On the subject of GPL disregard: When questioned about SCO bundling GPL programs, Blake Stowell said:
"Our issue is with the enforceability of the GPL".
-
When software is released with a GPL license, the author(s) still retains the copyright, but is granting specific terms under which the copyrighted work may be used without consulting the author.
If Mr. Stowell and SCO do not believe that the terms of license are valid, then the agreement of the license is nullified, and use of the work without other permission from the author is breaking copyright law.
Under these special circumstances, I believe that the authors of the GPL software in question should get clarification, and ask SCO for a written agreement to the terms of the GPL, or else demand a halt to the software use, and possibly payment for any infringement.
In this article, Stephen Evans, without proof, and without research is blaming the malicious Windows program called "MyDoom" on Linux and Open Source advocates.
First, The author of "MyDoom" must be very familiar with Windows programming to write this. Most Linux programmers do not consider knowledge of Windows programming as very useful information.
Second, the person who wrote the malicious program probably does not represent the operating system that he uses, the company he works for, or the country he lives in.
Linux and Open Source is advocated by and used by many people and organizations: Individuals, Companies, Communities, Schools, Churches, Space Agencies and in some cases, Governments. One should realize this before painting the picture.
SCO (formerly Caldera, a Linux company and maker of OpenLinux) has made many enemies, by threatening and suing some of the largest US and European companies, as well as individuals. Microsoft has not made many friends in the past either.
Linux and Open Source has also made many enemies. By opening and strengthening standards and software, it threatens companies with monopoly control, as well as spam companies and anti-virus companies that depend on current software weaknesses for business.
"MyDoom" could be the result of a company is retaliating against SCO. Or it could be a company is trying to harm Linux by causing negative uniformed accusations (like the BBC article). Or could just be a way to cover the authors tracks.
The company or person who put the [currently vapor] code there may be held liable. But not the end user who has been assured that the code is open source.
If someone contributed a short story to the NYT, and the NYT times printed it, a reader of the paper would certainly not owe royalties if the copyright turned out to be bogus.
Monday's response included no examples of copyright violations, Stowell said. "We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue."
Thunderbird is not fast like Firebird. In fact it seems slow just like Mozilla Mail.
And the recipent completion seems to suck like previous version of Mozilla/Netscape. If I start to type "bobs" email, I get "bo[@mydomain.com]", which is of course only useful on an intranet.
Kmail seems "just right", but every version that I have tried has been buggy.
At one point, MS had actual lawsuits against it from every direction. The Federal, State, local government and businesses such as Sun and Caldera (now SCO).
Did Gartner issue the same warning then?
So far SCO has only sued IBM. There is good reason for that. They have no case against others, unless they have a specific contract with them.
For a normal Linux user, there is no SCO agreement.
Linux users should assume that all linux code is covered under the GPL, unless shown otherwise.
The most SCO could ask linux users to do is remove possible infringing code, if there was any.
--
SCO claims that IBM borrowed their car years ago, and IBM took part of the car (perhaps near the bumper) and donated it to you, who assumed that it was a genuine gift from IBM.
Now SCO is coming to you and demanding payment. They are also running around town telling people that your car is running on parts stolen from SCO. You are more than willing to give up a part, if they can show and prove which part was taken. But SCO will not tell you which part it is, and instead says that if you pay for their car, they will not sue you.
For several months SCO/Caldera has been in litigation with IBM alleging that IBM put misappropriate SCO source code into Linux.
SCO's claims have been unsubstantiated in court, and SCO has not attempted to contact Linux kernel maintainers to have any source code in question removed. In fact, SCO's website still contains the full source code of Linux with the public licence to modify and use (GPL) intact.
SCO has continued to submit unsubstantiated claims to the press in apparent attempt to discredit Linux.
In Germany, SCO received an injunction against it, in which they can no long claim IP rights to the Linux kernel. SCO's web site has been shut down in Germany.
Now SCO, with no proof given, is attempting to extort Linux customers into purchasing UnixWare Licenses as a payment for protection against SCO litigation. Below is the SCO quote from the news release.
"Any business running commercial Linux that buys a UnixWare license would be held harmless against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format"
I believe that this shows that SCO is trying to extort millions of Linux customers into paying for a license, without giving specific proof of the allegation.
I urge the FTC to investigate the extortive behavior of SCO, as this behavior threatens to damage thousands of companies that depend on and develop for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
On the subject of GPL disregard:
When questioned about SCO bundling GPL programs, Blake Stowell said:
"Our issue is with the enforceability of the GPL".
-
When software is released with a GPL license, the author(s) still retains the copyright, but is granting specific terms under which the copyrighted work may be used without consulting the author.
If Mr. Stowell and SCO do not believe that the terms of license are valid, then the agreement of the license is nullified, and use of the work without other permission from the author is breaking copyright law.
Under these special circumstances, I believe that the authors of the GPL software in question should get clarification, and ask SCO for a written agreement to the terms of the GPL, or else demand a halt to the software use, and possibly payment for any infringement.
I never bought an AGP card , as I thought it was a very temporary solution that no one assumed would replace PCI.
I never bought a VESA local bus card either, actually.
SCO has been claiming for a year that they own the deed to the Linux property, even though they own none to little of it.
The false accusations have cost the authors considerable time and effort and reputation.
The accusations are at times obviously done with malice towards the Linux and FOSS communities.
Could there be such a thing as a class action Slander of Title against SCO suit led by Linus Torvalds.
Don't worry too much about the name, as the name actually is "Mozilla".
Think of it as "Mozilla Next Generation Browser code-named [Phoenix|Firebird|FireFly]".
"Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"
In this article, Stephen Evans, without proof, and without research is blaming the malicious Windows program called "MyDoom" on Linux and Open Source advocates.
First, The author of "MyDoom" must be very familiar with Windows programming to write this. Most Linux programmers do not consider knowledge of Windows programming as very useful information.
Second, the person who wrote the malicious program probably does not represent the operating system that he uses, the company he works for, or the country he lives in.
Linux and Open Source is advocated by and used by many people and organizations: Individuals, Companies, Communities, Schools, Churches, Space Agencies and in some cases, Governments. One should realize this before painting the picture.
SCO (formerly Caldera, a Linux company and maker of OpenLinux) has made many enemies, by threatening and suing some of the largest US and European companies, as well as individuals. Microsoft has not made many friends in the past either.
Linux and Open Source has also made many enemies. By opening and strengthening standards and software, it threatens companies with monopoly control, as well as spam companies and anti-virus companies that depend on current software weaknesses for business.
"MyDoom" could be the result of a company is retaliating against SCO. Or it could be a company is trying to harm Linux by causing negative uniformed accusations (like the BBC article). Or could just be a way to cover the authors tracks.
He should have a followup article on the Linux communities fascination with posting anal pict ures in ASCII, too.
Novell guys form a Linux company called "Caldera" to compete against Microsoft.
...
Caldera offers modified RedHat Linux called "OpenLinux".
Novell sells rights to old Unix software to SCO.
Caldera makes money from Linux.
SCO looses money.
Caldera uses money to buy failing UNIX company called SCO.
Caldera makes deal with Microsoft and drops litigation.
Caldera renames itself SCO Group, and rebrands itself as a UNIX company.
Caldera/SCO, with the help of Microsoft, threaten with UNIX rights to fight against Linux.
Novell buys Linux company, SuSe.
The company or person who put the [currently vapor] code there may be held liable. But not the end user who has been assured that the code is open source.
If someone contributed a short story to the NYT, and the NYT times printed it, a reader of the paper would certainly not owe royalties if the copyright turned out to be bogus.
I have no use for a floppy bay.
I tinkered with BSD, and was trying to see if BSD could easily live in a Linux environment.
FreeBSD understands Linux extended partitions and ext2, but you cannot boot an ext2 fs.
NetBSD will boot ext2 fs, but cannot deal with extended partitions. You would need to edit the disk
label.
OpenBSD seemed worse, but I really never tried it.
This seems like something that the BSD people would want to encourage us Linux users to give it a try.
Monday's response included no examples of copyright violations, Stowell said. "We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue."
I VVonder YYhy I saw that.
on that toy page, I saw this memory from
my childhood.
Driving with levers was fun.
Anyone else remember this.
Mozilla is not slow ( on a fast computer ).
Funny.
Thunderbird is not fast like Firebird. In fact it seems slow just like Mozilla Mail.
And the recipent completion seems to suck like previous version of Mozilla/Netscape. If I start to type "bobs" email, I get "bo[@mydomain.com]", which is of course only useful on an intranet.
Kmail seems "just right", but every version that I have tried has been buggy.
If I spend thousands on a plasma or projector or lcd display, hopefully I was smart enough to get one with digital input (DVI).
The device is incomplete unless it supports SPDIF and DVI.
Rusty's rpm has both source trees, and creates the proper modprobe and modprobe.old files needed in Linux 2.6 or 2.4.
e /r usty/modules/modutils-2.4.21-22.src.rpm
http://www.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/peopl
note, that if you search for CONFIG_BINFMT_COFF,
you will see that this was removed in 1994.
or was that COFF, different from the dll COFF referred to in this driver?
DLLs are PE-COFF ??
Anyone know the history there?
So does the dll loader part almost give us:
Kernel support for COFF (DLL) binaries?
Then all these media encoders that use DLL's don't need the wine hacks.
or...
(COFF) Kernel core (/proc/kcore) format
(ha ha)
SCO is claiming that they don't have to follow the GPL, because they believe it is unconstitutional.
This, at the very least admits that they do not agree with the terms of the license? Right?
Are kernel developers, samba developers and others sending notice of copyright infringment?
Can we put these articles in some "Registration required" catagory, so I can turn them off?
Getting a "Please register/login to read" message seems simalar to getting some "goatsie" page when you expect something informative.
The box would be great if I could hook it to a monitor ( or modern TV) to it, not to an old TV like my Atari 400.
There is no DVI?
At one point, MS had actual lawsuits against it from every direction. The Federal, State, local government and businesses such as Sun and Caldera (now SCO).
Did Gartner issue the same warning then?
So far SCO has only sued IBM. There is good reason for that. They have no case against others, unless they have a specific contract with them.
For a normal Linux user, there is no SCO agreement.
Linux users should assume that all linux code is covered under the GPL, unless shown otherwise.
The most SCO could ask linux users to do is remove possible infringing code, if there was any.
--
SCO claims that IBM borrowed their car years ago, and IBM took part of the car (perhaps near the bumper) and donated it to you, who assumed that it was a genuine gift from IBM.
Now SCO is coming to you and demanding payment. They are also running around town telling people that your car is running on parts stolen from SCO. You are more than willing to give up a part, if they can show and prove which part was taken. But SCO will not tell you which part it is, and instead says that if you pay for their car, they will not sue you.
For several months SCO/Caldera has been in litigation with IBM alleging that IBM put misappropriate SCO source code into Linux.
SCO's claims have been unsubstantiated in court, and SCO has not attempted to contact Linux kernel maintainers to have any source code in question removed. In fact, SCO's website still contains the full source code of Linux with the public licence to modify and use (GPL) intact.
SCO has continued to submit unsubstantiated claims to the press in apparent attempt to discredit Linux.
In Germany, SCO received an injunction against it, in which they can no long claim IP rights to the Linux kernel. SCO's web site has been shut down in Germany.
Now SCO, with no proof given, is attempting to extort Linux customers into purchasing UnixWare Licenses as a payment for protection against SCO litigation. Below is the SCO quote from the news release.
"Any business running commercial Linux that buys a UnixWare license would be held harmless against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format"
I believe that this shows that SCO is trying to extort millions of Linux customers into paying for a license, without giving specific proof of the allegation.
I urge the FTC to investigate the extortive behavior of SCO, as this behavior threatens to damage thousands of companies that depend on and develop for Linux.