Moreover, the argument that the window management in Windows is at fault for GIMP's cluttered UI just doesn't hold water.
GIMP's interface is cluttered on Linux with every window manager I've used. Even on its own virtual desktop it has problems. Similarly, Paint Shop Pro 7 on Windows uses MDI, but it also suffers from similar problems due to the non-docking and ill-fitting tool windows. Fortunately, Jasc listened to their customers and improved this in PSP8.
Take a look at apps like Eclipse. Do you think Eclipse would be popular among the developer community if every one of those windows was a floater -- including each source file you were trying to edit? Yuck. Of course not.
The fact that tool panels can dock together is a start, but GIMP should go all the way. On all platforms.
On the other hand, GIMP should leave some things up to the OS, such as the common File Open/Save dialog. Users become accustomed to the dialogs for their own OS, and it would be trivial for GIMP to bypass GTK and call directly into platform-specific APIs for things like this and only fall back on the GTK dialog when GIMP is compiled on an 'unknown' platform. The file dialog in Windows is so much better than the one in GTK that I can see this alone turning people away from GIMP! I suspect the same is true for users using their favorite window managers on Linux and other supported platforms.
GIMP has a lot of potential. It's a few UI hurdles away from being the best 2D bitmap application in the $0 to $200 or so range. Those hurdles are extremely high for the end user, particularly on Windows, but they should be pretty easy for the developers to resolve.
XP is based of NT, and NT is definitely not based on DOS. Learn your history.
Now, whether old code from the FAT file system was eventually ported to NT (NTFS is the native file system in NT) for compatibility reasons -- that's a good question. I don't know the answer.
"This has got to be the biggest BS I have seen on slashdot"
And was absolutely correct. illumin8's post was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.
I've been here for a long time and am accustomed to Slashdot groupthink, but I'm actually surprised illumin8's tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory lie was modded up, while vivek's response was modded down.
VC++ 2003 compiler catches this with the default settings. It catches even more of these types of programming errors if you crank up the warning level.
deleteme.cpp(9) : warning C4390: ';' : empty controlled statement found; is this the intent?
Huh? Buying the new car helped fund a spectrum of jobs from the engineers who designed the engine to the mechanics that change the oil. It also helped fund R&D in science and technology, some of which is as beneficial to your daily life as the pure theoretical research funded by the government.
You know, you can always spend your extra money on the programs you mentioned, either by voluntarily paying higher taxes, donating to charitable organizations, or directly funding programs that you consider important.
I don't listen to her "music" or otherwise pay her any attention, but Britney Spears has earned every penny that she's made. She is an entertainer and based on her popularity and how often she pops up in the news she is obviously very effective. If you think you could do a better job, go for it.
(For the record, I favor neither tax cuts nor tax increases. The current level is fine; it's the spending we need to get under control.)
You both have a point; it's all about balance. Both classic and contemporary authors should be read in school, and in my opinion students should be able to pick at least 25% of the books they read for class (from a reasonable list).
After taking many honors, AP, and college english classes, it took years before I could get back into reading for enjoyment.
To make matters worse, most English teachers are female, and at least in the classes I took there was a definite skew toward books that are torture for normal teenage males (eg. Emma).
Poetry disgusts me to this day, having had to survive though the bizarre, biased interpretations that make astrology and dream interpretation seem like science. And remember kids, you get graded on having the same interpretation as the teacher!
Luckily I was able to BS my way through, always getting at least a B.
You're on the right track, but it's more than that:
1) Risk management. Beta software is a way to manage the risks of rolling out a piece of software or a web site. Does the software have a subtle bug that can't be reproduced in the lab? Does the web site have unexpected scalability problems? Software can get deployed very quickly, and once the floodgates are open it can be tricky to fix these types of issues.
2) Customer feedback. Do the customers love the software but find a few important features awkward? Usability testing and focus groups will discover some issues, but others may require real customers to use the software for an extended period of time.
3) Early availability. The best software isn't software that has "no bugs", it's the software that's good enough and released soon enough to start being useful (and, potentially, grab market share). Beta versions make the software available sooner than normal, with the caveat that the customer will run into more bugs. The customer can decide whether this tradeoff is worth it.
(Clearly, this isn't appropriate for all types of software.)
4) Partner integration. Massive software rollouts, such as a new operating system or service pack, require an extended beta testing period in order to give partners time to prepare for and take advantage of the changes.
For example, XP SP2 contains many security enhancements that can break some software and web sites. These are impossible for Microsoft to fix on their end, so the betas give vendors some time to address the problems. Similarly, Longhorn adds a significant amount of functionality to the Windows platform, so providing early access (not even beta yet!) gives partners time to learn the new technology and start creating products that take advantage of it.
5) Customer integration. Complex software systems require time to plan, evaluate, and learn. Beta releases give customers additional time to figure out how (and whether) the software will fit into their existing infrastructure. It also gives them time to learn the new software and create training materials, procedures, etc. for the people that need it.
I can say, however, that I do research in statistics and information theory, and there is a certain degree to which research from Bell Labs and IBM pops up again and again. The same thing can definitely not be said about Microsoft.
Part of this is simply due to the fact that Microsoft's research arm is much younger than those from Bell Labs, IBM, and PARC.
The REAL monopoly here is with Microsoft, who could EASILY implement a real screen reader interface for a fraction of a percent of their development budget and bundle it free with their OS to reach a userbase orders of magnitudes larger than Apple will (realistically) ever hope to reach.
And then get sued (and criticized on/.) for bundling yet another program which competes with 3rd party vendors.
Not that it's a bad idea, of course, and Narrator should certainly be improved, but currently Microsoft puts their effort into creating the platform pieces (MSAA and related technologies) and leaves development of the end-user products to ISVs. This isn't all bad, as ISVs can leverage the interfaces to build accessibility tools tailored to different types/levels of disabilities as well as support for specialized hardware.
The fact that the software (and virtually everything else for people with disabilities) is expensive simply reflects the lower volume of demand.
Rest assured that if there weren't already several good 3rd party screen readers for Windows, Microsoft would build one in a heartbeat.
It's scary how many people jump on the regulation bandwagon just to spite Microsoft. You think you're going to get something for nothing by having the government prescribe OSS, the "one true way".
This is so wrong, I don't know where to begin. There is no one true way; choice is the key.
Give the developer the power choose whether or not he wants to release binaries, source code, whether to charge for either, and how they may be redistributed.
Give the user the power to choose the software product that best fits their needs, based on their own criteria. One user may choose less functional software because the source is available, while another use may choose proprietary software because it does exactly what they want. In some instances the best product may also be open source, but it's really a case-by-case thing.
When you let companies compete for customers, everybody wins. The role of the government should be to reduce barriers that limit user choice - within reason. They shouldn't try to stop temporary momentum (i.e. IBM 20 years ago, Microsoft ten years ago, or Google today), but if a company has a monopoly then, sure, regulate the types of contracts and exclusive agreements they can enter into. Regulate the business side, but don't regulate the types of products they can create to give them an artificial disadvantage over their competition. Forcing the market leader to produce inferior products doesn't help users.
You talk about freedom. Freedom doesn't mean forcing everybody to follow your "one true way" because opening the source code may have some perceived benefit (to you); it means giving people the freedom to choose.
Can anybody point me to nontrivial production-quality Python application? Ideally a client side app that doesn't require a bunch of fiddling to get working. I don't much care what it is, but I believe I have the same bias as other Python skeptics in that it's good for writing small scripts and back-end stuff, but not for a high-quality app that has to work. I'd love to see a counterexample.
For example, something like Chandler, but finished.
This issue illustrates one reason Microsoft doesn't release next-day patches. There's a certain amount of process and regression testing (on many platforms) that is done to minimize the chances of any new issues. Of course, problems still happen occasionally, and the process is constantly refined.
Plus, I can look at the source code for the patches and so can thousands of other people inside Microsoft.
Last, people can (and do) look at the patches the same way people search for security issues: dissasemble them; test them. The problems with this security patch would have been apparent almost as quickly with just a cursory look at the asm or a bit of testing with long URLs. Heck, just the *presense* of strcpy and strcat means they didn't know what the heck they were doing. Those functions should no longer be used in production code. Period.
This is terrible code, riddled with unsafe string functions on stack buffers and just waiting for an exploit. At minimum it will crash. Also, what happens when you're using URLs greater than 256 characters? The fact that these guys haven't heard of INTERNET_MAX_URL_LENGTH is disturbing.
I mean, in addition to the grandparent poster's comments on potential sFake and sTrue buffer overflow, surl is also easily overflowable.
Ironically, the satiric slidewarization of Tufte's essay communicates his main points better than the NYT article or other Slashdot posts. Slideware in the generic sense is the problem, not just Microsoft's implementation: low data density, choppy and linear flow, deeply hierarchical structure, data ends up broken up to prevent comparisons and analysis, etc.
I hate most slideware presentations as much as the next guy, but I have seen them done well. If you use higher resolution projectors (at least 1024x768) and have a good speaker that correctly uses the slides as supplemental information instead of an outline then it's not all bad.
(And yes, I have read the whole essay. Out of curiosity I bought it along with one of Tufte's other books a few months ago. It has some good points, but I was dissapointed by the lack of depth and convincing analysis.)
That's ridiculous. No decent OS should allow itself to ever be crashed by any application software.
Re-read the parent's post. He's not talking about Microsoft having to do workarounds for bad apps to prevent Windows from crashing. The workarounds are to prevent the bad 3rd party app from crashing.
For example, many apps written for Win9x had tons of flaws with heap overflows, double-freeing pointers, dangling pointers, etc., but the developers "lucked out" and their apps didn't crash. However, when you tried to run the app on Win2k/XP it would fall over and die. In order to make XP compatible with older software they had to port the whole Win9x memory manager to XP and "shim" the memory functions in those apps so they'd work.
There's a lot more to it than that, MS expends an astounding amount of effort to ensure that old software will run. Check out the application compatibility database sometime.
(And even worse, Microsoft provides tools that you can run your app under to see if you have many of the types of flaws that create application compatibility problems (and random crashes), yet almost no developers use them.)
Continuously violating copyright has the potential of finally killing it, and many see this as a very fortune outcome.
Nah, by the time people grow up enough to have enough influence, enough of them wake up to realize that IP has value and that copyright provides incentive to create new IP.
So I call to civil disobedience because is the most harming (for them) way of sending the message that current laws are not right....And no, I don't want "free lunch".
Curious. In years seeing this argument rehashed here and on other sites, it still seems like the primary issue people have with copyright is that they can't have everything for free. You know, the crazy idea that intellectual property has value. The crazy idea that if I create something I own it.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but that is not going away any time soon, no matter how much you steal. (I wonder if car thieves steal because they are opposed to automobile manufacturers' business practices. Anybody know?:P)
There are tons of legitimate complaints about the RIAA, MPAA, and others, but when you violate their copyright you just look like an immature criminal. When you put your money elsewhere -- independent companies and legal alternative distribution schemes -- you're twice as effective: you hit them where it hurts without looking like a criminal and giving them additional ammunition, and you give resources to alternatives so they can grow to legally challenge the status quo.
I'm curious because there's an 802.11b antenna sticking out of the front of the machine under my desk (it has front PCMCIA slots, and I run a laptop card and Linux for an accesspoint+two way firewall). My leg is often right up against this antenna and I've been thinking nothing of it.
You'd better get that leg checked out right away...
I have a Dell 2000FP both at work and at home. If you watch the price you can find it for $800 or less - it fluctuates frequently. I think there are a couple other 1600x1200 capable LCDs around that price range, but you're right that they're a lot less common than they should be.
Of course, I still use dual (and even triple) monitors in addition to the big one.;-)
This is all easy to say, and maybe it will go down that way; maybe it won't.
The point is, you guys are completely convinced that you're right (and you probably are). However, what happens when this goes to trial and IBM is "proved" guilty, or ends up settling for some large amount? What if you see the evidence is code that you wrote specifically for Linux that SCO claims to own, but you're effectively powerless to step up and "correct" the blatently wrong verdict?
This isn't just a what-if scenario, because it happens all the time and the majority of/. notice because it's happening to companies like Microsoft and never being questioned. Well, now they're noticing. This SCO charade is giving those folks a small taste of what it's like to be on the receiving end, and I hope it will broaden their perspective and make them more critical of similar baseless lawsuits.
This is an extreme example because all public evidence points to SCO having gone off the deep end, but here's hoping it will wake some people up.
Slashdot Mirror
Mistakes will happen, but there's a certificate revocation mechanism that can mitigate these types of failures.
Moreover, the argument that the window management in Windows is at fault for GIMP's cluttered UI just doesn't hold water.
GIMP's interface is cluttered on Linux with every window manager I've used. Even on its own virtual desktop it has problems. Similarly, Paint Shop Pro 7 on Windows uses MDI, but it also suffers from similar problems due to the non-docking and ill-fitting tool windows. Fortunately, Jasc listened to their customers and improved this in PSP8.
Take a look at apps like Eclipse. Do you think Eclipse would be popular among the developer community if every one of those windows was a floater -- including each source file you were trying to edit? Yuck. Of course not.
The fact that tool panels can dock together is a start, but GIMP should go all the way. On all platforms.
On the other hand, GIMP should leave some things up to the OS, such as the common File Open/Save dialog. Users become accustomed to the dialogs for their own OS, and it would be trivial for GIMP to bypass GTK and call directly into platform-specific APIs for things like this and only fall back on the GTK dialog when GIMP is compiled on an 'unknown' platform. The file dialog in Windows is so much better than the one in GTK that I can see this alone turning people away from GIMP! I suspect the same is true for users using their favorite window managers on Linux and other supported platforms.
GIMP has a lot of potential. It's a few UI hurdles away from being the best 2D bitmap application in the $0 to $200 or so range. Those hurdles are extremely high for the end user, particularly on Windows, but they should be pretty easy for the developers to resolve.
XP is based of NT, and NT is definitely not based on DOS. Learn your history.
Now, whether old code from the FAT file system was eventually ported to NT (NTFS is the native file system in NT) for compatibility reasons -- that's a good question. I don't know the answer.
vivek7006 wrote:
"This has got to be the biggest BS I have seen on slashdot"
And was absolutely correct. illumin8's post was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.
I've been here for a long time and am accustomed to Slashdot groupthink, but I'm actually surprised illumin8's tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory lie was modded up, while vivek's response was modded down.
You could move to South Korea...
VC++ 2003 compiler catches this with the default settings. It catches even more of these types of programming errors if you crank up the warning level.
deleteme.cpp(9) : warning C4390: ';' : empty controlled statement found; is this the intent?
Huh? Buying the new car helped fund a spectrum of jobs from the engineers who designed the engine to the mechanics that change the oil. It also helped fund R&D in science and technology, some of which is as beneficial to your daily life as the pure theoretical research funded by the government.
You know, you can always spend your extra money on the programs you mentioned, either by voluntarily paying higher taxes, donating to charitable organizations, or directly funding programs that you consider important.
I don't listen to her "music" or otherwise pay her any attention, but Britney Spears has earned every penny that she's made. She is an entertainer and based on her popularity and how often she pops up in the news she is obviously very effective. If you think you could do a better job, go for it.
(For the record, I favor neither tax cuts nor tax increases. The current level is fine; it's the spending we need to get under control.)
You both have a point; it's all about balance. Both classic and contemporary authors should be read in school, and in my opinion students should be able to pick at least 25% of the books they read for class (from a reasonable list).
After taking many honors, AP, and college english classes, it took years before I could get back into reading for enjoyment.
To make matters worse, most English teachers are female, and at least in the classes I took there was a definite skew toward books that are torture for normal teenage males (eg. Emma).
Poetry disgusts me to this day, having had to survive though the bizarre, biased interpretations that make astrology and dream interpretation seem like science. And remember kids, you get graded on having the same interpretation as the teacher!
Luckily I was able to BS my way through, always getting at least a B.
You're on the right track, but it's more than that:
1) Risk management. Beta software is a way to manage the risks of rolling out a piece of software or a web site. Does the software have a subtle bug that can't be reproduced in the lab? Does the web site have unexpected scalability problems? Software can get deployed very quickly, and once the floodgates are open it can be tricky to fix these types of issues.
2) Customer feedback. Do the customers love the software but find a few important features awkward? Usability testing and focus groups will discover some issues, but others may require real customers to use the software for an extended period of time.
3) Early availability. The best software isn't software that has "no bugs", it's the software that's good enough and released soon enough to start being useful (and, potentially, grab market share). Beta versions make the software available sooner than normal, with the caveat that the customer will run into more bugs. The customer can decide whether this tradeoff is worth it.
(Clearly, this isn't appropriate for all types of software.)
4) Partner integration. Massive software rollouts, such as a new operating system or service pack, require an extended beta testing period in order to give partners time to prepare for and take advantage of the changes.
For example, XP SP2 contains many security enhancements that can break some software and web sites. These are impossible for Microsoft to fix on their end, so the betas give vendors some time to address the problems. Similarly, Longhorn adds a significant amount of functionality to the Windows platform, so providing early access (not even beta yet!) gives partners time to learn the new technology and start creating products that take advantage of it.
5) Customer integration. Complex software systems require time to plan, evaluate, and learn. Beta releases give customers additional time to figure out how (and whether) the software will fit into their existing infrastructure. It also gives them time to learn the new software and create training materials, procedures, etc. for the people that need it.
Cognitive dissonance.
Define cutting edge.
They almost certainly are better all-around, and likely have better Arabic language support than most of the alternatives.
I can say, however, that I do research in statistics and information theory, and there is a certain degree to which research from Bell Labs and IBM pops up again and again. The same thing can definitely not be said about Microsoft.
Part of this is simply due to the fact that Microsoft's research arm is much younger than those from Bell Labs, IBM, and PARC.
The REAL monopoly here is with Microsoft, who could EASILY implement a real screen reader interface for a fraction of a percent of their development budget and bundle it free with their OS to reach a userbase orders of magnitudes larger than Apple will (realistically) ever hope to reach.
And then get sued (and criticized on /.) for bundling yet another program which competes with 3rd party vendors.
Not that it's a bad idea, of course, and Narrator should certainly be improved, but currently Microsoft puts their effort into creating the platform pieces (MSAA and related technologies) and leaves development of the end-user products to ISVs. This isn't all bad, as ISVs can leverage the interfaces to build accessibility tools tailored to different types/levels of disabilities as well as support for specialized hardware.
The fact that the software (and virtually everything else for people with disabilities) is expensive simply reflects the lower volume of demand.
Rest assured that if there weren't already several good 3rd party screen readers for Windows, Microsoft would build one in a heartbeat.
It's scary how many people jump on the regulation bandwagon just to spite Microsoft. You think you're going to get something for nothing by having the government prescribe OSS, the "one true way".
This is so wrong, I don't know where to begin. There is no one true way; choice is the key.
Give the developer the power choose whether or not he wants to release binaries, source code, whether to charge for either, and how they may be redistributed.
Give the user the power to choose the software product that best fits their needs, based on their own criteria. One user may choose less functional software because the source is available, while another use may choose proprietary software because it does exactly what they want. In some instances the best product may also be open source, but it's really a case-by-case thing.
When you let companies compete for customers, everybody wins. The role of the government should be to reduce barriers that limit user choice - within reason. They shouldn't try to stop temporary momentum (i.e. IBM 20 years ago, Microsoft ten years ago, or Google today), but if a company has a monopoly then, sure, regulate the types of contracts and exclusive agreements they can enter into. Regulate the business side, but don't regulate the types of products they can create to give them an artificial disadvantage over their competition. Forcing the market leader to produce inferior products doesn't help users.
You talk about freedom. Freedom doesn't mean forcing everybody to follow your "one true way" because opening the source code may have some perceived benefit (to you); it means giving people the freedom to choose.
Basic technology such as web servers are on their way of being removed from the realm of competition. 2004 is promising.
'Cause we all know competition is a bad thing, right?
Can anybody point me to nontrivial production-quality Python application? Ideally a client side app that doesn't require a bunch of fiddling to get working. I don't much care what it is, but I believe I have the same bias as other Python skeptics in that it's good for writing small scripts and back-end stuff, but not for a high-quality app that has to work. I'd love to see a counterexample.
For example, something like Chandler, but finished.
That's a total cop out.
This issue illustrates one reason Microsoft doesn't release next-day patches. There's a certain amount of process and regression testing (on many platforms) that is done to minimize the chances of any new issues. Of course, problems still happen occasionally, and the process is constantly refined.
Plus, I can look at the source code for the patches and so can thousands of other people inside Microsoft.
Last, people can (and do) look at the patches the same way people search for security issues: dissasemble them; test them. The problems with this security patch would have been apparent almost as quickly with just a cursory look at the asm or a bit of testing with long URLs. Heck, just the *presense* of strcpy and strcat means they didn't know what the heck they were doing. Those functions should no longer be used in production code. Period.
This is terrible code, riddled with unsafe string functions on stack buffers and just waiting for an exploit. At minimum it will crash. Also, what happens when you're using URLs greater than 256 characters? The fact that these guys haven't heard of INTERNET_MAX_URL_LENGTH is disturbing.
/ cgi-bin/expl oit.cgi?");
// Do some string manipulation to pull out real/fake part of url.
s url,sTrue);
I mean, in addition to the grandparent poster's comments on potential sFake and sTrue buffer overflow, surl is also easily overflowable.
char surl[256];
strcpy(surl,"http://www.openwares.org
char sFake[256];
char sTrue[256];
strcat(surl,sFake);
strcat(surl,"&");
strcat(
Ooookkkk... It would be an understatement to say this is the worst code I have seen in a long time.
Mod parent up! (I've always wanted to say that)
Ironically, the satiric slidewarization of Tufte's essay communicates his main points better than the NYT article or other Slashdot posts. Slideware in the generic sense is the problem, not just Microsoft's implementation: low data density, choppy and linear flow, deeply hierarchical structure, data ends up broken up to prevent comparisons and analysis, etc.
I hate most slideware presentations as much as the next guy, but I have seen them done well. If you use higher resolution projectors (at least 1024x768) and have a good speaker that correctly uses the slides as supplemental information instead of an outline then it's not all bad.
(And yes, I have read the whole essay. Out of curiosity I bought it along with one of Tufte's other books a few months ago. It has some good points, but I was dissapointed by the lack of depth and convincing analysis.)
That's ridiculous. No decent OS should allow itself to ever be crashed by any application software.
Re-read the parent's post. He's not talking about Microsoft having to do workarounds for bad apps to prevent Windows from crashing. The workarounds are to prevent the bad 3rd party app from crashing.
For example, many apps written for Win9x had tons of flaws with heap overflows, double-freeing pointers, dangling pointers, etc., but the developers "lucked out" and their apps didn't crash. However, when you tried to run the app on Win2k/XP it would fall over and die. In order to make XP compatible with older software they had to port the whole Win9x memory manager to XP and "shim" the memory functions in those apps so they'd work.
There's a lot more to it than that, MS expends an astounding amount of effort to ensure that old software will run. Check out the application compatibility database sometime.
(And even worse, Microsoft provides tools that you can run your app under to see if you have many of the types of flaws that create application compatibility problems (and random crashes), yet almost no developers use them.)
Continuously violating copyright has the potential of finally killing it, and many see this as a very fortune outcome.
Nah, by the time people grow up enough to have enough influence, enough of them wake up to realize that IP has value and that copyright provides incentive to create new IP.
So I call to civil disobedience because is the most harming (for them) way of sending the message that current laws are not right....And no, I don't want "free lunch".
Curious. In years seeing this argument rehashed here and on other sites, it still seems like the primary issue people have with copyright is that they can't have everything for free. You know, the crazy idea that intellectual property has value. The crazy idea that if I create something I own it.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but that is not going away any time soon, no matter how much you steal. (I wonder if car thieves steal because they are opposed to automobile manufacturers' business practices. Anybody know? :P)
There are tons of legitimate complaints about the RIAA, MPAA, and others, but when you violate their copyright you just look like an immature criminal. When you put your money elsewhere -- independent companies and legal alternative distribution schemes -- you're twice as effective: you hit them where it hurts without looking like a criminal and giving them additional ammunition, and you give resources to alternatives so they can grow to legally challenge the status quo.
I'm curious because there's an 802.11b antenna sticking out of the front of the machine under my desk (it has front PCMCIA slots, and I run a laptop card and Linux for an accesspoint+two way firewall). My leg is often right up against this antenna and I've been thinking nothing of it.
You'd better get that leg checked out right away...
I have a Dell 2000FP both at work and at home. If you watch the price you can find it for $800 or less - it fluctuates frequently. I think there are a couple other 1600x1200 capable LCDs around that price range, but you're right that they're a lot less common than they should be.
;-)
Of course, I still use dual (and even triple) monitors in addition to the big one.
This is all easy to say, and maybe it will go down that way; maybe it won't.
The point is, you guys are completely convinced that you're right (and you probably are). However, what happens when this goes to trial and IBM is "proved" guilty, or ends up settling for some large amount? What if you see the evidence is code that you wrote specifically for Linux that SCO claims to own, but you're effectively powerless to step up and "correct" the blatently wrong verdict?
This isn't just a what-if scenario, because it happens all the time and the majority of /. notice because it's happening to companies like Microsoft and never being questioned. Well, now they're noticing. This SCO charade is giving those folks a small taste of what it's like to be on the receiving end, and I hope it will broaden their perspective and make them more critical of similar baseless lawsuits.
This is an extreme example because all public evidence points to SCO having gone off the deep end, but here's hoping it will wake some people up.