You're falling into one of the fallacies about Open Source development oversight that SCO is trying to get everyone to buy. The fact is that Open Source development has extremely good oversight of IP in code, and the Linux kernel has a well-defined formal structure and organization for development, headed by Linus Torvalds.
Torvalds as well as the Free Softeware Foundation developers who contribute the GNU code to GNU/Linux appear to be far more concerned about incorporating proprietary code into their work than do many companies which develop and market proprietary code. See this Groklaw article for some good examples.
Additionally, while SCO would have us think that GNU/Linux end users are liable for IP infringement in Linux because there's no established company to sue, this is a tenuous and untested legal theory. Copyright is about copying. Use is about using. Using Linux is not illegal, nor can it be an infringement of SCO's copyrights, no matter what SCO says.
SCO's scare tactics are just that. They're on a shakedown expedition to try to collect IP royalties. If they were serious about targeting IP infringement they would put their cards on the table and declare what code in Linux is a problem for them, but they're running a classic protection racket, and unless and until they publicly tell us where the beef is, then they have no moral high ground on which to demand anything more than scorn and contempt.
I suggest you visit Groklaw's website and review the archives on the SCO/Linux issues before you start basing presumptions on SCO's erroneous FUD.
Bunk and flaimbait! Why do you think that IBM Global Services, in cooperation with Dell and HP, just announced a major push to promote Linux on the desktop worldwide. See, among others, http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16100352 or http://www.linuxworld.com/story/37858.htm. I get really tired of hearing people carp about how "Linux on the desktop is dead". This has been going on for years! IDC has estimated that deployment of Linux on the desktop will grow from about 1.5% today to c.a. 7% by 2006. That's just two years away, folks!
Don't forget when you complain about how hard Linux is to install, Windows comes pre-installed on most consumer level machines. This is courtesy of Microsoft's OEM licenses which severly discourage computer makers from offering choices, whatever the Justice Dept. decided about the practice. Just try to install Win2K sometime from scratch and get all the driver stuff to work with all your hardware.
Linux may not support the latest/greatest hardware on the market, but just about everything you need to do in a real-world situation can be done easily on a Linux desktop. I run gnome-2.4 under Gentoo Linux on my primary desktop and it works like a champ. It's easy, very configurable, and supports all the bells and whistles such as flash, streaming audio, java applets, etc. not to mention most standard office stuff I need to do. It's stable, as are the apps I run, and I'd recommend it to my 92 year non-techie old mom without hesitation. The BSOD is a thing of the past for me!
Some people see, or want to see "Linux" as a single entity, much like "Microsoft Windows" is a single entity, but things are never that simple. Like any democracy, Linux is messy whereas like any top-down totalitarian organization, Microsoft Windows is "clean." Linux is only one facet of the Open Source development community, the same community which, in it's original form, gave us the Internet itself, and Lord knows, the Internet is anything but focused. Linux and its development community have many voices, some of them talking at odds with one another. Walk through any shopping district anywhere in the world and you'll find the same plethora of opportunities and choices.
In the Open Source future, people are going to have to take at least a little responsibility for their own IT education and be Smart Shoppers, at least as far as finding a vendor, a distribution, a support company, which will provide focus and help folks get what they need.
Microsoft, of course, offers us Hobson's Choice ("You can use MS Windows, and if you don't like that, well there's always MS Windows") which is total focus, with no choice.
Live ain't always simple, and people who want the best have to take some responsibility for making choices and providing their own focus.
Absolutely!!! We don't need laws, we need guns. When everyone has a weapon, we can each defend our rights (as we percieve them) and the law can go hang! Who cares if my perception clashes with yours? We can settle the matter with our guns and get on with the business of survival.
Please see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200312051 35223118 for Linus Torvalds' very interesting and intelligent take on the foundations of US copyright laws and how they apply to the GPL. Leave it to a native-born Finn to elucidate the obvious in the US legal system!
I think what linux, and OSS in general needs, is an altogether economic model
Eric Raymond has made the excellent point that the vast majority of money that changes hands for software is paid to people who do custom programming work for hire, not for over-the-counter shrink wrapped wrapped retail software packages.
As a platform on which to do custom programming work for hire, Linux and OSS in general are head and shoulders above any proprietary OS.
There's your economic model. IBM has gotten a clue. They pay their programmers to do open source programming (e.g. evms), release it to the world, and then make their money riding on top of an OSS base.
Don't forget, if you're comparing Linux and Windows for home use, Windows users don't have to install their OS - chances are it was pre-installed when the bought the computer, and in fact M$ does't even provide a CD anymore when you buy a Windows box so you couldn't install it from scratch even if you wanted to!
Linux users always have to install from scratch. Microsoft won't let their OEM licensees pre-install Linux.
The installer isn't part of the issue, if you want to make the fair comparison.
Viewed in this way, I think it is reasonable to admit that Linux does not currently meet the expectations of a majority of consumers as a desktop operating system.
Check out Gnome 2.4. It damn sure meets my expectations. Now all I need is for some of the folks out there who write good home and small business applications to their butts in gear and port their products to Linux.
What's lacking is not desktop functionality, it's applications and state-of-the-art hardware support for Linux by 3rd party hardware manufacturers.
A. It came pre-installed on their computer when they bought it.
Q. Were did most people who use it get Linux?
A. They downloaded it, bought a box, orderd a CD and installed it themselves.
Q. What would happen to computer makers who made Linux "easy to install" by pre-installing it on computers, just as Windows is pre-installed?
A. The mean giant in Redmond would grind them up, turn them into pellets and feed them to his dogs! You can damn sure bet they would lose their OEM license from M$.
Let's not forget in looking at the ease of use of Linux vs. Windows for home use that a level playing field means that we don't consider the installation process, which most home users don't have to deal for Windows.
In fact, these days M$ usually doesn't even give you a Windows CD when you buy a new computer so you can't install it from scratch.
While self-apointed pundits argue whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" or not, the people who are actually developing desktop Linux are ignoring the pundits and steadily improving it - the gnome people, the kde people. I just build a box using gentoo Linux w. gnome 2.4 and gtk2 and I'm absolutely amazed at the progress that's been made, compared to where gnome and kde were 2 or 3 years ago. Things are getting steadily tighter, simpler and better integrated. We even have a "killer app" or two. Just check out galeon!
The open source community has a way of slowly, steadily and quietly turning sow's ears into silk purses. Look at mozilla, which was an absolute dog for years after Netscape turned it lose, and is now an A1 browser on any platform. The Linux desktop environment is making remarkably steady progress - it's the tortise that won't stop until the race is won.
I do most of my work on a Linux desktop, and my biggest problem is not the desktop, gnome, or any such, it's that M$ still has the industry in a lock-down as far as 3rd party support is concerned. A few companies such as Creative have figured it out, but when is the last time you went to CompUSA and saw a boxed hardware item with a penguin on it? They all have the little MS flag on them, but no penguins. If they put a penguin on the box, do you think that M$ would still certify ther products and allow them to put the M$ flag on them? NOT!
Same goes for software. I'd like to see Homesite for Linux. Homesite is written in Delphi. Delphi is available for Linux, I'm told, but Macromedia has no plans to port Homesite to Delphi for Linux. Intuit is another one. They'll _never_ get it! I need QuickBooks for Linux, but from everything we've seen, Intuit is totally clueless.
We've got a rock-solid OS. We have an excellent desktop environment. Now all we need is for others to figure out that the world is moving in our direction and to get with the program. You can't make chickens without eggs, nor eggs without chickens, but if the software and hardware industry would get a clue, we'd be able to work together to make it happen.
According to Bruce Perens' analysis, the code in question was part of Unix System 3 and was explicitly released into the public domain in January of 2002. Richie may have been in the employ of AT&T at the time he wrote this code, and it may once have belonged to Caldera/SCO, but they explicitly and publicly relinquished their claim to it.
I predict, with some confidence, that the the open source community, supporters of the GPL and other allied forces will come out on top of the current scrap with SCO, maybe (hopefully) in the short term, certainly in the long term. The power of a good idea transcends mortal intentions, and the move toward open source and open standards has roots and momentum that go to the very heart of the same human spirit that brought us the concepts of human liberty and dignity. In the same spirit, many cultures have moved to outlaw slavery and institute representative democracy. Dr. Edgar Villanueva's eloquent defense of the use of open source software in Peru is about as good as it gets as far as illuminating the essential links between open source, open standards and open societies.
This is not to say that the victory will be easy, nor that there won't be casualties. One thing I think we can say for sure is that with this conflict the community of Linux and open source advocates, users and developers has lost the innocence with which we started, and we'll never be the same. The world of cut-throat business law and politics into which we've been thrust is all too familiar to the leaders of major corporate playsers such as Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, IBM and the like. The fact that we've been assulted by a street thug rather than a giant corporate syndicate may make some difference in the way this shakes out, but either way, it's a solid indication that Linux has come of age.
The GPL has never yet had its day in court. It may be that, as it exists, it can't stand against a legal challenge, in which case a new and better GPL will be the result. If corporate IT managers distrust the legal implications of using Linux, this fight will end up laying it on the line for them, and the victory over SCO will end up defining open source's limits and advantages for them in a way which words and reassurances could never do. In many ways, we'll see the open source philosophy and its ideals refined and developed in ways which will make it practical, resiliant and competitive in the very real world.
If we believe that the open source development concept is relevant and real for the rest of the world, then we should welcome this fight. It's a seminal event in the coming of age of Linux in very real world of competitive ideas and enterprises.
Wake up, my friends! The day is dawning. It is a good day to do battle.
Sco's website is dark at this time. Hmmm. Traceroute stops at an Alter.net router, probably in Denver or Salt Lake City. Could some naughty child have been doing something nasty to the nice people at SCO? Shame on them!
The big mean IBM is beating up on them. I feel so sorry for poor little SCO. SCO is so nice, and would never, never beat up on anyone smaller than they are.
A Thread on the NANOG list from Tuesday quotes Al Jazeera tech staff indicating that at that time they realized that they were under a DDoS attack.
The footage with offending video of US POWs was aired, I believe, on Sunday on Al Jazeera's satellite TV service. www.aljazeera.net (the Arabic site) was available all day Monday, and could be accessed in English through any of several translation sites, and to the best of my knowledge, contained at most a few still photos of dead soldiers, although I didn't see any when I browsed their news. Nor was it regularly being shown on their TV feed which could be viewed at that time as streaming video at http://winmedia.ish.de/al-jazeera.
Monday Al Jazeera also started its English language website at english.aljazeera.net, although I didn't find out about this until it was too late to see it.
At that time the only functional nameserver for aljazeera.net (the parent domain for both English and Arabic versions of the site) was at Dataport in NJ, and as of Tuesday morning, access to this server was administratively blocked at Dataport's firewall. Through calls to Dataport I learned that yes, the name server was accessable from within Dataport's network, and that administrative blocking of the nameserver was not a matter they would discus with me, referring me instead directly to Al Jazeera. The secondary nameserver for aljazeera.net is in France, and according to my colo provider who keeps tabs on these kinds of things, it's been inoperative for a while.
I contacted Pat Berry at the EFF who told me about the thread on NANOG, and at that point it looked as if possibly Dataport was working to resolve the DDoS problem - possibly also directed against them, I don't know. According to Pat, english.aljazeera.net was intermittantly available on Tuesday, after Dataport re-opened their firewall, but I wasn't able to get to it.
On Wednesday, the root DNS servers removed Dataport's name server for aljazeera.net and replaced it with one managed by AT&T Global Network Services in France. I have no idea whether this was the result of a request by Al Jazeera in an attempt to clear up the problem, or a result of Dataport explicitly deciding to stop hosting their nameserver. Apparently english.aljazeera.net is or was also hosted at Dataport in NJ. The new name server in France is not pingable, for what reason I have no idea, and to the best of my knowledge has never been pingable from either the US or Europe. I also note that the video gateway for Al Jazeera in Arabic at http://winmedia.ish.de/al-jazeera (Germany) is also now unavailable.
Whether all of this is the result of a coordinated hack (and DDoS attack), a domino effect from too much traffic, or something more sinister I don't know. Supposedly, according to word from people at the English web service, this is just the result of a traffic overload, and that it started Monday, but this contradicts the information on the NANOG list. The whole thing is beginning to smell rather distinctly of rat. There are people, whose opinions I respect, who claim that Al Jazeera is little more than a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, but others disagree, and I know that Al Jazeera has been an excellent source of news on things such as ongoing deliberations at the UN regarding the war in Iraq which aren't being covered in the US press at all. It's a shame. It looks as if Al Jazeera may have become a cyber-war casualty.
Knowledge is power, and truth is the first casualty in wartime.
This is no flamebait. Sun is seriously losing market share. It wouldn't even surprise me if Sun were bought by Dell, which excels in hardware delivery but has no software base. Sun has Java, which would be a valuable asset for a company like Dell.
Fate can turn on a dime these days. Witness the nearly overnight downfall of IBM hegemonic control of the PC industry in the 80's.
Microsoft is not invulnerable. The arrogance and complacency of MS, Earthlink, AOL/TW and other mega-corporations will be the source of their ultimate downfall. There are forces and bodies of knowledge and power on the Internet of which MS and their kin have never dreamed. Anyone who doubts this should read Steve Gibson's account of his recent DDoS atttack at http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm, sit back with a warm cup of coffee and ponder the implications.
The power of a good idea is untimately irresistable, and the Internet is just such a good idea. Many walls and many established powers will fall before the sweeping changes which will surely come, no matter how strongly the Microsofts and AOLs of the world try to excercise their control. We are, in all likelihood, at the beginning of time of conflict, perhpas even war. Many of us may be called on to take action or to take stands, some of which may be difficult, frightening, dangerous or lonely.
Be hopeful, keep your eyes, ears and mind open, and remember that the Internet, like all open source endeavors, was founded on trust, sharing, and cooperation, and it's these that will see us through even the most difficult of times.
From what I've seen and read, ORBS has fallen from whatever grace it ever enjoyed, and it's blocking polilcy for legitimate open relays, as well as it's practice of adding to its blockedlist the mail servers of its critics has pretty much sidelined it as far as serious mail administrators are concerned. A much better list is the RSS list from mail-abuse.org. See http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss. BTW, I understand that the mail server at mail-abuse.org is on the ORBS list:(.
It's concievable that earthlink is using the DUL list to block SMTP connections from known dialup IP addresses. See www.mail-abuse.org/dul. I believe you can check and see if your IP is blocked by the list. It's a spam control issue. A lot of spam gets spewed out by clueless spammer lusers who set up mail servers on dialup connections.
On the other hand, servers listed in earthlink's MX records for earthlink addresses should be the only ones accepting SMTP connections.
1. Who pays the
developer? Are we to understand that our skills and time are worth nothing.
Apparently the people who develop open source software receive a great deal of benefit from it. No one is making them do it, and if they didn't want to, I'm sure they wouldn't do it.
2. If programmers are not
benefitting financially, then that usually means students are working the problems. Not to take anything away
from students but I'd rather have an experienced, disiplined programmer working on my projects.
Quality speaks for itself. If the work being done on open source projects were't quality work, Steve Balmer would never feel compelled to label Linux as the #1 threat to Microsoft. I think you'll find as well that many good developers are both students, in the best sense of the word, and also experienced and disciplined programmers.
3.Accountability. If you screw the code up... who cares you're working for free anyway.
Everyone else working on the code cares. Open source software isn't developed by one person working alone, It's developed within the context of a strong community with it's own very well developed ethic. If you want to understand this, read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar available in book form from O'Reilly & Associates.
4. Version control. How
many different versions of Linux are spinning around out there already?
Basically only one. There are many distributions of Linux, but the official Linux kernel itself is the product of a single development and version tree. Any trends toward forking are strongly resisted by everyone involved.
5. Capitalism. I understand that is the
foundation of the Americian economy. America is extremely successful using this model, it encourages
competition, ingenuity, research etc..."Open Source" flies in the face of all that is American, it is a backdoor
communist attack!
This is such a load of horse hooey that I suspect that it's a flame troll. Linux is a worldwide phenomenon. The sun never sets on the Linux development community! What do you propose, that people in the US be fobidden to use Linux? Or to work on its development? Or that Linus Torvalds' visa be revoked? Nonense! No one is forcing anyone to use or to work on the development of Linux. As I understand it, one of the foundations of American society is freedom from tyranny, and this includes the tyranny of capitalism. The US has a long and respected history of successful cooperative social movements, and only in a totalitarian society are people forbidden to gather together to engage in such efforts.
How many times does Microsoft have to be blindsided before they realize that the threat isn't any particular piece of software, be it Linux, Apache, Samba or whatever. The real threat to them is human, not technical, and is epitomized by the whole open source software scene and the paradigm of collective public software design. How many years now has ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar been out, both on the Internet and in book form? It sounds as if Balmer has never read it.
There's a tidal wave coming their way and they're still trying to empty the water from holes on the beach with a tin pail! If they were, by some diabolical miracle, able to quash Linux tomorrow, it would no more insure their survival than do the quills of a porcupine when it wanders onto a freeway.
Slashdot Mirror
Most open relays aren't in the US, but rather in countries that don't give a rat's behind about what the FTC says.
You're falling into one of the fallacies about Open Source development oversight that SCO is trying to get everyone to buy. The fact is that Open Source development has extremely good oversight of IP in code, and the Linux kernel has a well-defined formal structure and organization for development, headed by Linus Torvalds.
Torvalds as well as the Free Softeware Foundation developers who contribute the GNU code to GNU/Linux appear to be far more concerned about incorporating proprietary code into their work than do many companies which develop and market proprietary code. See this Groklaw article for some good examples.
Additionally, while SCO would have us think that GNU/Linux end users are liable for IP infringement in Linux because there's no established company to sue, this is a tenuous and untested legal theory. Copyright is about copying. Use is about using. Using Linux is not illegal, nor can it be an infringement of SCO's copyrights, no matter what SCO says.
SCO's scare tactics are just that. They're on a shakedown expedition to try to collect IP royalties. If they were serious about targeting IP infringement they would put their cards on the table and declare what code in Linux is a problem for them, but they're running a classic protection racket, and unless and until they publicly tell us where the beef is, then they have no moral high ground on which to demand anything more than scorn and contempt.
I suggest you visit Groklaw's website and review the archives on the SCO/Linux issues before you start basing presumptions on SCO's erroneous FUD.
Bunk and flaimbait! Why do you think that IBM Global Services, in cooperation with Dell and HP, just announced a major push to promote Linux on the desktop worldwide. See, among others, http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/showArticle .jhtml?articleID=16100352 or http://www.linuxworld.com/story/37858.htm. I get really tired of hearing people carp about how "Linux on the desktop is dead". This has been going on for years! IDC has estimated that deployment of Linux on the desktop will grow from about 1.5% today to c.a. 7% by 2006. That's just two years away, folks!
Don't forget when you complain about how hard Linux is to install, Windows comes pre-installed on most consumer level machines. This is courtesy of Microsoft's OEM licenses which severly discourage computer makers from offering choices, whatever the Justice Dept. decided about the practice. Just try to install Win2K sometime from scratch and get all the driver stuff to work with all your hardware.
Linux may not support the latest/greatest hardware on the market, but just about everything you need to do in a real-world situation can be done easily on a Linux desktop. I run gnome-2.4 under Gentoo Linux on my primary desktop and it works like a champ. It's easy, very configurable, and supports all the bells and whistles such as flash, streaming audio, java applets, etc. not to mention most standard office stuff I need to do. It's stable, as are the apps I run, and I'd recommend it to my 92 year non-techie old mom without hesitation. The BSOD is a thing of the past for me!
Some people see, or want to see "Linux" as a single entity, much like "Microsoft Windows" is a single entity, but things are never that simple. Like any democracy, Linux is messy whereas like any top-down totalitarian organization, Microsoft Windows is "clean." Linux is only one facet of the Open Source development community, the same community which, in it's original form, gave us the Internet itself, and Lord knows, the Internet is anything but focused. Linux and its development community have many voices, some of them talking at odds with one another. Walk through any shopping district anywhere in the world and you'll find the same plethora of opportunities and choices.
In the Open Source future, people are going to have to take at least a little responsibility for their own IT education and be Smart Shoppers, at least as far as finding a vendor, a distribution, a support company, which will provide focus and help folks get what they need.
Microsoft, of course, offers us Hobson's Choice ("You can use MS Windows, and if you don't like that, well there's always MS Windows") which is total focus, with no choice.
Live ain't always simple, and people who want the best have to take some responsibility for making choices and providing their own focus.
Absolutely!!! We don't need laws, we need guns. When everyone has a weapon, we can each defend our rights (as we percieve them) and the law can go hang! Who cares if my perception clashes with yours? We can settle the matter with our guns and get on with the business of survival.
Please see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200312051 35223118
for Linus Torvalds' very interesting and intelligent take on the foundations of US copyright laws and how they apply to the GPL. Leave it to a native-born Finn to elucidate the obvious in the US legal system!
I think what linux, and OSS in general needs, is an altogether economic model
Eric Raymond has made the excellent point that the vast majority of money that changes hands for software is paid to people who do custom programming work for hire, not for over-the-counter shrink wrapped wrapped retail software packages.
As a platform on which to do custom programming work for hire, Linux and OSS in general are head and shoulders above any proprietary OS.
There's your economic model. IBM has gotten a clue. They pay their programmers to do open source programming (e.g. evms), release it to the world, and then make their money riding on top of an OSS base.
Don't forget, if you're comparing Linux and Windows for home use, Windows users don't have to install their OS - chances are it was pre-installed when the bought the computer, and in fact M$ does't even provide a CD anymore when you buy a Windows box so you couldn't install it from scratch even if you wanted to!
Linux users always have to install from scratch. Microsoft won't let their OEM licensees pre-install Linux.
The installer isn't part of the issue, if you want to make the fair comparison.
Viewed in this way, I think it is reasonable to admit that Linux does not currently meet the expectations of a majority of consumers as a desktop operating system.
Check out Gnome 2.4. It damn sure meets my expectations. Now all I need is for some of the folks out there who write good home and small business applications to their butts in gear and port their products to Linux.
What's lacking is not desktop functionality, it's applications and state-of-the-art hardware support for Linux by 3rd party hardware manufacturers.
Q. Where do most home users get Windows?
A. It came pre-installed on their computer when they bought it.
Q. Were did most people who use it get Linux?
A. They downloaded it, bought a box, orderd a CD and installed it themselves.
Q. What would happen to computer makers who made Linux "easy to install" by pre-installing it on computers, just as Windows is pre-installed?
A. The mean giant in Redmond would grind them up, turn them into pellets and feed them to his dogs! You can damn sure bet they would lose their OEM license from M$.
Let's not forget in looking at the ease of use of Linux vs. Windows for home use that a level playing field means that we don't consider the installation process, which most home users don't have to deal for Windows.
In fact, these days M$ usually doesn't even give you a Windows CD when you buy a new computer so you can't install it from scratch.
While self-apointed pundits argue whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" or not, the people who are actually developing desktop Linux are ignoring the pundits and steadily improving it - the gnome people, the kde people. I just build a box using gentoo Linux w. gnome 2.4 and gtk2 and I'm absolutely amazed at the progress that's been made, compared to where gnome and kde were 2 or 3 years ago. Things are getting steadily tighter, simpler and better integrated. We even have a "killer app" or two. Just check out galeon!
The open source community has a way of slowly, steadily and quietly turning sow's ears into silk purses. Look at mozilla, which was an absolute dog for years after Netscape turned it lose, and is now an A1 browser on any platform. The Linux desktop environment is making remarkably steady progress - it's the tortise that won't stop until the race is won.
I do most of my work on a Linux desktop, and my biggest problem is not the desktop, gnome, or any such, it's that M$ still has the industry in a lock-down as far as 3rd party support is concerned. A few companies such as Creative have figured it out, but when is the last time you went to CompUSA and saw a boxed hardware item with a penguin on it? They all have the little MS flag on them, but no penguins. If they put a penguin on the box, do you think that M$ would still certify ther products and allow them to put the M$ flag on them? NOT!
Same goes for software. I'd like to see Homesite for Linux. Homesite is written in Delphi. Delphi is available for Linux, I'm told, but Macromedia has no plans to port Homesite to Delphi for Linux. Intuit is another one. They'll _never_ get it! I need QuickBooks for Linux, but from everything we've seen, Intuit is totally clueless.
We've got a rock-solid OS. We have an excellent desktop environment. Now all we need is for others to figure out that the world is moving in our direction and to get with the program. You can't make chickens without eggs, nor eggs without chickens, but if the software and hardware industry would get a clue, we'd be able to work together to make it happen.
This is not to say that the victory will be easy, nor that there won't be casualties. One thing I think we can say for sure is that with this conflict the community of Linux and open source advocates, users and developers has lost the innocence with which we started, and we'll never be the same. The world of cut-throat business law and politics into which we've been thrust is all too familiar to the leaders of major corporate playsers such as Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, IBM and the like. The fact that we've been assulted by a street thug rather than a giant corporate syndicate may make some difference in the way this shakes out, but either way, it's a solid indication that Linux has come of age.
The GPL has never yet had its day in court. It may be that, as it exists, it can't stand against a legal challenge, in which case a new and better GPL will be the result. If corporate IT managers distrust the legal implications of using Linux, this fight will end up laying it on the line for them, and the victory over SCO will end up defining open source's limits and advantages for them in a way which words and reassurances could never do. In many ways, we'll see the open source philosophy and its ideals refined and developed in ways which will make it practical, resiliant and competitive in the very real world.
If we believe that the open source development concept is relevant and real for the rest of the world, then we should welcome this fight. It's a seminal event in the coming of age of Linux in very real world of competitive ideas and enterprises.
Wake up, my friends! The day is dawning. It is a good day to do battle.
Sco's website is dark at this time. Hmmm. Traceroute stops at an Alter.net router, probably in Denver or Salt Lake City. Could some naughty child have been doing something nasty to the nice people at SCO? Shame on them!
The big mean IBM is beating up on them. I feel so sorry for poor little SCO. SCO is so nice, and would never, never beat up on anyone smaller than they are.
Good Lord! Now my cat can have her own IP address. 'nuff to go 'round? Sure!
Try limewire for Linux. It works fine!
A Thread on the NANOG list from Tuesday quotes Al Jazeera tech staff indicating that at that time they realized that they were under a DDoS attack.
The footage with offending video of US POWs was aired, I believe, on Sunday on Al Jazeera's satellite TV service. www.aljazeera.net (the Arabic site) was available all day Monday, and could be accessed in English through any of several translation sites, and to the best of my knowledge, contained at most a few still photos of dead soldiers, although I didn't see any when I browsed their news. Nor was it regularly being shown on their TV feed which could be viewed at that time as streaming video at http://winmedia.ish.de/al-jazeera.
Monday Al Jazeera also started its English language website at english.aljazeera.net, although I didn't find out about this until it was too late to see it.
At that time the only functional nameserver for aljazeera.net (the parent domain for both English and Arabic versions of the site) was at Dataport in NJ, and as of Tuesday morning, access to this server was administratively blocked at Dataport's firewall. Through calls to Dataport I learned that yes, the name server was accessable from within Dataport's network, and that administrative blocking of the nameserver was not a matter they would discus with me, referring me instead directly to Al Jazeera. The secondary nameserver for aljazeera.net is in France, and according to my colo provider who keeps tabs on these kinds of things, it's been inoperative for a while.
I contacted Pat Berry at the EFF who told me about the thread on NANOG, and at that point it looked as if possibly Dataport was working to resolve the DDoS problem - possibly also directed against them, I don't know. According to Pat, english.aljazeera.net was intermittantly available on Tuesday, after Dataport re-opened their firewall, but I wasn't able to get to it.
On Wednesday, the root DNS servers removed Dataport's name server for aljazeera.net and replaced it with one managed by AT&T Global Network Services in France. I have no idea whether this was the result of a request by Al Jazeera in an attempt to clear up the problem, or a result of Dataport explicitly deciding to stop hosting their nameserver. Apparently english.aljazeera.net is or was also hosted at Dataport in NJ. The new name server in France is not pingable, for what reason I have no idea, and to the best of my knowledge has never been pingable from either the US or Europe. I also note that the video gateway for Al Jazeera in Arabic at http://winmedia.ish.de/al-jazeera (Germany) is also now unavailable.
Whether all of this is the result of a coordinated hack (and DDoS attack), a domino effect from too much traffic, or something more sinister I don't know. Supposedly, according to word from people at the English web service, this is just the result of a traffic overload, and that it started Monday, but this contradicts the information on the NANOG list. The whole thing is beginning to smell rather distinctly of rat. There are people, whose opinions I respect, who claim that Al Jazeera is little more than a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, but others disagree, and I know that Al Jazeera has been an excellent source of news on things such as ongoing deliberations at the UN regarding the war in Iraq which aren't being covered in the US press at all. It's a shame. It looks as if Al Jazeera may have become a cyber-war casualty.
Knowledge is power, and truth is the first casualty in wartime.
This is no flamebait. Sun is seriously losing market share. It wouldn't even surprise me if Sun were bought by Dell, which excels in hardware delivery but has no software base. Sun has Java, which would be a valuable asset for a company like Dell.
Wonderful! Now we can have an Anticlaus theme park at the South Pole. Anticlaus - you know. This is the SOUTH pole we're talking about, isn't it?
Microsoft is not invulnerable. The arrogance and complacency of MS, Earthlink, AOL/TW and other mega-corporations will be the source of their ultimate downfall. There are forces and bodies of knowledge and power on the Internet of which MS and their kin have never dreamed. Anyone who doubts this should read Steve Gibson's account of his recent DDoS atttack at http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm, sit back with a warm cup of coffee and ponder the implications.
The power of a good idea is untimately irresistable, and the Internet is just such a good idea. Many walls and many established powers will fall before the sweeping changes which will surely come, no matter how strongly the Microsofts and AOLs of the world try to excercise their control. We are, in all likelihood, at the beginning of time of conflict, perhpas even war. Many of us may be called on to take action or to take stands, some of which may be difficult, frightening, dangerous or lonely.
Be hopeful, keep your eyes, ears and mind open, and remember that the Internet, like all open source endeavors, was founded on trust, sharing, and cooperation, and it's these that will see us through even the most difficult of times.
From what I've seen and read, ORBS has fallen from whatever grace it ever enjoyed, and it's blocking polilcy for legitimate open relays, as well as it's practice of adding to its blockedlist the mail servers of its critics has pretty much sidelined it as far as serious mail administrators are concerned. A much better list is the RSS list from mail-abuse.org. See http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss. BTW, I understand that the mail server at mail-abuse.org is on the ORBS list :(.
On the other hand, servers listed in earthlink's MX records for earthlink addresses should be the only ones accepting SMTP connections.
Apparently the people who develop open source software receive a great deal of benefit from it. No one is making them do it, and if they didn't want to, I'm sure they wouldn't do it.
2. If programmers are not benefitting financially, then that usually means students are working the problems. Not to take anything away from students but I'd rather have an experienced, disiplined programmer working on my projects.
Quality speaks for itself. If the work being done on open source projects were't quality work, Steve Balmer would never feel compelled to label Linux as the #1 threat to Microsoft. I think you'll find as well that many good developers are both students, in the best sense of the word, and also experienced and disciplined programmers.
3.Accountability. If you screw the code up... who cares you're working for free anyway.
Everyone else working on the code cares. Open source software isn't developed by one person working alone, It's developed within the context of a strong community with it's own very well developed ethic. If you want to understand this, read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar available in book form from O'Reilly & Associates.
4. Version control. How many different versions of Linux are spinning around out there already?
Basically only one. There are many distributions of Linux, but the official Linux kernel itself is the product of a single development and version tree. Any trends toward forking are strongly resisted by everyone involved.
5. Capitalism. I understand that is the foundation of the Americian economy. America is extremely successful using this model, it encourages competition, ingenuity, research etc..."Open Source" flies in the face of all that is American, it is a backdoor communist attack!
This is such a load of horse hooey that I suspect that it's a flame troll. Linux is a worldwide phenomenon. The sun never sets on the Linux development community! What do you propose, that people in the US be fobidden to use Linux? Or to work on its development? Or that Linus Torvalds' visa be revoked? Nonense! No one is forcing anyone to use or to work on the development of Linux. As I understand it, one of the foundations of American society is freedom from tyranny, and this includes the tyranny of capitalism. The US has a long and respected history of successful cooperative social movements, and only in a totalitarian society are people forbidden to gather together to engage in such efforts.
There's a tidal wave coming their way and they're still trying to empty the water from holes on the beach with a tin pail! If they were, by some diabolical miracle, able to quash Linux tomorrow, it would no more insure their survival than do the quills of a porcupine when it wanders onto a freeway.