So the Internet works because it "follows standards", and we know MSIE (price: free) has the largest share of the browser market.
They achieved that marketshare through illegal use of their x86 operating system monopoly. That's a fact as determined by the US courts.
So MS hasn't broken the Internet. Can someone give an example of what he's talking about?
He didn't say Microsoft had "broken" the Internet. Let's read it again:
Why must the public have to pay for those technologies once again because companies like Microsoft adopt them and then resell them as proprietary software?
Adopt and resell. Not break. His preceding paragraph about following standards makes no mention of Microsoft. You are trying to put words into his mouth.
all, where does your teenage A-Patchy Webserver hacker get his hands on the specialty hardware used in patrol cars?
1. Apache wasn't written by teenagers.
2. If you've ever worked for a large software company, you might have been shocked at how many wet-behind-the-ears uneducated (or "self taught") programmers are writing the major infrastructure software you depend upon. I find it frightening.
They are suing for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract."
And as you said, the breach of contract is based on the code being copied without permission. That's a copyright violation, whether NewSCO is suing over it or not.
Umm, if you entered into a contract not to copy code, then all your other points are irrelevant. You're not allowed to copy code.
It must be interesting to live in your world where everything is black and white. You are being overly simplistic if you think it's a matter of "code copied, IBM loses".
Hint: contracts can't state conditions that are illegal, nor can contracts be unfair, it seems NewSCO has already broken the contract without any help from IBM, it appears the contract permitted Novell to waive NewSCOs rights (which Novell has done), and in any event it seems OldSCO wasn't allowed to transfer the contract to NewSCO. All of these facts work strongly against NewSCO.
This is on top of the existing problems with the code. Eg, the code might already have been in the public domain (this was never decided in court but a judge gave a strong opinion in briefing) which means perhaps the contract was null and void from the start. NewSCO can't enforce contractual rights over code that they do not own! It even states that possibility quite clearly in the UNIX license amendments.
This is further heaped on top of the fact that you cannot sit on a copyright violation and wait for the damages to increase. A book author who tried this (waited until the book was popular before attempting to receive damages) managed to lose everything. So if it can be proven that NewSCO knew about the code copying (if there ever was any) for considerable time before taking action then they lose anyway.
NewSCO has an impossibly uphill battle on this and they haven't even cleared the first hurdle; NewSCO still hasn't provided any evidence for the code copying! This is not a criminal case, this is a civil case, and NewSCO cannot introduce surprise evidence during the trial. All the evidence must be delivered upfront.
So please step back from your simplistic and erroneous position of "code copied, IBM loses". Hopefully you can now understand that the deck is far more heavily weighted against SCO than that.
Don't all these organizations stand to benefit from SCO being wrong?
Sort of. They stand to lose if SCO is right, but they will have a neutral outcome if SCO is wrong. Except for IBM, none of the organisations and people I listed will win billions of dollars if SCO is wrong.
Also, the argument that "All these people agree with me, so I am right" is a fallacy.
I don't disagree, but I was responding to somebody who had said "There are an awful lot of smart people, including David Boies and several market analysts, who think SCO has a case". I was responding with the same argument to show that an awful lot of "smart people" think the opposite.
Copying code would be a breach of contract, which is what SCO's legal case is based upon.
It's not that simple.
Any copied code might already be in the public domain. See the judges comments in USL vs BSDI.
Any copied code might already be available under a BSD license. See the USL vs BSDI settlement.
Any code that is trivial, obvious, functional or non-creative is NOT copyrightable.
NewSCO might not have the rights to UNIX they claim to have. See Novell's latest statements.
NewSCO might have screwed any rights they did have by not suing IBM in the correct way (eg, 100 days notice).
OldSCO and NewSCO might have both contributed the code in dispute, not IBM. See the Linux ABI project and the work on JFS sponsored by NewSCO.
NewSCO is claiming rights to code that they admit they didn't write - eg, JFS - and IBM copying this code would not be a breach of contract. See the UNIX license amendments.
All of these factors means that your statement "copying code would be a breach of contract" is too simplistic. There are plenty of way where code can be copied without the contract being breached.
I am under the impression that few people suffer from hallucinations.
No? Never had a dream? Never seen a shape in the clouds? Never been startled by a shadow? I would think that nearly everybody has suffered from at least one hallucination in their lifetime.
Personal knowledge is not a bad way of obtaining knowledge.
I said "personal experience". The person before me said "personal experience". I'm not going to comment on the tautology of personal knowledge being a good way of obtaining knowledge.
How about knowable, but not provable. A matter of personal experience. But not something which can be demonstrated in a lab.
An interesting point, but I would say that personal experience is a dodgy way of obtaining knowledge, considering the number of people who suffer from hallucinations.
Well, that's because disputing data is pretty damn stupid, unless you think the measurements were done incorrectly. You can dispute the conclusions from the data with impunity if you make a good argument.
Or that electric cars cause as much pollution as gasoline cars.
Well, they don't. I don't know why you think they do. Sure, if your electric car is charged by electricity from a fossil fuel plant then it's a polluting car (though still less polluting than your typical combustion engine). But all of my electricity comes from hydroelectric power. So for me, an electric car is effectively pollution free (though there's convincing evidence that the hydroelectric dam is damaging to our local water ecology).
It's not because anything else is a "poorly-supported fringe opinion", because there are plenty of scientists and climatologists that offer support to contrarian views.
There are actually very few scientists who offer contrarian views. There are many scientists who offer alternate theories but that's not the same thing. People who say "there are many scientists who support BLAH" remind me of those fundamentalists who say "there are many scientists who say evolution is false". It's a lie that is invented to lend credibility to an otherwise indefensible position. Don't use that technique. You look bad merely by association.
The creed of environmentalism CANNOT be questioned. It's heretical to do so.
Of course, you can question it. You're silly to think that you can't. Scientists love a good debate. Unfortunately you can't contribute to a good debate with your... I'll be kind and say "weak arguments".
There are an awful lot of smart people, including David Boies and several market analysts, who think SCO has a case.
And there are other legal experts (Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglen) and other market analysts (Decatur Jones) who think SCO doesn't have a case.
On the side of "SCO is wrong" we also have Novell, IBM, HP, SGI and the FSF. We also have Linus Torvalds who isn't a lawyer but does seem to have some knowledge of Linux's history. We also have Eric Raymond who might not be your favourite person but there's no denying he has some knowledge of UNIX history.
On the side of "SCO is right" we have... mostly people who stand to benefit from SCO being right.
Bear in mind that cases are not tried in the media, and SCO is under no obligation to reveal its evidence.
SCO has been given a court order to reveal their evidence in... hrm... 6 days.
Absolutely not. I think it's quite possible, maybe even likely, that someone from IBM stole some SCO code and put it in Linux. There's certainly no evidence against this, as you can't prove such a negative without access to the SCO source.
Nor is there any evidence for this. That is what makes me believe there isn't any meat in SCO's sandwich.
Not just the atheist. Announcing that you actually believe in a religion, whatever it may be as long as its not currently fashionable, can lead to a lot of eyebrow-raising too. The only "acceptable" choice right now seems to be to be an agnostic...
Contrary to popular American belief, agnostic does not mean undecided. The problem with agnostics is that they claim that the existence of God is unknowable. I think it is merely unknown but perhaps knowable.
There are all kinds of sacred cows here, that you criticize at your peril:
I disagree. The very fact that you felt free to criticise these sacred cows right here is proof that you weren't "cowed" (pun!) by the peril of criticism. The debate is healthy and welcome; you are the proof of that.
the effectiveness of Linux,
There are any number of Linux criticisms here on Slashdot (where Linux means the entire distribution instead of the proper meaning of just the kernel). For example, I often see complaints about XFree86, debates over making a "salary" from Linux, people claiming that the Linux desktop sucks, that there aren't enough games, that it's too hard to manage, that there's not enough hardware support, that we should all use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, etc. I think Slashdot holds a healthy balance of Linux and non-Linux partisans. Or at the very least, the non-Linux partisans are very vocal with their opinion.
the evil of copyright in general
I think the criticisms of copyright are more restrained than an outright claim of "evil". Most Slashdot posters seem to agree that copyright is valuable but the current terms are far too heavily weighted in favour of corporations, and that has disrupted the balance between progress and compensation that the copyright creators intended.
and the recording industry in particular;
Hatred of the RIAA is not limited to Slashdot. The RIAA has received scorn from the wider press community, artists, labels, and customers.
the lack of merit to SCO's lawsuit
I have read a lot about this case - every article on Groklaw, every court document that is available online, every press release from SCO, every SEC filing and every contract that is even remotely related to this case - and I have come to the conclusion that there truly is a lack of merit to SCO's lawsuit.
So I don't think I'm a victim of anti-SCO groupthink. When SCO first started making waves in February 2003 I was one of the people to say "hey, SCO has every right to defend their IP, and if they're right then they deserve fair compensation". But the more facts I learn the more skeptical I have become that SCO's case has even the slightest merit.
Outside commentators (such as those from Forbes) have referred to Slashdot and like sites as "echo chambers",
The hypocrisy of Forbes referring to Slashdot as an "echo chamber" is apparently lost on you.
Just curious about this, but has anybody ever been sued for a GPL violation?
Sort of. I'll say "yes" but qualify. You can't sue somebody for violating the GPL. It's not a contract. It's a license. If they don't agree to the license then it has no legal weight.
The impressive part about the GPL is that if they don't agree to the GPL then copyright
law springs into effect. Copyright law can kick them in the teeth a lot harder than the GPL ever could.
So you don't really sue for a GPL violation. You sue for copyright infringement. You offer the GPL as an escape mechanism. If the guilty party accepts the GPL then they avoid the lawsuit. If they don't accept the GPL then... well... simply put, they lose in court.
There have been several examples of companies being sued for copyright infringement of GPLed software. I think they've all ended in settlement so far. So effectively the courts have been used to enforce the GPL. A recent example was MySQL vs NuSphere as reported on Slashdot.
Why would GPL be any less valid than Microsoft's EULA?... GPL is a license like any other. To use the software, you must adhere to its rules.
Without commenting on the validity either way, take note that they are different things. The GPL is a license to distribute[1] whereas the Microsoft EULA is a license to use. The GPL specifically mentions that all possible uses are already granted by copyright law without agreeing to the license.
Let me say that again... you do NOT have to agree to the GPL to use Linux. Copyright law was never intended to restrict use. That is precisely why companies created the EULA; so they could restrict use.
So the two licenses operate in different legal spaces. You really can't compare them based on nothing more than the common word "license" in their expanded acronyms.
Now take them to court because they are redistributing the content without a license. Easy case to prove, but the penalty is based on damages.
The penalty is based on damages but compliance is the issue, not money. Presumably the authors of GPL software aren't fishing for money; they just want the GPL violator to stop violating the GPL. The courts can order that as a separate issue to that of penalties.
The problem with Linux, at this point, is that it is still essentially a free UNIX. Today's geeks do not seem to have the patience to learn the UNIX command line; they are more insterested in the trendy video game of the week and hooking up their new digital camera to their computer
They are not geeks. They are consumers of electronic toys. A geek would want to pull the digital camera apart to see how it worked.
You obviously haven't checked the cost of natural gas lately, which is running about 9 cents/kwh this winter, up from 5 cents a few years ago
You "obviously" didn't check my location, which isn't the USA, and doesn't have the same costs for natural gas. In the wider world (which I know is a foreign concept to Americans <grin>) natural gas is very cheap.
The unsubsidized cost of nuclear is even more, from 11 cents/kwh to as much as 50 cents/kwh depending on which government is covering the insurance involved (search on "Price-Anderson" to get the U.S. story.)
I believe I made the point about nuclear being expensive in my first comment.
So, have a look at wind. Back in '98, wind cost 10 cents/kwh, but just five years later, it's wholesaleing in the U.S. for around 2 cents/kwh,
That's an incredible drop in price and very encouraging. Is that price drop because of government intervention? I hope not because I think clean energy sources should win on merit rather than by government edict. We've already seen the mess made when governments artificially prop-up unrealistic energy sources like nuclear.
Some people believe that wind power could be dominant in much less than 30 years.
I hope that does come true. Windpower has a number of benefits - clean, simple, renewable, sustainable, scalable - but it really needs to be cheaper before it makes a big difference.
Wind: Nonviable (kills birds, not cost efficient.)
As others have already commented on this thread, wind turbines kill fewer birds by several orders of magnitude than house windows. It's a non-issue.
Solar: Nonviable (cost of production exceeds energy consumed, massive chemical waste byproducts)
Solar doesn't have to use photovoltaic cells. The solarthermal plants are simple mirrors and water boilers to drive steam turbines and generators. A solarthermal power plant produces almost no chemical waste.
Nuclear: Zero CO2. Zero emissions while running. Waste products are compact and easily-localized/transported substance that may be a useful resource in the future. Most kilowatt-hours per kilogram of fuel (and waste) by orders of magnitude over every other option.
One of the problems with nuclear is that it's not really that cheap. The governments (in all countries) subsidize their nuclear power plants in various ways (eg, tariffs, research, cheap loans, fuel production, waste cleanup). It's cheap to the nuclear power plant company but it's not that cheap to the country overall.
The best option right now is sadly still coal, despite the high pollution output (both noxious and radioactive). Second best option is gas. The third best option is a coin-toss between nuclear and wind. My general hope is that geothermal or solarthermal has a breakthrough within the next decade, but I agree they're not viable in their current forms. These are my personal opinions, of course, but I have been reading about this stuff for years.
Slashdot Mirror
They achieved that marketshare through illegal use of their x86 operating system monopoly. That's a fact as determined by the US courts.
He didn't say Microsoft had "broken" the Internet. Let's read it again:
Adopt and resell. Not break. His preceding paragraph about following standards makes no mention of Microsoft. You are trying to put words into his mouth.
Well you did say this:
I can't fathom the difference.
Hey, that was my point. Shenanigans.
1. Apache wasn't written by teenagers.
2. If you've ever worked for a large software company, you might have been shocked at how many wet-behind-the-ears uneducated (or "self taught") programmers are writing the major infrastructure software you depend upon. I find it frightening.
I didn't say they were.
And as you said, the breach of contract is based on the code being copied without permission. That's a copyright violation, whether NewSCO is suing over it or not.
It must be interesting to live in your world where everything is black and white. You are being overly simplistic if you think it's a matter of "code copied, IBM loses".
Hint: contracts can't state conditions that are illegal, nor can contracts be unfair, it seems NewSCO has already broken the contract without any help from IBM, it appears the contract permitted Novell to waive NewSCOs rights (which Novell has done), and in any event it seems OldSCO wasn't allowed to transfer the contract to NewSCO. All of these facts work strongly against NewSCO.
This is on top of the existing problems with the code. Eg, the code might already have been in the public domain (this was never decided in court but a judge gave a strong opinion in briefing) which means perhaps the contract was null and void from the start. NewSCO can't enforce contractual rights over code that they do not own! It even states that possibility quite clearly in the UNIX license amendments.
This is further heaped on top of the fact that you cannot sit on a copyright violation and wait for the damages to increase. A book author who tried this (waited until the book was popular before attempting to receive damages) managed to lose everything. So if it can be proven that NewSCO knew about the code copying (if there ever was any) for considerable time before taking action then they lose anyway.
NewSCO has an impossibly uphill battle on this and they haven't even cleared the first hurdle; NewSCO still hasn't provided any evidence for the code copying! This is not a criminal case, this is a civil case, and NewSCO cannot introduce surprise evidence during the trial. All the evidence must be delivered upfront.
So please step back from your simplistic and erroneous position of "code copied, IBM loses". Hopefully you can now understand that the deck is far more heavily weighted against SCO than that.
Sort of. They stand to lose if SCO is right, but they will have a neutral outcome if SCO is wrong. Except for IBM, none of the organisations and people I listed will win billions of dollars if SCO is wrong.
I don't disagree, but I was responding to somebody who had said "There are an awful lot of smart people, including David Boies and several market analysts, who think SCO has a case". I was responding with the same argument to show that an awful lot of "smart people" think the opposite.
It's not that simple.
All of these factors means that your statement "copying code would be a breach of contract" is too simplistic. There are plenty of way where code can be copied without the contract being breached.
No? Never had a dream? Never seen a shape in the clouds? Never been startled by a shadow? I would think that nearly everybody has suffered from at least one hallucination in their lifetime.
I said "personal experience". The person before me said "personal experience". I'm not going to comment on the tautology of personal knowledge being a good way of obtaining knowledge.
An interesting point, but I would say that personal experience is a dodgy way of obtaining knowledge, considering the number of people who suffer from hallucinations.
SCO's legal case is without merit whether there is copied code or not.
If there are many certified mechanics in my area who compete with each other for my business, sure.
Well, that's because disputing data is pretty damn stupid, unless you think the measurements were done incorrectly. You can dispute the conclusions from the data with impunity if you make a good argument.
Well, they don't. I don't know why you think they do. Sure, if your electric car is charged by electricity from a fossil fuel plant then it's a polluting car (though still less polluting than your typical combustion engine). But all of my electricity comes from hydroelectric power. So for me, an electric car is effectively pollution free (though there's convincing evidence that the hydroelectric dam is damaging to our local water ecology).
There are actually very few scientists who offer contrarian views. There are many scientists who offer alternate theories but that's not the same thing. People who say "there are many scientists who support BLAH" remind me of those fundamentalists who say "there are many scientists who say evolution is false". It's a lie that is invented to lend credibility to an otherwise indefensible position. Don't use that technique. You look bad merely by association.
Of course, you can question it. You're silly to think that you can't. Scientists love a good debate. Unfortunately you can't contribute to a good debate with your... I'll be kind and say "weak arguments".
And there are other legal experts (Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglen) and other market analysts (Decatur Jones) who think SCO doesn't have a case.
On the side of "SCO is wrong" we also have Novell, IBM, HP, SGI and the FSF. We also have Linus Torvalds who isn't a lawyer but does seem to have some knowledge of Linux's history. We also have Eric Raymond who might not be your favourite person but there's no denying he has some knowledge of UNIX history.
On the side of "SCO is right" we have... mostly people who stand to benefit from SCO being right.
SCO has been given a court order to reveal their evidence in... hrm... 6 days.
Nor does it validate their conclusion.
Not that I'd call it a conclusion because Forbes never presents an argument. I'd call it an opinion.
Nor is there any evidence for this. That is what makes me believe there isn't any meat in SCO's sandwich.
And the bonnet on my car is pretty useless to me because I can't fix cars, but I'd never buy a car with the bonnet welded shut.
Contrary to popular American belief, agnostic does not mean undecided. The problem with agnostics is that they claim that the existence of God is unknowable. I think it is merely unknown but perhaps knowable.
I disagree. The very fact that you felt free to criticise these sacred cows right here is proof that you weren't "cowed" (pun!) by the peril of criticism. The debate is healthy and welcome; you are the proof of that.
There are any number of Linux criticisms here on Slashdot (where Linux means the entire distribution instead of the proper meaning of just the kernel). For example, I often see complaints about XFree86, debates over making a "salary" from Linux, people claiming that the Linux desktop sucks, that there aren't enough games, that it's too hard to manage, that there's not enough hardware support, that we should all use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, etc. I think Slashdot holds a healthy balance of Linux and non-Linux partisans. Or at the very least, the non-Linux partisans are very vocal with their opinion.
I think the criticisms of copyright are more restrained than an outright claim of "evil". Most Slashdot posters seem to agree that copyright is valuable but the current terms are far too heavily weighted in favour of corporations, and that has disrupted the balance between progress and compensation that the copyright creators intended.
Hatred of the RIAA is not limited to Slashdot. The RIAA has received scorn from the wider press community, artists, labels, and customers.
I have read a lot about this case - every article on Groklaw, every court document that is available online, every press release from SCO, every SEC filing and every contract that is even remotely related to this case - and I have come to the conclusion that there truly is a lack of merit to SCO's lawsuit.
So I don't think I'm a victim of anti-SCO groupthink. When SCO first started making waves in February 2003 I was one of the people to say "hey, SCO has every right to defend their IP, and if they're right then they deserve fair compensation". But the more facts I learn the more skeptical I have become that SCO's case has even the slightest merit.
The hypocrisy of Forbes referring to Slashdot as an "echo chamber" is apparently lost on you.
No no no, that was baby jesus.
Sort of. I'll say "yes" but qualify. You can't sue somebody for violating the GPL. It's not a contract. It's a license. If they don't agree to the license then it has no legal weight.
The impressive part about the GPL is that if they don't agree to the GPL then copyright law springs into effect. Copyright law can kick them in the teeth a lot harder than the GPL ever could.
So you don't really sue for a GPL violation. You sue for copyright infringement. You offer the GPL as an escape mechanism. If the guilty party accepts the GPL then they avoid the lawsuit. If they don't accept the GPL then... well... simply put, they lose in court.
There have been several examples of companies being sued for copyright infringement of GPLed software. I think they've all ended in settlement so far. So effectively the courts have been used to enforce the GPL. A recent example was MySQL vs NuSphere as reported on Slashdot.
Without commenting on the validity either way, take note that they are different things. The GPL is a license to distribute[1] whereas the Microsoft EULA is a license to use. The GPL specifically mentions that all possible uses are already granted by copyright law without agreeing to the license.
Let me say that again... you do NOT have to agree to the GPL to use Linux. Copyright law was never intended to restrict use. That is precisely why companies created the EULA; so they could restrict use.
So the two licenses operate in different legal spaces. You really can't compare them based on nothing more than the common word "license" in their expanded acronyms.
[1] ... and other things.
The penalty is based on damages but compliance is the issue, not money. Presumably the authors of GPL software aren't fishing for money; they just want the GPL violator to stop violating the GPL. The courts can order that as a separate issue to that of penalties.
They are not geeks. They are consumers of electronic toys. A geek would want to pull the digital camera apart to see how it worked.
You "obviously" didn't check my location, which isn't the USA, and doesn't have the same costs for natural gas. In the wider world (which I know is a foreign concept to Americans <grin>) natural gas is very cheap.
I believe I made the point about nuclear being expensive in my first comment.
That's an incredible drop in price and very encouraging. Is that price drop because of government intervention? I hope not because I think clean energy sources should win on merit rather than by government edict. We've already seen the mess made when governments artificially prop-up unrealistic energy sources like nuclear.
I hope that does come true. Windpower has a number of benefits - clean, simple, renewable, sustainable, scalable - but it really needs to be cheaper before it makes a big difference.
As others have already commented on this thread, wind turbines kill fewer birds by several orders of magnitude than house windows. It's a non-issue.
Solar doesn't have to use photovoltaic cells. The solarthermal plants are simple mirrors and water boilers to drive steam turbines and generators. A solarthermal power plant produces almost no chemical waste.
One of the problems with nuclear is that it's not really that cheap. The governments (in all countries) subsidize their nuclear power plants in various ways (eg, tariffs, research, cheap loans, fuel production, waste cleanup). It's cheap to the nuclear power plant company but it's not that cheap to the country overall.
The best option right now is sadly still coal, despite the high pollution output (both noxious and radioactive). Second best option is gas. The third best option is a coin-toss between nuclear and wind. My general hope is that geothermal or solarthermal has a breakthrough within the next decade, but I agree they're not viable in their current forms. These are my personal opinions, of course, but I have been reading about this stuff for years.