I never mentioned a thing about the FCC, and most people (both Republicrat and Demican) would argue that copyright law works very well. If you don't like the current copyright law, work to get it changed. In the meantime, don't go around violating other people's copyrights and expect the rest of society to be happy with that. They won't be.
Second of all, none of the articles that I have seen have even alleged that the girl in question did not, in fact, distribute the files that the RIAA is suggesting she distributed. The fact of the matter is that the RIAA didn't do a single thing that was "elusive," and they certainly didn't do anything illegal. All they did was catch a girl distributing thousands of their copyrighted songs. If you knew a shred about networking you would know that tracking this girl to her ISP was a trivial task.
Bush doesn't have a thing to do with this. I hope you have a nice day as well.
Once you have done something illegal, your choices, by necessity, become far more limited. It's called punishment. No one forced this girl to break the law, and now she gets to face the consequences.
If this were to become a criminal case, the little girl could even get state help with her attorney's fees (public defender). The reason that her family is going to go along with the RIAA is that they are being charitable. It's essentially the same thing as you deciding not to press charges against a thief that you caught red-handed stealing stuff from your living room.
Are you kidding? painehope wanted RedHat to support a 4000 CPU cluster for the price of a few lousy RedHat Linux boxed sets. That's just insane.
RedHat's support is still far less expensive than any commercial competitor. With Windows support is also separate from licensing. The difference is tha t with RedHat licensing itself is free.
If you want you can switch to SuSE (pretty much the only other Linux choice that is supported by a commercial company), but don't expect to pay any less for actual support (not to mention the fact that YaST2 is not Free Software).
Personally, I use Debian, as I am not interested in commercial support, but I can't blame RedHat for trying to get a fair price for their support. Engineers don't come cheap.
I would be the first to admit that the legal system is screwed up, but these aren't civil charges, and they aren't spurious. What the girl did would be classified as a felony offense, and no one is saying that she didn't distribute these files.
$3,500 to get out of a felony charge is a very small price to pay.
Now, if you want to change the laws so that the penalties are less harsh, then by all means, go ahead. However, I doubt that your idea will get much traction. Most voting adults agree with the idea of copyrights.
As for the rest of your argument, comparing sharing files over the Internet to sharing home-made CDs or tapes with your friends is disingenuous. The RIAA doesn't care if you do this, in fact, they almost certainly approve. There is a huge difference between burning a mix CD for a couple of friends and sharing thousands of files with the entire world. Copyrights are all about determining who (and how) copyrighted material gets distributed. The RIAA has turned a blind eye to sharing among friends forever (as is their right). They don't approve of sharing these same files over the Internet for everyone.
If you don't like their game, listen to someone else's music. It's really quite simple.
The question is whether or not you want extortion to be an acceptable business practice. What the RIAA is doing is not extortion. They have a fat pile of proof that this girl violated their copyrights. Under current laws the RIAA could now press for ridiculous amounts of damages and probably felony criminal charges to boot. Instead they are asking for a few grand (which probably doesn't even cover the costs of the investigation and prosecution).
That's not extortion.
The fact of the matter is that the RIAA has got this family by the short hairs, and they are letting them go with a slap on the wrist.
You may not agree with it, but distributing other people's copyrighted works is against the law. What's more, most people don't have a problem with that. They understand the reasoning by copyrights. Heck, push comes to shove I bet that even you agree that Steven Spielburg should have the final say as to whether or not his movies get censored for television, and you probably also agree that I should be able to keep Microsoft from "borrowing" my source code and using it in their products.
Yet somehow the RIAA is different. Violating their copyrights is acceptable.
You are talking with the wrong guy. I personally think that the penalties for buying a drink underage, speeding, and shoplifting should be higher. All of these activities have the potential to harm myself or members of my family, and shouldn't be tolerated.
I have very little sympathy for people who do things that they know are wrong and then complain about the consequences of their actions. Heck, you can bet that this girl understood that it was "wrong" to violate the RIAA's copyrights. She probably even thought it was cool to be sharing so much illegal music.
It's not quite so "cool" now, is it.
As for the amount of the fine, well I would agree that at the high end it is a little steep. If the RIAA was serious about pursuing the multi-million dollar settlement (and pressing criminal charges) then I would feel differently about their actions. However, they are actually being quite reasonable with their $3,500 sum. I bet that it cost the RIAA more than $3,500 to catch and prosecute this girl. In fact, I bet that their lawyers fees for this one case add up to more than $3,500. The way the law is set up basically puts filesharers that get caught in a situation where the RIAA can wreck their lives. The fact that the RIAA basically let's these people get away with a "slap on the wrist" is fairly telling.
I can guarantee you that any adult that sees this case is going to rethink their filesharing (and the filesharing of their children), and that's what the RIAA is after.
All the more reason not to engage in this illegal activity. The reason that the fine is so high is that copyright infringement of this magnitude used to be the type of thing that organized crime got into. The fact that the perpetrator was a 12 year-old girl doesn't change the law.
If anything the girl should be grateful that the RIAA is willing to drop the charges for a paltry $3,500. The alternative is far, far worse.
The fact of the matter is that the RIAA has the right to protect their copyrighted material. You may not like this fact, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. If you really want to "stick it to the man" don't listen to the RIAA's music. There are plenty of artists that are happy to share their work.
Yes, the folks in the music industry are generally not nice people. They have piles of faults, and have rigged the music business so that they make all of the money at the artist's expense. That doesn't make violating their copyrights ethical (or legal).
I couldn't agree more. Docbook is pretty slick, but turning your Docbook source into a useable format is ridiculously hard. And what's more, chances are fairly good that when you are done it won't look good. PostgreSQL, to cite an example, actually dumps their Docbook to RTF and then edits it in RTF before creating their Postscipt and PDF files. What's more, despite the fact that they released 7.4 yesterday they don't have 7.4 documentation ready to go because they can't get the docs to build.
Texinfo, on the other hand, is relatively easy to use, and it has well-supported tools for the creation of html, pdf (with hyperlinks), rtf, info (emacs rocks), and plain text.
Precisely. I don't mind the reviewer telling me that the version of Gaim included in Fedora can't connect to MSN. However, I don't want to hear about her failed attempt at compiling software out of CVS. Instead of wasting my time with that story why not find out from the folks at the Fedora project when a fix is likely to be available.
I want to hear about the tools that Fedora includes, and the tools that are missing by default. I want to hear about the packaging system. As you said, a distribution is basically a set of packages that are tested together. I want to hear how well the packages included work together. Heck, I want to hear how well the included support systems work. Are the mailing lists friendly? Are the people on the IRC channel knowledgeable?
The "review," as it was written, was an almost complete waste of time. There was barely any substance, and the points that the reviewer tried to make were largely incoherent.
The message consisted of little more than gibberish.
This was supposed to be a distribution review, and yet the first thing that the reviewer did was circumvent the included packaging system. Fedora uses yum by default, not apt-get and synaptic.
The entire review essentially consisted of a large rant about how hard it is to compile software from source. No duh Sherlock! That's why the distribution comes with a packaging manager and a set of RPMs that have been tested together. The whole point is that you shouldn't be compiling packages unless you know what you are doing (which she clearly does not, otherwise she would have been able to build the packages in question).
In short, the article was not a review of any part of Fedora but the install. After that the article degenerated into nothing more than a public expose of the author's shortcomings as a systems administrator.
Exactly. Any distribution "review" that even mentions the word "compile" gets an F- in my book. Why should I care that the reviewer can't build software from source? I want to hear about the software included in the distribution.
Exactly, in the past Microsoft has sponsored free Linux R&D (the Mindcraft benchmarks are an excellent example), and it has always worked to Linux's favor.
If Microsoft thinks that high-lighting Linux's security record, on the other hand, they are crazy. It is possible that you might come up with more Linux exploits if you count every single daemon, program, and service that you might possibly install, but that's a clear cut case of comparing apples to oranges. Linux sysadmins are going to take Microsoft's list, cross out all of the software they don't run, and be left with one heck of a short list of exploits.
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft's competitors were able to lower their costs considerably by integrating their silicon as they went along. Microsoft was stuck with chips from rival competitors that were already at their lowest possible price point on day one. The cost to produce a PS/2 has dropped dramatically. The cost to produce an XBox is almost the same now as it was when it was introduced.
Precisely. Despite all of the stuff I know about the case the fact that Boies and Co. were willing to take the SCO case on contingency always worried me. After all, those guys know far more about how to make money from litigation than I do. Even so, I couldn't figure out why Boies would allow McBride and the rest of the SCO management to shoot off their mouths in public about the case. Keeping management's mouth buttoned about pending litigation is standard procedure in cases where the party expects to actually win.
Once I realized that Boies had already worked it so that his company got paid the whole thing makes a great deal more sense. Now the entire case is all about dragging IBM (and Linux) through the mud for as long as possible with the hope of aggravating IBM off enough so that they buy SCO out. Boies is essentially wagering that IBM will cave. Otherwise, his lawfirm is going to be handing a very embarrassing defeat.
Actually, I would bet that the music industry would love these vouchers. It would be far more profitable to simply skim a percentage off the top of all taxpayers than to wheedle CD purchases out of teenagers (far and away their largest market). There would be two major advantages to such a scheme. The first advantage is that they would no longer have to worry about protecting copyrights, as they would get paid either way. The second advantage is that they would be freed even more from the burden of finding "good" artists, as they would get paid a certain percentage of this voucher money either way. After all, when you control the primary means of distributing and marketing music you win no matter how it works out that artists get paid.
If you want to break that up, you have to purchase your entertainment from the competition.
You can already give money to the artist of your choice. Just send him or her a check, purchase an album, or, better yet, go to a concert. There is no need to get the government more involved than it already is.
If you want to make a political gesture while supporting this artist make sure that you pay the thousands of artists that already offer their material in unencrypted formats. It really is as simple as that. If you don't like the media companies, buy from artists that aren't part of the media conglomerates. There are thousands of artists to choose from.
Artistic vouchers would be the worst possible solution. If you think that the credit card companies take a bite out of transactions they are involved with then you never have dealt with the government. The taxpayer would almost certainly end up paying at least $20 for a $10 voucher, and the record companies would still get all of the money because they still control the most sure method of getting the publicity that is necessary to make it big. The only difference would be that the RIAA companies would get paid in "vouchers," which, with our luck, would probably be tax-free money.
Not to mention the fact that you are volunteering my money, which I don't feel like spending on your "art."
Further government intervention in this arena would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. Anyone that thinks that this is a good idea needs to take a history class, at the very least, and a remedial economics class would probably be a good idea as well.
Not true at all, Boies and Co. not only get a huge cut of any winnings (yeah right), but they also get a 20% stake if the company is sold, and 20% of any equity raised. The $50 million that was raised recently, 20% of that is in Boies pocket right this minute. Plus, they got a ridiculously large chunk of stock as well (400,000 shares).
In short, SCO management is almost certainly telling suckers (er... investors) that the case is contingency based, but the lawyers have already been paid.
Even better, once the iTunes store becomes a major source of music for millions of folks then Apple can either
Renegotiate with the record labels.
Start signing artists themselves.
The reason that the RIAA is so powerful is that for years they were the only way for artists to get their music into the hands of customers. Even now it is almost impossible to get yourself heard without signing a contract with a major label.
If iTunes becomes a major outlet for music then Apple could very easily begin to finance and promote their own artists, and that's where the money is. Even better, instead of having to deal with Clear Channel to access thousands of separate geographic markets Apple will be able market directly to a large portion of the world.
In short, turning a profit is not necessary at this point, hovering near profitability is perfectly acceptable. The fact that iTunes drives iPod sales is just gravy.
Re:it's pretty obvious...
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
Perfect. Borland has created the perfect tool for getting their few remain Delphi developers to switch to Microsoft's wares.
If I am going to have to rewrite my applications, and if I am going to lose backwards compatibility, why in the world would I pay Borland for this privilege? It makes far more sense to simply start over in C# and be done with it.
Re:seen the price of VS.NET?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
Python, Emacs, Perl, Zope, Eclipse, Netbeans, Tcl, gcc... The list goes on and on. Free Software has plenty of good tools.
Oh please. I can name a double handful of commercial development tools that no longer exist. Kylix, the commercial tool we are talking about is essentially dead. No updates last year, no updates this year, and no way to use Kylix to take advantage of the 64 bit processors that are now available.
What's worse, the $1000 you pay for the development version is nothing compared to the time and money spent learning a technology that has no future. That same time could have been spent on any number of development tools that are going to be around at the end of the year.
And your assumptions about Free Software developers are also completely off the mark. My primary development tool is Emacs, a tool that has probably been available for longer than you have been alive. It isn't going to disappear anytime soon. Likewise Python, Perl, Zope, Apache, Tomcat, gcc, and the rest of the tools that I use. All of these tools have large communities of developers that depend on them for their livelihoods.
The fact of the matter is that I have been burned before by commercial toolsets that can disappear overnight. Heck, look at the plight of the VB developers who are having to rewrite all of their code for VB.Net. That simply doesn't happen with Free Software. I can run my Perl scripts from the dark ages on a modern Perl unmodified, can you say that about your tools?
Re:seen the price of VS.NET?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
Development environments are becoming a commodity. There are piles of good tools available, many of them are not only free, but are Free Software as well.
Kylix was a half-baked attempt at a Linux IDE, using a language that is losing marketshare. The fact that the enterprise version cost over $1000 was certainly an issue. I can get buckets of Free tools that are less buggy than Kylix, and they don't put me at the mercy of Borland.
The fact that Microsoft can still get folks to pay for VS.NET is irrelevant. People looking for Linux tools aren't likely to consider VS.NET.
Exactly. Why pay good money for development closed source development tools that leave you at the mercy of Borland when there are piles and piles of excellent Free tools with active communities and a guaranteed future. I bet that the folks that did pay for Kylix are upset that they trusted Borland.
Development tools have become a commodity boys and girls.
Cry me a river. You could have been born in China, India, South America, or anywhere in Africa. You're in the richest 1% of the world's population almost by default by just living in the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
I never mentioned a thing about the FCC, and most people (both Republicrat and Demican) would argue that copyright law works very well. If you don't like the current copyright law, work to get it changed. In the meantime, don't go around violating other people's copyrights and expect the rest of society to be happy with that. They won't be.
Second of all, none of the articles that I have seen have even alleged that the girl in question did not, in fact, distribute the files that the RIAA is suggesting she distributed. The fact of the matter is that the RIAA didn't do a single thing that was "elusive," and they certainly didn't do anything illegal. All they did was catch a girl distributing thousands of their copyrighted songs. If you knew a shred about networking you would know that tracking this girl to her ISP was a trivial task.
Bush doesn't have a thing to do with this. I hope you have a nice day as well.
Once you have done something illegal, your choices, by necessity, become far more limited. It's called punishment. No one forced this girl to break the law, and now she gets to face the consequences.
If this were to become a criminal case, the little girl could even get state help with her attorney's fees (public defender). The reason that her family is going to go along with the RIAA is that they are being charitable. It's essentially the same thing as you deciding not to press charges against a thief that you caught red-handed stealing stuff from your living room.
Are you kidding? painehope wanted RedHat to support a 4000 CPU cluster for the price of a few lousy RedHat Linux boxed sets. That's just insane.
RedHat's support is still far less expensive than any commercial competitor. With Windows support is also separate from licensing. The difference is tha t with RedHat licensing itself is free.
If you want you can switch to SuSE (pretty much the only other Linux choice that is supported by a commercial company), but don't expect to pay any less for actual support (not to mention the fact that YaST2 is not Free Software).
Personally, I use Debian, as I am not interested in commercial support, but I can't blame RedHat for trying to get a fair price for their support. Engineers don't come cheap.
I would be the first to admit that the legal system is screwed up, but these aren't civil charges, and they aren't spurious. What the girl did would be classified as a felony offense, and no one is saying that she didn't distribute these files.
$3,500 to get out of a felony charge is a very small price to pay.
Now, if you want to change the laws so that the penalties are less harsh, then by all means, go ahead. However, I doubt that your idea will get much traction. Most voting adults agree with the idea of copyrights.
As for the rest of your argument, comparing sharing files over the Internet to sharing home-made CDs or tapes with your friends is disingenuous. The RIAA doesn't care if you do this, in fact, they almost certainly approve. There is a huge difference between burning a mix CD for a couple of friends and sharing thousands of files with the entire world. Copyrights are all about determining who (and how) copyrighted material gets distributed. The RIAA has turned a blind eye to sharing among friends forever (as is their right). They don't approve of sharing these same files over the Internet for everyone.
If you don't like their game, listen to someone else's music. It's really quite simple.
The question is whether or not you want extortion to be an acceptable business practice. What the RIAA is doing is not extortion. They have a fat pile of proof that this girl violated their copyrights. Under current laws the RIAA could now press for ridiculous amounts of damages and probably felony criminal charges to boot. Instead they are asking for a few grand (which probably doesn't even cover the costs of the investigation and prosecution).
That's not extortion.
The fact of the matter is that the RIAA has got this family by the short hairs, and they are letting them go with a slap on the wrist.
You may not agree with it, but distributing other people's copyrighted works is against the law. What's more, most people don't have a problem with that. They understand the reasoning by copyrights. Heck, push comes to shove I bet that even you agree that Steven Spielburg should have the final say as to whether or not his movies get censored for television, and you probably also agree that I should be able to keep Microsoft from "borrowing" my source code and using it in their products.
Yet somehow the RIAA is different. Violating their copyrights is acceptable.
You are talking with the wrong guy. I personally think that the penalties for buying a drink underage, speeding, and shoplifting should be higher. All of these activities have the potential to harm myself or members of my family, and shouldn't be tolerated.
I have very little sympathy for people who do things that they know are wrong and then complain about the consequences of their actions. Heck, you can bet that this girl understood that it was "wrong" to violate the RIAA's copyrights. She probably even thought it was cool to be sharing so much illegal music.
It's not quite so "cool" now, is it.
As for the amount of the fine, well I would agree that at the high end it is a little steep. If the RIAA was serious about pursuing the multi-million dollar settlement (and pressing criminal charges) then I would feel differently about their actions. However, they are actually being quite reasonable with their $3,500 sum. I bet that it cost the RIAA more than $3,500 to catch and prosecute this girl. In fact, I bet that their lawyers fees for this one case add up to more than $3,500. The way the law is set up basically puts filesharers that get caught in a situation where the RIAA can wreck their lives. The fact that the RIAA basically let's these people get away with a "slap on the wrist" is fairly telling.
I can guarantee you that any adult that sees this case is going to rethink their filesharing (and the filesharing of their children), and that's what the RIAA is after.
All the more reason not to engage in this illegal activity. The reason that the fine is so high is that copyright infringement of this magnitude used to be the type of thing that organized crime got into. The fact that the perpetrator was a 12 year-old girl doesn't change the law.
If anything the girl should be grateful that the RIAA is willing to drop the charges for a paltry $3,500. The alternative is far, far worse.
The fact of the matter is that the RIAA has the right to protect their copyrighted material. You may not like this fact, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. If you really want to "stick it to the man" don't listen to the RIAA's music. There are plenty of artists that are happy to share their work.
Yes, the folks in the music industry are generally not nice people. They have piles of faults, and have rigged the music business so that they make all of the money at the artist's expense. That doesn't make violating their copyrights ethical (or legal).
I couldn't agree more. Docbook is pretty slick, but turning your Docbook source into a useable format is ridiculously hard. And what's more, chances are fairly good that when you are done it won't look good. PostgreSQL, to cite an example, actually dumps their Docbook to RTF and then edits it in RTF before creating their Postscipt and PDF files. What's more, despite the fact that they released 7.4 yesterday they don't have 7.4 documentation ready to go because they can't get the docs to build.
Texinfo, on the other hand, is relatively easy to use, and it has well-supported tools for the creation of html, pdf (with hyperlinks), rtf, info (emacs rocks), and plain text.
Lightning bolts would be fine, but some of us live too close to Lindon to be comfortable with wide scale natural disasters.
Precisely. I don't mind the reviewer telling me that the version of Gaim included in Fedora can't connect to MSN. However, I don't want to hear about her failed attempt at compiling software out of CVS. Instead of wasting my time with that story why not find out from the folks at the Fedora project when a fix is likely to be available.
I want to hear about the tools that Fedora includes, and the tools that are missing by default. I want to hear about the packaging system. As you said, a distribution is basically a set of packages that are tested together. I want to hear how well the packages included work together. Heck, I want to hear how well the included support systems work. Are the mailing lists friendly? Are the people on the IRC channel knowledgeable?
The "review," as it was written, was an almost complete waste of time. There was barely any substance, and the points that the reviewer tried to make were largely incoherent.
The message consisted of little more than gibberish.
This was supposed to be a distribution review, and yet the first thing that the reviewer did was circumvent the included packaging system. Fedora uses yum by default, not apt-get and synaptic.
The entire review essentially consisted of a large rant about how hard it is to compile software from source. No duh Sherlock! That's why the distribution comes with a packaging manager and a set of RPMs that have been tested together. The whole point is that you shouldn't be compiling packages unless you know what you are doing (which she clearly does not, otherwise she would have been able to build the packages in question).
In short, the article was not a review of any part of Fedora but the install. After that the article degenerated into nothing more than a public expose of the author's shortcomings as a systems administrator.
Exactly. Any distribution "review" that even mentions the word "compile" gets an F- in my book. Why should I care that the reviewer can't build software from source? I want to hear about the software included in the distribution.
Exactly, in the past Microsoft has sponsored free Linux R&D (the Mindcraft benchmarks are an excellent example), and it has always worked to Linux's favor.
If Microsoft thinks that high-lighting Linux's security record, on the other hand, they are crazy. It is possible that you might come up with more Linux exploits if you count every single daemon, program, and service that you might possibly install, but that's a clear cut case of comparing apples to oranges. Linux sysadmins are going to take Microsoft's list, cross out all of the software they don't run, and be left with one heck of a short list of exploits.
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft's competitors were able to lower their costs considerably by integrating their silicon as they went along. Microsoft was stuck with chips from rival competitors that were already at their lowest possible price point on day one. The cost to produce a PS/2 has dropped dramatically. The cost to produce an XBox is almost the same now as it was when it was introduced.
Precisely. Despite all of the stuff I know about the case the fact that Boies and Co. were willing to take the SCO case on contingency always worried me. After all, those guys know far more about how to make money from litigation than I do. Even so, I couldn't figure out why Boies would allow McBride and the rest of the SCO management to shoot off their mouths in public about the case. Keeping management's mouth buttoned about pending litigation is standard procedure in cases where the party expects to actually win.
Once I realized that Boies had already worked it so that his company got paid the whole thing makes a great deal more sense. Now the entire case is all about dragging IBM (and Linux) through the mud for as long as possible with the hope of aggravating IBM off enough so that they buy SCO out. Boies is essentially wagering that IBM will cave. Otherwise, his lawfirm is going to be handing a very embarrassing defeat.
Actually, I would bet that the music industry would love these vouchers. It would be far more profitable to simply skim a percentage off the top of all taxpayers than to wheedle CD purchases out of teenagers (far and away their largest market). There would be two major advantages to such a scheme. The first advantage is that they would no longer have to worry about protecting copyrights, as they would get paid either way. The second advantage is that they would be freed even more from the burden of finding "good" artists, as they would get paid a certain percentage of this voucher money either way. After all, when you control the primary means of distributing and marketing music you win no matter how it works out that artists get paid.
If you want to break that up, you have to purchase your entertainment from the competition.
You can already give money to the artist of your choice. Just send him or her a check, purchase an album, or, better yet, go to a concert. There is no need to get the government more involved than it already is.
If you want to make a political gesture while supporting this artist make sure that you pay the thousands of artists that already offer their material in unencrypted formats. It really is as simple as that. If you don't like the media companies, buy from artists that aren't part of the media conglomerates. There are thousands of artists to choose from.
Artistic vouchers would be the worst possible solution. If you think that the credit card companies take a bite out of transactions they are involved with then you never have dealt with the government. The taxpayer would almost certainly end up paying at least $20 for a $10 voucher, and the record companies would still get all of the money because they still control the most sure method of getting the publicity that is necessary to make it big. The only difference would be that the RIAA companies would get paid in "vouchers," which, with our luck, would probably be tax-free money.
Not to mention the fact that you are volunteering my money, which I don't feel like spending on your "art."
Further government intervention in this arena would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. Anyone that thinks that this is a good idea needs to take a history class, at the very least, and a remedial economics class would probably be a good idea as well.
Not true at all, Boies and Co. not only get a huge cut of any winnings (yeah right), but they also get a 20% stake if the company is sold, and 20% of any equity raised. The $50 million that was raised recently, 20% of that is in Boies pocket right this minute. Plus, they got a ridiculously large chunk of stock as well (400,000 shares).
Here's one source
In short, SCO management is almost certainly telling suckers (er... investors) that the case is contingency based, but the lawyers have already been paid.
Even better, once the iTunes store becomes a major source of music for millions of folks then Apple can either
The reason that the RIAA is so powerful is that for years they were the only way for artists to get their music into the hands of customers. Even now it is almost impossible to get yourself heard without signing a contract with a major label.
If iTunes becomes a major outlet for music then Apple could very easily begin to finance and promote their own artists, and that's where the money is. Even better, instead of having to deal with Clear Channel to access thousands of separate geographic markets Apple will be able market directly to a large portion of the world.
In short, turning a profit is not necessary at this point, hovering near profitability is perfectly acceptable. The fact that iTunes drives iPod sales is just gravy.
Perfect. Borland has created the perfect tool for getting their few remain Delphi developers to switch to Microsoft's wares.
If I am going to have to rewrite my applications, and if I am going to lose backwards compatibility, why in the world would I pay Borland for this privilege? It makes far more sense to simply start over in C# and be done with it.
Python, Emacs, Perl, Zope, Eclipse, Netbeans, Tcl, gcc... The list goes on and on. Free Software has plenty of good tools.
Oh please. I can name a double handful of commercial development tools that no longer exist. Kylix, the commercial tool we are talking about is essentially dead. No updates last year, no updates this year, and no way to use Kylix to take advantage of the 64 bit processors that are now available.
What's worse, the $1000 you pay for the development version is nothing compared to the time and money spent learning a technology that has no future. That same time could have been spent on any number of development tools that are going to be around at the end of the year.
And your assumptions about Free Software developers are also completely off the mark. My primary development tool is Emacs, a tool that has probably been available for longer than you have been alive. It isn't going to disappear anytime soon. Likewise Python, Perl, Zope, Apache, Tomcat, gcc, and the rest of the tools that I use. All of these tools have large communities of developers that depend on them for their livelihoods.
The fact of the matter is that I have been burned before by commercial toolsets that can disappear overnight. Heck, look at the plight of the VB developers who are having to rewrite all of their code for VB.Net. That simply doesn't happen with Free Software. I can run my Perl scripts from the dark ages on a modern Perl unmodified, can you say that about your tools?
Development environments are becoming a commodity. There are piles of good tools available, many of them are not only free, but are Free Software as well.
Kylix was a half-baked attempt at a Linux IDE, using a language that is losing marketshare. The fact that the enterprise version cost over $1000 was certainly an issue. I can get buckets of Free tools that are less buggy than Kylix, and they don't put me at the mercy of Borland.
The fact that Microsoft can still get folks to pay for VS.NET is irrelevant. People looking for Linux tools aren't likely to consider VS.NET.
Exactly. Why pay good money for development closed source development tools that leave you at the mercy of Borland when there are piles and piles of excellent Free tools with active communities and a guaranteed future. I bet that the folks that did pay for Kylix are upset that they trusted Borland.
Development tools have become a commodity boys and girls.
Cry me a river. You could have been born in China, India, South America, or anywhere in Africa. You're in the richest 1% of the world's population almost by default by just living in the U.S.
The per capita income in China is under $4000.