The fastest justice isn't necessarily the best justice either. I think that is the problem most people are having with the case. They see Germany slap SCO and tell them to shut up, and the US system plods along, slowly bringing justice. My interest is the results, not how fast they come about. This case has been going about for a year now, which is NOT extraordinarily long for a case like this. Yes, its is inconvenient, but in the end, justice will be served and SCO will have been given every fair chance to state their case. The big advantage is that when this is done, SCO will have nothing further they CAN say, we won't be seeing this come up again.
Correct. What makes the system liberal is how much leeway they are given to prove these points. Again, I don't think they have a case, but they will given every chance to prove it.
Our system is skewed toward the little guy, in THEORY. Usually this is not the case because the big guy can outspend the little guy, but the design is to prevent big corporations from having every advantage. Again, it isn't perfect, but I agree with the idea that gives the little guy more leverage when sueing.
What usually happens here in the States is you get all this negative press, and all the world talks about how terrible our court system is, but in the end, justice usually prevails, often on appeal. Once the case ends with justice, you hear nary a peep about how "fair" the system is. You only hear the negatives.
Corporations are NOT people. Since they offer space for people to shift liability, corporations should be treated harshier than people.
Your idea of corporations = people is really cheezy. Where did you get it from?
In the US, corporations are considered entities. Many Europeans (and others) do not like this because it can lead to abuses, and it does sometimes. But overall, I tend to agree with them being treated as such. I own a small corporation, that is the parent of the two small businesses I own, so I may be biased, but there are distict advantages and disadvantages to treating corporations like "people".
Maybe in your country corporations are not treated the same, but here in the States, corporations ARE "quazi-people" according to the law.
Um, I wget from all my windows machines, regularly. Even the ones without Cygwin installed. SSH and SFTP as well (thank you putty). And can even run Apache 1.3x/2.x for testing. Lots of unix utilities are ported to run on Windows, including wget.
It's time for a structural change in the US legal system,
While the US legal system is far from perfect, it's more a case of being different, instead of defective. The difference is that the US system is more liberal than European courts. I know many will find it hard to believe with the political press it gets, but when it comes to normal cases that you never hear of, the US system is very liberal, giving both parties more chances than a more conservative system would allow. SCO is getting typical treatment in this case, at least in the US. No one is really argueing this. That they have lied, and possibly committed securities fraud is a seperate case, and not within the scope of the current lawsuit.
It may be frustrating, but the role of the court is to find justice, and the US tends to let bad guys go instead of convicting innocents, and giving litigants more leeway to state their case. This cuts both ways, and has good results more often than bad. This gives the small guy a better chance to fight the big guy. Ironically, in this instance, the big guy is the good guy, but this is usually not the case.
It's not perfect, but its not a bad system. It's bad people taking advantage of an open and liberal system. Eventually, SCO will be put down after they have been given every opportunity to state their case. But I would still rather see SCO get away with stuff like this, temporarily, than see innocent people/groups/corporations get rushed in/out of a courtroom and denied justice.
A review of our Patent and Copyright laws is more likely to prevent these types of cases in the future, since Copyright is the central issue in the case and the enforceability of the GPL.
It's not a joke. Time for you to switch hosting companies.
While you are correct in theory, in practice this is not as easy as it sounds. That server is running a different OS, different versions of other software and will require rewriting some stuff. And I am more of a hack than a programmer. At best.
That is the frustrating part: I have to choose to either "stand my ground" and experience a transition that will be very expensive and very difficult to do in 30 to 60 days, or take a more reasoned 6 month+ approach that will end up helping SCO in at least a small way.
The fact that I did not have any notice to prepare IS the violation. Considering the well publicized SCO courtroom antics, and the fact that most people that rent servers are aware of the current SCO situation, it seems the management of EV1 servers has made TWO decisions:
1. To pay a royalty to SCO as an insurance policy.
2. To be dishonest with their own customers, even though they know the customers would have mixed feelings about their servers being "SCO licensed" without their consent.
My anger is that I WILL be helping SCO by virtue of NOT quiting TODAY. It is neither practical nor possible to do leave them in 24 hours, at least for most of us. The "Real World" often trumps "Wide-eyed Idealism" when you are on the firing line, at least temporarily.
Follow up about 29.5 hours later: no reply yet from EV1. I was logged in as a user and used their webmail form to submit the question.
Either they didn't take my concern seriously, they are flooded or they are just not sure how to respond (ie: they didn't think what customers might think about licensing from SCO). My guess is they just didn't take my concerns seriously.
Ok, granted, I overstated it a tad. I purchase the rights to use a particular server, I chose the operating system and environment among other things. I could have chosen Windows, but I didn't, I chose Linux. But now I have been FORCED to choose GNU/SCO/Linux which I consider to be an illegal product since SCO does not accept the GPL.
The software that is installed on my box is MY responsibility, they do not "support" it in any way except to wipe the system clean for a fee. I can change it to SuSe, FreeBSD, or any other OS I can remotely install. Regardless of what I do with the OS, I am now forced to support SCO at least temporarily, even if I am not using Linux on that server.
I do not wish to use an SCO licensed product, and I have been given no notice by EV1. I had to learn about it on slashdot. Now, I had NO choice in the matter, and in order to comply with my conscience, I must switch to a different remote server provider with NO notice whatsoever. Until I can change over, I will be paying at least one months payment (todays) to support SCO. This also puts me in a bind, since I am already busy enough.
So yes, it was NOT a violation of my civil rights, but I do feel violated by the actions of EV1, who have not disclosed any of this to their customers.
I just logged into my EV1 account and sent them email asking them about it. Polite, but asking if the news report was a joke or something.
This technically IS a violation of my rights since I pay for the entire box, which I can run any OS I want to on, and yes I run Linux. This means my monthly payment is subsidizing SCO. Wow, I am unwittingly sending money to SCO. I gotta go take a bath now, I just feel dirty.
You are correct. They have lots of pipe, and lots of servers. Their DB may be/.ed but you can't really slashdot their whole system, no matter how hard we tried.
But as a CUSTOMER of EV1, I am pissed that my box is now a "legally licensed SCO product". How can I possibly live this down???
A peak at their press release page shows some interesting information regarding their positions and actions. Googling news.google.com for fsf+lawsuit didn't show anything of interest. Reuters showed no hits for "fsf" at all, as well as "lawsuit gpl", which you would think would include sco news. Searching Yahoo News yielded better results, mainly SCO related. Then I got bored;)
Its a good questions. I didn't find that much, but no one has really challenged the GPL itself until now. Individual cases like the Linksys case are rare, and from my limited experience, they have been settled through careful and thoughtful (and sometimes slow) negotiation. Then again, if the FSF can quietly get infringers to comply, perhaps this is better than high profile lawsuits.
They are the best positioned to defend GPL software. Whether they are the best AT defending depends on how you look at it.
The court in Norway said Johansen acted legally so the information was obtained without breaking the law.
Part of the problem of intellectual property law is that it's purely a national thing. In this instance, both the US and Norway courts agree, but this isn't always the case.
I started following this case since the beginning, even bought a T-shirt from 2600.com to help pay for the legal costs. Yea, its not much help, but was really broke at the time, all I could do since I had just opened a new business. Yes, I mirrored a copy of DeCSS also, but like most everyone else, it was more symbolic than substance.
With all the kicking, screaming, bleeding and pain this caused, hopefully this will serve as one brick knocked out of a very unconstitutional wall called the DMCA. I know the US legal system gets a lot of heat about being Pro-Corporation, and often it is well deserved, but most of the time justice DOES prevail. It just takes time.
The SCO case is another example where it will take two years to end, but the results are very likely to be what we would expect. Often it is only on appeal (like the current topic) that justice gets corrected.
If a trade secret becomes public knowledge or is obtained legally by a person they have free use of that information.
Yup. Thats basically the tradeoff when you don't patent. If you can keep it secret for 100 years, then its like a 100 year patent. But once its known, its automatically Public Domain. At least in theory.
I think this is the primary reason it is recommended that authors assign copyright to the FSF. If I were to write a few hundred lines of kernel code that SomeInc, Inc. was infringing on, it would be difficult for me to prosecute, but with the FSF acting as a "clearinghouse" of sorts, it would be easier, since all the different bits of code put together make a more compelling case.
The question about funding is a good one, I am not sure how the FSF gets funding. I am sure that IBM et al would help, but in the long run, we can't depend on one or two corporations to fund the legal dept. of FSF. What if 10 years from now IBM was the infringer? Considering the previous problems with IBM in the 80s, it is not unthinkable, no matter how good a citizen they are now. SCO itself was a "good guy" in the Linux world just a few short years ago, before they started smoking crack.
In this circumstance, SCO itself has distributed the code in question under the GPL itself, however.
And they are still distributing the kernel to their own customers, in violation of the GPL.
In theory, yes, what you say *could* be true. But the way that SCO is doing it is clearly infringing on the copyright holders.
Again, it doesn't matter *HOW* you distribute GPL code for it to be infringing, its *IF* you distribute it in violation of the license, which they are doing. Just because they pulled the kernel off their public servers and only distribute to their existing customers is not a defense. The GPL clearly defines distribution as distribution of any kind outside of a singular institution.
The biggest irony is how SCO shamelessly is violating the IP rights of the various authors of the kernel code, while making claims on their own claimed IP.
Let's assume, just for a second, that the justice system drinks the SCO kool-aid and believes that SCO code actually is present in Linux. SCO, although they cannot themselves redistribute Linux, can ask that others pay SCO to redistribute Linux if it contains their proprietary materials.
Actually, SCO can charge a fee for their intellectual property, but they can't distribute GPL software without accepting the license, which they do not, as implied by their court filings. So SCO can sell all the Linux Cd's they want with their ip, as long as SCO doesn't use GPL licensed software. Or if they do, they are knowingly infringing because they do not have a license to distribute the software by the individual copyright owners.
So, if their material is part of the kernel, they can not legally license their own IP as part of the kernel, because they would have to be distributing and/or licensing GPL software. They may want it both ways, but they can't have it both ways.
This DeCSS case is a trade secret case. The court said that no trade secrets were illegally obtained.
Go back and read it again. He said no such thing. He said that once it was out, and all over the internet, it may have ceased to be a trade secret. Since this is the standard, a trade secret that becomes common knowledge is no longer a trade secret, the ruling restored the status quo before Kaplin turned activist.
The entire ruling is about how once a trade secret is no longer a trade secret, it is basically in the public domain. You can hold the individual/company/etc liable for the release, but not the people who distribute something that is no longer a trade secret. The appeal was about the injunction, and the harm that could be done if an injunction was not granted. IE: since it was no longer a trade secret, the judge (Kaplin) overstepped his boundries by issuing an injunction because the case didn't meet both standards required to do so. 1. Harm if the injunction was not issued, 2. Likelyhood that they would win the case. They had to succeed on both counts, and they succeeded in none.
Keep in mind, you can't patent a trade secret, and you can't claim a patent IS a trade secret. You can only choose one method: Patent it, sharing how you did it with everyone but they can't profit from it without your permission, or: Make it a trade secret, and protect that secret. The differences are that patents expire after a fixed term of years and trade secrets expire once they are no longer a secret. Their only recourse is to sue the original party that caused the secret to get out, maybe Xing.
Um.. Disparaging the GPL isn't the same thing as violating it. (Yes, they're violating the GPL, but saying that it sucks is a completely separate thing from violation of the license.)
Its not that SCO is diparaging it, its that they say it is illegal, and they are infringing on it by adding more restrictions to GPL software that they continue to distribute. The first instance means they no longer have any authority to distribute the software, and the second is clearly an illegal distribution of software in violation of copyright.
Some of us think that when you say "The GPL is not a valid license" you automatically lose your right to distribute under it, since acceptance is required to distribute it (not to USE it, but yes to distribute it). It doesn't matter if SCO only distributes GPL software to their existing customers in support either, since the GPL does not differentiate how you distribute, just if you distribute.
You can't have it both ways, you can't say a EULA is illegal and then exercise your rights under it. Without the GPL, it is flatly illegal to distribute GPL software, just as illegal as pirating copies of Windows XP. Just because one costs $$ and one doesn't, does not make it "less illegal".
BTW, I have a slashcode improvement request: I'd like the ability to moderate front page articles as "-1 Troll"
i have seen lots of comments to this affect and would agree. Let logged in users get 1 points, excellent karma gets 2 points to rate it (or 1 each, either way), everyone registered votes. Yahoo does this with their news with a 1-5 point rating. Then you can set your threshold for stories that are +1 only, or +3, etc.
Don't need a Funny/Troll/etc rating necessarily, just do similar to Yahoo. 1-5, or -1 to +5 rating system. Then maybe do modifiers, like I would add +3 for SCO stories, for instance. (just me).
Nope, the big changover was a few days ago. Even had a story here on it. Inktomi now provides the smarts for the yahoo search, and MSN and Lycos as well.
Sorry, but WRONG. Linus owns Linux. And the authors of other GPL software own the software. The rest of us, including any company, doesn't own any more than they have the copyright to.
We have a license to use it, the GPL. That is NOT the same as "everyone owns it". If Foo writes a program named Bar, Foo can release it under the GPL, and a proprietary license to any company. I can't do that with Bar because I don't own it.
The ability to charge for it does not imply ownership. It is simply allowed under the license, and the public can decide if you are adding enough value to pay for an OS that is both free and Free.
Actually, all I see is the offer, and several 500s and 'cant find server' errors. Don't think they are/.ed since the first comes up. They may not actually BE taking money, with the excuse "our servers are down, you know, the virus problem thing. Look at the monkey! Look!"
Fedora = Beta, forever and ever. Anything from Fedora that is ready for production is put into their Enterprise version. So Fedora is a blend of production grade and beta grade software, and always will be. Thats the whole reason it exists, so RedHat has a version they don't have to support that is Free and tested by thousands.
That said, after running Fedora on a couple of computers over the last few months, its pretty much a cleaner version of RH9. Its as bloated as 9, but overall, fairly comparable. I like it ok. I don't love it, but I like it. I don't run it on our most important servers, but it works fine for most general purposes, or on the desktop. I expect to replace Windows XP on my laptop with Fedora as soon as it gets out of the shop.
I understand what you are saying, im not a "free only" freak about software. Free is nice, when possible. I mean, im writing this on a windows box, with 4 PUTTY ssh windows open to the servers;)
I don't find Nano to be inferior, however. I can't tell the difference for what I do, basic CONF file editing, etc. I also don't consider mutt to be inferior to Pine. I am more used to pine/pico and still have them installed on several systems, but that doesn't make mutt/nano any LESS of program.
Before "GNU/Linux", Stallman was seriously considering names like "Lignux" and "Gnulix".
Gnulix sounds like some god-awful breakfast cereal from some unknown little mountainous country in Europe. Kinda like "Colon Blow" cereal commercials from SNL...
Or maybe Neelix's brother from Voyager, which is even worse.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point.
The fastest justice isn't necessarily the best justice either. I think that is the problem most people are having with the case. They see Germany slap SCO and tell them to shut up, and the US system plods along, slowly bringing justice. My interest is the results, not how fast they come about. This case has been going about for a year now, which is NOT extraordinarily long for a case like this. Yes, its is inconvenient, but in the end, justice will be served and SCO will have been given every fair chance to state their case. The big advantage is that when this is done, SCO will have nothing further they CAN say, we won't be seeing this come up again.
Correct. What makes the system liberal is how much leeway they are given to prove these points. Again, I don't think they have a case, but they will given every chance to prove it.
Our system is skewed toward the little guy, in THEORY. Usually this is not the case because the big guy can outspend the little guy, but the design is to prevent big corporations from having every advantage. Again, it isn't perfect, but I agree with the idea that gives the little guy more leverage when sueing.
What usually happens here in the States is you get all this negative press, and all the world talks about how terrible our court system is, but in the end, justice usually prevails, often on appeal. Once the case ends with justice, you hear nary a peep about how "fair" the system is. You only hear the negatives.
Corporations are NOT people. Since they offer space for people to shift liability, corporations should be treated harshier than people.
Your idea of corporations = people is really cheezy. Where did you get it from?
In the US, corporations are considered entities. Many Europeans (and others) do not like this because it can lead to abuses, and it does sometimes. But overall, I tend to agree with them being treated as such. I own a small corporation, that is the parent of the two small businesses I own, so I may be biased, but there are distict advantages and disadvantages to treating corporations like "people".
Maybe in your country corporations are not treated the same, but here in the States, corporations ARE "quazi-people" according to the law.
Um, I wget from all my windows machines, regularly. Even the ones without Cygwin installed. SSH and SFTP as well (thank you putty). And can even run Apache 1.3x/2.x for testing. Lots of unix utilities are ported to run on Windows, including wget.
It's time for a structural change in the US legal system,
While the US legal system is far from perfect, it's more a case of being different, instead of defective. The difference is that the US system is more liberal than European courts. I know many will find it hard to believe with the political press it gets, but when it comes to normal cases that you never hear of, the US system is very liberal, giving both parties more chances than a more conservative system would allow. SCO is getting typical treatment in this case, at least in the US. No one is really argueing this. That they have lied, and possibly committed securities fraud is a seperate case, and not within the scope of the current lawsuit.
It may be frustrating, but the role of the court is to find justice, and the US tends to let bad guys go instead of convicting innocents, and giving litigants more leeway to state their case. This cuts both ways, and has good results more often than bad. This gives the small guy a better chance to fight the big guy. Ironically, in this instance, the big guy is the good guy, but this is usually not the case.
It's not perfect, but its not a bad system. It's bad people taking advantage of an open and liberal system. Eventually, SCO will be put down after they have been given every opportunity to state their case. But I would still rather see SCO get away with stuff like this, temporarily, than see innocent people/groups/corporations get rushed in/out of a courtroom and denied justice.
A review of our Patent and Copyright laws is more likely to prevent these types of cases in the future, since Copyright is the central issue in the case and the enforceability of the GPL.
It's not a joke. Time for you to switch hosting companies.
While you are correct in theory, in practice this is not as easy as it sounds. That server is running a different OS, different versions of other software and will require rewriting some stuff. And I am more of a hack than a programmer. At best.
That is the frustrating part: I have to choose to either "stand my ground" and experience a transition that will be very expensive and very difficult to do in 30 to 60 days, or take a more reasoned 6 month+ approach that will end up helping SCO in at least a small way.
The fact that I did not have any notice to prepare IS the violation. Considering the well publicized SCO courtroom antics, and the fact that most people that rent servers are aware of the current SCO situation, it seems the management of EV1 servers has made TWO decisions:
1. To pay a royalty to SCO as an insurance policy.
2. To be dishonest with their own customers, even though they know the customers would have mixed feelings about their servers being "SCO licensed" without their consent.
My anger is that I WILL be helping SCO by virtue of NOT quiting TODAY. It is neither practical nor possible to do leave them in 24 hours, at least for most of us. The "Real World" often trumps "Wide-eyed Idealism" when you are on the firing line, at least temporarily.
Follow up about 29.5 hours later: no reply yet from EV1. I was logged in as a user and used their webmail form to submit the question.
Either they didn't take my concern seriously, they are flooded or they are just not sure how to respond (ie: they didn't think what customers might think about licensing from SCO). My guess is they just didn't take my concerns seriously.
Ok, granted, I overstated it a tad. I purchase the rights to use a particular server, I chose the operating system and environment among other things. I could have chosen Windows, but I didn't, I chose Linux. But now I have been FORCED to choose GNU/SCO/Linux which I consider to be an illegal product since SCO does not accept the GPL.
The software that is installed on my box is MY responsibility, they do not "support" it in any way except to wipe the system clean for a fee. I can change it to SuSe, FreeBSD, or any other OS I can remotely install. Regardless of what I do with the OS, I am now forced to support SCO at least temporarily, even if I am not using Linux on that server.
I do not wish to use an SCO licensed product, and I have been given no notice by EV1. I had to learn about it on slashdot. Now, I had NO choice in the matter, and in order to comply with my conscience, I must switch to a different remote server provider with NO notice whatsoever. Until I can change over, I will be paying at least one months payment (todays) to support SCO. This also puts me in a bind, since I am already busy enough.
So yes, it was NOT a violation of my civil rights, but I do feel violated by the actions of EV1, who have not disclosed any of this to their customers.
I just logged into my EV1 account and sent them email asking them about it. Polite, but asking if the news report was a joke or something.
This technically IS a violation of my rights since I pay for the entire box, which I can run any OS I want to on, and yes I run Linux. This means my monthly payment is subsidizing SCO. Wow, I am unwittingly sending money to SCO. I gotta go take a bath now, I just feel dirty.
You are correct. They have lots of pipe, and lots of servers. Their DB may be /.ed but you can't really slashdot their whole system, no matter how hard we tried.
But as a CUSTOMER of EV1, I am pissed that my box is now a "legally licensed SCO product". How can I possibly live this down???
A peak at their press release page shows some interesting information regarding their positions and actions. Googling news.google.com for fsf+lawsuit didn't show anything of interest. Reuters showed no hits for "fsf" at all, as well as "lawsuit gpl", which you would think would include sco news. Searching Yahoo News yielded better results, mainly SCO related. Then I got bored ;)
Its a good questions. I didn't find that much, but no one has really challenged the GPL itself until now. Individual cases like the Linksys case are rare, and from my limited experience, they have been settled through careful and thoughtful (and sometimes slow) negotiation. Then again, if the FSF can quietly get infringers to comply, perhaps this is better than high profile lawsuits.
They are the best positioned to defend GPL software. Whether they are the best AT defending depends on how you look at it.
The court in Norway said Johansen acted legally so the information was obtained without breaking the law.
Part of the problem of intellectual property law is that it's purely a national thing. In this instance, both the US and Norway courts agree, but this isn't always the case.
I started following this case since the beginning, even bought a T-shirt from 2600.com to help pay for the legal costs. Yea, its not much help, but was really broke at the time, all I could do since I had just opened a new business. Yes, I mirrored a copy of DeCSS also, but like most everyone else, it was more symbolic than substance.
With all the kicking, screaming, bleeding and pain this caused, hopefully this will serve as one brick knocked out of a very unconstitutional wall called the DMCA. I know the US legal system gets a lot of heat about being Pro-Corporation, and often it is well deserved, but most of the time justice DOES prevail. It just takes time.
The SCO case is another example where it will take two years to end, but the results are very likely to be what we would expect. Often it is only on appeal (like the current topic) that justice gets corrected.
If a trade secret becomes public knowledge or is obtained legally by a person they have free use of that information.
Yup. Thats basically the tradeoff when you don't patent. If you can keep it secret for 100 years, then its like a 100 year patent. But once its known, its automatically Public Domain. At least in theory.
I think this is the primary reason it is recommended that authors assign copyright to the FSF. If I were to write a few hundred lines of kernel code that SomeInc, Inc. was infringing on, it would be difficult for me to prosecute, but with the FSF acting as a "clearinghouse" of sorts, it would be easier, since all the different bits of code put together make a more compelling case.
The question about funding is a good one, I am not sure how the FSF gets funding. I am sure that IBM et al would help, but in the long run, we can't depend on one or two corporations to fund the legal dept. of FSF. What if 10 years from now IBM was the infringer? Considering the previous problems with IBM in the 80s, it is not unthinkable, no matter how good a citizen they are now. SCO itself was a "good guy" in the Linux world just a few short years ago, before they started smoking crack.
In this circumstance, SCO itself has distributed the code in question under the GPL itself, however.
And they are still distributing the kernel to their own customers, in violation of the GPL.
In theory, yes, what you say *could* be true. But the way that SCO is doing it is clearly infringing on the copyright holders.
Again, it doesn't matter *HOW* you distribute GPL code for it to be infringing, its *IF* you distribute it in violation of the license, which they are doing. Just because they pulled the kernel off their public servers and only distribute to their existing customers is not a defense. The GPL clearly defines distribution as distribution of any kind outside of a singular institution.
The biggest irony is how SCO shamelessly is violating the IP rights of the various authors of the kernel code, while making claims on their own claimed IP.
Let's assume, just for a second, that the justice system drinks the SCO kool-aid and believes that SCO code actually is present in Linux. SCO, although they cannot themselves redistribute Linux, can ask that others pay SCO to redistribute Linux if it contains their proprietary materials.
Actually, SCO can charge a fee for their intellectual property, but they can't distribute GPL software without accepting the license, which they do not, as implied by their court filings. So SCO can sell all the Linux Cd's they want with their ip, as long as SCO doesn't use GPL licensed software. Or if they do, they are knowingly infringing because they do not have a license to distribute the software by the individual copyright owners.
So, if their material is part of the kernel, they can not legally license their own IP as part of the kernel, because they would have to be distributing and/or licensing GPL software. They may want it both ways, but they can't have it both ways.
This DeCSS case is a trade secret case. The court said that no trade secrets were illegally obtained.
Go back and read it again. He said no such thing. He said that once it was out, and all over the internet, it may have ceased to be a trade secret. Since this is the standard, a trade secret that becomes common knowledge is no longer a trade secret, the ruling restored the status quo before Kaplin turned activist.
The entire ruling is about how once a trade secret is no longer a trade secret, it is basically in the public domain. You can hold the individual/company/etc liable for the release, but not the people who distribute something that is no longer a trade secret. The appeal was about the injunction, and the harm that could be done if an injunction was not granted. IE: since it was no longer a trade secret, the judge (Kaplin) overstepped his boundries by issuing an injunction because the case didn't meet both standards required to do so. 1. Harm if the injunction was not issued, 2. Likelyhood that they would win the case. They had to succeed on both counts, and they succeeded in none.
Keep in mind, you can't patent a trade secret, and you can't claim a patent IS a trade secret. You can only choose one method: Patent it, sharing how you did it with everyone but they can't profit from it without your permission, or: Make it a trade secret, and protect that secret. The differences are that patents expire after a fixed term of years and trade secrets expire once they are no longer a secret. Their only recourse is to sue the original party that caused the secret to get out, maybe Xing.
Um.. Disparaging the GPL isn't the same thing as violating it. (Yes, they're violating the GPL, but saying that it sucks is a completely separate thing from violation of the license.)
Its not that SCO is diparaging it, its that they say it is illegal, and they are infringing on it by adding more restrictions to GPL software that they continue to distribute. The first instance means they no longer have any authority to distribute the software, and the second is clearly an illegal distribution of software in violation of copyright.
Some of us think that when you say "The GPL is not a valid license" you automatically lose your right to distribute under it, since acceptance is required to distribute it (not to USE it, but yes to distribute it). It doesn't matter if SCO only distributes GPL software to their existing customers in support either, since the GPL does not differentiate how you distribute, just if you distribute.
You can't have it both ways, you can't say a EULA is illegal and then exercise your rights under it. Without the GPL, it is flatly illegal to distribute GPL software, just as illegal as pirating copies of Windows XP. Just because one costs $$ and one doesn't, does not make it "less illegal".
BTW, I have a slashcode improvement request: I'd like the ability to moderate front page articles as "-1 Troll"
i have seen lots of comments to this affect and would agree. Let logged in users get 1 points, excellent karma gets 2 points to rate it (or 1 each, either way), everyone registered votes. Yahoo does this with their news with a 1-5 point rating. Then you can set your threshold for stories that are +1 only, or +3, etc.
Don't need a Funny/Troll/etc rating necessarily, just do similar to Yahoo. 1-5, or -1 to +5 rating system. Then maybe do modifiers, like I would add +3 for SCO stories, for instance. (just me).
Nope, the big changover was a few days ago. Even had a story here on it. Inktomi now provides the smarts for the yahoo search, and MSN and Lycos as well.
Sorry, but WRONG. Linus owns Linux. And the authors of other GPL software own the software. The rest of us, including any company, doesn't own any more than they have the copyright to.
We have a license to use it, the GPL. That is NOT the same as "everyone owns it". If Foo writes a program named Bar, Foo can release it under the GPL, and a proprietary license to any company. I can't do that with Bar because I don't own it.
The ability to charge for it does not imply ownership. It is simply allowed under the license, and the public can decide if you are adding enough value to pay for an OS that is both free and Free.
Actually, all I see is the offer, and several 500s and 'cant find server' errors. Don't think they are /.ed since the first comes up. They may not actually BE taking money, with the excuse "our servers are down, you know, the virus problem thing. Look at the monkey! Look!"
Fedora = Beta, forever and ever. Anything from Fedora that is ready for production is put into their Enterprise version. So Fedora is a blend of production grade and beta grade software, and always will be. Thats the whole reason it exists, so RedHat has a version they don't have to support that is Free and tested by thousands.
That said, after running Fedora on a couple of computers over the last few months, its pretty much a cleaner version of RH9. Its as bloated as 9, but overall, fairly comparable. I like it ok. I don't love it, but I like it. I don't run it on our most important servers, but it works fine for most general purposes, or on the desktop. I expect to replace Windows XP on my laptop with Fedora as soon as it gets out of the shop.
Try watching "Joan of Arc" and tell me about how gentle and unwar like the human species was then compared to now.
I understand what you are saying, im not a "free only" freak about software. Free is nice, when possible. I mean, im writing this on a windows box, with 4 PUTTY ssh windows open to the servers ;)
I don't find Nano to be inferior, however. I can't tell the difference for what I do, basic CONF file editing, etc. I also don't consider mutt to be inferior to Pine. I am more used to pine/pico and still have them installed on several systems, but that doesn't make mutt/nano any LESS of program.
Before "GNU/Linux", Stallman was seriously considering names like "Lignux" and "Gnulix".
;)
Gnulix sounds like some god-awful breakfast cereal from some unknown little mountainous country in Europe. Kinda like "Colon Blow" cereal commercials from SNL...
Or maybe Neelix's brother from Voyager, which is even worse.