It's funny to see this discussed on Slashdot, an open source advocate, where on every other day people are focused on making sure software is free. Thus making sure you don't have to pay anyone in America, or India, or anyone at all to do software development.
Wake up.
At some point you have to pick a side, do you want free/cheap software, or do you want a day job that pays more then minimum wage to develop software? You can't have software be both free and cost lots of money at the same time.
IBM and others have figured this out before you did. Don't be mad, just pick another career, and try not to make that one free too;)
Excepting people like RMS, I think the free software is more a means of collaboration than that software should be free or whatever that philosophy is. I also think most free completed software (the Apache foundation a major exception) is free because M$ market share precludes using anything that competes with M$, therefore it has to be free to even get mindshare, much less sell it. The good news is that it worked, mindshare has been won, and now there are opportunities for customization, service, support, etc. that wasn't there with a commercial product that had no chance. And everyone benefited from collaboration. At least that's my take on it as a corporate programmer who's an outside observer.
Yes, I will. Someone has to clean up the mess that Clinton created. Stimulating the economy is one way to do that. Federal defecit can be repayed.
The federal deficit was being repayed under Clinton. In fact, we might have paid it off so our children wouldn't have to. But nooooooo, it's payoff time for the Republicans. Now your grandchildren will be paying as well for what you did. I hope they tell you what they think about it.
Is wealth really getting more concentrated? Corporations are consolidating, but the wealth is spread out over all stockholders. You can cite the x% of population have y% of dollars figures, but is that more concentrated than in the past, or less? I think less based on the history I have read.
Isn't the the reverse of what Ford did over 100 years ago? He paid workers more, and as a result, more people could afford the product they were producing.
When you outsource higher paying jobs, people have to find another (probably lower paying) job. With more people making less money (and this able to consume less), how is that good for the company long term?
This is similar to the famous economic paradox of a common grazing land. Sounds good, until everyone uses it and it is wore out. One large company outsourcing is seemingly better off as its own displaced workers are hardly enough to have an impact on its own sales. In reality, all large companies outsourcing as they are means that the many displaced workers have an impact on the sales of all the companies, and the people where the work was transferred will not be equivalent US consumers, you can be sure of that. What is seemingly good for one is a wholesale leaching of the US economy by all from which all will suffer more than they thought they were individually going to gain. It, and by that I mean our decades of giving up all productive means of employment to others, is societal suicide, remedied only by our soon to be inability to pay for imports, a 30's era Depression, and eventually a 40's era reindustrialization with commiserant 40's living standards. Well, it was good enough for our grandparents, anyway.
If IT gets outsourced from all over America, and payroll gets outsourced, and designing via autocad gets outsourced, what's left for Americans except marketing to the peasantry, managing the peasantry, or running the product over a barcode FOR the peasantry?
What are you talking about? What's left is to be the peasantry.
Growing up in the heart of union country, Michigan. I thought always thought one of the factors to bringing down some american industries was the unions demands. Well, now that my job industry in danger. I wish there was an union who could protect our jobs and represent the industry. Hell, we as computer professionals there is not even a powerful political lobby to fight our cause. First the call centers, then various levels of support centers and now development shops.
It's not "your" job. It's the companies job, and they can do what they want with it. It's unions that screwed this country up and left us with no manufacturing jobs at all, yours or theirs, whichever you prefer.
something reasonable like this will come about when all government contracts and services and goods purchased by the contractors are required to be performed by Americans.
That 24/7 thing is actually very, very, very innovative.
It's also something I remember someone mentioning Microsoft doing a number of years ago.
This is not true that I know of. They are renowned for consolidating all jobs to Redmond. It is only recently that they opened a center in India. Trying to sneak an "innovative" in for M$. Shame on you!
Face it, technical jobs are becomming increasingly a commodity that can be filled as easily by someone in Bangalore as Boston.
Only because of recently cheap high bandwidth worldwide internet communications. This was artificially created by US law and financed by the lost billions in the dot com bubble. Anything that makes overseas communications expensive again drives a stake through this. Dwindling oil supplies will take care of the current international transportation capability that enables products to be shipped worldwide so cheaply. Artificially cheap telecommunications can end anytime. The telecoms are losing their ass on it, and they're on life support as it is.
We pay them in dollars and ultimately, the only place where you can spend dollars is in the USA. The world gets rich with our money and so do we. Thats economics kids.
Who's going to buy these imports when everyone is unemployed? Think not? What is it that we're providing to others while the rest of the world does every imaginable job that we used to do? Why do you think we have record trade deficits month after month, year after year?
And why would a dollar ever need to come back here? It is perfectly good currency worldwide from what I have read.
If you ship U.S. jobs overseas, should you still be granted government contracts?
No, and the head of the Armed Services Committee tried to make it law, with the administration and most corporations fighting it. The modified Senate version that in addition also allows purchases from Nato nations must become law despite what the rich are doing to derail it even as we speak.
Why go to college and collect a huge debt when you can go to a trade school and make far better money?
I often see a response to this question here in that the trades and prevailing wages are controlled by unions, and there is a limit to how many tradesmen they will allow to join them. Also, if no one has a production job, who is going to pay plumbers? My grandparents had an outhouse, and pretty much everyone plumbed their property as necessary. Still, if one don't have a job and one's house gets repossessed, one must figure out how to do their own plumbing, unfortunately, on whatever place they can get.
From Central European perspective...it's very good think. I live in Poland, where unemployment rate is as high as 20%, 50% of university graduates are unemployed, and where I work as a system administrator for about 1000 zlotys (less than 300 USD) monthly and last payment was from March. I have a Masters Degree in Physics, and I am finishing my Masters thesis in Law. I'm 25 and still living with my parents in a flat (let's just say, that renting one room flat costs over 500 zlotys (half of my pay)) and I consider myself very lucky having a place to live, a job, and at least some perspectives. So whenever some US corp. is moving out of US, we people from underdeveloped countries, are rather happy, as this means better future for us.
Really the growth of America has always been from the determination of immigrants made up of people like you, but with telecommunications and cheap international transporation the jobs can be exported rather than just importing immigrants, although we now have both. We've got to find a way for all people to have productive jobs but right now jobs going overseas means we have many Americans facing what you face.
Historically, agriculture kept everyone employed at subsistence levels. Communism kept everyone employed at a little higher level. Socialism tries to keep employment up with no overtime and time off, but doesn't succeed. But capitalism is brutally efficient at maximizing production with minimum employment.
Technically there is seemingly an infinite amount of work, from public infrastructure that must be built or rebuilt to software that people and companies would like to have, but none of which enough people are willing to pay for to make building these things a reasonable investment to finance. The wild card is that the more money there is, the more marginal projects are able to be funded. Something a community could not afford to do they can do when fully employed. How to get everyone fully employed and money circulating from project to project faster and faster? I don't know, but I think it has to be done by doing something constructive with what is available and building momentum upon it, with an agricultural, barter subsistence economy at a minimum to keep the unemployed and underemployed occupied and alive. Efficiency is fine in doing more with less people, but the rest of the people have to survive, however inefficiently. But from those efforts will grow future small businesses and employers to employ more, and maybe start circulating that money faster to employ others. We can only hope, build, and be productive communities with what we have and create ourselves the wealth that is capital.
There is no reason to comment on this topic at all. All the comments are going to say: 1. The Indians are stealing the God given jobs of the Americans! wah wah wah 2. Those evil companies don't care about their employees! Wah wah wah 3. Clinton NAFTA foreigners H1-B blah blah blah, ramble ramble ramble Get over it! It's called capitalism. Companies have a loyalty ONLY to their shareholders. Not to their Employees. If a company treats their employees well, it is only incidental. That is how the system is built and that is the system championed by the United States and spread worldwide aggressively by the US government. Million of blue-collar jobs have moved overseas a long time ago. The whining techies screaming about American jobs being lost don't think twice about going to Fry's and buying an inexpensive video card or printer made in China. The whining techies don't think twice about going to Fry's and buying a Via motherboard made in Taiwan. All this crap about "American jobs" being lost is a whole bunch of nationalistic lip-service tripe. Put your money where your mouth is. I challenge you to stop buying a single electronic item (or clothes, or anything else) not made overseas by a worker who "stole" American jobs. If you can't, you are infinitely worse than the CEO who moved the jobs overseas because you were the one that caused the CEO to make that decision.
This comment is on the money, but the problem with trying to buy American is that you usually can't find anything American, and if it is American it often is assembled from foreign parts. I know, I always keep an eye out and especially try to avoid Made in China. It is extremely difficult to even be able to avoid buying Made in China, much less American. It won't change until the bottom finally drops out and we no longer can afford even Made in China. Then maybe we'll roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves again, much poorer but all the wiser for it.
Not so much... the population in India is so huge compared to that in the US. The standard of living here will lower faster than it can rise over there. I think this will be the more likely cause of a job export turnaround: A standard of living in the US that is too low to support overseas programmers.
This is a gem of wisdom. With ongoing record trade deficits, federal budget deficits, and personal and corporate bankrupcies, and energy costs continually rising higher as oil and gas run out, we will find that we can no longer afford to import our goods or pay for services overseas, and in addition find that we no longer have the capacity to do it ourselves.
We will have to revert to a WWII era industrialization economy and start over with living standards from the 40's and 50's. Hopefully we don't have to go through the 30's to get there.
actually, just to make you lose any hope on patent office and things as such, there was a fellow who patented a car like thingy in the late 1800's, the fellow even delayed it in the process(like companies do nowadays) until cars got into widespread production, and then licensed it to several manufacturers.
the fellow had not built a working car from the description in the patent even, and later lost in court to ford after failing to produce an usable car from the description in the patent(iirc court demanded it, the patent was very vague with details but nobody had bothered to go to court with the fellow and had instead paid quite nice sums and the fellow in question wasn't even an engineer but a patent official iirc).
ok so what this has to do with sco? not much except that companies are too reluctant to go to court and will even pay quite considerable sums for not having to do it, even if they would quite probably won if they took even a little time to investigate the issue.
i'm just amazed if some people really buy sco cash thinking sco has a viable business plan in 'licensing linux 2.4', big f***n boohoo, move back to 2.2 and start over EVEN if those few lines are never told because of some craziness and if they claim they are in 2.6 too, and why don't they just go after the fellow that submitted that code? surely such info would be available from the docs/tracking.
also why don't they sue anyone else than ibm? how many employees does sco even have?
and they really can't do it by the books by some twisted binary only licensing of linux without losing all rights to distribute it anyways..
People keep saying "a few lines" but misunderstood the "at last 80 consecutive lines copied" bit to be the sum total of identified infringement. The areas in question appear to be the "enterprise ready" stuff that IBM put into Linux, actually budgeting a billion dollars to make it enterprise ready, as they call it. The three acronyms that are referred to (NUMA, etc.) are hardly a few lines of code but instead major architecture features. Whether SCO can prove their claim of ownership of the architectural features as derivative works is the question, not identifying and replacing a few lines of code, in my opinion.
The attention to others than IBM and the number of SCO employees was in McBrides remarks. He said they are moving into new territory (translation: preparing to sue others than IBM) and the number of SCO employees is 330.
The binary licensing was explained several times, but people keep posting about it breaking GPL, etc. It was a license for Unixware that protects the licensee from additional SCO claims as long as the licensee is running distro binary Linux and doesn't modify the code themselves.
Um, yes. NUMA came from the SEQUENT (now IBM) codebase. Same with RCU. But SCO's claim is that since Sequent (Dynix) was a derivative of SysV, then it's THEIR code. Which presumably, means that this is not merely a contract dispute with IBM but an intellectual property case. But, it is very unlikely that SCO can prove in court that Sequent's contract with AT&T/USL/Novell/SCO/Caldera/SCO grants SCO any rights whatsoever to ownership, let alone control, of Sequent NUMA code. So SCO is claiming piracy of IP they don't even own (or at least haven't proven as such in court).
This isn't pointed nearly often enough or as well!
Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?
I use Netscape 7.0 at home, while IE is installed at work. There is no noticeable difference in rendering as I view many of the same sites from both work and home. I despise IE and Outlook, and I am very happy with Netscape and it's email/news reader and all the configuration settings available. Have used Netscape since the beginning, all under Windows. I received Mandrake 9.1 the other day, will check out Konqueror under Linux.
"connection extortion"
What do you mean? I've never worked on WS, just Tomcat and Weblogic, so I'm not familiar with the WS licensing costs.
IBM uses Websphere as their tollgate to do anything. They attempt to make every IBM product require Websphere, and Websphere licensing is about $425 per user per server per year last I heard. This is on top of whatever the IBM software products cost, and on top of paying thousands of dollars for Websphere. They charge for all these products based on the size of the box, so Websphere on a decent sized server is over $10,000, plus the user licensing, plus whatever their other products cost. This is their plan for replacing hardware sales as their main source of business. They actually think hardware is a commodity and that Websphere is something special. They're going down hard.
mind reading required when you say "Agh, RPG". I dragged OS/400 into the mix because it was a chance to tell Unix/Linux people about a real OS, not that they could deal with it.
Calling an RPG/400 program and leaving LR off is pobably better than a service program, in my opinion.
Yeah, IBM has fscked it up good. I ranted for years on midrange forums. I hope they go down hard when people tell them to take Websphere and its connection extortion to do anything and shove it.
What're you talking about? Oracle is Unbreakable! You must have misread the article, that article said that Oracle was fixing problems in other databases from other companies that were also named Oracle.
And, as usual, Larry was blaming it on custom code.
Through the 90s I watched my IT friends getting laid off "No offence to your friends, but what kind of IT people got laid off in the 90s? They couldn't afford a copy of "Learn to program HTML in 24 hours"?"
The early to mid 90's was a horrible IT recession, exceeded only by the overall depression of the early 80's and today's.com bust. A lot of IT people got laid off throughout the 90's until the boom started.
Well, this is disturbing on one level due to the lack of competition if Peoplesoft were absorbed by Oracle, and yet I find myself not being too concerned due to the overwhelming costs and grief that Peoplesoft software has put certain organizations I know of through. Yes, I realize it is complex software, but I felt as if we were actually beta testing Peoplesoft code for them when we implemented it. Soooo, perhaps things might actually turn out for the better?
You think it was better putting Oracle 11i in or Oracle's client/server apps in before that? Not from what I read. We just went live with PeopleSoft for HR after choosing it over Oracle. Didn't seem to go too bad so far, from what I've heard. At least I hope my paycheck got deposited. Better check, I guess...:)
You forget one important thing! Fro who is the money lowed?
If the US has borrowed from the US than it dose not matter. Well it dose but not as much as if it was from the EU / Asia / etc...
Well, in fact it does matter even if borrowed entirely from US sources. The debt payments take a big chunk out of the budget before anyone gets around to figuring out what the rest of the taxes can be spent on. If you take social security out of the computations, since it goes straight through to our parents, I have read that between 25% and 33% of our taxes goes to debt payments. Think about it. A quarter to a third of our children's and grandchildren's and great grandchildren's taxes goes to pay for us borrowing to live beyond our means before they even get to think about what they're going to do with what's left. And social security won't have enough to pay for the retirement of their parents who ran up the debt, so that will be another cost for them. And we're using up all the cheap energy sources so that they won't have any left and will have to pay for increasingly expensive energy. And we're leaving large amounts of toxic and radiactive waste dumps to pollute the groundwater because we won't pay to store it safely. And we're sending all our production jobs overseas so that no one will be able to afford to pay for any of this in any event.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny to see this discussed on Slashdot, an open source advocate, where on every other day people are focused on making sure software is free. Thus making sure you don't have to pay anyone in America, or India, or anyone at all to do software development.
;)
Wake up.
At some point you have to pick a side, do you want free/cheap software, or do you want a day job that pays more then minimum wage to develop software? You can't have software be both free and cost lots of money at the same time.
IBM and others have figured this out before you did. Don't be mad, just pick another career, and try not to make that one free too
Excepting people like RMS, I think the free software is more a means of collaboration than that software should be free or whatever that philosophy is. I also think most free completed software (the Apache foundation a major exception) is free because M$ market share precludes using anything that competes with M$, therefore it has to be free to even get mindshare, much less sell it. The good news is that it worked, mindshare has been won, and now there are opportunities for customization, service, support, etc. that wasn't there with a commercial product that had no chance. And everyone benefited from collaboration. At least that's my take on it as a corporate programmer who's an outside observer.
rd
Yes, I will. Someone has to clean up the mess that Clinton created. Stimulating the economy is one way to do that. Federal defecit can be repayed.
The federal deficit was being repayed under Clinton. In fact, we might have paid it off so our children wouldn't have to. But nooooooo, it's payoff time for the Republicans. Now your grandchildren will be paying as well for what you did. I hope they tell you what they think about it.
rd
Is wealth really getting more concentrated? Corporations are consolidating, but the wealth is spread out over all stockholders. You can cite the x% of population have y% of dollars figures, but is that more concentrated than in the past, or less? I think less based on the history I have read.
rd
Isn't the the reverse of what Ford did over 100 years ago? He paid workers more, and as a result, more people could afford the product they were producing.
When you outsource higher paying jobs, people have to find another (probably lower paying) job. With more people making less money (and this able to consume less), how is that good for the company long term?
This is similar to the famous economic paradox of a common grazing land. Sounds good, until everyone uses it and it is wore out. One large company outsourcing is seemingly better off as its own displaced workers are hardly enough to have an impact on its own sales. In reality, all large companies outsourcing as they are means that the many displaced workers have an impact on the sales of all the companies, and the people where the work was transferred will not be equivalent US consumers, you can be sure of that. What is seemingly good for one is a wholesale leaching of the US economy by all from which all will suffer more than they thought they were individually going to gain. It, and by that I mean our decades of giving up all productive means of employment to others, is societal suicide, remedied only by our soon to be inability to pay for imports, a 30's era Depression, and eventually a 40's era reindustrialization with commiserant 40's living standards. Well, it was good enough for our grandparents, anyway.
rd
If IT gets outsourced from all over America, and payroll gets outsourced, and designing via autocad gets outsourced, what's left for Americans except marketing to the peasantry, managing the peasantry, or running the product over a barcode FOR the peasantry?
What are you talking about? What's left is to be the peasantry.
rd
Growing up in the heart of union country, Michigan. I thought always thought one of the factors to bringing down some american industries was the unions demands. Well, now that my job industry in danger. I wish there was an union who could protect our jobs and represent the industry. Hell, we as computer professionals there is not even a powerful political lobby to fight our cause. First the call centers, then various levels of support centers and now development shops.
It's not "your" job. It's the companies job, and they can do what they want with it. It's unions that screwed this country up and left us with no manufacturing jobs at all, yours or theirs, whichever you prefer.
rd
something reasonable like this will come about when all government contracts and services and goods purchased by the contractors are required to be performed by Americans.
rd
That 24/7 thing is actually very, very, very innovative.
It's also something I remember someone mentioning Microsoft doing a number of years ago.
This is not true that I know of. They are renowned for consolidating all jobs to Redmond. It is only recently that they opened a center in India. Trying to sneak an "innovative" in for M$. Shame on you!
rd
Face it, technical jobs are becomming increasingly a commodity that can be filled as easily by someone in Bangalore as Boston.
Only because of recently cheap high bandwidth worldwide internet communications. This was artificially created by US law and financed by the lost billions in the dot com bubble. Anything that makes overseas communications expensive again drives a stake through this. Dwindling oil supplies will take care of the current international transportation capability that enables products to be shipped worldwide so cheaply. Artificially cheap telecommunications can end anytime. The telecoms are losing their ass on it, and they're on life support as it is.
rd
We pay them in dollars and ultimately, the only place where you can spend dollars is in the USA. The world gets rich with our money and so do we. Thats economics kids.
Who's going to buy these imports when everyone is unemployed? Think not? What is it that we're providing to others while the rest of the world does every imaginable job that we used to do? Why do you think we have record trade deficits month after month, year after year?
And why would a dollar ever need to come back here? It is perfectly good currency worldwide from what I have read.
rd
If you ship U.S. jobs overseas, should you still be granted government contracts?
No, and the head of the Armed Services Committee tried to make it law, with the administration and most corporations fighting it. The modified Senate version that in addition also allows purchases from Nato nations must become law despite what the rich are doing to derail it even as we speak.
rd
Why go to college and collect a huge debt when you can go to a trade school and make far better money?
I often see a response to this question here in that the trades and prevailing wages are controlled by unions, and there is a limit to how many tradesmen they will allow to join them. Also, if no one has a production job, who is going to pay plumbers? My grandparents had an outhouse, and pretty much everyone plumbed their property as necessary. Still, if one don't have a job and one's house gets repossessed, one must figure out how to do their own plumbing, unfortunately, on whatever place they can get.
rd
From Central European perspective...it's very good think. I live in Poland, where unemployment rate is as high as 20%, 50% of university graduates are unemployed, and where I work as a system administrator for about 1000 zlotys (less than 300 USD) monthly and last payment was from March.
I have a Masters Degree in Physics, and I am finishing my Masters thesis in Law. I'm 25 and still living with my parents in a flat (let's just say, that renting one room flat costs over 500 zlotys (half of my pay)) and I consider myself very lucky having a place to live, a job, and at least some perspectives.
So whenever some US corp. is moving out of US, we people from underdeveloped countries, are rather happy, as this means better future for us.
Really the growth of America has always been from the determination of immigrants made up of people like you, but with telecommunications and cheap international transporation the jobs can be exported rather than just importing immigrants, although we now have both. We've got to find a way for all people to have productive jobs but right now jobs going overseas means we have many Americans facing what you face.
Historically, agriculture kept everyone employed at subsistence levels. Communism kept everyone employed at a little higher level. Socialism tries to keep employment up with no overtime and time off, but doesn't succeed. But capitalism is brutally efficient at maximizing production with minimum employment.
Technically there is seemingly an infinite amount of work, from public infrastructure that must be built or rebuilt to software that people and companies would like to have, but none of which enough people are willing to pay for to make building these things a reasonable investment to finance. The wild card is that the more money there is, the more marginal projects are able to be funded. Something a community could not afford to do they can do when fully employed. How to get everyone fully employed and money circulating from project to project faster and faster? I don't know, but I think it has to be done by doing something constructive with what is available and building momentum upon it, with an agricultural, barter subsistence economy at a minimum to keep the unemployed and underemployed occupied and alive. Efficiency is fine in doing more with less people, but the rest of the people have to survive, however inefficiently. But from those efforts will grow future small businesses and employers to employ more, and maybe start circulating that money faster to employ others. We can only hope, build, and be productive communities with what we have and create ourselves the wealth that is capital.
rd
There is no reason to comment on this topic at all. All the comments are going to say: 1. The Indians are stealing the God given jobs of the Americans! wah wah wah 2. Those evil companies don't care about their employees! Wah wah wah 3. Clinton NAFTA foreigners H1-B blah blah blah, ramble ramble ramble Get over it! It's called capitalism. Companies have a loyalty ONLY to their shareholders. Not to their Employees. If a company treats their employees well, it is only incidental. That is how the system is built and that is the system championed by the United States and spread worldwide aggressively by the US government. Million of blue-collar jobs have moved overseas a long time ago. The whining techies screaming about American jobs being lost don't think twice about going to Fry's and buying an inexpensive video card or printer made in China. The whining techies don't think twice about going to Fry's and buying a Via motherboard made in Taiwan. All this crap about "American jobs" being lost is a whole bunch of nationalistic lip-service tripe. Put your money where your mouth is. I challenge you to stop buying a single electronic item (or clothes, or anything else) not made overseas by a worker who "stole" American jobs. If you can't, you are infinitely worse than the CEO who moved the jobs overseas because you were the one that caused the CEO to make that decision.
This comment is on the money, but the problem with trying to buy American is that you usually can't find anything American, and if it is American it often is assembled from foreign parts. I know, I always keep an eye out and especially try to avoid Made in China. It is extremely difficult to even be able to avoid buying Made in China, much less American. It won't change until the bottom finally drops out and we no longer can afford even Made in China. Then maybe we'll roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves again, much poorer but all the wiser for it.
rd
Not so much... the population in India is so huge compared to that in the US. The standard of living here will lower faster than it can rise over there.
I think this will be the more likely cause of a job export turnaround: A standard of living in the US that is too low to support overseas programmers.
This is a gem of wisdom. With ongoing record trade deficits, federal budget deficits, and personal and corporate bankrupcies, and energy costs continually rising higher as oil and gas run out, we will find that we can no longer afford to import our goods or pay for services overseas, and in addition find that we no longer have the capacity to do it ourselves.
We will have to revert to a WWII era industrialization economy and start over with living standards from the 40's and 50's. Hopefully we don't have to go through the 30's to get there.
rd
*Ford can not sue Chevy for designing 'a car'*
actually, just to make you lose any hope on patent office and things as such, there was a fellow who patented a car like thingy in the late 1800's, the fellow even delayed it in the process(like companies do nowadays) until cars got into widespread production, and then licensed it to several manufacturers.
the fellow had not built a working car from the description in the patent even, and later lost in court to ford after failing to produce an usable car from the description in the patent(iirc court demanded it, the patent was very vague with details but nobody had bothered to go to court with the fellow and had instead paid quite nice sums and the fellow in question wasn't even an engineer but a patent official iirc).
ok so what this has to do with sco? not much except that companies are too reluctant to go to court and will even pay quite considerable sums for not having to do it, even if they would quite probably won if they took even a little time to investigate the issue.
i'm just amazed if some people really buy sco cash thinking sco has a viable business plan in 'licensing linux 2.4', big f***n boohoo, move back to 2.2 and start over EVEN if those few lines are never told because of some craziness and if they claim they are in 2.6 too, and why don't they just go after the fellow that submitted that code? surely such info would be available from the docs/tracking.
also why don't they sue anyone else than ibm? how many employees does sco even have?
and they really can't do it by the books by some twisted binary only licensing of linux without losing all rights to distribute it anyways..
People keep saying "a few lines" but misunderstood the "at last 80 consecutive lines copied" bit to be the sum total of identified infringement. The areas in question appear to be the "enterprise ready" stuff that IBM put into Linux, actually budgeting a billion dollars to make it enterprise ready, as they call it. The three acronyms that are referred to (NUMA, etc.) are hardly a few lines of code but instead major architecture features. Whether SCO can prove their claim of ownership of the architectural features as derivative works is the question, not identifying and replacing a few lines of code, in my opinion.
The attention to others than IBM and the number of SCO employees was in McBrides remarks. He said they are moving into new territory (translation: preparing to sue others than IBM) and the number of SCO employees is 330.
The binary licensing was explained several times, but people keep posting about it breaking GPL, etc. It was a license for Unixware that protects the licensee from additional SCO claims as long as the licensee is running distro binary Linux and doesn't modify the code themselves.
rd
Um, yes. NUMA came from the SEQUENT (now IBM) codebase. Same with RCU. But SCO's claim is that since Sequent (Dynix) was a derivative of SysV, then it's THEIR code. Which presumably, means that this is not merely a contract dispute with IBM but an intellectual property case. But, it is very unlikely that SCO can prove in court that Sequent's contract with AT&T/USL/Novell/SCO/Caldera/SCO grants SCO any rights whatsoever to ownership, let alone control, of Sequent NUMA code. So SCO is claiming piracy of IP they don't even own (or at least haven't proven as such in court).
This isn't pointed nearly often enough or as well!
rd
Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?
I use Netscape 7.0 at home, while IE is installed at work. There is no noticeable difference in rendering as I view many of the same sites from both work and home. I despise IE and Outlook, and I am very happy with Netscape and it's email/news reader and all the configuration settings available. Have used Netscape since the beginning, all under Windows. I received Mandrake 9.1 the other day, will check out Konqueror under Linux.
rd
"connection extortion"
What do you mean? I've never worked on WS, just Tomcat and Weblogic, so I'm not familiar with the WS licensing costs.
IBM uses Websphere as their tollgate to do anything. They attempt to make every IBM product require Websphere, and Websphere licensing is about $425 per user per server per year last I heard. This is on top of whatever the IBM software products cost, and on top of paying thousands of dollars for Websphere. They charge for all these products based on the size of the box, so Websphere on a decent sized server is over $10,000, plus the user licensing, plus whatever their other products cost. This is their plan for replacing hardware sales as their main source of business. They actually think hardware is a commodity and that Websphere is something special. They're going down hard.
rd
mind reading required when you say "Agh, RPG". I dragged OS/400 into the mix because it was a chance to tell Unix/Linux people about a real OS, not that they could deal with it.
Calling an RPG/400 program and leaving LR off is pobably better than a service program, in my opinion.
Yeah, IBM has fscked it up good. I ranted for years on midrange forums. I hope they go down hard when people tell them to take Websphere and its connection extortion to do anything and shove it.
rd
What're you talking about? Oracle is Unbreakable! You must have misread the article, that article said that Oracle was fixing problems in other databases from other companies that were also named Oracle.
And, as usual, Larry was blaming it on custom code.
rd
Through the 90s I watched my IT friends getting laid off
.com bust. A lot of IT people got laid off throughout the 90's until the boom started.
"No offence to your friends, but what kind of IT people got laid off in the 90s? They couldn't afford a copy of "Learn to program HTML in 24 hours"?"
The early to mid 90's was a horrible IT recession, exceeded only by the overall depression of the early 80's and today's
rd
Actually quite the opposite is true. Oracle states that it will continue support of People Soft products for the next 10 years. (Version 8)
Larry didn't state that in the beginning. Damage control doesn't count.
rd
Well, this is disturbing on one level due to the lack of competition if Peoplesoft were absorbed by Oracle, and yet I find myself not being too concerned due to the overwhelming costs and grief that Peoplesoft software has put certain organizations I know of through. Yes, I realize it is complex software, but I felt as if we were actually beta testing Peoplesoft code for them when we implemented it. Soooo, perhaps things might actually turn out for the better?
:)
You think it was better putting Oracle 11i in or Oracle's client/server apps in before that? Not from what I read. We just went live with PeopleSoft for HR after choosing it over Oracle. Didn't seem to go too bad so far, from what I've heard. At least I hope my paycheck got deposited. Better check, I guess...
rd
You forget one important thing! Fro who is the money lowed?
If the US has borrowed from the US than it dose not matter. Well it dose but not as much as if it was from the EU / Asia / etc...
Well, in fact it does matter even if borrowed entirely from US sources. The debt payments take a big chunk out of the budget before anyone gets around to figuring out what the rest of the taxes can be spent on. If you take social security out of the computations, since it goes straight through to our parents, I have read that between 25% and 33% of our taxes goes to debt payments. Think about it. A quarter to a third of our children's and grandchildren's and great grandchildren's taxes goes to pay for us borrowing to live beyond our means before they even get to think about what they're going to do with what's left. And social security won't have enough to pay for the retirement of their parents who ran up the debt, so that will be another cost for them. And we're using up all the cheap energy sources so that they won't have any left and will have to pay for increasingly expensive energy. And we're leaving large amounts of toxic and radiactive waste dumps to pollute the groundwater because we won't pay to store it safely. And we're sending all our production jobs overseas so that no one will be able to afford to pay for any of this in any event.
So yes, they will not be amused.
rd