Bingo. IBM wants the case to go on. That was SCO's major miscalculation: They were hoping that Novell, IBM, DaimlerChrysler, Autozone etc were going to settle out-of-court rather than fight. Unfortunately:
* Novell is investing in Linux. * IBM's investing in Linux and is using the case to validate the GPL. * DaimlerChrysler, an automobile manufacturer, is highly experienced with quashing frivolous lawsuits of this nature. * AutoZone etc. is willing to follow the others' leads.
There's a difference between dismissing one party's claims, and dismissing the entire lawsuit. Even if the judge granted IBM's motion and dismissed every single one of SCO's claims, the case would still be open on IBM's counterclaims.
It's not going to disappear, because IBM doesn't want it to. IBM filed counterclaims, and they want to see those through to the end.
This suit is going somewhere, and the big news from Wednesday is that the judge is going to help it get there: They are going to make Linux and the GPL bulletproof.
You ever see any action movies? Usually the movies will have some scene where the chief good guy/bad guy/bad guy's Top Thug will get challenged by some stupid thug/underling/rent-a-cop, usually spurned on by alcohol/his friends/basic stupidity. We then get treated to a scene where the principal character goes above and beyond what is necessary to deal with the situation. They go further than they need, to demonstrate to other minor characters and to the audience: This person is a badass.
IBM is betting the farm on Linux. This is a new business model if you're younger than about 40 years old; to IBM, free software that sells the service and equipment is how they got big in the first place.
SCO unwittingly played right into IBM's hands. IBM waited for a good six months until SCO had made a ton of public statements (and Groklaw had started really building up a database -- "open-source legal" if you will -- that helped them in this regard). Then, IBM brought forth the counterclaims.
The counterclaims are not geared towards destroying SCO, but they will have that effect. The counterclaims are designed so that IBM can use this opportunity to create a substantive legal precedent for the new license that represents the old business model.
(Editorial comment: It's worth noting that the GPL and FSF are essentially reactionary; Stallman's not so much trying to create a New World Order as to restore the way things were back in the good old days. That's why I say that this new license represents IBM's old business model.)
What's happened with Wednesday's ruling is that IBM is more than they dreamed to get from this case: Not only is the judge clearly siding with IBM, but the judge is so pissed off with SCO that he will now guide the case towards a substantive legal precedent that not only rescues Linux developers and users from this current legal threat, but will stand the test of appeals and time.
Much as fair-use advocates go back to the Sony vs. MPAA suit, Linux businessmen in the future will go back to this lawsuit to show why it's perfectly sound and justifiable to use Linux without any worry. This is our Betamax suit.
SCO (and if you follow the money, Microsoft) really, really shot themselves in the ass with this lawsuit. In attempting to extort money from IBM and give them trouble, they ended up giving IBM the opportunity to get exactly what they wanted. The more that lawyers like Groklaw's marbux and others in the media look at the ruling, the more they realize that not only is SCO about to be destroyed, but Linux and the GPL will soon be ironclad.
When this court case is done, Linux and the GPL will be bulletproof.
That's why this particular frivolous lawsuit is taking so long: Once IBM made those counterclaims, it no longer became frivolous. And the price for the frivolity will be dire not just to SCO, but to every company that supported them.
Over the past year every company remotely connected with SCO has done what they can to distance themselves from them. EV1 apologized for buying Linux licenses. Another company that won Linux licenses as part of a settlement deal had to go on the public record denying that they paid for those licenses. Baystar, the company that put money into SCO on Microsoft's recommendation, backed out and asked for its money back.
Why would China bother? What does North Korea offer them? As it is, NK's threats give China a bit of elbow room in international relations, as the only country that can really, you know, do anything with NK. "Sure mister Prime Minister... we'll help you with North Korea, if you do this for us..."
Korea's land is pretty much worthless, cold shite. There isn't anything there that China doesn't already have too much of already.
No, I don't think China's gonna do anything like that.
Remember that IBM brought counterclaims against SCO. This is the important thing. By managing the case in the way they have, IBM is giving Linux and the GPL a rock-solid legal precedent. As a result this "frivolous" lawsuit will actually eliminate one of the big credibility concerns people had with Linux and with open-source development.
Seeing IBM out there defending open-source -- not out of any bullshit sense of "community," but to defend its business strategy -- is erasing the image of the open-source coder, unwashed, unshaven, working in his parents' basement, and replacing it with large corporations with "new" business models.
I use quotes, because this is the way the computer industry used to be in the days before Microsoft: Software was part of the hardware or service you bought, not a product in itself.
Hubble was one of the first casualties of the Challenger explosion. Remember that the first thing that needed to be fixed was a flawed mirror?
While I was in undergrad at UT, I was an officer in the local SEDS chapter, where Dr. Hans Mark explained that the mirror was known to be flawed before it was launched. When the Challenger exploded, NASA shut down everything. Hubble remained, unrepaired, in a dark warehouse somewhere. When they got the HST program back up and running, they'd long forgotten their problem with the mirror.
HST was a great idea, but there were some big screwups attached to it.
Isn't AT&T about to get bought out by one of its former subsidiaries, SBC (formerly Southwestern Bell)?
Linus never would have written this memo.
on
Microsoft in 2008
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First, it is way too long.
Second, it isn't nearly as witty as Linus is; it doesn't have any of the insults-that-make-you-feel-like-thanking-Linus-for -insulting-you that characterize his flames.
Third and most vital, Linus doesn't give a damn about any of the crap the author's writing about. He doesn't care about taking over the world or marketing. He is only interested in technology.
In one of the forewords to one of the editions of Fahrenheit 451 that I picked up at the library to read, Bradbury admits that Truffaut came up with some great lines for The Captain he wished he'd thought of himself; he also felt the movie was true to what he intended for the book.
In Europe, when Christopher Colombus wanted to fund an expedition to reach India by sailing West, he went to one government. He was turned down. He went to another. Also turned down. He went to several different European countries, all relatively close to each other, until he had a government tell him, "Yes."
China has had a single unified power structure governing the entire area for thousands of years. If a dynasty decided it didn't like your newfangled device or research area, then you didn't get to do it.
The geography that allows China to have a single power structure rule over it, and geography that keeps Europe divided despite multiple attempts to compeltely conquer it, turn out to be the main difference here. There are all these countries nearby each other in Europe; that increases the odds that you can travel somewhere where they have a pro-R&D ideology, if you can't find it in your own country.
Incidentally, I suspect that this "banning" China is doing will be slightly more effective than screaming at a brick wall. They have made their rule; fat chance of them actually being able to enforce it.
The only person I'll ever promote on my webpage is myself.
Oh, and the Brobdingnagian Bards. Them too. But that's because one of the guys is one of my best friends, and I steal their songs for remixes... not because they pay me.
What I meant was that they haven't hit rock bottom yet and haven't realized that this current descent is not merely the normal ups-and-downs of business. From a financial standpoint, things still look great (even up), so why would they be worried?
Disney didn't benefit from the creative cinema boom in the mid-to-late 70's that saved the major studios (and resurrected Fox from the dead). Until Michael Eisner and The Little Mermaid, Disney was irrelevant, uninteresting, and doomed.
On the Tron DVD, and one of the points Lisberger makes is that no one ever made a movie in the way Tron was, and no one will ever make a movie that way again. Part of the reason is the sheer manpower required to do it, which has only gotten more expensive; even back then, they outsourced to Taiwan. The other part is, as others have said more eloquently, changes in technology make the methods unnecessary.
There are two other things Tron had going for it that a remake is unlikely to have.
1. Jeff Bridges. The guy's an incredible talent, was not yet respected enough to ask for an unheard-of salary, and is the sort of great actor who goes for the interesting roles. At the time, the character was interesting. Now, the same character has been done many times before.
2. A desperate studio needing to take a huge risk. Remakes are low-risk by definition. Right now, Disney is coming down off of a high point. They still have the same guy guiding them that brought them to that high point. They're still following the same formulas that got them there, still making lots of money, and not aware that the old formula has become trite. At the time Tron came out, Disney was still reeling from Walt's death and was aware that people saw them as old-fashioned. We've forgotten those days of G-rated Don Knotts comedies and Herbie Goes Bananas. Disney's executives saw something daring and risky, and felt that Lisberger's studio could do something that could be a modern-day Fantasia. They felt Walt would approve. They were more right than they knew, and ended up producing something that few appreciated until after the film had left the box office.
I think the visual appeal can still work, but the role is no longer so interesting to that type of actor, and the studio is not taking any risks.
The more I think of it, the less interested I am.
I can beat that.
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Let me tell you about a guy with an MBA from Harvard I know who grew up in Midland, Texas -- aka the Ass End of Nowhere. He was absolutely brilliant, particularly with human relationships.
Now if you spoke to this guy, you'd never believe he graduated from college, much less got through grad school at the finest institution of higher education in the USA. He actually used that to his advantage. I saw him do this time and time again... he'd slip into the backwards Texas drawl, mess up some word or speech on purpose, and then people would think, "Oh, what a stupid hick." Of course, at this point, they were at his mercy, just like the lady and the vendor in the tale you describe.
Only this guy one-upped your gal and then some. He became President of the United States this way.
My frustration stemmed less from the stupid license and more from the inability to figure out just what the hell Talad wanted me to write. He clearly had something specific in mind, but lacked the music theory vocab to describe it, and so I ended up spending a lot of time with some work that was never going to get used.
The music is available for download through my website now. At least others can download and enjoy it now.
"I'll do you a better turn then that, I remember your name:) We used to hang out in the public channel and compare notes since we weren't 'leet enough to be in the dev channel:)"
Holy shit, Monkelectric -- you just echoed my exact experience when I offered my services to them over a year ago. I remember the guy who's nick started with "V" you're referring to -- I agree, he was top-notch to work with; a programmer out of Houston, if I recall. Texas friendly and all that. But he wasn't the one who I had to please; I had to please Talad, and when I pressed Talad for details on what he wanted for "combat music," I got a description very similar in nature to what you described.
When I saw the slashdot article my reaction was exactly like the grandparent post; I wasn't expecting to see another musician's take mirror my own so precisely.
"I think you made your point. Thank you for the demonstration." "Choose your next witticism carefully Mr. McBride, it may be your last." "Do you expect me to settle?" "No, Mr. McBride. I expect you to die."
In what sense do you think Apple is a "hardware company"? Most of their engineering and manufacturing seems to be outsourced.
Apple is a "hardware company" in the same sense that Dell is; their main corporate objective is computer hardware sales.
Note the pittance they make on iTunes Music Store sales along with the vigilance they have in making sure AAC files are the only DRM-enabled files to go on the iPod: iTMS is a tool to sell more iPods. Other things you can identify in this vein are the iLife suite, a bunch of applications that are shipped free with every new Mac; the FSF-approved licensing of Darwin's source code; and advancing certain other open-source projects, most notably ZeroConfig and Konqueror. They're business decisions that only make sense as they are part of a scheme to make Macintoshes and iPods more attractive products.
Based on this observation, I think that if it is the opinion of Apple that it can make the Apple more attractive to users, and that it's not prohibitively expensive (or distracting) to do so in terms of engineering resources, then they'll embed X11 directly into Quartz.
If Macintosh just becomes another platform for running Gnome and KDE apps, Apple loses, even if that actually makes Macintosh a more useful platform.
That may be true, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter. There is likely some merit in that point of view. Apples can already run KDE (and other open-source) apps through direct ports and utilities like Fink, so in a sense they already are what you describe here, and I admit that fact is one reason I purchased my Apple. Based on the observations I described above, I think Apple's management is using this kind of model, and I believe that they would see running Gnome and KDE apps better as a victory if it drives more Macintosh sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo. IBM wants the case to go on. That was SCO's major miscalculation: They were hoping that Novell, IBM, DaimlerChrysler, Autozone etc were going to settle out-of-court rather than fight. Unfortunately:
:)
* Novell is investing in Linux.
* IBM's investing in Linux and is using the case to validate the GPL.
* DaimlerChrysler, an automobile manufacturer, is highly experienced with quashing frivolous lawsuits of this nature.
* AutoZone etc. is willing to follow the others' leads.
All in all, it's great entertainment.
There's a difference between dismissing one party's claims, and dismissing the entire lawsuit. Even if the judge granted IBM's motion and dismissed every single one of SCO's claims, the case would still be open on IBM's counterclaims.
This case isn't about GPL.
What is the title of IBM's Sixth Counterclaim?
Skip down the page to the text that reads "SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM" almost halfway down the page.
What is the content of that claim?
Now do you notice mention of the GPL elsewhere? How about the seventh counterclaim? How about the eighth counterclaim?
This case is about the GPL very much, because IBM made it about the GPL. That's also why this case isn't going away.
It's not going to disappear, because IBM doesn't want it to. IBM filed counterclaims, and they want to see those through to the end.
This suit is going somewhere, and the big news from Wednesday is that the judge is going to help it get there: They are going to make Linux and the GPL bulletproof.
You ever see any action movies? Usually the movies will have some scene where the chief good guy/bad guy/bad guy's Top Thug will get challenged by some stupid thug/underling/rent-a-cop, usually spurned on by alcohol/his friends/basic stupidity. We then get treated to a scene where the principal character goes above and beyond what is necessary to deal with the situation. They go further than they need, to demonstrate to other minor characters and to the audience: This person is a badass.
IBM is betting the farm on Linux. This is a new business model if you're younger than about 40 years old; to IBM, free software that sells the service and equipment is how they got big in the first place.
SCO unwittingly played right into IBM's hands. IBM waited for a good six months until SCO had made a ton of public statements (and Groklaw had started really building up a database -- "open-source legal" if you will -- that helped them in this regard). Then, IBM brought forth the counterclaims.
The counterclaims are not geared towards destroying SCO, but they will have that effect. The counterclaims are designed so that IBM can use this opportunity to create a substantive legal precedent for the new license that represents the old business model.
(Editorial comment: It's worth noting that the GPL and FSF are essentially reactionary; Stallman's not so much trying to create a New World Order as to restore the way things were back in the good old days. That's why I say that this new license represents IBM's old business model.)
What's happened with Wednesday's ruling is that IBM is more than they dreamed to get from this case: Not only is the judge clearly siding with IBM, but the judge is so pissed off with SCO that he will now guide the case towards a substantive legal precedent that not only rescues Linux developers and users from this current legal threat, but will stand the test of appeals and time.
Much as fair-use advocates go back to the Sony vs. MPAA suit, Linux businessmen in the future will go back to this lawsuit to show why it's perfectly sound and justifiable to use Linux without any worry. This is our Betamax suit.
SCO (and if you follow the money, Microsoft) really, really shot themselves in the ass with this lawsuit. In attempting to extort money from IBM and give them trouble, they ended up giving IBM the opportunity to get exactly what they wanted. The more that lawyers like Groklaw's marbux and others in the media look at the ruling, the more they realize that not only is SCO about to be destroyed, but Linux and the GPL will soon be ironclad.
When this court case is done, Linux and the GPL will be bulletproof.
That's why this particular frivolous lawsuit is taking so long: Once IBM made those counterclaims, it no longer became frivolous. And the price for the frivolity will be dire not just to SCO, but to every company that supported them.
Over the past year every company remotely connected with SCO has done what they can to distance themselves from them. EV1 apologized for buying Linux licenses. Another company that won Linux licenses as part of a settlement deal had to go on the public record denying that they paid for those licenses. Baystar, the company that put money into SCO on Microsoft's recommendation, backed out and asked for its money back.
Doesn't sound very frivolous any more, does it?
Why would China bother? What does North Korea offer them? As it is, NK's threats give China a bit of elbow room in international relations, as the only country that can really, you know, do anything with NK. "Sure mister Prime Minister... we'll help you with North Korea, if you do this for us..."
Korea's land is pretty much worthless, cold shite. There isn't anything there that China doesn't already have too much of already.
No, I don't think China's gonna do anything like that.
Remember that IBM brought counterclaims against SCO. This is the important thing. By managing the case in the way they have, IBM is giving Linux and the GPL a rock-solid legal precedent. As a result this "frivolous" lawsuit will actually eliminate one of the big credibility concerns people had with Linux and with open-source development.
Seeing IBM out there defending open-source -- not out of any bullshit sense of "community," but to defend its business strategy -- is erasing the image of the open-source coder, unwashed, unshaven, working in his parents' basement, and replacing it with large corporations with "new" business models.
I use quotes, because this is the way the computer industry used to be in the days before Microsoft: Software was part of the hardware or service you bought, not a product in itself.
Hubble was one of the first casualties of the Challenger explosion. Remember that the first thing that needed to be fixed was a flawed mirror?
While I was in undergrad at UT, I was an officer in the local SEDS chapter, where Dr. Hans Mark explained that the mirror was known to be flawed before it was launched. When the Challenger exploded, NASA shut down everything. Hubble remained, unrepaired, in a dark warehouse somewhere. When they got the HST program back up and running, they'd long forgotten their problem with the mirror.
HST was a great idea, but there were some big screwups attached to it.
Isn't AT&T about to get bought out by one of its former subsidiaries, SBC (formerly Southwestern Bell)?
First, it is way too long.
r -insulting-you that characterize his flames.
Second, it isn't nearly as witty as Linus is; it doesn't have any of the insults-that-make-you-feel-like-thanking-Linus-fo
Third and most vital, Linus doesn't give a damn about any of the crap the author's writing about. He doesn't care about taking over the world or marketing. He is only interested in technology.
In one of the forewords to one of the editions of Fahrenheit 451 that I picked up at the library to read, Bradbury admits that Truffaut came up with some great lines for The Captain he wished he'd thought of himself; he also felt the movie was true to what he intended for the book.
" /thank you thank you, don't forget to tip your waitress. ;)" ...unless she's a cow, because we don't condone cow tipping.
You know, that's an old joke, but it takes on a whole different meaning in this context.
Cow Woman. Moo. Hey! I just thought of the perfect wet-nurse...
Your conclusion is surprisingly accurate.
In Europe, when Christopher Colombus wanted to fund an expedition to reach India by sailing West, he went to one government. He was turned down. He went to another. Also turned down. He went to several different European countries, all relatively close to each other, until he had a government tell him, "Yes."
China has had a single unified power structure governing the entire area for thousands of years. If a dynasty decided it didn't like your newfangled device or research area, then you didn't get to do it.
The geography that allows China to have a single power structure rule over it, and geography that keeps Europe divided despite multiple attempts to compeltely conquer it, turn out to be the main difference here. There are all these countries nearby each other in Europe; that increases the odds that you can travel somewhere where they have a pro-R&D ideology, if you can't find it in your own country.
Incidentally, I suspect that this "banning" China is doing will be slightly more effective than screaming at a brick wall. They have made their rule; fat chance of them actually being able to enforce it.
The MPAA and RIAA serve the vital purpose of distracting citizens from what the government is doing. That gives them an extremely high priority in DC.
The only person I'll ever promote on my webpage is myself.
Oh, and the Brobdingnagian Bards. Them too. But that's because one of the guys is one of my best friends, and I steal their songs for remixes... not because they pay me.
What I meant was that they haven't hit rock bottom yet and haven't realized that this current descent is not merely the normal ups-and-downs of business. From a financial standpoint, things still look great (even up), so why would they be worried?
Disney didn't benefit from the creative cinema boom in the mid-to-late 70's that saved the major studios (and resurrected Fox from the dead). Until Michael Eisner and The Little Mermaid, Disney was irrelevant, uninteresting, and doomed.
On the Tron DVD, and one of the points Lisberger makes is that no one ever made a movie in the way Tron was, and no one will ever make a movie that way again. Part of the reason is the sheer manpower required to do it, which has only gotten more expensive; even back then, they outsourced to Taiwan. The other part is, as others have said more eloquently, changes in technology make the methods unnecessary.
There are two other things Tron had going for it that a remake is unlikely to have.
1. Jeff Bridges. The guy's an incredible talent, was not yet respected enough to ask for an unheard-of salary, and is the sort of great actor who goes for the interesting roles. At the time, the character was interesting. Now, the same character has been done many times before.
2. A desperate studio needing to take a huge risk. Remakes are low-risk by definition. Right now, Disney is coming down off of a high point. They still have the same guy guiding them that brought them to that high point. They're still following the same formulas that got them there, still making lots of money, and not aware that the old formula has become trite. At the time Tron came out, Disney was still reeling from Walt's death and was aware that people saw them as old-fashioned. We've forgotten those days of G-rated Don Knotts comedies and Herbie Goes Bananas. Disney's executives saw something daring and risky, and felt that Lisberger's studio could do something that could be a modern-day Fantasia. They felt Walt would approve. They were more right than they knew, and ended up producing something that few appreciated until after the film had left the box office.
I think the visual appeal can still work, but the role is no longer so interesting to that type of actor, and the studio is not taking any risks.
The more I think of it, the less interested I am.
Let me tell you about a guy with an MBA from Harvard I know who grew up in Midland, Texas -- aka the Ass End of Nowhere. He was absolutely brilliant, particularly with human relationships.
Now if you spoke to this guy, you'd never believe he graduated from college, much less got through grad school at the finest institution of higher education in the USA. He actually used that to his advantage. I saw him do this time and time again... he'd slip into the backwards Texas drawl, mess up some word or speech on purpose, and then people would think, "Oh, what a stupid hick." Of course, at this point, they were at his mercy, just like the lady and the vendor in the tale you describe.
Only this guy one-upped your gal and then some. He became President of the United States this way.
Twice.
NeoOffice/J
I would say that's a good thing. After all, the idea is for people to write on subject they're experts on.
If he were to write on, say, the evolution of science fiction on television in the 20th century, you wouldn't expect it to be a very good article.
My frustration stemmed less from the stupid license and more from the inability to figure out just what the hell Talad wanted me to write. He clearly had something specific in mind, but lacked the music theory vocab to describe it, and so I ended up spending a lot of time with some work that was never going to get used.
The music is available for download through my website now. At least others can download and enjoy it now.
"I'll do you a better turn then that, I remember your name :) We used to hang out in the public channel and compare notes since we weren't 'leet enough to be in the dev channel :)"
Damn, I -knew- your nick looked familiar.
Holy shit, Monkelectric -- you just echoed my exact experience when I offered my services to them over a year ago. I remember the guy who's nick started with "V" you're referring to -- I agree, he was top-notch to work with; a programmer out of Houston, if I recall. Texas friendly and all that. But he wasn't the one who I had to please; I had to please Talad, and when I pressed Talad for details on what he wanted for "combat music," I got a description very similar in nature to what you described.
When I saw the slashdot article my reaction was exactly like the grandparent post; I wasn't expecting to see another musician's take mirror my own so precisely.
"I think you made your point. Thank you for the demonstration."
"Choose your next witticism carefully Mr. McBride, it may be your last."
"Do you expect me to settle?"
"No, Mr. McBride. I expect you to die."
In what sense do you think Apple is a "hardware company"? Most of their engineering and manufacturing seems to be outsourced.
Apple is a "hardware company" in the same sense that Dell is; their main corporate objective is computer hardware sales.
Note the pittance they make on iTunes Music Store sales along with the vigilance they have in making sure AAC files are the only DRM-enabled files to go on the iPod: iTMS is a tool to sell more iPods. Other things you can identify in this vein are the iLife suite, a bunch of applications that are shipped free with every new Mac; the FSF-approved licensing of Darwin's source code; and advancing certain other open-source projects, most notably ZeroConfig and Konqueror. They're business decisions that only make sense as they are part of a scheme to make Macintoshes and iPods more attractive products.
Based on this observation, I think that if it is the opinion of Apple that it can make the Apple more attractive to users, and that it's not prohibitively expensive (or distracting) to do so in terms of engineering resources, then they'll embed X11 directly into Quartz.
If Macintosh just becomes another platform for running Gnome and KDE apps, Apple loses, even if that actually makes Macintosh a more useful platform.
That may be true, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter. There is likely some merit in that point of view. Apples can already run KDE (and other open-source) apps through direct ports and utilities like Fink, so in a sense they already are what you describe here, and I admit that fact is one reason I purchased my Apple. Based on the observations I described above, I think Apple's management is using this kind of model, and I believe that they would see running Gnome and KDE apps better as a victory if it drives more Macintosh sales.