Absolutly to the point, the big picture behind all that dvd/mp3 stuff is that the big corporations have held a monopoly on the production and distribution chain in the past.
That was their power, and with the outcome of i.e. mp3 and the internet the see their empire falling. I resort to mp3 for a moment because this is a more appropriate example today. The motivation behind their actings is mainly that they will not be able to force artists into very bad contracts. While you can produce music cd's relativly simple today, you have no chance in distributing and promoting your music the conventional way, cause that's what is expensive. Use the internet and mp3 and e-commerce, and the big corporations are out of business.
OTOH the case with movies is nearly the same, while you need more money to produce a movie, there's still the potential to crush the business of coorporations, who earn money just because they hold the distribution chain, both at the end consumer and at the cinema level.
They will face a new competition, because there's enough potential money around today to finance the making of a movie, what we miss is a way to get it to the public independantly.
For instance, I would have never heard of a movie like PI if it wasn't for the internet. And without the web I doubt it would have got enough publicity to be shown anywhere in my town, it just isn't enough "mainstream".
And this shows that Tom Christiansen's reasoning is wrong, if you look behind the whole thing you see that also the freedom of the individual is hurt, because I for one think movies and music are also a kind of information, and my freedom to get that information is hurt when it has to pass a "big coorporation"-filter before coming to my attention. And that shouldn't be necessary with today's possibilies of electronic information exchange.
While you are right in saying that trin00/TFN is a big problem, on has to remark, as you say yourself, the attack you mention needs a cracked box. Show me ten boxes you have rooted (not your own please:)), and I'll give you the IP-Adresses of 20 Macs with OS 9.
In an abstract view, it was not one linux programmer who beat them, it was the slashdot crowd. This was IMO some sort of example for (beat me) the bazaar. Slashdot is a 24h beehive _without_ a certain target, but _sometimes_ there are usefull posts or even usefull things that happen outside slashdot, but bc of slashdot. That was it this time, many people where guessing what has happened to hotmail, one found the reason and another one fixed it. In this view,/. beat a number of "experts" (financial ones, in this case) of microsoft hands down in "finding a bug and fixing it".
Sorry, I was a bit lax in my wording. I únderstand that that it was not their bank, it was their providers bank (or some nice institution in between...) But if you buy something and the money for that doesn't show up on the sellers bank account, you will be the first to face problems, whether it's your fault or not. And if your business is to resell the goods, you better make sure that the flow continues. I know small companies often cannot afford to pay twice. But look at the original interview: We had sent in three payments to our Internet service provider, and they claimed they never got them. The checks were cashed. After going through numerous days of trying to figure out what happened, they couldn't figure it out, so we got our lawyer involved. No word they didn't have the money for a forth check, in contrary, they seemed to have money for lawyers (not that I blame them). So I got the impression I stated in the first comment, that they could have afforded first to pay to assure ongoing service and then try to get their money back. And just here on slashdot I saw mr. lauder stating that their ISP cut them off without warning, that didn't appear in the original article.
I didn't assume the worst, it's just the other way around, well kindoff. They seemed to do a good job in hosting free project homepages, and I just don't get why they now are so sure they have lost all their reputation. If I were their client I wouldn't loose my faith in them and continue to do business with them. Shit happens, surviving as a cheap provider isn't easy and this incindent sound plausible, so tell people what went wrong and move on. No need to totally stop your business.
What, they should pay all their bills twice? Because when you do business, your business partner isn't responsible for failures of your bank. Though I know learned they weren't informed that their provider didn't announce the cut-off, that is not very nice, too. But my point stands that the explanation for not continuing their service is not very convincing.
Ok, sorry I didn't want to be harsh to you (english is not my first language)... But why don't you just continue your service? If I were your client, I would really stay and that's what I don't get. Why are you so sure that all your reputation is lost?
Does anybody else really believe his explanation why they will not continue the service??? It doesn't sound convincing to me. And why the hell didn't they just send another cheque and then find out what happened with the first? My theory is they got in financial problems, the money thing went wrong and they hadn't enough money to just pay again (they would have got the other first money back). Then they were cut from the net and decided not to continue the business as it didn't pay out anyway, after all that was a business modell which now just seems to have failed.
I can assure you that _this_ kind of publicity will cause at least a major slap in the neck of their web-company. If fox is hard, they fire the company, if they are cute, they'll get their web-page for free or very cheap for the year or so. There is major competition in the web-designer business (a company I work for had to compete for a client against a "free webhosting + design for the first year" offer from a rival), and cute clients know that. So they will use every failure you make to get something cheaper. Some clueless people seem to have nothing else to do than to write email to companies about their websites (why do you use cookies? your background is too bright! your pages load too slow! why can't I...? why don't you...?) and everything gets forwarded to the webdesigners who then have to investigate why some asshole on the other end of the world has a shitty provider/browser/ broken os/14.4k modem and whatnot and reply with a sensible answer. But the same company would eventually fire you if just wrote a fully navigator 3.0/ie 3.0-compatible page without frames+plugins+javascript, cause they all use a fast connection with newer browsers and compare your design with the overloaded ones you can see everywhere. In this case the complaint was rightfull, but I wouldn't be surprised if that exact design was demanded by fox.
Well, would be really ok if they restricted themselves to do a "linux for beginners" review, but I just read into this a bit, and found this pearl of a snippet:
[...],but its phone support option makes it a viable choice for businesses looking to use Linux, especially since it costs $20 less than Red Hat's.
I guess the world they belive to inhabit still awaits its creation.
They could sue lycos, for mp3search.lycos.com, or every other specialized mp3-engine, they could sue every effnet or ircnet or dalnet or whatever, they could sue every ftp-admistrator who "forgets" to mark the/incoming directory readonly, they could sue altavista or other to get ie. them to display no pirate mp3-sitez (doesn't matter if it's technically feasible), they could sue geocities or lycos for the illegal websites they always host.
I know this is dumb, but applying the same logic they could do that.
I'm interested in hearing for people with better insight then myself into this sort of programming, if it is plausible to write a program where the key cannot be retrieved from the memory when the encryption is going on?
I doubt I have better inside, but I have one remark. The thing you ask about is something the record industry doesn't really want to defeat. Well they want to defeat it, but in reality they have to go further. Remember they want to defeat _copying_ the data on the dvd. That's archivable without cracking the encryption scheme. Just intercept the data _after_ it's decrypted (i.e. pseudo sounddrivers streaming in a wav file, pseudo video drivers etc.). And they want to defeat bit for bit copies of dvd's, because that way one just copies the protection scheme too. Naturally, breaking the encryption scheme would also allow copying, even simplify it, but the bitter truth is that that is harder (but not impossible), this is bad for alternative os's. This may be very hard to do for an outsider, but all it needs is just one insider to hand out crucial information and boom, game over for copy-protection. So, even if it were impossible for "normal" people to crack it (which I strongly doubt), that would only bring the real criminals who make big bucks selling pirated copy and can afford investing money to pay some insiders or technicians. And once such a technology is there, it will slowly (or not so slow) diffuse in the public domain - again game over. Oh, and hackers, I remember the story of some people hacking warner (was it really warner) and getting control over some computers controlling the feed of tv channels. Stealing some of the crypto secrets of dvd-players would be a great trophy and thinking of the sheer number of people sharing that secret someone probably will make a failure. It has happened with cable pay-tv, satellite pay-tv, it happens everyday with copy-protected software, with the vhs-protection, with radios manipulated to be able to hear the police channels or aircraft-tower conversations (and even participate actively), with the sony-cams which could "look through clothes", console-game cds, console-game regional locking, tuned motorcycles, overclocked smp celerons, microsoft's "secure" player... Everytime someone set up a technological barrier which hinders the customer to do what he wants to do, it fell sooner or later (mostly sooner). This dumb managers paying some technology consultants big $$$ for coming up with a dumb techology which only serves the purpose to make me pay more, and additionally makes the product more inconvenient, this managers are annoying the hell out of me.
---Oh shit, what a long rant and mostly unrelated to the question, well let's submit anyway....
Well, I didn't want to say that slashdot should be a linux advocacy website (or, more to the point, a only-good-news-about-linux-site). I think it is a web-site with has an opinion, a that opinion reflects in the fact that i.e. we see more linux/bsd/open source success stories than the same about windows nt. But this is relevant in this case only that it rules out that slashdot wanted to harm bruce/linux, analogous to the fictional linux-kernel story. But if they didn't want to harm linux (which they surely didn't), it was a failure to neglect the nature of a mailing-list, cause the only "news" we got here was "Bruce Perens did one post....". It even didn't say "there's currently a discussion at debian-legal, started by Bruce Perens, about....". I agree with you that all in all this was a proof for the "community's" appreciation of the big names. It proofed even more, it showed that despite negative voices we sometimes hear about "what has come out of slashdot", the system as a whole is capable to produce sensible feedback.
I aggree 100%, but I would go further. In the article you write
But I don't (personally) believe we should ever apologize for running legitimate news, including speculations made in public forums by Open Source celebrities.
Legitimate, thats the point here. I wouldn't say it was illegitimate to post this, but it was not clever. I know it wasn't done with this intention, but the same headline could have been in a not-open-source-friendly magazine, followed by some comments about unreliability for corporations working with open source and the whole fud we all know and hate. The danger of this happening because of slashdots covering of bruce's small email should have been clear. As others have pointed out, this was not a press release, but a posting in a mailing list. I'm not advocating the point of view that public mailing lists, even small ones, are private. But they are not a oneway medium too, and perhaps slashdot should have awaited some discussion in this list to make sure there is really a greater mass of people sharing the opinion of the post. Or should have asked Bruce personally if this really is his opinon. All in all, what should have happened is weighting the consequences of bringing that matter to slashdot (early) against slashdot's right to run legitimate news. One example, when I look at the linux-kernel mailing list, I sometimes see an exchange of personal insults (aka kernel traffics's "heated discussion"). It would be easy to snip away some context (or even cite full emails) and make a bad headline about a split between kernel developers. Slashdot would never do this, because one head to be intentionally evil against linux for this. But what slashdot did here unintentionally was IMO the same. So my point is, bruce made a failure, but slashdot made a failure too.
Main Entry: journalism Pronunciation: 'j&r-n&l-"i-z&m Function: noun Date: 1833 1 a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium 2 a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest
They don't mention the need to do background research, I fear that is your idealistic interpretation of the word. You can't avoid it, even when you post just links to other news-stories, you are still _selecting_, that means editing, and that means journalism. I guess you and me wouldn't be reading slashdot if they would emphasize on windows nt success stories.
And - this special case wasn't even one of the 99% you mention.
In an ideal word you were right, unfortunately here someone from could easily construct an article with qoutes from slashdot which would give a very negative impression about the whole thing. Think of a headline like "Prominent open source advocat threatens to sue corel corp.". I know this could happen with other slashdot articles too, but in this case it's so easy for a clueless reporter to f*ck up.
Some points, at first the principal problem with security in ie isn't his integration with the os, it's the dumb activex-controls (sometimes by interacting with the os, here you are right). But all in all it's not the integration from the outside (os) to the inside (like in kde) which is dangerous, but the other way round, controling the os from inside the browser. Second, and related, frame-spoofing can happen in netscape too which isn't integrated at all,and the last flaw i've seen was in netscape (a bad one seemingly), reported to bugtraq on 24.11. If they use java with a standart java-engine they should be relativly secure.
I agree with you, slashdot this was one of the occurences where slashdot has to decide whether they want to be pure journalists or journalists with a positive relation to linux/opensource. If they decide to be the latter, they should have rechecked this, because bruce seemed to be a little too fast in this case. But this shows that one has to doublecheck what he posts in public/semi-public forums, cause there's _no_ privacy. That was Bruce's fault and could have led to a zdnet headline without slashdot. OTOH slashdot shouldn't have been the first to carry this in the public.
Well, easy, wait till the first 10 Supercomputers of the world, the nasa saturn mission, the superpowers icbms, ibm's and sun's enterprise machines and every SAP-installation around is on linux;-). Then tell the people "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you, too." I expect this to work better than the other way around, which microsoft tries;-).
I'm not sure here, but it sounds a little bit filthy to do a self-insurance for a job one company does for a third person. I mean it's bad for the customer, in case of self-insurace and a suit about a broken package, the plaintiffs were the same as the defendand. My chances of getting the money should be worse compared to the "legal" case when UPS would be a "neutral" plaintiff because a independend insurance company was sued by me.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutly to the point, the big picture behind all that dvd/mp3 stuff is that the big corporations have held a monopoly on the production and distribution chain in the past.
That was their power, and with the outcome of i.e. mp3 and the internet the see their empire falling. I resort to mp3 for a moment because this is a more appropriate example today.
The motivation behind their actings is mainly that they will not be able to force artists into very bad contracts. While you can produce music cd's relativly simple today, you have no chance in distributing and promoting your music the conventional way, cause that's what is expensive.
Use the internet and mp3 and e-commerce, and the big corporations are out of business.
OTOH the case with movies is nearly the same, while you need more money to produce a movie, there's still the potential to crush the business of coorporations, who earn money just because they hold the distribution chain, both at the end consumer and at the cinema level.
They will face a new competition, because there's enough potential money around today to finance the making of a movie, what we miss is a way to get it to the public independantly.
For instance, I would have never heard of a movie like PI if it wasn't for the internet. And without the web I doubt it would have got enough publicity to be shown anywhere in my town, it just isn't enough "mainstream".
And this shows that Tom Christiansen's reasoning is wrong, if you look behind the whole thing you see that also the freedom of the individual is hurt, because I for one think movies and music are also a kind of information, and my freedom to get that information is hurt when it has to pass a "big coorporation"-filter before coming to my attention. And that shouldn't be necessary with today's possibilies of electronic information exchange.
While you are right in saying that trin00/TFN is a big problem, on has to remark, as you say yourself, the attack you mention needs a cracked box. :)), and I'll give you the IP-Adresses of 20 Macs with OS 9.
Show me ten boxes you have rooted (not your own please
In an abstract view, it was not one linux programmer who beat them, it was the slashdot crowd. This was IMO some sort of example for (beat me) the bazaar. Slashdot is a 24h beehive _without_ a certain target, but _sometimes_ there are usefull posts or even usefull things that happen outside slashdot, but bc of slashdot. /. beat a number of "experts" (financial ones, in this case) of microsoft hands down in "finding a bug and fixing it".
That was it this time, many people where guessing what has happened to hotmail, one found the reason and another one fixed it.
In this view,
This is sooo cool, gratulations.
Hey hemos and friends, how about an update to the front story?
Sorry, I was a bit lax in my wording.
I únderstand that that it was not their bank, it was their providers bank (or some nice institution in between...)
But if you buy something and the money for that doesn't show up on the sellers bank account, you will be the first to face problems, whether it's your fault or not. And if your business is to resell the goods, you better make sure that the flow continues. I know small companies often cannot afford to pay twice. But look at the original interview:
We had sent in three payments to our Internet service provider, and they claimed they never got them. The checks were cashed. After going through numerous days of trying to figure out what happened, they couldn't figure it out, so we got our lawyer involved.
No word they didn't have the money for a forth check, in contrary, they seemed to have money for lawyers (not that I blame them). So I got the impression I stated in the first comment, that they could have afforded first to pay to assure ongoing service and then try to get their money back.
And just here on slashdot I saw mr. lauder stating that their ISP cut them off without warning, that didn't appear in the original article.
I didn't assume the worst, it's just the other way around, well kindoff. They seemed to do a good job in hosting free project homepages, and I just don't get why they now are so sure they have lost all their reputation.
If I were their client I wouldn't loose my faith in them and continue to do business with them.
Shit happens, surviving as a cheap provider isn't easy and this incindent sound plausible, so tell people what went wrong and move on. No need to totally stop your business.
What, they should pay all their bills twice?
Because when you do business, your business partner isn't responsible for failures of your bank.
Though I know learned they weren't informed that their provider didn't announce the cut-off, that is not very nice, too.
But my point stands that the explanation for not continuing their service is not very convincing.
Ok, sorry I didn't want to be harsh to you (english is not my first language)...
But why don't you just continue your service?
If I were your client, I would really stay and that's what I don't get. Why are you so sure that all your reputation is lost?
Does anybody else really believe his explanation why they will not continue the service??? It doesn't sound convincing to me.
And why the hell didn't they just send another cheque and then find out what happened with the first?
My theory is they got in financial problems, the money thing went wrong and they hadn't enough money to just pay again (they would have got the other first money back).
Then they were cut from the net and decided not to continue the business as it didn't pay out anyway, after all that was a business modell which now just seems to have failed.
If you want to try that at home,
try
cat file > file
and boom.
I'm sometimes bitten by that when filtering files with grep an mistyping the second filename.
I can assure you that _this_ kind of publicity will cause at least a major slap in the neck of their web-company. If fox is hard, they fire the company, if they are cute, they'll get their web-page for free or very cheap for the year or so.
There is major competition in the web-designer business (a company I work for had to compete for a client against a "free webhosting + design for the first year" offer from a rival), and cute clients know that. So they will use every failure you make to get something cheaper.
Some clueless people seem to have nothing else to do than to write email to companies about their websites (why do you use cookies? your background is too bright! your pages load too slow! why can't I...? why don't you...?) and everything gets forwarded to the webdesigners who then have to investigate why some asshole on the other end of the world has a shitty provider/browser/ broken os/14.4k modem and whatnot and reply with a sensible answer. But the same company would eventually fire you if just wrote a fully navigator 3.0/ie 3.0-compatible page without frames+plugins+javascript, cause they all use a fast connection with newer browsers and compare your design with the overloaded ones you can see everywhere.
In this case the complaint was rightfull, but I wouldn't be surprised if that exact design was demanded by fox.
Well, would be really ok if they restricted themselves to do a "linux for beginners" review, but I just read into this a bit, and found this pearl of a snippet:
[...],but its phone support option makes it a viable choice for businesses looking to use Linux, especially since it costs $20 less than Red Hat's.
I guess the world they belive to inhabit still awaits its creation.
They could sue lycos, for mp3search.lycos.com, or every other specialized mp3-engine, they could sue every effnet or ircnet or dalnet or whatever, they could sue every ftp-admistrator who "forgets" to mark the /incoming directory readonly, they could sue altavista or other to get ie. them to display no pirate mp3-sitez (doesn't matter if it's technically feasible), they could sue geocities or lycos for the illegal websites they always host.
I know this is dumb, but applying the same logic they could do that.
Microsoft's Recommendation (to uninstall Diskkeeper) is not working. The files will be restored by the `System File Protection' (SFP).
Oh my, I thought all the time that this SFP thingy will be a major pain in the ass, seems like I was right.
I'm interested in hearing for people with better insight then myself into this sort of programming, if it is plausible to write a program where the key cannot be retrieved from the memory when the encryption is going on?
...
I doubt I have better inside, but I have one remark. The thing you ask about is something the record industry doesn't really want to defeat.
Well they want to defeat it, but in reality they have to go further. Remember they want to defeat _copying_ the data on the dvd. That's archivable without cracking the encryption scheme.
Just intercept the data _after_ it's decrypted (i.e. pseudo sounddrivers streaming in a wav file, pseudo video drivers etc.).
And they want to defeat bit for bit copies of dvd's, because that way one just copies the protection scheme too.
Naturally, breaking the encryption scheme would also allow copying, even simplify it, but the bitter truth is that that is harder (but not impossible), this is bad for alternative os's.
This may be very hard to do for an outsider, but all it needs is just one insider to hand out crucial information and boom, game over for copy-protection.
So, even if it were impossible for "normal" people to crack it (which I strongly doubt), that would only bring the real criminals who make big bucks selling pirated copy and can afford investing money to pay some insiders or technicians.
And once such a technology is there, it will slowly (or not so slow) diffuse in the public domain - again game over. Oh, and hackers, I remember the story of some people hacking warner (was it really warner) and getting control over some computers controlling the feed of tv channels. Stealing some of the crypto secrets of dvd-players would be a great trophy and thinking of the sheer number of people sharing that secret someone probably will make a failure.
It has happened with cable pay-tv, satellite pay-tv, it happens everyday with copy-protected
software, with the vhs-protection, with radios manipulated to be able to hear the police channels or aircraft-tower conversations (and even participate actively), with the sony-cams which could "look through clothes", console-game cds, console-game regional locking, tuned motorcycles, overclocked smp celerons, microsoft's "secure" player
Everytime someone set up a technological barrier which hinders the customer to do what he wants to do, it fell sooner or later (mostly sooner).
This dumb managers paying some technology consultants big $$$ for coming up with a dumb techology which only serves the purpose to make me pay more, and additionally makes the product more inconvenient, this managers are annoying the hell out of me.
---Oh shit, what a long rant and mostly unrelated to the question, well let's submit anyway....
Well, I didn't want to say that slashdot should be a linux advocacy website (or, more to the point, a only-good-news-about-linux-site). I think it is a web-site with has an opinion, a that opinion reflects in the fact that i.e. we see more linux/bsd/open source success stories than the same about windows nt. ....".
But this is relevant in this case only that it rules out that slashdot wanted to harm bruce/linux, analogous to the fictional linux-kernel story.
But if they didn't want to harm linux (which they surely didn't), it was a failure to neglect the nature of a mailing-list, cause the only "news" we got here was "Bruce Perens did one post....".
It even didn't say "there's currently a discussion at debian-legal, started by Bruce Perens, about
I agree with you that all in all this was a proof for the "community's" appreciation of the big names. It proofed even more, it showed that despite negative voices we sometimes hear about "what has come out of slashdot", the system as a whole is capable to produce sensible feedback.
In the article you write
Legitimate, thats the point here.
I wouldn't say it was illegitimate to post this, but it was not clever. I know it wasn't done with this intention, but the same headline could have been in a not-open-source-friendly magazine, followed by some comments about unreliability for corporations working with open source and the whole fud we all know and hate.
The danger of this happening because of slashdots covering of bruce's small email should have been clear.
As others have pointed out, this was not a press release, but a posting in a mailing list. I'm not advocating the point of view that public mailing lists, even small ones, are private. But they are not a oneway medium too, and perhaps slashdot should have awaited some discussion in this list to make sure there is really a greater mass of people sharing the opinion of the post. Or should have asked Bruce personally if this really is his opinon.
All in all, what should have happened is weighting the consequences of bringing that matter to slashdot (early) against slashdot's right to run legitimate news.
One example, when I look at the linux-kernel mailing list, I sometimes see an exchange of personal insults (aka kernel traffics's "heated discussion"). It would be easy to snip away some context (or even cite full emails) and make a bad headline about a split between kernel developers.
Slashdot would never do this, because one head to be intentionally evil against linux for this.
But what slashdot did here unintentionally was IMO the same.
So my point is, bruce made a failure, but slashdot made a failure too.
From Marriam-Webster dictionary:
Main Entry: journalism
Pronunciation: 'j&r-n&l-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1833
1 a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2 a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest
They don't mention the need to do background research, I fear that is your idealistic interpretation of the word.
You can't avoid it, even when you post just links to other news-stories, you are still _selecting_, that means editing, and that means journalism.
I guess you and me wouldn't be reading slashdot if they would emphasize on windows nt success stories.
And - this special case wasn't even one of the 99% you mention.
In an ideal word you were right, unfortunately here someone from could easily construct an article with qoutes from slashdot which would give a very negative impression about the whole thing.
Think of a headline like "Prominent open source advocat threatens to sue corel corp.".
I know this could happen with other slashdot articles too, but in this case it's so easy for a clueless reporter to f*ck up.
Some points, at first the principal problem with security in ie isn't his integration with the os, it's the dumb activex-controls (sometimes by interacting with the os, here you are right).
But all in all it's not the integration from the outside (os) to the inside (like in kde) which is dangerous, but the other way round, controling the os from inside the browser.
Second, and related, frame-spoofing can happen in netscape too which isn't integrated at all,and the last flaw i've seen was in netscape (a bad one seemingly), reported to bugtraq on 24.11.
If they use java with a standart java-engine they should be relativly secure.
I agree with you, slashdot this was one of the occurences where slashdot has to decide whether they want to be pure journalists or journalists with a positive relation to linux/opensource.
If they decide to be the latter, they should have rechecked this, because bruce seemed to be a little too fast in this case.
But this shows that one has to doublecheck what he posts in public/semi-public forums, cause there's _no_ privacy.
That was Bruce's fault and could have led to a zdnet headline without slashdot.
OTOH slashdot shouldn't have been the first to carry this in the public.
Well, easy, wait till the first 10 Supercomputers of the world, the nasa saturn mission, the superpowers icbms, ibm's and sun's enterprise machines and every SAP-installation around is on linux ;-). ;-).
Then tell the people "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you, too."
I expect this to work better than the other way around, which microsoft tries
When ibm or your company go bancrupt no one else is hurt because they can't pay some repairs for fire or an accident.
I'm not sure here, but it sounds a little bit filthy to do a self-insurance for a job one company does for a third person.
I mean it's bad for the customer, in case of self-insurace and a suit about a broken package, the plaintiffs were the same as the defendand.
My chances of getting the money should be worse compared to the "legal" case when UPS would be a "neutral" plaintiff because a independend insurance company was sued by me.
AND seeing southpark doesn't mean seeing southpark in english