You're an idiot. Any country with a few dozen earth movers can bury shit so deep it can't be detected. In a couple of days. That's right, a couple of days.
They can, of course, dig them up in the same timescale. The only things Iraq appears to have burried were some aircraft. Which were found looking like they had come from a junkyard. An unusable weapon is of no military value at all.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands. The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war.
Hussein always was such a person. Just that the US didn't care much about it up until the point Iraq invaded Kuwait. Indeed they were happy cheering him on when Iraq invaded Iraq.
Now countries which see themselves as threatened by the US know that behaving rationally will get them nowhere.
Disarming yourself in the face of an ememy is hardly rational...
The way to go is to accumulate nukes and point them at an ally of the US.
Actual weapons, you can't shoot very well with research products. As well as the ability to disable invading troops en-mass. Combined with being able to shoot down warplanes and sink warships.
At the time, I thought the N Koreans were insane. It took time to work out what they were up to.
Even though the policy is known as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) it is perfectly sane and based on historical precedent.
Apparently a VERY large percentage of the Iranian people are in favor of normalizing relations with the US.
It wouldn't suprise me if a lot of people throughout the entire region of the "Middle East" would want normal diplomatic relations with the US. (Along with other countries, e.g. Cuba.) Problem is that the US's relationship with this part of the world hasn't been "normal" for a long time.
(Up until recently that couldn't be determined very well, given that the regime was still run by people heavily invested in the immediately-post-Shah anti-American rhetoric.
It can't be easy for the Iranians to forget, let alone forgive, that the Shah was a tyrant supported by the US. In order to install him the US (together with the UK) obliterated a democratic Iranian government.
I've been watching Iran long enough to know that the parent is correct. the 65%+ of the population who are under 30 have no use for their government at all. The joke at the beginning of the Iraq war was "Good, we're next."
Those over 30 can probably remember what it's like to live under a US backed tyrany. Whatever they may think of the current Iranian government they might not want to put the clock back to the 1960's & 1970's either.
Do they really don't notice what it's all about. This is not just about Linux and OSS any longer. If SCO succeeds with their far reaching definition of derivative works than this would crush all US based software develoment.
Why should such a ruling be specific to software? It could put RIAA/MPAA members out of business PDQ.
Any remote root patch that doesn't get installed in a timely matter is the fault of the IT "dudes." The head IT "dude" needs to be convinced that the risk of patching far outweighs the costs that come with cleaning up a virus/worm.
There is also a risk that applying the patch could break something, this also needs to be considered.
End users in most environments should not have the privileges that would allow them to infect themselves. Windows machines can be secured while still allowing users to get work done. Doing so requires a competent administrator.
It depends what they are required to run. There is plenty of Windows software around where giving the user privs is the easiest way to get it to work. Possibly even the only thing the vendor recommends.
It would be kind of hard to offer guarentees on something the recipient can modify to their heart's content. With GPL software it is your job to check that it does what it needs to or make it do the required task(s). Since you actually have the source this is possible. With proprietary software such a task is unlikely to be possible. For starters you don't even know what is "in the box"...
At Dungeness B nuclear power station in the UK they still run the reactor control systems with BBC B computers. The reason is that the operating system and control code is so small (ca. 32KB) that the engineers have gone through it by hand and manually checked every possible scenario.
The hardware is also well documented. The circuit diagram for the entire machine being around one page of A3.
Hasn't SCO said something along the lines of a license not being valid unless it's a physically signed paper document?
Unless SCO can actually dig up a valid law which states this then they would probably be laughed out of court. IIRC there is case law for an email being considered a "signed document".
If they haven't accepted the terms in the GPL, they may need to make a payment to obtain a valid license.
Only if that is what the copyright holder(s) request.
They may also need to get permission from a _lot_ of people.
This is what they actually need, permission from the copyright holder(s) to distribute. It's entirely up to the copyright holder what terms apply to this permission. The GPL effectivly stating that permission is granted subject to the stated conditions. Current copyright laws give copyright holders a great deal of choice in how they can licence their works.
If you want to modify or distribute it, you must accept and agree to the GPL since it is copyrighted code.
You don't need to agree to the GPL to modify GPL software. You only need to agree to the GPL to distribute a version you have modified. Nothing stops anyone taking a GPLed program, modifying it and using it personally. (Where "personally" applies to any legal "person".)
If you flately state that the GPL is invalid or void, then you are implying that you do not agree with it, thus you can't distribute any software under that license. There is nothing else that gives you the authority to distribute it, so you must cease distributing it now. No current customer, no potential customer, no one. If you don't secure a seperate license deal with all the copyright holders, you are violating copyright laws.
Also anyone you may have supplied GPL code to is covered only by the GPL. They are free to ignore any other licence you may have attempted to place on them.
If SCO is distributing Samba, they must obtain a license to use it in some form or another. If SCO disclaims the GPL license, they have no other right to use the software.
They can still use Samba however they like without agreeing to the GPL. What they cannot do is distribute it regardless of if that distribution is selling, embedding in some other product, making it available for download on a SCO server, possibly even if the company sells part of itself/splits.
At their discretion, the Samba team can choose to offer SCO the right to use Samba under a different, for profit license. This defeats the purpose of Open Source ideals in a big way.
Nothing stops the Samba Team from offering alternative licences which are still "open source".
To say the GPL is invalid is to say all software EULA's are invalid.
The GPL is not an EULA. Whilst invalidating the GPL might affect similar licences (in which case expect the likes of the RIAA and MPAA to come in to help defend the GPL), it would have no effect on EULA's.
The difference is that the customer does the choosing. MySQL doesn't choose who will get what licence, the customer chooses which licence they wish to use.
MySQL, as copyright holder, indicates which licences they offer as "standard options", as does the Samba Team. If SCO (or anyone else) want a different licence then they need to explicitally ask. The only difference is that MySQL offer a some sort of pay for licence as a standard option whereas the Samba Team don't.
From www.mysql.com: Commercial licenses for either version can also be purchased from MySQL AB, for those who don't wish to be bound by the LGPL or GPL. For more information on licensing MySQL Connector/J, please contact us. MySQL AB also offers commercial support for MySQL Connector/J.
How is that different from licensing Samba to SCO to distribute it in a non-GPL way?
AFAIK the Samba Team are not offering a non GPL distribution licence. Even if they did it still may not be to SCO's liking.
If the Samba team sues SCO for copyright reasons, then they would basically be saying that the GPL is meaningless, because it specifically GRANTS the right to copy, modify and distribute Samba.
The GPL grants those permissions conditionally. If SCO reject the GPL then it has no permission from the copyright holders to distribute the program.
You must understand that "legal thinking" is different than 'logical thinking" and that SCO's claims are related to copyright of derivative works which "may" be interpreted by courts to be a symmetrical issue to the GPL's viral copyright.
The GPL is not "viral" it is copyright law which is "viral". Effectivly SCO are claiming that their "virus" makes them the copyright holder of anything which is Unix like.
This is where it could get complicated. Does acceptance of the GPL depend on the company's statements or actions? SCO has made public statements that they do not accept the GPL. That could terminate their rights, but if they distribute source for Samba
This would be an open and shut case of copyright infringement on SCO's part.
or point users to samba.org to download source, would that keep them legal under the GPL?
The GPL wouldn't be an issue for SCO here, since SCO would not be distributing Samba in such a case. Simply telling people where to find an "authorised distributor".
The question now is, does this give SAMBA a right to pull their license? I don't believe it does, or that such a rule would be productive. Unless the GPL is written in such a way that violating one piece of GPL'ed software revokes distribution rights of *all* GPL'ed software, Samba cannot revoke the GPL on Samba.
They don't need to, not that there is really any provision for revoking the GPL. If SCO rejects the GPL then they cannot distribute GPL software. Unless they get some alternative permission from the copyright holder(s).
The reason is, they can say whatever they want about the GPL, just as I can stand outside Microsoft's campus with leaflets about why EULAs may not be legally enforceable. What I'm doing isn't violating the EULA of any software I have.
The GPL is not an EULA.
By the same reasoning, until SCO actually violates the GPL with regards to Samba software, I think they're legal.
Making a public statement that they don't agree to the GPL then distributing GPL software would be copyright infringement on their part. As soon as SCO distributes a single copy of Samba, in any way, they become "software pirates".
The GPL states you have the right to copy and distribute MY software that I own the copyright to under certain conditions. I have chosen to allow those conditions. Unless those conditions are unresonable, under established copyright law, that IS allowed.
Even if those conditions were found to be unreasonable, the default under copyright law, is that a third party needs the copyright holder's permission to create and distribute copies. Thus if SCO were to find some way to invalidate the GPL they would be effectivly admitting to "software piracy".
My understanding is that it doesnt matter what the code is itself, but rather, the concept used to implement SMP.
If that is the case, you can rewrite it a hundred times but if it operates under a standard principle that SCO claims ownership of then the effort is wasted.
Only once SCO actually make their case. e.g produce a valid patent. Any idiot can claim ownership of anything they like, by itself such a claim means nothing.
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You're an idiot. Any country with a few dozen earth movers can bury shit so deep it can't be detected. In a couple of days. That's right, a couple of days.
They can, of course, dig them up in the same timescale. The only things Iraq appears to have burried were some aircraft. Which were found looking like they had come from a junkyard.
An unusable weapon is of no military value at all.
He certainly hid his weapons of mass destruction carefully. The inspectors haven't found them yet.
Hidden so well they were no use at all in defending against an invasion. Even given several months warning.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands. The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war.
Hussein always was such a person. Just that the US didn't care much about it up until the point Iraq invaded Kuwait. Indeed they were happy cheering him on when Iraq invaded Iraq.
Now countries which see themselves as threatened by the US know that behaving rationally will get them nowhere.
Disarming yourself in the face of an ememy is hardly rational...
The way to go is to accumulate nukes and point them at an ally of the US.
Actual weapons, you can't shoot very well with research products. As well as the ability to disable invading troops en-mass. Combined with being able to shoot down warplanes and sink warships.
At the time, I thought the N Koreans were insane. It took time to work out what they were up to.
Even though the policy is known as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) it is perfectly sane and based on historical precedent.
Apparently a VERY large percentage of the Iranian people are in favor of normalizing relations with the US.
It wouldn't suprise me if a lot of people throughout the entire region of the "Middle East" would want normal diplomatic relations with the US. (Along with other countries, e.g. Cuba.) Problem is that the US's relationship with this part of the world hasn't been "normal" for a long time.
(Up until recently that couldn't be determined very well, given that the regime was still run by people heavily invested in the immediately-post-Shah anti-American rhetoric.
It can't be easy for the Iranians to forget, let alone forgive, that the Shah was a tyrant supported by the US. In order to install him the US (together with the UK) obliterated a democratic Iranian government.
I've been watching Iran long enough to know that the parent is correct. the 65%+ of the population who are under 30 have no use for their government at all. The joke at the beginning of the Iraq war was "Good, we're next."
Those over 30 can probably remember what it's like to live under a US backed tyrany. Whatever they may think of the current Iranian government they might not want to put the clock back to the 1960's & 1970's either.
Do they really don't notice what it's all about. This is not just about Linux and OSS any longer. If SCO succeeds with their far reaching definition of derivative works than this would crush all US based software develoment.
Why should such a ruling be specific to software? It could put RIAA/MPAA members out of business PDQ.
Any remote root patch that doesn't get installed in a timely matter is the fault of the IT "dudes." The head IT "dude" needs to be convinced that the risk of patching far outweighs the costs that come with cleaning up a virus/worm.
There is also a risk that applying the patch could break something, this also needs to be considered.
End users in most environments should not have the privileges that would allow them to infect themselves. Windows machines can be secured while still allowing users to get work done. Doing so requires a competent administrator.
It depends what they are required to run. There is plenty of Windows software around where giving the user privs is the easiest way to get it to work. Possibly even the only thing the vendor recommends.
And similar language exists in the GPL
It would be kind of hard to offer guarentees on something the recipient can modify to their heart's content. With GPL software it is your job to check that it does what it needs to or make it do the required task(s). Since you actually have the source this is possible. With proprietary software such a task is unlikely to be possible. For starters you don't even know what is "in the box"...
At Dungeness B nuclear power station in the UK they still run the reactor control systems with BBC B computers. The reason is that the operating system and control code is so small (ca. 32KB) that the engineers have gone through it by hand and manually checked every possible scenario.
The hardware is also well documented. The circuit diagram for the entire machine being around one page of A3.
...should be fired. Why was the safety monitoring system on a nuclear power plant exposed, even indirectly, to the internet?
Why is it running on an "off the shelf" system which is specifically documented as unsuitable for such an application?
Can you explain why you think it might be true? It's not very plausible. It's not as if multi processor systems are amazing new technology,
They have been around for a very long time. The Sequent Symmetry used 386s running at something like 20MHz in the late 1980s.
BTW `a fraction of a millisecond'? How impressive is that! SCO has the technology to implement a semaphore in less than a million instructions!
Actually on a shared memory machine the only tricky bit is cache management. IIRC Sequent used a never cached piece of memory for semaphores.
Hasn't SCO said something along the lines of a license not being valid unless it's a physically signed paper document?
Unless SCO can actually dig up a valid law which states this then they would probably be laughed out of court. IIRC there is case law for an email being considered a "signed document".
If they haven't accepted the terms in the GPL, they may need to make a payment to obtain a valid license.
Only if that is what the copyright holder(s) request.
They may also need to get permission from a _lot_ of people.
This is what they actually need, permission from the copyright holder(s) to distribute. It's entirely up to the copyright holder what terms apply to this permission. The GPL effectivly stating that permission is granted subject to the stated conditions. Current copyright laws give copyright holders a great deal of choice in how they can licence their works.
If you want to modify or distribute it, you must accept and agree to the GPL since it is copyrighted code.
You don't need to agree to the GPL to modify GPL software. You only need to agree to the GPL to distribute a version you have modified.
Nothing stops anyone taking a GPLed program, modifying it and using it personally. (Where "personally" applies to any legal "person".)
If you flately state that the GPL is invalid or void, then you are implying that you do not agree with it, thus you can't distribute any software under that license. There is nothing else that gives you the authority to distribute it, so you must cease distributing it now. No current customer, no potential customer, no one. If you don't secure a seperate license deal with all the copyright holders, you are violating copyright laws.
Also anyone you may have supplied GPL code to is covered only by the GPL. They are free to ignore any other licence you may have attempted to place on them.
If SCO is distributing Samba, they must obtain a license to use it in some form or another. If SCO disclaims the GPL license, they have no other right to use the software.
They can still use Samba however they like without agreeing to the GPL. What they cannot do is distribute it regardless of if that distribution is selling, embedding in some other product, making it available for download on a SCO server, possibly even if the company sells part of itself/splits.
At their discretion, the Samba team can choose to offer SCO the right to use Samba under a different, for profit license. This defeats the purpose of Open Source ideals in a big way.
Nothing stops the Samba Team from offering alternative licences which are still "open source".
To say the GPL is invalid is to say all software EULA's are invalid.
The GPL is not an EULA. Whilst invalidating the GPL might affect similar licences (in which case expect the likes of the RIAA and MPAA to come in to help defend the GPL), it would have no effect on EULA's.
The difference is that the customer does the choosing. MySQL doesn't choose who will get what licence, the customer chooses which licence they wish to use.
MySQL, as copyright holder, indicates which licences they offer as "standard options", as does the Samba Team. If SCO (or anyone else) want a different licence then they need to explicitally ask. The only difference is that MySQL offer a some sort of pay for licence as a standard option whereas the Samba Team don't.
From www.mysql.com: Commercial licenses for either version can also be purchased from MySQL AB, for those who don't wish to be bound by the LGPL or GPL. For more information on licensing MySQL Connector/J, please contact us. MySQL AB also offers commercial support for MySQL Connector/J.
How is that different from licensing Samba to SCO to distribute it in a non-GPL way?
AFAIK the Samba Team are not offering a non GPL distribution licence. Even if they did it still may not be to SCO's liking.
If the Samba team sues SCO for copyright reasons, then they would basically be saying that the GPL is meaningless, because it specifically GRANTS the right to copy, modify and distribute Samba.
The GPL grants those permissions conditionally. If SCO reject the GPL then it has no permission from the copyright holders to distribute the program.
You must understand that "legal thinking" is different than 'logical thinking" and that SCO's claims are related to copyright of derivative works which "may" be interpreted by courts to be a symmetrical issue to the GPL's viral copyright.
The GPL is not "viral" it is copyright law which is "viral". Effectivly SCO are claiming that their "virus" makes them the copyright holder of anything which is Unix like.
This is where it could get complicated. Does acceptance of the GPL depend on the company's statements or actions? SCO has made public statements that they do not accept the GPL. That could terminate their rights, but if they distribute source for Samba
This would be an open and shut case of copyright infringement on SCO's part.
or point users to samba.org to download source, would that keep them legal under the GPL?
The GPL wouldn't be an issue for SCO here, since SCO would not be distributing Samba in such a case. Simply telling people where to find an "authorised distributor".
The question now is, does this give SAMBA a right to pull their license? I don't believe it does, or that such a rule would be productive. Unless the GPL is written in such a way that violating one piece of GPL'ed software revokes distribution rights of *all* GPL'ed software, Samba cannot revoke the GPL on Samba.
They don't need to, not that there is really any provision for revoking the GPL. If SCO rejects the GPL then they cannot distribute GPL software. Unless they get some alternative permission from the copyright holder(s).
The reason is, they can say whatever they want about the GPL, just as I can stand outside Microsoft's campus with leaflets about why EULAs may not be legally enforceable. What I'm doing isn't violating the EULA of any software I have.
The GPL is not an EULA.
By the same reasoning, until SCO actually violates the GPL with regards to Samba software, I think they're legal.
Making a public statement that they don't agree to the GPL then distributing GPL software would be copyright infringement on their part. As soon as SCO distributes a single copy of Samba, in any way, they become "software pirates".
The GPL states you have the right to copy and distribute MY software that I own the copyright to under certain conditions. I have chosen to allow those conditions. Unless those conditions are unresonable, under established copyright law, that IS allowed.
Even if those conditions were found to be unreasonable, the default under copyright law, is that a third party needs the copyright holder's permission to create and distribute copies. Thus if SCO were to find some way to invalidate the GPL they would be effectivly admitting to "software piracy".
It's a bit like if I started suing say British Airways, trying to claim that all of the 747's they are using are in fact mine!
On the basis that you bought some plans from the Wright brothers...
My understanding is that it doesnt matter what the code is itself, but rather, the concept used to implement SMP.
If that is the case, you can rewrite it a hundred times but if it operates under a standard principle that SCO claims ownership of then the effort is wasted.
Only once SCO actually make their case. e.g produce a valid patent. Any idiot can claim ownership of anything they like, by itself such a claim means nothing.