Reverse stock splits cost money -- expecially 1 for 3. They'll have to buy beck fractional shares.
It still only buys them a short reprieve. There's another limit they are close to hitting -- $20 million total market capitalization. A reverse split can help the price, but does nothing for Market Cap.
It's really just a matter of time. They might as well acept the delisting and not waste any prescious cash on it.
Very sad that european courts can deal with utterly absurd claims so very quickly in corporate cases (and have done so for SCO's), while the SCOX vs. IBM and SCOX vs. Novell still drag on even though by the judge's comments it's clear they know the thing is a farce.
As the SCO v. Daimler-Chrysler case shows, US courts can deal swiftly with bogus claims. Part of the reason the IBM case has dragged on so long is IBM's approach to the case. Instead of making a motion for dismissal -- which might have dealt with many of SCOX's claims, IBM chose to respond with 14 counterclaims - more claims than in SCOX's original suit. This, as much as anything else, added tremendously to the complexity and time required to prepare the case.
In SCO v. Novell, Novell did begin with motions to dismiss -- and their first such motion was granted. But, because the Asset Purchase Agreement between Novell and the original Santa Cruz was so poorly drafted, the judge could do nothing at to grant a permanent dismissal. It appears that the parties never really agreed whether copyrights should be transferred, so they papered over the problem with the nonsensical "except for copyrights necessary to run the business" language. Even Novell eventually piled on a number of counterclaims of their own.
What you have in cases with counterclaims is two cases going on simulatneously. That is going to take a long time.
And where does this supposed internal clock get its time? Is it set at the factory and kept running in shipping and warehouse storage by a battery? There's nothing in a design requirement for an IP interface and web server administration tool which requires time stamps.
So, where does the printer get the date and time? My printers don't have an internal clock (to the best of my knoledge.) The print driver must be supplying that information which leaves open the possibility of the date and time beeing spoofed in any number of ways.
It can _always_ be a candidate to be better understood, revised or outright discarded.
Of course, but, as I said, no scientist wastes their time trying to disprove accepted science. They may find a result which is inconsistant with accepted theory and publish it, but no one is going to try to disprove gravity or even go out of their way to verify it.
The moment one theory is put on a pedestal, it's suddenly taken as a 100% finished and definitive fact, that noone should ever question, it stopped being science.
That's some chip on your shoulder. If you want to challange accepted results in science, you have to work at it to be taken seriously. You learn the basic science in the field, you make an original contribution and that gets you credibility and the background necessary to work professionally in the field.
It's not that no one should ever question it, It that not just anyone should question it.
I accept the judgement of the leading scientists in the field -- that there is sufficient evidence for global warming caused by the effects of human activity. At some point, critics need to stop complaining there isn't enough evidence and start finding refinements for the accepted theory.
In science you're _supposed_ to question everything, regardless of why.
Actually, no. Actual scientists work within a scientific framework of generally recognized science. Their job is to contribute to the pool of knowledge.
Sometimes science takes a retrench and discards an old, incomplete theory for a newer, more useful one. But no real scientist wastes their time questioning EVERYTHING. And no real scientist wastes their time questioning results outside their field of competence.
That's how science works. You have to distinguish between massive compact objects with an event horizon and speculations about what goes on behind that horizon. The article was saying that singularities don't exist. It's pretty clear that objects with an escape velocity in excess of the speed of light do exist. the conventional term for these things is 'black holes'. No one knows exactly what physics goes on behind the event horizon.
Why do you say that the GPL is irrevocable? Is there some langauge in it which makes it irrevocable? Do you have standing to sue to fight a purportive revocation?
In general, gratis license grants are prospectively revocable. If the owner informs the person who has received the grant that it is revoked as of today, that person loses the license to redistribute. They don't have standing to sue to maintain the license because it is not a contract.
There's nothing which stops the sole author of a GPLed piece of software from revoking their license. They may have to spend a lot of time tracking down and giving C&D notices to subsequent redistributors (and likely no court will grant damages until notice of the revocation has been received.) but that dosn't stop the grantor from revoking their grant.
they do still need to provide access to the source if it was under the GPL, specifically, when you got it
Assuming that the company owns all of the copyrights in the software, that's a completely unenforcable promise. If the company ceases to provide source code, you don't have standing to sue them in court for specific performance because they haven't promised anyhting. All they have done is require that third party distributors distribute code, they haven't required that they themselves distribute source code.
Furthermore, the GPL is likely prospectively revocable. The new owner could revoke the license grant and you couldn't compel them to continue it because you don't have a contract all you have is a license grant. And the law is pretty well settled that license grants without compensation are revocable.
If you invite someone into your backyard, you have granted them a license to enter your property. If you don't like what they are doing, you can revoke the license and tell them to leave. Your license is revocable at will.
It's not hard to find bootleg DVDs in NYC. I can think of three places where you are likely to find someone with a selection of recent theatrical releaes lined up on a cardboard box on a Friday afternoon. The last guy I passed had Hitch, Guess Who and Beauty Shop plus at least a half dozen other titles. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with what's currently playing (and in NYC all you have to do is look up at the billboards) will recognize that these are current titles and not yet released on DVD. It usually takes a week for a big, new release to hot the bootleg table.
Mostly they display the DVD boxes on a cardboard box. Some of the guys will use a blanket so that they can just hide their wares and take off if the police show up.
Of course, it's unconscionable that the police would take bribes to enforce the law. But it's equally clear that the MPAA wasn't paying enough because those guys are in the same places week after week.
In my, not so legal, opinion, embedding a font is a typical *use* of that font. Since the GPL, by its terms, does not cover use, embedding a font is not an act of distribution as contemplated by the GPL. Additional evidence supporting this view is that the font designer has ticked the "may embed" bit in the font descriptor explicitly allowing embedding and the fact that fonts can not, in ordinary operation, be extracted from documents in which they have been enbedded. Additional assistance may be obtained from the "mere aggregation" clause. Unfortunately, the FSF has not seen fit to take the common sense approach to this question.
You can't embed the font file itself or substantial pieces of the data that created it in a document (such as a PDF) without permission from the owner, and it is there that GPL exceptions may be needed to prevent the entire document from becoming GPL.
That is complete and utter nonsense. It is a "mere aggregation" under the GPL. The GPL does not make a PDF or other embedded document format subject to the GPL.
So, are you suggesting he reverse engineered it by thinking about how it might work? Are you claiming he had no access at all to tcpdumps of BK sessions?
He must have. The logical consequences of that follow immediately. Either he had an accomplice who was using BK or he was sniffing someone's traffic without their permission. There are logically no other alternatives.
>> I don't know how Tridge was doing his reverse engineering. Apparently neither do you. So perhaps we should wait to crucify the guy until we actually have some facts.
Come on, tell me. How did Tridge get access to dumps of BK network protocol? There's only two possibilities. They involve either an accomplice or sniffing someone else's packets.
You see, valuing Freeness in software, is not just idealogy. Freedom is a tangible, practical virtue.
Listen to yourself. Virtue is ideological.
If a tool can disappear at any moment, is it really the best tool? Imagine what a surgeon would think, if his scalpel suddenly disintigrated in the middle of an operation.
The tool didn't just disappear. Linus stopped using it which meant that the productive relationship he had built up based on three year's experience with the tool was disrupted.
The tool is still usable and still used by some kernel maintainers. Over time, though, they will migrate to whatever Linus and the git team come up with.
You've demonstrated that you know jack shit about SCMs, how Linus works and why BK was an extrmely valuable tool. It's demonstrably true that BK was an excellent tool because of the productivity the LK team has shown over the last three years. Linus has used other SCMs and they don't work the way he works. BK was clearly a better tool.
You can't sensibly argue it wasn't unless you are doing what the subject warns you about.
Reverse engineering is moral when you buy your own software, your own hardware and anything you screw up affects only you. Tride's RE work violated two of these conditions.
That makes no sense. How was Tridge getting access to BK network traffic for reverse engineering? Either he was using the tool or he had an accomplice who had accepted the license. Or are you telling me that OSDL allowed Tridge to sniff Linus' traffic?
Either way, something stinks here.
Linus has been very clear about the shortcomings of other SCM tools. He would tell anyone who would listen what he liked about BK and what he disliked about the others. The others DIDN'T WORK FOR LINUS. They didn't work the way he wanted to work.
Linus chose the best tool available to get the job done. It happened to be a closed source tool. The productivity of the LK team over the past three years testifies to the value of the tool.
In the meantime, Tridge tries to reverse engineer the network protocol. It's one thing to pay for software and then try to reverse engineer it for interoperability. It's another thing to take something which somone has offered to the LK community and violate the conditions of that gift. If you can't see the difference, your ideological blinders are obscuring your vision.
Linus has every reason to be angry. Someone took away a very useful tool from him. I'd be pissed.
Is there a social contract, then, which says that I should have installed Flash on my PC? Hey, a lot of ads are delivered up in flash. Am I stealing from these websites which use flash ads because I've resisted the self-destructive urge to load this pile of steaming crapware on my PC?
I fail to see that this is a problem. The past few years of Linux development have been incredibly productive due to bitkeeper. It's a good tool for the job.
That they had to stop using it is neither here nor there. They got three years of use out of a good tool and anything they write to replace it it going to benefit from that experience with a good tool.
Why do I act as though ideology is a dirty word? It isn't? When ideology makes you do suboptimal things and, worse, when it makes to try to force *others* like Linus to do suboptimal things, then yes, ideology is most assuredly evil.
Linus used BitKeeper despite its closed source/free use license because it was THE BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB. Linus defends other developers choice of license because it's their choice.
Linus, thank $DEITY, is no ESR.
You know, I choose to drive a vehicle I bought from a proprietary car manufacturer because it works better than anything I am able to build myself. I hope you don't think less of me.
What? Translation involves taking the ideas and expressions i a work and finding a way to make similar expressions in a language with different idioms, vocabulary and verb forms. It is *far* from a mechanical process. Mechanical processes, like Altavista's babelfish and Google's translation tools, provide *poor* translations.
Yes, a scan is like a photo for the purposes. Read Bridgeman v. Corel. Digital copies of public domain images are not copyrightable works. Scanning a work so as to provide the clearest image adds no creative expression which can be protected. The protectable elements in photos are the posing, the lighting and the camera details like depth of focus, filters and framing. Your vacation snapshot of the Washington monument taken from on line to tour it which is essentially identical to hundreds of thousands of similar photos has a very thin copyright. Someone else's carefully lit and shot nighttime photo taken at just the moment that the full moon is hanging next to the top has substancial copyright protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Reverse stock splits cost money -- expecially 1 for 3. They'll have to buy beck fractional shares.
It still only buys them a short reprieve. There's another limit they are close to hitting -- $20 million total market capitalization. A reverse split can help the price, but does nothing for Market Cap.
It's really just a matter of time. They might as well acept the delisting and not waste any prescious cash on it.
Very sad that european courts can deal with utterly absurd claims so very quickly in corporate cases (and have done so for SCO's), while the SCOX vs. IBM and SCOX vs. Novell still drag on even though by the judge's comments it's clear they know the thing is a farce.
As the SCO v. Daimler-Chrysler case shows, US courts can deal swiftly with bogus claims. Part of the reason the IBM case has dragged on so long is IBM's approach to the case. Instead of making a motion for dismissal -- which might have dealt with many of SCOX's claims, IBM chose to respond with 14 counterclaims - more claims than in SCOX's original suit. This, as much as anything else, added tremendously to the complexity and time required to prepare the case.
In SCO v. Novell, Novell did begin with motions to dismiss -- and their first such motion was granted. But, because the Asset Purchase Agreement between Novell and the original Santa Cruz was so poorly drafted, the judge could do nothing at to grant a permanent dismissal. It appears that the parties never really agreed whether copyrights should be transferred, so they papered over the problem with the nonsensical "except for copyrights necessary to run the business" language. Even Novell eventually piled on a number of counterclaims of their own.
What you have in cases with counterclaims is two cases going on simulatneously. That is going to take a long time.
And where does this supposed internal clock get its time? Is it set at the factory and kept running in shipping and warehouse storage by a battery? There's nothing in a design requirement for an IP interface and web server administration tool which requires time stamps.
So, where does the printer get the date and time? My printers don't have an internal clock (to the best of my knoledge.) The print driver must be supplying that information which leaves open the possibility of the date and time beeing spoofed in any number of ways.
It can _always_ be a candidate to be better understood, revised or outright discarded.
Of course, but, as I said, no scientist wastes their time trying to disprove accepted science. They may find a result which is inconsistant with accepted theory and publish it, but no one is going to try to disprove gravity or even go out of their way to verify it.
The moment one theory is put on a pedestal, it's suddenly taken as a 100% finished and definitive fact, that noone should ever question, it stopped being science.
That's some chip on your shoulder. If you want to challange accepted results in science, you have to work at it to be taken seriously. You learn the basic science in the field, you make an original contribution and that gets you credibility and the background necessary to work professionally in the field.
It's not that no one should ever question it, It that not just anyone should question it.
I accept the judgement of the leading scientists in the field -- that there is sufficient evidence for global warming caused by the effects of human activity. At some point, critics need to stop complaining there isn't enough evidence and start finding refinements for the accepted theory.
In science you're _supposed_ to question everything, regardless of why.
Actually, no. Actual scientists work within a scientific framework of generally recognized science. Their job is to contribute to the pool of knowledge.
Sometimes science takes a retrench and discards an old, incomplete theory for a newer, more useful one. But no real scientist wastes their time questioning EVERYTHING. And no real scientist wastes their time questioning results outside their field of competence.
That's how science works. You have to distinguish between massive compact objects with an event horizon and speculations about what goes on behind that horizon. The article was saying that singularities don't exist. It's pretty clear that objects with an escape velocity in excess of the speed of light do exist. the conventional term for these things is 'black holes'. No one knows exactly what physics goes on behind the event horizon.
Why do you say that the GPL is irrevocable? Is there some langauge in it which makes it irrevocable? Do you have standing to sue to fight a purportive revocation?
In general, gratis license grants are prospectively revocable. If the owner informs the person who has received the grant that it is revoked as of today, that person loses the license to redistribute. They don't have standing to sue to maintain the license because it is not a contract.
There's nothing which stops the sole author of a GPLed piece of software from revoking their license. They may have to spend a lot of time tracking down and giving C&D notices to subsequent redistributors (and likely no court will grant damages until notice of the revocation has been received.) but that dosn't stop the grantor from revoking their grant.
they do still need to provide access to the source if it was under the GPL, specifically, when you got it
Assuming that the company owns all of the copyrights in the software, that's a completely unenforcable promise. If the company ceases to provide source code, you don't have standing to sue them in court for specific performance because they haven't promised anyhting. All they have done is require that third party distributors distribute code, they haven't required that they themselves distribute source code.
Furthermore, the GPL is likely prospectively revocable. The new owner could revoke the license grant and you couldn't compel them to continue it because you don't have a contract all you have is a license grant. And the law is pretty well settled that license grants without compensation are revocable.
If you invite someone into your backyard, you have granted them a license to enter your property. If you don't like what they are doing, you can revoke the license and tell them to leave. Your license is revocable at will.
It's not hard to find bootleg DVDs in NYC. I can think of three places where you are likely to find someone with a selection of recent theatrical releaes lined up on a cardboard box on a Friday afternoon. The last guy I passed had Hitch, Guess Who and Beauty Shop plus at least a half dozen other titles. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with what's currently playing (and in NYC all you have to do is look up at the billboards) will recognize that these are current titles and not yet released on DVD. It usually takes a week for a big, new release to hot the bootleg table.
Mostly they display the DVD boxes on a cardboard box. Some of the guys will use a blanket so that they can just hide their wares and take off if the police show up.
Of course, it's unconscionable that the police would take bribes to enforce the law. But it's equally clear that the MPAA wasn't paying enough because those guys are in the same places week after week.
In my, not so legal, opinion, embedding a font is a typical *use* of that font. Since the GPL, by its terms, does not cover use, embedding a font is not an act of distribution as contemplated by the GPL. Additional evidence supporting this view is that the font designer has ticked the "may embed" bit in the font descriptor explicitly allowing embedding and the fact that fonts can not, in ordinary operation, be extracted from documents in which they have been enbedded. Additional assistance may be obtained from the "mere aggregation" clause. Unfortunately, the FSF has not seen fit to take the common sense approach to this question.
The "font exception" is unnecessary.
You can't embed the font file itself or substantial pieces of the data that created it in a document (such as a PDF) without permission from the owner, and it is there that GPL exceptions may be needed to prevent the entire document from becoming GPL.
That is complete and utter nonsense. It is a "mere aggregation" under the GPL. The GPL does not make a PDF or other embedded document format subject to the GPL.
So, are you suggesting he reverse engineered it by thinking about how it might work? Are you claiming he had no access at all to tcpdumps of BK sessions?
He must have. The logical consequences of that follow immediately. Either he had an accomplice who was using BK or he was sniffing someone's traffic without their permission. There are logically no other alternatives.
>> I don't know how Tridge was doing his reverse engineering. Apparently neither do you. So perhaps we should wait to crucify the guy until we actually have some facts.
Come on, tell me. How did Tridge get access to dumps of BK network protocol? There's only two possibilities. They involve either an accomplice or sniffing someone else's packets.
You see, valuing Freeness in software, is not just idealogy. Freedom is a tangible, practical virtue.
Listen to yourself. Virtue is ideological.
If a tool can disappear at any moment, is it really the best tool? Imagine what a surgeon would think, if his scalpel suddenly disintigrated in the middle of an operation.
The tool didn't just disappear. Linus stopped using it which meant that the productive relationship he had built up based on three year's experience with the tool was disrupted.
The tool is still usable and still used by some kernel maintainers. Over time, though, they will migrate to whatever Linus and the git team come up with.
You've demonstrated that you know jack shit about SCMs, how Linus works and why BK was an extrmely valuable tool. It's demonstrably true that BK was an excellent tool because of the productivity the LK team has shown over the last three years. Linus has used other SCMs and they don't work the way he works. BK was clearly a better tool.
You can't sensibly argue it wasn't unless you are doing what the subject warns you about.
Reverse engineering is moral when you buy your own software, your own hardware and anything you screw up affects only you. Tride's RE work violated two of these conditions.
Yeah, Linus is productive because Larry makes him offer a human sacrifice before each coding session with BK.
You have auto-Godwinned yourself.
That makes no sense. How was Tridge getting access to BK network traffic for reverse engineering? Either he was using the tool or he had an accomplice who had accepted the license. Or are you telling me that OSDL allowed Tridge to sniff Linus' traffic?
Either way, something stinks here.
Linus has been very clear about the shortcomings of other SCM tools. He would tell anyone who would listen what he liked about BK and what he disliked about the others. The others DIDN'T WORK FOR LINUS. They didn't work the way he wanted to work.
The compromise was too great to use an OS tool.
Linus chose the best tool available to get the job done. It happened to be a closed source tool. The productivity of the LK team over the past three years testifies to the value of the tool.
In the meantime, Tridge tries to reverse engineer the network protocol. It's one thing to pay for software and then try to reverse engineer it for interoperability. It's another thing to take something which somone has offered to the LK community and violate the conditions of that gift. If you can't see the difference, your ideological blinders are obscuring your vision.
Linus has every reason to be angry. Someone took away a very useful tool from him. I'd be pissed.
Is there a social contract, then, which says that I should have installed Flash on my PC? Hey, a lot of ads are delivered up in flash. Am I stealing from these websites which use flash ads because I've resisted the self-destructive urge to load this pile of steaming crapware on my PC?
The "social contract" concept is bogus.
I fail to see that this is a problem. The past few years of Linux development have been incredibly productive due to bitkeeper. It's a good tool for the job.
That they had to stop using it is neither here nor there. They got three years of use out of a good tool and anything they write to replace it it going to benefit from that experience with a good tool.
Why do I act as though ideology is a dirty word? It isn't? When ideology makes you do suboptimal things and, worse, when it makes to try to force *others* like Linus to do suboptimal things, then yes, ideology is most assuredly evil.
Yes, I should be referencing RMS. I saw that as I hit submit.
Perhaps you should say that your more ideological colleagues will bite you in the ass.
Linus used BitKeeper despite its closed source/free use license because it was THE BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB. Linus defends other developers choice of license because it's their choice.
Linus, thank $DEITY, is no ESR.
You know, I choose to drive a vehicle I bought from a proprietary car manufacturer because it works better than anything I am able to build myself. I hope you don't think less of me.
What? Translation involves taking the ideas and expressions i a work and finding a way to make similar expressions in a language with different idioms, vocabulary and verb forms. It is *far* from a mechanical process. Mechanical processes, like Altavista's babelfish and Google's translation tools, provide *poor* translations.
Yes, a scan is like a photo for the purposes. Read Bridgeman v. Corel. Digital copies of public domain images are not copyrightable works. Scanning a work so as to provide the clearest image adds no creative expression which can be protected. The protectable elements in photos are the posing, the lighting and the camera details like depth of focus, filters and framing. Your vacation snapshot of the Washington monument taken from on line to tour it which is essentially identical to hundreds of thousands of similar photos has a very thin copyright. Someone else's carefully lit and shot nighttime photo taken at just the moment that the full moon is hanging next to the top has substancial copyright protection.