I suppose if they "rolled their own" they might have to spell out where all the components came from, but going with Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, etc. lets them point a finger over-there for both support and compliance issues.
Spam costs *me* bandwidth, disk space, time/cost to implement filters, etc. It's profitable for them because they only pay a small amount to pump millions of messages out, then even a tiny fraction of one percent responding nets them profit.
If we can make it more costly for these slime to do business, it will hopefully thin the ranks.
Given the way the judge dismissed SCOX's original slander of title case v. Novell, saying the contract they inherited from Santa Cruz Operation didn't appear to be a conveyance of copyright, SCOX may have built their case on a very soft sandpile, which has been held up to date only by their frequent, loud "they do SO own them" PR.
Add to this the USL v. BSDI case, which USL settled very quickly when the judge appeared ready to declare that the UNIX codebase had not been properly protected, and could be considered public-domain material, which would have decimated the commercial UNIX business USL was trying to build. Revisiting that could moot all of this.
The same judge is hearing both the Novell and IBM cases; he could make his life so much simpler if he ruled again for Novell, which would scuttle SCOX's case v. IBM. The counter-suit from IBM would annihilate SCOX and we could all move on to something useful.
The judge's dismissal of IBM's motions for partial summary judgment were based on discovery not having completed yet. He made comments at the time that indicated he would be quite willing to revisit them once discovery had closed.
The SCOundrels' case with Novell turns on whether SCOX (The SCO Group nee Caldera, vs. Santa Cruz Operation) ever even received copyrights. Novell's deal with Santa Cruz does not appear to have transferred the copyrights, so when Caldera bought the business from them, they certainly couldn't have got them.
Conveniently enough, the same judge is hearing both cases, so ruling on one (Novell has the copyrights, SCOX doesn't) will kill the other (SCOX can't claim copyright infringement, they don't own any).
IBM's claims, however, would still stand. The counter-suit damages will likely vaporize whatever's left of the SCOX scum. And it can't come too soon for me.
The judge has already commented on SCOX's astonishing lack of evidence; he's giving them lots of rope to hang themselves on, so when he hands them their collective ass, they don't have any grounds to come back and claim they didn't get a fair chance to make their [non-existant] case. And the positive PR accruing to Big Blue for defending Linux far outweighs the cost of the legal team, especially when sites like Groklaw are doing half the analysis work for them gratis.
Caldera was started by Ray Noorda after he left Novell, to flog Linux-for-business (he's long since disconnected from it). They acquired the UNIX business of Santa Cruz (mainly for the reseller channel?), and renamed themselves SCO Group. What was left of Santa Cruz became Tarantella, and has been bought up by Sun.
SCOG's run their business into the ground (their clients are fleeing in droves), and decided to misread the AT&T -> Novell -> Santa Cruz agreements to believe they own UNIX in toto, and that any code that touched the SysV codebase (as in IBM's RCU, NUMA, etc.) is theirs, despite lawyers from the preceding firms telling them they're full of it. They went after IBM, apparently expecting a quiet payoff/buyout, and got a countersuit instead. Now that they're facing the unblinking horde that is IBM's legal department, and the techies deconstructing their PR within minutes, their strategy seems to be reduced to delaying the inevitable.
Novell, meanwhile, decided that Linux was a Good Thing, also, and bought another Linux vendor, and seem to be making a reasonably successful go of it.
They still own over 90% of the desktop market, with tactics that would make any 19th C. business baron proud. The recent hoo-hah over ODF in Mass. just proves they're still ready to go to the wall to defend the Windows/Office stranglehold. The rest of it is subsidiary. The server market has *always* been more heterogenous, with Big Iron and the various *ix in there. The push for Media Center PCs and XBox was to cut off Sony making the "living room PC" on their terms. The "Starter Edition" version for non-US markets is simply a marketing ploy to combat Linux on the desktop. Here in the US, it's the "Office Student Edition" you'll find at any Big Box Store for a quarter of the regular cost for Office, and how often do the cashiers check whether you're really eligible? Any interoperability work they do is to avoid additional anti-competitive charges: the terms they're asking for much of it are meant to keep out the F/OSS crowd.
Sadly these days, with all the compliance laws on the books, it may be fastest to invoke the prospect of liability problems to break the logjam. I don't know how small a company these things reach down to, but given the US gummint, I suspect it's pretty far down.
The MA people were assuming there was going to be re-training costs regardless of what product they migrated to, so whether it's Office 12 or OO.org is irrelevant. They also made the argument that going to ODF would also save on the hard cost of having to upgrade thousands of PCs to something capable of running Office 12.
MA did their homework, and I'm assuming similar arguments pertain in the French case as well.
The interesting points in this are (a) it's appearing in The Gray Lady, which gives it a certain weight over a mere web post, and (b) it's coming from someone in the music business, even if a small-time player, vs. one of us tech-types simply bemoaning the eee-vuls of DRM.
Microsoft at the MA forum about adopting ODF was trying to claim that the state wanted them to sacrifice their IP rights to get the state's business. Peter Quinn's reply was that the state's adoption of open standards was more important to them than retaining Microsoft's proprietary formats.
ANY CUSTOMER should be in the same boat: they should be picking a product based on THEIR business requirements, not Microsoft's wants. That they've been able to dictate formats for this long only reinforces their monopoly status.
For a lot of uses today, a swarm of processors like this makes more sense than driving one CPU hellishly fast so it can task-switch quick enough to get around to everything.
Sun traditionally has been very good at engineering the interconnects so I expect the actual throughput on this is pretty good.
Given the 'discount bin' movies for $5-10. at most big box stores, already on a platter in a box, unless they were willing to provide content *ahead* of DVD release (unlikely), they're pricing themselves out of the market.
Add in the fact that most folks are more interested in watch-once than ownership, and the cost for Blockbuster, Netflix or even cable VOD is about half this, they're way off the mark.
a) AT&T's lawyers have said for the record the restriction only applied if SysV code was incorporated into the vendor's product, not for independent code added to the baseline (such as JFS, NUMA, etc).
b) Novell's said the same.
c) There's still the case between SCO & Novell whether the copyrights went with the code, or Santa Cruz simply became a licensor who sold those rights to Caldera. SCO may have no standing to begin with.
IBM has a countersuit that would have to be answered, probably one of the reasons they didn't go for the quick kill. There's also the Red Hat case with Lanham Act violations. Whoever gets the debris of SCO would *still* have to answer those charges, which would make it hard to unload on someone. A bankruptcy trustee would likely be very interested in settling all claims to clear the deck for a liquidation sale.
a) IBM's been accused of breaking a contract and stealing a business partner's IP. Given the amount of money IBM makes from services, that's a Very Bad Thing to be accused of.
b) IBM has sunk buckets o' money into Linux. They don't want to have to dole some of it out to somebody else.
c) IBM has enough cash on hand and legal staff to drown SCO in lawyers until Doomsday.
d) SCO launched a nuisance suit expecting to get a quick, quiet payoff to go away. If every vendor that ever dealt with IBM and is now in financial trouble did the same and expected a payout, IBM would be bleeding money. Making an object lesson of SCO's to-date-laughable claims solves the problem.
e) Big Bad Blue has received much geek cred for their stand.
f) SCO has successfully pulled IBM, Novell and Red Hat down on them; we may *finally* resolve ownership of whatever copyrights still exist on UNIX and what should become of them, and the enforceability of the GPL.
somebody posted this last week about making old 50s shows available for cheap. Sounds promising to me as a way of preserving the early days of TV. Heck, I'd pay a buck for old Zachary creature features.
Re:ma bell not back
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In the beginning was Ma Bell, and things were regular.
Then did Judge Greene divide, and there was AT&T and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies: NyNex, Bell Atlantic, Bellsouth, Ameritech, US West, Southwest Bell and Pacific Telesis.
Nynex & Bell Atlantic -> Verizon Southwest Bell & Ameritech & Pacific Telesis (and SNET) -> SBC US West -> acquired by Qwest during the dot-boom
Seven RBOCs down to four, three of them owning a LD carrier or trying to: Qwest already a carrier, Verizon buying MCI, SBC buying AT&T. Bellsouth's the poor sister at this point. What ever happened to Sprint's LD business?
Working contract at AT&T Computer Systems in NJ '87-'90, they re-used the American Bell badge blanks they'd pre-ordered for the name change. The Name That Must Not Be Spoken was whited over with the authorized building codes.
You do have Western Electric, it's just called Lucent. They inherited The Labs when they were spun out in the 90's.
You've gone from AT&T & the Seven Baby Bells to four regionals (Nynex & Bell Atlantic -> Verizon, Southwest Bell + Pacific Telesis + Ameritech -> SBC), three of which own/are acquiring a long-distance company (SBC - AT&T, Quest, Verizon - MCI).
Having listened to the forum, the state folks said a lot of that $50M would be upgrading thousands of PCs to to be able to run Vista and MS-Office 12. Much less slack in hardware prices. And the alternative suites would run fine on the existing boxes, removing that hardware expense. Very useful exchange with the MS guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose if they "rolled their own" they might have to spell out where all the components came from, but going with Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, etc. lets them point a finger over-there for both support and compliance issues.
THANK YOU.
Direct mail works because *THEY PAY FOR IT*.
Spam costs *me* bandwidth, disk space, time/cost to implement filters, etc. It's profitable for them because they only pay a small amount to pump millions of messages out, then even a tiny fraction of one percent responding nets them profit.
If we can make it more costly for these slime to do business, it will hopefully thin the ranks.
Given the way the judge dismissed SCOX's original slander of title case v. Novell, saying the contract they inherited from Santa Cruz Operation didn't appear to be a conveyance of copyright, SCOX may have built their case on a very soft sandpile, which has been held up to date only by their frequent, loud "they do SO own them" PR.
Add to this the USL v. BSDI case, which USL settled very quickly when the judge appeared ready to declare that the UNIX codebase had not been properly protected, and could be considered public-domain material, which would have decimated the commercial UNIX business USL was trying to build. Revisiting that could moot all of this.
The same judge is hearing both the Novell and IBM cases; he could make his life so much simpler if he ruled again for Novell, which would scuttle SCOX's case v. IBM. The counter-suit from IBM would annihilate SCOX and we could all move on to something useful.
The judge's dismissal of IBM's motions for partial summary judgment were based on discovery not having completed yet. He made comments at the time that indicated he would be quite willing to revisit them once discovery had closed.
That was on Dec 22. Expect them to resurface.
The SCOundrels' case with Novell turns on whether SCOX (The SCO Group nee Caldera, vs. Santa Cruz Operation) ever even received copyrights. Novell's deal with Santa Cruz does not appear to have transferred the copyrights, so when Caldera bought the business from them, they certainly couldn't have got them.
Conveniently enough, the same judge is hearing both cases, so ruling on one (Novell has the copyrights, SCOX doesn't) will kill the other (SCOX can't claim copyright infringement, they don't own any).
IBM's claims, however, would still stand. The counter-suit damages will likely vaporize whatever's left of the SCOX scum. And it can't come too soon for me.
The judge has already commented on SCOX's astonishing lack of evidence; he's giving them lots of rope to hang themselves on, so when he hands them their collective ass, they don't have any grounds to come back and claim they didn't get a fair chance to make their [non-existant] case. And the positive PR accruing to Big Blue for defending Linux far outweighs the cost of the legal team, especially when sites like Groklaw are doing half the analysis work for them gratis.
Caldera was started by Ray Noorda after he left Novell, to flog Linux-for-business (he's long since disconnected from it). They acquired the UNIX business of Santa Cruz (mainly for the reseller channel?), and renamed themselves SCO Group. What was left of Santa Cruz became Tarantella, and has been bought up by Sun.
SCOG's run their business into the ground (their clients are fleeing in droves), and decided to misread the AT&T -> Novell -> Santa Cruz agreements to believe they own UNIX in toto, and that any code that touched the SysV codebase (as in IBM's RCU, NUMA, etc.) is theirs, despite lawyers from the preceding firms telling them they're full of it. They went after IBM, apparently expecting a quiet payoff/buyout, and got a countersuit instead. Now that they're facing the unblinking horde that is IBM's legal department, and the techies deconstructing their PR within minutes, their strategy seems to be reduced to delaying the inevitable.
Novell, meanwhile, decided that Linux was a Good Thing, also, and bought another Linux vendor, and seem to be making a reasonably successful go of it.
They still own over 90% of the desktop market, with tactics that would make any 19th C. business baron proud. The recent hoo-hah over ODF in Mass. just proves they're still ready to go to the wall to defend the Windows/Office stranglehold. The rest of it is subsidiary. The server market has *always* been more heterogenous, with Big Iron and the various *ix in there. The push for Media Center PCs and XBox was to cut off Sony making the "living room PC" on their terms. The "Starter Edition" version for non-US markets is simply a marketing ploy to combat Linux on the desktop. Here in the US, it's the "Office Student Edition" you'll find at any Big Box Store for a quarter of the regular cost for Office, and how often do the cashiers check whether you're really eligible? Any interoperability work they do is to avoid additional anti-competitive charges: the terms they're asking for much of it are meant to keep out the F/OSS crowd.
Sadly these days, with all the compliance laws on the books, it may be fastest to invoke the prospect of liability problems to break the logjam. I don't know how small a company these things reach down to, but given the US gummint, I suspect it's pretty far down.
The MA people were assuming there was going to be re-training costs regardless of what product they migrated to, so whether it's Office 12 or OO.org is irrelevant. They also made the argument that going to ODF would also save on the hard cost of having to upgrade thousands of PCs to something capable of running Office 12.
MA did their homework, and I'm assuming similar arguments pertain in the French case as well.
The interesting points in this are (a) it's appearing in The Gray Lady, which gives it a certain weight over a mere web post, and (b) it's coming from someone in the music business, even if a small-time player, vs. one of us tech-types simply bemoaning the eee-vuls of DRM.
ANY CUSTOMER should be in the same boat: they should be picking a product based on THEIR business requirements, not Microsoft's wants. That they've been able to dictate formats for this long only reinforces their monopoly status.
Presumably they can only sue for CDs sold in Texas.
Texas has roughly 9% of the population X 2.1M CDs = 200K polluted CDs sold in TX.
That's still 20 Billion (2x10^10) bucks (200K * $100K/offense).
I'm sure the other state attornies general are furiously scouring their statutes for similar provisions to get in on the gravy train.
For a lot of uses today, a swarm of processors like this makes more sense than driving one CPU hellishly fast so it can task-switch quick enough to get around to everything.
Sun traditionally has been very good at engineering the interconnects so I expect the actual throughput on this is pretty good.
Will be interesting to see how well this does.
Given the 'discount bin' movies for $5-10. at most big box stores, already on a platter in a box, unless they were willing to provide content *ahead* of DVD release (unlikely), they're pricing themselves out of the market.
Add in the fact that most folks are more interested in watch-once than ownership, and the cost for Blockbuster, Netflix or even cable VOD is about half this, they're way off the mark.
Of course
a) AT&T's lawyers have said for the record the restriction only applied if SysV code was incorporated into the vendor's product, not for independent code added to the baseline (such as JFS, NUMA, etc).
b) Novell's said the same.
c) There's still the case between SCO & Novell whether the copyrights went with the code, or Santa Cruz simply became a licensor who sold those rights to Caldera. SCO may have no standing to begin with.
IBM has a countersuit that would have to be answered, probably one of the reasons they didn't go for the quick kill. There's also the Red Hat case with Lanham Act violations. Whoever gets the debris of SCO would *still* have to answer those charges, which would make it hard to unload on someone. A bankruptcy trustee would likely be very interested in settling all claims to clear the deck for a liquidation sale.
a) IBM's been accused of breaking a contract and stealing a business partner's IP. Given the amount of money IBM makes from services, that's a Very Bad Thing to be accused of.
b) IBM has sunk buckets o' money into Linux. They don't want to have to dole some of it out to somebody else.
c) IBM has enough cash on hand and legal staff to drown SCO in lawyers until Doomsday.
d) SCO launched a nuisance suit expecting to get a quick, quiet payoff to go away. If every vendor that ever dealt with IBM and is now in financial trouble did the same and expected a payout, IBM would be bleeding money. Making an object lesson of SCO's to-date-laughable claims solves the problem.
e) Big Bad Blue has received much geek cred for their stand.
f) SCO has successfully pulled IBM, Novell and Red Hat down on them; we may *finally* resolve ownership of whatever copyrights still exist on UNIX and what should become of them, and the enforceability of the GPL.
Actually, given the plaintiff involved, it might be time to drag Jeff Meyer out of pseudo-retirement and revive STUPID PEOPLE'S COURT!
somebody posted this last week about making old 50s shows available for cheap. Sounds promising to me as a way of preserving the early days of TV. Heck, I'd pay a buck for old Zachary creature features.
In the beginning was Ma Bell, and things were regular.
Then did Judge Greene divide, and there was AT&T and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies: NyNex, Bell Atlantic, Bellsouth, Ameritech, US West, Southwest Bell and Pacific Telesis.
Nynex & Bell Atlantic -> Verizon
Southwest Bell & Ameritech & Pacific Telesis (and SNET) -> SBC
US West -> acquired by Qwest during the dot-boom
Seven RBOCs down to four, three of them owning a LD carrier or trying to: Qwest already a carrier, Verizon buying MCI, SBC buying AT&T. Bellsouth's the poor sister at this point. What ever happened to Sprint's LD business?
Working contract at AT&T Computer Systems in NJ '87-'90, they re-used the American Bell badge blanks they'd pre-ordered for the name change. The Name That Must Not Be Spoken was whited over with the authorized building codes.
You do have Western Electric, it's just called Lucent. They inherited The Labs when they were spun out in the 90's. You've gone from AT&T & the Seven Baby Bells to four regionals (Nynex & Bell Atlantic -> Verizon, Southwest Bell + Pacific Telesis + Ameritech -> SBC), three of which own/are acquiring a long-distance company (SBC - AT&T, Quest, Verizon - MCI).
I blush, sir. Thank you.
Now that the tech crew has "outed" Prendergast as basically a paid shill, you wonder what his funding for next year will look like.
Having listened to the forum, the state folks said a lot of that $50M would be upgrading thousands of PCs to to be able to run Vista and MS-Office 12. Much less slack in hardware prices. And the alternative suites would run fine on the existing boxes, removing that hardware expense. Very useful exchange with the MS guy.