Obviously IANAL but I'd guess he would retain the option of commenting on *OTHER'S* cases as he has been doing unless he were to lose the suit. I doubt he can comment on this case in particular as it immediately involves him.
I *think* what TFA was trying to get across was that Samsung was putting its money into display technology vs. becoming YA maker of Blu-Ray players cutting corners to get into this year's Black Friday sales. That said, the writer's breathtaking inability to distinguish between a media format and displays makes me cringe.
This case should have been shutdown five years ago. SCOX has *NEVER* shown any infringing code, has been shown *NOT* to own the copyrights they're claiming were infringed, has dragged out all of the countersuits, and then ran to the BK court when the rulings all started falling against them. MS and Sun have kept the corpse propped up and twitching in an attempt to keep folks from jumping to Linux on commodity x86 hardware and detracting from their market.
At this point the flies have joined in beating the dead horse for wasting their time along with everyone else's.
Given the money funneled in from Baystar on the recommendations of someone at MS, given the barely-disguised FUD money paid by Sun, who at the time were in one of their Linux-is-TEH-3V1L! phases, the idea of claiming Linux was encumbered and Not Suitable for Business was pretty obvious. Recall this was also the time of the attempt to show Linux was a ripoff of Minix by the opinion-for-hire deTocqueville Institute, whose funding also came in large part from MS. The money they threw SCOX to make Linux look bad was chump change. This provided them material to point their potential defectors-to-Linux at with arms-length deniability.
What they apparently didn't plan on was the strength of the grassroots response from the developer community to undo the PR spin. If anything, the result has been to strongly validate the Linux ecosystem as a safe bet.
The bankruptcy trustee, along with Novell and some of the creditors, objected, and SCOX folded, especially when the terms of the deal showed that $95MM of that amount was in fact a loan (which they'd pay back how?). SCOX said they were going back to renegotiate the deal, and nothing more has been heard about it. Groklaw link with questions about SNCP, and the report of the hearing.
There's your skulking, bloodsucking animated carcass, and then there's vampires.
These bottom-feeders should have been sent to their corporate grave years ago, but keep coming back for One More Try. Hopefully this latest ruling really is the stake-in-the-heart they've had coming.
The ruling that sent the SCOundrels into bankruptcy court last year confirmed that the deal Caldera inherited from Santa Cruz Operation did *NOT* transfer copyrights from Novell, just gave rights to develop new code from it (i.e. Unixware) and act as Novell's collection agent on existing licenses. The current management (using the term *VERY* loosely), seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them. The present fiaSCO has ensued, only getting better when they tried to sue Novell for actually claiming the copyrights SCO was trying to use, which led to today's ruling.
>>that will harm or impugn the dignity of the congress.
"All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity." - Mark Twain
The only folks having much concern for the dignity of the Congress are the bottom-feeders having managed to get their widening hindquarters in there.
For most markets, you have either cable or DSL. In large markets, you probably have both. In some VERY major markets (Bos-Wash metroplex, California, etc), you may have fiber-optic and cable.
Outside of that last group, you really don't have a choice of providers, so you're stuck with whatever crappy TOS they give you. Just look at the recent news about Comcast throttling P2P, and now talking about monthly traffic caps. Guess how long that would last if they actually *DID* have competition for customers?
Sadly, the prospects of this bill getting anywhere in the current whores-for-corporations Congress is about nil, but it probably looks good for Conyers' re-election campaign.
see here for a piece at ConsortiumInfo on the matter...
---- Here is how the eleven countries that upgraded from O to P membership in the months (and often just days) before the OOXML voting period closed on OOXML, and also whether or not they voted in the more recent ballot (all data is from Rick's analysis of the voting record):
Upgrades that voted to adopt OOXML and didn't vote later: 7
(Cote dIvoire, Cyprus, Lebanon, Malta, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela)
Upgrades that abstained on OOXML and didn't vote later: 1
(Trinidad and Tobago)
Upgrades that voted against OOXML and didn't vote later: 0
The fallout of a public-sector agency picking a technology standard is that the various companies that do business with it would need to adopt it to continue doing business, or come up with the necessary adapters in-between. Could be (a) a windfall for 'local' developers/support staff in assisting migrations and (b) a five-year ban would pretty much ensure MS couldn't get back in the door, since it would then take ANOTHER massive conversion effort for questionable value. The trickle-down to suppliers, etc would be similar.
[ The prospect that member nations adopting this could drive this decision into their schools and retrain a generation of kids on Some Other OS probably has Ballmer losing bowel control. ]
With the ruling that Novell owns what copyrights are left in UNIX, all SCOX has left are some x86-based drivers and utilities for Unixware, that still need the SysV base to be useful. The only other useful item might be the customer lists for The Next Guy to use to promote their migrate-to-Linux consultancy...
They also "own" the liabilities of IBM & Novell's countersuits, and the Red Hat Lanham Act suit for interfering in its doing business by casting doubt on Linux' legitimacy. Potential amount of these, especially in the IBM case, dwarfs the budget of many developing countries.
Because (as came out last fall) SCOX didn't own the UNIX code to start with; they only inherited a resellers' agreement and royalty collection business from Santa Cruz. The copyrights (such as they are) to the legacy UNIX codebase stayed with Novell.
THAT'S what sent the stock into the pink-sheets, and prompted them to file Ch. 11 the day before the trial in Utah to determine how much of their bank balance *should* have gone to Novell as royalties. That trial restarts in April, by which time the SCOundrels will have probably burned through as much money as possible just for spite.
>> Novell could easily buy up the remaining pieces of SCOX if they wanted to.
Most of us that have been following this assume this was SCOX' intent all along; threaten a lawsuit and get a payoff from either IBM and/or Novell to quietly go away.
Then IBM called the bluff and asked for some actual EVIDENCE; at that point the dodge-the-bullet game began and has dragged on until now.
But back to point, what does SCOX have to buy? Novell ALREADY owns the UNIX codebase, SCOX has succeeded in destroying the VAR/OEM channel; Novell can sit back and watch the implosion, then start up a short-term consultancy to migrate the remaining stragglers to SUSE.
Caldera/SCO Group was reselling the legacy AT&T System V for x86, with some of their own enhancements. THAT code is still for the most part (c) Novell, who bought out AT&T's interest back in '92. There was also the input from Sun that produced Sys V.4, and drivers developed by numerous vendors, so opening the whole thing may be more trouble than it's worth at this point, given the dwindling interest.
Just remember, this isn't your parents' Ma Bell, this is the former Southwest Bell, long considered the most cut-throat of the RBOC children, having eaten half its siblings and now wearing its parent's skin like some hideous story out of Greek myth.
I somehow doubt this is what Judge Greene had in mind at the time...
As has been said many times elsewhere in this piece, the judge has ruled that Novell holds the UNIX copyrights, such as they are. All SCOX might have direct rights to is whatever code has been added to the old AT&T codebase since the deal.
The Utah judge also ruled that the Sun & Microsoft payments were to some extent SysV license fees; the trial that would have started the week SCOX filed BK was to determine how much. Those monies (conversion) aren't supposed to be part of the bankruptcy estate, because legally it wasn't SCOX' to start with (analogy of bank thief filing BK and claiming the stolen money as part of his assets).
Given all the suits facing SCOX from Novell, IBM, etc., I don't see how this offer makes any sense. They can't sell the "UNIX IP", it's Novell's. Novell gets back the "UNIX business" from SCaldera on a change of ownership, per the contract, which the BK judge can't/won't void. They can't wave off IBM's countercharges. They owe *something* back to Novell of whatever they have in the bank. What the fsck do they have to sell?
Looks like YA attempt to bleed out the money to Anyone-But-Novell before the courts drop the hammer on them. Traditional Canopy Group behavior.
>> Item 8 states that the majority of the traffic on P2P is pirated material....
While no one is going to argue the amount of pirated content available on P2P networks, given (a) that many Linux releases use BT as a distribution medium (Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, etc.) with images up to a DVD-ROM's worth of data (4.5 Gb), (b) the amount of video-based material (movies and television) that is out there, whose files are no doubt larger than audio MP3 rips, is it fair to assume that the music industry's concerns are a relatively small portion of the overall P2P traffic? Going to a popular tracker site such as http://mininova.org/, the largest BT swarms are typically found for the prior night's TV shows.
Item 9 (sales decline directly related to pirated content) has been contested for some time; the industry has reduced its number of releases, the majority sellers are now the big-box stores who carry little in the way of back-catalog material in favor of chart-topping new releases, and the rise of sales in DVDs (sell-through DVD prices comparable to new-release CDs appearing as a better value).
With more and more households pulling down big files, with HDTV starting to take off and the jump in downloads *that* will cause, with more multi-PC homes (four in mine), of COURSE they're going to want more bandwidth.
And until FTTH becomes more prevalent, cable is the best available option.
A offputting variant of what people are used to, late to market, costs more, works worse, bad enough to make even the suck-up trade press like ZD question the value of upgrading.
The SCOundrels have three active cases that can sink them: the critical one for them to dodge right now is the Novell case, which would determine whether or not SCOX actually holds the UNIX copyrights they're trying to leverage against IBM. If they lose that, the IBM case effectively becomes moot, since they don't have the standing to bring the suit. Also the trust Novell is seeking against SCOX' current assets for unpaid SysV royalties would gut them at once.
Losing the Novell case would also make Red Hat's Lanham Act case (business interference) a slam-dunk since they would have had no standing to accuse Red Hat to start with. The collection of dubious accusations they've made since '03 is about to come around and bite them squarely in the gonads.
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Obviously IANAL but I'd guess he would retain the option of commenting on *OTHER'S* cases as he has been doing unless he were to lose the suit. I doubt he can comment on this case in particular as it immediately involves him.
I *think* what TFA was trying to get across was that Samsung was putting its money into display technology vs. becoming YA maker of Blu-Ray players cutting corners to get into this year's Black Friday sales.
That said, the writer's breathtaking inability to distinguish between a media format and displays makes me cringe.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
This case should have been shutdown five years ago. SCOX has *NEVER* shown any infringing code, has been shown *NOT* to own the copyrights they're claiming were infringed, has dragged out all of the countersuits, and then ran to the BK court when the rulings all started falling against them. MS and Sun have kept the corpse propped up and twitching in an attempt to keep folks from jumping to Linux on commodity x86 hardware and detracting from their market.
At this point the flies have joined in beating the dead horse for wasting their time along with everyone else's.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Given the money funneled in from Baystar on the recommendations of someone at MS, given the barely-disguised FUD money paid by Sun, who at the time were in one of their Linux-is-TEH-3V1L! phases, the idea of claiming Linux was encumbered and Not Suitable for Business was pretty obvious. Recall this was also the time of the attempt to show Linux was a ripoff of Minix by the opinion-for-hire deTocqueville Institute, whose funding also came in large part from MS. The money they threw SCOX to make Linux look bad was chump change. This provided them material to point their potential defectors-to-Linux at with arms-length deniability.
What they apparently didn't plan on was the strength of the grassroots response from the developer community to undo the PR spin. If anything, the result has been to strongly validate the Linux ecosystem as a safe bet.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
The bankruptcy trustee, along with Novell and some of the creditors, objected, and SCOX folded, especially when the terms of the deal showed that $95MM of that amount was in fact a loan (which they'd pay back how?). SCOX said they were going back to renegotiate the deal, and nothing more has been heard about it. Groklaw link with questions about SNCP, and the report of the hearing.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
There's your skulking, bloodsucking animated carcass, and then there's vampires.
These bottom-feeders should have been sent to their corporate grave years ago, but keep coming back for One More Try. Hopefully this latest ruling really is the stake-in-the-heart they've had coming.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
and *THAT'S* why you scatter the ashes into running water; jeez, the sloppy training these modern vampire hunters get...
The ruling that sent the SCOundrels into bankruptcy court last year confirmed that the deal Caldera inherited from Santa Cruz Operation did *NOT* transfer copyrights from Novell, just gave rights to develop new code from it (i.e. Unixware) and act as Novell's collection agent on existing licenses. The current management (using the term *VERY* loosely), seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them. The present fiaSCO has ensued, only getting better when they tried to sue Novell for actually claiming the copyrights SCO was trying to use, which led to today's ruling.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
>>that will harm or impugn the dignity of the congress.
"All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity." - Mark Twain
The only folks having much concern for the dignity of the Congress are the bottom-feeders having managed to get their widening hindquarters in there.
For most markets, you have either cable or DSL. In large markets, you probably have both. In some VERY major markets (Bos-Wash metroplex, California, etc), you may have fiber-optic and cable.
Outside of that last group, you really don't have a choice of providers, so you're stuck with whatever crappy TOS they give you. Just look at the recent news about Comcast throttling P2P, and now talking about monthly traffic caps. Guess how long that would last if they actually *DID* have competition for customers?
Sadly, the prospects of this bill getting anywhere in the current whores-for-corporations Congress is about nil, but it probably looks good for Conyers' re-election campaign.
see here for a piece at ConsortiumInfo on the matter...
----
Here is how the eleven countries that upgraded from O to P membership in the months (and often just days) before the OOXML voting period closed on OOXML, and also whether or not they voted in the more recent ballot (all data is from Rick's analysis of the voting record):
Upgrades that voted to adopt OOXML and didn't vote later: 7
(Cote dIvoire, Cyprus, Lebanon, Malta, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela)
Upgrades that abstained on OOXML and didn't vote later: 1
(Trinidad and Tobago)
Upgrades that voted against OOXML and didn't vote later: 0
The fallout of a public-sector agency picking a technology standard is that the various companies that do business with it would need to adopt it to continue doing business, or come up with the necessary adapters in-between. Could be (a) a windfall for 'local' developers/support staff in assisting migrations and (b) a five-year ban would pretty much ensure MS couldn't get back in the door, since it would then take ANOTHER massive conversion effort for questionable value. The trickle-down to suppliers, etc would be similar.
[ The prospect that member nations adopting this could drive this decision into their schools and retrain a generation of kids on Some Other OS probably has Ballmer losing bowel control. ]
With the ruling that Novell owns what copyrights are left in UNIX, all SCOX has left are some x86-based drivers and utilities for Unixware, that still need the SysV base to be useful. The only other useful item might be the customer lists for The Next Guy to use to promote their migrate-to-Linux consultancy...
They also "own" the liabilities of IBM & Novell's countersuits, and the Red Hat Lanham Act suit for interfering in its doing business by casting doubt on Linux' legitimacy. Potential amount of these, especially in the IBM case, dwarfs the budget of many developing countries.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
Because (as came out last fall) SCOX didn't own the UNIX code to start with; they only inherited a resellers' agreement and royalty collection business from Santa Cruz. The copyrights (such as they are) to the legacy UNIX codebase stayed with Novell.
THAT'S what sent the stock into the pink-sheets, and prompted them to file Ch. 11 the day before the trial in Utah to determine how much of their bank balance *should* have gone to Novell as royalties. That trial restarts in April, by which time the SCOundrels will have probably burned through as much money as possible just for spite.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Most of us that have been following this assume this was SCOX' intent all along; threaten a lawsuit and get a payoff from either IBM and/or Novell to quietly go away.
Then IBM called the bluff and asked for some actual EVIDENCE; at that point the dodge-the-bullet game began and has dragged on until now.
But back to point, what does SCOX have to buy? Novell ALREADY owns the UNIX codebase, SCOX has succeeded in destroying the VAR/OEM channel; Novell can sit back and watch the implosion, then start up a short-term consultancy to migrate the remaining stragglers to SUSE.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Caldera/SCO Group was reselling the legacy AT&T System V for x86, with some of their own enhancements. THAT code is still for the most part (c) Novell, who bought out AT&T's interest back in '92. There was also the input from Sun that produced Sys V.4, and drivers developed by numerous vendors, so opening the whole thing may be more trouble than it's worth at this point, given the dwindling interest.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Just remember, this isn't your parents' Ma Bell, this is the former Southwest Bell, long considered the most cut-throat of the RBOC children, having eaten half its siblings and now wearing its parent's skin like some hideous story out of Greek myth.
I somehow doubt this is what Judge Greene had in mind at the time...
As has been said many times elsewhere in this piece, the judge has ruled that Novell holds the UNIX copyrights, such as they are. All SCOX might have direct rights to is whatever code has been added to the old AT&T codebase since the deal.
The Utah judge also ruled that the Sun & Microsoft payments were to some extent SysV license fees; the trial that would have started the week SCOX filed BK was to determine how much. Those monies (conversion) aren't supposed to be part of the bankruptcy estate, because legally it wasn't SCOX' to start with (analogy of bank thief filing BK and claiming the stolen money as part of his assets).
Given all the suits facing SCOX from Novell, IBM, etc., I don't see how this offer makes any sense. They can't sell the "UNIX IP", it's Novell's. Novell gets back the "UNIX business" from SCaldera on a change of ownership, per the contract, which the BK judge can't/won't void. They can't wave off IBM's countercharges. They owe *something* back to Novell of whatever they have in the bank. What the fsck do they have to sell?
Looks like YA attempt to bleed out the money to Anyone-But-Novell before the courts drop the hammer on them. Traditional Canopy Group behavior.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
202-762-1401 & 202-762-1069 (Washington DC), 719-567-6742 (Colorado Springs CO); the audio track from WWV.
Have this at work and home; hand in a reasonable curve, only have to roll my thumb, no travel space needed for shifting a mouse around.
>> Item 8 states that the majority of the traffic on P2P is pirated material ....
While no one is going to argue the amount of pirated content available on P2P networks, given (a) that many Linux releases use BT as a distribution medium (Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, etc.) with images up to a DVD-ROM's worth of data (4.5 Gb), (b) the amount of video-based material (movies and television) that is out there, whose files are no doubt larger than audio MP3 rips, is it fair to assume that the music industry's concerns are a relatively small portion of the overall P2P traffic? Going to a popular tracker site such as http://mininova.org/, the largest BT swarms are typically found for the prior night's TV shows.
Item 9 (sales decline directly related to pirated content) has been contested for some time; the industry has reduced its number of releases, the majority sellers are now the big-box stores who carry little in the way of back-catalog material in favor of chart-topping new releases, and the rise of sales in DVDs (sell-through DVD prices comparable to new-release CDs appearing as a better value).
This piece in the LA Times hits the mark a little closer for most of us: 'Yabba-dabba science'.
With more and more households pulling down big files, with HDTV starting to take off and the jump in downloads *that* will cause, with more multi-PC homes (four in mine), of COURSE they're going to want more bandwidth.
And until FTTH becomes more prevalent, cable is the best available option.
A offputting variant of what people are used to, late to market, costs more, works worse, bad enough to make even the suck-up trade press like ZD question the value of upgrading.
Are we looking at Windows ME: Next Generation?
The SCOundrels have three active cases that can sink them: the critical one for them to dodge right now is the Novell case, which would determine whether or not SCOX actually holds the UNIX copyrights they're trying to leverage against IBM. If they lose that, the IBM case effectively becomes moot, since they don't have the standing to bring the suit. Also the trust Novell is seeking against SCOX' current assets for unpaid SysV royalties would gut them at once.
Losing the Novell case would also make Red Hat's Lanham Act case (business interference) a slam-dunk since they would have had no standing to accuse Red Hat to start with. The collection of dubious accusations they've made since '03 is about to come around and bite them squarely in the gonads.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!