not saying Microsoft is on the same level of evil as other figures I've mentioned. Analogies have certian similaraties, but also differences that you should recognize. My point is about being suspicious based on a pattern of past behavior. But, then, this is considered a knee-jerk reaction.
Very cool. I will try it sometime. I did like Gtk-Gnutella. Right now, I like XNap. But no reason I could not run both, offering the same collection of shared files.
Suppose SCO waits until trial, and then prooves the existance of copied code in Linux. Don't you think that such code will get fixed anyway? Do you think that an injunction will be reasonsable? (That is the judge's job.) The injuunction won't apply to the "fixed" Linux. So at most, maybe SCO can show copyright violation, possibly collect damages, if they can proove actual damages, and they might possibly stop IBM from distributing Linux for a brief time. Very little benefit it seems. So it seems almost equally idiotic to wait.
Do you think the judge can issue an injunction against the whole world to stop Linux distribution? Even so, don't you think that everyone will rush to obtain the fixed sources.
SCO's real Microsoft sponsored objective is to keep Linux in legal limibo for as long as is possible. Nothing more. By revealing the supposed proof, everyone would go back to business as usual. OTOH, there may be no proof.
Finally, if SCO's (and by implication Microsoft's) motives weren't to create FUD, don't you think their main objective would be to get distribution of copyrighted works stopped ASAP! If someone were distributing your copyright works for money, your first immediate goal is to get this stopped ASAP. In order to do so, you would have to show the actual infringement and get a preliminary injunction.
Let me put it this way, if Microsoft were aware of a major copyright violator of its software, do you think they would stall and delay saying, "We'll only show the proof at trial!", after dragging this out for as long as possible. Or do you suppose the legal response would be swift and decisive, starting with an injunction, and maybe even a raid.
Finally, showing the copyright infringement will not make the past wrongdoing go away. The person who is ultimately responsible is someone who misappropriated code and put it into Linux.
Showing of proof of violation will also not make past evidence of wrongdoing go away. How many millions of source code CD-ROM's do you think there are on the planet? Heck, evey linux distribution include at least one cd crammed with sources. A historic archive of such CD's actually shows the entire development evolution of the kernel. Right out in the open in front of God and everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
It has now become clear to me that SCO has a very good chance of winning every single one of their claims.
By observing the public statements made almost daily by SCO and their spokespeople, the secret of their strategy has emerged and I now clearly see it. There is a very real and serious danger here.
Really, I must hand it to SCO. A brilliant legal strategy.
I don't believe the open source community has previously contemplated this particular type of legal attack.
SCO's strategy is simply this: they will win all claims, because IBM's lawyers will be unable to present a good defense, because IBM's lawyers are unable to concentrate, due to their inability to stop laughing. This will be especially unfavorable if this laughing behavior carries over into the courtroom.
Is this just a sneaky way to make all web sites into a blog.
how are they going to verify the location of the individual? Despite the US governments wishes, only a small part of the planet is under their direct control and, ergo, their laws. Dubious legality of destruction not withstanding, they sure as hell have NO rights to destroy someones system in Sweden or wherever.
Do you think this would stop them? Is it better to ask permission or forgiveness?
I also think you misunderstand something. The US Govt's master does control the computers used all over the planet.
Gotta love this quote....
"Today's lawsuits are exactly the kinds of action we need to put illegal spammers out of business."
Do we want to allow legal spammers to remain in business?
As you pointed out the function runs at compile time. Therefore whatever the macro returns, is the text that gets compiled. That is the end of it.
I want to write a macro so that I can now write syntax like this.....
The macro expands to something like this...
The macro function can go through whatever gyrations it wants to to transform the source into the replacement text at compile time. But then that replacement text is statically compiled.
It seems irrelevant to me whether a macro is used in global procedures, or methods of an object.
It might have been 2001. It was definitely awhile ago. I have posted it to slashdot exactly 3 times. Two very recently.
:-) I know the truth about its origins, and that's all that really matters to me.
I thought of it in my shower getting ready for work.
I don't really care. I posted it originally for amusement. I'm sure it has made it all over the Internet without any attribution, other than that the original first post of it was by ReelOddeo on Slashdot. I doubt most people would try to credit that.
I'm not really seeking any fame for it. Someone just said "Credit the source." So I did.
I hope people everywhere are amused by it.
I wrote it last year.
This is the third time I've put it on slashdot.
I assume it is original enough that nobody else has done the same thing.
Therefore, any other copies you find must be from either my first or second posting on slashdot.
Ask other sources why *they* don't credit the source.
I did change the wording slightly. This was a concious decision, not an accident.
>>Quite frankly, by using Microsoft products, you are doing a disservice the the U.S. taxpayers.
>How is it a disservice to use a product that allows [...]
Do you see the disconnect in these two statements?
Using products from Microsoft is the disservice. Not using a certian technology.
Let me rephrase. Using products from a certian vendor is a disservice. It's not the technology that is being complained about. The technology is great.
Our father, who art in Redmond
Microsoft be they name
Thy monopoly come, thy will be done
throughout the earth as it is in the US.
Give us this day, our daily license activation key
And forgive us our bug reports
as we forgive our system crashes
And lead us not into competition
But deliver us from innovation
For thine is the Control, and the Power and the Greed
Forever. Amen.
Okay. I am the source. I wrote this last year.
Copyright 2002 Danny Brewer
Use allowed under the Open Content license. How's that?
It's probably even money that they'll bow to internal pressure to get something out, sort of like a WinME for XP or something, a stop gap to make people buy something.
Otherwise, all those people who paid extra to be in the guarenteed update program will be upset, because it will become obvious that they are not getting very much for their money.
That's kind of the delema that they've painted themselves into. We will ship no software before it's time. But we've already taken people's money so that they can get implied promised upgrades.
Our father, who art in Redmond
Microsoft be they name
Thy monopoly come, thy will be done
throughout the earth as it is in the US.
Give us this day, our daily license activation key
And forgive us our bug reports
as we forgive our system crashes
And lead us not into competition
But deliver us from innovation
For thine is the Control, and the Power and the Greed
Forever. Amen.
How many times has Microsoft been lambasted for getting a half-done product to market and then patching its worst parts? He's saying they're trying not to do that.
He's saying that.
How many times has Microsoft said one thing, but then...
No copyright infringement has occured. Nothing has been copied or reproduced. No protection device has been circumvented either, but moot since no infringement has even occured.
It's kinda similar to books with the covers ripped off, which are not supposed to be sold since they were written off by the publisher.
Having (i.e. posessing) a book that the publisher was supposed to destroy is not a copyright infringement.
Selling such a physical object is not a copyright infringement. (Nothing is being copied or reproduced.)
How you acquired such an item might be in question.
(1) Maybe the bookseller is violating their contract with the publisher, and sells or gives you the book they are supposed to destroy. (Publisher guilty of violating their contract.)
(2) Maybe you use a gun and force the bookseller to give you the book they are suposed to destroy. (armed robbery?)
(3) Or maybe you simply find this physical object in their trash. (tresspassing, if on their property.) If it is in the trash, out at the curb, then it is public domain. Selling or posessing the book is not a copyright infringement as nothing is being copied. You do not have a right to make copies of the book even though you found it in the trash.
If someone is finding old sewing patterns in the trash, then no copyright infringement is taking place. Only the possibility of tresspassing.
However, if they were not legally obtained, McCalls has the right to do this; although they should not have used the DMCA, they have a legitimate clame to the patterns.
McCalls has no claim. There is no copyright violation occuring here. Nobody is "copying" or "reproducing" anything.
The only claim that might exist is that the store (not McCalls) could have a Tresspassing claim against whoever got into their dumpster, depending on where said dumpster is located.
So while DMCA may be hated on Slashdot, I believe McCalls has a right to protect their copyrighted materials, which they want to have removed from the marketplace.
Two points.
1. The DMCA is completely inappropriate then. Cite some other law which has actually been violated.
2. No actual law has been broken. If you put something in the trash, it is public domain. This is already well established. If I take something out of your trashcan and sell it, no law is being broken.
In the case of 2 above, I want to elaborate even more. No copyright is being violated. I'm not "copying" or "reproducing" anything. The act of copying would be a copyright violation (not DMCA though). But I'm not copying.
This is like me selling a physical object that you think has no value and which you put into the trash. No law is broken. If you later realize that the physical object has value, tough. You can't do anything about the fact that 2nd party and 3rd party agree on market value for some object that you put into the trashcan.
People are using the DMCA as a 'catch all' law to make EVERYTHING online illegal.
Not true. Not everything online.
Only stuff that should not be online. That is, stuff which does not benefit megacorps.
If the people who started monsterpatterns.com would spend half as much time consuming content instead of doing things they shouldn't be doing, this would not have happened.
(Insightful, +1)
Am I right in thinking that you just said that you use OOo formats primarily in programs you wrote, and do not generally use OpenOffice itself for most of the stuff you do?
:-) A toy whose trademarked name I won't mention here.
///, Lisa, MacWrite, ClarisWorks, etc. So I'm pretty anxious to have an office suite that runs everywhere I want to be, and that will NEVER render my documents inaccessible. No matter what, I can convert my OOo documents into any other future open source productivity suite that may be in vogue this decade or next decade.
Not quite right.
I write programs in Java that do things related to OpenOffice.org. Sometimes I use the Java UNO runtime to make a UNO connection to a running OOo, and then make it generate drawings. Other times, a Java program simply reads or writes an OOo document format, but does not require an actual running copy of OOo. Of course the purpose of reading or writing the OOo document format is for the purpose of compatibility.
For example, run a Java program, enter the number of teeth in the outer ring, number of gear teeth on an inner wheel, pen radius on inner wheel, and it produces a flower-like drawing similar to a plastic toy you might have had as a child that used gear tooth wheels and rings with colored ball point pens.
In this case. The drawing produced is for the purpose of viewing / editing / copying / pasting / printing / resizing, etc. using OpenOffice.org.
My programs are for use with OpenOffice.org.
Aside from that, I use OpenOffice.org as my primary productivity suite. Word processing (writing documentation for the aforementioned programs before I eventually find a site to host them as open source projects). I save everything in native OOo formats. No need to save as ".doc", even though I do have access to Word.
The thing about OOo is that it is a WYSIWYG word processor
Yes, but I don't think you understood my meaning. I like to use WYSIWYG word processors. But if needed, I can use standard off the shelf tools to manipulate the OOo document format into other useful current, and future formats. In other words, one big feature of the openness of the OOo doc format is that I will never suffer "bit rot" again or loose documents to obsolete software.
I have abandoned work from several generations of computers, from the TRS-80, Apple ][, Apple
Incidentally, if you know jed, you actually know enough of emacs to use that
While technically true, I still find emacs difficult to use and jed easy to use. For whatever reason, jed conforms to fit me, a longtime Mac user and only 4-years ago convert to Linux.
4 years ago, I was pretty much resigned that I would have to learn ancient school tools either vi or emacs. Last summer I suddenly realized that this will never ever become necessary with the state of modern distributions, rescue disks, etc. With jed, via. ssh, I get a nice colorized display with pull down menus. I have not yet found it necessary to use the extensibility scripting capabilities of jed, but I very much appreciate that they are there when and if I need them. From several false starts learning emacs, I definitely recognize the similaraties to jed. This is one of the several things that attracted me to jed. But emacs, like any seldom used, but complex skill, is very difficult to learn.
I could give you piano lessons. But if you only tried to play every few months, you would never quite seem to be able to pick up the skill, even though you could converse well about it.
A 5-person shop now may buy one copy of MS Word, and make 4 copies because they can't afford 5 full copies. That does NOT mean that MS has lost the sales of 4 copies. It means the company was willing to fork over the cost of one copy of Word for 5 users to use it.
Now let's assume that software wasn't copyable at all (BSA and Microsoft just had an orgasm), and compliance with licensing agreements was perfect and the computers themeslves magically enforced them 100% accurately. That same company may now very well buy NO copies of MS Word, and go to a cheaper product because the cost of 5 copies of the product is not an acceptable value for the product they get.
Ah, but by tacitly allowing the one pirated copy, MS, while not making any money, at least prevents a competitor from making money.
the OpenOffice format isn't really preferable to MSFT file formats for any practical reason
Not true. I write Java programs which read and write OOo drawings. Do you think I could do this easily with Microsoft Visio? Since OOo docs are just a zip file of xml files, I can use the java.util.zip.* classes and the jdom.org classes as a foundation for my own library to read/write the OOo docs.
For instance, I have a maze generator in Java. It creates OOo drawing of mazes. Eventually to have crossword and word search puzzle generators.
Some of my tools use UNO to talk to a running OOo and produce drawings. Some read and write the doc formats. Eventually, others will run as a component within OOo (if I can ever figure out how to do that!).
There are many ideas for program produced drawings that have me inspired with more than I can implement right now. Nice drawings of calendars (holidays, vacation days, meetings, etc.), drawings of org charts. A library that takes a nice xml style set of tree structured nodes and produces an org-chart like tree structured multi-page drawing.
Back to your remark. Basically, I see the openness and ease of access to OOo's doc formats as a major practical benefit.
I don't do much with Writer, but with just standard tools, you could script the unzip of a Writer file, and then XSLT that into any other useful format, such as DocBook. All without even having an installed copy of OOo on your machine. All with off-the shelf tools.
Everyone I know who uses OpenOffice only uses it to deal with MSFT files and writes their books, papers, and web pages in plain text or LaTeX with emacs or vi.
I do not. Your experience may be limited to your environment. I use none of the tools you mention (except for plain text). I do not even know how to use the tools you mention. Many times I've started to learn either Latex, emacs or vi. Never actually had enough motivation to overcome the inertia. Many other modern tools are available. (Jed for SSH based remote editing of config files, for instance.) I write documents in OOo Writer and save them in the native formats. When necessary, I export to both ".doc" and ".pdf" for exchange with others.
the knee-jerk "MS is the devil" reaction hurts everyone.
The knee-jerk "Saddam is the devil" reaction hurts everyone.
The knee-jerk "Hitler is the devil" reaction hurts everyone.
Have you considered that although it may be knee-jerk, it is not an irrational reaction? People have this wonderful thing called pattern recognition. Let's say, we're talking. I suddenly punch you in the mouth. Next week, we're talking again. I suddenly out of the blue, punch you in the mouth. Now let's say, again, a few days later, we're talking.... are we learning yet?
No one is engaging MS seriously on this
Yeah. No one is engaging Saddam seriously. No one was engaging Hitler seriously. No one was engaging Stalin seriously. Etc.
Since this is Slashdot, some people [the regular Microsoft shills here] will be distracted by my analogy. I'm not saying Microsoft is on the same level of evil as other figures I've mentioned. Analogies have certian similaraties, but also differences that you should recognize. My point is about being suspicious based on a pattern of past behavior. But, then, this is considered a knee-jerk reaction.
But what does [Britney Spears] have to do with the RIAA - does she sing or something??
Did you miss item (f) on the list of crimes against humanity?
(f) Torture
But there was also item (k)...
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
Very cool. I will try it sometime. I did like Gtk-Gnutella. Right now, I like XNap. But no reason I could not run both, offering the same collection of shared files.
Shhhhhh! Don't let them know. :-) Let the RIAA believe it was successful.
Suppose SCO waits until trial, and then prooves the existance of copied code in Linux. Don't you think that such code will get fixed anyway? Do you think that an injunction will be reasonsable? (That is the judge's job.) The injuunction won't apply to the "fixed" Linux. So at most, maybe SCO can show copyright violation, possibly collect damages, if they can proove actual damages, and they might possibly stop IBM from distributing Linux for a brief time. Very little benefit it seems. So it seems almost equally idiotic to wait.
Do you think the judge can issue an injunction against the whole world to stop Linux distribution? Even so, don't you think that everyone will rush to obtain the fixed sources.
SCO's real Microsoft sponsored objective is to keep Linux in legal limibo for as long as is possible. Nothing more. By revealing the supposed proof, everyone would go back to business as usual. OTOH, there may be no proof.
Finally, if SCO's (and by implication Microsoft's) motives weren't to create FUD, don't you think their main objective would be to get distribution of copyrighted works stopped ASAP! If someone were distributing your copyright works for money, your first immediate goal is to get this stopped ASAP. In order to do so, you would have to show the actual infringement and get a preliminary injunction.
Let me put it this way, if Microsoft were aware of a major copyright violator of its software, do you think they would stall and delay saying, "We'll only show the proof at trial!", after dragging this out for as long as possible. Or do you suppose the legal response would be swift and decisive, starting with an injunction, and maybe even a raid.
Finally, showing the copyright infringement will not make the past wrongdoing go away. The person who is ultimately responsible is someone who misappropriated code and put it into Linux.
Showing of proof of violation will also not make past evidence of wrongdoing go away. How many millions of source code CD-ROM's do you think there are on the planet? Heck, evey linux distribution include at least one cd crammed with sources. A historic archive of such CD's actually shows the entire development evolution of the kernel. Right out in the open in front of God and everyone else.
This could turn into a real legel wedgie.