Whether the million-line would be considered to be "based on" the GPL is questionable. However, what is clear is that the author/publisher of the million-line program would be guilty of violating the copyright on the GPL'd code that he included. The author of the GPL'd code would then be able to seek damages and force the removal of his code from the million-line program (or negotiate some suitable liscensing for the code, at his discretion).
The court date for the SCO-IBM suit is currently set for April 2005. Is it really reasonable to believe that SCO will be a functioning entity at that point? Their management team is dumping stock like mad, and should have long since divested themselves of any stock in the company. So who will be left to go to trial with IBM?
Just so that everyone knows. This "news" became public around the same time as SCO's stock was in free-fall. In fact, the stock was trading 2 dollars lower than its opening price and falling. I found this rather a coincidence because since the news came out, the stock actually regained an entire dollar to its value.
Yes, many people have commented on the timing of SCO's press releases, and how they always seem to happen at just the right moments to send the stock ticking back upward. It's pretty clear this is a pump-and-dump operation.
So, the question is, how many more stock-boosting announcements does SCO have lined up? And how many more do they need to give the rest of their management team time to unload their otherwise-worthless stock?
What you want is a "product" and not a "service". What you're asking for is for the government to provide free every product which does "good for the public". This would include, soap, laundry detergent, deoderant (heh), cars, bikes, clothes, scissors, pens, pencils, paper, toilet paper, paper clips, computers, books, magazines (aka toilet paper), etc etc (you get my point).
No, the question is asking whether the government should fund the development of software that's freely available for the public good. There's a big difference between providing copy-able bits and providing physical products. You're drawing an unwarranted parallel between a single government program and full-scale socialism.
So what you're asking for is the government to determine what "product" is for the public good, subsidize it to limit business opprotunities to provide individuals who are looking to earn a living and profit from their work. Not to mention stock holders who make money on the profits made by companies who sell these products.
So? Libraries limit business opportunities for bookstores. Public fire departments limit business opportunities for private firefighting companies. Police departments limit business opportunities for private security firms and private investigators. Any government service detracts from private business opportunities. The question to be asked is whether society benefits from the tradeoff.
Doing this would not only affect the general moral of workers who provide such services, but will put thousands of people out of work while at the same time increasing our taxes to figures that I don't even want to imagine.
I can't tell here whether you're referring to a government program to sponsor open-source development or to your straw-man target socialist government. If you're talking only about government funding of software development, I can't see how that would raise taxes to the enormous levels you seem to think it would.
Generally, bad idea. Period. Besides, this "public good" is only to be for the public good of about 1/4 the US population.
Not true. Software is fundamentally important to the economy. If publically funded software development were to make software more widely and cheaply available, the efficiency of the economy as a whole would improve, to everyone's benefit, even those who never sit in front of a monitor.
Oh and by the way, most towns in the U.S. still have volunteer services where very little money is provided by the town.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, any town with a fire department has to spend a significant amount of money on equipment and physical infrastructure, regardless of whether the actual labor is paid or free.
I plan to make several anonymous calls to SCO, asking them exactly which of Mr. McBride's orfices he would like his money in. I plan to pay in small bills, all folded until they're nothing but sharp little corners. Who's with me?!
All I know is that Mike Hunt and Hugh G. Rection are about to get themselves Linux licenses.
I'm not into the scientific journal "scene", as it were, but I expect that's about as insulting as a review can possibly be. So maybe this guy is onto something profound, but more likely it's smoke and mirrors.
Having been exposed to that "scene", I can tell you that the referees for papers submitted to academic journals are capable of being quite clueless when they want to be. I've known a number of authors who got comments back from referees which made it quite clear the referees hadn't even bothered trying to understand the paper.
Believe it or not, the whole paper-refereeing scene isn't that much different from the Slashdot moderation system. Referees are chosen more or less at random (from within the community of people who are knowledgeable about the paper's subject matter, and who are willing to read and comment on a paper.) And just like Slashdot, some of them won't take the time to read the paper completely, some won't understand what the paper is really saying, and some will let their own personal biases determine how they vote.
Even if the probability of SCO beating IBM or taking control of Linux is very small, the payoff would be so large that even when discounted by a tiny probability, the current stock price, which reflects expected (in the probabilistic sense) profits looks reasonable.
Except that anyone who takes the time to investigate the case will conclude that the probability of an SCO victory in court is in fact zero, and thus there is no finite payoff that produces a non-zero expectation. (Read all those "Insighful" and "Informative" posts you're referring to--they do get repetitive, but by and large they're correct. SCO has no legal leg to stand on in this case.)
The people who are buying SCO stock are simply hoping to find stupider people to sell it to later on. It's pure speculation -- very much like the tech bubble.
Sure, I use it and you use it. When my mother uses it, I will accept that it's popular. Until then, it's popular only in a very narrow sense, e.g. "Originating among the people".
No, it's quite definitely popular in the sense of frequently encountered or widely accepted. And as the earlier poster said, since there's as yet no application of the Linux kernel that doesn't also involve use of the GNU tools, the GNU tools are, at a minimum as popular as the Linux kernel.
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, Jonathan Lamy, said Hatch was "apparently making a metaphorical point that if peer-to-peer networks don't take reasonable steps to prevent massive copyright infringement on the systems they create, Congress may be forced to consider stronger measures." The RIAA represents the major music labels.
So even the RIAA wants to make it clear that they don't actually endorse "destroying" people's computers. Hatch seems to be out on this limb by himself.
Timeline wise the origins of the SCO code predates the Linux code. thus if you discover two things are similar one should probably assume that the older one is more original.
Only if one assumes that both codebases grow and gain functionality at the same rate. As ESR showed in his whitepaper, Linux has grown and gained functionality substantially faster than SCO, and is ahead in many areas.
why would SCO want to alter any existing functionality in their code by changing it to linux code?
Perhaps the Linux implementation was more featureful. Perhaps it was more efficient. Perhaps the copied linux code delivered some functionality that was not present at all in the UnixWare kernel. Indeed, ESR shows in his whitepaper that Linux is substantiall more advanced than UnixWare in many areas, and has been for some time.
would this not be a recipe for destroyng backward compatibility?
Not as a rule. Programmers add features to all kinds of software without destroying backward-compatibility.
At a minumim any cribbed code would have to be patched for backward compatiblity. the only cases where this would not be true is if the new code was for completely novel functionality that would not have any influence on or need to call existing SCO code. not likely.
I don't follow at all. Why is that unlikely?
The more likely explanation is that they either both got the code from a source older than SCO's code (e.g. BSD) or Linux copied SCOs code as alledged.
Actually, if we know that the code was copied either from Linux to UnixWare or vice versa (i.e., we know that it didn't come from BSD), then the far likelier explanation is that SCO copied Linux code. Rememeber that UnixWare is proprietary; an SCO coder could easily copy a chunk of the Linux kernel and no one would ever know. However, anyone who copied in the other direction would be putting himself at risk, since the Linux kernel is open source, and the evidence of the copying would therefore be plainly visible.
first the SCO engineers were not re-writing the SCO linux kernel they were simply writing stubs and wrappers for the SCO kernel to make an API (if you will) that looked like Linux on the outside and was actually calling SCO unix routines. they were NOT changing the SCO unix routines or making SCO kernel more linux like. they just wanted to allow Linux application to be able to execute in a Linux Personality Module layer that made SCO look like linux without having to change the SCO kernel
Yes, this is what the unnamed "source close to SCO" says he was doing -- re-implementing certain Linux kernel APIs in the UnixWare kernel. And you're correct that that's perfectly legal.
But what he's saying is that while he and the other programmers on the project were implementing the LKP, they discovered that portions of the UnixWare kernel were already very similar to portions of the Linux kernel -- to the point of having identical variable names (presumably non-trivial ones), etc. In other words, although the LKP project is perfectly legal, this anonymous source says that while working on it, he and the other programmers on the project uncovered evidence of prior code-copying by SCO.
This is a lengthy prediction, and I'll probably get modded down for it,
Nothing like a good bit of karma-martyring, eh?
However, very few people in business are going to understand this. Management are scared idiots, American management doubly so. They're going to stay away from Linux in droves and are already feeling personally betrayed by the people who make Linux, just on the strength of the FUD and accusations. They're already at home telling the wife how big a mistake Linux was and how they should have listened to the doubters.
It's natural for them to take this view so easily because they've been conditioned all their lives to believe that "there's no such thing as a free lunch" and "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and after years of business training they're suspect of anything (even family matters) that don't emphasize the "bottom line" above all else. They were very reluctant to consider Linux in the first instance for these reasons and it took years of badgering on technical grounds and tempting on cost grounds from technical underlings to stop them from seeing Linux as some kind of a scam in the first place.
Your argument, like so many others I've seen along these lines, seems to be predicated on the assumption that the people who make it into management are blithering idiots. I've seen no evidence to support this notion. Yes, they do think differently from tech people. Yes, occasionally a single management type will make a bad decision as a result of misunderstanding a technical issue. But to label these people as a class as idiots is a major error.
Aside from that, you make numerous other unsupported claims in the above two paragraphs. (e.g., "They're already at home telling the wife how big a mistake Linux was and how they should have listened to the doubters." Really? How do you know this?)
The courts in the US, unfortunately, have the same view. If it's corporation versus non-corporation, the corporation will always get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof will always be on the non-corporation, regardless of what the "law" may say, and in many cases, it's impossible for the non-coproration to win a case; the court will simply rule for the corporation even if it's patently obvious that the law doesn't support such a ruling. They'll do it with a backhanded wink and a nod and the belief that to hurt business and "the economy" is far worse that to hurt any non-business entity or group of individuals.
Well, assuming that this assertion you make is true (again, you provide no supporting evidence, so it's rather difficult to evaluate, but assuming for the moment that it is true) then Linux is safe because IBM is a much bigger corporation than SCO, and upholding SCO's claims would do far more damage to the economy than a ruling in favor of IBM.
if you are not making money off of keeping your code secret, and you are going to release the code anyway, does it hurt you to allow others to make their code, which is derived from your code, secret?
It certainly does. If they keep their code secret, I can't read it, learn from it, recompile it, or modify it. If someone's going to do something cool with my code, I want to be able to play with it.
This will work for about five minutes, after which lists of every camera location will have been posted online.
RTFA. The cameras will be placed at likely terrorist targets, like chemical plants, airports and reservoirs. Not surprisingly, these places tend to already have security, so it's not going to be a particularly big revelation that there are cameras there as well. And since these will be big rugged outdoor webcams (again, RTFA), they'll be pretty easily visible regardless.
I had a dream once in which someone asked me if I knew how to use a shotgun. I said "Of course I know how to use a shotgun, I've played DOOM. First you step on the ammo..."
My freind runs Gentoo and he emerged it before it was even written, a year ago. I think he is at the mall right now, yelling at the mall walkers about how optimized his system is.
I'm a Gentoo user myself, but I gotta admit this is really funny.
This makes an interesting counterpoint to an article from last week about an editorial by Sheldon Pacotti, one of the designers of Deus Ex. Rees seems to think self-censorship is the best defense, while Pacotti thinks it's best to spread the knowledge far and wide, so that everybody has the information necessary to devise defenses against technological threats.
Yes, he does think about the state of the world, and he does have an educated view, but he ALSO has his own 'world' that he thinks the world is becoming.
So? Everyone who looks at the world and thinks about the future has some ideas about where he/she thinks it's headed. The only difference between Pacotti and (most of) the rest of us is that he's shared some of his ideas in a computer game.
While methane and other gases that are produced are used to power the plant, all the end products except the purified water can be sold, [Halberstadt] said.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: But what if...
A: No.
Q: Okay, but suppose...
A: Even then, no.
TheFrood
Whether the million-line would be considered to be "based on" the GPL is questionable. However, what is clear is that the author/publisher of the million-line program would be guilty of violating the copyright on the GPL'd code that he included. The author of the GPL'd code would then be able to seek damages and force the removal of his code from the million-line program (or negotiate some suitable liscensing for the code, at his discretion).
TheFrood
The court date for the SCO-IBM suit is currently set for April 2005. Is it really reasonable to believe that SCO will be a functioning entity at that point? Their management team is dumping stock like mad, and should have long since divested themselves of any stock in the company. So who will be left to go to trial with IBM?
TheFrood
Just so that everyone knows. This "news" became public around the same time as SCO's stock was in free-fall. In fact, the stock was trading 2 dollars lower than its opening price and falling. I found this rather a coincidence because since the news came out, the stock actually regained an entire dollar to its value.
Yes, many people have commented on the timing of SCO's press releases, and how they always seem to happen at just the right moments to send the stock ticking back upward. It's pretty clear this is a pump-and-dump operation.
So, the question is, how many more stock-boosting announcements does SCO have lined up? And how many more do they need to give the rest of their management team time to unload their otherwise-worthless stock?
TheFrood
What you want is a "product" and not a "service". What you're asking for is for the government to provide free every product which does "good for the public". This would include, soap, laundry detergent, deoderant (heh), cars, bikes, clothes, scissors, pens, pencils, paper, toilet paper, paper clips, computers, books, magazines (aka toilet paper), etc etc (you get my point).
No, the question is asking whether the government should fund the development of software that's freely available for the public good. There's a big difference between providing copy-able bits and providing physical products. You're drawing an unwarranted parallel between a single government program and full-scale socialism.
So what you're asking for is the government to determine what "product" is for the public good, subsidize it to limit business opprotunities to provide individuals who are looking to earn a living and profit from their work. Not to mention stock holders who make money on the profits made by companies who sell these products.
So? Libraries limit business opportunities for bookstores. Public fire departments limit business opportunities for private firefighting companies. Police departments limit business opportunities for private security firms and private investigators. Any government service detracts from private business opportunities. The question to be asked is whether society benefits from the tradeoff.
Doing this would not only affect the general moral of workers who provide such services, but will put thousands of people out of work while at the same time increasing our taxes to figures that I don't even want to imagine.
I can't tell here whether you're referring to a government program to sponsor open-source development or to your straw-man target socialist government. If you're talking only about government funding of software development, I can't see how that would raise taxes to the enormous levels you seem to think it would.
Generally, bad idea. Period. Besides, this "public good" is only to be for the public good of about 1/4 the US population.
Not true. Software is fundamentally important to the economy. If publically funded software development were to make software more widely and cheaply available, the efficiency of the economy as a whole would improve, to everyone's benefit, even those who never sit in front of a monitor.
Oh and by the way, most towns in the U.S. still have volunteer services where very little money is provided by the town.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, any town with a fire department has to spend a significant amount of money on equipment and physical infrastructure, regardless of whether the actual labor is paid or free.
TheFrood
I plan to make several anonymous calls to SCO, asking them exactly which of Mr. McBride's orfices he would like his money in. I plan to pay in small bills, all folded until they're nothing but sharp little corners. Who's with me?!
All I know is that Mike Hunt and Hugh G. Rection are about to get themselves Linux licenses.
TheFrood
I'm not into the scientific journal "scene", as it were, but I expect that's about as insulting as a review can possibly be. So maybe this guy is onto something profound, but more likely it's smoke and mirrors.
Having been exposed to that "scene", I can tell you that the referees for papers submitted to academic journals are capable of being quite clueless when they want to be. I've known a number of authors who got comments back from referees which made it quite clear the referees hadn't even bothered trying to understand the paper.
Believe it or not, the whole paper-refereeing scene isn't that much different from the Slashdot moderation system. Referees are chosen more or less at random (from within the community of people who are knowledgeable about the paper's subject matter, and who are willing to read and comment on a paper.) And just like Slashdot, some of them won't take the time to read the paper completely, some won't understand what the paper is really saying, and some will let their own personal biases determine how they vote.
TheFrood
If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.
Which, if you read the article, is exactly what O'Reilly is predicting.
TheFrood
Even if the probability of SCO beating IBM or taking control of Linux is very small, the payoff would be so large that even when discounted by a tiny probability, the current stock price, which reflects expected (in the probabilistic sense) profits looks reasonable.
Except that anyone who takes the time to investigate the case will conclude that the probability of an SCO victory in court is in fact zero, and thus there is no finite payoff that produces a non-zero expectation. (Read all those "Insighful" and "Informative" posts you're referring to--they do get repetitive, but by and large they're correct. SCO has no legal leg to stand on in this case.)
The people who are buying SCO stock are simply hoping to find stupider people to sell it to later on. It's pure speculation -- very much like the tech bubble.
TheFrood
Try "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club".
TheFrood
A lot of people say, "What's that?"
It's PAT.
Just wanted to let you know at least one person got the joke.
Sure, I use it and you use it. When my mother uses it, I will accept that it's popular. Until then, it's popular only in a very narrow sense, e.g. "Originating among the people".
No, it's quite definitely popular in the sense of
frequently encountered or widely accepted. And as the earlier poster said, since there's as yet no application of the Linux kernel that doesn't also involve use of the GNU tools, the GNU tools are, at a minimum as popular as the Linux kernel.
TheFrood
Damn, I was hoping it was that Dukes of Hazard thing again.
TheFrood
So even the RIAA wants to make it clear that they don't actually endorse "destroying" people's computers. Hatch seems to be out on this limb by himself.
TheFrood
they have a staggering ability to actually add there own text. *yawn*
And they often misuse "there" instead of "their", too.
TheFrood
Timeline wise the origins of the SCO code predates the Linux code. thus if you discover two things are similar one should probably assume that the older one is more original.
Only if one assumes that both codebases grow and gain functionality at the same rate. As ESR showed in his whitepaper, Linux has grown and gained functionality substantially faster than SCO, and is ahead in many areas.
why would SCO want to alter any existing functionality in their code by changing it to linux code?
Perhaps the Linux implementation was more featureful. Perhaps it was more efficient. Perhaps the copied linux code delivered some functionality that was not present at all in the UnixWare kernel. Indeed, ESR shows in his whitepaper that Linux is substantiall more advanced than UnixWare in many areas, and has been for some time.
would this not be a recipe for destroyng backward compatibility?
Not as a rule. Programmers add features to all kinds of software without destroying backward-compatibility.
At a minumim any cribbed code would have to be patched for backward compatiblity. the only cases where this would not be true is if the new code was for completely novel functionality that would not have any influence on or need to call existing SCO code. not likely.
I don't follow at all. Why is that unlikely?
The more likely explanation is that they either both got the code from a source older than SCO's code (e.g. BSD) or Linux copied SCOs code as alledged.
Actually, if we know that the code was copied either from Linux to UnixWare or vice versa (i.e., we know that it didn't come from BSD), then the far likelier explanation is that SCO copied Linux code. Rememeber that UnixWare is proprietary; an SCO coder could easily copy a chunk of the Linux kernel and no one would ever know. However, anyone who copied in the other direction would be putting himself at risk, since the Linux kernel is open source, and the evidence of the copying would therefore be plainly visible.
TheFrood
first the SCO engineers were not re-writing the SCO linux kernel they were simply writing stubs and wrappers for the SCO kernel to make an API (if you will) that looked like Linux on the outside and was actually calling SCO unix routines. they were NOT changing the SCO unix routines or making SCO kernel more linux like. they just wanted to allow Linux application to be able to execute in a Linux Personality Module layer that made SCO look like linux without having to change the SCO kernel
Yes, this is what the unnamed "source close to SCO" says he was doing -- re-implementing certain Linux kernel APIs in the UnixWare kernel. And you're correct that that's perfectly legal.
But what he's saying is that while he and the other programmers on the project were implementing the LKP, they discovered that portions of the UnixWare kernel were already very similar to portions of the Linux kernel -- to the point of having identical variable names (presumably non-trivial ones), etc. In other words, although the LKP project is perfectly legal, this anonymous source says that while working on it, he and the other programmers on the project uncovered evidence of prior code-copying by SCO.
TheFrood
This is a lengthy prediction, and I'll probably get modded down for it,
Nothing like a good bit of karma-martyring, eh?
However, very few people in business are going to understand this. Management are scared idiots, American management doubly so. They're going to stay away from Linux in droves and are already feeling personally betrayed by the people who make Linux, just on the strength of the FUD and accusations. They're already at home telling the wife how big a mistake Linux was and how they should have listened to the doubters.
It's natural for them to take this view so easily because they've been conditioned all their lives to believe that "there's no such thing as a free lunch" and "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and after years of business training they're suspect of anything (even family matters) that don't emphasize the "bottom line" above all else. They were very reluctant to consider Linux in the first instance for these reasons and it took years of badgering on technical grounds and tempting on cost grounds from technical underlings to stop them from seeing Linux as some kind of a scam in the first place.
Your argument, like so many others I've seen along these lines, seems to be predicated on the assumption that the people who make it into management are blithering idiots. I've seen no evidence to support this notion. Yes, they do think differently from tech people. Yes, occasionally a single management type will make a bad decision as a result of misunderstanding a technical issue. But to label these people as a class as idiots is a major error.
Aside from that, you make numerous other unsupported claims in the above two paragraphs. (e.g., "They're already at home telling the wife how big a mistake Linux was and how they should have listened to the doubters." Really? How do you know this?)
The courts in the US, unfortunately, have the same view. If it's corporation versus non-corporation, the corporation will always get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof will always be on the non-corporation, regardless of what the "law" may say, and in many cases, it's impossible for the non-coproration to win a case; the court will simply rule for the corporation even if it's patently obvious that the law doesn't support such a ruling. They'll do it with a backhanded wink and a nod and the belief that to hurt business and "the economy" is far worse that to hurt any non-business entity or group of individuals.
Well, assuming that this assertion you make is true (again, you provide no supporting evidence, so it's rather difficult to evaluate, but assuming for the moment that it is true) then Linux is safe because IBM is a much bigger corporation than SCO, and upholding SCO's claims would do far more damage to the economy than a ruling in favor of IBM.
TheFrood
if you are not making money off of keeping your code secret, and you are going to release the code anyway, does it hurt you to allow others to make their code, which is derived from your code, secret?
It certainly does. If they keep their code secret, I can't read it, learn from it, recompile it, or modify it. If someone's going to do something cool with my code, I want to be able to play with it.
TheFrood
This will work for about five minutes, after which lists of every camera location will have been posted online.
RTFA. The cameras will be placed at likely terrorist targets, like chemical plants, airports and reservoirs. Not surprisingly, these places tend to already have security, so it's not going to be a particularly big revelation that there are cameras there as well. And since these will be big rugged outdoor webcams (again, RTFA), they'll be pretty easily visible regardless.
TheFrood
I had a dream once in which someone asked me if I knew how to use a shotgun. I said "Of course I know how to use a shotgun, I've played DOOM. First you step on the ammo..."
TheFrood
My freind runs Gentoo and he emerged it before it was even written, a year ago. I think he is at the mall right now, yelling at the mall walkers about how optimized his system is.
I'm a Gentoo user myself, but I gotta admit this is really funny.
TheFrood
This makes an interesting counterpoint to an article from last week about an editorial by Sheldon Pacotti, one of the designers of Deus Ex. Rees seems to think self-censorship is the best defense, while Pacotti thinks it's best to spread the knowledge far and wide, so that everybody has the information necessary to devise defenses against technological threats.
TheFrood
Yes, he does think about the state of the world, and he does have an educated view, but he ALSO has his own 'world' that he thinks the world is becoming.
So? Everyone who looks at the world and thinks about the future has some ideas about where he/she thinks it's headed. The only difference between Pacotti and (most of) the rest of us is that he's shared some of his ideas in a computer game.
TheFrood
While methane and other gases that are produced are used to power the plant, all the end products except the purified water can be sold, [Halberstadt] said.
Yeah, because nobody needs water.
TheFrood