What would be the legal basis for ISO charging royalties on using these codes? Copyright does not cover it: for purely informational documents, copyright only covers the exact form of expression. I don't know of any other kind of intellectual property, however fanciful, that even comes close to covering the use of a set of codes.
So my question is: what kind of drugs do they smoke over there at ISO, and can I get some?
"In my opinion, this makes OpenOffice unusable for complex documents, and makes its use for interoperability somewhat limited (although interoperability is less likely an issue when dealing with complex documents)."
I hope you reported it over at oo.org and not just here;-)
You know that all the Microsoft products work together
Really? Then why have I watched entire offices grind to a halt while everybody desperately tries to get a document made by one version of MSWord to load in another?
In SI units (which most civilised counties use) M means mega which is defined as 10^6, i.e. 1000000 , it is only the computer industry that deems K (1000) to equal 1024 which it does not, then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024. This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers
You've been eating too much granola. When the quantity measured is distance, the base is decimal; for memory, the base is binary. There is no ambiguity.
with Microsoft posting $8.07 billion in revenue and $1.92 billion in net income, it's pretty ridiculous to say that selling software is dead
What is dead, or walking wounded rather, is the ability to sell commodity software for the markups Microsoft is used to. In other words, Microsoft better get prepared for a world in which each copy of Windows brings in 10% of what it used to, and MS Office brings in 3%.
Anti-virus companies would have updated virus defs out there within a day or two of distribution and a lot of people would become disinfected before the symptoms kicked in.
You can't count on this any more, since the technique of downloading the actual rootkit from the web became popular. Virus companies can't possibly know every trojan that can be posted to a random web page and downloaded by the worm. Hence, "disinfecting" is going to become a more and more dubious proposition over time.
Proper cleanup requires a full system reinstall, compile with all applications and utilities. Get too lazy to do that, and you're going to find out what a really subtle trojan can do.
There are no ill effects to SCO whatsoever from the fact they showed non-infringing code snippets to their investors and to the press and presented them as infringing code snippets whatsoever, SCOs investors remain unaware of this, and little to no-one in the "mainstream" (non-geek) press covers this.
It's commonly thought that the only reason SCOX stock is rising is because somebody with deep pockets is manipulating it.
For you who hate Microsoft and hate the abuse of patents, do you know which side to take?
It's simply poetic that the biggest ever abuse of the new, evil software patent regime is targetted directly at the company most interested in using software patents as a competitive barrier. There is no dilemma here.
It now becomes clear that California's intention was to give Microsoft enough rope to hang themselves. In other words, settle and wait for them to violate, as Microsoft always does. In retrospect, that was brilliant. The next move is up to us.
For starters, one of the key elements of the settlement is that Microsoft's APIs (and file formats as well?) were supposed to become readily available for the purpose of interoperabilty. While the exact wording of the settlement may be subject to interpretation, the intent is not: competitors were supposed to be able to use information provided by Microsoft to create products that interoperate. That did not happen. It's now up to us to point out in simple, precise terms, how Microsoft violated the intent of the settlement.
That's just the first big breach that occured to me, I'm sure there are more. If we handle this correctly, Microsoft will shortly be back in court with a problem that even the DOJ won't be able to sweep under the carpet.
ACID tends to be a knee jerk reaction, and most people realyl need to be askign themselves what it ACTUALLY buys them.
It buys them a database that you they can expect to still be there, sound and consistent, after the machine blows a fuse in the middle of 200 simultaneous updates. It buys them a database that doesn't accumulate rot over time because somebody deleted a customer at the same time somebody in another city entered an invoice. It buys them queries that give the right answer, because of only ever seeing the database in a consistent state, even while other queries running at the same time are only partially completed.
Basically, it gives them a database capable of completely correct operation, not just mostly correct. Of course that may not matter to you, in that case I have a faulty pacemaker to sell you.
The more points you discover and disprove now with SCO's claims.. the higher quality, more refined, and detailed SCO's evidence will be when this setup finally gets to a court in front of a judge.
Having many thousands of bright minds working on our side much more balances the advantage SCO can get by snooping on our discourse, if they can even come close to following it all, that is. We outnumber them, it's stupid not to capitalize on that.
Just think, if the word doesn't go out, there are many people who might not have come out of the woodwork to contribute their valuable input, historical recollection, interesting files, legal insight, whatever. We work in the open, we share information, we cooperate, we are many in number. They work in the dark, they trust nobody, they're afraid to ask for help, they are few. It's open source versus closed source all over again.
Also, we each do our own thinking, we try to come up with the part we can contribute, then we go looking for the best place to contribute it. Multiply by 10's of thousands. Compare to a few fevered minds going over and over the same rotten thoughts then sending out marching orders. Seen two systems like that before? Right, it's a free market economy versus Soviet-style central planning. In the end, the free market won because it is more efficient.
With the help of the open source community, they are slowly changing their weapon of choice from a shotgun to a rifle.
A rifle will not help you much against a herd of 50,000 enraged penguins stampeding towards you at an average speed in excess of 100 miles per hour.
vi represents the "Unix-way" of small efficient single purpose tools.
daniel@moonunit:~$ sudo apt-get remove vim Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following packages will be REMOVED:
vim 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 151 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 15.3MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
as someone pointed out on LWN I believe, the license used was a four-clause BSD with advertising clause, which is incompatible with the GPL. So, copying the code into a GPLed work violates the advertising clause.
Yes, and it's the right of the copyright holder to complain. The remedy is for the author of the GPL code (who has the right to make any exception they choose) to add back the license or remove the code. End of story.
This code was "developed" under the watchful eye of responsible capitalists, yet copyright infringement happened anyway.
You meant to say "copyright infringement might have happened". In order to receive protection under copyright protectionm the thing protected has to be an original work by the author, but the code in question comes from a long chain of derivation, from code that is now explicitly licensed to be freely copied and modified, or going even further back, from code that was published in the original K&R C manual.
There is simply no compelling moral imperative here. The fact that "some law is being broken" is no good reason to get involved. Even if ESR knew who the perpetrator is, there's no good reason for him to stick his neck out on SCO's behalf. Should he decide to be a snitch, he would draw attention to himself from law enforcement. This is really not in his (or your) best intrests ever. It is better that you remain anonymous in this respect.
The act of snitching would not entirely be without risk. Thus, ESR must balance his own interests against those of a party that means to do him harm. ESR must also balance his interests against the moral significance of the wrong that occured.
A DDoS of one minor company simply doesn't merit drawing the attention of law enforcement to yourself.
When advocating immoral behaviour, please make it clear you're not speaking on my behalf.
As far as I'm concerned, "we" is the group that keeps the moral high ground. Anybody who breaks the law in the name of justice is "they".
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What would be the legal basis for ISO charging royalties on using these codes? Copyright does not cover it: for purely informational documents, copyright only covers the exact form of expression. I don't know of any other kind of intellectual property, however fanciful, that even comes close to covering the use of a set of codes.
So my question is: what kind of drugs do they smoke over there at ISO, and can I get some?
"In my opinion, this makes OpenOffice unusable for complex documents, and makes its use for interoperability somewhat limited (although interoperability is less likely an issue when dealing with complex documents)."
;-)
I hope you reported it over at oo.org and not just here
You know that all the Microsoft products work together
;-)
Really? Then why have I watched entire offices grind to a halt while everybody desperately tries to get a document made by one version of MSWord to load in another?
they all come from a big name corporation
That's a feature, not a benefit
And anyway, in what way is Sun not a big name?
I wonder if the SWX format will ever really take hold.
Maybe it will
Not likely. Most human beings count in 10s. Only technogeeks like us count in 2s.
Everybody who ever bought a computer bought it with the memory specced in binary.
In SI units (which most civilised counties use) M means mega which is defined as 10^6, i.e. 1000000 , it is only the computer industry that deems K (1000) to equal 1024 which it does not, then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024. This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers
;-)
You've been eating too much granola. When the quantity measured is distance, the base is decimal; for memory, the base is binary. There is no ambiguity.
And besides, "kibblebytes" sounds stupid
with Microsoft posting $8.07 billion in revenue and $1.92 billion in net income, it's pretty ridiculous to say that selling software is dead
What is dead, or walking wounded rather, is the ability to sell commodity software for the markups Microsoft is used to. In other words, Microsoft better get prepared for a world in which each copy of Windows brings in 10% of what it used to, and MS Office brings in 3%.
I don't think anyone is claiming that you can't make money with open source.
Not now, they aren't.
Anti-virus companies would have updated virus defs out there within a day or two of distribution and a lot of people would become disinfected before the symptoms kicked in.
You can't count on this any more, since the technique of downloading the actual rootkit from the web became popular. Virus companies can't possibly know every trojan that can be posted to a random web page and downloaded by the worm. Hence, "disinfecting" is going to become a more and more dubious proposition over time.
Proper cleanup requires a full system reinstall, compile with all applications and utilities. Get too lazy to do that, and you're going to find out what a really subtle trojan can do.
right now Linux is a hot news item, so people listen.
Right, and the ironic thing is, before the SCO suit, many people hadn't heard of Linux, or weren't taking it seriously. Now they have, and do.
Have we ever seen those employees running to OS/2 because they used it at work?
OS/2 isn't Linux.
There are no ill effects to SCO whatsoever from the fact they showed non-infringing code snippets to their investors and to the press and presented them as infringing code snippets whatsoever, SCOs investors remain unaware of this, and little to no-one in the "mainstream" (non-geek) press covers this.
It's commonly thought that the only reason SCOX stock is rising is because somebody with deep pockets is manipulating it.
For you who hate Microsoft and hate the abuse of patents, do you know which side to take?
It's simply poetic that the biggest ever abuse of the new, evil software patent regime is targetted directly at the company most interested in using software patents as a competitive barrier. There is no dilemma here.
we hate MS, go Eolas!!!
we hate patents, go MS!!!
That's easy, MS should succeed in overturning the patent, turn Eolas into a smoking hole in the ground, and suffer horrible wounds during the fight.
Move along now, no dilemma to see here.
It now becomes clear that California's intention was to give Microsoft enough rope to hang themselves. In other words, settle and wait for them to violate, as Microsoft always does. In retrospect, that was brilliant. The next move is up to us.
For starters, one of the key elements of the settlement is that Microsoft's APIs (and file formats as well?) were supposed to become readily available for the purpose of interoperabilty. While the exact wording of the settlement may be subject to interpretation, the intent is not: competitors were supposed to be able to use information provided by Microsoft to create products that interoperate. That did not happen. It's now up to us to point out in simple, precise terms, how Microsoft violated the intent of the settlement.
That's just the first big breach that occured to me, I'm sure there are more. If we handle this correctly, Microsoft will shortly be back in court with a problem that even the DOJ won't be able to sweep under the carpet.
ok the MS solutions are a little unusual in that they are shared-nothing but the other competitiors are free to do likewise
Omigawd. At least you're honest about that. So it's fast as long as you rewrite all your applications and aren't worried about ACID.
In which case I'd wonder why you don't use MySQL.
sorry, maybe it is just me, but the whole "ARRGG IT AIN'T ACID" is a lot of hype to me. ACID boils down to transactions. plain and simple.
Perhaps you need a deeper understanding.
ACID tends to be a knee jerk reaction, and most people realyl need to be askign themselves what it ACTUALLY buys them.
It buys them a database that you they can expect to still be there, sound and consistent, after the machine blows a fuse in the middle of 200 simultaneous updates. It buys them a database that doesn't accumulate rot over time because somebody deleted a customer at the same time somebody in another city entered an invoice. It buys them queries that give the right answer, because of only ever seeing the database in a consistent state, even while other queries running at the same time are only partially completed.
Basically, it gives them a database capable of completely correct operation, not just mostly correct. Of course that may not matter to you, in that case I have a faulty pacemaker to sell you.
The more points you discover and disprove now with SCO's claims.. the higher quality, more refined, and detailed SCO's evidence will be when this setup finally gets to a court in front of a judge.
Having many thousands of bright minds working on our side much more balances the advantage SCO can get by snooping on our discourse, if they can even come close to following it all, that is. We outnumber them, it's stupid not to capitalize on that.
Just think, if the word doesn't go out, there are many people who might not have come out of the woodwork to contribute their valuable input, historical recollection, interesting files, legal insight, whatever. We work in the open, we share information, we cooperate, we are many in number. They work in the dark, they trust nobody, they're afraid to ask for help, they are few. It's open source versus closed source all over again.
Also, we each do our own thinking, we try to come up with the part we can contribute, then we go looking for the best place to contribute it. Multiply by 10's of thousands. Compare to a few fevered minds going over and over the same rotten thoughts then sending out marching orders. Seen two systems like that before? Right, it's a free market economy versus Soviet-style central planning. In the end, the free market won because it is more efficient.
With the help of the open source community, they are slowly changing their weapon of choice from a shotgun to a rifle.
A rifle will not help you much against a herd of 50,000 enraged penguins stampeding towards you at an average speed in excess of 100 miles per hour.
vi represents the "Unix-way" of small efficient single purpose tools.
daniel@moonunit:~$ sudo apt-get remove vim
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
vim
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 151 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 15.3MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
as someone pointed out on LWN I believe, the license used was a four-clause BSD with advertising clause, which is incompatible with the GPL. So, copying the code into a GPLed work violates the advertising clause.
Yes, and it's the right of the copyright holder to complain. The remedy is for the author of the GPL code (who has the right to make any exception they choose) to add back the license or remove the code. End of story.
This code was "developed" under the watchful eye of responsible capitalists, yet copyright infringement happened anyway.
You meant to say "copyright infringement might have happened". In order to receive protection under copyright protectionm the thing protected has to be an original work by the author, but the code in question comes from a long chain of derivation, from code that is now explicitly licensed to be freely copied and modified, or going even further back, from code that was published in the original K&R C manual.
SCO still has programmers? I thought they fired them all and used the money to hire lawyers instead.
They certainly don't have a VP of Engineering any more.
There is simply no compelling moral imperative here. The fact that "some law is being broken" is no good reason to get involved. Even if ESR knew who the perpetrator is, there's no good reason for him to stick his neck out on SCO's behalf. Should he decide to be a snitch, he would draw attention to himself from law enforcement. This is really not in his (or your) best intrests ever. It is better that you remain anonymous in this respect.
The act of snitching would not entirely be without risk. Thus, ESR must balance his own interests against those of a party that means to do him harm. ESR must also balance his interests against the moral significance of the wrong that occured.
A DDoS of one minor company simply doesn't merit drawing the attention of law enforcement to yourself.
When advocating immoral behaviour, please make it clear you're not speaking on my behalf.
As far as I'm concerned, "we" is the group that keeps the moral high ground. Anybody who breaks the law in the name of justice is "they".
When they're resorting to exaggerations like this, it shows how little SCO really has.
Ah, sweetly put. This point needs to be hammered home.
Jewish people actually benefited to a certain degree from Hitler's extreme anti-Semitism
You're nuts.