The GPL license COULD potential open a business up for a lawsuit, and anyone who reads Slashdot knows that GPL-lovers are very quick to cry for censure of any company suspected of violating the license.
The safest, and most appropriate license for government-funded and government-created software is the BSD license.
You say that "GPL-Lovers" will sue entities releasing software under the GPL?
If you really think that Microsoft can easily replicate what Google is doing (using thousands of computers to calculate rankings, all organized in a cluster) with Windows, you look like Bill Gates' bootlicker.
Between some kid putting up some website on IIS and running a global search engine, there are some differences.
Actually, I don't know how you got moderated "Insightful".
Microsoft has clearly lost the Internet battle.
Microsoft's goal was to create a network in which they control all the protocols, all the formats and everybody has to pay a fee to put a site online.
But now we have a network with TCP/IP (Unix), http (neutral), html (neutral) where everybody can put up websites.
The whole browser-battle was just damage-control by Microsoft.
And in the next 5 years, with millions of online-capable PS3, millions of online-capable cellphones, millions of new Linux desktops (It's happening slowly, but it happens, just look at Munich and how 5 other cities around it also are looking into switching to Linux just a month after Munich's decision) and millions of Firebird or Opera users on Windows, IE's domination days are counted.
Sure, they will probably hold the majority of browsers for quite a while, but if only 30% are non-IE, it's a too large chunk to ignore and IE domination is over.
We have now identified lots of code copied source from our precious SCO Unix.
Here are 2 of the worst offending code snippets:
kernel/sched.c: n++; kernel/signal.c: ++count;
Please look at our SCO-Unix code, you will see how shamelessly those lines were copied:
drivers/scsi.c: n++; drivers/keybd.c: ++count;
And there are 58 other lines of shamelessly copied source code in Linux. Our marketing department has calculated that each line of code is worth 50,000,000 $ which translates to an average of about 10,000,000$ per character. We have found copied characters worth of 5,693,340,000,000 $ in the Linux source code, however, because we are generous, we only insist on the fully copied lines of code. However, if IBM doesn't pay, we might be forced to demand the full amount.
But for now, I only demand IBM to pay 3,000,000,000 $ within 2 weeks to this account:
account holder: Barl McDride
account no: 4239573204
Royal Cayman Bank
134 Ocean Boulevard, Cayman Islands
Every week of delay will cause another 1,000,000,000 $ due to lost sales, mental stress and other damages which have to be paid to the same account, so please pay quickly, or else.
Changed my mind? I have been entirely consistant in what I've said. A license for the Unix source code does not merely cover the Unix kernel. It includes core utilities and libraries. Microsoft licensed this code to port to Windows.
That doesn't make any sense. SFU exists for years already and there is nothing more to port to Windows that SCO can offer.
From your link: "The idea of going ahead with the license was initially motivated by wanting to make a statement reinforcing everything we've been saying about IP."
Wow, they are really desperate. The part in which they want to "improve" SFU is nonsense, because, as I said, there is nothing in SCO's over 10 year old code that can improve it.
What improvements (feature-wise) are you talking about anyway? I'm really excited to see such mind-gobbling new features from the 70's like multi-user management, multitasking and virtual memory.
Microsoft is not funding SCOs attack against Linux. A Unix source license would pay for SCO's lawyers for what, an hour two worth of work? It takes a fairly large team of high priced lawyers to attack IBM, and this does not come cheap. A single Unix source license is not particularly significant here.
Except that the quarter in which MS bought the license was the first profitable quarter for SCO in years.
Of course MS doesn't make any apps that run on Unix, but SFU are more or less Unix apps ported to Windows, partly even GPL apps.
So even when SCO were right about having the rights for the Unix OS, nobody would need a license to distribute mere Unix apps.
Also, MS already distributes SFU for years, strange coincidence that they buy a license from SCO just after they have threatened IBM but well before SCO has to pay any serious legal fees.
They claim that Services for Unix (which runs on Windows not on Unix) includes 300 Unix utilities and 1900 Unix API calls. It makes perfect sense that they would license the code for those utilities and libraries from SCO.
So let me get that straigt: You want me to believe that I need a license from SCO to implement a Unix system call?
I am merely stating that there is absolutely a valid reason why Microsoft would have bought a license for the Unix source code: To port it to Windows.
So you changed your mind? A few lines up you say it's because of SFU (a suite of *applications* which were distributed for *years* without any IP-issues already), now all of the sudden you think they will port "Unix code" to Windows?
Of course your new explanation is also lacking: By now, even Windows has everything SCO's outdated sourcecode has so what exactly would they port? Doesn't make any sense.
I am spouting no Microsoft party line FUD or anything along those lines.
Oh sure. The line "valid reason why Microsoft would have bought a license for the Unix source code" thus trying to indicate that SCO owns "the Unix source code" is FUD in a pure form. SCO owns parts of a very outdated source (over 10 years old) which is mostly (in the form of BSD) in the public domain anyway.
I hate to rain on your FUD-parade, but programming and/or offering Unix applications doesn't require a license from SCO. You know that just as well as I do.
You insult my intelligence by posting such nonsense.
Even Microsoft itself has admitted that the license itself wasn't really the reason for the purchase, they have stated that they wanted to "support" SCO because they treat that valuable IP the right way.
So better check with your local MSFT-representative to get your FUD inline with the official partyline from Redmond.
You absolutely aren't alone... I think it is safe to say that SCO is well on its way to being the most hated company in the IT sector. Microsoft, step aside, there is a new whipping boy in town.
Given the fact that Microsoft is financing SCO's anti-Linux crusade (or do you really believe that they pay millions for a license they don't need?), I can't agree with you.
I think you got that wrong, the correct spelling is:
Konqueror
Re:For payback (not gnome?? what??)
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
why not gnome?
Because while KDE improves in leaps and bounds (becoming faster, more integrated) Gnome just took a step backwards by removing configuration options.
Of course offering Gnome doesn't hurt anybody, but if they want to have a chance on the desktop it would be better to load KDE by default.
Actually my opinion is pretty much confirmed by the big inroads KDE/Linux, especially SuSE is making in Europe (already 5%-20% in German non-technical newsgroup posts, Munich, a city of 1.5 million will also switch) while desktop Linux is in a comatose state (less than 5% share in most non-technical newsgroups, no big cities switching) everywhere where RedHat (= Gnome/Linux) is dominating, especially the USA.
The Gnomies can talk all day long how confusing KDE is to the mythical, non-existant "average" user invented by self-proclaimed usability experts, however the *real* users in the *real* world have chosen KDE. Call me crazy, but I consider the needs of real users more important than those of hypothetical ones.
However I feel it would compete with their own OS.. even if it is on its way down. Some company (re: execs) don't like the idea of throwing out their baby.
Actually KDE/Solaris wouldn't be any more expensive than KDE/Linux for Sun, however Solaris doesn't offer anything over Linux on the desktop AFAIK and Linux is better supported (think about consumer hardware), better known and runs on more architectures (Think about Opteron, think about PPC970) so Linux would certainly be the better choice.
That Solaris is doomed in the long term is a fact.
Don't you guys get it that I'm talking exlusively about the desktop here?
Sun can put out a cheaper DESKTOP than HP and Dell because they don't have to pay the MS tax and it doesn't interfere with their high-margin server business.
Sun has 1 thing no other big computer-maker has: Complete independence from Microsoft.
If Sun were smart they would slap together cheap parts (may be but don't have to be x86), put KDE (not GNOME) and Linux on it and offer it at a good price.
IBM, HP, Dell etc. can't react that easily because they have to fear retaliation from Microsoft, so Sun could be the only serious Linux workstation maker for quite a few years. Despite all financial problems, Sun has a very good trademark so I have no doubt that Sun could sell a lot of those machines.
Also this wouldn't hurt their server business because those machines would be desktops.
All the monopoly-whining in the world won't help. On the contrary, it will help Microsoft by portraing them as invulnerable, always winning and not worth resisting.
What will make a difference is use products and open standards.
For example in southern Germany the tiny town of SchwÃbisch Hall has moved to Linux a few months ago, a few weeks ago Munich was inspired by that and (just a few kilometers away) has decided to do the same and a week later Stuttgart und Oldenburg, 2 other south-German cities are evaluating to join in, others will follow.
The dominos are falling. With all the relevant software being ported to Linux, expect a lot of other european cities to move to KDE/Linux as well within 3 years.
So please:
Stop whining, start doing. Whining will not achieve anything.
Tell your coworkers and your boss about Mozilla and OpenOffice, explain to your boss that Microsoft will give anybody huge discounts who is able to move away from Microsoft, etc.
It's more like that:
- Hey, Johnny stole something from me
- Huh? What?
- Something.
- So what did he steal?
- I won't tell anybody.
- Hmmm, so what shall we do about that now?
- Punish him! Punish him!
- But you won't tell me what he stole.
- I won't tell, but it's worth a billion of dollars.
- Huh.
Well it is insightful because SCO refuses to disclose the affected code.
If SCO would like to resolve IP issues as they claim they want, they would reveal the code, it would get replaced in the Linux kernel and everybody would be happy.
Do I lose the license when the maintenance agreement expires?
No. By purchasing the Maintenance Program once, you obtain the license for the continuous utilization of all components of SuSE Linux as described above.
Then SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 is not for you and SuSE will happily sell you a SuSE8.2 box for 60-70$ (which you can install on as many machines as you want BTW)
Well 5 licenses of XP and 5 licenses of Office XP cost somewhere between 2000$ and 3000$ without any support.
If you want a year of support from MS, I would guesstimate that you would end up paying at least 6000$ for 5 seats or 10 times of what SuSE charges.
SuSE's offering isn't meant for home users, it targets businesses which don't have much Linux experience and will need both much support to make the jump and also a possibility to run at least the most important MS apps.
For that niche (and only for that niche) SuSE's offer isn't a bad deal, IMO.
Actually, I think the amount of RAM is the most important thing. With 256MB, KDE/Linux would certainly be usable on a 200MHz machine. It wouldn't be blazingly fast, but certainly usable, especially the latest versions of KDE which became a bit faster too.
Slashdot Mirror
The safest, and most appropriate license for government-funded and government-created software is the BSD license.
You say that "GPL-Lovers" will sue entities releasing software under the GPL?
Do you even think before you post?
Between some kid putting up some website on IIS and running a global search engine, there are some differences.
Microsoft has clearly lost the Internet battle.
Microsoft's goal was to create a network in which they control all the protocols, all the formats and everybody has to pay a fee to put a site online.
But now we have a network with TCP/IP (Unix), http (neutral), html (neutral) where everybody can put up websites.
The whole browser-battle was just damage-control by Microsoft.
And in the next 5 years, with millions of online-capable PS3, millions of online-capable cellphones, millions of new Linux desktops (It's happening slowly, but it happens, just look at Munich and how 5 other cities around it also are looking into switching to Linux just a month after Munich's decision) and millions of Firebird or Opera users on Windows, IE's domination days are counted.
Sure, they will probably hold the majority of browsers for quite a while, but if only 30% are non-IE, it's a too large chunk to ignore and IE domination is over.
We have now identified lots of code copied source from our precious SCO Unix.
Here are 2 of the worst offending code snippets:
Please look at our SCO-Unix code, you will see how shamelessly those lines were copied:
And there are 58 other lines of shamelessly copied source code in Linux. Our marketing department has calculated that each line of code is worth 50,000,000 $ which translates to an average of about 10,000,000$ per character. We have found copied characters worth of 5,693,340,000,000 $ in the Linux source code, however, because we are generous, we only insist on the fully copied lines of code. However, if IBM doesn't pay, we might be forced to demand the full amount.
But for now, I only demand IBM to pay 3,000,000,000 $ within 2 weeks to this account:
account holder: Barl McDride
account no: 4239573204
Royal Cayman Bank
134 Ocean Boulevard, Cayman Islands
Every week of delay will cause another 1,000,000,000 $ due to lost sales, mental stress and other damages which have to be paid to the same account, so please pay quickly, or else.
Sincirely, your pal
Darl McBride
That doesn't make any sense. SFU exists for years already and there is nothing more to port to Windows that SCO can offer.
From your link: "The idea of going ahead with the license was initially motivated by wanting to make a statement reinforcing everything we've been saying about IP."
Wow, they are really desperate. The part in which they want to "improve" SFU is nonsense, because, as I said, there is nothing in SCO's over 10 year old code that can improve it.
What improvements (feature-wise) are you talking about anyway? I'm really excited to see such mind-gobbling new features from the 70's like multi-user management, multitasking and virtual memory.
Microsoft is not funding SCOs attack against Linux. A Unix source license would pay for SCO's lawyers for what, an hour two worth of work? It takes a fairly large team of high priced lawyers to attack IBM, and this does not come cheap. A single Unix source license is not particularly significant here.
Except that the quarter in which MS bought the license was the first profitable quarter for SCO in years.
By now, I think even most MS supporters are no longer believing SCO has a case. It's just vapor.
So even when SCO were right about having the rights for the Unix OS, nobody would need a license to distribute mere Unix apps.
Also, MS already distributes SFU for years, strange coincidence that they buy a license from SCO just after they have threatened IBM but well before SCO has to pay any serious legal fees.
They claim that Services for Unix (which runs on Windows not on Unix) includes 300 Unix utilities and 1900 Unix API calls. It makes perfect sense that they would license the code for those utilities and libraries from SCO.
So let me get that straigt: You want me to believe that I need a license from SCO to implement a Unix system call?
I am merely stating that there is absolutely a valid reason why Microsoft would have bought a license for the Unix source code: To port it to Windows.
So you changed your mind? A few lines up you say it's because of SFU (a suite of *applications* which were distributed for *years* without any IP-issues already), now all of the sudden you think they will port "Unix code" to Windows?
Of course your new explanation is also lacking: By now, even Windows has everything SCO's outdated sourcecode has so what exactly would they port? Doesn't make any sense.
I am spouting no Microsoft party line FUD or anything along those lines.
Oh sure. The line "valid reason why Microsoft would have bought a license for the Unix source code" thus trying to indicate that SCO owns "the Unix source code" is FUD in a pure form. SCO owns parts of a very outdated source (over 10 years old) which is mostly (in the form of BSD) in the public domain anyway.
You insult my intelligence by posting such nonsense.
Even Microsoft itself has admitted that the license itself wasn't really the reason for the purchase, they have stated that they wanted to "support" SCO because they treat that valuable IP the right way.
So better check with your local MSFT-representative to get your FUD inline with the official partyline from Redmond.
Given the fact that Microsoft is financing SCO's anti-Linux crusade (or do you really believe that they pay millions for a license they don't need?), I can't agree with you.
I think you got that wrong, the correct spelling is:
Konqueror
Because while KDE improves in leaps and bounds (becoming faster, more integrated) Gnome just took a step backwards by removing configuration options.
Of course offering Gnome doesn't hurt anybody, but if they want to have a chance on the desktop it would be better to load KDE by default.
Actually my opinion is pretty much confirmed by the big inroads KDE/Linux, especially SuSE is making in Europe (already 5%-20% in German non-technical newsgroup posts, Munich, a city of 1.5 million will also switch) while desktop Linux is in a comatose state (less than 5% share in most non-technical newsgroups, no big cities switching) everywhere where RedHat (= Gnome/Linux) is dominating, especially the USA.
The Gnomies can talk all day long how confusing KDE is to the mythical, non-existant "average" user invented by self-proclaimed usability experts, however the *real* users in the *real* world have chosen KDE. Call me crazy, but I consider the needs of real users more important than those of hypothetical ones.
However I feel it would compete with their own OS.. even if it is on its way down. Some company (re: execs) don't like the idea of throwing out their baby.
Actually KDE/Solaris wouldn't be any more expensive than KDE/Linux for Sun, however Solaris doesn't offer anything over Linux on the desktop AFAIK and Linux is better supported (think about consumer hardware), better known and runs on more architectures (Think about Opteron, think about PPC970) so Linux would certainly be the better choice.
That Solaris is doomed in the long term is a fact.
Sun can put out a cheaper DESKTOP than HP and Dell because they don't have to pay the MS tax and it doesn't interfere with their high-margin server business.
If you would have bothered reading my comment you would have realized that I was talking about workstations and not servers.
But only if they play their cards right.
Sun has 1 thing no other big computer-maker has: Complete independence from Microsoft.
If Sun were smart they would slap together cheap parts (may be but don't have to be x86), put KDE (not GNOME) and Linux on it and offer it at a good price.
IBM, HP, Dell etc. can't react that easily because they have to fear retaliation from Microsoft, so Sun could be the only serious Linux workstation maker for quite a few years. Despite all financial problems, Sun has a very good trademark so I have no doubt that Sun could sell a lot of those machines.
Also this wouldn't hurt their server business because those machines would be desktops.
Anyway, of course it all depends on how much power you have, a janitor won't be able to influence a companie's IT decisions, but the head-admin will.
Just the facts:
All the monopoly-whining in the world won't help. On the contrary, it will help Microsoft by portraing them as invulnerable, always winning and not worth resisting.
What will make a difference is use products and open standards.
For example in southern Germany the tiny town of SchwÃbisch Hall has moved to Linux a few months ago, a few weeks ago Munich was inspired by that and (just a few kilometers away) has decided to do the same and a week later Stuttgart und Oldenburg, 2 other south-German cities are evaluating to join in, others will follow.
The dominos are falling. With all the relevant software being ported to Linux, expect a lot of other european cities to move to KDE/Linux as well within 3 years.
So please:
Stop whining, start doing. Whining will not achieve anything.
Tell your coworkers and your boss about Mozilla and OpenOffice, explain to your boss that Microsoft will give anybody huge discounts who is able to move away from Microsoft, etc.
Yeah, "GNU's not Unix/Unix", insightful.
It's more like that: - Hey, Johnny stole something from me - Huh? What? - Something. - So what did he steal? - I won't tell anybody. - Hmmm, so what shall we do about that now? - Punish him! Punish him! - But you won't tell me what he stole. - I won't tell, but it's worth a billion of dollars. - Huh.
If SCO would like to resolve IP issues as they claim they want, they would reveal the code, it would get replaced in the Linux kernel and everybody would be happy.
Do I lose the license when the maintenance agreement expires?
No. By purchasing the Maintenance Program once, you obtain the license for the continuous utilization of all components of SuSE Linux as described above.
Then SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 is not for you and SuSE will happily sell you a SuSE8.2 box for 60-70$ (which you can install on as many machines as you want BTW)
If you want a year of support from MS, I would guesstimate that you would end up paying at least 6000$ for 5 seats or 10 times of what SuSE charges.
SuSE's offering isn't meant for home users, it targets businesses which don't have much Linux experience and will need both much support to make the jump and also a possibility to run at least the most important MS apps.
For that niche (and only for that niche) SuSE's offer isn't a bad deal, IMO.
A large part of Microsoft employees is stock options.
Actually, I think the amount of RAM is the most important thing. With 256MB, KDE/Linux would certainly be usable on a 200MHz machine. It wouldn't be blazingly fast, but certainly usable, especially the latest versions of KDE which became a bit faster too.