Yes, I am proud of that. It was a damn good paper to begin with, and it got much better over the years. I had already proven my ability to write a research paper, and I didn't need any more practice. Writing a research paper was just busy work for me, and only took time away from the things I actually needed to spend time learning.
It's not like I was just printing up and handing in the exact same paper every time, nor was I buying it off the internet or anything like that. It was my own work, and I made significant changes every time in order to fit with the particular requirements of the assignment. I don't see anything unethical about maximizing the return on the significant effort I put into it innitially.
Knowing your learning style is key, it's really too bad schools don't make those tests a standard part of the curriculum. Doing that in grade school, and again in high school, would make a huge difference for a lot of kids, I think. I didn't take one until I took a class in college that the school required of anyone who wanted to be a tutor. I'm one of the lucky few who is basically even overall, but it's highly dependent on the subject matter. My guess is that I'm naturally visual, but after 15 years of being a musician, audio and T-K have come up to that level as well.
That's become a deciding factor for me. Using Windows at work, where somebody else has to maintain it, is fine, but at home Linux is just so much less hassle.
Also, how bulky are they?
I might be interested in the Logitech pen thing, but the special expensive paper kind of turns me off. It would really suck to have this big, expensive pen be useless in a couple of years because Logitech decides it's no longer profitable to print the special paper. When I buy something like that I want to know that I'll still be able to use it in 5 years. And, of course, there's the Linux thing again.
My handwriting is quite legible, thanks to 3 years of drafting classes, but I don't do cursive, which I hear is a problem for a lot of OCR software. I could live without OCR, I suppose, but it seems pointless to go to so much effort and expense if I don't end up with the ability to do a string search. Without that, I think I'm better off with paper.
The only problem I see is that highlighters will "encourage" you to gloss over the non-highlighted text, and for that reason highlighters are not recommended by learning experts (I had to take a class in this stuff to become a tutor, I don't claim to be an expert myself). Of course, the fact that you read the text at least once before doing the highlighting probably makes up for that. Underlining is considered to be a superior alternative, btw, which would eliminate one more thing you have to carry to class. Writing in the margins is highly recommended.
I used this method in my general ed classes (English, History, etc), but I don't think it would be effective in, say, Calculus or Physics, where most of my "notes" were the equations and diagrams we worked on in class. Also, I have a hard enough time reading the book at all, let alone before the lecture, and forget about suplimental material. That's my own time-management issue, though, and I've gotten better as I've gotten older.
Everyone remembers more when they write it down, as has been shown by so many studies that it is now considered a scientific fact in the teaching community. The more of your senses that are involved, the better you will remember.
Notice, however, that I said nothing about detailed notes. You're almost certainly right in that regard, but mostly because you'd be spending more time on your notes than paying attention to the actual information. You can't get around that by using a keyboard though, in fact that only aggravates the problem since the motion of your hand is so much less tied to the information being recorded. The only way around that is to find your perfect balance between note-taking and paying attention.
My own notes are quite sparse, generally. My Trig notes, for example, took up only a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but they had everything I needed and, more importantly, nothing I didn't. They weren't even crammed full of super tiny text like you sometimes see when a teacher allows one page of notes for a test and some yahoo tries to fit the entire book on there.
I'm sure your method works fine for you, and maybe it's better over-all considering your particular situation, but from a strict memory point of view it's far from optimal. At the most basic level, your notes and diagrams are seperated, although whatever work you may put into integrating them later may make up for that.
If I could get a tablet that ran Linux I would buy it today. Digitized, searchable notes would be incredibly useful. With luck This will be a reallity by the time I go back to school, which should be 12-18 months if all goes well.
Without Linux, though, I'm just not interested. I've escaped the pain of Windows once, and a tablet is just not compelling enough to make me go back.
theory comes much easier once you have a practical understanding of a system.
Not always. I went through a technician program before starting my EE (on the theory that maybe I could get a decent paying job to help me pay for school, but that's another post), and I don't think it helped me with the theory much at all. All the tech classes I took were very hands on, and I have a pretty good handle on building and even designing circuits, at least simple ones.
When I took the circuits portion of the physics series, though, I was just as lost as anyone else. I could look at the circuit and know what it was doing, but there didn't seem to be any connection at all between that and the theory the lab was supposed to be based on. Even the basics like Ohm's law had become unweildly nonsense.
On the other hand, I have friends who made it through that and later were exposed to electronics as it is tought to technicians, and I could actually see everything falling into place in their minds.
That said, I think the demise of the apprenticeship is one of the worst things to happen to education, and I'm glad that an institution like MIT is smart enough to recognize that and try to fill in the gap to some degree.
A laptop would be nice for programming classes, but only because you wouldn't have to fuss with floppies and platform variations. Laptops are worde than useless for notes though. Partly for the reasons you list (diagrams and equations) and partly because you remember more if you physically write the stuff down. Don't rob yourself of that valuable few percent you get from tactile-kinesthetic involvement! Every little bit counts.
I learned to get 1 thin 3-ring binder for each class. I like the ones with the cardboard binding, not the floppy cheap plastic ones, and make sure you get a different color for each class so you don't confuse them in your rush out the door. Don't reuse them, unless you're absolutely sure you will never need the info from that class ever again (hint, I wrote a research paper my senior year in high school that I reused, with some revision, in every English class I took in college). Also, get yourself a good 3-hole punch so you can get all the handouts, tests, quizes, etc. in there too. You can also get 3-ring pouches for floppies and CDs, which are handy.
At the end of the semester I just make sure everything for that class is in there, take out any unused paper, label the spine with a Sharpie, and stick it on the shelf. Having class notes organized and easy to find like that has helped me a great deal when it's come time to finally apply the stuff in the real world.
A PDA would be a waste, I think, unless you already are in the habit of using a dayplanner or something like that. It's much better to devote that carrying space to a good graphing calculator.
If the government switches (ehrm, continues switching) to commodity hardware for these things it might make it possible for Microsoft to start bidding on them. Surely there's some profit in those contracts even when commodity hardware and free software is used?
If they're buying commodity pre-built machines then it's quite likely that they are paying the Microsoft Tax on every one of them. That would certainly be profitatable for Microsoft, especially since if they're just wiping the drive to put it in a Beowulf Microsoft will never have to worry about providing any support for it.
I don't think they deserve to be recognized by their official corporate symbol anymore. If Microsoft rates a borg photoshop, Caldera certainly should get something more exemplary of their character and bearing.
What's so inappropriate about a giant Micky Mouse casting its shadow over a scortched earth? That seems to describe them and their policies perfectly to me.
One problem: I read somewhere recently that SCO says their lawyer is working on contingency. I don't have time to find a link right now, but that would seem to shoot a rather large hole in your scenario.
Re:250,000 Euros... Per Violation
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 1
That's 250,000 euros each and every time they make such a claim without backing it up. That could get expensive fast!
I know that's the origional issue, and according to Eben Moglen, a professor of law and general counsel for the FSF who actually enforces the GPL on a regular basis, there are no ambiguities in the GPL. After giving it some thought, I've decided to take his word for it over yours.
I never said there weren't violators, if that were true Mr Moglen wouldn't have anything to say about enforcing the GPL, would he? I just repeated his claim that when violators are confronted with the facts and the language of the GPL they have, without exception, realized that there was no way they could win if the issue went to court. I also repeated Mr. Moglen's beleif, and I think he knows better than either of us, that if there were a weakness in the GPL it would have been tested in court. It's not like the GPL is new or anything, it's been around for at least 15 years, and in that time not a single person has had the balls to test it in court. That certainly seems like substantial evidence of it's lack of ambiguity to me.
The SCO situation, however, has nothing to do with the GPL, and even if it did the FSF would have no business pressing the issue since the FSF doesn't hold the copyrights to Linux. The only reason for IBM to raise the GPL as a defense would be to show the possibility that it was in fact SCO that stole the code from Linux, or perhaps that it was there before IBM was ever involved in Linux. Even then, the fact that it is the GPL, and not say BSD or QPL or Artistic license, is totally irrelevant. The only relevance is that it is an open source license, and thus the code was available to anyone who wanted to take a look at it.
The only way the language of the GPL would be truely relevant is if SCO went after another Linux distro and could be shown to have knowingly distributed their code under the GPL. In that case it would hardly be a demonstration of weakness of the GPL itself, but rather a demonstration of it's strength.
I'm wondering if you've tried SuSE recently? Especially with 8.x I think they've acheived the goal of making things easier without dumbing them down. I'm not a Red Hat user, but I often get the impression that they are consistently missing the mark on this.
IMHO, yast is comprehensible to a newbie, usable and even helpful for an intermediate user (which I consider myself), and gets out of the expert's way when it needs to. Updates are easy and intuitive, as is installation of any package SuSE includes (which is a hell of a lot), And everything is actually configured during the installation (something I understand Red Hat doesn't do).
As for your desktop experience, I agree with you partially. I personally prefer WindowMaker, but that's mostly because I don't like clutter and am extremely comfortable on the command line. KDE is great for my wife, though, and seems to be quite stable for her. Perhaps the stability issues you've experienced are the fault of the distro, not the environments themselves? On the speed differences, though, I really don't see that much of a difference on my current system (nForce2, AthlonXP 1800+, GeForce2 32MB, 512MB RAM). Perhaps you don't have DMA enabled for your hard drive? That sped up load times significantly for me, I'd estimate something like 60-70%.
I disagree that the desktop is dying, and here's why: devices such as you suggest have been repeatedly introduced to the market, and just as repeatedly rejected by it, at least as a replacement for the desktop. They certainly complement it, and in some cases augment it, but they will never replace it until they somehow manage to squeeze the functionality of at least a 17" monitor into that hand-held device. There are ways to do that of course, even today, but I don't see them becoming mainstream any time soon.
Caldera bought SCO and then changed their name to SCO, and consequently the name of Caldera's Linux distribution changed as well. I really don't think that counts as SCO releasing their own Linux distro, especially considering that they started dissing Linux as soon as they changed their name.
How do you know that it wasn't IBM that prompted Novell to examine their contracts with SCO? IBM is famous for their patent armoury, after all, I'm sure a few people there pay attention to this sort of thing.
About Netware, I used (Netware 5) in a LAN class I took a year or so ago, and I liked working with it. The interface is great. They've accomplished everything MS claims to be trying to do and more (GUI interface, user profiles, extreme granularity of permissions), and given it the ease of use of basic Unix permissions. It's frighteningly intuitive. The only thing that put me off of it was the price, which for the small business I was working for at the time would have been about $1700 for the Small Business Edition (IIRC, $1300 base plus $70 per user) not including hardware and my time to put it together. That was just too much, especially considering that I was able to get the functionality we actually needed for $200 using Linux on an old machine we had sitting in our storeroom (if you're curious, that $200 was split pretty evenly between the new harddrive we got for it and my time to put it all together).
If money hadn't been such a serious issue, though, I would have been happy to use Netware.
I very much doubt that there is language in the contract that specifically says Novell has to sue. There are other ways to resolve these kinds of disputes, and almost every one of them is preferable to involving a judge. All Novell would have to do to resolve the issue is help Linux developers fix the infected code, either by identification and rewrite, or by relicensing, as their contract with SCO allows. That's how every single GPL dispute has been resolved so far.
SCO probably does have contracts with the other UnitedLinux members (SuSE, Connectiva, and TurboLinux, IIRC). I know that has definately tempered SuSE's response to this whole thing. Maybe those contracts make the UnitedLinux partners vulnerable to SCO.
(Somewhat OT) As a SuSE fanboy, I have to say that I'm very disappointed in SuSE's wussy stance on this. If I were running SuSE, I would be PISSED. At the very least, I would be talking to my lawyers to see if there was any way to use SCO's obvious bad faith to get them ejected from UnitedLinux and have all relevant contracts with them nullified. Who knows, though, maye they're pulling a Microsoft and basically underwriting the next LinuxTag.
It's more than just a historic victory. BSD won because SysV was found to be riddled with unattributed BSD code. Part of the settlement was that the BSD code could stay there, which makes BSD effectively immune to Unix IP suits (immunity may have also been part of the settlement, I don't recall). Any action against BSD based on SysV IP rights would be suicide.
SCO didn't release their own Linux distro, they were bought up by a Linux company , Caldera, which makes this whole thing all the more shameful.
Of course, the Caldera leadership has never shown itself to be particularly bright. They were, after all, the ones trying to sell Linux under a per-seat license a while back.
That seems right to me, but I wonder. A lot of SCO's FUD against Linux users relies on the idea that customers may be liable. Their letter says:
[...] Linux distributors do not warrant the legal integrity of the Linux code provided to customers. Therefore legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user.
Since proprietary licences generally disclaim liability too one would expect their customers to be in the same position -- at least if it is possible to disclaim liability for this.
The whole warranty thing is pure FUD. They're just regurgitating the same rhetoric Microsoft was spewing, and we all know MS warrants nothing. In fact, I've yet to see a license for any software, proprietary or otherwise, that doesn't have an exclusion of liability clause, and I very much doubt that SCO doesn't include one as well.
There are 2 things going on here, though. One is that, by the nature of open source, the division between user and publisher is blurred, so any user that has submitted code which is based on the tainted code is potentially liable I suppose, as well as, obviously, anyone who distributed it. I think it would be a very hard case to pursue, though, since the user would have no way of knowing that the code was tainted unless they were somehow intimitly familiar with SCO's code already. It's still a valid point for SCO to make, however.
The second is that SCO's complaint is not based solely on copyright, they also mention trade secrets and (IIRC) patents. The copyright issue (copied code) is the one that gets the most press here, since that is the allegation most insulting to Linux developers.
Re:Because MUDS are run by people..
on
Saving MUDs?
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· Score: 1
I would add politics to the list. That's the basic reason all the MUDs I ever played on fell apart. It was always the really petty, infantile sort of politics, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had mod points so I could mod you up.
For those people who play counter strike (well), they know that de_dust is probably one of the most unbalanced maps out there.
I've always hated de_dust, for that very reason. I've never understood why it was so popular.
On the other hand, It would be one of the easiest ones to build.
Yes, I am proud of that. It was a damn good paper to begin with, and it got much better over the years. I had already proven my ability to write a research paper, and I didn't need any more practice. Writing a research paper was just busy work for me, and only took time away from the things I actually needed to spend time learning.
It's not like I was just printing up and handing in the exact same paper every time, nor was I buying it off the internet or anything like that. It was my own work, and I made significant changes every time in order to fit with the particular requirements of the assignment. I don't see anything unethical about maximizing the return on the significant effort I put into it innitially.
Knowing your learning style is key, it's really too bad schools don't make those tests a standard part of the curriculum. Doing that in grade school, and again in high school, would make a huge difference for a lot of kids, I think. I didn't take one until I took a class in college that the school required of anyone who wanted to be a tutor. I'm one of the lucky few who is basically even overall, but it's highly dependent on the subject matter. My guess is that I'm naturally visual, but after 15 years of being a musician, audio and T-K have come up to that level as well.
But does it run in Linux?
That's become a deciding factor for me. Using Windows at work, where somebody else has to maintain it, is fine, but at home Linux is just so much less hassle.
Also, how bulky are they?
I might be interested in the Logitech pen thing, but the special expensive paper kind of turns me off. It would really suck to have this big, expensive pen be useless in a couple of years because Logitech decides it's no longer profitable to print the special paper. When I buy something like that I want to know that I'll still be able to use it in 5 years. And, of course, there's the Linux thing again.
My handwriting is quite legible, thanks to 3 years of drafting classes, but I don't do cursive, which I hear is a problem for a lot of OCR software. I could live without OCR, I suppose, but it seems pointless to go to so much effort and expense if I don't end up with the ability to do a string search. Without that, I think I'm better off with paper.
The only problem I see is that highlighters will "encourage" you to gloss over the non-highlighted text, and for that reason highlighters are not recommended by learning experts (I had to take a class in this stuff to become a tutor, I don't claim to be an expert myself). Of course, the fact that you read the text at least once before doing the highlighting probably makes up for that. Underlining is considered to be a superior alternative, btw, which would eliminate one more thing you have to carry to class. Writing in the margins is highly recommended.
I used this method in my general ed classes (English, History, etc), but I don't think it would be effective in, say, Calculus or Physics, where most of my "notes" were the equations and diagrams we worked on in class. Also, I have a hard enough time reading the book at all, let alone before the lecture, and forget about suplimental material. That's my own time-management issue, though, and I've gotten better as I've gotten older.
Everyone remembers more when they write it down, as has been shown by so many studies that it is now considered a scientific fact in the teaching community. The more of your senses that are involved, the better you will remember.
Notice, however, that I said nothing about detailed notes. You're almost certainly right in that regard, but mostly because you'd be spending more time on your notes than paying attention to the actual information. You can't get around that by using a keyboard though, in fact that only aggravates the problem since the motion of your hand is so much less tied to the information being recorded. The only way around that is to find your perfect balance between note-taking and paying attention.
My own notes are quite sparse, generally. My Trig notes, for example, took up only a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but they had everything I needed and, more importantly, nothing I didn't. They weren't even crammed full of super tiny text like you sometimes see when a teacher allows one page of notes for a test and some yahoo tries to fit the entire book on there.
I'm sure your method works fine for you, and maybe it's better over-all considering your particular situation, but from a strict memory point of view it's far from optimal. At the most basic level, your notes and diagrams are seperated, although whatever work you may put into integrating them later may make up for that.
If I could get a tablet that ran Linux I would buy it today. Digitized, searchable notes would be incredibly useful. With luck This will be a reallity by the time I go back to school, which should be 12-18 months if all goes well.
Without Linux, though, I'm just not interested. I've escaped the pain of Windows once, and a tablet is just not compelling enough to make me go back.
theory comes much easier once you have a practical understanding of a system.
Not always. I went through a technician program before starting my EE (on the theory that maybe I could get a decent paying job to help me pay for school, but that's another post), and I don't think it helped me with the theory much at all. All the tech classes I took were very hands on, and I have a pretty good handle on building and even designing circuits, at least simple ones.
When I took the circuits portion of the physics series, though, I was just as lost as anyone else. I could look at the circuit and know what it was doing, but there didn't seem to be any connection at all between that and the theory the lab was supposed to be based on. Even the basics like Ohm's law had become unweildly nonsense.
On the other hand, I have friends who made it through that and later were exposed to electronics as it is tought to technicians, and I could actually see everything falling into place in their minds.
That said, I think the demise of the apprenticeship is one of the worst things to happen to education, and I'm glad that an institution like MIT is smart enough to recognize that and try to fill in the gap to some degree.
I couldn't agree more.
A laptop would be nice for programming classes, but only because you wouldn't have to fuss with floppies and platform variations. Laptops are worde than useless for notes though. Partly for the reasons you list (diagrams and equations) and partly because you remember more if you physically write the stuff down. Don't rob yourself of that valuable few percent you get from tactile-kinesthetic involvement! Every little bit counts.
I learned to get 1 thin 3-ring binder for each class. I like the ones with the cardboard binding, not the floppy cheap plastic ones, and make sure you get a different color for each class so you don't confuse them in your rush out the door. Don't reuse them, unless you're absolutely sure you will never need the info from that class ever again (hint, I wrote a research paper my senior year in high school that I reused, with some revision, in every English class I took in college). Also, get yourself a good 3-hole punch so you can get all the handouts, tests, quizes, etc. in there too. You can also get 3-ring pouches for floppies and CDs, which are handy.
At the end of the semester I just make sure everything for that class is in there, take out any unused paper, label the spine with a Sharpie, and stick it on the shelf. Having class notes organized and easy to find like that has helped me a great deal when it's come time to finally apply the stuff in the real world.
A PDA would be a waste, I think, unless you already are in the habit of using a dayplanner or something like that. It's much better to devote that carrying space to a good graphing calculator.
If the government switches (ehrm, continues switching) to commodity hardware for these things it might make it possible for Microsoft to start bidding on them. Surely there's some profit in those contracts even when commodity hardware and free software is used?
If they're buying commodity pre-built machines then it's quite likely that they are paying the Microsoft Tax on every one of them. That would certainly be profitatable for Microsoft, especially since if they're just wiping the drive to put it in a Beowulf Microsoft will never have to worry about providing any support for it.
I don't think they deserve to be recognized by their official corporate symbol anymore. If Microsoft rates a borg photoshop, Caldera certainly should get something more exemplary of their character and bearing.
What's so inappropriate about a giant Micky Mouse casting its shadow over a scortched earth? That seems to describe them and their policies perfectly to me.
I think it's more likely that they don't think enough people are still using 2.2 for it to be worth worrying about.
One problem: I read somewhere recently that SCO says their lawyer is working on contingency. I don't have time to find a link right now, but that would seem to shoot a rather large hole in your scenario.
That's 250,000 euros each and every time they make such a claim without backing it up. That could get expensive fast!
I know that's the origional issue, and according to Eben Moglen, a professor of law and general counsel for the FSF who actually enforces the GPL on a regular basis, there are no ambiguities in the GPL. After giving it some thought, I've decided to take his word for it over yours.
I never said there weren't violators, if that were true Mr Moglen wouldn't have anything to say about enforcing the GPL, would he? I just repeated his claim that when violators are confronted with the facts and the language of the GPL they have, without exception, realized that there was no way they could win if the issue went to court. I also repeated Mr. Moglen's beleif, and I think he knows better than either of us, that if there were a weakness in the GPL it would have been tested in court. It's not like the GPL is new or anything, it's been around for at least 15 years, and in that time not a single person has had the balls to test it in court. That certainly seems like substantial evidence of it's lack of ambiguity to me.
The SCO situation, however, has nothing to do with the GPL, and even if it did the FSF would have no business pressing the issue since the FSF doesn't hold the copyrights to Linux. The only reason for IBM to raise the GPL as a defense would be to show the possibility that it was in fact SCO that stole the code from Linux, or perhaps that it was there before IBM was ever involved in Linux. Even then, the fact that it is the GPL, and not say BSD or QPL or Artistic license, is totally irrelevant. The only relevance is that it is an open source license, and thus the code was available to anyone who wanted to take a look at it.
The only way the language of the GPL would be truely relevant is if SCO went after another Linux distro and could be shown to have knowingly distributed their code under the GPL. In that case it would hardly be a demonstration of weakness of the GPL itself, but rather a demonstration of it's strength.
I'm wondering if you've tried SuSE recently? Especially with 8.x I think they've acheived the goal of making things easier without dumbing them down. I'm not a Red Hat user, but I often get the impression that they are consistently missing the mark on this.
IMHO, yast is comprehensible to a newbie, usable and even helpful for an intermediate user (which I consider myself), and gets out of the expert's way when it needs to. Updates are easy and intuitive, as is installation of any package SuSE includes (which is a hell of a lot), And everything is actually configured during the installation (something I understand Red Hat doesn't do).
As for your desktop experience, I agree with you partially. I personally prefer WindowMaker, but that's mostly because I don't like clutter and am extremely comfortable on the command line. KDE is great for my wife, though, and seems to be quite stable for her. Perhaps the stability issues you've experienced are the fault of the distro, not the environments themselves? On the speed differences, though, I really don't see that much of a difference on my current system (nForce2, AthlonXP 1800+, GeForce2 32MB, 512MB RAM). Perhaps you don't have DMA enabled for your hard drive? That sped up load times significantly for me, I'd estimate something like 60-70%.
I disagree that the desktop is dying, and here's why: devices such as you suggest have been repeatedly introduced to the market, and just as repeatedly rejected by it, at least as a replacement for the desktop. They certainly complement it, and in some cases augment it, but they will never replace it until they somehow manage to squeeze the functionality of at least a 17" monitor into that hand-held device. There are ways to do that of course, even today, but I don't see them becoming mainstream any time soon.
Caldera bought SCO and then changed their name to SCO, and consequently the name of Caldera's Linux distribution changed as well. I really don't think that counts as SCO releasing their own Linux distro, especially considering that they started dissing Linux as soon as they changed their name.
How do you know that it wasn't IBM that prompted Novell to examine their contracts with SCO? IBM is famous for their patent armoury, after all, I'm sure a few people there pay attention to this sort of thing.
About Netware, I used (Netware 5) in a LAN class I took a year or so ago, and I liked working with it. The interface is great. They've accomplished everything MS claims to be trying to do and more (GUI interface, user profiles, extreme granularity of permissions), and given it the ease of use of basic Unix permissions. It's frighteningly intuitive. The only thing that put me off of it was the price, which for the small business I was working for at the time would have been about $1700 for the Small Business Edition (IIRC, $1300 base plus $70 per user) not including hardware and my time to put it together. That was just too much, especially considering that I was able to get the functionality we actually needed for $200 using Linux on an old machine we had sitting in our storeroom (if you're curious, that $200 was split pretty evenly between the new harddrive we got for it and my time to put it all together).
If money hadn't been such a serious issue, though, I would have been happy to use Netware.
I very much doubt that there is language in the contract that specifically says Novell has to sue. There are other ways to resolve these kinds of disputes, and almost every one of them is preferable to involving a judge. All Novell would have to do to resolve the issue is help Linux developers fix the infected code, either by identification and rewrite, or by relicensing, as their contract with SCO allows. That's how every single GPL dispute has been resolved so far.
SCO probably does have contracts with the other UnitedLinux members (SuSE, Connectiva, and TurboLinux, IIRC). I know that has definately tempered SuSE's response to this whole thing. Maybe those contracts make the UnitedLinux partners vulnerable to SCO.
(Somewhat OT)
As a SuSE fanboy, I have to say that I'm very disappointed in SuSE's wussy stance on this. If I were running SuSE, I would be PISSED. At the very least, I would be talking to my lawyers to see if there was any way to use SCO's obvious bad faith to get them ejected from UnitedLinux and have all relevant contracts with them nullified. Who knows, though, maye they're pulling a Microsoft and basically underwriting the next LinuxTag.
It's more than just a historic victory. BSD won because SysV was found to be riddled with unattributed BSD code. Part of the settlement was that the BSD code could stay there, which makes BSD effectively immune to Unix IP suits (immunity may have also been part of the settlement, I don't recall). Any action against BSD based on SysV IP rights would be suicide.
SCO didn't release their own Linux distro, they were bought up by a Linux company , Caldera, which makes this whole thing all the more shameful.
Of course, the Caldera leadership has never shown itself to be particularly bright. They were, after all, the ones trying to sell Linux under a per-seat license a while back.
That seems right to me, but I wonder. A lot of SCO's FUD against Linux users relies on the idea that customers may be liable. Their letter says:
[...] Linux distributors do not warrant the legal integrity of the Linux code provided to customers. Therefore legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user.
Since proprietary licences generally disclaim liability too one would expect their customers to be in the same position -- at least if it is possible to disclaim liability for this.
The whole warranty thing is pure FUD. They're just regurgitating the same rhetoric Microsoft was spewing, and we all know MS warrants nothing. In fact, I've yet to see a license for any software, proprietary or otherwise, that doesn't have an exclusion of liability clause, and I very much doubt that SCO doesn't include one as well.
There are 2 things going on here, though. One is that, by the nature of open source, the division between user and publisher is blurred, so any user that has submitted code which is based on the tainted code is potentially liable I suppose, as well as, obviously, anyone who distributed it. I think it would be a very hard case to pursue, though, since the user would have no way of knowing that the code was tainted unless they were somehow intimitly familiar with SCO's code already. It's still a valid point for SCO to make, however.
The second is that SCO's complaint is not based solely on copyright, they also mention trade secrets and (IIRC) patents. The copyright issue (copied code) is the one that gets the most press here, since that is the allegation most insulting to Linux developers.
I would add politics to the list. That's the basic reason all the MUDs I ever played on fell apart. It was always the really petty, infantile sort of politics, too.