The SCO Group has entered into a series of essentially inherently flawed lawsuits and fraudulent license claims against users of the Linux operating system. Since 1994, Caldera International and the Santa Cruz Operation have been accepting, profiting from and distributing software developed by hundreds of independent developers under the terms of the GPL and LGPL license. The SCO Group has failed to put forward any sustainable legal theory why it should not abide by the terms of the GPL license. Detailed investigation into other facts and evidence which regularly conflict with the SCO Group's various legal claims, filing, press and public statements, raises serous questions which can no longer be explained away by a lack of competence in either the SCO Group's CEOs or the SCO Group's legal representation.
To quote Bruce Perens' 2006 State of Open Source press conference
Perjury:
When one applies for a patent, an oath is
sworn. The penalty for falsehoods under that oath
[http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/ usc_sec_18_00001001----000-.html]
in theory - is currently 5 years imprisonment, or a fine, or both. That's
in theory. Now, let's talk about practice. At the meeting, Robert Clark,
Deputy Director of the Office of Patent Legal Administration, said that
there _was_ a patent perjury case: in 1974, and that one comes along
every 25 years or so. Yet, we are aware of, for example, a much more
recent patent in which the claims included verbatim text of a published
paper by a researcher not connected with the applicant. And there are
examples like Microsoft's two-click patent, in which there does not seem
to have been any excuse for the filer to have been unaware of prior art.
There's a strong financial incentive for the unscrupulous to eavesdrop
on the open discussion lists of standards organizations or Open Source
projects and to make pre-dated patent filings with that information,
another form of perjury.
My premise in bringing this up is that there does not seem to be
any sense of peril for those who game the system. The worst that can
happen to a perjurer is that his patent claim is denied, and he can
get a continuation from the patent office and eventually get the patent
anyway. Contrast this to how courts treat perjury in non-patent matters:
impeachment of a witness for unreliable testimony is often followed by
prosecution for perjury and a lengthy jail sentence.
This creates a quandry for the patent examiner, because the total lack
of enforcement against perjury means that the examiner should not assume
that any patent application has been made in good faith. That examiner
might not get a whole day in which to evaluate a patent application,
and the fact that we can't rely on the applicant telling the truth makes
a job with an impossible time constraint even more preposterous.
Perjury is not a victimless crime: it creates intellectual _poverty_
because its victims will be unjustly denied use of technology covered
by a patent claim that, in general, they can't afford to litigate.
In some cases, the perjurer is hiding behind an attorney or a patent
agent who believes in the honesty of the claim. But the applicant should
be counseled on the peril of perjury in making an application, and the
peril should be real.
Today's policy seems to be denial that a problem exists. I submit that
improving software patent quality should improve the active pursuit
of perjurers: referral of applications from an examiner to a criminal
investigator during examination or re-examination, and we must carry
that process through to conviction on a regular basis.
This is something that the U.S. Patent Office can do without changing a
single law. The law-enforcement authorities exist, the public sympathy is
there for enforcement against white-collar crime, nobody's whining that
Ken Lay got in trouble. So, United States Patent Office, let's hear an
annoucement that you are going to be vigilant about referring perjurers
for criminal enforcement, more than four times a century.
A customer enters a Novell Office.
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
(Novell does not respond.)
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?
Novell: What do you mean "miss"?
Mr. Praline: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
Novell: We're closin' for lunch.
Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Linux Distro what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Novell: Oh yes, the, uh, the Novell OpenSuse Linux...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. According to the terms of the GPL you can no longer distribute it, that's what's wrong with it!
Movell: No, no, it's uh,... part of the service agreement.
Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a violation of the GPL when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Novell: No no it not violated, it's , it's cirumvented'! Remarkable OS, the Suse Linux, idn'it, ay? Beautiful eye candy with GLX
Mr. Praline: The eye candy don't enter into it. your in violation of the GPL.
Novell: Nononono, no, no! it's just slightly cirumvented! ...
To any company involved in bringing to market saleable goods or services, the Patent Lawsuit strategy is like starting a Nuclear War. Only those who consider they have no future in the market will risk the inevitable mutually assured destruction from the counter lawsuits.
The USA will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Other Governments and Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects
Other countries and even Europe's parliament will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The USA administration and even more myopic major corporations will continue to let more and more manufacturing, service industry and development to be off-shored resulting in importing permanent poverty into the USA.
You want to see the future of the USA? Visit the remnants of Detroit motor city works, Ye Mighty, and despair
An open letter to antitrust, competition, consumer and trade practice monitoring agency officials worldwide.
The role of trade practice and antitrust legislation is to provide the consumer with protection from abusive business practices and monopolies. In one of the most serous cases of monopolization in the information technology industry, the agencies charged with protecting the competitive process and the consumer have utterly failed to stem the offending corporation's anti-competitive practices.
The Microsoft corporation has been under continuous investigation by antitrust policing agencies since 1989. Despite this scrutiny, the Microsoft corporation, using covert and overt anti-competitive business tactics, has maintained an unabated campaign against alternatives to Microsoft Windows operating system platforms and Microsoft applications.
For years the Microsoft corporation has earned around 70% to 80% net profit from sales of its operating systems and application software. Only in areas like Thailand where Linux on the desktop has just begun to gain a foothold has Microsoft stated that it will release versions of its operating system platform and application software at a lower price to Original Equipment Manufactures (OEMs) and retail consumers than is available in the rest of the modern world. Consumers benefit where real competition exists.
The world desktop operating system market remains predominantly monopolized by Microsoft. Over the last decade, Microsoft continued to lever its desktop platform monopoly to the point where it now holds a dominant position worldwide in the application office suite and web browser software markets. On its own, the current USA Department Of Justice (DOJ) settlement with the Microsoft corporation has failed to bring about any restoration of serous competition to the desktop operating system market. Microsoft continues to use similar anti-competitive business tactics in an attempt to monopolize the digital media player and the desktop services server markets. Competing vendors increasingly find that they can no longer compete with Microsoft if they limit themselves to only the traditional closed source model of software development.
In the last six years information technology vendors have adopted techniques and resources from two existing movements geared toward the construction of software. The newer open source movement, represented by the non-profit Open Source Initiative (OSI) corporation, emphasizes the licensing of software in a manner which encourages its collaborative development in an open environment. The older free software movement, represented by the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF), focuses on the ethical issues surrounding the licensing of software. The free software movement emphasizes freedoms which are often taken for granted outside of the field of software: the freedom to use, study how something works, improve or adapt it and redistribute.
The Free Software Foundation offers two software license schemes which are compatible with their own goals and those of the Open Source Initiative: The GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). Essentially, the GPL and LGPL licenses grant the recipient extra rights than that granted by copyright law. Both licenses insure that a contributer or distributer of a GPL or LGPL licensed work may not further impede downstream recipients the rights granted by the same license. Many developing software in an open source manner have realized that this benefit offered by the GPL and LGPL licenses outweigh any potential losses. The licensing also insures that no contributing or distributing vendor or group of vendors could potentially monopolize the market, insuring that real market competition dictates price. Just as the automotive indus
In California there was an outrage when it was disclosed that electricity companies had deliberately idled plants while supplies were tight and then waited for prices to skyrocket on the spot market. If the current Internet network infrastructure provided by the backbone providers and Internet service providers can currently support much higher speeds and data quantities to current customers, then is the act of packet filtering and setting arbitrary low speed and data caps also effectively providing an "idled" service?
Is a tiered Internet service, where content providers would be effectively competing on a similar market to the electricity "spot market", a market based entirely on artificial Scarcity?
CHORUS:
Europe was having trouble.
What a sad, sad story.
Needed a new climate to restore.
Its former glory.
Where, oh, where was it?
Where could that man it?
We looked around and then we found.
The pollution for you and me.
LEAD TENOR SCIENTIST:
And now it's...
Springtime for Europe and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
Glaciers receding at a faster pace
Look out, here comes the heatwave race!
Springtime for Europe and Germany
Rhineland's a fine land once more!
Springtime for Europe and Germany
Watch out, Europe
Al Gore going on tour!
The 1960s space program was only possible because of the freely cooperative relationship between the organizations and businesses involved. The sharing of ideas, methods and all sorts of patentable technology took place between all of the stakeholders without concern for license fees for use in the space program.
Part of the reason was the secrecy with the ongoing race with the old Soviet Union. A company could not file a patent without the patent being publicly available from the US patent office. The other reason was that the end user, the US Government, would just appropriate the royalty free use of any patent with space or military applications.
Whatever that reasons, the rabid and successful development of the space program would not have been possible in today's IP lawyer driven patent filing, royalty seeking economic environment.
A similar situation took place in the software industry from 1970 to 1990, to quote:
PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most
of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry
would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large
company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation,
algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this
company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take
as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges
with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't
done any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a
way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause
patent problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve
more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a
patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many application
categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with
patentable ideas. A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom
(available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the
way patents are applied to software.
The space frontier needs to be designated a patent free development zone. Also without the current need for cold war secrecy, the US Government should encourage as much design development to be done in an open source licensed manner.
Many USA based corporations are involved in "shonky deals" which positively affect the executives share prices before they dumb the shares on the market. However the SEC could use a better series of targets as an example.
The SEC should be prosecuting Jim Allchin, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, BayStar Capital LP, Baystar Capital II, L.P., BayStar Capital Management, LLC, Boies Schiller & Flexner, The Canopy Group, Brent Christensen, Steven Derby, Bill Gates, Lawrence Goldfarb, Jeff Hunsaker, Steven M. Lamar, Darl McBride, Microsoft Corporation, Morgan Keegan, Darcy Mott, Thomas Raimondi, Royal Bank of Canada, S2 Strategic Consulting, Blake Stowell, The SCO Group, Inc., Vulcan Capital, Ralph Yarro, and Bert Young. for numerous crimes centered around the recent activities of The SCO Group, Inc.
VO: In the 1970s, this film was made, that showed what happened in Nasser's main prison in the '50s and '60s. It was based on the testimony of survivors. Torturers who had been trained by the CIA unleashed an orgy of violence against Muslim Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point, Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.
General FOUAD ALLAM, Interrogator Interior Ministry 1958-87 (speaking in Arabic; subtitled): Sayyed Qutb thought of himself as a superior sort of person. He saw himself as an important Islamist thinker and a strong character. And so on and so on. But at the end of the day, when he was in the military prison he gave us the exact details about his secret group and the orders he had given. The most dangerous was the order to flood the whole of the Nile delta and drown this corrupt land of infidels.
VO: Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it jahilliyah--a state of barbarous ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people didn't realize that they were infected. They believed that they were free, and that their politicians were taking them forward to a new world. But in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.
The SCO Group has deleted plenty of damaging evidence from it's own websites ( *.sco.com and *.caldera.com ) and excluded the Internet Archive's Wayback machine from mirroring old content.
In a virtual simulation of real world politics, you enter the federal capital of the USA as a blogger/reporter to uncover the corruption taking place in all the three great houses of the federal government.
GoogleMart, what Walmart is to retail, Google could be to internet based sales ( watch out Ebay ).
Google allow businesses to upload descriptive catalogs of items for sale and online sales material. Because Google is hosting the content and online checkout cart system, it can track when a transaction (sale) is completed. Google charges businesses on a per completed transaction basis and pays the host of the ad clicked accordingly.
In Sun's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: -
"I am great MCNEALYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The CEO of CEOs; this mighty Company shows
"The wonders of my hand." - The Company's gone, -
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Cybertron.
[12] Governments, organizations and individuals are becoming increasingly concerned about software compatibility, conflicts and the possible existence of spyware in the software applications they use. If you have access to the source code, then you can check it and compile it for yourself. This is not an option for closed source proprietary applications, and not everyone has the resources to check each line of source code. One solution for these issues is to employ a trusted third party, separate from the application developer, who is tasked with maintaining a trusted build environment, to build the binaries from source code. The Trusted Build Agent (TBA) would hold the source to each build in escrow, releasing the source code for only open source licensed code. Competing businesses providing a TBA service in a free market would compete with each other in not only price and level of certification, but also on the ability to detect hostile, vulnerable, incompatible or just plain buggy source code. You could request a trusted build from multiple TBAs test the ability to detect defects. Defects would be reported back to the application developers, along with any patches and suggestions that provide a fix. To a lesser extent, most Linux distributions and other operating system vendors that build and redistribute open source licensed code already provide this role.
"...public online registries that document..."
on
Public Patents?
·
· Score: 1
The USPTO patent application examiners task could be made more reliable if the examiners could consult one or more public online registries that document cases of prior art and public discoveries. The online registries could provide a means for the public to retroactively point to cases of preexisting prior art for pending patent applications and a means to proactively document publicly known ideas and concepts. Although websites and digitally stored content in general is changeable, individual entries and changes in an online registry could be legally authenticated by means of digital timestamping ( http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=234 7 ). An online registry could be hosted by the USPTO as an adjunct to the existing online public patent and patent pending databases. The USPTO could also publicly recognize other individual registries hosted by third parties such as a commercial entity or a non-profit community similar to Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org/ ). An individual adding an entry to such a publicly online registry does not involve granting that individual any form of monopoly, therefore the action need not have any artificial barrier involving fees or payments. Would the existence of digitally timestamped public content overcome any objections by the USPTO to its citing as prior art? Has the USPTO any plans to add some form of publicly accessible feedback mechanism to the patent application process?
Fuck
By Christopher M. Fairman, Ohio State Moritz College of Law
You can download the paper from here
ABSTRACT:
This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.
SUBJECT AREA:
Communications Law; Constitutional Law; Education Law; Employment Practice; Psychology and Psychiatry; Sexuality and the Law
I'm over forty years old. I have lived though, vividly remember and fully comprehend the late 1970s oil crisis, New Zealand's own 1984 balance of payments crisis and the 1987 share market crash. My Father was born a year after the 1926 stock market crash and is well acquainted with the effects of the resulting depression. I have repeatedly seen fools and so called wise men throw their fortunes on various markets and schemes based upon expected high return on investment. Eventually and inevitablely the pyramid schemes -- for in the end that's all the revolving investment schemes are -- collapse.
I am fully aware of attempts to prop up and explain away the current US deficits, but, if you bother to read though the texts you will find the same language and faulty logic that was used to explain away the sustainability of pre-1987 junk bonds. It did not work then, and without radical adjustments, the system will fail again.
Slashdot Mirror
Please cease and desist linking to site xxx.mil ( reacted ) or whitehouse.gov or else we will bomb you.
Signed G.W. Bush.
In other words ( from Wednesday, March 10, 2004 A plea for relief from Microsoft's escalating anti-competitive tactics. ):
If you are concerned about DRM, please vote for Peter Gutmann's A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.
State of Open Source
A customer enters a Novell Office.
...
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
(Novell does not respond.)
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?
Novell: What do you mean "miss"?
Mr. Praline: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
Novell: We're closin' for lunch.
Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Linux Distro what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Novell: Oh yes, the, uh, the Novell OpenSuse Linux...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. According to the terms of the GPL you can no longer distribute it, that's what's wrong with it!
Movell: No, no, it's uh,... part of the service agreement.
Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a violation of the GPL when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Novell: No no it not violated, it's , it's cirumvented'! Remarkable OS, the Suse Linux, idn'it, ay? Beautiful eye candy with GLX
Mr. Praline: The eye candy don't enter into it. your in violation of the GPL.
Novell: Nononono, no, no! it's just slightly cirumvented!
To any company involved in bringing to market saleable goods or services, the Patent Lawsuit strategy is like starting a Nuclear War. Only those who consider they have no future in the market will risk the inevitable mutually assured destruction from the counter lawsuits.
That is another reason why Lawsuit mushroom clouds rise over the remains of USA's Tech industries
Let Jon Stewart Explain
From the blog
In California there was an outrage when it was disclosed that electricity companies had deliberately idled plants while supplies were tight and then waited for prices to skyrocket on the spot market. If the current Internet network infrastructure provided by the backbone providers and Internet service providers can currently support much higher speeds and data quantities to current customers, then is the act of packet filtering and setting arbitrary low speed and data caps also effectively providing an "idled" service?
Is a tiered Internet service, where content providers would be effectively competing on a similar market to the electricity "spot market", a market based entirely on artificial Scarcity?
Europe was having trouble.
What a sad, sad story.
Needed a new climate to restore.
Its former glory.
Where, oh, where was it?
Where could that man it?
We looked around and then we found.
The pollution for you and me.
LEAD TENOR SCIENTIST:
And now it's...
Springtime for Europe and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
Glaciers receding at a faster pace
Look out, here comes the heatwave race!
Springtime for Europe and Germany
Rhineland's a fine land once more!
Springtime for Europe and Germany
Watch out, Europe
Al Gore going on tour!
Corrected link : for numerous crimes centered around the recent activities of The SCO Group, Inc
The 1960s space program was only possible because of the freely cooperative relationship between the organizations and businesses involved. The sharing of ideas, methods and all sorts of patentable technology took place between all of the stakeholders without concern for license fees for use in the space program.
Part of the reason was the secrecy with the ongoing race with the old Soviet Union. A company could not file a patent without the patent being publicly available from the US patent office. The other reason was that the end user, the US Government, would just appropriate the royalty free use of any patent with space or military applications.
Whatever that reasons, the rabid and successful development of the space program would not have been possible in today's IP lawyer driven patent filing, royalty seeking economic environment.
A similar situation took place in the software industry from 1970 to 1990, to quote:
Challenges and Strategy Bill Gates May 16, 1991The space frontier needs to be designated a patent free development zone. Also without the current need for cold war secrecy, the US Government should encourage as much design development to be done in an open source licensed manner.
The SEC should be prosecuting Jim Allchin, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, BayStar Capital LP, Baystar Capital II, L.P., BayStar Capital Management, LLC, Boies Schiller & Flexner, The Canopy Group, Brent Christensen, Steven Derby, Bill Gates, Lawrence Goldfarb, Jeff Hunsaker, Steven M. Lamar, Darl McBride, Microsoft Corporation, Morgan Keegan, Darcy Mott, Thomas Raimondi, Royal Bank of Canada, S2 Strategic Consulting, Blake Stowell, The SCO Group, Inc., Vulcan Capital, Ralph Yarro, and Bert Young. for numerous crimes centered around the recent activities of The SCO Group, Inc.
From Baby it's cold outside
From 09 June 2003 What evidence of origin,ownership,copyright + GPL.
So all the online gamblers switch to day trading , which is entirely legal, with the inevitable result of a total f**k up of the US sharemarket.
Daniel Wallace's crackpot Anti-GPL arguments were repeatedly and utterly refuted back in Febuary 2004.
GoogleMart, what Walmart is to retail, Google could be to internet based sales ( watch out Ebay ).
Google allow businesses to upload descriptive catalogs of items for sale and online sales material. Because Google is hosting the content and online checkout cart system, it can track when a transaction (sale) is completed. Google charges businesses on a per completed transaction basis and pays the host of the ad clicked accordingly.
In Sun's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: -
"I am great MCNEALYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The CEO of CEOs; this mighty Company shows
"The wonders of my hand." - The Company's gone, -
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Cybertron.
By Christopher M. Fairman, Ohio State Moritz College of Law
You can download the paper from here
According to the CIA's own figures the USA's world share of GDP (purchasing power parity) has fallen to 20%.
I'm over forty years old. I have lived though, vividly remember and fully comprehend the late 1970s oil crisis, New Zealand's own 1984 balance of payments crisis and the 1987 share market crash. My Father was born a year after the 1926 stock market crash and is well acquainted with the effects of the resulting depression. I have repeatedly seen fools and so called wise men throw their fortunes on various markets and schemes based upon expected high return on investment. Eventually and inevitablely the pyramid schemes -- for in the end that's all the revolving investment schemes are -- collapse.
I am fully aware of attempts to prop up and explain away the current US deficits, but, if you bother to read though the texts you will find the same language and faulty logic that was used to explain away the sustainability of pre-1987 junk bonds. It did not work then, and without radical adjustments, the system will fail again.