Clearing the m(F)ud
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The article on Linuxjournal has been about the clearest article on the whole debacle I've seen yet. It says a number of things to me:
1.It takes someone involved with OSS to finally paint a somewhat clear picture of what this whole issue is about.
2.SCO seems to have some knowledge from the Monterrey project that IBM developers that were working there later became involved in Linux. To me this is perhaps the only real case SCO has got. They would have known who was developing on the IBM side and by scanning the Linux kernel mailing list might have seen those same names turn up. Hence SCO's case. However for SCO to actually prove anything beyond conjecture -which isn't admissible in court- will prove extremely difficult, as the author says. The presented code that SCO has been showing the NDA signees is possibly taken form Unix (SysV) or AIX but is very likely to be some sort of common use code that exists in just about every OS known. If the code is a ubiquitous as the author feels, then it is likely that the court will not rule in SCO's favour. That would be the death knell for SCO because it would open the doors for just about everyone on the earth to sue SCO for issues ranging from code theft to harrasment.
3.SCO is mainly creating a fog of war in order to frighten people, just as IBM is claiming.
4.I am less worried know than I was before I read the article.
The worst possible outcome, is that, with the current US government using the fear of terrorism weapon as an excuse to invade countries, ruin the economy, support corrupt corporations, that the court would in fact rule in SCO's favour. The outcome of that would almost certainly be that IBM will use it's patents to sue SCO on hundreds of accounts and will certainly appeal the case until it gets to the supreme court. I am pretty sure that SCO would eventually lose, but the damage to OSS in the USA would be done. The court procedings will have minimal effect outside the the USA. I am pretty sure that no European court will give any chance to SCO of winning a case against an OS that was origionally developed in Finland and is a major source of income in Germany (SuSE). It would be interesting in this case to see if a software split would occur, with software developement in the USA totally encumbered by legal issues, leaving only Microsoft able to peddle it's wares with success there, and OSS taking over outside the USA . Of course this is only conjecture and speculation.
It means what we already knew: That you as a single person are of no value to your government. This is the real world in which corporations can get tax breaks, get away with multi million dollar fraud, sic the feds onto you for sharing an mp3, sue you for your life's savings and the world in which you are powerless. It's exagerated but this is why communism was so popular in the early 20th century. The commies promised to put the rich fuckers up against the wall and shoot them. (They did this of course, but thereafter they were the one's treating you like shit)
The next time you think big business and globalisation is fine and that those pesky anti-war demonstrators should get locked away, think of this again....and perhaps you should check your hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc as well;)
For all the snarling and growling and derision about Apple, the sheer amount of posts on the topic of new Apple hardware says perhaps more about the interest in Apple's hard- and software than any poll ever could.
I try to keep an overview of the facts pertaining to this case and it seems as if the quote "professional litigious bastards" has more to it than first meets the eye. Consider the newer bits of info that become apparent in this article:
According to the article it seems very likely that the Canopy Group is involved in some kind of scheme in which the companies it owns buy one anothers stocks in order to push up interest in that stock which is then sold to outsiders at a profit, only to be later bought back, again at a profit, when the stock tanks once again. The sudden boost in SCO stock since this case has begun is indeed very reminiscent of what is described on the Forbes page.
Not only this, but it seems as if these groups of companies specifically look for cheap old products that they can buy and then use as ammunition in IP lawsuits. It also looks as if they specifically look for employees who have experience in litigation, such as Darl McBride, who has yet to show any knowledge of Unix or software whatsoever apart from the fact that it has lines.
Added to all this, it seems as if this company specifically teams up with whoever is willing to be a vested interest in order to sabotage some other companies market. The mention of Redmond Wa, Vista.com as well as the knowledge that Center 7 and SCO were trying to port Active Directory to Unix says a lot to me in terms of the word Microsoft and Microsoft's common tactics of sabotaging with underhand tactics anyone who gets in it's way.
I do start to see the MO of this suit: Go for as many points as possible, no matter how remotely removed they are from the actual suit itself, because this generates DOUBT amongst managers and shareholders, who routinely have no knowledge of computers whatsoever. No matter how long this actual suit carries on, SCO can make a profit on it's stock which it's managers are now unloading on outsiders, which they will then buy back when the stock inevitably tanks.
SCO, in fact the entire Canopy Group's main line of business is simply making money. This may sound obvious, but think about what it means. It means they have no interest in any real product and simply want to make money in any way they can. They might very well have released the "ancient Unix" code years ago for the sole purpose of trolling for some suckers to misuse their code. To me, usually when some American company starts sprouting BS in the form of "so that users can share experiences and code with developers, mafiosi etc" I know it's a lie.
I think that IBM is very right to take this case to court as was CA to continue their case. I think IBM is going to wait until enough evidence has been released in order for them to counter sue SCO and it's parent into the ground. The details of this case will be very interesting in that I expect SCO's indirect dealings with Microsoft to come to the for eventually.
The only thing that really worries me personally, as a MacOSX user, is that Apple has based it's browser on Trolltech's Qt toolkit. If Trolltech is indeed owned by Canopy (stupid fucks, how could they let that happen), then it could very well be yet another bait. KDE might have some huge potential problems comming up as well.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is what motivated MS engineers to do this, but it also highlights one of the problems MS has: Their broad user base. As someone who just lost his job admining 20 Windows users I know that just as many Windows users never use the desktop as MS might assume. While Windows offers just about as much functionality in terms of drag and drop and meta key modifiers (Ctrl-Drag for copy etc) as the Macintosh does, Micorsoft never advertises this functionality. Most standard users don't even know what the right mouse button is for and do most actions either through the toolbar or the menu.
Someone posted in the SCO article yesterday, that SCO was in a stock scam, and that their aim was to make money for the board for a while by keeping a high volume in the press before going under when the actual court case proves they do not have any real basis in their case.
I agree that SCO must be one or more of the following things:
1.SCO is indeed doing a stock scam as their actual products are close to worthless. An SEC investigation would be very apropriate here, but would only happen after the fact, sadly.
2.SCO is being funded by another party to persue this scheme, the most likely candidates being Microsoft or SUN, both of whom have a vested interest in seeing Linux and IBM suffer. I would go for Microsoft because while SUN has something to gain in seeing IBM suffer, they also have something to lose if Linux suffers. Microsoft is the only party that has something to gain if both Linux and IBM suffer. It would need a leaked email or something to start the ball rolling on an investigation into this side of the matter though. I also wonder at the same time why no leaked emails have as yet appeared from any SCO employees.
3.SCO's products are absolutely worthless and SCO is indeed trying to do a last ditch fight in order to legally force some kind of artificial marketshare for it's products. The fact that SCO has changed it's public statements on numerous occiasions and even changed the official claim recently (IBM bypassing export controls even though it is no business of SCO to enforce this and the RCU claim which is as patchy as well), means that SCO knows it is on shaky ground. The latest official claims show that SCO is indeed scraping the bottom of the barrel and are truly frightened by the fact that IBM hasn't taken them seriously. Their lawyers nerves must be blank. The accusation against Linux is simply something they are doing in order to try and strengthen their claim. It does however mean that they are actually pouring through every piece of available information in order to come up with some kind of evidence because they truly do not have any that would stand up in court.
The only thing that worries me is that Linus should perhaps learn when to shut the fuck up and think before he speaks. Courts are not democracies and crap like his statments on patents can and will be used against him.
I am just speculating here, but this does open a path of thought for me in that Apple might have encouraged this action by Trolltech (wider audience, more traction in corporations, more traction amongst consumers etc). Apple's use of KHTML in Safari may very well a sign of things to come in the other area where Apple has been dependant on Microsoft: Office.
Quite a few people wondered why Apple went with KHTML instead of Gecko in developing a new browser and I think the answer was proabably because of the companies involved - Trolltech is not AOL/Netscape -, and that KHTML is much more lightweight than geckko could ever be, thereby giving Apple the same ability to offer developers the same HTML rendering API on the Mac as MS has done with IE on Windows. Apple could very well be considering doing the same thing with KOffice.
KOffice is way behind OpenOffice in terms of maturity and features, but KHTML was also behind Gecko in terms of standards support until Apple developers started adding to it. I think Apple's developers would very well be capable of adding the features to KOffice that it lacked, including MS Office document support. They might do this in a manner similar to what they've done with KHTML and webcore: creating "Office" i.e. word processing, spreadsheet and presentation API's, giving these back to the community and creating a closed product ala Safari that would be based on them.
This is wild speculation, but many people have wondered why Apple has done almost nothing Appleworks since OSX entered the scene. I don't think it was only fear of MS cutting off Office for the Mac that prompted this.
The hurdle to making so called rich clients (my God, that word "rich" is starting to get fucking irritating) is higher than either Macromedia or Microsoft realises. Macromedia at least has some idea of how difficult this is, in that they are not exactly winning over huge numbers of developers to their cause. If that wasn't the case they would not be in the financial difficulties that they now are: They bet the house on the internet, neglecting those products which made them rich in the first place i.e. Director, Authorware and Freehand. Make no mistake Flash is a brilliant technology, as are ColdFusion and Dreamweaver, but for SECURE internet applications no one trusts Flash, which is why Java Applets and applications are still used by banks for online banking.
On top of this times are very rough and not many companies see any advantage in making expensive Flash sites with little visible ROI.
But Macromedia at least knows this. MS I'm not so sure. MS has the weight to push a technology into high visibility but MS makes it bread and butter from tools, OS's and Office software, definitely not from high-expenditure loss leaders like the X-Box or other lickable items. MS might well invest in making fancy vector graphics applications and tools but 1.) who is going to trust them on security, and 2.) who is going to spend money on those things that they wouldn't have on Flash?
I think MS will eventually simply abandon the effort or buy out Macromedia.
In fact it's quite a bit larger than Microsoft and employs considerably more people than they do. I very much doubt that the US government will try to make an example of IBM, because it definitely is not in their interests to do so.
The claim that IBM is aiding terrorism is something so cliched in America it's almost not even funny anymore. This is something so typically used as a last ditch defense when everything else fails that most people should be able to see it with ease. SCO's claims have varied from copyright infringment until proven otherwise, through contract breach by releasing SCO code until IBM called that bluff as well, up until now when SCO goes for the patriotic kneejerk reaction hoping to rally Americans to the cause.
Incidentally, they're also claming RCU is in breach of contract. The RCU might very well be in breach of contract in that Sequent added code to Linux although that code was developed under the Unix licence from SCO. Sequent was bought by IBM and that makes IBM guilty although I'm not sure that SCO can claim ownership of anything that Sequent developed unless there was an agreement between them.
Which would in fact leave only the patriotic fallback, and I'm pretty sure that that one is not going to hold up in court.
In the beginning it was a suit against IBM's alleged breach of contract in copying code from Unix(tm) -whatever this means right now - into Linux. SCO gave IBM 100 days to give them $1 billion or get their AIX licence revoked. At the time it wasn't sure that this had anything to do with Linux.
IBM barely responded.
Then there were 1500 letters of warning sent to corporations running Linux and AIX I assume. At the time it wasn't sure that this had anything to do Linus.
IBM barely responded and the Linux community exploded with some people even calling Darl to come out and have a fist fight. Linus was very calm and welcomed the threat, but commented that the suit didn't have much chance of getting anywhere. Microsft, very publicly, bought a licence from SCO, giving rise to millions of suspicions that MS was behind the whole charade.
Then Darl McBride retracted his statement about sueing Linus. He then started the first of his (in)famous conference calls, claiming ownership to just about everything that had ever been in touch with anything to do with Unix.
Then Novell chimed up saying that no patents or copyrights had been sold to SCO.
SCO claimed that they had been sold, "according to some of our experts"
Then SCO started harping about hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Speculation was rife in the OSS community as to what code exactly was being referred to.
Then there was the code preview and the (in)famous SCO NDA, which in effect didn't allow you to comment on the specifics of the code. Most analysts commented that they didn't see how SCO had a case, with only Microsoft friendly Gartner warning clients about Linux.
Most analysts refused the NDA, with only some analysts taking the bait. After reviewing the code, the situation was by no means any clearer than before, because while the analysts had indeed seen similar code, there was no relaible means of checking when the code had been entered into the SCO Unixware codebase, thereby starting suspicions by thousands of OSS members that SCO had in fact copied Linux code into the SCO code base.
The 100 day period rolls around, with only Darl "the mouth" McBride making threatening sounds about "mapping it all out for IBM and AIX licencees". Darl had failed to notice that IBM covers each and every one of it's cutomers against lawsuits against AIX.
The next week, IBM, in a first real response to the whole theater piece, basically stated that "AIX is ours, it's licence is irrevocable, and that this matter will be sttled in court". McBride, apparently very unsettled by the fact that IBM was not taking him personally seriously, resorted to an attempted injunction and that all time favourite fallback method used by Americans of all colors and creeds when really in deep shit: "Linux is giving the commies, arabs and terrorists high tech because it's free for all"- Appealing to Americans patriotic fervour when one has no other way out, thereby following the likes of other famous personages such as Oliver North, Admiral Pointdexter and Richard Nixon.
In this comedy that SCO is putting out (I am amazed that anyone takes them seriously), the only thing that I am still waiting for is for SCO to sue the Catholic church (and perhaps a few other religions) for misusing SCO's inalienable right to the SOURCE OF LIFE.
The farce, as it stands today, seems to be that SCO is indeed intending to try and poker with every single OS out there today. AIX, Linux, *BSD, OSX and even Microsoft. I'll give McBride one thing, and one thing only: Guts. He has a lot of that to be able to do what he is doing. He is doing a David vs. Goliath even though the end result is almost certainly going to be the death of SCO and multiple private lawsuits against McBride for endangering people's livelyhoods. In fact the reason that there haven't been more countersuits as of yet only shows how few people take SCO seriously. The fact that SCO's stock has gone up shows mainly how little stock traders know about the whole affair.
If it works good luck to them. The mere fact that they are doing this is enough to push the space race into higher gear again. In the long run it will be good for the economy and there will definitely be a manned human settlement on the moon within the next two decades.
And hated it. This was in 2000 on a friends old computer with the constrained face of AOL making browsing unusable.
This was also at the time when I was still working for a dotbomb. What makes me so fucking hopping mad when I read this article, and there are literally tens of thousands who feel exactly this way, is how pure, unadulterated GREED fucked up the internet economy, and with it our jobs and our lives.
The moronic waste of invested money on expensive offices, cars, gadgets and toys by people who had no idea what they were actually doing running a company at the age of 26 with no experience and less intelligence is nothing compared to the greed that sucked everything up.
For that and the ensuing years of poverty and joblessness: FUCK THEM!
Most here, obviously in light of the fact that MacIE is such a piece of crap, are more worried by the thought of MS killing Office for OSX. People claim that MS will break support for older versions of Windows Office on Windows because they don't care.
Wrong, they have to care. About 10% of all Office users are still using Office95, about 20% still using Office97, about 40 to 50% still using Office2000. (Office2000 can open OfficeXP documents without many problems). Not that many moved to OfficeXP. A new office that cannot save old Office compatible documents will not get many customers. MS will not willingly shoot themselves in the foot.
Your Office X will remain compatible for a number of years yet, no worry. After that you can switch to OpenOffice.
If they find PC's with Windows simpler to maintain, a statement that I can only believe in if they have no experience with any other OS, then they have an entirely different problem on their hands: The IT staff is incompetent. That the IT staff is incompetent is something I can believe if the district is so poor that they simply took the 6 cheapest "technicians" they could find. This district would do well in replacing the IT staff with people who could, at the least, support Linux. Their costs, since this is the motivating factor, would drop, and they would be independant of being bullied into future upgrades from Redmond.
But sadly they are probably to intellectually challenged to realise this.
If Hollywood in the form of the RIAA and the MPAA carry on the way they are, and continually push the limits to edge so that finally one has to have permission to play any song or watch any movie (I'm being overly melodramatic here) Hollywood will die because consumers generally get irritated with things that are restrictive.
The Microsoft home will almost certainly be an absolute desaster in the first two iterations until Microsoft "get's it", but will then catch on with the mainstream public.
And that is what counts with shareholders. I personally do somehow think of OSX as a "Unix" even though it's not. If Apple doesn't defend themselves they open themselves to being sued by every 2-bit SCO-like company to walk past the store front.
The "Stop calling us a bunch of fuckheads or we won't speak to you" mentality is very prevalent at Quark. When the mTropolis userbase were trying to get the money together to buy the code from Quark, one of the conditions that Quark stipulated in buying the code is that people would have to "stop making derogatory comments about Quark". Every was in a hate frenzy about Quark fucking up mTropolis the way it did (no aid for the developers, no advertising, nothing and then just killing it) and even though most of us stopped bad mouthing Quark immediately, the effort was in vain, because Quark was more interested in killing the product than letting others show that it was as good as we all thought.
These two come free with plain vanilla Windows although I wouldn't recommend them to beginners as Windows is too schizoid in it's implementation to make these intuitive. I would truly recommend any modern Unix flavour (with the exception of SCO) that has a host of languages on board by default. This enables the kids to pick the language they want, from shell scripts to C++.
Slashdot Mirror
The article on Linuxjournal has been about the clearest article on the whole debacle I've seen yet. It says a number of things to me:
1.It takes someone involved with OSS to finally paint a somewhat clear picture of what this whole issue is about.
2.SCO seems to have some knowledge from the Monterrey project that IBM developers that were working there later became involved in Linux. To me this is perhaps the only real case SCO has got. They would have known who was developing on the IBM side and by scanning the Linux kernel mailing list might have seen those same names turn up. Hence SCO's case. However for SCO to actually prove anything beyond conjecture -which isn't admissible in court- will prove extremely difficult, as the author says. The presented code that SCO has been showing the NDA signees is possibly taken form Unix (SysV) or AIX but is very likely to be some sort of common use code that exists in just about every OS known. If the code is a ubiquitous as the author feels, then it is likely that the court will not rule in SCO's favour. That would be the death knell for SCO because it would open the doors for just about everyone on the earth to sue SCO for issues ranging from code theft to harrasment.
3.SCO is mainly creating a fog of war in order to frighten people, just as IBM is claiming.
4.I am less worried know than I was before I read the article.
The worst possible outcome, is that, with the current US government using the fear of terrorism weapon as an excuse to invade countries, ruin the economy, support corrupt corporations, that the court would in fact rule in SCO's favour. The outcome of that would almost certainly be that IBM will use it's patents to sue SCO on hundreds of accounts and will certainly appeal the case until it gets to the supreme court. I am pretty sure that SCO would eventually lose, but the damage to OSS in the USA would be done. The court procedings will have minimal effect outside the the USA. I am pretty sure that no European court will give any chance to SCO of winning a case against an OS that was origionally developed in Finland and is a major source of income in Germany (SuSE). It would be interesting in this case to see if a software split would occur, with software developement in the USA totally encumbered by legal issues, leaving only Microsoft able to peddle it's wares with success there, and OSS taking over outside the USA . Of course this is only conjecture and speculation.
It means what we already knew: That you as a single person are of no value to your government. This is the real world in which corporations can get tax breaks, get away with multi million dollar fraud, sic the feds onto you for sharing an mp3, sue you for your life's savings and the world in which you are powerless. It's exagerated but this is why communism was so popular in the early 20th century. The commies promised to put the rich fuckers up against the wall and shoot them. (They did this of course, but thereafter they were the one's treating you like shit)
...and perhaps you should check your hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc as well ;)
The next time you think big business and globalisation is fine and that those pesky anti-war demonstrators should get locked away, think of this again.
For all the snarling and growling and derision about Apple, the sheer amount of posts on the topic of new Apple hardware says perhaps more about the interest in Apple's hard- and software than any poll ever could.
I try to keep an overview of the facts pertaining to this case and it seems as if the quote "professional litigious bastards" has more to it than first meets the eye. Consider the newer bits of info that become apparent in this article:
According to the article it seems very likely that the Canopy Group is involved in some kind of scheme in which the companies it owns buy one anothers stocks in order to push up interest in that stock which is then sold to outsiders at a profit, only to be later bought back, again at a profit, when the stock tanks once again. The sudden boost in SCO stock since this case has begun is indeed very reminiscent of what is described on the Forbes page.
Not only this, but it seems as if these groups of companies specifically look for cheap old products that they can buy and then use as ammunition in IP lawsuits. It also looks as if they specifically look for employees who have experience in litigation, such as Darl McBride, who has yet to show any knowledge of Unix or software whatsoever apart from the fact that it has lines.
Added to all this, it seems as if this company specifically teams up with whoever is willing to be a vested interest in order to sabotage some other companies market. The mention of Redmond Wa, Vista.com as well as the knowledge that Center 7 and SCO were trying to port Active Directory to Unix says a lot to me in terms of the word Microsoft and Microsoft's common tactics of sabotaging with underhand tactics anyone who gets in it's way.
I do start to see the MO of this suit: Go for as many points as possible, no matter how remotely removed they are from the actual suit itself, because this generates DOUBT amongst managers and shareholders, who routinely have no knowledge of computers whatsoever. No matter how long this actual suit carries on, SCO can make a profit on it's stock which it's managers are now unloading on outsiders, which they will then buy back when the stock inevitably tanks.
SCO, in fact the entire Canopy Group's main line of business is simply making money. This may sound obvious, but think about what it means. It means they have no interest in any real product and simply want to make money in any way they can. They might very well have released the "ancient Unix" code years ago for the sole purpose of trolling for some suckers to misuse their code. To me, usually when some American company starts sprouting BS in the form of "so that users can share experiences and code with developers, mafiosi etc" I know it's a lie.
I think that IBM is very right to take this case to court as was CA to continue their case. I think IBM is going to wait until enough evidence has been released in order for them to counter sue SCO and it's parent into the ground. The details of this case will be very interesting in that I expect SCO's indirect dealings with Microsoft to come to the for eventually.
The only thing that really worries me personally, as a MacOSX user, is that Apple has based it's browser on Trolltech's Qt toolkit. If Trolltech is indeed owned by Canopy (stupid fucks, how could they let that happen), then it could very well be yet another bait. KDE might have some huge potential problems comming up as well.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is what motivated MS engineers to do this, but it also highlights one of the problems MS has: Their broad user base. As someone who just lost his job admining 20 Windows users I know that just as many Windows users never use the desktop as MS might assume. While Windows offers just about as much functionality in terms of drag and drop and meta key modifiers (Ctrl-Drag for copy etc) as the Macintosh does, Micorsoft never advertises this functionality. Most standard users don't even know what the right mouse button is for and do most actions either through the toolbar or the menu.
Uhm, Quicktime is Apple's baby. I think you're mistaking QT with Qt (small t and big T). Trolltech's toolkit is Qt.
KHTML was not written by Trolltech but is dependant on the Qt toolkit.
Someone posted in the SCO article yesterday, that SCO was in a stock scam, and that their aim was to make money for the board for a while by keeping a high volume in the press before going under when the actual court case proves they do not have any real basis in their case.
I agree that SCO must be one or more of the following things:
1.SCO is indeed doing a stock scam as their actual products are close to worthless. An SEC investigation would be very apropriate here, but would only happen after the fact, sadly.
2.SCO is being funded by another party to persue this scheme, the most likely candidates being Microsoft or SUN, both of whom have a vested interest in seeing Linux and IBM suffer. I would go for Microsoft because while SUN has something to gain in seeing IBM suffer, they also have something to lose if Linux suffers. Microsoft is the only party that has something to gain if both Linux and IBM suffer. It would need a leaked email or something to start the ball rolling on an investigation into this side of the matter though. I also wonder at the same time why no leaked emails have as yet appeared from any SCO employees.
3.SCO's products are absolutely worthless and SCO is indeed trying to do a last ditch fight in order to legally force some kind of artificial marketshare for it's products. The fact that SCO has changed it's public statements on numerous occiasions and even changed the official claim recently (IBM bypassing export controls even though it is no business of SCO to enforce this and the RCU claim which is as patchy as well), means that SCO knows it is on shaky ground. The latest official claims show that SCO is indeed scraping the bottom of the barrel and are truly frightened by the fact that IBM hasn't taken them seriously. Their lawyers nerves must be blank. The accusation against Linux is simply something they are doing in order to try and strengthen their claim. It does however mean that they are actually pouring through every piece of available information in order to come up with some kind of evidence because they truly do not have any that would stand up in court.
The only thing that worries me is that Linus should perhaps learn when to shut the fuck up and think before he speaks. Courts are not democracies and crap like his statments on patents can and will be used against him.
I am just speculating here, but this does open a path of thought for me in that Apple might have encouraged this action by Trolltech (wider audience, more traction in corporations, more traction amongst consumers etc). Apple's use of KHTML in Safari may very well a sign of things to come in the other area where Apple has been dependant on Microsoft: Office.
Quite a few people wondered why Apple went with KHTML instead of Gecko in developing a new browser and I think the answer was proabably because of the companies involved - Trolltech is not AOL/Netscape -, and that KHTML is much more lightweight than geckko could ever be, thereby giving Apple the same ability to offer developers the same HTML rendering API on the Mac as MS has done with IE on Windows. Apple could very well be considering doing the same thing with KOffice.
KOffice is way behind OpenOffice in terms of maturity and features, but KHTML was also behind Gecko in terms of standards support until Apple developers started adding to it. I think Apple's developers would very well be capable of adding the features to KOffice that it lacked, including MS Office document support. They might do this in a manner similar to what they've done with KHTML and webcore: creating "Office" i.e. word processing, spreadsheet and presentation API's, giving these back to the community and creating a closed product ala Safari that would be based on them.
This is wild speculation, but many people have wondered why Apple has done almost nothing Appleworks since OSX entered the scene. I don't think it was only fear of MS cutting off Office for the Mac that prompted this.
then perhaps we could avoid dupes.
The hurdle to making so called rich clients (my God, that word "rich" is starting to get fucking irritating) is higher than either Macromedia or Microsoft realises. Macromedia at least has some idea of how difficult this is, in that they are not exactly winning over huge numbers of developers to their cause. If that wasn't the case they would not be in the financial difficulties that they now are: They bet the house on the internet, neglecting those products which made them rich in the first place i.e. Director, Authorware and Freehand. Make no mistake Flash is a brilliant technology, as are ColdFusion and Dreamweaver, but for SECURE internet applications no one trusts Flash, which is why Java Applets and applications are still used by banks for online banking.
On top of this times are very rough and not many companies see any advantage in making expensive Flash sites with little visible ROI.
But Macromedia at least knows this. MS I'm not so sure. MS has the weight to push a technology into high visibility but MS makes it bread and butter from tools, OS's and Office software, definitely not from high-expenditure loss leaders like the X-Box or other lickable items. MS might well invest in making fancy vector graphics applications and tools but 1.) who is going to trust them on security, and 2.) who is going to spend money on those things that they wouldn't have on Flash?
I think MS will eventually simply abandon the effort or buy out Macromedia.
In fact it's quite a bit larger than Microsoft and employs considerably more people than they do. I very much doubt that the US government will try to make an example of IBM, because it definitely is not in their interests to do so.
is all IBM should have to say to the world to answer that one.
The claim that IBM is aiding terrorism is something so cliched in America it's almost not even funny anymore. This is something so typically used as a last ditch defense when everything else fails that most people should be able to see it with ease. SCO's claims have varied from copyright infringment until proven otherwise, through contract breach by releasing SCO code until IBM called that bluff as well, up until now when SCO goes for the patriotic kneejerk reaction hoping to rally Americans to the cause.
Incidentally, they're also claming RCU is in breach of contract. The RCU might very well be in breach of contract in that Sequent added code to Linux although that code was developed under the Unix licence from SCO. Sequent was bought by IBM and that makes IBM guilty although I'm not sure that SCO can claim ownership of anything that Sequent developed unless there was an agreement between them.
Which would in fact leave only the patriotic fallback, and I'm pretty sure that that one is not going to hold up in court.
So, in other words, you're fucked Darl.
In the beginning it was a suit against IBM's alleged breach of contract in copying code from Unix(tm) -whatever this means right now - into Linux. SCO gave IBM 100 days to give them $1 billion or get their AIX licence revoked. At the time it wasn't sure that this had anything to do with Linux.
IBM barely responded.
Then there were 1500 letters of warning sent to corporations running Linux and AIX I assume. At the time it wasn't sure that this had anything to do Linus.
IBM barely responded and the Linux community exploded with some people even calling Darl to come out and have a fist fight. Linus was very calm and welcomed the threat, but commented that the suit didn't have much chance of getting anywhere. Microsft, very publicly, bought a licence from SCO, giving rise to millions of suspicions that MS was behind the whole charade.
Then Darl McBride retracted his statement about sueing Linus. He then started the first of his (in)famous conference calls, claiming ownership to just about everything that had ever been in touch with anything to do with Unix.
Then Novell chimed up saying that no patents or copyrights had been sold to SCO.
SCO claimed that they had been sold, "according to some of our experts"
Then SCO started harping about hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Speculation was rife in the OSS community as to what code exactly was being referred to.
Then there was the code preview and the (in)famous SCO NDA, which in effect didn't allow you to comment on the specifics of the code. Most analysts commented that they didn't see how SCO had a case, with only Microsoft friendly Gartner warning clients about Linux.
Most analysts refused the NDA, with only some analysts taking the bait. After reviewing the code, the situation was by no means any clearer than before, because while the analysts had indeed seen similar code, there was no relaible means of checking when the code had been entered into the SCO Unixware codebase, thereby starting suspicions by thousands of OSS members that SCO had in fact copied Linux code into the SCO code base.
The 100 day period rolls around, with only Darl "the mouth" McBride making threatening sounds about "mapping it all out for IBM and AIX licencees". Darl had failed to notice that IBM covers each and every one of it's cutomers against lawsuits against AIX.
The next week, IBM, in a first real response to the whole theater piece, basically stated that "AIX is ours, it's licence is irrevocable, and that this matter will be sttled in court". McBride, apparently very unsettled by the fact that IBM was not taking him personally seriously, resorted to an attempted injunction and that all time favourite fallback method used by Americans of all colors and creeds when really in deep shit: "Linux is giving the commies, arabs and terrorists high tech because it's free for all"- Appealing to Americans patriotic fervour when one has no other way out, thereby following the likes of other famous personages such as Oliver North, Admiral Pointdexter and Richard Nixon.
The saga continues...
This is better than TV.
In this comedy that SCO is putting out (I am amazed that anyone takes them seriously), the only thing that I am still waiting for is for SCO to sue the Catholic church (and perhaps a few other religions) for misusing SCO's inalienable right to the SOURCE OF LIFE.
The farce, as it stands today, seems to be that SCO is indeed intending to try and poker with every single OS out there today. AIX, Linux, *BSD, OSX and even Microsoft. I'll give McBride one thing, and one thing only: Guts. He has a lot of that to be able to do what he is doing. He is doing a David vs. Goliath even though the end result is almost certainly going to be the death of SCO and multiple private lawsuits against McBride for endangering people's livelyhoods. In fact the reason that there haven't been more countersuits as of yet only shows how few people take SCO seriously. The fact that SCO's stock has gone up shows mainly how little stock traders know about the whole affair.
This is definitely better than TV.
If it works good luck to them. The mere fact that they are doing this is enough to push the space race into higher gear again. In the long run it will be good for the economy and there will definitely be a manned human settlement on the moon within the next two decades.
And hated it. This was in 2000 on a friends old computer with the constrained face of AOL making browsing unusable.
This was also at the time when I was still working for a dotbomb. What makes me so fucking hopping mad when I read this article, and there are literally tens of thousands who feel exactly this way, is how pure, unadulterated GREED fucked up the internet economy, and with it our jobs and our lives.
The moronic waste of invested money on expensive offices, cars, gadgets and toys by people who had no idea what they were actually doing running a company at the age of 26 with no experience and less intelligence is nothing compared to the greed that sucked everything up.
For that and the ensuing years of poverty and joblessness: FUCK THEM!
Most here, obviously in light of the fact that MacIE is such a piece of crap, are more worried by the thought of MS killing Office for OSX. People claim that MS will break support for older versions of Windows Office on Windows because they don't care.
Wrong, they have to care. About 10% of all Office users are still using Office95, about 20% still using Office97, about 40 to 50% still using Office2000. (Office2000 can open OfficeXP documents without many problems). Not that many moved to OfficeXP. A new office that cannot save old Office compatible documents will not get many customers. MS will not willingly shoot themselves in the foot.
Your Office X will remain compatible for a number of years yet, no worry. After that you can switch to OpenOffice.
If they find PC's with Windows simpler to maintain, a statement that I can only believe in if they have no experience with any other OS, then they have an entirely different problem on their hands: The IT staff is incompetent. That the IT staff is incompetent is something I can believe if the district is so poor that they simply took the 6 cheapest "technicians" they could find. This district would do well in replacing the IT staff with people who could, at the least, support Linux. Their costs, since this is the motivating factor, would drop, and they would be independant of being bullied into future upgrades from Redmond.
But sadly they are probably to intellectually challenged to realise this.
crap.o.la
survive yet another desaster in marketing.
If Hollywood in the form of the RIAA and the MPAA carry on the way they are, and continually push the limits to edge so that finally one has to have permission to play any song or watch any movie (I'm being overly melodramatic here) Hollywood will die because consumers generally get irritated with things that are restrictive.
The Microsoft home will almost certainly be an absolute desaster in the first two iterations until Microsoft "get's it", but will then catch on with the mainstream public.
And that is what counts with shareholders. I personally do somehow think of OSX as a "Unix" even though it's not. If Apple doesn't defend themselves they open themselves to being sued by every 2-bit SCO-like company to walk past the store front.
about SCO's claims about SCO code being in the Linux kernel then, since you were so deeply involved in the whole thing?
The "Stop calling us a bunch of fuckheads or we won't speak to you" mentality is very prevalent at Quark. When the mTropolis userbase were trying to get the money together to buy the code from Quark, one of the conditions that Quark stipulated in buying the code is that people would have to "stop making derogatory comments about Quark". Every was in a hate frenzy about Quark fucking up mTropolis the way it did (no aid for the developers, no advertising, nothing and then just killing it) and even though most of us stopped bad mouthing Quark immediately, the effort was in vain, because Quark was more interested in killing the product than letting others show that it was as good as we all thought.
These two come free with plain vanilla Windows although I wouldn't recommend them to beginners as Windows is too schizoid in it's implementation to make these intuitive. I would truly recommend any modern Unix flavour (with the exception of SCO) that has a host of languages on board by default. This enables the kids to pick the language they want, from shell scripts to C++.