Those who follow discussions concerning the arguments being prepared for the SCO lawsuit are betting right now that the GPL will be among the targets of that action. They may be right, they may be wrong, but references to that action are relevant to any discussion about software licensing these days.
One time, I sent mail about Echelon to my Senetor. I was frankly stunned and awed to the point of voting for him in the next election because I got back a letter than addressed what I had said, and outlined what he had done as a result, and what the results of his actions were.
It seems to me that this (the above-referenced summary of positions and actions) is the absolute minimally acceptable response to a serious question asked of an employee....
What I don't know is how these projects should be interpreted. Are they just looking for lucrative orders from the government that won't help against terrorism, but make some people richer or is there really the wish of people in the government to gather information about everyone in order to get more power? Probably, it's both, to some degree.
It is both, all, and everything.
There's a cultural struggle in the background here between those who identify with governmental power and those who do not.
9/11 scared us. I was in NYC that day, I saw the first plane fly directly over me on the way to the 94th floor of the North tower, I live here still. I know the fear.
The difference between those in this discussion who say "Who cares if they watch you if you're doing nothing wrong?" and those who say "I don't want the government doing this at all" is the object of their fear. I've seen what unrestrained governmental power is capable of, it's not pretty. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't believe that there's anything a free society can do to prevent things like 9/11 (and still remain a free society) that we weren't supposed to be doing pre-9/11. There won't be another US hijacking, but that's because of those people that took back the plane that crashed in PA, not because of Ashcroft, Cheney, et al.
There will be another attack, but that's because we make ourselves a target with our own affluence and our arrogance. If we took the money we are spending in Iraq and used it to feed, house and clothe every human being on the planet regardless of what they believe, there would be legions of people who can't find the US on a map willing to die to protect us.
If we REALLY invaded countries for the purposes of protecting populations and building infrastructure (instead of guarding the oil ministries), the threats would come, but they would come from the powerful for whom this meddling disrupts their profits, not oppressed populations, and the powerful just don't do suicide attacks.
I've discussed this elsewhere repeatedly--The thinking that got us into this will not get us out.
The flaw with the parent is that it assumes that whoever comes to power next is different. No. That will never happen. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Political philosophers have been arguing ways to mitigate this human characteristic and have never really solved it yet...
Huh?
I made no distinction between administrations, past or future.
The USGovt can't even manage the information they receive now. There are reams of information they had about the 9/11 plans that just didn't get invetigated, interrogations that are untranslated years after they happened, untold bytes that are simply stored and unexamined, we should abandon the notion that the government wants these capabilities to protect anyone.
The government wants this information because of a desire for power. Will this be used to scan for threats to the general public or to curtail and monitor the activites of those who threaten governmental power, like dissenting political activists? Look at the history of the abuse of the FBI by almost every executive administration for those answers.
Your metaphor relies on an anthropormorphic leap for both the shark and a corporation. It further relies on the assumption that this leap has the same dimensions for either entity. It doesn't.
We don't know why sharks do what they do. We know what it appears they are doing/thinking as if they reasoned and experienced the world as humans do, i.e., I'm hungry, let's eat, I'm interested in offspring, let's mate. etc. etc. While all that is well and good for the purposes of a discussion, neither of us has any idea if this is reality as sharks experience it.
This isn't true for corporations. We can make reasonable guesses about reality as it is experienced by the people who run SCO.
Yes it is naive to expect that priveleged human beings will act in the interests of "the rest of the world" whomever or whatever you consider them to be. To do so is to ignore what history, current events, psychology, and economics tell us about human beings, corporations, and the way both tend to behave.
You can take your lessons from history where you find them. Your certainty regarding the agendas of organized groups fails to account for people who follow leaders like Gandhi or MLK.
Microsoft is a very successful company, but no one can say this is because of successful ethics - in fact, there is considerable evidence that they succeeded by ignoring ethical considerations in their single-minded pursuit of control and dominance of various markets....
...you are implying a universal code of conduct that everyone agrees upon when in fact none such exists.
If a universal understanding of ethical conduct does in fact not exist how can you determine that Microsoft is "ignoring ethical considerations?" Perhaps they subscribe to an ethical code that puts the needs of stockholders above all else. Perhaps they are being rigorously ethical in their view.
Of course, that sort of moral relativism has been argued by Stalin, Hitler, et al. and that's where it belongs. Anyone is free to believe that universal moral imperatives do not exist, but that doesn't make it so.
Corporations EXIST so that those who run them will not suffer the liabilities of their failures. They PERSIST because they make money for the owners.
There are other ways to judge the "success" of a company than the stock price and P&L. In my view, Microsoft is an abysmal failure because it has thwarted and set back the progress of computer science for years to come. It is a pox on mankind, we'd all be better off if it had never come into existence. It's done nothing but cheat, steal, obscure, and bully since it's inception. I'm not impressed by the money. The crack dealers on my block make more money than I do. Big deal.
In 1999, I sold my Amazon stock for about 10 times what it is worth today. I wanted to buy a car with the money. Does that make me a successful investor? In some sense, yes, but at the time, everyone told me I was nuts and a real loser as an investor for getting off one of the premier tech stocks when I had gotten in at such a low price.
It did go up another multiple before the bubble burst, had I sold it a few months later I would have been able to buy two cars. Did I fail?
I only needed one car and I enjoyed it very much. Seeing as how I paid about 1/5th of the price of the car when I bought the shares of Amazon I sold to purchase it, I consider it a successful venture. Others would tell me I failed because I sold the stock while it was clearly still going up.
The people making the decisions at SCO are wrong. They're wrong because they are abusing the legal system for financial gain. The fact that their plan is legal or in concert with capitalistic values is so much noise. Wrong is wrong. They don't own the Code, they know it, they're just seeking to exploit a weakness in IP law in 2003 to line their pocke
What I publish online is not private, it's what I want to share. What I tell my doctor, lawyer and even someone who sells me tutoring aids for my kids should be private. People who sell private information after prommising to keep it to themselves have betrayed my trust and commited fraud. People who explicitly lie about sharing what I tell them desrve to be fined.
I agree. The point I was making was that there simply aren't technological solutions available to enforce these promises. The Internet was not designed with this kind of problem in mind.
Let's face it, the Internet is just not private. The Internet was conceived in a semi-private environment, absolutely bereft of retail commercial incentive, when the primary concern was sharing information.
I work in information privacy in health care. We are faced with the competing interests of sharing information and protecting confidences. It is a zero sum game between the two, to get one you have to give on the other.
I shop quite a lot on the Internet, but I do it as a special user on my systems so that my e-mail address, browser caches and cookie stores are distinct from those I use when otherwise communicating with people for non-commercial endeavors. I always lie about my gender, income, region and interests to web forms seeking demographic information. I use a special credit card for Internet purchases which always go to my work address.
Does this give me absolute privacy? No, but it keeps me from being low-hanging fruit. I realize not everyone has the opportunities I do, but there are some things anyone can do.
We aren't entirely powerless in this game. Like all other technological challenges, you just have to keep ahead and don't let your predilection for convenience and free stuff lead you into stupid disclosures.
Wow, this is a surprise - we're talking about a corporation here, not a philanthropist. This is like saying 'the way this shark is circling around me confirms my suspicion that it wants to eat me and not be my friend.'
Your metaphor fails. A shark is a single entity, an integrated unit, by definition incapable of ethical judgements as we discussed herein.
SCO is a corporate entity. It is *only* an entity separate from the collective that runs it because of the artifice of law.
Is it naive to expect that this artifice, i.e. SCO Inc., be or do good? Without question, one cannot rely on any artificial system to be good.
Is it naive to expect that the collective be and/or do good? That's really a question that each of us can only answer for ourselves. Further, is it naive to expect that a collective of privileged, educated human beings, already gainfully employed with a standard of living greater than 96% of the rest of the world will be and/or do good?
If it is, I have one other question. Is such cynicism an easy way of excusing one's self from like-minded ethical conduct?
Law suits imho (I teach media law) are far more often strategies than principled legal action. Sometimes the strategy is principled, and sometimes not.
You are correct. I think I might have not chosen the best word. I was referring to principle with a lower case p, as in "we own the code." I don't see how they can even believe that in this case.
not that long ago Intel began to demand that a non-profit group that teaches yoga to young people in juvanile detention called "Yoga Inside" change their name because it violated the trademark "Intel Inside."
An excellent example of what I mean.
the law is a self-replicating virus even when its biproducts are principled.
I am led to the same conclusion. Not too surprising an association since both the legal system and computer code are purely a product of human intellect....
This article frames the issues in a way that cause me to consider that this lawsuit is a legal metaphor for a computer virus. Let me explain what I mean.
This article seems to confirm my suspicion that this lawsuit is a business strategy rather than a principled legal action. If it is also true they they themselves distributed the code under the GPL for which they now seek copyright protection, then maybe the GPL is really the target. Perhaps their lawyers believe that if they can make an argument that invalidates the GPL then they can indeed make a claim against IBM.
But, it is important to note that the exploit here would be of the copyright laws rather as a remedy for some improper action by IBM.
In this sense, the lawsuit is the legal equivalent of a virus. It is seeking to exploit a weakness in the code . Rather than doing something just and benevolent (as lawsuits are intended), this suit seems to seek to exploit a weakness for selfish gain or malevolent satisfaction.
Beyond that, the lack of distinction between GNU and Linux in their pleadings as described in the EFF statement is just lame on SCO's part. Lord knows, both Mr. Stallman and Mr. Raymond have done what they could to ring that bell. Some SCO investigator should have picked up on that.
Why do this? Because it's there? I have a Tandy 102 without a working "P" on the keyboard someone could have. Maybe it would be neat to write a OS without using any P's.
Your rage is well-placed. My line "has not entirely faded from view" was an ironic understatement.
We can't rely on the system to be good. People have to be good.
I think what is happening now is a reaction to the rejection of narrow values of the 50's by the children of the 60's. The 60's-era ethic embraced alternative values and norms for behavior. Exploration of such demanded a relaxation of heretofore overly stringent culturally-mandated standards of moral conduct.
The reins were never hauled back in by the ME decade of the 70's and the hyper-moralism of the Reagan 80's was just ignored by people who saw through it's hypocrisy. When Reagan and his ilk got away with all that, our culture become to regard personal morality as a personal decision as a sort of defense against the hypocrisy and idiocy of "Just Say No" and Iran-Contra.
Now, we have found ourselves without a moral compass with only the law as a standard, i.e., if it is legal (or if the accountants sign off on it), it is okay. Concepts of "right and wrong" are relegated to personal choice, not cultural mandates. Our president wasn't elected by those he governs and he lacks the mental gravitas to understand the nuances of moral government in that situation.
I don't think we should go back to a day when having long hair could get you beat up by thge cops, but the pendulum swings too far in the other direction at this time, in my humble opinion.
And, as you point out, this problem is in no way confined to this country or western culture.
Right, you've hit on the piece of ambiguity that I believe the SCO legal team finds interesting. You can't rewrite a book and call it your own just because you put the words in a different order.
If you treat code as prose, when does it become original and not derivative? How much has to change? Is this a fair way to assign property rights for code? I think the lawyers are seeing dollars signs right here.
However, I have to acknowledge that sometimes important law is made because lawyers are chasing money, that's not necessarily a bad thing....
I stand corrected. You're quite right, they won't be ruined by losing a lawsuit on the plaintiff's side. I think they've already done the damage.
Enron and Worldcom were much bigger. Stupid, greedy, pointless moves by the morally-agnostic leadership of those companies brought them down. Their size was no protection, in fact, one could argue that their size was necessary to lend credibility to their self-delusion. I think the same forces are at work in SCO.
But, it's just an outsider's opinion, I'm just commenting on patterns I recognize.
Yeah, I do think they understand both the issues and the language. It's not that I have a high estimation of them. I've spent a significant portion of my IT consulting career working for litigation firms. The top-down overview of this just too closely resembles a litigation team taking advantage of a legal position in a relatively unchallenged area of the law. It is best, they estimate, to act as stupid as possible to narrow the debate as much as one can. They're aren't unintelligent, they just lack virtuous character.
If you treat code like prose, which is essentially what the current copyright laws do, you're bound to end up in situations like this at some point. Until the system acquires the wisdom to correctly resolve these new kinds of arguments concerning what property really is, ligitators know that the early birds are going to get the big worms, if there are any to be had.
$5M profit on $25M of revenue is is not as much money as it sounds like and their company name will be in ruin no matter how this turns out. If they win, they're the new bullies, if they lose, they will expose the idiocy underlying their allegations. Either way, stick the proverbial fork in them, they're done.
This is every bit as stupid as the AOL-Time Warner merger. But that doesn't mean some people aren't going to get rich. If the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it's that there are other ways to derive a fortune from one's association with a tech company than just selling good products and providing excellent customer service.
For the sake of discussion, let's assume the case has merit. The Linux community will rewrite the improperly used code, redesigning it if need be, craft tools to migrate everyone over to it, and go on. This is open source, utter transparency, no secrets. They can't go after every line of the current kernel, we know that, and there's more than one way to do everything.
SCO will be soon be a shell company. They might as well be making buggy whips. I think this is the ultimate agenda of the leadership, they just hope to cash out with the settlement from IBM.
It was interesting to me how the PR folks tried to associate Linux with software piracy and communism. I don't think this is because of a real misperception on their part, it seems much more likely to be spin-directed FUD. It's more pathetic than enraging to me.
It really all seems like a legal strategy to exploit the fact that our IP laws have not really caught up with the PC revolution. They might get some money from IBM, if they do, they leverage their legal victory and liquid revenues to bump the stock price and sell the company. It won't fool Warren Buffet or Peter Lynch, but there are still plenty of fools with money in the world.
This type of business strategy--utterly bereft of moral values--has not yet entirely faded from view. The real tragedy is not the threat to Linux, but the threat to SCO employees and investors. I don't see this working out well for them in any way. Some lawyers will get rich, though.
So, follow the money. SCO is now a lawsuit machine. IBM will survive this no matter how it turns out. SCO won't.
Right, but they don't regard cryptographic analysis per se as speech. That's my incompletely made point.
In this country (the US) people are arguing that monetary political contributions are free speech. Given these sorts of broad applications of 1st amendment rights, it is not too much of a stretch to imagaine an argument in defense of a software publisher that asserts that cryptoanalysis is also free expression. Therefore, as long as the government can't demonstrate that one's efforts are aimed at anything other than the advancement of mankind's understanding of applied mathematics I don't think this kind of ban could hold up in the US. cf. Phil Zimmerman. Certainly they would have nailed Phil if they thought they could have.
Freedom of speech is regarded by European governments as an important component of civil government, but they don't worship at it's throne like US Citizens regard the First Amendment.
It won't prevent pirating, I think the fact that the law doesn't address *use* is a concession to that point. It seems that they rather seek to prevent pirating from becoming a European industry. I think this is analogous to US laws against gambling, where they still exist.
IANAL, but in Texas, the law against playing poker for money actually makes the *house cut* illegal. I think the lawmakers conceded the point that people were still going to play poker, they just wanted to prevent it from becoming an industry.
So, in this game of legal poker, SCO is calling IBM's bluff.
All that those of us on the sidelines can do is watch with bemused detachment. Microsoft, by way of it's proxy in this instance, SCO, is executing another brute force attempt to manipulate the marketplace with something other than quality products and good service.
I wonder how much of humanity's talent has gone wasted in similar grabs for market dominance at any cost? I wonder about the people making these decisions. Do they really believe that they're fooling anyone or do they just not care? It's easy to demonize them, but there's more heat than light there.
It reminds me of the recent decline of McDonald's. We've known for a number of years that the super-size meal phenomenon was a pox on humanity something like Windows has been. It causes health problems, obscures the real cost of food and threatens the safety of the food supply.
Yet, super-sizing is regarded as something people are freely allowed to accept or decline, so we assign the individual ownership of the destruction wrought. Such assignment doesn't acount for the agri-business subsidy and the advertising onslaught. Even in the face of all these unfair advantages, McDonald's is finally losing money and changing it's menu (as it should) because the real costs of making a meal out of a half-pound burger, a quarter-pound of fries and a liter of soda are finally becoming known by enough consumers to counteract the loyalty of those who continue to chose to supersize meals in spite of cost.
Will Microsft someday similarly change their hostile business practices?
Now SCO has decided to forfeit any claims it may have had to corporate integrity in order to ride shotgun with Microsoft on another attempt to brute force Windows into market dominace. It won't work, it can't work for the reasons elucidated many times on/. If any of us are using code they succeed in taking away, we'll just write better code to replace it. They can't take away our ideas or the creative talents we use to bring those ideas to fruition.
Why do they try?
Did McDonalds really think that serving a harmfully excessive meal was a good idea just because people bought it? Does SCO think that having the winner lawyers on their side will remake them into a successful company?
In my humble opinion, some software packages are worth what I trade for the licenses (GPL--development mods, bug reports), some of them aren't ($$$---Windows, MS Office). In any case, licensing fees are a trivial part of the total cost of ownership for my systems. I always pay the piper, it just inconvenient not to.
Your assertion that converting digital music from one format to another either confers licensure or obviates it is pretty funny. One might as well claim that since the bits reside on one's own storage media that they are similarly no longer subject to intellectual property laws.
I walk by guys crouched over blankets selling Nelly CD's and Matrix Reload DVD's here on 125th st in NYC that are your philosophical brethren. Rock on, bro, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
I get paid for my work, so does everyone working for me. It all works out. Money is just scorekeeping.
My point was that it seems difficult to suddenly take a project, GNU/Linux, developed and distributed under one licensing scheme, GPL, and suddenly decide that another licensing scheme is in effect. (Apologies to ESR) One just can't take a talisman from the bazaar and build a cathedral around it.
Will rewriting the lines that are established as copied from the code be enough? I'm not being argumentative, I really wonder about the law.
These New York Times guys that just went down for the copied news stories couldn't have gotten away with just changing the word order in the story. It was the fact that they copied their news rather than reported it that was the problem.
If Linux is found to be a re-draft of someone else's original work is it enough that the ones and zeroes be put in a different order? Again, I am not making an argument here, I actually am wondering about the answer...
Ok, for the sake of discussion, let's assume that the 80 lines were lifted and it is deemed improper. I think we have a long way to go before that is established as fact, but if it is.....
How in the world do you get us,/.'ers, to buy a license for code we ourselves modify? Just last week I had to fix some code in my kernel because the new gcc wouldn't compile it. Apparently there was a patch for it, but I had just turned off my broadband (not worth the $$$) and I needed to compile ppp into the code to get my modem to work. So, it was fix the code or wait for a CD to show up in the mail. I'm going to pay for this?
If someone has a later model digital camera, digital video recorder, mp3 player or some other type of new (or esoteric) hardware it might sometimes make more sense for them to use windows to interact with these devices. In such a case, doing a reload with winxp will probably get them results they want quicker than tracking down, configuring, finding kernel modules for and installing the proper Linux drivers, if they exist.
I have to admit, even though I don't like using Microsoft code, I do. I keep a winXP machine around (but safely offline) for just the abovementioned interface applications with my various gadgets. I don't keep any data on it because I expect to have to relaod the OS without warning at almost any time. I regard it is a sort of over-priced commercial device portal for my home network.
I think this Thai iniative will yield good things also.
The government of Thailand is the real force behind this move. That is an interesting development, has Microsoft ever taken on a government before? (I'm kidding) I wonder who has more cash?
The fact that Linux has no licensing fee does give these machines a competitive advantage, especially if the user intends on puchasing a pirated copy of Windows. In fact, this government-sponsored initiative also gives an advantage to the software pirates, i.e., it gives them a new market. Hmm, is this a good idea? Is there any fair way to avoid this? Or is it that Microsoft creates their own disadvantage here by way of their licensing policies and fees?
The bulk of the TCO for these machines is assumed to be end user support. Really? If you install a kernel especially suited to the hardware on the laptop, I'd think support would be down. I've struggled very hard with Linux (Debian and Slackware) over the years, but it's always been over hardware issues. Once I learnt enuff Perl to do stuff, use of the Linux environment has been natural and intuitive for me.
In Windows, I am still a stranger in a strange land. I still can't get Windows to do what I want it to do on a regular basis, but hardware setup is usually pretty smooth. If I had been wise enough to ask someone smarter than I to build my kernel for each Linux box I have deployed, I would have spent WAY less time and money on support for them compared to the Windows machines. Is my experience so unique as to be counter to the conventional wisdom? How did the Thai Ministry conclude that they must anticipate higher support costs?
Slashdot Mirror
Those who follow discussions concerning the arguments being prepared for the SCO lawsuit are betting right now that the GPL will be among the targets of that action. They may be right, they may be wrong, but references to that action are relevant to any discussion about software licensing these days.
One time, I sent mail about Echelon to my Senetor. I was frankly stunned and awed to the point of voting for him in the next election because I got back a letter than addressed what I had said, and outlined what he had done as a result, and what the results of his actions were.
It seems to me that this (the above-referenced summary of positions and actions) is the absolute minimally acceptable response to a serious question asked of an employee....
What I don't know is how these projects should be interpreted. Are they just looking for lucrative orders from the government that won't help against terrorism, but make some people richer or is there really the wish of people in the government to gather information about everyone in order to get more power? Probably, it's both, to some degree.
It is both, all, and everything.
There's a cultural struggle in the background here between those who identify with governmental power and those who do not.
9/11 scared us. I was in NYC that day, I saw the first plane fly directly over me on the way to the 94th floor of the North tower, I live here still. I know the fear.
The difference between those in this discussion who say "Who cares if they watch you if you're doing nothing wrong?" and those who say "I don't want the government doing this at all" is the object of their fear. I've seen what unrestrained governmental power is capable of, it's not pretty. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't believe that there's anything a free society can do to prevent things like 9/11 (and still remain a free society) that we weren't supposed to be doing pre-9/11. There won't be another US hijacking, but that's because of those people that took back the plane that crashed in PA, not because of Ashcroft, Cheney, et al.
There will be another attack, but that's because we make ourselves a target with our own affluence and our arrogance. If we took the money we are spending in Iraq and used it to feed, house and clothe every human being on the planet regardless of what they believe, there would be legions of people who can't find the US on a map willing to die to protect us.
If we REALLY invaded countries for the purposes of protecting populations and building infrastructure (instead of guarding the oil ministries), the threats would come, but they would come from the powerful for whom this meddling disrupts their profits, not oppressed populations, and the powerful just don't do suicide attacks.
I've discussed this elsewhere repeatedly--The thinking that got us into this will not get us out.
The flaw with the parent is that it assumes that whoever comes to power next is different. No. That will never happen. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Political philosophers have been arguing ways to mitigate this human characteristic and have never really solved it yet...
Huh?
I made no distinction between administrations, past or future.
The USGovt can't even manage the information they receive now. There are reams of information they had about the 9/11 plans that just didn't get invetigated, interrogations that are untranslated years after they happened, untold bytes that are simply stored and unexamined, we should abandon the notion that the government wants these capabilities to protect anyone.
The government wants this information because of a desire for power. Will this be used to scan for threats to the general public or to curtail and monitor the activites of those who threaten governmental power, like dissenting political activists? Look at the history of the abuse of the FBI by almost every executive administration for those answers.
This won't stop until the people pull the plug.
We don't know why sharks do what they do. We know what it appears they are doing/thinking as if they reasoned and experienced the world as humans do, i.e., I'm hungry, let's eat, I'm interested in offspring, let's mate. etc. etc. While all that is well and good for the purposes of a discussion, neither of us has any idea if this is reality as sharks experience it.
This isn't true for corporations. We can make reasonable guesses about reality as it is experienced by the people who run SCO.
You can take your lessons from history where you find them. Your certainty regarding the agendas of organized groups fails to account for people who follow leaders like Gandhi or MLK.
If a universal understanding of ethical conduct does in fact not exist how can you determine that Microsoft is "ignoring ethical considerations?" Perhaps they subscribe to an ethical code that puts the needs of stockholders above all else. Perhaps they are being rigorously ethical in their view.
Of course, that sort of moral relativism has been argued by Stalin, Hitler, et al. and that's where it belongs. Anyone is free to believe that universal moral imperatives do not exist, but that doesn't make it so.
Corporations EXIST so that those who run them will not suffer the liabilities of their failures. They PERSIST because they make money for the owners.
There are other ways to judge the "success" of a company than the stock price and P&L. In my view, Microsoft is an abysmal failure because it has thwarted and set back the progress of computer science for years to come. It is a pox on mankind, we'd all be better off if it had never come into existence. It's done nothing but cheat, steal, obscure, and bully since it's inception. I'm not impressed by the money. The crack dealers on my block make more money than I do. Big deal.
In 1999, I sold my Amazon stock for about 10 times what it is worth today. I wanted to buy a car with the money. Does that make me a successful investor? In some sense, yes, but at the time, everyone told me I was nuts and a real loser as an investor for getting off one of the premier tech stocks when I had gotten in at such a low price.
It did go up another multiple before the bubble burst, had I sold it a few months later I would have been able to buy two cars. Did I fail?
I only needed one car and I enjoyed it very much. Seeing as how I paid about 1/5th of the price of the car when I bought the shares of Amazon I sold to purchase it, I consider it a successful venture. Others would tell me I failed because I sold the stock while it was clearly still going up.
The people making the decisions at SCO are wrong. They're wrong because they are abusing the legal system for financial gain. The fact that their plan is legal or in concert with capitalistic values is so much noise. Wrong is wrong. They don't own the Code, they know it, they're just seeking to exploit a weakness in IP law in 2003 to line their pocke
What I publish online is not private, it's what I want to share. What I tell my doctor, lawyer and even someone who sells me tutoring aids for my kids should be private. People who sell private information after prommising to keep it to themselves have betrayed my trust and commited fraud. People who explicitly lie about sharing what I tell them desrve to be fined.
I agree. The point I was making was that there simply aren't technological solutions available to enforce these promises. The Internet was not designed with this kind of problem in mind.
Let's face it, the Internet is just not private. The Internet was conceived in a semi-private environment, absolutely bereft of retail commercial incentive, when the primary concern was sharing information.
I work in information privacy in health care. We are faced with the competing interests of sharing information and protecting confidences. It is a zero sum game between the two, to get one you have to give on the other.
I shop quite a lot on the Internet, but I do it as a special user on my systems so that my e-mail address, browser caches and cookie stores are distinct from those I use when otherwise communicating with people for non-commercial endeavors. I always lie about my gender, income, region and interests to web forms seeking demographic information. I use a special
credit card for Internet purchases which always go to my work address.
Does this give me absolute privacy? No, but it keeps me from being low-hanging fruit. I realize not everyone has the opportunities I do, but there are some things anyone can do.
We aren't entirely powerless in this game. Like all other technological challenges, you just have to keep ahead and don't let your predilection for convenience and free stuff lead you into stupid disclosures.
Wow, this is a surprise - we're talking about a corporation here, not a philanthropist. This is like saying 'the way this shark is circling around me confirms my suspicion that it wants to eat me and not be my friend.'
Your metaphor fails. A shark is a single entity, an integrated unit, by definition incapable of ethical judgements as we discussed herein.
SCO is a corporate entity. It is *only* an entity separate from the collective that runs it because of the artifice of law.
Is it naive to expect that this artifice, i.e. SCO Inc., be or do good? Without question, one cannot rely on any artificial system to be good.
Is it naive to expect that the collective be and/or do good? That's really a question that each of us can only answer for ourselves. Further, is it naive to expect that a collective of privileged, educated human beings, already gainfully employed with a standard of living greater than 96% of the rest of the world will be and/or do good?
If it is, I have one other question. Is such cynicism an easy way of excusing one's self from like-minded ethical conduct?
This article frames the issues in a way that cause me to consider that this lawsuit is a legal metaphor for a computer virus. Let me explain what I mean.
This article seems to confirm my suspicion that this lawsuit is a business strategy rather than a principled legal action. If it is also true they they themselves distributed the code under the GPL for which they now seek copyright protection, then maybe the GPL is really the target. Perhaps their lawyers believe that if they can make an argument that invalidates the GPL then they can indeed make a claim against IBM.
But, it is important to note that the exploit here would be of the copyright laws rather as a remedy for some improper action by IBM.
In this sense, the lawsuit is the legal equivalent of a virus. It is seeking to exploit a weakness in the code . Rather than doing something just and benevolent (as lawsuits are intended), this suit seems to seek to exploit a weakness for selfish gain or malevolent satisfaction.
Beyond that, the lack of distinction between GNU and Linux in their pleadings as described in the EFF statement is just lame on SCO's part. Lord knows, both Mr. Stallman and Mr. Raymond have done what they could to ring that bell. Some SCO investigator should have picked up on that.
Why do this? Because it's there? I have a Tandy 102 without a working "P" on the keyboard someone could have. Maybe it would be neat to write a OS without using any P's.
Your rage is well-placed. My line "has not entirely faded from view" was an ironic understatement.
We can't rely on the system to be good. People have to be good.
I think what is happening now is a reaction to the rejection of narrow values of the 50's by the children of the 60's. The 60's-era ethic embraced alternative values and norms for behavior. Exploration of such demanded a relaxation of heretofore overly stringent culturally-mandated standards of moral conduct.
The reins were never hauled back in by the ME decade of the 70's and the hyper-moralism of the Reagan 80's was just ignored by people who saw through it's hypocrisy. When Reagan and his ilk got away with all that, our culture become to regard personal morality as a personal decision as a sort of defense against the hypocrisy and idiocy of "Just Say No" and Iran-Contra.
Now, we have found ourselves without a moral compass with only the law as a standard, i.e., if it is legal (or if the accountants sign off on it), it is okay. Concepts of "right and wrong" are relegated to personal choice, not cultural mandates. Our president wasn't elected by those he governs and he lacks the mental gravitas to understand the nuances of moral government in that situation.
I don't think we should go back to a day when having long hair could get you beat up by thge cops, but the pendulum swings too far in the other direction at this time, in my humble opinion.
And, as you point out, this problem is in no way confined to this country or western culture.
Right, you've hit on the piece of ambiguity that I believe the SCO legal team finds interesting. You can't rewrite a book and call it your own just because you put the words in a different order.
If you treat code as prose, when does it become original and not derivative? How much has to change? Is this a fair way to assign property rights for code? I think the lawyers are seeing dollars signs right here.
However, I have to acknowledge that sometimes important law is made because lawyers are chasing money, that's not necessarily a bad thing....
I stand corrected. You're quite right, they won't be ruined by losing a lawsuit on the plaintiff's side. I think they've already done the damage.
Enron and Worldcom were much bigger. Stupid, greedy, pointless moves by the morally-agnostic leadership of those companies brought them down. Their size was no protection, in fact, one could argue that their size was necessary to lend credibility to their self-delusion. I think the same forces are at work in SCO.
But, it's just an outsider's opinion, I'm just commenting on patterns I recognize.
Yeah, I do think they understand both the issues and the language. It's not that I have a high estimation of them. I've spent a significant portion of my IT consulting career working for litigation firms. The top-down overview of this just too closely resembles a litigation team taking advantage of a legal position in a relatively unchallenged area of the law. It is best, they estimate, to act as stupid as possible to narrow the debate as much as one can. They're aren't unintelligent, they just lack virtuous character.
If you treat code like prose, which is essentially what the current copyright laws do, you're bound to end up in situations like this at some point. Until the system acquires the wisdom to correctly resolve these new kinds of arguments concerning what property really is, ligitators know that the early birds are going to get the big worms, if there are any to be had.
$5M profit on $25M of revenue is is not as much money as it sounds like and their company name will be in ruin no matter how this turns out. If they win, they're the new bullies, if they lose, they will expose the idiocy underlying their allegations. Either way, stick the proverbial fork in them, they're done.
This is every bit as stupid as the AOL-Time Warner merger. But that doesn't mean some people aren't going to get rich. If the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it's that there are other ways to derive a fortune from one's association with a tech company than just selling good products and providing excellent customer service.
For the sake of discussion, let's assume the case has merit. The Linux community will rewrite the improperly used code, redesigning it if need be, craft tools to migrate everyone over to it, and go on. This is open source, utter transparency, no secrets. They can't go after every line of the current kernel, we know that, and there's more than one way to do everything.
SCO will be soon be a shell company. They might as well be making buggy whips. I think this is the ultimate agenda of the leadership, they just hope to cash out with the settlement from IBM.
It was interesting to me how the PR folks tried to associate Linux with software piracy and communism. I don't think this is because of a real misperception on their part, it seems much more likely to be spin-directed FUD. It's more pathetic than enraging to me.
It really all seems like a legal strategy to exploit the fact that our IP laws have not really caught up with the PC revolution. They might get some money from IBM, if they do, they leverage their legal victory and liquid revenues to bump the stock price and sell the company. It won't fool Warren Buffet or Peter Lynch, but there are still plenty of fools with money in the world.
This type of business strategy--utterly bereft of moral values--has not yet entirely faded from view. The real tragedy is not the threat to Linux, but the threat to SCO employees and investors. I don't see this working out well for them in any way. Some lawyers will get rich, though.
So, follow the money. SCO is now a lawsuit machine. IBM will survive this no matter how it turns out. SCO won't.
Right, but they don't regard cryptographic analysis per se as speech. That's my incompletely made point.
In this country (the US) people are arguing that monetary political contributions are free speech. Given these sorts of broad applications of 1st amendment rights, it is not too much of a stretch to imagaine an argument in defense of a software publisher that asserts that cryptoanalysis is also free expression. Therefore, as long as the government can't demonstrate that one's efforts are aimed at anything other than the advancement of mankind's understanding of applied mathematics I don't think this kind of ban could hold up in the US. cf. Phil Zimmerman. Certainly they would have nailed Phil if they thought they could have.
Freedom of speech is regarded by European governments as an important component of civil government, but they don't worship at it's throne like US Citizens regard the First Amendment.
It won't prevent pirating, I think the fact that the law doesn't address *use* is a concession to that point. It seems that they rather seek to prevent pirating from becoming a European industry. I think this is analogous to US laws against gambling, where they still exist.
IANAL, but in Texas, the law against playing poker for money actually makes the *house cut* illegal. I think the lawmakers conceded the point that people were still going to play poker, they just wanted to prevent it from becoming an industry.
So, in this game of legal poker, SCO is calling IBM's bluff.
/. If any of us are using code they succeed in taking away, we'll just write better code to replace it. They can't take away our ideas or the creative talents we use to bring those ideas to fruition.
All that those of us on the sidelines can do is watch with bemused detachment. Microsoft, by way of it's proxy in this instance, SCO, is executing another brute force attempt to manipulate the marketplace with something other than quality products and good service.
I wonder how much of humanity's talent has gone wasted in similar grabs for market dominance at any cost? I wonder about the people making these decisions. Do they really believe that they're fooling anyone or do they just not care? It's easy to demonize them, but there's more heat than light there.
It reminds me of the recent decline of McDonald's. We've known for a number of years that the super-size meal phenomenon was a pox on humanity something like Windows has been. It causes health problems, obscures the real cost of food and threatens the safety of the food supply.
Yet, super-sizing is regarded as something people are freely allowed to accept or decline, so we assign the individual ownership of the destruction wrought. Such assignment doesn't acount for the agri-business subsidy and the advertising onslaught. Even in the face of all these unfair advantages, McDonald's is finally losing money and changing it's menu (as it should) because the real costs of making a meal out of a half-pound burger, a quarter-pound of fries and a liter of soda are finally becoming known by enough consumers to counteract the loyalty of those who continue to chose to supersize meals in spite of cost.
Will Microsft someday similarly change their hostile business practices?
Now SCO has decided to forfeit any claims it may have had to corporate integrity in order to ride shotgun with Microsoft on another attempt to brute force Windows into market dominace. It won't work, it can't work for the reasons elucidated many times on
Why do they try?
Did McDonalds really think that serving a harmfully excessive meal was a good idea just because people bought it? Does SCO think that having the winner lawyers on their side will remake them into a successful company?
In my humble opinion, some software packages are worth what I trade for the licenses (GPL--development mods, bug reports), some of them aren't ($$$---Windows, MS Office). In any case, licensing fees are a trivial part of the total cost of ownership for my systems. I always pay the piper, it just inconvenient not to.
Your assertion that converting digital music from one format to another either confers licensure or obviates it is pretty funny. One might as well claim that since the bits reside on one's own storage media that they are similarly no longer subject to intellectual property laws.
I walk by guys crouched over blankets selling Nelly CD's and Matrix Reload DVD's here on 125th st in NYC that are your philosophical brethren. Rock on, bro, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
I get paid for my work, so does everyone working for me. It all works out. Money is just scorekeeping.
My point was that it seems difficult to suddenly take a project, GNU/Linux, developed and distributed under one licensing scheme, GPL, and suddenly decide that another licensing scheme is in effect. (Apologies to ESR) One just can't take a talisman from the bazaar and build a cathedral around it.
Will rewriting the lines that are established as copied from the code be enough? I'm not being argumentative, I really wonder about the law.
These New York Times guys that just went down for the copied news stories couldn't have gotten away with just changing the word order in the story. It was the fact that they copied their news rather than reported it that was the problem.
If Linux is found to be a re-draft of someone else's original work is it enough that the ones and zeroes be put in a different order? Again, I am not making an argument here, I actually am wondering about the answer...
Ok, for the sake of discussion, let's assume that the 80 lines were lifted and it is deemed improper. I think we have a long way to go before that is established as fact, but if it is.....
/.'ers, to buy a license for code we ourselves modify? Just last week I had to fix some code in my kernel because the new gcc wouldn't compile it. Apparently there was a patch for it, but I had just turned off my broadband (not worth the $$$) and I needed to compile ppp into the code to get my modem to work. So, it was fix the code or wait for a CD to show up in the mail. I'm going to pay for this?
How in the world do you get us,
If someone has a later model digital camera, digital video recorder, mp3 player or some other type of new (or esoteric) hardware it might sometimes make more sense for them to use windows to interact with these devices. In such a case, doing a reload with winxp will probably get them results they want quicker than tracking down, configuring, finding kernel modules for and installing the proper Linux drivers, if they exist.
I have to admit, even though I don't like using Microsoft code, I do. I keep a winXP machine around (but safely offline) for just the abovementioned interface applications with my various gadgets. I don't keep any data on it because I expect to have to relaod the OS without warning at almost any time. I regard it is a sort of over-priced commercial device portal for my home network.
I think this Thai iniative will yield good things also.
The government of Thailand is the real force behind this move. That is an interesting development, has Microsoft ever taken on a government before? (I'm kidding) I wonder who has more cash?
The fact that Linux has no licensing fee does give these machines a competitive advantage, especially if the user intends on puchasing a pirated copy of Windows. In fact, this government-sponsored initiative also gives an advantage to the software pirates, i.e., it gives them a new market. Hmm, is this a good idea? Is there any fair way to avoid this? Or is it that Microsoft creates their own disadvantage here by way of their licensing policies and fees?
The bulk of the TCO for these machines is assumed to be end user support. Really? If you install a kernel especially suited to the hardware on the laptop, I'd think support would be down. I've struggled very hard with Linux (Debian and Slackware) over the years, but it's always been over hardware issues. Once I learnt enuff Perl to do stuff, use of the Linux environment has been natural and intuitive for me.
In Windows, I am still a stranger in a strange land. I still can't get Windows to do what I want it to do on a regular basis, but hardware setup is usually pretty smooth. If I had been wise enough to ask someone smarter than I to build my kernel for each Linux box I have deployed, I would have spent WAY less time and money on support for them compared to the Windows machines. Is my experience so unique as to be counter to the conventional wisdom? How did the Thai Ministry conclude that they must anticipate higher support costs?