Not in so many words, but you can put limits on their rights to use the code you made available to them. That's what the GPL does: if I look at the code and use it as a loose model to solve a different problem in a different convtext, then I am bound by GPL to release that new code under GPL if I ever distribute the resulting binary. I can retain copyright, but I must divulge my code.
I know that you meant your post as a joke -- but, in fact, that is precisely the truth. If the original code is an SCO trade secret, then any leakage of information which would allow a third party to reconstruct the code debases the protected status of the code. If SCO reveals that lines 986-1068 of schedule.c in Linux are the same as lines 342-422 of coresch.c in UnixWare, then the lines from the UnixWare source are no longer a trade secret.
Re:This may be true for some, but it's not for me
on
Robots Without a Cause
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In fact, what the article's author does is a little dishonest. When he says "not to change the world", he means "not to change the world in the way I want". The ability to efficiently vacuum a room without human intervention is a world-changing thing for people who would otherwise have to stand over the vacuum cleaning the rug or floor. It frees people to not hire other people to do the slavish chore of vacuuming their floors, thus reducing the demand for menial workers.
(And if you think that's not important...how many clerk/typists are there in your place of work? How many families do you know who have cooks?)
Well, not quite. Nussbaum et. al are talking about the question of the objective value of emotional response: things which bring you pleasure are, ipso facto, valuable, and things which cause you pain are, ipso facto, costly. That's certainly important and true -- and, all to often, neglected -- but it's not something terribly new. You can go back to Watson and the other Chicago behaviorists and still see that idea quite explicitly stated.
There's another side of the story, though: the question of whether humans and other decision makers can be modelled as rational decision makers. We can't answer that, since we can't all agree on what a rational decision maker is, but we do know that humans and animals are not utilitarian decision makers. There's a wonderful theorem, due to Mike Cohen, which actually proves that we cannot: it is possible to use simple betting games to show that no linear preference order can account for the behavior of subjects making choices in risky scenarios. That means that humans can't be treated as simply maximizing some utility functional.
But your flea-market counterfeiter never had a legal, good-faith contract and license to sell a derivative product under his own label.
In this case, SCO's main claim is that IBM didn't have such a license, either. If IBM had illegally misappropriated UnixWare trade secrets into Linux, and if their Unix contract with SCO has a non-disclosure agreement, then they were in material breach of that contract in the instant that they disclosed the trade secrets. From that moment on, according to SCO, IBM had no right to redistribute any form of Unix, including AIX.
That's a solid argument, in general, so the major issue is whether SCO has the evidence it claims. (It isn't the only issue: argument is fine, but jurisprudence works case by case. I can imagine perfectly reasonable situations where the two companies could both believe their right, even if the allegedly infringing code exists and was copied as a block.) If SCO prevails, then all AIX licenses granted since the first public disclosure of the trade secret code are invalid. SCO is merely suing to have all the affected parties made aware of that fact. If they win, and you run an AIX box, then it's up to you to determine if IBM defrauded you when they claimed to issue you a license.
I don't think that SCO is making that claim. The article's author is making that claim, and, like the gp. post, I find it pretty weak. After all, we know that it's possible to make a clean mapping module, since FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all have clean-room linux kernel personality modules.
I'd like to know how different the SCO LKP is from those, in fact. I'll be honest with you: if I were going to write an LKP for a version of UNIX which was to run on x86 hardware, I'd start with the FreeBSD implementation, figuring that it would get me 95+% of the thunks for free, and give me a very strong hint on how to emulate difficult things like LinuxThreads.
Actually, at least on the MS side, UPnP is also a bunch of smart guys "scratching an itch". They're just scratching different itches: the zeroconf guys are working on making attachment to the network transparent to the user, the UPnP guys are working on providing transparent access to the resources on that network. The two systems together attempt to extend the stack stack which allows a user to plug in his 802.11b card (802.11b), quickly connect to a network (TCP/IP) and get an IP address (zeroconf), and find the nearest printer (UPnP). The user should only see the authentication prompt.
Your comment makes it appear that Apple is trying to extend zeroconf to attach to file servers. In my opinion, that overloads the protocol unwisely. There are a number of pragmatic issues involved in binding to a network resource (e.g. bandwidth, current load, other restrictions). Those issues require negotiation between both the resource provider and the newly attached consumer, and that's why a new protocol is needed.
No, it was clearly sabotage on the part of SCO. Their programmer deliberately added code to the Pathfinder source, disguising the fact that it was taken from the original English-system Unix codebase. The balance of the code was taken from the European-based Linux.
Eighty lines of correct code is about two weeks' output from a senior programmer. An experienced programmer can write about ten lines per day of debugged code and spends about four days a week actually at the keyboard. (I'm told that the original citation is to Brooks' _The Mythical Man Month_, but I've never chased it down. The figures have been replicated a number of times.) In that light, 80 lines is more than a smoking gun, it's a smoking crater...if its provenance can be proved. Two batches of eighty lines each are a disaster...again, provided that their provenance can be proved.
I'd bet on SCO for that proof, if I were you. So far, we've seen them armed for bear: Novell thought they had SCO, and now look like fools, then OSS types thought the evidence didn't exist, and now we know they were wrong. I'd guess that SCO has affadavits from the original programmers for the code they showed to the analysts.
I can think of several plausible reasons. One might be the Novell had to act to transfer the copyrights to SCO, and had not done so. In that case, I'd expect SCO to send notes to Novell asking them to complete the transfer.
Whatever you think of the SCO/IBM story, in the SCO/Novell story, SCO has sounded more plausible all along. Remember, they said that they hold copyrights, and that they had spoken to the four people who signed the original document. According to SCO, all four believed that they had intended to transfer all rights to SCO.
Ironically, your story exactly supports the claims of BSA. About 20% of all desktop computers are in large organizations, and about 60% are in SMORGs (small and medium-sized organizations.) In the hypothetical samm office you talk about, half of the copies of Windows 95 and two-thirds of the copies of Office 97 are pirated. If that standard obtains across all organizations (and it seems fairly reproducible), then about 40% of all software is pirated. That's not to say that LORGs don't have occasional instances of piracy, but, frankly, they're rarer than in smaller organizations and in homes.
Equally ironic, the BSA wants your clients to behave in exactly the way you instruct them to -- if they think they're out of compliance, bring in an expert to bring them into compliance, get into compliance, and throw the letter away. If your client calls you, and you regularize their licenses by buying legitimate used copies of the software, then everybody is happy. You've made your money, the BSA members have made theirs, and the customer has done the audit that was needed.
The linked article answers this pretty compellingly: if the LHC can make quantum holes, then any other equivalent source -- like, oh, say, the solar wind -- can do the same thing. That means they're either being created all the time (in which case we can probably safely ignore everybody's favorite doomsday scenario) or they aren't being created (in which case, it would awfully nice to understand exactly why.)
OTOH, maybe IHBT, IHL, HAND.
Does anybody remember Larry Niven's short story "The Hole Man"?
Perhaps you ought to look at that story yourself. Several poeple, including me, refuted the core claim as made by the editor and the "original submitter". There is no loss of formatting when you save a document in XML from Word.
The original article was SlashFUD, nothing more, and the original poster is correct.
Re:considered the father of Linux?
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 2, Informative
No matter how much you or SCO's CEO wishes it to be, there is no liability passed to the end user, period.
Not exactly. I can't speak to the issue of the end user of a single copy bought from Red Hat -- that'd be complicated. However, the liability would be inherited by anyone who made an infringing copy of the work in question. Thus, Red Hat, IBM, and VA Linux would unquestionably be liable. If you installed Red Hat on more than one computer, I think that a lawyer might well argue that you were liable for the second and subsequent copies of the product you installed. If you went out and downloaded a copy from one of the kernel mirrors, then you, the end user, would be liable, period, whether or not you actually installed the system. (Installation may not be infringement, but making media from which you could install unequivocally is.)
No. The Fermat Conjecture was never considered the a terribly important question in number theory. he Riemann Hypothesis is much more important. One could also make the case for Golberg's Conjecture or the Twin-prime conjecture.
The author of the LinuxWorld piece is doing advocacy, not analysis. SCO's case is far more subtle than most in the Linux community seem to think.
As an example, the author takes issue with the SCO's claim that IBM must have stolen SCO trade secrets in order to improve Linux by saying "OK, then, diff the code." It's true that such a diff would provide prima facie proof of violation, but there are plenty of violations which would not require any code to leak at all.
Suppose part of the validation test set for Monterey consisted of a stress test written by SCO and owned by SCO. That code wouldn't ever be in the final product, and it would certainly be SCO's intellectual property, shared with IBM in order to make Monterey work better. Let us further suppose that code was used in the Linux development work, and found a key set of bugs. (Don't tell me it isn't possible that it would have been -- developers tend to think of tools as just tools, and forget that they may be encumbered.) At that point, there would been a misappropriation of IP.
(Disclaimer: I have not ever seen any of the code covered by any of these agreements, nor have I ever seen any tests in the Monterey test suite, nor had any contact with any of the principals in this lawsuit. I'm merely criticizing the LinuxWorld piece; any resemblance between the situation outlined here and reality would be purely coincidental.)
Office 2003 preserves teh presentation markup in the XML file. You can prove this to yourself, if you want (and if you're willing to run the O11 beta): create a test document in Word 2003, save it as XML, and look at the result. The presentation data is in the file -- and it isn't even encryted.
Actually, no, they didn't. n-dimensional universes -- if they are compact -- are shaped like n-tori, not n-spheres. The question is quether they have genus one (and are thus flat) or have genus 2+ (are have negative curvature.)
Actually, the plural of octopus is octopodes because it's Latin. The word literally means "eight-foot", and "foot" is third declension: pes/pedes. Thus, more than one object with eight feet each would be octo-podes, octopodes.
One of the devs in our division drinks double-shot decaf lattes with skim milk and without foam. When he walks up to the espresso bar with his coffee cup, the barista asks him "A double tall why bother, right?"
Re:Not to be a troll here but...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 1
And if you don't watch the superbowl, then the terrorists will have already won
Slashdot Mirror
Not in so many words, but you can put limits on their rights to use the code you made available to them. That's what the GPL does: if I look at the code and use it as a loose model to solve a different problem in a different convtext, then I am bound by GPL to release that new code under GPL if I ever distribute the resulting binary. I can retain copyright, but I must divulge my code.
I know that you meant your post as a joke -- but, in fact, that is precisely the truth. If the original code is an SCO trade secret, then any leakage of information which would allow a third party to reconstruct the code debases the protected status of the code. If SCO reveals that lines 986-1068 of schedule.c in Linux are the same as lines 342-422 of coresch.c in UnixWare, then the lines from the UnixWare source are no longer a trade secret.
In fact, what the article's author does is a little dishonest. When he says "not to change the world", he means "not to change the world in the way I want". The ability to efficiently vacuum a room without human intervention is a world-changing thing for people who would otherwise have to stand over the vacuum cleaning the rug or floor. It frees people to not hire other people to do the slavish chore of vacuuming their floors, thus reducing the demand for menial workers.
(And if you think that's not important...how many clerk/typists are there in your place of work? How many families do you know who have cooks?)
Well, not quite. Nussbaum et. al are talking about the question of the objective value of emotional response: things which bring you pleasure are, ipso facto, valuable, and things which cause you pain are, ipso facto, costly. That's certainly important and true -- and, all to often, neglected -- but it's not something terribly new. You can go back to Watson and the other Chicago behaviorists and still see that idea quite explicitly stated.
There's another side of the story, though: the question of whether humans and other decision makers can be modelled as rational decision makers. We can't answer that, since we can't all agree on what a rational decision maker is, but we do know that humans and animals are not utilitarian decision makers. There's a wonderful theorem, due to Mike Cohen, which actually proves that we cannot: it is possible to use simple betting games to show that no linear preference order can account for the behavior of subjects making choices in risky scenarios. That means that humans can't be treated as simply maximizing some utility functional.
That's a solid argument, in general, so the major issue is whether SCO has the evidence it claims. (It isn't the only issue: argument is fine, but jurisprudence works case by case. I can imagine perfectly reasonable situations where the two companies could both believe their right, even if the allegedly infringing code exists and was copied as a block.) If SCO prevails, then all AIX licenses granted since the first public disclosure of the trade secret code are invalid. SCO is merely suing to have all the affected parties made aware of that fact. If they win, and you run an AIX box, then it's up to you to determine if IBM defrauded you when they claimed to issue you a license.
I don't think that SCO is making that claim. The article's author is making that claim, and, like the gp. post, I find it pretty weak. After all, we know that it's possible to make a clean mapping module, since FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all have clean-room linux kernel personality modules.
I'd like to know how different the SCO LKP is from those, in fact. I'll be honest with you: if I were going to write an LKP for a version of UNIX which was to run on x86 hardware, I'd start with the FreeBSD implementation, figuring that it would get me 95+% of the thunks for free, and give me a very strong hint on how to emulate difficult things like LinuxThreads.
Actually, at least on the MS side, UPnP is also a bunch of smart guys "scratching an itch". They're just scratching different itches: the zeroconf guys are working on making attachment to the network transparent to the user, the UPnP guys are working on providing transparent access to the resources on that network. The two systems together attempt to extend the stack stack which allows a user to plug in his 802.11b card (802.11b), quickly connect to a network (TCP/IP) and get an IP address (zeroconf), and find the nearest printer (UPnP). The user should only see the authentication prompt.
Your comment makes it appear that Apple is trying to extend zeroconf to attach to file servers. In my opinion, that overloads the protocol unwisely. There are a number of pragmatic issues involved in binding to a network resource (e.g. bandwidth, current load, other restrictions). Those issues require negotiation between both the resource provider and the newly attached consumer, and that's why a new protocol is needed.
No, it was clearly sabotage on the part of SCO. Their programmer deliberately added code to the Pathfinder source, disguising the fact that it was taken from the original English-system Unix codebase. The balance of the code was taken from the European-based Linux.
Eighty lines of correct code is about two weeks' output from a senior programmer. An experienced programmer can write about ten lines per day of debugged code and spends about four days a week actually at the keyboard. (I'm told that the original citation is to Brooks' _The Mythical Man Month_, but I've never chased it down. The figures have been replicated a number of times.) In that light, 80 lines is more than a smoking gun, it's a smoking crater...if its provenance can be proved. Two batches of eighty lines each are a disaster...again, provided that their provenance can be proved.
I'd bet on SCO for that proof, if I were you. So far, we've seen them armed for bear: Novell thought they had SCO, and now look like fools, then OSS types thought the evidence didn't exist, and now we know they were wrong. I'd guess that SCO has affadavits from the original programmers for the code they showed to the analysts.
Clippie: It looks to me like you're trying to turn my in to an 802.11b antenna.
Would you like me:
(a) to find you a different victim to work on?
(b) to turn you in to the BSA?
I can think of several plausible reasons. One might be the Novell had to act to transfer the copyrights to SCO, and had not done so. In that case, I'd expect SCO to send notes to Novell asking them to complete the transfer.
Whatever you think of the SCO/IBM story, in the SCO/Novell story, SCO has sounded more plausible all along. Remember, they said that they hold copyrights, and that they had spoken to the four people who signed the original document. According to SCO, all four believed that they had intended to transfer all rights to SCO.
Ironically, your story exactly supports the claims of BSA. About 20% of all desktop computers are in large organizations, and about 60% are in SMORGs (small and medium-sized organizations.) In the hypothetical samm office you talk about, half of the copies of Windows 95 and two-thirds of the copies of Office 97 are pirated. If that standard obtains across all organizations (and it seems fairly reproducible), then about 40% of all software is pirated. That's not to say that LORGs don't have occasional instances of piracy, but, frankly, they're rarer than in smaller organizations and in homes.
Equally ironic, the BSA wants your clients to behave in exactly the way you instruct them to -- if they think they're out of compliance, bring in an expert to bring them into compliance, get into compliance, and throw the letter away. If your client calls you, and you regularize their licenses by buying legitimate used copies of the software, then everybody is happy. You've made your money, the BSA members have made theirs, and the customer has done the audit that was needed.
The linked article answers this pretty compellingly: if the LHC can make quantum holes, then any other equivalent source -- like, oh, say, the solar wind -- can do the same thing. That means they're either being created all the time (in which case we can probably safely ignore everybody's favorite doomsday scenario) or they aren't being created (in which case, it would awfully nice to understand exactly why.)
OTOH, maybe IHBT, IHL, HAND.
Does anybody remember Larry Niven's short story "The Hole Man"?
Perhaps you ought to look at that story yourself. Several poeple, including me, refuted the core claim as made by the editor and the "original submitter". There is no loss of formatting when you save a document in XML from Word.
The original article was SlashFUD, nothing more, and the original poster is correct.
No. The Fermat Conjecture was never considered the a terribly important question in number theory. he Riemann Hypothesis is much more important. One could also make the case for Golberg's Conjecture or the Twin-prime conjecture.
Actually, we had one on Enewietok and one more ready to ship out from San Francisco.
The author of the LinuxWorld piece is doing advocacy, not analysis. SCO's case is far more subtle than most in the Linux community seem to think.
As an example, the author takes issue with the SCO's claim that IBM must have stolen SCO trade secrets in order to improve Linux by saying "OK, then, diff the code." It's true that such a diff would provide prima facie proof of violation, but there are plenty of violations which would not require any code to leak at all.
Suppose part of the validation test set for Monterey consisted of a stress test written by SCO and owned by SCO. That code wouldn't ever be in the final product, and it would certainly be SCO's intellectual property, shared with IBM in order to make Monterey work better. Let us further suppose that code was used in the Linux development work, and found a key set of bugs. (Don't tell me it isn't possible that it would have been -- developers tend to think of tools as just tools, and forget that they may be encumbered.) At that point, there would been a misappropriation of IP.
(Disclaimer: I have not ever seen any of the code covered by any of these agreements, nor have I ever seen any tests in the Monterey test suite, nor had any contact with any of the principals in this lawsuit. I'm merely criticizing the LinuxWorld piece; any resemblance between the situation outlined here and reality would be purely coincidental.)
Office 2003 preserves teh presentation markup in the XML file. You can prove this to yourself, if you want (and if you're willing to run the O11 beta): create a test document in Word 2003, save it as XML, and look at the result. The presentation data is in the file -- and it isn't even encryted.
Actually, no, they didn't. n-dimensional universes -- if they are compact -- are shaped like n-tori, not n-spheres. The question is quether they have genus one (and are thus flat) or have genus 2+ (are have negative curvature.)
Yes! Unreal Karma Tournament 2003! The best thing? It runs as well under Linux as it does under MacOS X.
Actually, the plural of octopus is octopodes because it's Latin. The word literally means "eight-foot", and "foot" is third declension: pes/pedes. Thus, more than one object with eight feet each would be octo-podes, octopodes.
-- Skoolkid Latin R Us
You only have one chromosome and reproduce asexually? Wow! /. news for bugs, stuff that infects.
One of the devs in our division drinks double-shot decaf lattes with skim milk and without foam. When he walks up to the espresso bar with his coffee cup, the barista asks him "A double tall why bother, right?"
And if you don't watch the superbowl, then the terrorists will have already won