Boy, my post went right over your head, didn't it?
MS hasn't been lowering the price of anything! Prices of computer hardware and software were steadily falling long before MS got into the market, and continued to fall afterwards. MS has lowered their prices and improved their products more slowly than almost anyone else! If you think you're better off than you would have been in a competitive market, I'm sorry for you!
Microsoft isn't a monopoly, per say, they're just really successful.
Tell it to the judge, bub! Seriously, they may not meet ONE OF THE dictionary definitions of "monopoly", but they most definitely meet the LEGAL definition, which is what's important here.
And furthermore (and this is a point that proponents of both sides often seem to miss), there is nothing wrong with having a monopoly! What's illegal and wrong is abusing your monopoly position. Both Intel and Cisco have been found in court to have a monopoly in their respective markets. But both have been cleared of any charges of wrongdoing (rightfully so IMO).
No, because SCOldera doesn't have a clear, uncontested title to "Unix". First of all, the Open Group owns the trademark "UNIX(tm)," secondly, Novell has a competing claim to the code, and finally, large parts of the code are owned by others - most notably the Regents of the University of California.
Caldera/SCO is also the target of more lawsuits than they've filed. They've already lost a suit in Germany, and been additionally fined for violating a court order, and they're under investigation by the Australian government. Doesn't make them look like a very tempting aquisition.
But most of all, yes, MS in particular (who might otherwise be willing to overlook some of these obvious problems) would be in a world of trouble due to their monopoly position. The SEC could and probably would forbid such an aquisition. And remember, US law isn't the only thing they have to worry about. MS also does business in the UK and EU, and would have to deal with major repercussions there as well.
And finally, there are change-of-ownership issues in the contract between Novell and oldSCO. NewSCO seems to think they can sidestep this by claiming that they merged with oldSCO's OS division, and thus the ownership didn't actually didn't change. MS would have a much harder time making such an argument.
But what this case is likely to prove (and may well have already proven) is that FLOSS is not an easy target. There are plenty of low-hanging fruit available for corporate fraud and intimidation. If SCOldera's claims are proven to be utterly without merit (which seems a given at this point), I doubt if we'll see another such case anytime soon. Lies that people (investors) might believe are much more likely to be effective.
same problem applies to putting code in the public domain, or the BSD license
(I'd call it an "issue," not a "problem." It's only a problem if you're planning to sue everyone in the world for using the code you released openly.)
And if you want to see someone's head explode, go find a BSD fanatic, and explain to them that the BSD license is viral. Then stand back. Way, way back!:)
GPL is like a prion, anything it touches is meant to turn into itself.
Sorry, but if you combine BSD code and GPL'd code, the BSD'd code REMAINS UNDER THE BSD LICENSE!
I'm dealing with this exact situation right now. I've got an app that is mostly under a BSD-like license, but which has one optional module (an emacs link) that is GPL'd. Guess what? Delete that module, and the whole damn thing instantly reverts to its BSDish license!
BSD fanatics (I'm a fan but not a fanatic) are fond of saying that proprietary derivatives are ok because the original code remains BSD'd. Well guess what, bubba? The same is true for GPL'd derivatives! Maybe even more so.
The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation.
Hogwash! And even if that were its objective (and it's not), it would fail miserably, because it explicitly doesn't prevent commercial exploitation at all! It's easy to make a license that prevents commercial exploitation -- I've dealt with several in my career (e.g. early versions of infozip). The GPL is clearly NOT in that category. Heck, as the examples of Trolltech and MySQL show, it doesn't even prevent proprietary exploitation! (Though that is closer to its actual intended goal.)
Whatever your beef with RMS personally, the fact remains that the GPL has been extremely successful, and is in widespread use, and has NOT caused the sky to fall, or western civilization to collapse, and it's pretty obvious that it's not going to!
I've met RMS, and I don't agree with him on a lot of points, but RMS is not the GPL. The GPL is a license that is in wide use, and has been found acceptable by large corporations like IBM (who have more lawyers on retainer than most software companies have employees). Trying to make XFree86 incompatible with the GPL at this late date is a completely stupid move, and will do nothing but guarantee a fork, backed by everyone from Debian to IBM and Novell (to cover both ends of the fanaticism spectrum).
(Whoops, I originally posted this info in response to another article. This is the one I meant to respond to.)
When Sterling Ball, CEO of the Ernie Ball Co., decided to sever business ties with MS, he rejected Apple as an alternative vendor specifically because of that $150 million investment! Details here.
When the Ernie Ball guitar string company got upset with MS over an overpublicized BSA audit, CEO Sterling Ball decided to switch to somebody (anybody!) else. And according to this article/interview, "We looked at all the alternatives. We looked at Apple, but that's owned in part by Microsoft." So they ended up running Linux.
While it may be true that MS doesn't actually own or control Apple or Comcast, someone like Sterling Ball who is making it a point of honor not to give MS any more money may still consider MS's investments in Apple or Comcast to be relevent information.
The SCO you're referring to is now out of the OS market, and doing business as "Tarantella". This SCO (the one suing IBM and Novell) is a Novell spin-off (irony of ironies) formerly known as Caldera which was formed to market a proprietary desktop system on top of Red Hat Linux. They later switched to making their own distro, struggled, teamed up with Suse and Connectiva to create "UnitedLinux", struggled some more, bought Unixware, the UNIX/SysV licensing business and the name from old SCO, announced they were going to incorporate the best of SysV in Linux, struggled some more, then had a change of heart and name and started suing everyone in sight.
No, even if Novell owns the code, SCO is pretty clearly their designated agent for licensing it, which should be sufficient grounds for them (SCO) to continue their suit against IBM. Anyway, a large part of SCO's claims against IBM have to do with "Project Monterey" (the now-dead port of SysV to the all-but-dead ia64), which SCO and IBM and others were collaborating on. That part of the suit clearly has nothing to do with who owns the code.
Actually, while Caldera^WSCO has announced all sorts of plans to sue everybody and his Aunt Tillie, they have, in fact, only initiated two lawsuits, vs. IBM and now vs. Novell. Counting IBM's countersuit, there are four lawsuits against them, and Novell's countersuit will probably make five. They've already lost two of those suits, and, in the German case, were later fined an additional 10,000 euros for violating the judge's orders.
SCO's claims against IBM are about contract violations and trade secrets. This suit does not "go to the heart" of that; in fact, it's pretty much irrelevent to what Caldera^WSCO has claimed in court.
Now, the claims they make in press releases, that's another matter!:)
> when I looked [...] FLAC took about twice as long to compress
Hmm, according to the Flac comparison page, we're both wrong. FLAC is only about a third again slower at compressing (12:54 vs. 9:44 in their tests), not twice as slow, but it's just a hair slower at decompressing (7:08 vs. 6:31). But that's in the default mode. If you compare "flac -3" vs. "shorten -p8", you'll see that the times are almost reversed, but FLAC still compresses noticably better.
Anyway, they're both slow enough that I would/do run them in the background.:)
I've also got code that encapsulates a Shorten file and streams it
According to the same page, FLAC is already streamable, so you shouldn't need extra code for that. But you can encapsulate it with Ogg if you want. FLAC also has support from a few hardware vendors, if that's relevent.
I don't know about the sound card, but as a member of the Debian project, I have to ask why you're using non-free third-party software like shorten when flac provides (slightly) better compression, faster decompression (if you ever need it), a more flexible format overall, and is included with and supported by Debian?
I only keep a copy of shorten around so I can decompress any.shns I get (from, e.g. etree or the internet audio archive), but I never ever use its compression features. The shorten-plugin for XMMS crashes on a fairly regular basis, while the flac plugin seems rock solid. So, I'm highly motivated to convert my.shns to.flacs ASAP. The 5-10% better compression that flac offers is just the icing on the cake.:)
I opted out of Microsoft for Oracle a long time ago. In favor of Solaris and a real server platform.
Well, Oracle doesn't seem to agree with your assessment, as they have switched to Linux from Solaris for internal operations, and recently switched to Linux (again from Solaris) as their primary build platform.
Still, what would Oracle know about running their own software? Surely it makes more sense to take advice from some random poster on slashdot. You've convinced me, I'm switching to Solaris tomorrow.
I was trying to keep an eye on Groklaw when it suddenly stopped responding, so I figured it was time to head over to slashdot and see what was new. Sure enough, I found this article pointing to the smoking ruins of what used to be an informative site.:)
I wonder if it's time for OSDL to offer their hosting services to Pamela?
You don't "own" derivative works. You have rights to your contribution towards it.
Unless you signed a contract that says otherwise. That's why SCOldera keeps claiming that this lawsuit is about contracts, not copyrights.
Of course, IBM has shown evidence that their contract does NOT say otherwise, but SCOldera seems to be hoping that the judge will overlook that tiny detail.:)
And of course, while SCOldera's claims against IBM may not involve copyright, IBM's counterclaims of trade libel make the PR statements about "millions of lines of infringing code" very relevent. If SCOldera hasn't provided proof of those statements, they're probably in big(ger) trouble.
> what is wrong with rewriting the code from the ground-up?
Nothing is wrong with that, as long as your time is worth nothing.
Actually, rewrites can actually save time if the code is old and crufty enough. Cut-and-paste programming, fragile global dependencies, poor or non-existent factoring and other antipatterns can make a code base all-but unmaintainable.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to determine just when your code has become so hard to maintain that a rewrite would actually save time over hacking in needed new features. My experience suggests that keeping old code alive for too long is the more common error, but there are plenty who err the other way too.
I'm not saying the idea of a programmable watch is stupid. Im saying the suggestion they use a programmable watch in a situation where a cheap, single-purpose item will work better is stupid.
Since the Linux watch prototypes were first shown publicly nearly four years ago, it's not unreasonable to think that they might be approaching cheapness themselves. (Assuming that there are plans to mass market them at some point, which is, I think, still unknown.)
Also, saying that an item that is essentially useless "works better" than an item that could actually have uses seems like a bit of a stretch. Unless you can think of an actual use for a watch that only keeps Martian time? I can't. I suspect most of these watches will end up gathering dust on a shelf or trophy case somewhere.
Of course, the actual answer to the question, "why didn't they just use a Linux/PalmOS watch" is that such devices are not yet on the market. But that doesn't mean the question is stupid. That just means that there is a reasonable answer.
it isnt a requirement that every item in the world be tweakable
Who said anything about "it has to be tweakable"? Most devices that run PalmOS or embedded Linux are interesting primarily because they're useful, not because they're tweakable. People don't (usually) buy, e.g. a TiVo so they can tweak it. I am sure that if Citizen does put IBM's Linux Watch on the market, it will not need any tweaking to work. So your argument about "time spent fucking with the watch" is a straw man.
I don't think it's at all stupid to say, "digital devices which could have fulfilled the same role, and which would have been far more useful overall, were demoed at trade shows several years ago. Why aren't these devices on the market already, so that NASA could have given them out (with custom Martian-time software pre-installed) instead?" There's probably a reasonable answer to that question, but that doesn't mean it's a stupid question.
I always thought that code based on GPLed code falls under the GPL anyway
No, any original work you do can be licensed any way you want. If you combine your work with GPL'd code, then the combined result must be GPL if you distribute it, but your individual sections can still be under another license as long as that license is GPL-compatible or you don't distribute.
Thus, any BSD-licensed bits in the Linux kernel are still BSD-licensed, even though the kernel as a whole is GPL'd.
and must be published.
No, you don't have to publish. If you do publish, you have to publish everything (inc. source), but you still retain the option of publishing nothing. If you just want to use the system, you can combine it with any sort of code your heart desires. Microsoft, if they wanted, could make a modified version of Linux that was inextricably linked to IE, and could deploy that system on every desktop in their company. They just couldn't distribute it outside of the company.
Anyway, this is all irrelevent to the topic of eCos. They're changing the copyright owner not the license! Owners aren't subject to license terms -- owners set license terms!
I don't know about everything, but Linux has already been done on a watch, so the question doesn't seem completely unreasonable. And Citizen announced that they were interested in IBM's design, so they (who know a lot more about the consumer electronics market than you or I) didn't seem to think it was completely silly. Furthermore, IBM's Linux watch might actually be useful (since it could switch between Earth-based and Mars-based displays), whereas this device is just going to molder on people's trophy shelves.
I admit that I generally prefer analog watches, but I'm still far more interested in a Linux watch than I am in this utterly-useless thing.
> One wonders why [they] didn't just get a...Linux or PalmOS based wrist-computer?
Because that suggestion is stupid.
Not particularly. IBM first demoed their watch back in 2000, and Citizen announced that they were interested in the project in 2001. Now it's a few years later, and consumer electronics companies are pretty clever about turning expensive prototypes into affordable (or almost affordable) commercial products. It's not completely unreasonable to think that such a device might finally be available for a specialty order like this.
Furthermore, such a device would be eminently more practical, since it would be capable of displaying Earth time too and of switching between displays of Martian and Earth time.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, my post went right over your head, didn't it?
MS hasn't been lowering the price of anything! Prices of computer hardware and software were steadily falling long before MS got into the market, and continued to fall afterwards. MS has lowered their prices and improved their products more slowly than almost anyone else! If you think you're better off than you would have been in a competitive market, I'm sorry for you!
Microsoft isn't a monopoly, per say, they're just really successful.
Tell it to the judge, bub! Seriously, they may not meet ONE OF THE dictionary definitions of "monopoly", but they most definitely meet the LEGAL definition, which is what's important here.
And furthermore (and this is a point that proponents of both sides often seem to miss), there is nothing wrong with having a monopoly! What's illegal and wrong is abusing your monopoly position. Both Intel and Cisco have been found in court to have a monopoly in their respective markets. But both have been cleared of any charges of wrongdoing (rightfully so IMO).
No, because SCOldera doesn't have a clear, uncontested title to "Unix". First of all, the Open Group owns the trademark "UNIX(tm)," secondly, Novell has a competing claim to the code, and finally, large parts of the code are owned by others - most notably the Regents of the University of California.
Caldera/SCO is also the target of more lawsuits than they've filed. They've already lost a suit in Germany, and been additionally fined for violating a court order, and they're under investigation by the Australian government. Doesn't make them look like a very tempting aquisition.
But most of all, yes, MS in particular (who might otherwise be willing to overlook some of these obvious problems) would be in a world of trouble due to their monopoly position. The SEC could and probably would forbid such an aquisition. And remember, US law isn't the only thing they have to worry about. MS also does business in the UK and EU, and would have to deal with major repercussions there as well.
And finally, there are change-of-ownership issues in the contract between Novell and oldSCO. NewSCO seems to think they can sidestep this by claiming that they merged with oldSCO's OS division, and thus the ownership didn't actually didn't change. MS would have a much harder time making such an argument.
But what this case is likely to prove (and may well have already proven) is that FLOSS is not an easy target. There are plenty of low-hanging fruit available for corporate fraud and intimidation. If SCOldera's claims are proven to be utterly without merit (which seems a given at this point), I doubt if we'll see another such case anytime soon. Lies that people (investors) might believe are much more likely to be effective.
same problem applies to putting code in the public domain, or the BSD license
:)
(I'd call it an "issue," not a "problem." It's only a problem if you're planning to sue everyone in the world for using the code you released openly.)
And if you want to see someone's head explode, go find a BSD fanatic, and explain to them that the BSD license is viral. Then stand back. Way, way back!
GPL is like a prion, anything it touches is meant to turn into itself.
Sorry, but if you combine BSD code and GPL'd code, the BSD'd code REMAINS UNDER THE BSD LICENSE!
I'm dealing with this exact situation right now. I've got an app that is mostly under a BSD-like license, but which has one optional module (an emacs link) that is GPL'd. Guess what? Delete that module, and the whole damn thing instantly reverts to its BSDish license!
BSD fanatics (I'm a fan but not a fanatic) are fond of saying that proprietary derivatives are ok because the original code remains BSD'd. Well guess what, bubba? The same is true for GPL'd derivatives! Maybe even more so.
The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation.
Hogwash! And even if that were its objective (and it's not), it would fail miserably, because it explicitly doesn't prevent commercial exploitation at all! It's easy to make a license that prevents commercial exploitation -- I've dealt with several in my career (e.g. early versions of infozip). The GPL is clearly NOT in that category. Heck, as the examples of Trolltech and MySQL show, it doesn't even prevent proprietary exploitation! (Though that is closer to its actual intended goal.)
Whatever your beef with RMS personally, the fact remains that the GPL has been extremely successful, and is in widespread use, and has NOT caused the sky to fall, or western civilization to collapse, and it's pretty obvious that it's not going to!
I've met RMS, and I don't agree with him on a lot of points, but RMS is not the GPL. The GPL is a license that is in wide use, and has been found acceptable by large corporations like IBM (who have more lawyers on retainer than most software companies have employees). Trying to make XFree86 incompatible with the GPL at this late date is a completely stupid move, and will do nothing but guarantee a fork, backed by everyone from Debian to IBM and Novell (to cover both ends of the fanaticism spectrum).
(Whoops, I originally posted this info in response to another article. This is the one I meant to respond to.)
When Sterling Ball, CEO of the Ernie Ball Co., decided to sever business ties with MS, he rejected Apple as an alternative vendor specifically because of that $150 million investment! Details here.
When the Ernie Ball guitar string company got upset with MS over an overpublicized BSA audit, CEO Sterling Ball decided to switch to somebody (anybody!) else. And according to this article/interview, "We looked at all the alternatives. We looked at Apple, but that's owned in part by Microsoft." So they ended up running Linux.
While it may be true that MS doesn't actually own or control Apple or Comcast, someone like Sterling Ball who is making it a point of honor not to give MS any more money may still consider MS's investments in Apple or Comcast to be relevent information.
"A young girl kills a woman, then kills her sister" -- The Wizard of Oz
The SCO you're referring to is now out of the OS market, and doing business as "Tarantella". This SCO (the one suing IBM and Novell) is a Novell spin-off (irony of ironies) formerly known as Caldera which was formed to market a proprietary desktop system on top of Red Hat Linux. They later switched to making their own distro, struggled, teamed up with Suse and Connectiva to create "UnitedLinux", struggled some more, bought Unixware, the UNIX/SysV licensing business and the name from old SCO, announced they were going to incorporate the best of SysV in Linux, struggled some more, then had a change of heart and name and started suing everyone in sight.
Damn straight! Who cares about these crappy lossy formats! If it doesn't support FLAC, I refuse to buy it!
(p.s. for the humor impaired, the above is a joke.)
No, even if Novell owns the code, SCO is pretty clearly their designated agent for licensing it, which should be sufficient grounds for them (SCO) to continue their suit against IBM. Anyway, a large part of SCO's claims against IBM have to do with "Project Monterey" (the now-dead port of SysV to the all-but-dead ia64), which SCO and IBM and others were collaborating on. That part of the suit clearly has nothing to do with who owns the code.
Actually, while Caldera^WSCO has announced all sorts of plans to sue everybody and his Aunt Tillie, they have, in fact, only initiated two lawsuits, vs. IBM and now vs. Novell. Counting IBM's countersuit, there are four lawsuits against them, and Novell's countersuit will probably make five. They've already lost two of those suits, and, in the German case, were later fined an additional 10,000 euros for violating the judge's orders.
SCO's claims against IBM are about contract violations and trade secrets. This suit does not "go to the heart" of that; in fact, it's pretty much irrelevent to what Caldera^WSCO has claimed in court.
:)
Now, the claims they make in press releases, that's another matter!
>> Flac decompresses faster
:)
> when I looked [...] FLAC took about twice as long to compress
Hmm, according to the Flac comparison page, we're both wrong. FLAC is only about a third again slower at compressing (12:54 vs. 9:44 in their tests), not twice as slow, but it's just a hair slower at decompressing (7:08 vs. 6:31). But that's in the default mode. If you compare "flac -3" vs. "shorten -p8", you'll see that the times are almost reversed, but FLAC still compresses noticably better.
Anyway, they're both slow enough that I would/do run them in the background.
I've also got code that encapsulates a Shorten file and streams it
According to the same page, FLAC is already streamable, so you shouldn't need extra code for that. But you can encapsulate it with Ogg if you want. FLAC also has support from a few hardware vendors, if that's relevent.
Getting even farther off-topic....
.shns I get (from, e.g. etree or the internet audio archive), but I never ever use its compression features. The shorten-plugin for XMMS crashes on a fairly regular basis, while the flac plugin seems rock solid. So, I'm highly motivated to convert my .shns to .flacs ASAP. The 5-10% better compression that flac offers is just the icing on the cake. :)
I don't know about the sound card, but as a member of the Debian project, I have to ask why you're using non-free third-party software like shorten when flac provides (slightly) better compression, faster decompression (if you ever need it), a more flexible format overall, and is included with and supported by Debian?
I only keep a copy of shorten around so I can decompress any
I opted out of Microsoft for Oracle a long time ago. In favor of Solaris and a real server platform.
Well, Oracle doesn't seem to agree with your assessment, as they have switched to Linux from Solaris for internal operations, and recently switched to Linux (again from Solaris) as their primary build platform.
Still, what would Oracle know about running their own software? Surely it makes more sense to take advice from some random poster on slashdot. You've convinced me, I'm switching to Solaris tomorrow.
But definitely keep an eye on the Groklaw site.
:)
I was trying to keep an eye on Groklaw when it suddenly stopped responding, so I figured it was time to head over to slashdot and see what was new. Sure enough, I found this article pointing to the smoking ruins of what used to be an informative site.
I wonder if it's time for OSDL to offer their hosting services to Pamela?
You don't "own" derivative works. You have rights to your contribution towards it.
:)
Unless you signed a contract that says otherwise. That's why SCOldera keeps claiming that this lawsuit is about contracts, not copyrights.
Of course, IBM has shown evidence that their contract does NOT say otherwise, but SCOldera seems to be hoping that the judge will overlook that tiny detail.
And of course, while SCOldera's claims against IBM may not involve copyright, IBM's counterclaims of trade libel make the PR statements about "millions of lines of infringing code" very relevent. If SCOldera hasn't provided proof of those statements, they're probably in big(ger) trouble.
> what is wrong with rewriting the code from the ground-up?
Nothing is wrong with that, as long as your time is worth nothing.
Actually, rewrites can actually save time if the code is old and crufty enough. Cut-and-paste programming, fragile global dependencies, poor or non-existent factoring and other antipatterns can make a code base all-but unmaintainable.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to determine just when your code has become so hard to maintain that a rewrite would actually save time over hacking in needed new features. My experience suggests that keeping old code alive for too long is the more common error, but there are plenty who err the other way too.
No, I didn't misunderstand you.
I'm not saying the idea of a programmable watch is stupid. Im saying the suggestion they use a programmable watch in a situation where a cheap, single-purpose item will work better is stupid.
Since the Linux watch prototypes were first shown publicly nearly four years ago, it's not unreasonable to think that they might be approaching cheapness themselves. (Assuming that there are plans to mass market them at some point, which is, I think, still unknown.)
Also, saying that an item that is essentially useless "works better" than an item that could actually have uses seems like a bit of a stretch. Unless you can think of an actual use for a watch that only keeps Martian time? I can't. I suspect most of these watches will end up gathering dust on a shelf or trophy case somewhere.
Of course, the actual answer to the question, "why didn't they just use a Linux/PalmOS watch" is that such devices are not yet on the market. But that doesn't mean the question is stupid. That just means that there is a reasonable answer.
it isnt a requirement that every item in the world be tweakable
Who said anything about "it has to be tweakable"? Most devices that run PalmOS or embedded Linux are interesting primarily because they're useful, not because they're tweakable. People don't (usually) buy, e.g. a TiVo so they can tweak it. I am sure that if Citizen does put IBM's Linux Watch on the market, it will not need any tweaking to work. So your argument about "time spent fucking with the watch" is a straw man.
I don't think it's at all stupid to say, "digital devices which could have fulfilled the same role, and which would have been far more useful overall, were demoed at trade shows several years ago. Why aren't these devices on the market already, so that NASA could have given them out (with custom Martian-time software pre-installed) instead?" There's probably a reasonable answer to that question, but that doesn't mean it's a stupid question.
I always thought that code based on GPLed code falls under the GPL anyway
No, any original work you do can be licensed any way you want. If you combine your work with GPL'd code, then the combined result must be GPL if you distribute it, but your individual sections can still be under another license as long as that license is GPL-compatible or you don't distribute.
Thus, any BSD-licensed bits in the Linux kernel are still BSD-licensed, even though the kernel as a whole is GPL'd.
and must be published.
No, you don't have to publish. If you do publish, you have to publish everything (inc. source), but you still retain the option of publishing nothing. If you just want to use the system, you can combine it with any sort of code your heart desires. Microsoft, if they wanted, could make a modified version of Linux that was inextricably linked to IE, and could deploy that system on every desktop in their company. They just couldn't distribute it outside of the company.
Anyway, this is all irrelevent to the topic of eCos. They're changing the copyright owner not the license! Owners aren't subject to license terms -- owners set license terms!
Why must everything on Slashdot be Linux-based?
I don't know about everything, but Linux has already been done on a watch, so the question doesn't seem completely unreasonable. And Citizen announced that they were interested in IBM's design, so they (who know a lot more about the consumer electronics market than you or I) didn't seem to think it was completely silly. Furthermore, IBM's Linux watch might actually be useful (since it could switch between Earth-based and Mars-based displays), whereas this device is just going to molder on people's trophy shelves.
I admit that I generally prefer analog watches, but I'm still far more interested in a Linux watch than I am in this utterly-useless thing.
> One wonders why [they] didn't just get a...Linux or PalmOS based wrist-computer?
Because that suggestion is stupid.
Not particularly. IBM first demoed their watch back in 2000, and Citizen announced that they were interested in the project in 2001. Now it's a few years later, and consumer electronics companies are pretty clever about turning expensive prototypes into affordable (or almost affordable) commercial products. It's not completely unreasonable to think that such a device might finally be available for a specialty order like this.
Furthermore, such a device would be eminently more practical, since it would be capable of displaying Earth time too and of switching between displays of Martian and Earth time.
So no, the suggestion was not stupid at all.