Unfortunately comparing changelog entries doesn't really work as evidence. How can we no that they didn't alter their logs?
The Linux community have a hard time doing this, as they work out in the open, but SCO might have bin temped to do so.
We need to compare binaries from the time where the theft is supposed to have taken place.
And even then, it would be hard, as it really doesn't prove the origin of the code.
Perhaps we all need to build our own stuff to stay free when Palladium (or whatever it's called these days) are built into every chip made by all major chip vendors.
And the similarities in the comments could come from some posix documentation that programmers have copied more or less verbatim to describe what they were doing
I'm willing to buy it for $1. Nobody should offer them more than that. It should not be profitable to make questionable lawsuits just to have people buy your company or your cr*ppy source to make the problem go away.
Probably some truth in that, but on the other hand, if pay peanuts you get monkeys
In my experience an employee is not full value for my company until he have at least five years of working experience in his field. And as education takes a greater part of peoples life, the they tend to be quite old and probably have familly etc before the can be of any real use.
Not entirely true. Young people may have easier to learn unimportent stuff as they are not yet gotten the ability to filter out whats important from what is unimportant. This could sometimes prove a disadvantage at an exam where questions sometimes are asked out of context. But the ability filter information tend to be very useful in real life. Even at a programming job.
If they are coders, they are in trouble. But so are their younger collegues. The IT market of today require a lot more than just coding skills.
But on the other hand, if they learn analysis and design they might have an advantage over younger people as they have more life experience, and perhaps have skills from sectors of society outside of the IT business. That may help them to understand the problems of their future customer better and in the end make them build better systems.
For one thing they disabled logging in the windows file server but not in samba. That would hamper Linux performance quite a bit. Then they compare old Linux version to new windows versions. I expect that a Red Hat 9 that already has the new Linux threading system would do a lot better.
Anyway it's nice to have MS pay for performance tests the information we get from them could prove very useful to the Linux kernel developers and help them produce a more optimized 2.6 kernel.
If you could sue companies for this kind of software errors and win. the prices of sofware would rise to astronomical levels, as companies would have to compensate for the risk of losing money in large lawsuits. This would mean that you could just as well do all your development in house, and if you started out by expanding GPL:ed source for your in house projects you would certainly not release your program to the general public for the same reasons.
Yes, it is true that switching systems usually costs money. But should all of that costs fall on the new system? I think not. If you have chosen a system that stores information in undocumented hard to access file formats, some of the costs could have bin expected and should have bin calculated for when your old system was chosen.
E-mail is an international thing. Spam problems can't be solved just by having one ore even many countries introducing a tax. There will always be some country where the taxes are low or nonexistent. And we can expect that spammers would move their operation to such countries.
We can also expect that companies that need to communicate internally by sending short mail messages will extend their virtual private network into such low tax regions.
The only thing that happens would probably be less incomes to ISPs in countries having this tax.
I can't see how that changes things in the IBM case.
Caldera still distributed a GPLed Linux kernel free for everyone, including IBM, to modify as long as they do it according to the rules of the GPL license. And as Caldera owned the source of unix they may license it any way they want, including GPL as they did in their Linux distro.
The previous owner of Unix might have objections to what Caldera did before they bought Unix.
"Ummm, they said they are prepared to present examples in court."
Not really. It only shows that SCO hopes for a settlement out of court. If this goes to court, SCO may have to reveal that they use the same portions of code in their own Linux distro, and that would violate GPL, meaning that they will have to chose between selling Linux and their precious Unix kernel.
If they can't compile it into running windows programs, how can they be sure that the programs on their windows CDs are built from the code that they have looked at?
In a two or three years time, you will get a free windows CD including MS Office with every computer magazine you buy.
To make money MS will try to sell you services instead. E.g. they could remove the spellchecker from MS Office and offer a pay per use.Net spellchecker service.
So the difference between Microsoft and OSS companies like Red Hat will be much less in the future. They will both try to sell you services. But a true OSS product will have the advantage of being user modifyable.
Microsoft used the free as in bear concept to beat Netscape on the browser market, now they get a spoon full of their own medicin. Except that free as in bear as well as in speak makes it a lot more potent.
Last time I checked, it was much faster to set up RedHat 8 than windows XP with SQL Server and MS Exchange. In fact, normally you set up redhat 8 including mail server and database server faster than a plain XP desktop installation.
And what is easy to use can be very different for diffent kinds of users. In the windows world the user is supposed to do all the admining himself, while in the Unix world you have a trained sysadmin to help you.
That way unix users can do more productive work, and the admin cost becomes visible to the management, this means that IT bottlenecks can be discovered and removed and productivity is increased. As Unix systems normally can handle 2-3 times more user than a windows admin Unix becomes a lot cheaper
You see the problem is not so much that Red Hat ships a "broken" or lets be kind and call it a higly modified version of KDE. The real problem is that they do a bad job of supporting their version.
As Red Hat is very slow on releasing bugfixes for their KDE if they release any fixes at all, that is. This goes for fixes for crashes and other malfunctions as well aa security related bug fixes.
And as KDE is part of the redhat distro, it is also part of what users expect to get updated if they subscribe to the Red Hat up2date service that people actually pay money for. But KDE users will not get good value for their money.
And it is not always simple to changie distro. Some products e.g. databasess may only be certified to work with a certain distro e.g. Red Hat.
You mention calendering software. And yes, that kind of software can be useful, and there are good Exchange replacements that run on Linux out there (e.g. Bynari). But this kind of software is kind of overrated. People spend far too much time in meetings instead of getting real work done. If you can't handle your meetings with ordinary e-mail and a good old pocket calendar that might indicate some problems in your organization.
You also mention the cost of switching. Why should that cost apply only to the new OS. And if you stay on the MS turf you have a constant cost of switching as MS forces upgrades down your throat. And what if some vital propriatary software component becomes unavilable leaving old data in closed file formats unreadable, what will your costs of switching be in that situation.
That may have bin true in the past, when Linux was an issue for hobbyists running it at home. But now Linux aim for the corporate desktop. And that is clearly a market where people are willing to pay for good software and various types of support of that software.
Oracle and IBM have no problem selling software in the $40.000+ class to Linux corporate users.
When PHPs realize how much they can save by using a comodity, thin client, OS like Linux for their desktops. There will be a substantial market for high quality Linux software.
The problem for MS is that the gap in quality and features between MS-Office and Open/StarOffice is very small. The needs of 99% of the MS-Office users is covered by Open/StarOffice. And when management becomes aware of this, office software will become a comodity. This means that MS will have to take their business elsewhere, or become a very streamlined support and delivery chain of that comodity.
Hmm, If it only was the fonts that sucked in Linux java. On my Swedish keyboard I can't even write some characters in Swing based java applications. This bug has bin around for 3!!! years.
This is very annoying since java could be an excelent way simplify a switch from Windows to Linux.
You are probably right in that most Scandinaivans understand English well enough to use MS software.
But I think you miss the point. It's not about understanding. It's about being able to use their own native language. Not translating it, is like saying why can't Norway use the US flag, after all they are both red white and blue, so it would be so much cheaper to make just one version.
Java is java. It doesn't matter if it's free or not. It will still have the same APIs and bytecode interpretation or it will not be java. The whole point of java is the compile once run everywhere thing. Eclipse will not be able to distinguish between a free java or a Sun propriatory one.
And all free code developed in Eclipse can be used in a future free java version. If somebody developed a propriatory java processor in silicon, would Eclipse still be useless? Saying Eclipse is useless for free development is like saying Linux is useless on the Intel platform because the Intel microcode isn't free.
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Unfortunately comparing changelog entries doesn't really work as evidence. How can we no that they didn't alter their logs? The Linux community have a hard time doing this, as they work out in the open, but SCO might have bin temped to do so. We need to compare binaries from the time where the theft is supposed to have taken place. And even then, it would be hard, as it really doesn't prove the origin of the code.
Perhaps we all need to build our own stuff to stay free when Palladium (or whatever it's called these days) are built into every chip made by all major chip vendors.
And the similarities in the comments could come from some posix documentation that programmers have copied more or less verbatim to describe what they were doing
I'm willing to buy it for $1. Nobody should offer them more than that. It should not be profitable to make questionable lawsuits just to have people buy your company or your cr*ppy source to make the problem go away.
Probably some truth in that, but on the other hand,
if pay peanuts you get monkeys
In my experience an employee is not full value for my company until he have at least five years of working experience in his field. And as education takes a greater part of peoples life, the they tend to be quite old and probably have familly etc before the can be of any real use.
Not entirely true. Young people may have easier to learn unimportent stuff as they are not yet gotten the ability to filter out whats important from what is unimportant. This could sometimes prove a disadvantage at an exam where questions sometimes are asked out of context. But the ability filter information tend to be very useful in real life. Even at a programming job.
If they are coders, they are in trouble. But so are their younger collegues. The IT market of today require a lot more than just coding skills.
But on the other hand, if they learn analysis and design they might have an advantage over younger people as they have more life experience, and perhaps have skills from sectors of society outside of the IT business. That may help them to understand the problems of their future customer better and in the end make them build better systems.
This is the old Mindcraft story all over again.
For one thing they disabled logging in the windows file server but not in samba. That would hamper Linux performance quite a bit. Then they compare old Linux version to new windows versions. I expect that a Red Hat 9 that already has the new Linux threading system would do a lot better.
Anyway it's nice to have MS pay for performance tests the information we get from them could prove very useful to the Linux kernel developers and help them produce a more optimized 2.6 kernel.
If you could sue companies for this kind of software errors and win. the prices of sofware would rise to astronomical levels, as companies would have to compensate for the risk of losing money in large lawsuits. This would mean that you could just as well do all your development in house, and if you started out by expanding GPL:ed source for your in house projects you would certainly not release your program to the general public for the same reasons.
Yes, it is true that switching systems usually costs money. But should all of that costs fall on the new system? I think not. If you have chosen a system that stores information in undocumented hard to access file formats, some of the costs could have bin expected and should have bin calculated for when your old system was chosen.
E-mail is an international thing. Spam problems can't be solved just by having one ore even many countries introducing a tax. There will always be some country where the taxes are low or nonexistent. And we can expect that spammers would move their operation to such countries.
We can also expect that companies that need to communicate internally by sending short mail messages will extend their virtual private network into such low tax regions.
The only thing that happens would probably be less incomes to ISPs in countries having this tax.
I can't see how that changes things in the IBM case.
Caldera still distributed a GPLed Linux kernel free for everyone, including IBM, to modify as long as they do it according to the rules of the GPL license. And as Caldera owned the source of unix they may license it any way they want, including GPL as they did in their Linux distro.
The previous owner of Unix might have objections to what Caldera did before they bought Unix.
No only new additions to 2.5 that are not based on previously GPLed code is vulnerable.
"Ummm, they said they are prepared to present examples in court."
Not really. It only shows that SCO hopes for a settlement out of court. If this goes to court, SCO may have to reveal that they use the same portions of code in their own Linux distro, and that would violate GPL, meaning that they will have to chose between selling Linux and their precious Unix kernel.
Anybody got the number for the Redmond department of BSA?
If they can't compile it into running windows programs, how can they be sure that the programs on their windows CDs are built from the code that they have looked at?
In a two or three years time, you will get a free windows CD including MS Office with every computer magazine you buy.
.Net spellchecker service.
To make money MS will try to sell you services instead. E.g. they could remove the spellchecker from MS Office and offer a pay per use
So the difference between Microsoft and OSS companies like Red Hat will be much less in the future. They will both try to sell you services. But a true OSS product will have the advantage of being user modifyable.
Microsoft used the free as in bear concept to beat Netscape on the browser market, now they get a spoon full of their own medicin. Except that free as in bear as well as in speak makes it a lot more potent.
Last time I checked, it was much faster to set up RedHat 8 than windows XP with SQL Server and MS Exchange. In fact, normally you set up redhat 8 including mail server and database server faster than a plain XP desktop installation.
And what is easy to use can be very different for diffent kinds of users. In the windows world the user is supposed to do all the admining himself, while in the Unix world you have a trained sysadmin to help you.
That way unix users can do more productive work, and the admin cost becomes visible to the management, this means that IT bottlenecks can be discovered and removed and productivity is increased. As Unix systems normally can handle 2-3 times more user than a windows admin Unix becomes a lot cheaper
You see the problem is not so much that Red Hat ships a "broken" or lets be kind and call it a higly modified version of KDE. The real problem is that they do a bad job of supporting their version.
As Red Hat is very slow on releasing bugfixes for their KDE if they release any fixes at all, that is. This goes for fixes for crashes and other malfunctions as well aa security related bug fixes.
And as KDE is part of the redhat distro, it is also part of what users expect to get updated if they subscribe to the Red Hat up2date service that people actually pay money for. But KDE users will not get good value for their money.
And it is not always simple to changie distro. Some products e.g. databasess may only be certified to work with a certain distro e.g. Red Hat.
I'm a little surprised that SCO make these IP claims even before they have bin bougth by Microsoft.
Who knows what contacs that have bin taken between SCO and Microsoft. This kind of stunt would be a perfect way for MS to get another Unix/Linux war.
You mention calendering software. And yes, that kind of software can be useful, and there are good Exchange replacements that run on Linux out there (e.g. Bynari). But this kind of software is kind of overrated. People spend far too much time in meetings instead of getting real work done. If you can't handle your meetings with ordinary e-mail and a good old pocket calendar that might indicate some problems in your organization.
You also mention the cost of switching. Why should that cost apply only to the new OS. And if you stay on the MS turf you have a constant cost of switching as MS forces upgrades down your throat.
And what if some vital propriatary software component becomes unavilable leaving old data in closed file formats unreadable, what will your costs of switching be in that situation.
That may have bin true in the past, when Linux was an issue for hobbyists running it at home. But now Linux aim for the corporate desktop. And that is clearly a market where people are willing to pay for good software and various types of support of that software.
Oracle and IBM have no problem selling software in the $40.000+ class to Linux corporate users.
When PHPs realize how much they can save by using a comodity, thin client, OS like Linux for their desktops. There will be a substantial market for high quality Linux software.
The problem for MS is that the gap in quality and features between MS-Office and Open/StarOffice is very small. The needs of 99% of the MS-Office users is covered by Open/StarOffice. And when management becomes aware of this, office software will become a comodity. This means that MS will have to take their business elsewhere, or become a very streamlined support and delivery chain of that comodity.
Hmm, If it only was the fonts that sucked in Linux java. On my Swedish keyboard I can't even write some characters in Swing based java applications.
This bug has bin around for 3!!! years.
This is very annoying since java could be an excelent way simplify a switch from Windows to Linux.
You are probably right in that most Scandinaivans understand English well enough to use MS software.
But I think you miss the point. It's not about understanding. It's about being able to use their own native language. Not translating it, is like saying why can't Norway use the US flag, after all they are both red white and blue, so it would be so much cheaper to make just one version.
Java is java. It doesn't matter if it's free or not. It will still have the same APIs and bytecode interpretation or it will not be java. The whole point of java is the compile once run everywhere thing. Eclipse will not be able to distinguish between a free java or a Sun propriatory one.
And all free code developed in Eclipse can be used in a future free java version. If somebody developed a propriatory java processor in silicon, would Eclipse still be useless? Saying Eclipse is useless for free development is like saying Linux is useless on the Intel platform because the Intel microcode isn't free.