SCO is claiming that Linux kernel code came from their kernel, that is their basis of a charge of theft.
Showing 80 lines of code only suggests a common origin, it doesn't give any clue as to who stole from who. To do that we need to have good programmers, who understand things like source code control, to go back through the archives and determine when the code appeared in the Linux and SCO kernels. The one that had it first is likely to be the original source, but other checks need to be made, eg: was that code in a BSD or in Minix,..., at around then ? Is it code that had been available on the net ? Is it code in a manufacturer's device driver and the programmer wrote the SCO and Linux versions ?
Showing that the code is the same, shows little.
Unfortunately, the legal stink that is created could do much to worry corporations into not deploying Linux, especially when the next similar case(s) rear their heads. Some companies would love Linux and Free Software to die, now is a good time to stick the knife in before IT director's come to realise that they don't need to waste most of their budget in software licenses.
There is too much national pride at stake for this to ever gain acceptance -- imagine accepting an address system for my country that was designed in another country - even worse -- another US import!
Not a troll, many countries like to feel that they are at least in control of their own particular patch.
Bearing in mind that Steve Mann had decided to make a fuss, cutting off his service was crassly stupid. Did they think that this would pacify him and so not tell the world, or did they think that this would be like a red rag to a bull ?
You have got to wonder how little there must between the ears of the Telstra manager that decided this.
US Army likes XBox
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
See BBC News today, they have a war game that runs on one. Is this preparation for dealing with those individuals that won't run a M$ operating system ?
Oh, I've had x-rays and the doctors have told me what they saw - I don't have the training to distinguish one vague blob from another. Presumably if I did have one implanted the doctors would be disallowed to tell me - in much the same way as a system administrator (in the UK at least) is not allowed to tell someone that the police are monitoring their emails.
There are many that say ``If you don't want the police to know, you must be guilty of something.''
Can someone provide me a link to comments from M$ on this one, they have been uncharacteristically silent on this issue... which leads me to think that this is because they are (in some way) beind/... the SCO action.
UNIX is a philosophy as more than a piece of code. It grew into a community where people shared and helped each other.
MULTICS was one of the roots, another (of many) was the
software tools idea of Kernighan and Plauger.
GNU/Linux is an embodyment of that philosophy, and the one that is currently the most vigorous. The original AT&T codebase was strangled by the lawyers who so wanted to protect what they saw was theirs that they starved it of the oxygen of new ideas and code.
Today - I can make a machine dual boot using something like lilo or grub.
One one of these future machines I will also be able to, but the Windows that boots will not be 'trusted' (since a non trusted program was in the boot path) and so you won't be able to listen to MP3, view DVD,... So I expect people to not to make their machines dual boot.
Don't expect M$ to admit that this is one of the aims of what they are trying to do.
I'm just putting the finishing touches to my sure fire way of avoiding court fines, something that I am willing to share for a mere £100. Could all slashdotters please help me in this noble enterprise by sending me the email addresses of all the spammers that they know.
This is because we are used to paying £15 for an album. The companies are merely fulfilling our expectation.
To get a price change you need to change the public's expectation, for that to happen you need real price competition - that is not in the interests of the music publishers and so it doesn't happen.
They claim that there is competition when prices differ by 20%, we will have real competition when they differ by 50%.
Yes, but the code that it would be based on would be their code - so they get to choose the licence. If you add GPL code to M$ code it is you that is in violation, not them.
Although I welcome the (partial) opening of the source code; the open source community needs to take care that it isn't bitten. Think what could happen: The samba team makes a new advance in unpicking a part of the SMB protocol; M$ says ``they only did it because they had access to our source code from WinCE''. There then rages a huge debate that Samba is tainted by proprietary code...
Making their code more readily available could be a double edged sword.
it allows experimentation with the alternatives, and the best variant ``wins''.
it means that incompatible ways of doing things can be tried out
alternative solutions are sometimes better in one area or another -- specialisation.
(Think: large machine/small machine; user with good/bad eyesight;...)
Choice is bad because:
it confuses users; ``Which one do I use ?''
users need to learn new tools if the one that they chose ``looses''.
it makes it harder for programmers to write code; they need to either make one choice or work with the alternatives
interoperation between the choices sometimes does not work well (or at all)
it defrays development effort; the same work is done/duplicated in many of the choices -- so it all takes longer
systems are bigger as they often have more than one choice installed at once (Gnome/KDE, emacs/vi,...)
Choice and standardisation are opposites, each has its own benefits.
In the past, choice has been seen as a ``good thing'', us techies were happy to put the work in and learn the choices and make transitions as standards changed.
Aunt Tilly doesn't want that. She just wants to: surf the net; write letters;... she wants just one tool for each task, she wants them to all work together; she doesn't want to learn new tools every 2 years.
As computers become commodity items and computer use becomes de-skilled, the needs of the non technical population need to be appreciated by us hackers. We keep on wanting world domination, so we need to pay the price.
This is what the author was saying.
But, you say, what about the next best thing ?, well - maybe we need to play with that in private (or at least where Aunt Tilly doesn't see), until it is polished & ready when she will look at it, but only if it is so much better that it is worth her learning the new way.
Surely the solution is obvious: make the posession of clip on lamps an offence under the DMCA, I cannot see why someone would want to posess such equipement unless it was to break into a computer and steal the latest music CDs....
SCO was a popular platform for Unix on Intel. It was a private company, microsoft had a 20% shareholding, but it wasn't quoted on the stockmarket. It had been like that for years.
Suddenly (about 1995): they announced that they wanted to float on the stock market, all sorts of reasons given but one side effect was that it meant that the major shareholders (the directors) would be able to 'cash in' on their shareholding by selling to Joe Shareholder. Quite unfortunately for the new share holders, Linux started to bite into SCO profits soon after float and it never really recovered.
I have no doubt that the SCO directors had no idea that this ''new phenomenon called Linux'' would have any effect on the SCO sales & thus share price; they were only involved in that sector of the market and so would never have heard of Linux, and even if they had they would not have been able to predict the future effect on the SCO share price; it is quite coincidental that they sold their shares to the general public just before the value started to crumble.
An easier way is to use 'less' - which filters out nasty characters. You hit 'F' and it acts like 'tail -f' with the nice bonus that you can hit '^c' if you see something and want to and go back up the file to see how it started.
Other scientists believe the batteries were used for electroplating - transferring a thin layer of metal on to another metal surface - a technique still used today and a common classroom experiment.
So, presumably, the US patent office (which, as we all know, will have properly researched for prior art) will grant Saddam a patent tomorrow on batteries & electroplating.
That will somewhat put a block on Bush's war mongering when Saddam doesn't grant licenses.
Tony Blair's push to war with Iraq has just about as much legitimacy. The evidence presented does not support the case for war, either they have kept something important back or their motives are completely different.
Either way: 80-90% of the British public don't support their prime minister.
Slashdot Mirror
Showing 80 lines of code only suggests a common origin, it doesn't give any clue as to who stole from who. To do that we need to have good programmers, who understand things like source code control, to go back through the archives and determine when the code appeared in the Linux and SCO kernels. The one that had it first is likely to be the original source, but other checks need to be made, eg: was that code in a BSD or in Minix, ..., at around then ? Is it code that had been available on the net ? Is it code in a manufacturer's device driver and the programmer wrote the SCO and Linux versions ?
Showing that the code is the same, shows little.
Unfortunately, the legal stink that is created could do much to worry corporations into not deploying Linux, especially when the next similar case(s) rear their heads. Some companies would love Linux and Free Software to die, now is a good time to stick the knife in before IT director's come to realise that they don't need to waste most of their budget in software licenses.
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
Not a troll, many countries like to feel that they are at least in control of their own particular patch.
Bearing in mind that Steve Mann had decided to make a fuss, cutting off his service was crassly stupid. Did they think that this would pacify him and so not tell the world, or did they think that this would be like a red rag to a bull ?
You have got to wonder how little there must between the ears of the Telstra manager that decided this.
See BBC News today , they have a war game that runs on one. Is this preparation for dealing with those individuals that won't run a M$ operating system ?
Oh, I've had x-rays and the doctors have told me what they saw - I don't have the training to distinguish one vague blob from another. Presumably if I did have one implanted the doctors would be disallowed to tell me - in much the same way as a system administrator (in the UK at least) is not allowed to tell someone that the police are monitoring their emails.
There are many that say ``If you don't want the police to know, you must be guilty of something.''
Can someone provide me a link to comments from M$ on this one, they have been uncharacteristically silent on this issue ... which leads me to think that this is because they are (in some way) beind/... the SCO action.
GNU/Linux is an embodyment of that philosophy, and the one that is currently the most vigorous. The original AT&T codebase was strangled by the lawyers who so wanted to protect what they saw was theirs that they starved it of the oxygen of new ideas and code.
Today - I can make a machine dual boot using something like lilo or grub.
... So I expect people to not to make their machines dual boot.
One one of these future machines I will also be able to, but the Windows that boots will not be 'trusted' (since a non trusted program was in the boot path) and so you won't be able to listen to MP3, view DVD,
Don't expect M$ to admit that this is one of the aims of what they are trying to do.
I'm just putting the finishing touches to my sure fire way of avoiding court fines, something that I am willing to share for a mere £100. Could all slashdotters please help me in this noble enterprise by sending me the email addresses of all the spammers that they know.
Yes, but the average Brit, in his heart of hearts, still doesn't really believe that.
This is because we are used to paying £15 for an album. The companies are merely fulfilling our expectation.
To get a price change you need to change the public's expectation, for that to happen you need real price competition - that is not in the interests of the music publishers and so it doesn't happen.
They claim that there is competition when prices differ by 20%, we will have real competition when they differ by 50%.
Yes, but the code that it would be based on would be their code - so they get to choose the licence. If you add GPL code to M$ code it is you that is in violation, not them.
Although I welcome the (partial) opening of the source code; the open source community needs to take care that it isn't bitten. Think what could happen: The samba team makes a new advance in unpicking a part of the SMB protocol; M$ says ``they only did it because they had access to our source code from WinCE''. There then rages a huge debate that Samba is tainted by proprietary code ...
Making their code more readily available could be a double edged sword.
Please enlighten someone who is not from the USA.
(Think: large machine/small machine; user with good/bad eyesight;
Choice is bad because:
Choice and standardisation are opposites, each has its own benefits.
In the past, choice has been seen as a ``good thing'', us techies were happy to put the work in and learn the choices and make transitions as standards changed.
Aunt Tilly doesn't want that. She just wants to: surf the net; write letters; ... she wants just one tool for each task, she wants them to all work together; she doesn't want to learn new tools every 2 years.
As computers become commodity items and computer use becomes de-skilled, the needs of the non technical population need to be appreciated by us hackers. We keep on wanting world domination, so we need to pay the price.
This is what the author was saying.
But, you say, what about the next best thing ?, well - maybe we need to play with that in private (or at least where Aunt Tilly doesn't see), until it is polished & ready when she will look at it, but only if it is so much better that it is worth her learning the new way.
Did CmdrTaco have the evil bit set when he uploaded this article ?
Is this the slashdot editor's equivalent of the first post game ?
Do you think that if I got a patent that covered spamming then we could all heave a sigh of relief ... ?
Surely the solution is obvious: make the posession of clip on lamps an offence under the DMCA, I cannot see why someone would want to posess such equipement unless it was to break into a computer and steal the latest music CDs....
OK, we have found God's doughnut. Where is the coffee mug that he is dunking it into ?
SCO was a popular platform for Unix on Intel. It was a private company, microsoft had a 20% shareholding, but it wasn't quoted on the stockmarket. It had been like that for years.
Suddenly (about 1995): they announced that they wanted to float on the stock market, all sorts of reasons given but one side effect was that it meant that the major shareholders (the directors) would be able to 'cash in' on their shareholding by selling to Joe Shareholder. Quite unfortunately for the new share holders, Linux started to bite into SCO profits soon after float and it never really recovered.
I have no doubt that the SCO directors had no idea that this ''new phenomenon called Linux'' would have any effect on the SCO sales & thus share price; they were only involved in that sector of the market and so would never have heard of Linux, and even if they had they would not have been able to predict the future effect on the SCO share price; it is quite coincidental that they sold their shares to the general public just before the value started to crumble.
For some time now I just forward all of this stuff to:
419@spring39.demon.co.uk and new.scotland.yard@met.police.uk
OK, not difficult, but my bit at helping nail these crooks.
An easier way is to use 'less' - which filters out nasty characters. You hit 'F' and it acts like 'tail -f' with the nice bonus that you can hit '^c' if you see something and want to and go back up the file to see how it started.
It does help to reread the manuals occasionally.
So, presumably, the US patent office (which, as we all know, will have properly researched for prior art) will grant Saddam a patent tomorrow on batteries & electroplating.
That will somewhat put a block on Bush's war mongering when Saddam doesn't grant licenses.
Tony Blair's push to war with Iraq has just about as much legitimacy. The evidence presented does not support the case for war, either they have kept something important back or their motives are completely different.
Either way: 80-90% of the British public don't support their prime minister.