Great, another GTK appearance option (long).
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Menu Shadows in GTK2
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Is there anywhere out there a configuration applet for GTK2? You know, something to configure the colors and fonts and manage odd things like drop shadows for menus without having to choose somebody else's idea of a nice desktop in a pre-built theme?
As a longtime KDE user, I'm used to just popping up the control center and configuring such things. KDE has always somehow taken care of the GTK applications' appearances as well. Some recent GTK2 applications, however (i.e. Ximan Evolution) began ignoring KDE's configuration. I got rather tired of seeing these sticking out like a sore thumb on my desktop and decided it was time to configure them to match my colors and fonts using a native GTK tool, instead of "cheating" by using KDE to configure my GTK applications.
Ummmm, where to start, that was the question.
I couldn't find anything but the theme selector in Red Hat 9's GNOME desktop. That let me choose other people's ideas of a nice desktop, but not my own. I tried the old "gnomecc" tool from the command line, but it wasn't there. Finally using an strace I figured out that the appearance of gtk was controlled in.gtkrc.mine and.gtkrc-2.0.mine. Great! Apparently this is how KDE controls the appearance of GTK applications -- it edits these files for me. But now some applications are not getting the hint properly. Okay, I'll edit the files by hand, no problem. I looked at the existing files... Not so great. Not intuitive.
Color format looks like the odd (0-1,0-1,0-1) tuple used by some GTK apps (notably The GIMP) in alternate color palette dialogs. I start up the GIMP and start trying to construct matching colors using that format, and then inserting them into.gtkrc-2.0.mine. After changing a few of the color options by trial and error, more gtk2 widgets do indeed match my KDE colors. Unfortunately, many do not, and the font still sucks.
Since there's nothing helpful in the.gtkrc and.gtkrc-2.0 files themselves, I start looking around for documentation. Back in the old days, X Resources for dotfiles were always documented in application manual pages. Maybe GTK apps do the same thing?
No dice.
So I get on to Google Groups and start looking. I find references to a file at gtk.org. Pretty soon I am digging through this little gem at developer.gnome.org, among others.
I couldn't believe that changing the appearance for a few GTK applications was orders of magnitude more complex and user-unfriendly than editing my old.Xdefaults or.XResources files had been. After another hour or so of studying, and some more trial-and-error, I was finally able to get my GTK2 applications to completely match my simple KDE colors and fonts -- which had taken me all of two minutes to select when I chose them way back in the KDE2 days and which I've been using ever since.
So... now we have GTK2 drop-shadows... Who the hell will ever figure out how to turn them on? Before we add yet more GTK2 appearance options, wouldn't it be prudent to get an application into GNOME to configure them all? Is there already one (other than KDE control center, which doesn't yet seem to completely work with GTK2) and I've just missed it?
In any case, for a while after Red Hat 9 came out I wondered if there was any real reason I was using KDE over GNOME... This episode gave me my answer!
No way white Christians would ever launch a brutal armed campaign, kill millions of middle easterners, burn their homes and libraries and loot their cultural treasures, thereby setting their society back by thousands of years, all in the name of the Christian God and his holy book! I mean, white Christians wouldn't even think of such a...
I would imagine that very few/. readers buy from these interests. I would imagine, in fact, that very few people in general buy from these people.
We actually know that the response is on the order of (as you state) 1 in 1000. My guess is that the victims of this kind of marketing almost exclusively among the elderly and the working poor (read: uneducated).
The leftist-authoritarian in me says that a boycott by people who already don't patronize these criminals is not enough. Perhaps it is time to simply ban direct marketing? After all, regardless of any other issues at hand, can anyone say that anything of value has ever been purveyed this way?
Weigh this against the harm that it does, in terms of unwanted phone calls, unwanted email, unwanted snail-mail, "no item" fraud, elderly-parents-scammed-out-of-life-savings, etc. Perhaps I am overstating the case here. But nevertheless, the value (or lack thereof) of this type of "marketing" is an issue that merits come consideration...
These are fat cats not unlike ambuilance-chasing lawyers; they are lining their pockets at the expense of the people who can bear the loss least. Telling the/. crowd to stop buying from direct mailers is likely to have the same effect as telling stockbrokers to stop falling for the Nigerian scam.
See the Byte article and other inverviews win Sontag. I quote (emphasis added):
"We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)."
In the same article, SCO refuses to rule out going after Apple and Microsoft, says explicitly that they're considering going after FreeBSD already and will only officially exclude Sun from their list of future lawsuits because apparently Sun's all paid up.
But SCO do claim ownership of/bin/ls; they say that it's SysV-derived. And they have stated (see Byte interview) that after Linux, there's a good chance they'll go after *BSD because it is SysV-derived as well.
They are including the SysV userland as "theirs" and thus anything which is even remotely similar as "SysV-derived".
While SCO's claims are certainly annoying, they don't pose much of a threat to the open source community since the code in question (if it exists and is ever revealed) can be removed.
You're incorrect on this one. SCO has claimed in several forums (see especially the Byte interview) that all commercial operating systems and all *BSD operating systems at this moment are derivative works of Unix System V and thus that SCO has "IP rights" to them.
Now, they further claim that since all of IBM's operating systems (from PC-DOS to AIX to OS/2) are derived in some way from Unix System V and are therefore property of SCO, IBM's act of contributing code to Linux also makes Linux SCO IP as well, since Linux is then a "derivative" of Unix System V and since without SCO's IP, IBM has no operating systems or operating system knowledge whatsoever.
So, according to SCO, Linux itself became a derivative work of SCO IP once IBM contributed any code. Now, years later, much has been added to the Linux kernel by others and much other software has been developed using GCC on Linux. SCO's claim is that none of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the fact that Linux became a derivative of Unix System V, and thus, all kernel code or userspace code since then are essentially Unix System V derivatives as well.
As a result, SCO has asserted in several interviews (I believe the CNet Darl McBride interview was the strongest in this regard, but I may be wrong, so much shit has flown around) that it is no longer feasible to simply remove code from Linux, because even after this is done, the Linux kernel and Linux userspace will remain derivatives of Unix System V in a fundamental way. SCO believes that the only way to remedy the situation is to license Linux through SCO, and it appears that this is what they are shooting for -- "control" of Linux, which they now assert should be legally and morally theirs anyway.
Point: They have stated on numerous occasions that simple removal of code does not address their claim or the harm that they say continues to be done to them through "theft" of their IP.
Of course, this is all crap (as is the simple phrase "IP rights", as Stallman points out) but none of it matters, because they don't plan to play it in court, they plan to write it all into a letter and send it to companies along with a demand that they "license" SCO Linux for $$$. They'll get rich on Linux licensing long before this ever goes to court. That in itself is reprehensible but not too scary...
What's scary is that from this position, the more money they rake in through Linux "licensing" the better position they'll be in to make the claim that Linux actually is theirs, to corporate America, to world governments, and to other clueless bodies who nevertheless have rather a lot of de facto market power.
My god, why must Americans put everything into Rebublican vs. Democrat boxes? From Miriam Webster:
2 a : marked by generosity : OPENHANDED b : given or provided in a generous and openhanded way 6 a : of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism b capitalized : of or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political liberalism; especially : of or constituting a political party in the United Kingdom associated with ideals of individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives
Both of these could fit the poster's context, including but not limited to, GPL, anti-segregation movements and vietnam protesting. Nowhere in MW's definitions for "liberal" do you find "Democrat Party, USA" or "communist."
How about lawyers, panderers, swindlers and the others determined to take advantage of an unequitable and exploitative system to make millions at any cost?
Don't be surprised if they don't bother to ask anyone or actually win a court battle before they start selling Linux licenses. Their plan of action is not to go to court with this. Their plan of action is likely to raise a stink (as they have done), get CIO's and functionaries thinking about it (as they have done), and then to send out tens of thousands demand letters to every corporate Linux user they can locate, threatening legal action if the company in question doesn't "come clean" and "license Linux" from SCO for $$$.
They will thus begin to sell Linux licenses and make other profitable deals based on "their" Linux code whether or not they have "the right" to do so. Clueless corporate operatives will Send Them The Money and will continue to use Linux, happy in the knowledge that their license is now "legal" since they have "licensed" it from SCO for $$$. This money will then go into SCO's legal coffers for more demand letters, more suit threats, and preparation for defense against any lawsuits that come their way as a result.
This will continue until one of the big boys actually sues SCO to stop them. SCO's plan was probably originally to get bought out. Their contingency plan is likely not to sue others; it's to rake in the cash until someone successfully sues them.
Not only are there lines of SCO's code in Linux, but also derivative products based on SCO intellectual property have been created, Sontag said. Getting all of the protected bits out, assuming SCO's claims are valid, would be a huge chore.
"Our biggest issues are with the derivative code," he said. "It would be almost impossible to separate it out."
This is the first time that SCO has essentially admitted in the open what some have been saying all along: SCO does not believe that Linux coders can ever "clean" Linux up; simply replacing "infringing" lines of code with new code is not enough becasue they are trying to claim that Linux itself is now a derivative product of SCO Unix.
The chances of this going away before SCO is utterly dead are zero. SCO has no intention of easily revealing the "matching" lines of code because they believe that they are irrelevant... as far as SCO is concerned, every line of code in Linux is infringing and it is essentially beyond repair. Since it is open-source, Linux can't license proprietary code from SCO. Ergo, the courts should essentially put an end to Linux in much the same way that they did with DeCSS code. At least, this seems to be how SCO sees it.
If you think that the riots in 1992 were about race, you have never visited south central Los Angeles for any period of time. The povery and hoplessness in these areas in the early '90s was mind-boggling. I'll never forget my first visit to the area and the sense of utter decline and economic hoplelessness in this part of the city.
It doesn't matter what the trigger was. It could have been anything... but the tension that made riots possible was the direct result of the lack of availability any sort of productive activity in which to engage, ecnomic or otherwise.
What you've suggested is that it's a good idea to risk the beginning of what could be a bloody and oppressive sectarian revolution in a large north african state in which exists with some measure popular support for international terrorism, all because it's somehow wrongheaded not to allow a few people to see "The Matirx Reloaded"?
If a film like this one contributes to unrest among the populace that leads to the forceful replacement of the current regime (one of the few that has made peace with Israel) with a religious state, those few who wanted to see it would likely not see another western film for decades to come.
This is not a matter of a few busybodies "picking on" others because they just don't like movies too much, and what you call "facing up" in this case would actually be a decision made without any regard for or understanding of the larger political and social realities in the region.
Could it be that your analogy is simply not a good one? Or that it is, in fact, silly?
"Tired of being treated like criminals?". Well, most people are. Sucks, doesn't it.
There is no small amount of folly in criminalizing the behavior of "most people" -- in making felons of the masses because of things that people believe to be innocent everyday acts. Ask any of the numerous governments that have fallen during the last several centuries...
Unfortunately, the very ugly hack to get alpha transparency in IE requires a relatively recent version of DirectX on the client system in order to work properly. So you're still going to leave a sizable percentage of users out in the cold.
This is a lengthy prediction, and I'll probably get modded down for it, but hey, Slashdot is all about having fun by voicing one's opinion, so here I go.
You know and I know that SCO's case is meaningless and that even if some hapless SCO, Caldera or IBM idiot inserted code into Linux, that code can be quickly removed and replaced and a new kernel distributed to people using Linux.
You and I also know that it is much more likely that code made its way from Linux into SCO, or from BSD into both, and that SCO's "side-by-side code" demonstration technique doesn't hold up to solid reasoning.
However, very few people in business are going to understand this. Management are scared idiots, American management doubly so. They're going to stay away from Linux in droves and are already feeling personally betrayed by the people who make Linux, just on the strength of the FUD and accusations. They're already at home telling the wife how big a mistake Linux was and how they should have listened to the doubters.
It's natural for them to take this view so easily because they've been conditioned all their lives to believe that "there's no such thing as a free lunch" and "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and after years of business training they're suspect of anything (even family matters) that don't emphasize the "bottom line" above all else. They were very reluctant to consider Linux in the first instance for these reasons and it took years of badgering on technical grounds and tempting on cost grounds from technical underlings to stop them from seeing Linux as some kind of a scam in the first place.
The courts in the US, unfortunately, have the same view. If it's corporation versus non-corporation, the corporation will always get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof will always be on the non-corporation, regardless of what the "law" may say, and in many cases, it's impossible for the non-coproration to win a case; the court will simply rule for the corporation even if it's patently obvious that the law doesn't support such a ruling. They'll do it with a backhanded wink and a nod and the belief that to hurt business and "the economy" is far worse that to hurt any non-business entity or group of individuals.
For these reasons, Linux in the US will likely suffer horribly over the next few months or perhaps even several years. In fact, it's doubtful that Linux will ever recover the "inevitable force" swagger that it has had over the last few months in that country. Instead, Linux will continue to grow across the rest of the world and the US will lose yet another technical and cultural advantage in the interests of supporting business above all else.
Hmm, maybe it's not so much a prediction as a fear. But I can't help but think that SCO has turned a corner on this one, not in terms of their case from an honest perspective, but in terms of the effect they're having.
Re:This SCO story just makes me sick to my stomach
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Latest SCO News
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· Score: 1
Perhaps the original poster was thinking more contextually, something on the order of donation-supported NGOs operating in poverty-stricken areas being able to save costs and provide area-based communications or computing with Linux, rather than actual people in huts trying to work spreadsheets.
The poster's points are perhaps extreme, but they are in the end valid, in my opinion.
Thumb your nose at the MPAA and get what you want at the same time... I bought both series on DVD on eBay years ago. They're Hong kong "bootlegs" but are basically re-encoded versions from other recordings (i.e. widescreen laserdisc) mastered to region 0 DVD. The Star Wars DVDs in particular are very, very nice indeed and most everyone who sees them asks how I managed to get an advance copy of the "real" Star Wars DVDs.
Of course, if the "real" versions ever come out, I'll get them as well, but in the meantime, everyone's always turning up asking to watch my copies.
Also picked up Barton Fink and a couple of other unreleased-on-DVD films this way...
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. SCO are pushing this case hard with press releases in the public eye, and that's where the real danger lies, not from any Slashdot posting.
In typical fashion, mainstream media are confused as hell about technology and the players in it, and are reporting utter crap essentially on the strength of SCO's press releases alone. My local media outlet ran a story recently on how longtime Linux competitor SCO, one of the biggest players in the IT market, may finally have found the evidence it needs to prove that Linux developers have stolen intellectual property from Unix.
There are any number of things wrong with this statement of course, but crack local reporter Jill Schmoe doesn't know this, she has a press release, a deadline and an editor to work with. That's what she came up with.
Contacting the parties themselves doesn't help... So far, SCO is apparently easy to contact and willing to blather on at length about how it's been wronged by Linux (they seem to have forgotten IBM for the most part) but IBM of course is staying rather tight-lipped and when Jill Schmoe needs to 'call Linux' she doesn't even know where to start, so she just gives up on that one.
Stopping the Slashdot coverage is likely to end the only Linux-positive forum in this conflict.
I know at least two people who bought Caldera stock around IPO time because it was a Linux company. They believed in Linux as a product, wanted to support Linux development, and thought there might be some future profit in it.
I've heard a lot from them over the last week. With Caldera/SCO's current action, they've ended up as pawns in a game to attack Linux -- not at all the reason they invested their dollars in the beginning. They have decided to sell out as a result of the SCO action, and have lost significant money in the process on Caldera/SCO shares alone. But they also realize that the dollars they had invested this company have supported action which may eventually reduce the value of their larger holdings in other Linux companies. I can understand the frustration that they must feel.
I'd venture to say a lot of Caldera investors may be in the same position. So what's this about "rights" of the shareholders?
I'm surprised you even felt the need to try to discredit the original poster. His ID is "I'm a racist!" and his homepage link points to an Aryan Nations-inspired race war video game called "Ethnic Cleansing."
Anyone who gives this joker the time of day is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Complaints about the slowness of X in Linux are also bogus and are down almost entirely to drivers. Many drivers that have been written by the OSS community tend to have been written essentially by reverse engineering the hardware, without manufacturer support. As a result, they often suck.
Drivers which have been provided by the actual manufacturers of the graphics hardware (as is the case in the Windows world) fare much better.
A perfect example is NVidia hardware, because both free and manufacturer provided solutions exist. The nv driver included with XFree86 is fairly slow in 2d and provides no 3d support. On the other hand, if you download NVidia's Linux drivers for XFree86, you get mind-numbing 2D acceleration and blazing fast 3D acceleration at the same speeds as the Windows drivers, with full OpenGL support.
Unfortunately, because the NVidia drivers aren't OSS, most distributions don't install them. Users install Linux, get sub-par graphics performance, and decide that "1) Linux graphics are slow, 2) X provides Linux graphics, 3) ergo, X is slow" and never even realize that they could increase the throughput of their graphics subsystem manyfold simply by downloading a better driver.
It's really an issue all across the Linux world -- poor driver support because of uncooperative manufacturers... it's just than in X, a poor hack of a driver is much more obvious because the user interacts with it directly.
The Linux community is throwing innovation away. There are things about X that drew me from PC/Mac to Unix/X then Linux back in the early '90s:
Total configurability... you can choose anything from wm2 to KDE to act as your environment and at least once, you could make your environment behave in almost any way you wanted (remember dotfiles?)
Nice UI features like focus-follows-mouse, horizontal/vertical maximize, "user placement" of applications (used to always use this in TWM, FVWM, etc.) and so on.
Total network transparency.
Multi-display, Xinerama, multiple-input, etc. etc. etc.
Multiplatform application support (using Basilisk and Crossover, I have Windows applications, Mac OS applications and Linux/Unix applications all on the same desktop).
The Linux community has recently been rabid in its desire to get rid of such things. The "choose your environemnt" philosophy has been sacrificed in favor of the KDE/GNOME wars, and/. posters regularly bemoan the fact that even TWO choices are available. GNOME and recent distros have done away with focus-follows-mouse, user placement, and similar features totally; you can't even choose them as options in the default installs. Every X story on/. is met with a flood of "WE HATE NETWORK TRANSPARENCY" posts about the X11 protocol. People are more and more pushing for framebuffer+toolkit options that will make the more flexible output/input options unfeasible or at least less abstractable.
The current Linux community hates innovation. They wouldn't know innovation if it rose up and bit them in the ass. Anything new and different is seen as a kind of dangerous superceding of Windows, which is apparently what users REALLY WANT and Linux is talked about as being WAAAAAAY "behind" (aside from X-hating, KDE/GNOME-hating posts, witness the diatribes the other day against Unix in general in the Gobo story).
Linux began as almost pure innovation, an OS written from the ground up by GNU and Linus Torvalds. It is network-centric, runs on devices ranging from tiny to supercomputer, supported SMP, software RAID, IPV6, and a million other features before any of the other consumer operating systems. It's still one of the only free pieces of "major" software in the world. The marriage of Unix, new ideas, new technologies and new languages in Linux has created probably the single most productive large-scale computing environment in history, and at one of the lowest price points, too.
And yet Linux users (especially the converts over the last 3-5 years) can't stop moaning about how Linux will never be successful until it apes Windows and MacOS. And then they complain about a lack of innovation...
Methinks Linux users are confused. Or maybe they can't see the forest for the trees. Or something.
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Is there anywhere out there a configuration applet for GTK2? You know, something to configure the colors and fonts and manage odd things like drop shadows for menus without having to choose somebody else's idea of a nice desktop in a pre-built theme?
.gtkrc.mine and .gtkrc-2.0.mine. Great! Apparently this is how KDE controls the appearance of GTK applications -- it edits these files for me. But now some applications are not getting the hint properly. Okay, I'll edit the files by hand, no problem. I looked at the existing files... Not so great. Not intuitive.
.gtkrc-2.0.mine. After changing a few of the color options by trial and error, more gtk2 widgets do indeed match my KDE colors. Unfortunately, many do not, and the font still sucks.
.gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 files themselves, I start looking around for documentation. Back in the old days, X Resources for dotfiles were always documented in application manual pages. Maybe GTK apps do the same thing?
.Xdefaults or .XResources files had been. After another hour or so of studying, and some more trial-and-error, I was finally able to get my GTK2 applications to completely match my simple KDE colors and fonts -- which had taken me all of two minutes to select when I chose them way back in the KDE2 days and which I've been using ever since.
As a longtime KDE user, I'm used to just popping up the control center and configuring such things. KDE has always somehow taken care of the GTK applications' appearances as well. Some recent GTK2 applications, however (i.e. Ximan Evolution) began ignoring KDE's configuration. I got rather tired of seeing these sticking out like a sore thumb on my desktop and decided it was time to configure them to match my colors and fonts using a native GTK tool, instead of "cheating" by using KDE to configure my GTK applications.
Ummmm, where to start, that was the question.
I couldn't find anything but the theme selector in Red Hat 9's GNOME desktop. That let me choose other people's ideas of a nice desktop, but not my own. I tried the old "gnomecc" tool from the command line, but it wasn't there. Finally using an strace I figured out that the appearance of gtk was controlled in
Color format looks like the odd (0-1,0-1,0-1) tuple used by some GTK apps (notably The GIMP) in alternate color palette dialogs. I start up the GIMP and start trying to construct matching colors using that format, and then inserting them into
Since there's nothing helpful in the
No dice.
So I get on to Google Groups and start looking. I find references to a file at gtk.org. Pretty soon I am digging through this little gem at developer.gnome.org, among others.
I couldn't believe that changing the appearance for a few GTK applications was orders of magnitude more complex and user-unfriendly than editing my old
So... now we have GTK2 drop-shadows... Who the hell will ever figure out how to turn them on? Before we add yet more GTK2 appearance options, wouldn't it be prudent to get an application into GNOME to configure them all? Is there already one (other than KDE control center, which doesn't yet seem to completely work with GTK2) and I've just missed it?
In any case, for a while after Red Hat 9 came out I wondered if there was any real reason I was using KDE over GNOME... This episode gave me my answer!
Yeah, white Christians are way better than that!
No way white Christians would ever launch a brutal armed campaign, kill millions of middle easterners, burn their homes and libraries and loot their cultural treasures, thereby setting their society back by thousands of years, all in the name of the Christian God and his holy book! I mean, white Christians wouldn't even think of such a...
Oh, wait...
I would imagine that very few /. readers buy from these interests. I would imagine, in fact, that very few people in general buy from these people.
/. crowd to stop buying from direct mailers is likely to have the same effect as telling stockbrokers to stop falling for the Nigerian scam.
We actually know that the response is on the order of (as you state) 1 in 1000. My guess is that the victims of this kind of marketing almost exclusively among the elderly and the working poor (read: uneducated).
The leftist-authoritarian in me says that a boycott by people who already don't patronize these criminals is not enough. Perhaps it is time to simply ban direct marketing? After all, regardless of any other issues at hand, can anyone say that anything of value has ever been purveyed this way?
Weigh this against the harm that it does, in terms of unwanted phone calls, unwanted email, unwanted snail-mail, "no item" fraud, elderly-parents-scammed-out-of-life-savings, etc. Perhaps I am overstating the case here. But nevertheless, the value (or lack thereof) of this type of "marketing" is an issue that merits come consideration...
These are fat cats not unlike ambuilance-chasing lawyers; they are lining their pockets at the expense of the people who can bear the loss least. Telling the
One has to live somewhere and eat something. The courts have removed this person's incentive to work at all.
If I were this man, I certainly wouldn't work any longer. I'd simply quit my job and spend a lifetime "riding the rails" and keeping a diary about it.
Folk hero stuff, absolutely!
See the Byte article and other inverviews win Sontag. I quote (emphasis added):
"We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)."
In the same article, SCO refuses to rule out going after Apple and Microsoft, says explicitly that they're considering going after FreeBSD already and will only officially exclude Sun from their list of future lawsuits because apparently Sun's all paid up.
You're the one who wasn't listening.
But SCO do claim ownership of /bin/ls; they say that it's SysV-derived. And they have stated (see Byte interview) that after Linux, there's a good chance they'll go after *BSD because it is SysV-derived as well.
They are including the SysV userland as "theirs" and thus anything which is even remotely similar as "SysV-derived".
While SCO's claims are certainly annoying, they don't pose much of a threat to the open source community since the code in question (if it exists and is ever revealed) can be removed.
You're incorrect on this one. SCO has claimed in several forums (see especially the Byte interview) that all commercial operating systems and all *BSD operating systems at this moment are derivative works of Unix System V and thus that SCO has "IP rights" to them.
Now, they further claim that since all of IBM's operating systems (from PC-DOS to AIX to OS/2) are derived in some way from Unix System V and are therefore property of SCO, IBM's act of contributing code to Linux also makes Linux SCO IP as well, since Linux is then a "derivative" of Unix System V and since without SCO's IP, IBM has no operating systems or operating system knowledge whatsoever.
So, according to SCO, Linux itself became a derivative work of SCO IP once IBM contributed any code. Now, years later, much has been added to the Linux kernel by others and much other software has been developed using GCC on Linux. SCO's claim is that none of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the fact that Linux became a derivative of Unix System V, and thus, all kernel code or userspace code since then are essentially Unix System V derivatives as well.
As a result, SCO has asserted in several interviews (I believe the CNet Darl McBride interview was the strongest in this regard, but I may be wrong, so much shit has flown around) that it is no longer feasible to simply remove code from Linux, because even after this is done, the Linux kernel and Linux userspace will remain derivatives of Unix System V in a fundamental way. SCO believes that the only way to remedy the situation is to license Linux through SCO, and it appears that this is what they are shooting for -- "control" of Linux, which they now assert should be legally and morally theirs anyway.
Point: They have stated on numerous occasions that simple removal of code does not address their claim or the harm that they say continues to be done to them through "theft" of their IP.
Of course, this is all crap (as is the simple phrase "IP rights", as Stallman points out) but none of it matters, because they don't plan to play it in court, they plan to write it all into a letter and send it to companies along with a demand that they "license" SCO Linux for $$$. They'll get rich on Linux licensing long before this ever goes to court. That in itself is reprehensible but not too scary...
What's scary is that from this position, the more money they rake in through Linux "licensing" the better position they'll be in to make the claim that Linux actually is theirs, to corporate America, to world governments, and to other clueless bodies who nevertheless have rather a lot of de facto market power.
My god, why must Americans put everything into Rebublican vs. Democrat boxes? From Miriam Webster:
2 a : marked by generosity : OPENHANDED b : given or provided in a generous and openhanded way
6 a : of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism b capitalized : of or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political liberalism; especially : of or constituting a political party in the United Kingdom associated with ideals of individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives
Both of these could fit the poster's context, including but not limited to, GPL, anti-segregation movements and vietnam protesting. Nowhere in MW's definitions for "liberal" do you find "Democrat Party, USA" or "communist."
How about lawyers, panderers, swindlers and the others determined to take advantage of an unequitable and exploitative system to make millions at any cost?
Trotskyism = Stalinism (idea of permanent revolution and all).
No.
Stalin vs. Trotsky.
Don't be surprised if they don't bother to ask anyone or actually win a court battle before they start selling Linux licenses. Their plan of action is not to go to court with this. Their plan of action is likely to raise a stink (as they have done), get CIO's and functionaries thinking about it (as they have done), and then to send out tens of thousands demand letters to every corporate Linux user they can locate, threatening legal action if the company in question doesn't "come clean" and "license Linux" from SCO for $$$.
They will thus begin to sell Linux licenses and make other profitable deals based on "their" Linux code whether or not they have "the right" to do so. Clueless corporate operatives will Send Them The Money and will continue to use Linux, happy in the knowledge that their license is now "legal" since they have "licensed" it from SCO for $$$. This money will then go into SCO's legal coffers for more demand letters, more suit threats, and preparation for defense against any lawsuits that come their way as a result.
This will continue until one of the big boys actually sues SCO to stop them. SCO's plan was probably originally to get bought out. Their contingency plan is likely not to sue others; it's to rake in the cash until someone successfully sues them.
I believe it was at Modern Humorist.
Not only are there lines of SCO's code in Linux, but also derivative products based on SCO intellectual property have been created, Sontag said. Getting all of the protected bits out, assuming SCO's claims are valid, would be a huge chore.
"Our biggest issues are with the derivative code," he said. "It would be almost impossible to separate it out."
This is the first time that SCO has essentially admitted in the open what some have been saying all along: SCO does not believe that Linux coders can ever "clean" Linux up; simply replacing "infringing" lines of code with new code is not enough becasue they are trying to claim that Linux itself is now a derivative product of SCO Unix.
The chances of this going away before SCO is utterly dead are zero. SCO has no intention of easily revealing the "matching" lines of code because they believe that they are irrelevant... as far as SCO is concerned, every line of code in Linux is infringing and it is essentially beyond repair. Since it is open-source, Linux can't license proprietary code from SCO. Ergo, the courts should essentially put an end to Linux in much the same way that they did with DeCSS code. At least, this seems to be how SCO sees it.
If you think that the riots in 1992 were about race, you have never visited south central Los Angeles for any period of time. The povery and hoplessness in these areas in the early '90s was mind-boggling. I'll never forget my first visit to the area and the sense of utter decline and economic hoplelessness in this part of the city.
It doesn't matter what the trigger was. It could have been anything... but the tension that made riots possible was the direct result of the lack of availability any sort of productive activity in which to engage, ecnomic or otherwise.
Hmmm... not too bright here.
What you've suggested is that it's a good idea to risk the beginning of what could be a bloody and oppressive sectarian revolution in a large north african state in which exists with some measure popular support for international terrorism, all because it's somehow wrongheaded not to allow a few people to see "The Matirx Reloaded"?
If a film like this one contributes to unrest among the populace that leads to the forceful replacement of the current regime (one of the few that has made peace with Israel) with a religious state, those few who wanted to see it would likely not see another western film for decades to come.
This is not a matter of a few busybodies "picking on" others because they just don't like movies too much, and what you call "facing up" in this case would actually be a decision made without any regard for or understanding of the larger political and social realities in the region.
Could it be that your analogy is simply not a good one? Or that it is, in fact, silly?
"Tired of being treated like criminals?". Well, most people are. Sucks, doesn't it.
There is no small amount of folly in criminalizing the behavior of "most people" -- in making felons of the masses because of things that people believe to be innocent everyday acts. Ask any of the numerous governments that have fallen during the last several centuries...
Unfortunately, the very ugly hack to get alpha transparency in IE requires a relatively recent version of DirectX on the client system in order to work properly. So you're still going to leave a sizable percentage of users out in the cold.
This is a lengthy prediction, and I'll probably get modded down for it, but hey, Slashdot is all about having fun by voicing one's opinion, so here I go.
You know and I know that SCO's case is meaningless and that even if some hapless SCO, Caldera or IBM idiot inserted code into Linux, that code can be quickly removed and replaced and a new kernel distributed to people using Linux.
You and I also know that it is much more likely that code made its way from Linux into SCO, or from BSD into both, and that SCO's "side-by-side code" demonstration technique doesn't hold up to solid reasoning.
However, very few people in business are going to understand this. Management are scared idiots, American management doubly so. They're going to stay away from Linux in droves and are already feeling personally betrayed by the people who make Linux, just on the strength of the FUD and accusations. They're already at home telling the wife how big a mistake Linux was and how they should have listened to the doubters.
It's natural for them to take this view so easily because they've been conditioned all their lives to believe that "there's no such thing as a free lunch" and "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and after years of business training they're suspect of anything (even family matters) that don't emphasize the "bottom line" above all else. They were very reluctant to consider Linux in the first instance for these reasons and it took years of badgering on technical grounds and tempting on cost grounds from technical underlings to stop them from seeing Linux as some kind of a scam in the first place.
The courts in the US, unfortunately, have the same view. If it's corporation versus non-corporation, the corporation will always get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof will always be on the non-corporation, regardless of what the "law" may say, and in many cases, it's impossible for the non-coproration to win a case; the court will simply rule for the corporation even if it's patently obvious that the law doesn't support such a ruling. They'll do it with a backhanded wink and a nod and the belief that to hurt business and "the economy" is far worse that to hurt any non-business entity or group of individuals.
For these reasons, Linux in the US will likely suffer horribly over the next few months or perhaps even several years. In fact, it's doubtful that Linux will ever recover the "inevitable force" swagger that it has had over the last few months in that country. Instead, Linux will continue to grow across the rest of the world and the US will lose yet another technical and cultural advantage in the interests of supporting business above all else.
Hmm, maybe it's not so much a prediction as a fear. But I can't help but think that SCO has turned a corner on this one, not in terms of their case from an honest perspective, but in terms of the effect they're having.
Perhaps the original poster was thinking more contextually, something on the order of donation-supported NGOs operating in poverty-stricken areas being able to save costs and provide area-based communications or computing with Linux, rather than actual people in huts trying to work spreadsheets.
The poster's points are perhaps extreme, but they are in the end valid, in my opinion.
Thumb your nose at the MPAA and get what you want at the same time... I bought both series on DVD on eBay years ago. They're Hong kong "bootlegs" but are basically re-encoded versions from other recordings (i.e. widescreen laserdisc) mastered to region 0 DVD. The Star Wars DVDs in particular are very, very nice indeed and most everyone who sees them asks how I managed to get an advance copy of the "real" Star Wars DVDs.
Of course, if the "real" versions ever come out, I'll get them as well, but in the meantime, everyone's always turning up asking to watch my copies.
Also picked up Barton Fink and a couple of other unreleased-on-DVD films this way...
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. SCO are pushing this case hard with press releases in the public eye, and that's where the real danger lies, not from any Slashdot posting.
In typical fashion, mainstream media are confused as hell about technology and the players in it, and are reporting utter crap essentially on the strength of SCO's press releases alone. My local media outlet ran a story recently on how longtime Linux competitor SCO, one of the biggest players in the IT market, may finally have found the evidence it needs to prove that Linux developers have stolen intellectual property from Unix.
There are any number of things wrong with this statement of course, but crack local reporter Jill Schmoe doesn't know this, she has a press release, a deadline and an editor to work with. That's what she came up with.
Contacting the parties themselves doesn't help... So far, SCO is apparently easy to contact and willing to blather on at length about how it's been wronged by Linux (they seem to have forgotten IBM for the most part) but IBM of course is staying rather tight-lipped and when Jill Schmoe needs to 'call Linux' she doesn't even know where to start, so she just gives up on that one.
Stopping the Slashdot coverage is likely to end the only Linux-positive forum in this conflict.
I know at least two people who bought Caldera stock around IPO time because it was a Linux company. They believed in Linux as a product, wanted to support Linux development, and thought there might be some future profit in it.
I've heard a lot from them over the last week. With Caldera/SCO's current action, they've ended up as pawns in a game to attack Linux -- not at all the reason they invested their dollars in the beginning. They have decided to sell out as a result of the SCO action, and have lost significant money in the process on Caldera/SCO shares alone. But they also realize that the dollars they had invested this company have supported action which may eventually reduce the value of their larger holdings in other Linux companies. I can understand the frustration that they must feel.
I'd venture to say a lot of Caldera investors may be in the same position. So what's this about "rights" of the shareholders?
I'm surprised you even felt the need to try to discredit the original poster. His ID is "I'm a racist!" and his homepage link points to an Aryan Nations-inspired race war video game called "Ethnic Cleansing."
Anyone who gives this joker the time of day is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Complaints about the slowness of X in Linux are also bogus and are down almost entirely to drivers. Many drivers that have been written by the OSS community tend to have been written essentially by reverse engineering the hardware, without manufacturer support. As a result, they often suck.
Drivers which have been provided by the actual manufacturers of the graphics hardware (as is the case in the Windows world) fare much better.
A perfect example is NVidia hardware, because both free and manufacturer provided solutions exist. The nv driver included with XFree86 is fairly slow in 2d and provides no 3d support. On the other hand, if you download NVidia's Linux drivers for XFree86, you get mind-numbing 2D acceleration and blazing fast 3D acceleration at the same speeds as the Windows drivers, with full OpenGL support.
Unfortunately, because the NVidia drivers aren't OSS, most distributions don't install them. Users install Linux, get sub-par graphics performance, and decide that "1) Linux graphics are slow, 2) X provides Linux graphics, 3) ergo, X is slow" and never even realize that they could increase the throughput of their graphics subsystem manyfold simply by downloading a better driver.
It's really an issue all across the Linux world -- poor driver support because of uncooperative manufacturers... it's just than in X, a poor hack of a driver is much more obvious because the user interacts with it directly.
The Linux community has recently been rabid in its desire to get rid of such things. The "choose your environemnt" philosophy has been sacrificed in favor of the KDE/GNOME wars, and
The current Linux community hates innovation. They wouldn't know innovation if it rose up and bit them in the ass. Anything new and different is seen as a kind of dangerous superceding of Windows, which is apparently what users REALLY WANT and Linux is talked about as being WAAAAAAY "behind" (aside from X-hating, KDE/GNOME-hating posts, witness the diatribes the other day against Unix in general in the Gobo story).
Linux began as almost pure innovation, an OS written from the ground up by GNU and Linus Torvalds. It is network-centric, runs on devices ranging from tiny to supercomputer, supported SMP, software RAID, IPV6, and a million other features before any of the other consumer operating systems. It's still one of the only free pieces of "major" software in the world. The marriage of Unix, new ideas, new technologies and new languages in Linux has created probably the single most productive large-scale computing environment in history, and at one of the lowest price points, too.
And yet Linux users (especially the converts over the last 3-5 years) can't stop moaning about how Linux will never be successful until it apes Windows and MacOS. And then they complain about a lack of innovation...
Methinks Linux users are confused. Or maybe they can't see the forest for the trees. Or something.