Those of us who remember when he stole the Jargon File from the community and sold it as his own think, "Why yes. Yes he should."
That would come as a hell of a surprise to Guy Steele, who gratefully handed off the project to Eric, as he'd long since lacked the time to maintain it, and who strongly approves of Eric's good work updating and expanding it since then.
The company had a nasty tendency of attempting to bundle about four other products with PGP and *refusing* to negotiate with any company, no matter how large, about perhaps a more reasonable package.
Funny you should mention that. The exact same thing happened after NAI bought Trusted Information Systems, makers of the (formerly) superb Gauntlet firewalling software: They bundled it with such in indigestible batch of mandatory other goods and services that all of the professional TIS installers I know switched in disgust to other products, such as Novell Border Manager. Which has more or less killed TIS Gauntlet.
Because Mailman has an annoying tendency to be web-based. You have to do the little password thing to do anything interesting, like subscribe.
The premise is incorrect. To see the extremely extensive list of e-mail-accessible options for any Mailman mailing list, send message text "help" to [listname-]request@[listserverhost].
Some have wondered why GCC -- arguably the GNU project's flagship, after the Emacs operating system^W^Weditor -- doesn't use Mailman as a list manager.
Almost certainly because it was set up a long time ago, before Mailman was available.
I tried to ask Caldera's Open Source Architect, Ronald Joe Record, on a LUG mailing list, what specific copyrighted property in the downloadable Caldera 3.1 Workstation ISO image its restrictive "EULA.TXT" language refers to. (See: http://lists.svlug.org/archives//smaug/2001q3/0001 22.html)
The CD image includes, in file LICENSE.TXT, what's supposed to be a complete list of who owns copyright on which codebase, and what sort of licence it's under. None seemed to qualify -- and Caldera couldn't claim restrictive rights under a theory of compilation copyright, as long as their CD included third-party GPLed code, which it does.
So, I asked Ronald if he wouldn't mind specifying what the very restrictive EULA.TXT stuff applies to.
His response? He immediately de-subscribed, and completely ducked the question.
Any other Caldera representatives care to address the subject?
David Ben-Gurion is noted as having said, "We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew."
Excuse me, but that wasn't Ben-Gurion who said that: You're paraphrasing Jabotinsky -- badly.
Indeed. Our evangelist friend appears to be on the Java Mafia's copious supply of marketing crack.
People, kindly take a few minutes to browse through the LinuxToday talkbacks on that article, and watch Ganesh's claims being dismembered from a multitude of perspective -- including those of quite a number of professional Java developers. You'll see his essay mocked for playing dumb games with Netcraft statistics, zinged for pushing the licensing issue under the carpet, derided for trying to urge a bloated, inappropriate, sweeping solution to a basically non-existent problem, and outright flamed for trying to hustle us with the threat of Micorsoft's vapourous marketing initiative du jour.
And, as the hucksters say, much, much more.
(And, people: Kindly tell me that you're not dumb enough to get stampeded by this blatant con job. Please.)
It attacked the brainstems of morons who had left notoriously insecure network-daemon software running unpatched for a year or more. That's what we call being too stupid to live.
Corel Linux (based on Debian) had definitely the easiest installation! [...but] I
wanted to install new KDE 2.x, so I added some regular Debian sites to the update program. It went hell, as the Debian packages broke the system entirely.
Indeed it does. Since the Conectiva people are probably reading this Slashdot item, I figure it's an excellent place for me to apologise to one of the coders of the Synaptic utility, who argued this point with me on IDG's sadly discontinued forum.linuxworld.com newsgroups: He had cited Corel Linux as an example of a supposedly Debian-compatible distribution that did not smoothly upgrade to Debian-stable, because of Corel's severely broken, incompatible KDE 1.1 packages. I had replied, quite honestly based on my recollection, that I'd upgraded Corel Linux to Debian-stable (2.2/potato, KDE2) without major problems.
He'd then called me a liar, and things went downhill from there. He was correct: I just didn't remember that it's necessary to yank Corel's mutant KDE 1.1 packages (the "kde-corel" one, and anything tied to it) before one could successfully proceed. And then Debian's KDE2 "task-kde" goes in beautifully.
I hope this helps you (or someone) out.
Meanwhile, I happen to be installing Conectiva 7.0 (in English) on a spare machine, and must say it is quite slick.
I have been using client side validation for as long as I have developed web applications (almost five years now). When people use our intranet we require them to use JavaScript.
And all the sysadmins, and every clueful technical user in your company hates you. Why? Because they have to enable Javascript to use your Intranet site, and then quickly turn it off before revisiting the Net at large?
And why is that? You already know why, but you're shoving Javascript down your fellow employees' throats for your own convenience: Client-side Javascript in Web browsers has proven time and again to be one of the biggest security disasters in existence.
You say that's an implementation problem? Fine, show me even one browser implementation where Javascript cannot be used to steal the user's files, to pop up an endless series of windows so that the user has to kill his browser or X11 to recover, and to implement spyware. All I ask is one. It can even be a sucky browser, rather than, say, Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, or Skipstone.
Until you do, Javascript remains a trap for the clueless -- and you are shooting your co-workers in the foot. At any sane company, one where the Web staff are not allowed to run amok at the company's expense, that would be forcibly curtailed by management decree.
We made more than a few enemies by poking fun at the reams of poor journalism about NC. I wish I could point you to archives of the articles, but I'm not aware of any way to reach them. The campaign against NC was ultimately successful. For that among other reasons, the magazine folded, and the content disappeared forever, at least as far as I know.
Thanks to Don Marti and I acting quickly to create and keep a mirror (allowed by IDG's licence terms), NC World's superb coverage remains available, at http://ncworld.zgp.org/.
You want choices of IDE development environments? I've catalogued about a hundred of them for Linux. Mostly as an overkill counterargument for when I hear "There aren't any IDEs for Linux".
Oddly enough, I stopped hearing that bit of FUD about a year ago, about the time I added entry #40.
Never mind proprietary, inflexible semi-solutions like DigitalPaths's Palm Query App (which works only over the grossly overpriced Palm VII Internet-access service). Nor do you need the equally proprietary and inflexible AvantSlow (AvantGo). How about some open-source software, for a change?
Justin Mason's SiteScooper and David A. Desrosiers's Plucker are the options that come immediately to mind.
Both of those, and hundreds of other open-source packages, either for PalmOS or for other OSes working with PalmOS, are also carried in my repository of PalmOS open-source code and information.
This really is great news for the Palm, if for no other reason than the fact that it carries an open source license. As anyone who owns a
Palm has noticed, there is a dearth of open and/or free software developed for it.
Dearth? There are hundred of such packages. There just haven't been well-maintained sites devoted to them. Most PalmOS software sites are clueless about licensing issues, and label packages "free" when they are proprietary shareware or crippleware. And most such sites don't even have copies of the listed software, so you find broken links to long-vanished Geocities pages, etc.
I'm building what I hope will be the right sort of site, on my main Linux box. There isn't yet any HTML, but there are complete index (ASCII) files, local copies of all offerings, and information on the licensing, the author credits, and the sites of origin. The collection thus far is at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/palmos/
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Never piss off the world's sysadmins
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 2
I'm just now sending the following off to "sales@blackice.com":
Gentlemen:
Your company has just filed lawsuit against the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) organization, for including some of your companies Internet-machine addresses on its list of IP addresses that some system administrators (sysadmins) elect to filter out.
I am a system administrator. I know many other system administrators. And there is a very important fact that you may not be aware of:
The MAPS people will remove your IPs from its list, pretty much immediately, if/when you correct whatever earned you that status. In that sense, MAPS are "forgiving" people.
Sysadmins don't forgive. In suing the MAPS group, you have just put yourselves on tens of thousands of sysadmins' shitlists for eternity. They're all going to filter you into oblivion, easily, summarily, and without remorse, exactly the way I'm about to. And you're _never_ going to come out.
bwt writes: "It now seems that the DVD-CCA has insulted the entire open source movement.
Insulted, yes. But, contrary to innumerable people's assertions in this thread, this assertion in DVDCCA's opposition brief does not constitute libel.
In defamation law, one of the required elements, for an act of libel, is "identification": The party spoken of must be a person in the eyes of the law (which, obviously, includes corporations, arms of government, etc.).
Thus, you can, for example, make scurrilous factual assertions about unspecified lawyers all day long without running afoul of defamation law -- as long as you don't address (identify) specific individuals, law firms, trade associations, etc.
Had DVDCCA made this assertion about the Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, the Debian Project, or any other group with recognised existence as a legal "person", it might now be at risk for a libel action. Since it disparaged "the open source movement", however, it did not violate that law.
I can hardly say enough good things about Dan's suite of DNS servers and client programs.
Having gone through the annoyance of administering a qmail site, I don't suffer from this disability.
dnscache, dnsfilter, tinydns, pickdns, walldns, rbldns, axfrdns, axfr-get, and the sundry associated libraries are just yet more screwball non-free software from Bernstein: He can keep 'em, and all his other non-FHS-compliant offerings. If I switch to anything, it'll be the GPLed Dents package.
It seems from your account that your employer is not distributing your program: Behind closed doors, it can do with your program and their proprietary changes (including ones it pays you to make) whatever it wishes. You will not own those changes -- but they fall under the GPL, with obvious consequences if your employer distributes its version.
What happens beyond that depends entirely on whether you're working at a firm run by intelligent and enlightened management: Advised of the situation, management may well authorise release of its mods. Or, they may wish to negotiate a separate licence for the whole package. In your shoes, I'd certainly ask.
However, let me tell you what happens at a less-than-enlightened firm that fails to act in its own interest:
Deirdre Saoirse, Elise Shapiro, Nick Moffitt, and I once started a helpdesk-management project, coding it (in Python) in the evenings at The Linux Cabal in San Francisco. Deirdre did almost all of the work, but we made good progress, and it was starting to look like a realistic enterprise-level ticket-tracking system.
All three of us were then working at a VC-funded, supposedly open-source-oriented firm, which initially allowed and encouraged further development of our project during work hours, with a view to adopting it internally. But soon thereafter a new CIO was brought aboard, and Deirdre was suddenly told -- by a founder/board-member who ironically claims to be a spokeman for the open-source community -- that she was not an open-source developer, and would be subsequently forbidden to work on the project during work hours.
(Some USA employment contracts purport to assign to the company ownership of all work you do during your term of employment. I consider it highly likely that such terms violate basic copyright law and are inherently unenforceable. I suspect employers know this.)
All three of us subsequently left, and it's my understanding that the firm then spent tens of millions of dollars on a proprietary software project of the CIO's, and I have no idea whether they yet have a functional helpdesk system.
But, the good news is that our project's codebase still exists, remains free software, and may emerge at some point for general use. And the nice thing is that you can (and should!) leave buttheaded companies and take your open-source projects with you. So, that is your worst-case scenario.
I think the one anonymous coward was right: that was Arthur F. Tyde III, not Rob.
In fact, Rob wrote me in e-mail and said it wasn't he -- which is good enough for me.
Therefore, Rob, my apologies. It did sound like you, especially in post #184 (earlier in the thread -- and I notice that some other commentators felt likewise), but the recent posts seem to be from someone much higher up in the organisation.
I perhaps should have recognised that fact, as to the latter posts, because Rob has a sense of personal ethics.
Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com (speaking for himself)
The rather talkative, insider Anonymous Coward in this thread wrote:
Auditors are not HR people.
This was in reply to Deeny's:
So, should talking to an auditor be a firing offense? Because one of Linuxcare's IT staff was fired for apparently that. Which brings up the interesting question of what she could possibly have said that might have made that much of a difference...unless it involved things like, oh, employee emails being sniffed by the IT staff, or things that might actually get a company in a great deal of legal hot water. Or perhaps she was talking about the numerous reports of racist, sexist and (in San Francisco!) homophobic remarks from current IT management, leading the auditors to believe that the employee relations were, um, weak.
"Auditors are not HR people", you say? What a fascinating comment.
Rob, I'd just like to make sure I understand what you're saying, here: Are you saying that a sysadmin's having talked to auditors has suddenly become a fireable offence?
You see, I used to be in the financial accounting business. Doing audit work, no less. And I seem to recall that auditors are allowed and encouraged by both their engagement letters and business law to ask any employee questions.
So, now, you're admitting that your firm fired a sysadmin (or was that two sysadmins) for cooperating with routine business checks on management operations and records? And implying that this is routine and expected at your firm?
My goodness. I wish you guys luck, but I suspect you have some quite serious fundamental problems, if this is any indication.
-- Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com (speaking for himself)
Yet another anonymous coward took a swipe at Deeny:
1. You are a disgruntled employee who is grinding an axe....
You are almost certainly an employee, and very likely a particular department head with a distinctive writing style, who is attempting character assassination from behind cover of anonymity. I believe that just might be considered to speak volumes.
I'm not going to blow your cover, sir, but I do hope you're aware that your audience includes co-workers bright enough to draw their own conclusions about the veracity and ethics of the sundry parties?
I suggest you think twice before attempting this sort of tactic again, or I just might "out" you.
It's not a revolt if all people are doing is complaining. To the contrary: People tend to complain instead of taking corrective action, as many classic studies have amply demonstrated.
Dear MCSEs who are following this story: Watch closely, and you'll notice that you're being given the opportunity to vent your frustration, to give "input", to register your protest voice. That is how the game is played: You're presented with a fait accompli, and then given an opportunity to make futile, powerless gestures all about how annoyed you are.
This is one of life's intelligence tests. The way you pass is by declining the opportunity to protest, and instead act to fix the underlying situation. Or, be honest with yourself and admit that you're going to cave in. But don't waste your time protesting.
Consider how you came to be in this bind, and you'll see you've slowly moved into a certification relationship that's not working. Your best move is to say "No thanks": The only way to win this game is not to play.
When Redmond is done saying it's considered "your thoughts and concerns", has finished "helping you understand", and has ceased portraying your anger as "confusion", just ponder whether you will ever want to be in a position to be conned by these people again. There are healthy business relationships to be found, and good people to work with. Your first step towards finding them will be to say "Thanks, I'll get back to you", and start looking elsewhere.
Either that, or admit that you're dependent on Microsoft, and, as a business decision, will do what you're told. That's your decision to make -- but there's no need to kid yourself about the supposed value of protest, on your way to that course of action.
Slashdot Mirror
That would come as a hell of a surprise to Guy Steele, who gratefully handed off the project to Eric, as he'd long since lacked the time to maintain it, and who strongly approves of Eric's good work updating and expanding it since then.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Funny you should mention that. The exact same thing happened after NAI bought Trusted Information Systems, makers of the (formerly) superb Gauntlet firewalling software: They bundled it with such in indigestible batch of mandatory other goods and services that all of the professional TIS installers I know switched in disgust to other products, such as Novell Border Manager. Which has more or less killed TIS Gauntlet.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Because Mailman has an annoying tendency to be web-based. You have to do the little password thing to do anything interesting, like subscribe.
The premise is incorrect. To see the extremely extensive list of e-mail-accessible options for any Mailman mailing list, send message text "help" to [listname-]request@[listserverhost].
Some have wondered why GCC -- arguably the GNU project's flagship, after the Emacs operating system^W^Weditor -- doesn't use Mailman as a list manager.
Almost certainly because it was set up a long time ago, before Mailman was available.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
I tried to ask Caldera's Open Source Architect, Ronald Joe Record, on a LUG mailing list, what specific copyrighted property in the downloadable Caldera 3.1 Workstation ISO image its restrictive "EULA.TXT" language refers to. (See: http://lists.svlug.org/archives//smaug/2001q3/0001 22.html)
The CD image includes, in file LICENSE.TXT, what's supposed to be a complete list of who owns copyright on which codebase, and what sort of licence it's under. None seemed to qualify -- and Caldera couldn't claim restrictive rights under a theory of compilation copyright, as long as their CD included third-party GPLed code, which it does.
So, I asked Ronald if he wouldn't mind specifying what the very restrictive EULA.TXT stuff applies to.
His response? He immediately de-subscribed, and completely ducked the question.
Any other Caldera representatives care to address the subject?
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
David Ben-Gurion is noted as having said, "We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew."
Excuse me, but that wasn't Ben-Gurion who said that: You're paraphrasing Jabotinsky -- badly.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
Indeed. Our evangelist friend appears to be on the Java Mafia's copious supply of marketing crack.
People, kindly take a few minutes to browse through the LinuxToday talkbacks on that article, and watch Ganesh's claims being dismembered from a multitude of perspective -- including those of quite a number of professional Java developers. You'll see his essay mocked for playing dumb games with Netcraft statistics, zinged for pushing the licensing issue under the carpet, derided for trying to urge a bloated, inappropriate, sweeping solution to a basically non-existent problem, and outright flamed for trying to hustle us with the threat of Micorsoft's vapourous marketing initiative du jour.
And, as the hucksters say, much, much more.
(And, people: Kindly tell me that you're not dumb enough to get stampeded by this blatant con job. Please.)
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
It attacked the brainstems of morons who had left notoriously insecure network-daemon software running unpatched for a year or more. That's what we call being too stupid to live.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Indeed it does. Since the Conectiva people are probably reading this Slashdot item, I figure it's an excellent place for me to apologise to one of the coders of the Synaptic utility, who argued this point with me on IDG's sadly discontinued forum.linuxworld.com newsgroups: He had cited Corel Linux as an example of a supposedly Debian-compatible distribution that did not smoothly upgrade to Debian-stable, because of Corel's severely broken, incompatible KDE 1.1 packages. I had replied, quite honestly based on my recollection, that I'd upgraded Corel Linux to Debian-stable (2.2/potato, KDE2) without major problems.
He'd then called me a liar, and things went downhill from there. He was correct: I just didn't remember that it's necessary to yank Corel's mutant KDE 1.1 packages (the "kde-corel" one, and anything tied to it) before one could successfully proceed. And then Debian's KDE2 "task-kde" goes in beautifully.
I hope this helps you (or someone) out.
Meanwhile, I happen to be installing Conectiva 7.0 (in English) on a spare machine, and must say it is quite slick.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
I have been using client side validation for as long as I have developed web applications (almost five years now). When people use our intranet we require them to use JavaScript.
And all the sysadmins, and every clueful technical user in your company hates you. Why? Because they have to enable Javascript to use your Intranet site, and then quickly turn it off before revisiting the Net at large?
And why is that? You already know why, but you're shoving Javascript down your fellow employees' throats for your own convenience: Client-side Javascript in Web browsers has proven time and again to be one of the biggest security disasters in existence.
You say that's an implementation problem? Fine, show me even one browser implementation where Javascript cannot be used to steal the user's files, to pop up an endless series of windows so that the user has to kill his browser or X11 to recover, and to implement spyware. All I ask is one. It can even be a sucky browser, rather than, say, Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, or Skipstone.
Until you do, Javascript remains a trap for the clueless -- and you are shooting your co-workers in the foot. At any sane company, one where the Web staff are not allowed to run amok at the company's expense, that would be forcibly curtailed by management decree.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Enjoy!
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
You want choices of IDE development environments? I've catalogued about a hundred of them for Linux. Mostly as an overkill counterargument for when I hear "There aren't any IDEs for Linux".
Oddly enough, I stopped hearing that bit of FUD about a year ago, about the time I added entry #40.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
Never mind proprietary, inflexible semi-solutions like DigitalPaths's Palm Query App (which works only over the grossly overpriced Palm VII Internet-access service). Nor do you need the equally proprietary and inflexible AvantSlow (AvantGo). How about some open-source software, for a change?
Justin Mason's SiteScooper and David A. Desrosiers's Plucker are the options that come immediately to mind.
Both of those, and hundreds of other open-source packages, either for PalmOS or for other OSes working with PalmOS, are also carried in my repository of PalmOS open-source code and information.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
This really is great news for the Palm, if for no other reason than the fact that it carries an open source license. As anyone who owns a Palm has noticed, there is a dearth of open and/or free software developed for it.
Dearth? There are hundred of such packages. There just haven't been well-maintained sites devoted to them. Most PalmOS software sites are clueless about licensing issues, and label packages "free" when they are proprietary shareware or crippleware. And most such sites don't even have copies of the listed software, so you find broken links to long-vanished Geocities pages, etc.
I'm building what I hope will be the right sort of site, on my main Linux box. There isn't yet any HTML, but there are complete index (ASCII) files, local copies of all offerings, and information on the licensing, the author credits, and the sites of origin. The collection thus far is at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/palmos/
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Gentlemen:
Your company has just filed lawsuit against the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) organization, for including some of your companies Internet-machine addresses on its list of IP addresses that some system administrators (sysadmins) elect to filter out.
I am a system administrator. I know many other system administrators. And there is a very important fact that you may not be aware of:
The MAPS people will remove your IPs from its list, pretty much immediately, if/when you correct whatever earned you that status. In that sense, MAPS are "forgiving" people.
Sysadmins don't forgive. In suing the MAPS group, you have just put yourselves on tens of thousands of sysadmins' shitlists for eternity. They're all going to filter you into oblivion, easily, summarily, and without remorse, exactly the way I'm about to. And you're _never_ going to come out.
Boy, did _you_ ever make a tactical mistake.
Sincerely,
Rick Moen
bwt writes: "It now seems that the DVD-CCA has insulted the entire open source movement.
Insulted, yes. But, contrary to innumerable people's assertions in this thread, this assertion in DVDCCA's opposition brief does not constitute libel.
In defamation law, one of the required elements, for an act of libel, is "identification": The party spoken of must be a person in the eyes of the law (which, obviously, includes corporations, arms of government, etc.). Thus, you can, for example, make scurrilous factual assertions about unspecified lawyers all day long without running afoul of defamation law -- as long as you don't address (identify) specific individuals, law firms, trade associations, etc.
Had DVDCCA made this assertion about the Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, the Debian Project, or any other group with recognised existence as a legal "person", it might now be at risk for a libel action. Since it disparaged "the open source movement", however, it did not violate that law.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Not only is the registration system still hors de combat, but also it's more than a little buggy:
We are sorry. The database is currently overloaded.
Current load is 538.
Limit is 600.
Please try again in an hour or two.
The Debian teem thinks the QPL is not GPL compatible. Other distributions think it is.
No they don't. They simply estimate that nobody's going to sue them for violating the GPL licence terms, in that instance. There's a big difference.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
kindbud wrote:
I can hardly say enough good things about Dan's suite of DNS servers and client programs.
Having gone through the annoyance of administering a qmail site, I don't suffer from this disability.
dnscache, dnsfilter, tinydns, pickdns, walldns, rbldns, axfrdns, axfr-get, and the sundry associated libraries are just yet more screwball non-free software from Bernstein: He can keep 'em, and all his other non-FHS-compliant offerings. If I switch to anything, it'll be the GPLed Dents package.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
It seems from your account that your employer is not distributing your program: Behind closed doors, it can do with your program and their proprietary changes (including ones it pays you to make) whatever it wishes. You will not own those changes -- but they fall under the GPL, with obvious consequences if your employer distributes its version.
What happens beyond that depends entirely on whether you're working at a firm run by intelligent and enlightened management: Advised of the situation, management may well authorise release of its mods. Or, they may wish to negotiate a separate licence for the whole package. In your shoes, I'd certainly ask.
However, let me tell you what happens at a less-than-enlightened firm that fails to act in its own interest:
Deirdre Saoirse, Elise Shapiro, Nick Moffitt, and I once started a helpdesk-management project, coding it (in Python) in the evenings at The Linux Cabal in San Francisco. Deirdre did almost all of the work, but we made good progress, and it was starting to look like a realistic enterprise-level ticket-tracking system.
All three of us were then working at a VC-funded, supposedly open-source-oriented firm, which initially allowed and encouraged further development of our project during work hours, with a view to adopting it internally. But soon thereafter a new CIO was brought aboard, and Deirdre was suddenly told -- by a founder/board-member who ironically claims to be a spokeman for the open-source community -- that she was not an open-source developer, and would be subsequently forbidden to work on the project during work hours.
(Some USA employment contracts purport to assign to the company ownership of all work you do during your term of employment. I consider it highly likely that such terms violate basic copyright law and are inherently unenforceable. I suspect employers know this.)
All three of us subsequently left, and it's my understanding that the firm then spent tens of millions of dollars on a proprietary software project of the CIO's, and I have no idea whether they yet have a functional helpdesk system.
But, the good news is that our project's codebase still exists, remains free software, and may emerge at some point for general use. And the nice thing is that you can (and should!) leave buttheaded companies and take your open-source projects with you. So, that is your worst-case scenario.
-- Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
An anonymous coward wrote:
I think the one anonymous coward was right: that was Arthur F. Tyde III, not Rob.
In fact, Rob wrote me in e-mail and said it wasn't he -- which is good enough for me.
Therefore, Rob, my apologies. It did sound like you, especially in post #184 (earlier in the thread -- and I notice that some other commentators felt likewise), but the recent posts seem to be from someone much higher up in the organisation.
I perhaps should have recognised that fact, as to the latter posts, because Rob has a sense of personal ethics.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
(speaking for himself)
The rather talkative, insider Anonymous Coward in this thread wrote:
Auditors are not HR people.
This was in reply to Deeny's:
So, should talking to an auditor be a firing offense? Because one of Linuxcare's IT staff was fired for apparently that. Which brings up the interesting question of what she could possibly have said that might have made that much of a difference...unless it involved things like, oh, employee emails being sniffed by the IT staff, or things that might actually get a company in a great deal of legal hot water. Or perhaps she was talking about the numerous reports of racist, sexist and (in San Francisco!) homophobic remarks from current IT management, leading the auditors to believe that the employee relations were, um, weak.
"Auditors are not HR people", you say? What a fascinating comment.
Rob, I'd just like to make sure I understand what you're saying, here: Are you saying that a sysadmin's having talked to auditors has suddenly become a fireable offence?
You see, I used to be in the financial accounting business. Doing audit work, no less. And I seem to recall that auditors are allowed and encouraged by both their engagement letters and business law to ask any employee questions.
So, now, you're admitting that your firm fired a sysadmin (or was that two sysadmins) for cooperating with routine business checks on management operations and records? And implying that this is routine and expected at your firm?
My goodness. I wish you guys luck, but I suspect you have some quite serious fundamental problems, if this is any indication.
-- Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
(speaking for himself)
Yet another anonymous coward took a swipe at Deeny:
1. You are a disgruntled employee who is grinding an axe....
You are almost certainly an employee, and very likely a particular department head with a distinctive writing style, who is attempting character assassination from behind cover of anonymity. I believe that just might be considered to speak volumes.
I'm not going to blow your cover, sir, but I do hope you're aware that your audience includes co-workers bright enough to draw their own conclusions about the veracity and ethics of the sundry parties?
I suggest you think twice before attempting this sort of tactic again, or I just might "out" you.
Regards,Rick Moen
(speaking for himself)
Now I'm going to slither out of here before Rick Moen figures out who this is...
I don't look under rocks that small.
It's not a revolt if all people are doing is complaining. To the contrary: People tend to complain instead of taking corrective action, as many classic studies have amply demonstrated.
Dear MCSEs who are following this story: Watch closely, and you'll notice that you're being given the opportunity to vent your frustration, to give "input", to register your protest voice. That is how the game is played: You're presented with a fait accompli, and then given an opportunity to make futile, powerless gestures all about how annoyed you are.
This is one of life's intelligence tests. The way you pass is by declining the opportunity to protest, and instead act to fix the underlying situation. Or, be honest with yourself and admit that you're going to cave in. But don't waste your time protesting.
Consider how you came to be in this bind, and you'll see you've slowly moved into a certification relationship that's not working. Your best move is to say "No thanks": The only way to win this game is not to play.
When Redmond is done saying it's considered "your thoughts and concerns", has finished "helping you understand", and has ceased portraying your anger as "confusion", just ponder whether you will ever want to be in a position to be conned by these people again. There are healthy business relationships to be found, and good people to work with. Your first step towards finding them will be to say "Thanks, I'll get back to you", and start looking elsewhere.
Either that, or admit that you're dependent on Microsoft, and, as a business decision, will do what you're told. That's your decision to make -- but there's no need to kid yourself about the supposed value of protest, on your way to that course of action.
-- Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com
Anyone else having problems downloading the strong encryption version?
Go to http://www.netscape.com/download/ unsupported.html, and pick the Linux 2.2 / 128-bit Communicator 4.72 link. It works.
Rick Moenrick@linuxmafia.com