If you don't allow corporations to reap the benefits of doing business in the United States, then they won't do business in the United States. It is the average American, not the multi-billionaires, who would suffer if the US stopped being the primary destination for investment capital and entrepreneurs.
With our $7 Trillion national debt and $44 Trillion dollar Entitlements debt, the US economy would be irreparably devestated by any such flight of capital.
This is actually not true. SCO said they were adding two aims that were worth $1B a pop and the press did the math: 1+1+3=5.
The press forgot that SCO also dropped the trade secret claim. It should be $4B. Of course, SCO isn't about to correct a mistake in their favor. It seems to be what's reported in the press that they care most about, not what is reported in the courtroom.
Apparently, the new copyright claim is that IBM continued to distribute AIX even after SCO "terminated" their license.
In other words, the copyright claim doesn't have anything to do with the alleged copying of code from SysV to Linux.
Additionally, SCO responded to IBMs interrogatory (asking which Linux files SCO claims any rights to) by listing only 17 files (and not identifying specific lines in those files) and indicating that none of these 17 files contain code from SysV.
I really expected them to do much better. I don't see how IBM can be ordered to proceed with discovery given existing case law. (Although it seems like IBM might voluntarily produce information so they can limit SCOs avenues of appeal.
Choose any 10 people off the street, or out of an college science program.
Give them a choice of the person who offers scientific proof, the person who offers scientific proof that he can't know, or the person who offers no information whatsoever (your third option).
Everything else being equal, they will pick the guy who knows 99 times out of 100. It has nothing to do with who is right. Its just a fact of human nature. I KNOW:-)
In a debate between somebody who claims to KNOW the answer, and somebody who claims that the answer is unknowable, the former will always win.
This doesn't mean that the former is correct. Its just that people have a natural desire to know what is going on. The more you know, the more you can anticipate and control your environment.
Somebody who claims that it is difficult or impossible to know something in an absolute sense, offers his audience a far less attractive viewpoint and is doomed to lose the debate, metaphysical accuracy notwithstanding.
You are permitted to add proprietary code to the apache software, and to sell object code only licenses for the combined package. There is no requirement that these licenses be transferable either.
Because of this, Apache License code is broadly accepted in the commercial world, while many companies will not touch GPL or LGPL'd code.
The price for this acceptance is that somebody else can make money off of your work without giving you anything in return.
If this were not occuring in the context of SCO's outrageous actions, I would think that Novell is completely in the wrong. It is certainly clear that Novell attempted to misrepresent their current rights in the System V codebase.
I am thankful that Novell is doing this, but I worry that they could lose money in this lawsuit. I am especially afraid that the suits at Novell will get cold feet. They may step back, evaluate the cost of proceeding, determine that it is too expensive, and settle with SCO.
SCO has claimed (under penalty of perjury) that they DID produce answers to ALL of IBMs interogatories (questions) before the deadline.
This includes an answer to IBM's request that they identify (with specificity) all rights that they claim to the Linux operating system.
We haven't seen this answer (yet). IBM will presumably claim that SCO has NOT answered its questions on January 23rd. But the title of the article is false. SCO _HAS_ produced evidence. The only question is whether or not that evidence is meaningful.
The Warp Pipe guy never intended to put it under an open source license.
He put it on Sourceforge out of ignorance.
You can't accidentally open source something. Even if the Sourceforge contract includes an explicit transferable grant of the right to distribute the source code, there clearly wasn't a meeting of the minds, so it isn't a valid contract.
Ok, then, please explain to me why office clerks belonging to the longshoreman's union make $136,000 per year? There is an ample supply of individuals on the west coast who will do the job for well under $40K.
How did supply and demand determine that $136,000 was the correct amount?
"On average from experience working with both solutions I'd guestimate in the course of a year the average windows system has over a week of downtime compared with about an hour for the average linux system."
This is an absurd and unsupportable accusation. Very few of the millions upon millions of people who used Windows for business last year lost a week of productivity due to their operating system. The director of the non-profit most likely has not had such an experience. By contrast, there are dozens of articles all over the web about people who spent a week just installing Linux. Telling a non-profit director, who has been using Windows successfully, that the average Windows system has a week of down time every year will do nothing but ruin your credibility.
"And then there is the productivity gain that comes with using well chosen solutions."
Real life businesses and non-profits are spectacularly sub-optimal. When they make decisions that deviate from the norm, they are generally flawed. If their success on Linux is dependent on choosing well, they will most likely fail. If they just copy everybody else and use Windows, they will most likely succeed.
"It's not like linux is an almost as good or good enough solution, we shouldnt forget it's a superior solution, in the hands of a user who has learned to use it word is rapidly accelerated, in the hands of someone who learns just enough to get by, it will still outpace the same user on windows since there also they learn just enough to get by."
But they don't know how to use Linux. Otherwise, they wouldn't think Windows was a requirement. Somebody who has been using Windows and Microsoft Office will find Linux and Open Office to be a clearly inferior solution. You are denying reality. In reality, if you pick 10 random business employees, they will consistently choose Windows over Linux, primarilly because they've seen it before and because it was designed for idiots. I doubt very much that a speach about how superior Linux is will change their mind.
"And this is different from windows how?"
They are comfortable with Windows, and that is all the difference in the world.
I addressed the volunteer situation first, because I am more familiar with it.
Volunteers still need to be paid, they get paid with the belief that they have made a difference, and contributed something good. You can't afford to train them, and they are very sensitive to anything that can interfere with the good feeling they receive. If they're forced to learn new software, and they aren't unusually technically savvy, you're liable to significantly reduce the probability of them volunteering again.
Suppose a non-profit is using volunteers who are familiar with Windows. Do you force them to learn Linux? Not if you want to keep them. They're volunteering so they can feel good about themselves. One or two frustrating software problems can easily cancel this good feeling out.
Suppose the computer users are paid employees who are familiar with Windows. Maybe person X gets $30K/year. If, over the lifetime of the computer, that person wastes a week of time learning about Linux, it was a bad decision.
But, you protest, Linux isn't hard to use. Can they call you if they have a problem? They can't. They are frightned that there will be a problem that they can't solve. What do you tell a non-profit whose $1M grant application was rejected because Word was unable to open the document saved in Microsoft fomat by Open Office. If I was running a non-profit, I'd be panic striken by the possibility.
People who are familiar with Linux and Open Office cost more on average than people who are familiar with Windows and Microsoft Office. What makes you think that the cost of hardware and software is even a material factor in the decision?
If the stock price rises, the short position and the converted shares cancel each other out. If the stock price falls, the shares are never converted, and investors profit by an amount equal to difference in value between the series A and the common. (Potentially doubling their money if the company is liquidated and there is enough to fully pay the Series A, but no money left over for the common shareholders).
That said, I doubt that the investors in this offering are immediately planing to hedge their position. In fact, they probably signed agreements prohibiting this, and reducing the liquidity of their shares. (This is admitedly difficult to enforce in the case of a private company).
Stallman declined to be interviewed unless this article used his nomenclature throughout
It boggles my mind that he did this. There's probably no one who has done more to harm the "Free Software" side of the debate than RMS himself. I think he needs psychiatric help.
(This 24 hours after I wrote a nasty letter to Forbes about how unfair they were to the FSF)
Traditionally terrorism has refered to intentional attacks against civilians with the purpose of spreading terror (presumably to some political end). This has usually meant the intentional extralegal killing of civilians. Things have become muddled after 9/11, but John Ashcroft and the far left notwithstanding, I think that very few people disagree with this definition even today.
US policy has been consistent in this regard. Countries have the right to pursue terrorists and any deaths which result from this pursuit, even the death of innocents, are not terrorist acts. They are unfortunate casualties of the fight against terrorism.
There is ample reason to believe that Israeli attempts to minimize civilian casualties are inadequate. But at a minimum it is clear that they are making some effort in this regard, and that Israeli lives have been lost as a consequence. It is easy for us in the US to object to the relative weight given by the Israeli government to Israeli lives vs. Palestinian lives, because no American lives are on the line. I wonder how many innocent Iraqi lives WE would trade the life of one American soldier.
It doesn't matter if they are Israeli or Palestinian.
It just happens to be the case that right now you see many more killings by Palestinian terrorists than by Israeli terrorists. This is probably because Israel is in political control of the region right now.
When (if?) peace is achieved and some of the settlements are evacuated, you can expect to see a far greater degree of activity from Israeli terrorist groups. Right now, they would have to be strategic morons to do anything. (Obviously there are at least a few handfuls of strategic morons).
The US has not listed a website as a terrorist organization. It simply listed it as an alias for a known terrorist organization.
Kahane.com is not being banned for saying bad things. It is being banned FOR CARRYING OUT TERRORIST ATTACKS IN WHICH CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOMPLISH POLITICAL GOALS.
Listing kahane.com as an alias for Kahane Kach just makes it clearer to US citizens that aiding any group claiming that name is a felony.
It makes as much sense to claim that kahane.com is a non-terrorist political offshoot of a terrorist group as it does to claim (as the Europeans did until recently) that Hamas is a non-terroist organization.
This notion that groups which support the killing of civilians can be split into terrorist and non-terrorist components simply does not pass the smell test.
I'm glad to see the Bush administration applying this principle uniformly.
Reading the comments here, it is clear that very few people have actually read the new "evidence".
What has been "discovered" are two equity research reports from February and April of this year that basically make the case that SCO (at under $4/share) is undervalued, particularly in light of the potential for revenues from the IBM lawsuit and the pursuit of alleged copyright violations.
The report was spectacularly prescient. Today the stock is trading at over $17/share. Far from being embarassed, the authors of the report are likely beaming with pride.
Even if you believe that SCO has no legitimate claim on the Linux source code, their conclusions still could have been justified based on the expected value of settlements.
There is nothing evil about the report. It simply drew an accurate (and richly rewarded) conclusion based on Darl's pronouncements, and their own corroborative research.
I'll even defend their corroborative research. On the one hand you have David Boies pursuing the lawsuit largely on a contingency basis, and a CEO who claims (supported by several journalists) that identical code appears in SCO's products and the Linux code base. On the other hand you have several thousand hackers who don't think that they have infringed on SCO's IP, but say that they can't be sure until they actually see the code. Keeping in mind that if the CEO deliberately misrepresents the status of his company, he can go to jail, who are you going to believe.
MOST REASONABLE PEOPLE, would believe the CEO. Going on about the BSD settlement, the GPL, and SCO IP violations is FAR more likely to confuse than convince. Moreover, even if the CEO is probably wrong, the research report's conclusions remain valid. Only if you can conclude with near certainty that Darl is wrong, can you reject the report's conclusions.
My hat goes off to the report's authors. They made a great call.
The original poster explained why he used H1-B visas thusly:
"The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage."
This is precisely why the H1-B visa exists.
You suggest that in order to apply for an H1-B, there can be no Americans available with the same skill set, even if they are incompetent. As any immigration lawyer can tell you, this is flat out wrong.
Under the statute, companies are permitted to set the qualifications for the position any way they see fit. If they want to set a subjective cutoff based on skill level, that is their option. In the case of programers, this is a business necessity.
Remember, a single bad programer can easily do as much harm as ten other programmers do good.
If the law required us to hire any American who put C on their resume, it would have taken billions of dollars out of our economy over the course of the bubble. And believe you me, billions of extra dollars in the hands of American companies and shareholders results in a great many additional jobs for Americans.
Europe is also primarily dominated by Christians, while India is dominated by Hindus, yet their intolerance didn't lead to any terrorist attacks against either region as far as I am aware.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't allow corporations to reap the benefits of doing business in the United States, then they won't do business in the United States. It is the average American, not the multi-billionaires, who would suffer if the US stopped being the primary destination for investment capital and entrepreneurs.
With our $7 Trillion national debt and $44 Trillion dollar Entitlements debt, the US economy would be irreparably devestated by any such flight of capital.
The joke would have gained much and lost nothing had it not been identified as a "jewish joke"
In this case it is the ADDITION of racism that hurt the joke, not its subtraction.
Don't let your anti-PC attitudes get in the way of humor.
This is actually not true. SCO said they were adding two aims that were worth $1B a pop and the press did the math: 1+1+3=5.
The press forgot that SCO also dropped the trade secret claim. It should be $4B. Of course, SCO isn't about to correct a mistake in their favor. It seems to be what's reported in the press that they care most about, not what is reported in the courtroom.
SCO's case is completely falling appart.
Apparently, the new copyright claim is that IBM continued to distribute AIX even after SCO "terminated" their license.
In other words, the copyright claim doesn't have anything to do with the alleged copying of code from SysV to Linux.
Additionally, SCO responded to IBMs interrogatory (asking which Linux files SCO claims any rights to) by listing only 17 files (and not identifying specific lines in those files) and indicating that none of these 17 files contain code from SysV.
I really expected them to do much better. I don't see how IBM can be ordered to proceed with discovery given existing case law. (Although it seems like IBM might voluntarily produce information so they can limit SCOs avenues of appeal.
Your claim is easily disproved.
:-)
Choose any 10 people off the street, or out of an college science program.
Give them a choice of the person who offers scientific proof, the person who offers scientific proof that he can't know, or the person who offers no information whatsoever (your third option).
Everything else being equal, they will pick the guy who knows 99 times out of 100. It has nothing to do with who is right. Its just a fact of human nature. I KNOW
In a debate between somebody who claims to KNOW the answer, and somebody who claims that the answer is unknowable, the former will always win.
This doesn't mean that the former is correct. Its just that people have a natural desire to know what is going on. The more you know, the more you can anticipate and control your environment.
Somebody who claims that it is difficult or impossible to know something in an absolute sense, offers his audience a far less attractive viewpoint and is doomed to lose the debate, metaphysical accuracy notwithstanding.
Yes.
You are permitted to add proprietary code to the apache software, and to sell object code only licenses for the combined package. There is no requirement that these licenses be transferable either.
Because of this, Apache License code is broadly accepted in the commercial world, while many companies will not touch GPL or LGPL'd code.
The price for this acceptance is that somebody else can make money off of your work without giving you anything in return.
If this were not occuring in the context of SCO's outrageous actions, I would think that Novell is completely in the wrong. It is certainly clear that Novell attempted to misrepresent their current rights in the System V codebase.
I am thankful that Novell is doing this, but I worry that they could lose money in this lawsuit. I am especially afraid that the suits at Novell will get cold feet. They may step back, evaluate the cost of proceeding, determine that it is too expensive, and settle with SCO.
SCO's only claimed non-compliance relates to IBM's requests for documents (which are fairly unimportant in comparison to the key interogatories).
SCO has claimed (under penalty of perjury) that they DID produce answers to ALL of IBMs interogatories (questions) before the deadline.
This includes an answer to IBM's request that they identify (with specificity) all rights that they claim to the Linux operating system.
We haven't seen this answer (yet). IBM will presumably claim that SCO has NOT answered its questions on January 23rd. But the title of the article is false. SCO _HAS_ produced evidence. The only question is whether or not that evidence is meaningful.
The problem is that there are many trading systems.
You can't use two phase commit because it doesn't scale in the real world.
This means that all trades would have to be conducted on a single system.
The Warp Pipe guy never intended to put it under an open source license.
He put it on Sourceforge out of ignorance.
You can't accidentally open source something. Even if the Sourceforge contract includes an explicit transferable grant of the right to distribute the source code, there clearly wasn't a meeting of the minds, so it isn't a valid contract.
Ok, then, please explain to me why office clerks belonging to the longshoreman's union make $136,000 per year? There is an ample supply of individuals on the west coast who will do the job for well under $40K.
How did supply and demand determine that $136,000 was the correct amount?
"On average from experience working with both solutions I'd guestimate in the course of a year the average windows system has over a week of downtime compared with about an hour for the average linux system."
This is an absurd and unsupportable accusation. Very few of the millions upon millions of people who used Windows for business last year lost a week of productivity due to their operating system. The director of the non-profit most likely has not had such an experience. By contrast, there are dozens of articles all over the web about people who spent a week just installing Linux. Telling a non-profit director, who has been using Windows successfully, that the average Windows system has a week of down time every year will do nothing but ruin your credibility.
"And then there is the productivity gain that comes with using well chosen solutions."
Real life businesses and non-profits are spectacularly sub-optimal. When they make decisions that deviate from the norm, they are generally flawed. If their success on Linux is dependent on choosing well, they will most likely fail. If they just copy everybody else and use Windows, they will most likely succeed.
"It's not like linux is an almost as good or good enough solution, we shouldnt forget it's a superior solution, in the hands of a user who has learned to use it word is rapidly accelerated, in the hands of someone who learns just enough to get by, it will still outpace the same user on windows since there also they learn just enough to get by."
But they don't know how to use Linux. Otherwise, they wouldn't think Windows was a requirement. Somebody who has been using Windows and Microsoft Office will find Linux and Open Office to be a clearly inferior solution. You are denying reality. In reality, if you pick 10 random business employees, they will consistently choose Windows over Linux, primarilly because they've seen it before and because it was designed for idiots. I doubt very much that a speach about how superior Linux is will change their mind.
"And this is different from windows how?"
They are comfortable with Windows, and that is all the difference in the world.
I addressed the volunteer situation first, because I am more familiar with it.
Volunteers still need to be paid, they get paid with the belief that they have made a difference, and contributed something good. You can't afford to train them, and they are very sensitive to anything that can interfere with the good feeling they receive. If they're forced to learn new software, and they aren't unusually technically savvy, you're liable to significantly reduce the probability of them volunteering again.
Computers are cheap, people are expensive.
Suppose a non-profit is using volunteers who are familiar with Windows. Do you force them to learn Linux? Not if you want to keep them. They're volunteering so they can feel good about themselves. One or two frustrating software problems can easily cancel this good feeling out.
Suppose the computer users are paid employees who are familiar with Windows. Maybe person X gets $30K/year. If, over the lifetime of the computer, that person wastes a week of time learning about Linux, it was a bad decision.
But, you protest, Linux isn't hard to use. Can they call you if they have a problem? They can't. They are frightned that there will be a problem that they can't solve. What do you tell a non-profit whose $1M grant application was rejected because Word was unable to open the document saved in Microsoft fomat by Open Office. If I was running a non-profit, I'd be panic striken by the possibility.
People who are familiar with Linux and Open Office cost more on average than people who are familiar with Windows and Microsoft Office. What makes you think that the cost of hardware and software is even a material factor in the decision?
If the stock price rises, the short position and the converted shares cancel each other out. If the stock price falls, the shares are never converted, and investors profit by an amount equal to difference in value between the series A and the common. (Potentially doubling their money if the company is liquidated and there is enough to fully pay the Series A, but no money left over for the common shareholders).
That said, I doubt that the investors in this offering are immediately planing to hedge their position. In fact, they probably signed agreements prohibiting this, and reducing the liquidity of their shares. (This is admitedly difficult to enforce in the case of a private company).
It boggles my mind that he did this. There's probably no one who has done more to harm the "Free Software" side of the debate than RMS himself. I think he needs psychiatric help.
(This 24 hours after I wrote a nasty letter to Forbes about how unfair they were to the FSF)
Traditionally terrorism has refered to intentional attacks against civilians with the purpose of spreading terror (presumably to some political end). This has usually meant the intentional extralegal killing of civilians. Things have become muddled after 9/11, but John Ashcroft and the far left notwithstanding, I think that very few people disagree with this definition even today.
US policy has been consistent in this regard. Countries have the right to pursue terrorists and any deaths which result from this pursuit, even the death of innocents, are not terrorist acts. They are unfortunate casualties of the fight against terrorism.
There is ample reason to believe that Israeli attempts to minimize civilian casualties are inadequate. But at a minimum it is clear that they are making some effort in this regard, and that Israeli lives have been lost as a consequence. It is easy for us in the US to object to the relative weight given by the Israeli government to Israeli lives vs. Palestinian lives, because no American lives are on the line. I wonder how many innocent Iraqi lives WE would trade the life of one American soldier.
It doesn't matter if they are Israeli or Palestinian.
It just happens to be the case that right now you see many more killings by Palestinian terrorists than by Israeli terrorists. This is probably because Israel is in political control of the region right now.
When (if?) peace is achieved and some of the settlements are evacuated, you can expect to see a far greater degree of activity from Israeli terrorist groups. Right now, they would have to be strategic morons to do anything. (Obviously there are at least a few handfuls of strategic morons).
The US has not listed a website as a terrorist organization. It simply listed it as an alias for a known terrorist organization.
Kahane.com is not being banned for saying bad things. It is being banned FOR CARRYING OUT TERRORIST ATTACKS IN WHICH CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOMPLISH POLITICAL GOALS.
Listing kahane.com as an alias for Kahane Kach just makes it clearer to US citizens that aiding any group claiming that name is a felony.
It makes as much sense to claim that kahane.com is a non-terrorist political offshoot of a terrorist group as it does to claim (as the Europeans did until recently) that Hamas is a non-terroist organization.
This notion that groups which support the killing of civilians can be split into terrorist and non-terrorist components simply does not pass the smell test.
I'm glad to see the Bush administration applying this principle uniformly.
If you read the article, you'll see that he honestly gave this as the reason for droping the lawsuit.
Reading the comments here, it is clear that very few people have actually read the new "evidence".
What has been "discovered" are two equity research reports from February and April of this year that basically make the case that SCO (at under $4/share) is undervalued, particularly in light of the potential for revenues from the IBM lawsuit and the pursuit of alleged copyright violations.
The report was spectacularly prescient. Today the stock is trading at over $17/share. Far from being embarassed, the authors of the report are likely beaming with pride.
Even if you believe that SCO has no legitimate claim on the Linux source code, their conclusions still could have been justified based on the expected value of settlements.
There is nothing evil about the report. It simply drew an accurate (and richly rewarded) conclusion based on Darl's pronouncements, and their own corroborative research.
I'll even defend their corroborative research. On the one hand you have David Boies pursuing the lawsuit largely on a contingency basis, and a CEO who claims (supported by several journalists) that identical code appears in SCO's products and the Linux code base. On the other hand you have several thousand hackers who don't think that they have infringed on SCO's IP, but say that they can't be sure until they actually see the code. Keeping in mind that if the CEO deliberately misrepresents the status of his company, he can go to jail, who are you going to believe.
MOST REASONABLE PEOPLE, would believe the CEO. Going on about the BSD settlement, the GPL, and SCO IP violations is FAR more likely to confuse than convince. Moreover, even if the CEO is probably wrong, the research report's conclusions remain valid. Only if you can conclude with near certainty that Darl is wrong, can you reject the report's conclusions.
My hat goes off to the report's authors. They made a great call.
The original poster explained why he used H1-B visas thusly:
"The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage."
This is precisely why the H1-B visa exists.
You suggest that in order to apply for an H1-B, there can be no Americans available with the same skill set, even if they are incompetent. As any immigration lawyer can tell you, this is flat out wrong.
Under the statute, companies are permitted to set the qualifications for the position any way they see fit. If they want to set a subjective cutoff based on skill level, that is their option. In the case of programers, this is a business necessity.
Remember, a single bad programer can easily do as much harm as ten other programmers do good.
If the law required us to hire any American who put C on their resume, it would have taken billions of dollars out of our economy over the course of the bubble. And believe you me, billions of extra dollars in the hands of American companies and shareholders results in a great many additional jobs for Americans.
Sadly, all the world, including Europe and India are targets. You are simply misinformed. Most recently, 53 people were killed by an Islamic Terrorist in Mumbai