My ISP gives me the option of tagging e-mail that originates from RBL, ORBS and DUL listed servers. I haven't gotten an e-mail yet from an RBL-listed server that wasn't spam, but most of the ORBS-tagged e-mail was from legitimate sources, mostly people's work e-mail addresses.
As a behavior-modification tool, the ORBS is useless. Too many people run insecure mail servers for most people to be willing to filter it all out. Enforcing the ORBS list will be more painful to the enforcer than the violator.
A better method would be to get a court case to establish that people running insecure mail-servers have partial liability for spam-floods using their server. A case could easily be made that anyone with the knowlege to run a mail-server has the ability to discover that running an open relay is dangerous, and the ability to perform some minimal securing.
What I would like to see (and what I keep getting on soapboxes about after I've had a pint or two at the pub) is a fully cross-platform, xml-aware, user-friendly, Mozilla-based help browser. Yes, there are a lot of buzzwords in that description, but I still think that it would be a phenomenally useful tool. Providing a usable interface for online help is at least as important as having usable content to display within that interface.
This sounds like a great idea, except for the Mozilla bit. One feature in such a help browser I'd like to see is to use the XML to allow the user to select different levels of technical detail, both as a default, and within each document. This could also be used to switch between feature-based and task-based help.
The question was originally about man pages, which, in my experience range from excellent to useless. While developing a super-spiffy FBC help browser is a useful thing, the concept of man pages isn't bad, just the execution. There are lots of man pages which seriously need improvement. (Like tar.)
Broadcasting this on TV is a cute stunt, but doesn't seem like it would be that terribly useful. There are already plenty of places where the DeCSS code is kept, it can be redistributed through Usenet, and there are probably going to be places where it remains legal, no matter how much the RIAA bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hlobbies governments. If we're ever at the point where transcribing the code from a frame-by-frame playback of the video is the only way to transfer the code, we'll be in really big trouble, and DeCSS will be the least of our problems.
The primary value of this stunt is in pointing out inconsistencies in the Oz copyright laws. Unfortunately, those inconsistencies are likely to be resolved in a restrictive direction.
One of the most useful bits about that article is its focus, especially in the later pages, on sales and sevice support for various Unices.
For home use, that doesn't matter - I'm not going to pay $100/month for support - I could buy a lot of O'Reilly books for $100/month. For a medium-sized corporate system, that does matter. Real large corporations will keep a staff of Unix (or NT) wizards around for support, but a 100-person office will need someone to backstop their in-house support. Downloading Debian doesn't provide that.
If I were my company's IT person, I could take that article to my boss to say "here's a good, well-supported, Unix system that will outperform our NT servers, and you'll be able to support it after I'm gone". That would be far more convincing to the bean-counters than a simple exposition of the technical superiority of Unix.
In paticular wellsfargo won't let you sign in with Mozilla because it asks you to "Upgrade" to Netscape 4.X.
Wells Fargo won't even let me in with Netscape 4.72 for Windows. Last week they told me March 9th for the testing to be complete, but I'm still being redirected to the "denied" page. They're saying 1700 pst (-0800), now.
At least in the case of Wells Fargo, they seem to actually do some testing of browsers. I can see that a browser could have secure crypto and defeat the crypto entirely by doing something else stupid. So for banking, useragent checking is appropriate. Imagine the liability if they approve a browser that leaves passwords in its cache...
Run a beta version of a browser for "secure" transactions over the internet. I think that you will find some problems with that.
wow! A first post with some substantive content!
Of course there are some problems with that. However, if the crypto code is secure, I would have little trouble using it for my everyday banking online. I'm only dealing with hundreds of dollars at a time, though - if I was dealing with tens of thousands, I'd be paranoid about such stuff.
How many people worry about security on the internet, while not keeping their credit card carbons? Or, for that matter, trusting their credit cards to $6.00/hour clerks in stores they frequent? Or keeping a 4-digit PIN for their ATM card? A beta browser using existing tested crypto code seems to be safer than most of those ideas.
Au contraire, that's exactly what the market is for. The "someone wins, someone loses" mentality about the market is common among lay folks (like myself, I Am Not An Economist), especially those of a scientific bent, as it plays to a certain hypothetical Principle of Conservation of Wealth. But economics simply doesn't work that way. If that were the case, then taking that concept ad absurdam, we'd all still be having to share the same meager wealth that the first few thousand proto-humans had a few million years ago, among the six billion of us.
Markets, per se, don't create wealth. Work does. At the end of the day today, the United States is richer by the results of about 800 million hours of people's labor. Some of that labor is directly producing goods, some of it is producing abstract goods, some of it is providing services.
But yesterday, Blodget changed his tune, predicting that the vast majority of Internet companies will be bankrupt within five years. Of all Internet companies, "75 percent will disappear within five years, and 75 percent will never make money, or sell themselves," Blodget said at the Silicon Alley 2000 Internet conference. He declined, however, to predict which companies would survive and which would die.
This is a real easy prediction to make. The same is true for all companies. The internet weirdness is that the companies that don't survive are still making a pretty big splash before they go.
When I was in my lockpicking phase (anyone have a link to the MIT Lockpicking Guide?), I learned an important point: Having lockpicks isn't illegal. Using them in conjunction with a crime (breaking and entering, robbery, etc.) is illegal and a separate charge. There is no difference in having cracking tools. If I'm not cracking anything, then it doesn't matter. A quick look at the article indicates they were using those tools to crack machines. Thus, a separate charge.
The idea of a crime of "possession of lockpicking tools" under any circumstances is repugnant in a free society. A crime of "criminal misuse of lockpicking tools" is appropriate, just as are heavier sentences for using a gun to commit a crime, since both tools have a very high potential for misuse, and require a high level of responsibility from their owners.
Check out http://linuxberg.mirror.ac.uk in Netscrape 4.x for Linux. Look for the big date in red.... doesn't happen in IE, or in Netscrape for non-Linux platforms (Windoze and AIX tested so far). Silly javascript:)
In Opera 3.62 ß6 under Windoze 4.10.1998, it shows the date as 29, That's all - no month, no year.
Re:*I* can find primes fast!
on
SSH v. SRP
·
· Score: 1
It isn't very hard. Finding primes has little to do with factoring though... Cheers, Ben PS Here is a moderately efficient algorithm in an unefficient language:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# primes - generate primes [snip] =head1 BUGS B<primes> has no known bugs.
Yes it does - if the first number entered is 0, the list will go 2, 1, 3, 5, 7...
To fix, change $start == 1 to $start < 2 in line 30. The documentation reports (correctly) that the range is up to, but not including, the second number entered on the command line. It's not a bug, but it is an annoying feature.
Hell, while we're on the subject of Unix ports, why did they port IE to Solaris/Sparc and not Solaris/x86?
Simple. Microsoft isn't in business to let it's application development teams build up more competition for it's OS development teams. Solaris/Sparc runs on obscure hardware that NT can't? Fine, give them an IE port and hope that the accelerated death of Netscape will outweigh the few lost sales of NT/x86 workstations. But practically every copy of Solaris/x86 (and Linux) in use means one more Intel system that won't see NT installed, and so no ports for them.
hmmm. How about: Office for MacOS X, Office for Solaris/Sparc, Office for HP/UX, Office for Linux/PPC, Office for Linux/Alpha, Office for Linux/MIPS-SGI, Office for Linux/Sparc (just to kick Scott McNealey one more time), maybe even Office for BeOS/PPC.
The truth is that the *idea* of communism (not it's applications) stems from anything but evil intents.
The truth is that the idea of Communism stems from an evil idea, that the individual is completely valueless, and that only the collective mass has any rights. Marx dressed this idea up in a fantasy that somehow people with no rights nor incentives will be more productive than people with rights who are free to trade.
In practice, Communism has only infrequently descended to the depths of which it is capable.
Calling the GPL "Communist" is silly - the GPL is an expression of a not-very-materialist philosophy, and Communism is a very materialist idea.
"I would say this Slade character is more of a capitalist, siezing private property and not giving anyhing back."
This Slade character is a thief, plain and simple. Capitalism isn't about theft. Under capitalism, you're only obligation to "give back" comes from contractual arrangements you make. Siezing private property is antithetical to capitalism (though not to some forms of corporatist syndicalism, which is what folks like Donald Trump and lots of big corporations stand for). What Slade is doing is theft. Not capitalism, not communism, just theft.
Another point I'd like to make about Netware is while it is a superior product compared to NT the problem is that there aren't enough people who really know their way around Netware compared to those that do NT. That's going to really hamper Netware. They should do something like Sun and SCO do and sell cheap media kits/licenses. The more people that know Netware, the more likely it is going to be deployed in a commercial setting. I think this would be more sucessful in combatting M$ than just bitching and whining.
They do. There are books on Netware admin which come with licence-restricted copies of Netware 5.
There is also the Common Unix Printing System. I wonder if Corel will work with that, or create competition for it.
I don't use WordPerfect for Linux because it wouldn't print the same characters as it displayed on the screen. I think I'll give it another try now that I have a True Type font server up and running, but I'm not too hopeful.
Coincidentally, Hedy Lamarr is also the face on the package of CorelDRAW. IIRC, she successfully sued Corel for using her image without prior authorization.
Can (or should) Linus now piss all over this scam IPO by withholding permission to use the Linux(TM) trademark in their name?
Can he? Linus probably can't prevent Dr. Chiou from calling his distrubutions "LinuxWhatever", as long as it is Linux. He'd have had to enforce it against Red Hat and Yggdrasil, etc., to have any claim on those grounds. However, there may be a case to prevent use of "LinuxOne" as a corporate name. RedHat, SuSE, etc, don't have Linux in their corporate name. VA Linux does, but they go permission first. LinuxOne does not appear to have, and I don't see the "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds" on the LinuxOne website.
Should he? If he has legal ground to stand on, yes. A scammer like Dr. Chiou deserves what he gets, including (hopefully) a loudly publicized lawsuit the day before the IPO.
Under US trademark and copyright laws, if you own a trademark you have to defend every misuse of your product you find. Otherwise, your trademark can become genericized.
This leads to things like companies writing in to magazines to inform them that "we enjoyed your article on why photocopiers should be banned, but we wanted to remind you that the word 'Xerox' is a trademark for our particular brand of photocopier and should not be used as a generic synonym for the verb 'to photocopy.'"
Then there are the trademarks a company wants to lose... like Heroin(tm).
Leaking (was) Re:Stallman's reply
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
The interesting test case would be one where a company makes changes that they want to keep to themselves to GPL'ed code and one of the employees releases them. What it would be testing is whether the employees could act as individuals with respect to the enhancements to the code.
This really is the interesting problem - I personally think that if an employee leaks binaries without leaking source, he's violating the GPL, but the corporation isn't. There are liability issues relating to employees. If the company doesn't want to provide the source code for the leaked binaries, they have to fire (or otherwise discipline) the employee. If they take no action against the leaker, then they have tacitly endorsed the leak, and therefore take responsibility for distributing the program, and thus have to release source due to the GPL. If the corporation disciplines the employee, then they (generally) avoid liability fot the employee's actions.
There are lots of subtleties to employee liability law, and there are many conditions that have to be satisfied for things to work the way I described above. While the general concepts of corporate liability are very similar in US and UK law, and also in most other European or European-derived legal systems, there are bigger differences in the treatment of unauthorized actions of employees. Thus the outcome of the hypothetical would likely be different in different countries.
This, however, isn't really a weakness of the GPL. In one possible outcome, things aren't significantly different than if there was no leak, and in the other, there is new code available to the community - which is kinda the point of the GPL.
To what do you attribute the long, steady drop in market share of WordPerfect for Windows? In retrospect, what could you have done differently to have at least slowed it down?
As an side here's something that may prove interesting: Since comments aren't removed if they slander(etc) people, as this *might* force/. to be liable for ALL such comments... Could it be that Slashdot is liable for the stories they post if they don't post all of them?
Try this on for size:
Slashdot posts a story about a company which is negatively portrayed. Story is later discovered to be false. Company sues SlashDot for (fill in blank here).
I'm not a lawyer nor a Newspaper guy, but what are the responsibilities of news outlets to report the truth? I know tabloids get sued all the time, and/. isn't exactly a tabloid, but it DOES have a habit of posting articles based on rumors. What happens when one day some company gets pissed off, and decides to really do something about it? Any thoughts?
Basic law for journalists is actually pretty easy - if you say something is a rumor, you're pretty much in the clear. If you attribute a statement, and can back up that attribution, the person making the statement is liable, not you. If you say "alleged" a lot, you're safe. There are subtleties to all this, but that's the basics.
Let's take LinuxOne as an example - people have been saying they're a scam on and off slashdot. Look at how CmdrTaco presented a fairly negative leadoff in December. There's not a whole lot to file a libel suit in that article: CEO's questionable past is an opinion, with a reference, and the behavior of the corporate web-server is an easily checkable and provable fact. Andover's lawyers may be a bit nervous over the GPL violations, since that's an allegation which has not been proven in court (yet), and a judge may find that something worth going to trial over.
Not putting in that magic word "alleged" is a pretty big journalistic no-no, and yes, the Slashdot gang probably would be liable if those GPL violations aren't found to be violations.
"Employ known figures indeed. Sounds like some of the famous traders in the old bazaar don't want too many newcomers setting up stalls unless they pay their dues."
RobLimo wrote:
What's wrong with that? In the "pure" Open Source business model, for-profit companies are living on the backs of the community. They need to give a little back in order to have any cred.
Bruce Perens goes overboard by implying that a bunch of nobodies can't be up to any good.
In this particular case, it's pretty obvious that LinuxOne is a scam, and it is generally true that folks who come from nowhere deserve extra scrutiny. However, just because someone has no (known) history in the community doesn't mean that he doesn't belong. LinuxOne would smell just as bad if it had a well-known Unix kernel hacker on staff. Contrariwise, if a bunch of nobodies said "We've translated all the on-line documentation into Chinese, and we're going to re-sell a Chinese RedHat distro", with a real business plan and some real funding (not a copy of the RedHat plan and some orders from controlled shell companies), I'd see nothing wrong with it.
Don't confuse the issue of LinuxOne being a fraud with the issue of LinuxOne coming out of nowhere. They're related, but not congruent.
Slashdot Mirror
As a behavior-modification tool, the ORBS is useless. Too many people run insecure mail servers for most people to be willing to filter it all out. Enforcing the ORBS list will be more painful to the enforcer than the violator.
A better method would be to get a court case to establish that people running insecure mail-servers have partial liability for spam-floods using their server. A case could easily be made that anyone with the knowlege to run a mail-server has the ability to discover that running an open relay is dangerous, and the ability to perform some minimal securing.
The Economist has an interesting article: When Life is More Interesting than Art about American Beauty, Hollywood, and the suburbs.
after I've had a pint or two at the pub) is a fully cross-platform,
xml-aware, user-friendly, Mozilla-based help browser. Yes, there are a
lot of buzzwords in that description, but I still think that it would
be a phenomenally useful tool. Providing a usable interface for online
help is at least as important as having usable content to display within
that interface.
This sounds like a great idea, except for the Mozilla bit. One feature in such a help browser I'd like to see is to use the XML to allow the user to select different levels of technical detail, both as a default, and within each document. This could also be used to switch between feature-based and task-based help.
The question was originally about man pages, which, in my experience range from excellent to useless. While developing a super-spiffy FBC help browser is a useful thing, the concept of man pages isn't bad, just the execution. There are lots of man pages which seriously need improvement. (Like tar.)
The primary value of this stunt is in pointing out inconsistencies in the Oz copyright laws. Unfortunately, those inconsistencies are likely to be resolved in a restrictive direction.
For home use, that doesn't matter - I'm not going to pay $100/month for support - I could buy a lot of O'Reilly books for $100/month. For a medium-sized corporate system, that does matter. Real large corporations will keep a staff of Unix (or NT) wizards around for support, but a 100-person office will need someone to backstop their in-house support. Downloading Debian doesn't provide that.
If I were my company's IT person, I could take that article to my boss to say "here's a good, well-supported, Unix system that will outperform our NT servers, and you'll be able to support it after I'm gone". That would be far more convincing to the bean-counters than a simple exposition of the technical superiority of Unix.
Wells Fargo won't even let me in with Netscape 4.72 for Windows. Last week they told me March 9th for the testing to be complete, but I'm still being redirected to the "denied" page. They're saying 1700 pst (-0800), now.
At least in the case of Wells Fargo, they seem to actually do some testing of browsers. I can see that a browser could have secure crypto and defeat the crypto entirely by doing something else stupid. So for banking, useragent checking is appropriate. Imagine the liability if they approve a browser that leaves passwords in its cache...
wow! A first post with some substantive content!
Of course there are some problems with that. However, if the crypto code is secure, I would have little trouble using it for my everyday banking online. I'm only dealing with hundreds of dollars at a time, though - if I was dealing with tens of thousands, I'd be paranoid about such stuff.
How many people worry about security on the internet, while not keeping their credit card carbons? Or, for that matter, trusting their credit cards to $6.00/hour clerks in stores they frequent? Or keeping a 4-digit PIN for their ATM card? A beta browser using existing tested crypto code seems to be safer than most of those ideas.
Au contraire, that's exactly what the market is for. The "someone wins, someone loses" mentality about the market is common among lay folks (like myself, I Am Not An Economist), especially those of a scientific bent, as it plays to a certain hypothetical Principle of Conservation of Wealth.
But economics simply doesn't work that way. If that were the case, then taking that concept ad absurdam, we'd all still be having to share the same meager wealth that the first few thousand proto-humans had a few million years ago, among the six billion of us.
Markets, per se, don't create wealth. Work does. At the end of the day today, the United States is richer by the results of about 800 million hours of people's labor. Some of that labor is directly producing goods, some of it is producing abstract goods, some of it is providing services.
Of all Internet companies, "75 percent will disappear within five years, and 75 percent will never make money, or sell themselves," Blodget said at the Silicon Alley 2000 Internet conference.
He declined, however, to predict which companies would survive and which would die.
This is a real easy prediction to make. The same is true for all companies. The internet weirdness is that the companies that don't survive are still making a pretty big splash before they go.
Having lockpicks isn't illegal. Using them in conjunction with a crime (breaking and entering, robbery, etc.) is illegal and a separate charge.
There is no difference in having cracking tools. If I'm not cracking anything, then it doesn't matter. A quick look at the article indicates they were using those tools to crack machines. Thus, a separate charge.
The idea of a crime of "possession of lockpicking tools" under any circumstances is repugnant in a free society. A crime of "criminal misuse of lockpicking tools" is appropriate, just as are heavier sentences for using a gun to commit a crime, since both tools have a very high potential for misuse, and require a high level of responsibility from their owners.
In Opera 3.62 ß6 under Windoze 4.10.1998, it shows the date as 29, That's all - no month, no year.
Cheers,
Ben
PS Here is a moderately efficient algorithm in an unefficient language:
Yes it does - if the first number entered is 0, the list will go 2, 1, 3, 5, 7...
To fix, change $start == 1 to $start < 2 in line 30. The documentation reports (correctly) that the range is up to, but not including, the second number entered on the command line. It's not a bug, but it is an annoying feature.
Simple. Microsoft isn't in business to let it's application development teams build up more competition for it's OS development teams. Solaris/Sparc runs on obscure hardware that NT can't? Fine, give them an IE port and hope that the accelerated death of Netscape will outweigh the few lost sales of NT/x86 workstations. But practically every copy of Solaris/x86 (and Linux) in use means one more Intel system that won't see NT installed, and so no ports for them.
hmmm. How about: Office for MacOS X, Office for Solaris/Sparc, Office for HP/UX, Office for Linux/PPC, Office for Linux/Alpha, Office for Linux/MIPS-SGI, Office for Linux/Sparc (just to kick Scott McNealey one more time), maybe even Office for BeOS/PPC.
The truth is that the idea of Communism stems from an evil idea, that the individual is completely valueless, and that only the collective mass has any rights. Marx dressed this idea up in a fantasy that somehow people with no rights nor incentives will be more productive than people with rights who are free to trade.
In practice, Communism has only infrequently descended to the depths of which it is capable.
Calling the GPL "Communist" is silly - the GPL is an expression of a not-very-materialist philosophy, and Communism is a very materialist idea.
"I would say this Slade character is more of a capitalist, siezing private property and not giving anyhing back."
This Slade character is a thief, plain and simple. Capitalism isn't about theft. Under capitalism, you're only obligation to "give back" comes from contractual arrangements you make. Siezing private property is antithetical to capitalism (though not to some forms of corporatist syndicalism, which is what folks like Donald Trump and lots of big corporations stand for). What Slade is doing is theft. Not capitalism, not communism, just theft.
They do. There are books on Netware admin which come with licence-restricted copies of Netware 5.
I don't use WordPerfect for Linux because it wouldn't print the same characters as it displayed on the screen. I think I'll give it another try now that I have a True Type font server up and running, but I'm not too hopeful.
Coincidentally, Hedy Lamarr is also the face on the package of CorelDRAW. IIRC, she successfully sued Corel for using her image without prior authorization.
Can he? Linus probably can't prevent Dr. Chiou from calling his distrubutions "LinuxWhatever", as long as it is Linux. He'd have had to enforce it against Red Hat and Yggdrasil, etc., to have any claim on those grounds. However, there may be a case to prevent use of "LinuxOne" as a corporate name. RedHat, SuSE, etc, don't have Linux in their corporate name. VA Linux does, but they go permission first. LinuxOne does not appear to have, and I don't see the "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds" on the LinuxOne website.
Should he? If he has legal ground to stand on, yes. A scammer like Dr. Chiou deserves what he gets, including (hopefully) a loudly publicized lawsuit the day before the IPO.
This leads to things like companies writing in to magazines to inform them that "we enjoyed your article on why photocopiers should be banned, but we wanted to remind you that the word 'Xerox' is a trademark for our particular brand of photocopier and should not be used as a generic synonym for the verb 'to photocopy.'"
Then there are the trademarks a company wants to lose... like Heroin(tm).
This really is the interesting problem - I personally think that if an employee leaks binaries without leaking source, he's violating the GPL, but the corporation isn't. There are liability issues relating to employees. If the company doesn't want to provide the source code for the leaked binaries, they have to fire (or otherwise discipline) the employee. If they take no action against the leaker, then they have tacitly endorsed the leak, and therefore take responsibility for distributing the program, and thus have to release source due to the GPL. If the corporation disciplines the employee, then they (generally) avoid liability fot the employee's actions.
There are lots of subtleties to employee liability law, and there are many conditions that have to be satisfied for things to work the way I described above. While the general concepts of corporate liability are very similar in US and UK law, and also in most other European or European-derived legal systems, there are bigger differences in the treatment of unauthorized actions of employees. Thus the outcome of the hypothetical would likely be different in different countries.
This, however, isn't really a weakness of the GPL. In one possible outcome, things aren't significantly different than if there was no leak, and in the other, there is new code available to the community - which is kinda the point of the GPL.
When can we expect to see CorelDraw for Linux? What sort of pricing can we expect for CorelDraw?
To what do you attribute the long, steady drop in market share of WordPerfect for Windows? In retrospect, what could you have done differently to have at least slowed it down?
http://www.geniebusters.org/
As an side here's something that may prove interesting: Since comments aren't removed if they slander(etc) people, as this *might* force /. to be liable for ALL such comments... Could it be that Slashdot is liable for the stories they post if they don't post all of them?
Try this on for size:
Slashdot posts a story about a company which is negatively portrayed. Story is later discovered to be false. Company sues SlashDot for (fill in blank here).
I'm not a lawyer nor a Newspaper guy, but what are the responsibilities of news outlets to report the truth? I know tabloids get sued all the time, and /. isn't exactly a tabloid, but it DOES have a habit of posting articles based on rumors. What happens when one day some company gets pissed off, and decides to really do something about it? Any thoughts?
Basic law for journalists is actually pretty easy - if you say something is a rumor, you're pretty much in the clear. If you attribute a statement, and can back up that attribution, the person making the statement is liable, not you. If you say "alleged" a lot, you're safe. There are subtleties to all this, but that's the basics.
Let's take LinuxOne as an example - people have been saying they're a scam on and off slashdot. Look at how CmdrTaco presented a fairly negative leadoff in December. There's not a whole lot to file a libel suit in that article: CEO's questionable past is an opinion, with a reference, and the behavior of the corporate web-server is an easily checkable and provable fact. Andover's lawyers may be a bit nervous over the GPL violations, since that's an allegation which has not been proven in court (yet), and a judge may find that something worth going to trial over.
Not putting in that magic word "alleged" is a pretty big journalistic no-no, and yes, the Slashdot gang probably would be liable if those GPL violations aren't found to be violations.
"Employ known figures indeed. Sounds like some of the famous traders in the old bazaar don't want too many newcomers setting up stalls unless they pay their dues."
RobLimo wrote:
What's wrong with that? In the "pure" Open Source business model, for-profit companies are living on the backs of the community. They need to give a little back in order to have any cred.
Bruce Perens goes overboard by implying that a bunch of nobodies can't be up to any good.
In this particular case, it's pretty obvious that LinuxOne is a scam, and it is generally true that folks who come from nowhere deserve extra scrutiny. However, just because someone has no (known) history in the community doesn't mean that he doesn't belong. LinuxOne would smell just as bad if it had a well-known Unix kernel hacker on staff. Contrariwise, if a bunch of nobodies said "We've translated all the on-line documentation into Chinese, and we're going to re-sell a Chinese RedHat distro", with a real business plan and some real funding (not a copy of the RedHat plan and some orders from controlled shell companies), I'd see nothing wrong with it.
Don't confuse the issue of LinuxOne being a fraud with the issue of LinuxOne coming out of nowhere. They're related, but not congruent.