Have you looked at deanforamerica.com? I'd say that site is a good indicator of Internet-awareness. The man has a *blog*, for crying out loud! [...] i long for the day when the *president* writes a daily weblog.
Unless your university was subcontracting it's email services to Hotmail and Yahoo, there is no way they'd know you were BCC'ing anyone, because (by definition), BCCs aren't seen by the recipient (either the user or mailserver.)
While it's true that the BCC: header isn't included in the body of the email sent, the mail server can compare the recipients specified by the RCPT TO commands with those listed in the To: and CC: headers, and infer that those not listed were BCCed. And some mail servers will insert a BCC: header in the received message if the recipient isn't listed in the To: or CC: headers.
An interesting point would be: shuold government fund GPL-licensed software? Only OSS software companies may benefit from it.
Quoting the old Microsoft myth, eh? What keeps non-software companies out there from benefiting from the use of GPL-licensed and other OSS software? What prevents a non-OSS software company from aggregating GPL-licensed and other OSS software with their own closed source products, and benefiting from the combination? The only lack of benefit for a non-OSS software company from GPL-licensed and other OSS software is that they may not be able to incorporate the code directly into their own products. But why should a non-OSS software company have the right to take code developed with taxpayer funding, incorporate it into closed-source software, then turn around and ask the taxpayer to pay again for code they've already paid for?
If the contractor is essentially doing government work that a government employee could have done, it's not copyrightable.
But that's a very vague standard. I was assigned to a USAF Research Lab where we doing R&D on computerized training. One of the projects was primarily developed by contractors who worked at the lab, with the researchers who were DoD civilians. Could the work have been done by government employees? Sure - almost all of the contractors were hired by the contracting company specifically for this contract, with the involvement of the USAF contract manager. They could have been hired as DoD civilians and done the exact same work (leaving aside questions of the programmers being willing to work on DoD pay scales, and the lab being willing to hire employees who would be much more difficult to let go than were the contractors). But because it was done under contract, the copyright could be transferred by the contractor to the USAF, which later licensed the software to a educational software company for them to enhance and sell commercially.
If the Government develops software, it's public domain since the Government is not allowed to hold copyrights. Sometimes the Government holds software as a state secret, but still cannot hold the copyright.
That's not the case. It used to be that the US Government could not create software under copyright (I believe that has changed, but I'm not entirely certain), but it could hold copyrights transferred to it. As a result, software would be developed by a contractor, and the contract would stipulate that the copyright would be transferred to the government.
And long before it became fashionable, too. Perhaps the first government sponsored project under the Free Software moniker was when the USAF awarded a contract to NYU to create a compiler to assist the Ada 9x standardization process, and required that it be placed under the GNU GPL (at least, it's the first one noted here). The commercial publishers of Ada compilers made what should now be a familiar complaint - that it was unfair for the government to fund a product which would compete with, and reduce the market for, their products.
The ownership dispute doesn't have anything to do with the GPL. SCO is claiming that it owns code written by IBM as the result of the AT&T Unix license, so if anything, it's the AT&T license that's problematic, not the GPL.
You've seen some code, but have you been able to investigate the history of the code, to verify that SCO is the original owner of the code, rather than another owner contributing the same code to SCO and Linux, without giving up their own rights to it? Did SCO discuss how they are going to argue that their agreement under the GPL to not assert claims on the code they distributed was not binding? I doubt it. And as for Linux being kicked back four or five years in development? Hardly. SCO isn't even claiming that the 2.3.x kernels infringe, which implies that the early 2.4.x kernels don't, so even if SCO does win, you're talking about a limited portion of the kernel being knocked back a year or two at most.
A formal separation doesn't mean that they operate in isolation from each other. Judges need to remain on reasonable terms with the executive and legislative branches if they hope to be appointed to higher levels of the judiciary.
The buying of Santa Cruz Operation by Caldera follows their previous "buy-to-sue" pattern of buying DR-DOS to sue Microsoft.
Caldera never made much of an attempt to sell DR-DOS. On the other hand, Caldera really tried to sell their Linux distribution to the SCO customers that they acquired. I remember thinking at the time, though, that SCO had sold Caldera a pig in a poke. I was involved in moving an Air Force research program from SCO Open DeskTop to Linux in 1994-5, so by the time SCO sold Unix to Caldera, it was clear to me that ODT (and UnixWare, which I had evaluated when it was put out by Novell) was on its last legs.
Caldera were not doing too well and even tried bringing out a "Per Seat" licensing model for their Linux distro.
That was part of Caldera from the beginning (again, it was something I evaluated when looking for a replacement for SCO ODT), because one of their original goals was to make a Linux distribution that played well with NetWare, and they did that with licensed code from Novell.
I'd speculate they purchased the Unix rights and changed their name to SCO as part of this whole campaign.
I can believe that changing their name is part of the lawsuit plan, but I don't think that filing suit was their intent when they purchased the SCO Unix properties. Caldera started by trying to sell a Linux with a per-seat licensing model. When that was a clear failure, they attempted to acquire customers who were used to per-seat licensing from SCO, and sell Caldera Linux to those customers. When that failed, the only thing left was lawsuits.
Right, what we need is a competent judge, who can see that SCO's claims are nonsense.
That depends upon what you mean by competent, or, more precisely, what field you want the judge to be competent in. What I think is needed in these cases are judges who are competent in case law and in running trials, not ones who are (who think that they are) competent in technology. A judge who is technically competent but is legally lacking, like Thomas Penfield Jackson, will wind up overturned for mishandling the case. The technical competence has to come from the expert witnesses, who also need to be competent communicators.
Just because RH will get the docs doesn't mean they'll be free to publish them.
Agreed. SCO will probably attempt to have any source code they have to provide placed under seal, which would prevent Red Hat from disclosing it. I don't know how likely it would be that SCO would succeed at that, or if having it placed under seal would prevent Red Had from submitting patches which would remove any sealed code from Open Source projects.
SCO's client base will get offers to move over to Linux for free and share price will free-fall.
Which, it appeared to me, was why SCO sold Unix to Caldera in the first place. SCO was already seeing that UnixWare and Open Desktop were being replaced by Linux, and found a sucker in Caldera to sell to. When Caldera started trying to switch the SCO customers from UW and ODT to Linux, they made matters worse, because they were telling the SCO customers that Linux was as suitable for their needs as UW and ODT, but they couldn't give them a good reason for paying Caldera a per-seat license (because the Caldera Linux distribution included some code licensed on a per-seat basis, the distribution as a whole couldn't be freely copied), as opposed to a freely-copyable distribution.
Nah, man, you've got it all backwards. Microsoft is the perfect icon for capitalist greed, whereas those pinko commie bastards over at IBM are just *giving* away the software.
Or it could be framed as central control (USSR/Microsoft) versus (relative) freedom (USA/IBM). You can find parallels in either direction - the important parallel is the notion of large powers using smaller proxies to fight their battles. Although, in a sense, IBM is really a proxy here as well. Microsoft's battle isn't really against IBM, but against Linux - IBM is only a (large) proxy for Linux.
I mean seriously what's the deal? It seems like they're mostly just speculating on the outcome of this trial thing..
Of course. While in the long run stock values may be related to business fundamentals, short term market fluctuations are are largely about perceptions. If SCO is perceived as having a strong case, their stock price will rise. If they're perceived as having a weak case, it will drop.
While we may disagree with the DMCA, they do have obligations under the law to comply with the subpeona.
Only if the subpoena was issued legally.
Frankly, the whole "privacy" issue is a no go with me. If they are violating copyright, it is not a privacy issue.
Perhaps, but RIAA is only asserting that the users have violated copyright. Whether or not an assertion by one party is sufficient cause to violate the privacy of others is a legitimate question.
That's like saying that you can't release the info of a scam artists because of privacy issues. If there is a legitimate legal reason for the information to be needed, then it needs to be released. A subpoena says there is a legal need for the information.
But saying that there is a legal need for the information doesn't mean that there is a legal need for that information.
You can argue the rules of giving out these subpoenas (and I would agree they are given out to easily probably), but saying you can;t honor a subpoena because of "privacy" issues is a no-go.
But you can challenge a subpoena in court for being improper or overbroad before honoring it. That's what SBC is doing.
If the court has need of this information, then you need to give it, the privacy matter is moot, because it has been decided there is at least a good chance they have broken the law (even if the law is a crappy one).
Just because a court has "need" of information doesn't mean that the court has an unfettered right to it. For example, a court may "need" the membership list of an organization, but it can't have it without neeting a fairly high burden of proof.
Fighting the subpoena for "privacy" is the wrong battle.
Well, I'm glad that you're not SBC's legal counsel.
It's for spam investigations and tracking individual user statistics.
And why do you need individual user statistics?
How else would you be able to determine how much utilization is on your servers? Not just an overall, but which groups are used and how often?
By logging which groups are used, and how often. That doesn't require logging who was doing the access.
Without that type of information, an admin who only follows the playstation2 might think the xbox groups are not being used by his customers enough to replicate the feed anymore. He'll then delete the group from the servers and have 700-800 users really pissed off. With user statistics assembled from logs, he'll know clearly that the demand for the group is high enough with his local users to keep it.
But do you need to know how many users are accessing the group, or do you need to know how many times articles from the group are accessed, compared to how many articles are in the group?Also, if you are a software publisher and someone uploaded a software application you spent the last 4 years working on to alt.binaries.warez.whatever and you want to locate the person to file a suit against them. You'd be completely powerless without some kind of data trail in place.
And posting something on a newsgroup is a different ball of wax than reading something from a newsgroup. It's not unreasonable to ensure that a newsgroup posting made to your server accurately identifies the account being used to make the post.
It does not require a law for a customer or other ISP to take you to court and sue you for a large sum of money for not being responsible with your data.
For instance, you want to cancel a user's account for abuse of your news servers. Well, you cancel their account without NNTP logs and you will have your butt served to you in court.
But this doesn't require logging what newsgroups they accessed. If the abuse is spamming newsgroups, you have logs of posts. If the abuse is exceeding download limits, then you log the sizes of the articles being retrieved.
Another example would be a user giving his account information out to 15 other people, but not wanting to be billed for the concurrent logins (phone lines cost money!). You can't really do much without clear evidence before reprimanding or removing the user from your service.
And that requires logging when the account was accessed, not what the user did while the account was accessed.
Finally, say you need FBI assistance because someone is signing up for multiple accounts with stolen credit cards for the purpose of spamming or other devious activities. It makes investigators happy when you can produce dates, times, phone numbers, mail records, etc.
And it's your job to make investigators happy?
You need to wake up and think more like an american here.
And now we have the last refuge of a scoundrel.
The most common use of data collected by an ISP is used to shut down spammers and DoS monkies. How do you suppose they are going to do this without any information?
Why do you need to log what newsgroups a user accessed (read) to do this?
You can't have your cake and eat it too, especially when you consider everything you do on the 'net involves someone else's hardware.
That's hardware that the customer is paying for the use of.
I hope this educates you on the matter, as rambling as my grammar is this morning.:)
Yes, it clearly shows that you are more than willing to give up your liberty for temporary security. Personally, I don't like living in a police state where people like you believe that it's their job to make the police happy.
Equating the "please think of the children card" to a temper tantrum does not invalidate its importance.
"Please think of the children" is the next-to-last refuge of a scoundrel. It's used by someone who can't logically defend their position, so they instead make it appear that their opponents are attacking children.
> So you woudl actually prefer that the scumbag was > still on the lose, right?
It sounds like the ones in uniform still are on the loose. I think that it should take a little more evidence than simply being in the vicinity of a crime before the police start shadowing someone.
Except that SCO II is the inheritor of the Death Star legacy, from AT&T through Novell and SCO I. SCO II is a partially built, non-operational Death Star being approached by a fleet of X-Wing and Y-Wing IBM patent fighters.
Slashdot Mirror
No bet - they don't.
Here's a link to the column which does not require registration.
And long before it became fashionable, too. Perhaps the first government sponsored project under the Free Software moniker was when the USAF awarded a contract to NYU to create a compiler to assist the Ada 9x standardization process, and required that it be placed under the GNU GPL (at least, it's the first one noted here). The commercial publishers of Ada compilers made what should now be a familiar complaint - that it was unfair for the government to fund a product which would compete with, and reduce the market for, their products.
The ownership dispute doesn't have anything to do with the GPL. SCO is claiming that it owns code written by IBM as the result of the AT&T Unix license, so if anything, it's the AT&T license that's problematic, not the GPL.
You've seen some code, but have you been able to investigate the history of the code, to verify that SCO is the original owner of the code, rather than another owner contributing the same code to SCO and Linux, without giving up their own rights to it? Did SCO discuss how they are going to argue that their agreement under the GPL to not assert claims on the code they distributed was not binding? I doubt it. And as for Linux being kicked back four or five years in development? Hardly. SCO isn't even claiming that the 2.3.x kernels infringe, which implies that the early 2.4.x kernels don't, so even if SCO does win, you're talking about a limited portion of the kernel being knocked back a year or two at most.
A formal separation doesn't mean that they operate in isolation from each other. Judges need to remain on reasonable terms with the executive and legislative branches if they hope to be appointed to higher levels of the judiciary.
> So you woudl actually prefer that the scumbag was
> still on the lose, right?
It sounds like the ones in uniform still are on the loose. I think that it should take a little more evidence than simply being in the vicinity of a crime before the police start shadowing someone.
Except that SCO II is the inheritor of the Death Star legacy, from AT&T through Novell and SCO I. SCO II is a partially built, non-operational Death Star being approached by a fleet of X-Wing and Y-Wing IBM patent fighters.