I should mention that by asking a judge to put any GPLd code into the public domain, instead of letting it revert to standard copyright, SCO is asking the courts to, effectively, write a new IP law. Current American IP law specifically states that a work cannot enter public domain until either the author's life plus 70 years passes, or until the author explicitly places their work into the public domain. SCO is asking the court to place entire bodies of work into the public domain without the consent of the copyright holders, and long before the legal copyright period expires. I don't think even the original twenty-eight year limit on copyright set over two centuries ago would have expired on GPL works.
Does SCO really know what kind of a Pandora's Box they're opening here?
Except that the brunt of SCO's claim is that Linux, being a Unix derivative, is really the copyright of SCO (having bought the System V copyrights, or so they claim; Novell says otherwise), so the copyright and licenses can only be decided upon and enforced by SCO.
For this claim to have any merit, SCO must prove that:
a) IBM or another party they attack willfully contributed SysV code to the Linux codebase, and it is still there.
b) The licences agreed to by IBM or another party gives SCO the right to any derivative works based on SysV code (many people have stated that the JFS code in Linux, upon which one of SCO's claims is based, most likely came from IBM's clean-room OS/2 implementation).
c) The "derivative works" clause would give SCO control over any other program containing the actual derivative code, regardless of other existing copyrights prior to introduction of, and after removal of, said infringing code.
Linux, after all, is not a Unix "derivative", but a Unix work-alike. It looks like Unix, smells like Unix, but is not a direct branch from other Unices (except, possibly, with code from various BSDs contributed over time). Its tool suite is not from Unix, but from the GNU work-alikes. SCO's seriously reaching here.
I see what you're getting at, but there are now issues beyond the SCO-IBM case. SCO is now, possibly, willfully violating the copyrights of other programmers. This now goes beyond SCO-IBM, and SCO's public statements can now be used in other ways in a potentially far more important case for the GPL. To paraphrase someone's Slashdot sig, they've stepped into penguinshit. On purpose.
Quite frankly, this may not be SCO's goal. Some people have asserted, without evidence but with some inferences, that SCO may already be violating the GPL. By having the licence declared invalid before anyone gets a chance to look at their code (if ever), any discoveries would be legally cleared in a similar way to how the code SCO showed at their stockholders meeting was found to be clean--it was released at a previous point in the past under a GPL-compatible licence. Alternatively, those who think Microsoft is behind the whole thing believe that M$ may be attempting to destroy the GPL, and thus have the right to either raid Linux code, or wipe out a potential competitor without having to get their own hands dirty. Since M$ is working on its own, new CLI for embedded systems and GUI-less systems, eliminating a potential competitor that already does these things would make market penetration very easy, since I suspect many relatively recent Linux converts would go running back into Bill's arms before moving on to the *BSDs. Comfort syndrome and all.
They could care less about selling their own version of Linux, they just want to get paid for the components of Linux they're asserting ownership of.
No, they want to get paid for all of Linux, regardless of how much they may actually own. If they really cared about clearing copyright infringements and getting properly paid, they could have been far more open and cooperative about what particular code is infringing. Instead, they're trying to hold IBM up for big money over code that many people have demonstrated SCO never touched, and may not be able to touch depending on the exact content and scope of various SysV licencing agreements.
SCO is actually claiming in their legal filings that the code would not revert back to the original contributors but instead be placed in the public domain. Therefore, the original contributors would have no legal claim against SCO and the SCOholes would be free to redistribute the now public domain software as they see fit.
Considering how pro-copyright legislatures and courts have been as of late, this would be a stunning reversal. SCO would have to make an unbelieveably persuasive argument that the contributors never intended to exert any control over the code once released, even though distribution under the GPL implies at least some restrictions over distribution.
If SCO tries to argue that the code is already "in the wild", and thus impossible to restrict again, I would argue that the copyright owners, who clearly intended to maintain some influence and control over distribution of the code as is their right under copyright law, can simply collectively state that current holders of the code can either delete or continue to use the existing formerly-GPL'd code, but it cannot be distributed until something is worked out. Ordering copies of copyrighted works destroyed is not unknown; Pepsi managed to win an injunction against the band Negativland over the Dispepsi album, which resulted in a destruction order. Enforcement may be a minor headache, but unfortunately for SCO, there is precedent in this matter. (FIXME: someone check this fact. I'm in a minor rush now, and it may not have been Dispepsi that was hit with the destruction order--but Negativland has been in trouble over copyright issues in the past.)
IANAL, of course. This is Slashdot, we all play lawyers here.
The FSF and the kernel hackers could have a field day with SCO right now. This, along with the aborted attempt to sell binary run-time licences that restrict rights in a similar fashion, may be exactly the mistakes the GNU/Linux copyright owners have been waiting for.
I'm pretty sure SCO's public statements about the invalidity of the GPL, combined with the GPL's own statements that any disagreement over the terms of GPL-code distribution kicks the whole package back to standard copyright and thus makes SCO's own continued distribution illegal as hell, will make this case a laugher. For all of SCO's claims that the GPL is anti-copyright and unconstitutional, the licence itself makes clear that if the conditions can't be fulfilled or the licence is found to be unenforceable, standard copyright law applies--which means, unfortunately for SCO, the code they're trying to distribute is not automatically public domain, and thus they have no right to distribute any code they can't claim direct ownership for. It just means the authors would have to come up with another way to licence their code, either collectively or individually--and SCO would be in no position to make demands.
Not that I'd be able to see much in this land of light pollution, but there are some relatively light-less areas I could reach... if it weren't SO DAMNED CLOUDY.
I don't know about you, but I'm shutting off the computer tonight--just in case.
"Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from a variety of people around the world would be higher-quality than from people who do it professionally?..."
I get two reactions from this quote:
1)...and how many people working under H-1B visas does your company employ, Mr. Ballmer?
2) It sounds like Ballmer is saying people who don't work for a good, market-loving American company can't write good code, and that only people who work for companies and program to pay the mortgage/rent can program well.
Maybe I'm reading too much into the dancing king's quote, but I think he needs to remove his head from his ass. Then again, he's probably rich enough to be set for life once he leaves M$/gets heaved over the side, so what does reality matter to him? That's for little people...
So what does this make BonziBuddy? Friendware? Cuddleware?
LSDware.
Every time I see the damn purple jumpy thing running on someone else's machine, I feel like I'm having an acid flashback. Considering that I've never dropped acid, that's some trick.
Is this the same Indymedia which consists of "stories" posted by raving lunatics that try to pass their most rabid conspiracy theories as legitimate news items?
Sounds kind of like Slashdot.
If that's independent news media, give me my biased greedy coporate controlled news anyday.
1) The open newswire you blast is handled differently on different IMCs. Some sites have an iron-fisted editorial policy, while others are practically free-for-alls. Since the newswire clerks tend to be activists familiar with being ignored and shouted down, the topic of censorship and editorial control is always sensitive. I've argued for a looser editorial policy in some cases, and I've argued for a harder line on crap in others. Read the mailing lists sometime--a lot of people who spend time working on an IMC or two share similar concerns about the unsourced, unsubstantiated crap that some people post as news. Unfortunately, it's hard to argue that such stuff should be immediately hidden when corporate and state media sources post similarly unsourced or half-cocked news with a hardline editorial policy.
2) One person's wacko conspiracy theory is another person's reality. Mind you, this does not excuse some of the greater excesses of the tinfoil hat crowd (the whole "plane didn't hit the Pentagon" crap is so blatantly factless I have to wonder if it's someone's idea of a joke, or a lame COINTELPRO plant, for one example). However, the term "conspiracy theory" seems to be aimed at practically any argument that challenges conventional wisdom, instead of being reserved for the truly raving shit. I actually feel better letting those we view as nutters present their case, so it can be judged on the merits (or lack thereof), instead of having someone else decide for me before the info/crap can even reach my eyes.
3) Some reactionaries like to refer to Indymedia as "Nazimedia" because some of the morons from the neo-Nazi crowd think they've found a place where they can post freely and get away with it. Going back to my first point, many (ok, practically all) IMCs have editorial policies that explicitly ban racism, sexism, or other forms of hatred based upon intrinsic, immutable characteristics. We hate the Nazi fuckers just as much as you do--even more, perhaps. The Jewish-world-conspiracy morons get the same reaction from real progressive and radical activists that I imagine many of you would have upon reading the crap, and if it can't be hidden due to an extremely loose editorial policy, the imbeciles can at least get slapped down in comments.
Finally...
4) The open newswires found on most sites are a fluke of history. The original newswire, on the Seattle IMC, dates from the 1999 "Battle of Seattle". It was intended solely as an experiment in relatively unfiltered, frontline reporting from any observer who could get to a computer. It's rather amazing that many IMCs haven't cracked down and just rid themselves of the often-criticized and -abused open wires, but perhaps it speaks to the committment of most volunteers to ideals of freedom of information and debate.
"You are your own journalist."--English tagline of Indymedia Israel.
The Bank of Canada is the country's central bank, which sets general interest rates and lends money to other banks.
The Royal Bank of Canada is a private corporation that, among other things, sends me pre-approved credit cards and invests in litigous pump-and-dump companies.
So the gang of idiots that keeps sending me "pre-approved" credit cards from a bank I don't have any accounts at is financing a company that wants me to pay for an operating system they had no hand in developing and refuse to prove they have any actual code in?
This needs to get passed along to Canadian tech-heads and Canadian business reporters. I know at least one reporter from a non-commercial, non-state radio station that might eat this up...
Um, actually, if everyone waits, there'll be nobody to play the guinea pigs. Forget what I just said, unenlightened masses -- download immediately, for my benefit!
It's a cute statement, but I predict we will soon see similar howling when Linux 2.6 comes out of testing and prerelease phases. Bugs that can't be triggered by developers' hardware and software configurations probably won't be found and fixed before release. It's harder to rationalize on the Macintosh platform, which arguably is far easier to test extensively due to less variance in hardware configurations compared to operating systems that run on numerous platforms (and, in the case of ubiquitous x86, uncountable configurations), but I imagine it happens. Credit Apple for at least pulling the update once it became clear something was badly b0rked.
Consider this another argument for giving Linux 2.6 a test run and hunting for bugs if you have the time to spare, otherwise you'll just end up doing it later with a "stable" version.:)
(...but at least you can do more than just submit bug reports and hope the hackers give a crud, unlike the fun world of corporate closed-source...)
And CF is becoming pretty standard for adding new capabilities (bluetooth, 890.11, ethernet, etc.) to high-end PDA's. And manufacturers aren't going to replace CF card slots with these much larger cards.
And for more limited uses (RAM cards) there is SD/MMC.
Actually, the SD-size slot can support devices beyond memory cards, if the slot is SDIO. Palm sells a Bluetooth card for its non-Bluetooth PDAs, and SanDisk sells an SD-format 802.11b card. Veo has offered a camera for a few months now that fits in an SD slot; Palm had a mail-in offer for one of these cameras with Tungsten Ts for a couple months.
I have to keep an eye on this stuff, because the store I work at gets a lot of customers whose first statement is "I want a PDA that will let me surf the web," so I need to know how to let them down gently while still letting them know that they can use their PDA wirelessly, just not everywhere for cheap as of yet*.
*Yes, I know about the GPRS-enabled models and getting an aircard for certain iPaqs with certain sleeves. These are not cheap solutions. "Cheap" for most people seems to mean "less than Cdn$400".
12. A general reduction in overall power usage will reduce the amount of resources necessary to build and maintain generating capacity. This would increase the lifetime of all generators and distribution systems, thus reducing maintenance costs, along with the costs of extracting, processing, and using non-renewable and long-term-renewable fuels. This seems to be anathema to a significant fraction of the population, considering how many people went right back to keeping all of the lights on and cranking their air conditioners to "deep freeze" following the August power failure, so this approach has its own drawbacks. Still, imagine the overall savings that would result from a 5% reduction in average load. Imagine how viable small-scale, per-home solar and wind generators would become with even greater reductions in usage.
The top execs are not selling their stock, or else they might draw the fire of the SEC.
Some are, but slowly, so they don't attract attention. I would be interested to time those sales with SCO press releases, especially considering what would have been unrealistically optimistic autosale targets a mere eight months ago, and that SCO has produced nothing but legal paperwork and PR hot air in a long time.
I do hope someone is cataloguing all of these stock tricks, though. I imagine the SEC would be very interested in evidence that a company is engaging in a pump-and-dump scheme, and the execs are getting away with it.
We just dislike the way they try to disparage open source, try to hijack Linux, try to extort money from Linux users, try to pump and dump their stock, try to create a business model using the courts, try to prove they are still relevant by bragging about how much negative press they've generated, etc.
Don't forget "try to destroy the licence half of the software in their new version of UnixWare is distributed under, without which they would have no right to include it freely."
t turned out that the code SCO showed in Vegas originated from 1973. The code has appeared in programming text books already in 70s and it has been released under BSD license several times by many parties, including SCO (then Caldera) itself last year. The code SCO showed, allegedly violating their rights, was therefore in Linux legally.
Not quite, but there's still question as to who originally committed the violation.
The code came from a file named ate_utils.c, part of the IA64 architecture-specific implementation. The file first appeared in a patch sometime in late November, 2001. The code wasn't added to the main kernel until at least early February, 2002, a couple weeks after Caldera released several old Unix codebases (including ones with the code in question) under a BSD-style licence. However, the file with the code does not credit Caldera--the copyright line credits SGI. SCO may have a case for this particular file, but it can be fixed with a simple attribution. I don't think that's worth $699 (soon to be $1399) per machine simply to run, especially on uniprocessor machines that don't make use of this chunk of code at all (it was part of an early ia64 multiproc implementation).
The question becomes one of whether this is from an SGI codebase, who at SGI or elsewhere wrote that code, and where they got that chunk of code from. There may be liability here, but it does not seem to fall with the Linux kernel maintainers--and the infringement, as I said, can be fixed with a simple credit addition to the file as outlined in the Caldera licence.
The code is already gone from the latest versions of the kernel, so the infringing code is obsolete, and it wouldn't be too difficult to wipe it off the net if it came to that.
This would be an easy way for SCO to cripple Linux if there really are "millions" of lines of infringing code. Instead, it looks clear SCO's more interested in getting a cash cow. I think there are several legal arguments that can be used to wipe out SCO's case because they haven't made a good-faith attempt at actually getting any infringing code removed.
You're right--my bad for relying on BitKeeper submission dates alone.
So the question becomes one of whether someone at SGI felt they could legally submit that code, whether they didn't realize that code was not public or under a Free licence, or whether some lazy coder decided to toss it in.
More importantly it was release PRIOR to Caldera relicensing the Ancient Unix code.
Not quite; the Caldera BSD-style licence arrived on Jan. 23, 2002. The earliest date on the file itself is 2002/02/28 17:31:25, in the initial 2.4 patch that added this file. The patches themselves were added on March 9 and 13, 2002.
However, the required copyright notice is not there, so if an SGI employee submitted this file to the Linux IA-64 implementation under the assumption that the UNIX copyright issues had been cleared by the Caldera announcement, that employee blew it by not adding a proper copyright notice. If the file in question, however, comes from SGI's IRIX code, then the issues changes to whether SGI's changes to SysV code become property of the SysV owner under the AT&T licence, or whether SGI managed to get an IBM-like exemption on the derivative works clause.
Either way, it appears to me that the breach of copyright was initially committed by an outside coder, who submitted the code as part of the IA64 implementation to the kernel maintainers without adding proper attribution.
I think some more investigation needs to be done into the origins of the code. It would be very helpful if the individual who initially submitted this code for addition to the kernel spoke up.
Since it looks like this may be a piece of code covered by a BSD-type licence that does not adhere to the licence restrictions (namely, proper copyright notice and attribution), it may be a good idea to start tracking down who is responsible for submitting this patch in the first place.
That particular defunct file in 2.5 was submitted by what looks like a generic HP patch submission address. In 2.4, it came from patch@conectiva, which leads me to believe Marcelo added this as part of a large ia64 patch (he has a conectiva.com address). The code has an SGI copyright notice, so I'd be interested to discover if this piece of code exists in IRIX, and what SGI's Unix contract looks like.
A jbarnes@sgi.com patched the file in question twice before it was deleted in 2.5 by chadt, while a jh@com[helgaas] patched and deleted it in 2.4.
At this point, I would need to know what SGI's Unix contract specifies, and where SGI got this code from in order to rate a copyright notice on the file.
Is that one of the supposed typos that SCO claims are common between SysV and Linux? If this is what they've been showing to the NDA signers, SCO is looking at even bigger trouble.
A patch was submitted by someone from HP, containing a Silicon Graphics, Inc. copyright line, along with at least one chunk of code that is nearly identical to several early BSDs, as part of an SMP implementation, that SCO is claiming IBM donated to the Linux kernel in violation of a contract?
What. The. Fuck. I don't even want to try and figure out the web of licences, contracts, and original sources for this code. Based on other comments, it looks like a basic (crappy) implementation of memory allocation. On top of it all, whoever at SCO prepared the PowerPoint presentation managed to mistype the supposed SysV code.
Several scattered thoughts come to mind, among them "chutzpah", "pump and dump", and "someone's going to jail when this is all over."
Slashdot Mirror
I should mention that by asking a judge to put any GPLd code into the public domain, instead of letting it revert to standard copyright, SCO is asking the courts to, effectively, write a new IP law. Current American IP law specifically states that a work cannot enter public domain until either the author's life plus 70 years passes, or until the author explicitly places their work into the public domain. SCO is asking the court to place entire bodies of work into the public domain without the consent of the copyright holders, and long before the legal copyright period expires. I don't think even the original twenty-eight year limit on copyright set over two centuries ago would have expired on GPL works.
Does SCO really know what kind of a Pandora's Box they're opening here?
Except that the brunt of SCO's claim is that Linux, being a Unix derivative, is really the copyright of SCO (having bought the System V copyrights, or so they claim; Novell says otherwise), so the copyright and licenses can only be decided upon and enforced by SCO.
For this claim to have any merit, SCO must prove that:
a) IBM or another party they attack willfully contributed SysV code to the Linux codebase, and it is still there.
b) The licences agreed to by IBM or another party gives SCO the right to any derivative works based on SysV code (many people have stated that the JFS code in Linux, upon which one of SCO's claims is based, most likely came from IBM's clean-room OS/2 implementation).
c) The "derivative works" clause would give SCO control over any other program containing the actual derivative code, regardless of other existing copyrights prior to introduction of, and after removal of, said infringing code.
Linux, after all, is not a Unix "derivative", but a Unix work-alike. It looks like Unix, smells like Unix, but is not a direct branch from other Unices (except, possibly, with code from various BSDs contributed over time). Its tool suite is not from Unix, but from the GNU work-alikes. SCO's seriously reaching here.
I see what you're getting at, but there are now issues beyond the SCO-IBM case. SCO is now, possibly, willfully violating the copyrights of other programmers. This now goes beyond SCO-IBM, and SCO's public statements can now be used in other ways in a potentially far more important case for the GPL. To paraphrase someone's Slashdot sig, they've stepped into penguinshit. On purpose.
Sure, but isn't this SCO's goal?
Quite frankly, this may not be SCO's goal. Some people have asserted, without evidence but with some inferences, that SCO may already be violating the GPL. By having the licence declared invalid before anyone gets a chance to look at their code (if ever), any discoveries would be legally cleared in a similar way to how the code SCO showed at their stockholders meeting was found to be clean--it was released at a previous point in the past under a GPL-compatible licence. Alternatively, those who think Microsoft is behind the whole thing believe that M$ may be attempting to destroy the GPL, and thus have the right to either raid Linux code, or wipe out a potential competitor without having to get their own hands dirty. Since M$ is working on its own, new CLI for embedded systems and GUI-less systems, eliminating a potential competitor that already does these things would make market penetration very easy, since I suspect many relatively recent Linux converts would go running back into Bill's arms before moving on to the *BSDs. Comfort syndrome and all.
They could care less about selling their own version of Linux, they just want to get paid for the components of Linux they're asserting ownership of.
No, they want to get paid for all of Linux, regardless of how much they may actually own. If they really cared about clearing copyright infringements and getting properly paid, they could have been far more open and cooperative about what particular code is infringing. Instead, they're trying to hold IBM up for big money over code that many people have demonstrated SCO never touched, and may not be able to touch depending on the exact content and scope of various SysV licencing agreements.
SCO is actually claiming in their legal filings that the code would not revert back to the original contributors but instead be placed in the public domain. Therefore, the original contributors would have no legal claim against SCO and the SCOholes would be free to redistribute the now public domain software as they see fit.
Considering how pro-copyright legislatures and courts have been as of late, this would be a stunning reversal. SCO would have to make an unbelieveably persuasive argument that the contributors never intended to exert any control over the code once released, even though distribution under the GPL implies at least some restrictions over distribution.
If SCO tries to argue that the code is already "in the wild", and thus impossible to restrict again, I would argue that the copyright owners, who clearly intended to maintain some influence and control over distribution of the code as is their right under copyright law, can simply collectively state that current holders of the code can either delete or continue to use the existing formerly-GPL'd code, but it cannot be distributed until something is worked out. Ordering copies of copyrighted works destroyed is not unknown; Pepsi managed to win an injunction against the band Negativland over the Dispepsi album, which resulted in a destruction order. Enforcement may be a minor headache, but unfortunately for SCO, there is precedent in this matter. (FIXME: someone check this fact. I'm in a minor rush now, and it may not have been Dispepsi that was hit with the destruction order--but Negativland has been in trouble over copyright issues in the past.)
IANAL, of course. This is Slashdot, we all play lawyers here.
The FSF and the kernel hackers could have a field day with SCO right now. This, along with the aborted attempt to sell binary run-time licences that restrict rights in a similar fashion, may be exactly the mistakes the GNU/Linux copyright owners have been waiting for.
I'm pretty sure SCO's public statements about the invalidity of the GPL, combined with the GPL's own statements that any disagreement over the terms of GPL-code distribution kicks the whole package back to standard copyright and thus makes SCO's own continued distribution illegal as hell, will make this case a laugher. For all of SCO's claims that the GPL is anti-copyright and unconstitutional, the licence itself makes clear that if the conditions can't be fulfilled or the licence is found to be unenforceable, standard copyright law applies--which means, unfortunately for SCO, the code they're trying to distribute is not automatically public domain, and thus they have no right to distribute any code they can't claim direct ownership for. It just means the authors would have to come up with another way to licence their code, either collectively or individually--and SCO would be in no position to make demands.
Not that I'd be able to see much in this land of light pollution, but there are some relatively light-less areas I could reach... if it weren't SO DAMNED CLOUDY.
I don't know about you, but I'm shutting off the computer tonight--just in case.
From the Groklaw article, quoting Steve Ballmer:
..."
...and how many people working under H-1B visas does your company employ, Mr. Ballmer?
"Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from a variety of people around the world would be higher-quality than from people who do it professionally?
I get two reactions from this quote:
1)
2) It sounds like Ballmer is saying people who don't work for a good, market-loving American company can't write good code, and that only people who work for companies and program to pay the mortgage/rent can program well.
Maybe I'm reading too much into the dancing king's quote, but I think he needs to remove his head from his ass. Then again, he's probably rich enough to be set for life once he leaves M$/gets heaved over the side, so what does reality matter to him? That's for little people...
So what does this make BonziBuddy? Friendware? Cuddleware?
LSDware.
Every time I see the damn purple jumpy thing running on someone else's machine, I feel like I'm having an acid flashback. Considering that I've never dropped acid, that's some trick.
I prefer to call Gator "something that can't install itself on my system."
*hugs Galeon*
Is this the same Indymedia which consists of "stories" posted by raving lunatics that try to pass their most rabid conspiracy theories as legitimate news items?
Sounds kind of like Slashdot.
If that's independent news media, give me my biased greedy coporate controlled news anyday.
1) The open newswire you blast is handled differently on different IMCs. Some sites have an iron-fisted editorial policy, while others are practically free-for-alls. Since the newswire clerks tend to be activists familiar with being ignored and shouted down, the topic of censorship and editorial control is always sensitive. I've argued for a looser editorial policy in some cases, and I've argued for a harder line on crap in others. Read the mailing lists sometime--a lot of people who spend time working on an IMC or two share similar concerns about the unsourced, unsubstantiated crap that some people post as news. Unfortunately, it's hard to argue that such stuff should be immediately hidden when corporate and state media sources post similarly unsourced or half-cocked news with a hardline editorial policy.
2) One person's wacko conspiracy theory is another person's reality. Mind you, this does not excuse some of the greater excesses of the tinfoil hat crowd (the whole "plane didn't hit the Pentagon" crap is so blatantly factless I have to wonder if it's someone's idea of a joke, or a lame COINTELPRO plant, for one example). However, the term "conspiracy theory" seems to be aimed at practically any argument that challenges conventional wisdom, instead of being reserved for the truly raving shit. I actually feel better letting those we view as nutters present their case, so it can be judged on the merits (or lack thereof), instead of having someone else decide for me before the info/crap can even reach my eyes.
3) Some reactionaries like to refer to Indymedia as "Nazimedia" because some of the morons from the neo-Nazi crowd think they've found a place where they can post freely and get away with it. Going back to my first point, many (ok, practically all) IMCs have editorial policies that explicitly ban racism, sexism, or other forms of hatred based upon intrinsic, immutable characteristics. We hate the Nazi fuckers just as much as you do--even more, perhaps. The Jewish-world-conspiracy morons get the same reaction from real progressive and radical activists that I imagine many of you would have upon reading the crap, and if it can't be hidden due to an extremely loose editorial policy, the imbeciles can at least get slapped down in comments.
Finally...
4) The open newswires found on most sites are a fluke of history. The original newswire, on the Seattle IMC, dates from the 1999 "Battle of Seattle". It was intended solely as an experiment in relatively unfiltered, frontline reporting from any observer who could get to a computer. It's rather amazing that many IMCs haven't cracked down and just rid themselves of the often-criticized and -abused open wires, but perhaps it speaks to the committment of most volunteers to ideals of freedom of information and debate.
"You are your own journalist."--English tagline of Indymedia Israel.
Be careful.
The Bank of Canada is the country's central bank, which sets general interest rates and lends money to other banks.
The Royal Bank of Canada is a private corporation that, among other things, sends me pre-approved credit cards and invests in litigous pump-and-dump companies.
So the gang of idiots that keeps sending me "pre-approved" credit cards from a bank I don't have any accounts at is financing a company that wants me to pay for an operating system they had no hand in developing and refuse to prove they have any actual code in?
This needs to get passed along to Canadian tech-heads and Canadian business reporters. I know at least one reporter from a non-commercial, non-state radio station that might eat this up...
You can take this tenth planet and stick it where the sun don't shine.
Um, actually, if everyone waits, there'll be nobody to play the guinea pigs. Forget what I just said, unenlightened masses -- download immediately, for my benefit!
It's a cute statement, but I predict we will soon see similar howling when Linux 2.6 comes out of testing and prerelease phases. Bugs that can't be triggered by developers' hardware and software configurations probably won't be found and fixed before release. It's harder to rationalize on the Macintosh platform, which arguably is far easier to test extensively due to less variance in hardware configurations compared to operating systems that run on numerous platforms (and, in the case of ubiquitous x86, uncountable configurations), but I imagine it happens. Credit Apple for at least pulling the update once it became clear something was badly b0rked.
Consider this another argument for giving Linux 2.6 a test run and hunting for bugs if you have the time to spare, otherwise you'll just end up doing it later with a "stable" version.:)
(...but at least you can do more than just submit bug reports and hope the hackers give a crud, unlike the fun world of corporate closed-source...)
And CF is becoming pretty standard for adding new capabilities (bluetooth, 890.11, ethernet, etc.) to high-end PDA's. And manufacturers aren't going to replace CF card slots with these much larger cards.
And for more limited uses (RAM cards) there is SD/MMC.
Actually, the SD-size slot can support devices beyond memory cards, if the slot is SDIO. Palm sells a Bluetooth card for its non-Bluetooth PDAs, and SanDisk sells an SD-format 802.11b card. Veo has offered a camera for a few months now that fits in an SD slot; Palm had a mail-in offer for one of these cameras with Tungsten Ts for a couple months.
I have to keep an eye on this stuff, because the store I work at gets a lot of customers whose first statement is "I want a PDA that will let me surf the web," so I need to know how to let them down gently while still letting them know that they can use their PDA wirelessly, just not everywhere for cheap as of yet*.
*Yes, I know about the GPRS-enabled models and getting an aircard for certain iPaqs with certain sleeves. These are not cheap solutions. "Cheap" for most people seems to mean "less than Cdn$400".
12. A general reduction in overall power usage will reduce the amount of resources necessary to build and maintain generating capacity. This would increase the lifetime of all generators and distribution systems, thus reducing maintenance costs, along with the costs of extracting, processing, and using non-renewable and long-term-renewable fuels. This seems to be anathema to a significant fraction of the population, considering how many people went right back to keeping all of the lights on and cranking their air conditioners to "deep freeze" following the August power failure, so this approach has its own drawbacks. Still, imagine the overall savings that would result from a 5% reduction in average load. Imagine how viable small-scale, per-home solar and wind generators would become with even greater reductions in usage.
A man can dream...
The top execs are not selling their stock, or else they might draw the fire of the SEC.
Some are, but slowly, so they don't attract attention. I would be interested to time those sales with SCO press releases, especially considering what would have been unrealistically optimistic autosale targets a mere eight months ago, and that SCO has produced nothing but legal paperwork and PR hot air in a long time.
I do hope someone is cataloguing all of these stock tricks, though. I imagine the SEC would be very interested in evidence that a company is engaging in a pump-and-dump scheme, and the execs are getting away with it.
We just dislike the way they try to disparage open source, try to hijack Linux, try to extort money from Linux users, try to pump and dump their stock, try to create a business model using the courts, try to prove they are still relevant by bragging about how much negative press they've generated, etc.
Don't forget "try to destroy the licence half of the software in their new version of UnixWare is distributed under, without which they would have no right to include it freely."
Fucking putzes. Instant karma will get them.
t turned out that the code SCO showed in Vegas originated from 1973. The code has appeared in programming text books already in 70s and it has been released under BSD license several times by many parties, including SCO (then Caldera) itself last year. The code SCO showed, allegedly violating their rights, was therefore in Linux legally.
Not quite, but there's still question as to who originally committed the violation.
The code came from a file named ate_utils.c, part of the IA64 architecture-specific implementation. The file first appeared in a patch sometime in late November, 2001. The code wasn't added to the main kernel until at least early February, 2002, a couple weeks after Caldera released several old Unix codebases (including ones with the code in question) under a BSD-style licence. However, the file with the code does not credit Caldera--the copyright line credits SGI. SCO may have a case for this particular file, but it can be fixed with a simple attribution. I don't think that's worth $699 (soon to be $1399) per machine simply to run, especially on uniprocessor machines that don't make use of this chunk of code at all (it was part of an early ia64 multiproc implementation).
The question becomes one of whether this is from an SGI codebase, who at SGI or elsewhere wrote that code, and where they got that chunk of code from. There may be liability here, but it does not seem to fall with the Linux kernel maintainers--and the infringement, as I said, can be fixed with a simple credit addition to the file as outlined in the Caldera licence.
The code is already gone from the latest versions of the kernel, so the infringing code is obsolete, and it wouldn't be too difficult to wipe it off the net if it came to that.
This would be an easy way for SCO to cripple Linux if there really are "millions" of lines of infringing code. Instead, it looks clear SCO's more interested in getting a cash cow. I think there are several legal arguments that can be used to wipe out SCO's case because they haven't made a good-faith attempt at actually getting any infringing code removed.
You're right--my bad for relying on BitKeeper submission dates alone.
So the question becomes one of whether someone at SGI felt they could legally submit that code, whether they didn't realize that code was not public or under a Free licence, or whether some lazy coder decided to toss it in.
More importantly it was release PRIOR to Caldera relicensing the Ancient Unix code.
Not quite; the Caldera BSD-style licence arrived on Jan. 23, 2002. The earliest date on the file itself is 2002/02/28 17:31:25, in the initial 2.4 patch that added this file. The patches themselves were added on March 9 and 13, 2002.
2.4 initial patch.
2.5 initial patch.
However, the required copyright notice is not there, so if an SGI employee submitted this file to the Linux IA-64 implementation under the assumption that the UNIX copyright issues had been cleared by the Caldera announcement, that employee blew it by not adding a proper copyright notice. If the file in question, however, comes from SGI's IRIX code, then the issues changes to whether SGI's changes to SysV code become property of the SysV owner under the AT&T licence, or whether SGI managed to get an IBM-like exemption on the derivative works clause.
Either way, it appears to me that the breach of copyright was initially committed by an outside coder, who submitted the code as part of the IA64 implementation to the kernel maintainers without adding proper attribution.
I think some more investigation needs to be done into the origins of the code. It would be very helpful if the individual who initially submitted this code for addition to the kernel spoke up.
Since it looks like this may be a piece of code covered by a BSD-type licence that does not adhere to the licence restrictions (namely, proper copyright notice and attribution), it may be a good idea to start tracking down who is responsible for submitting this patch in the first place.
The file is in 2.4.21, but got dumped about eight weeks ago.
That particular defunct file in 2.5 was submitted by what looks like a generic HP patch submission address. In 2.4, it came from patch@conectiva, which leads me to believe Marcelo added this as part of a large ia64 patch (he has a conectiva.com address). The code has an SGI copyright notice, so I'd be interested to discover if this piece of code exists in IRIX, and what SGI's Unix contract looks like.
A jbarnes@sgi.com patched the file in question twice before it was deleted in 2.5 by chadt, while a jh@com[helgaas] patched and deleted it in 2.4.
At this point, I would need to know what SGI's Unix contract specifies, and where SGI got this code from in order to rate a copyright notice on the file.
Is that one of the supposed typos that SCO claims are common between SysV and Linux? If this is what they've been showing to the NDA signers, SCO is looking at even bigger trouble.
Short that stock, baby, short that stock...
Judge: The foreman will pass the verdict to the bailiff.
[Lionel Hutz hands him something]
Judge: This verdict is written on a cocktail napkin. And it still says guilty. And guilty is spelled wrong!
So let me get this straight.
A patch was submitted by someone from HP, containing a Silicon Graphics, Inc. copyright line, along with at least one chunk of code that is nearly identical to several early BSDs, as part of an SMP implementation, that SCO is claiming IBM donated to the Linux kernel in violation of a contract?
What. The. Fuck. I don't even want to try and figure out the web of licences, contracts, and original sources for this code. Based on other comments, it looks like a basic (crappy) implementation of memory allocation. On top of it all, whoever at SCO prepared the PowerPoint presentation managed to mistype the supposed SysV code.
Several scattered thoughts come to mind, among them "chutzpah", "pump and dump", and "someone's going to jail when this is all over."