Are you saying my post is similar to speeches given by Hitler?
Yes, but only in the unbelievably strained sense that Linux zealotry is similar to terrorism.
Are you saying if you were to compare my post to Hitler's speeches, the comparison would be flamebait?
Yes, even if it was "backed up with reasoning".
It looks as though you are saying comparing my post to Hitler's speeches would be wrong but not too bad because it wouldn't deny the existance of the OS agnostic.
No, I'm saying it would be wrong, but not as bad as the TechNewsWorld article because it would only insult a few people instead of a few thousand people.
Who's denying the existence of the OS Agnostic?
Nobody is. What the article is denying is the existance of anybody who isn't either an agnostic, a priest, or a zealot about Linux, and the insulting implication is that if you show a consistent preference for Linux over other operating systems it must because you're in one of the two irrational groups.
As to your second paragraph, I don' think he's joking when he claims that linux zealotry will undermine the SCO case in court.
He didn't claim that Linux zealotry will undermine the SCO case in court. He claimed that Linux zealotry has convinced him that SCO has a legitimate case. It's the ad hominem fallacy, where he thinks that because the thesis "SCO has no case" is supported by idiots then that thesis must be wrong. This fallacy at least isn't insulting, unlike his false trilemma, but it's surprising that anyone who spends any time on the internet could fall for it - where is the cause so noble that it doesn't have it's share of idiots supporting it?
They do, therefore, say things that are untrue, and it is human nature (and the assumed nature of the court) to think someone who has been caught in a lie will lie again.
Are there any Linux Zealots scheduled to testify in either of SCO's court cases? If not, then whether they lie or not is irrelevant. The evidence against SCO is all facts in the public record which you can check for yourself without having to trust in anybody's credibility; it's the other side of the case which is supported by a belief in secret evidence that can't be publically revealed.
Those that flat-out deny obvious truths that have been shown to them first hand in their effort to blindly hate Microsoft and love Linux are not a benefit to our community.
I agree entirely. The solution to the problem is to ignore those people, not to blindly tar anyone who happens to agree with them occasionally with the same brush.
He's not blindly saying "You zealots are terrorists so NYA!", he backs up his claims with reasoning.
If I were to compare your post (or his article) to Hitler's rhetoric, I could point out the overgeneralizations, the use of a hated group as a tool to demonize those who disagree with you, the paternalistic attitude, or other reasonable similarities... but it would still be flamebait, and of the same type: comparing a couple writers on the internet to a genocidal fascist is about as strained as comparing other writers to a group of mass murderering theocrats. It wouldn't be such bad flamebait, either, because I would only be attacking two people instead of blindly denying the existence of everyone who considers themselves neither OS agnostic nor a "Priest" or "Zealot".
C'mon, man, look at this guy's logic: "These Zealots have been the primary reason that I've come to believe SCO will likely win its lawsuit -- because if the Zealots are lying about facts I know to be true, they must be lying about facts I don't know about." He may be joking, but if he's really that stupid then I could convince him of anything just by writing to him and pretending to be a lying zealot who believes the opposite.
Yup; the analogy is perfect. To you, the bits on my hard drive are completely uncopyable, because you can't break into my computer any more easily than I can break into your kitchen. If I were to send you some of the bits on my hard drive, however, then any attempt I made to make them "uncopyable" would be about as effective as you sending me a cooler full of ice: it only really works as long as the recipient cooperates.
There was a good 2 months there where all DNS operations didn't work with dynamically linked libc's, and several distributions didn't work at all, so they decided to switch it back and break stuff even more. And that's just one example.
Would you provide more information about this example? Nearly every piece of software on my computer is dynamically linked to libc.so, I upgrade glibc underneath all this software regularly (from amateur package sources as well as Red Hat), and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if my DNS lookups had stopped working for two months.
Isn't the loss of something of value the same as being required to pay for something?
Only if the something of value is something you had in the first place. "An interminable support contract with Red Hat" is not something you have.
Suffering an adverse effect if you do something sure sounds like a "restriction" to me.
In that case it's not just Red Hat violating your interpretation of the GPL. I've assisted people installing and using Linux, but only done so if they were using one of the distros I'm familiar with. Am I "restricting" their GPL-given right to install other distributions? No, I'm providing something of additional value to them if they don't. HP will give you legal indemnification if you run one version of Linux on their hardware, but not if you modify your installation. Are they "restricting" their users right to modify GPLed software? No, they're providing something of additional value to their users who don't make modifications.
It's more like "I will give you help learning Linux as long as you buy me a beer, but you can't make copies without buying me a one beer per copy and getting my help on those other copies"
No, it's not. You can make copies without getting Red Hat's help on those other copies - you just have to cancel your support contract on that first copy too. You can install as many copies of their server as you want, but you have to buy support on all or none of them.
Remember that not all (actually, I believe the majority of) investments are not direct -- a group, like a mutual fund or an investment bank is managing someone else's money.
You're right, particularly in this case. It looks like 10% of SCO (which didn't have a lot of public shares floating around to begin with) is now owned by Royce and Associates and part of their mutual funds; plus there's the $20M they just got from Royal Bank of Canada.
So you could say that it's the fault of the original fund contributors and they weren't paranoid enough, but I 'm not sure that such an expectation is reasonable.
Isn't it? If you give your retirement money to someone else and tell them they can decide how to invest it, you're basically making your future dependent on their capacity for decision making. Surely some paranoia should be called for there.
Anything else can be rigged, including the paper trail it produces.
Open source can be rigged too. In order to rig a simple system of printed paper ballots (where for example a touchscreen voting system prints out a ballot which only has the desired candidate names printed, in easily scannable fonts, and the voter then folds this ballot to hide the vote from view and places it through a slot into a transparent case), one would have to physically interfere with the ballots at many separate polling places. In order to rig a system of verifiable paper ballots, one would have to crack public key encryption. In order to rig a system of open source, entirely electronic polling, one would only have to find (or create) an exploitable bug and keep it secret, or make sure that the published source code isn't the same as the source code on the running machines, which would only require those machines to be of proprietary design or to be out of inspectors' sight for a brief time.
At the time of this posting, SCO is around 41, Sun is around 3.
I'm assuming you meant 21.
You need to understand that the price of an individual share of stock is meaningless without considering how many shares of stock are outstanding. Look at the market capitalization instead: the market thinks that SCOX is worth $250 million (yes, it's still ridiculous), and that SUNW is worth $11,500 million.
I guess it's a given that the stock market is a game of sorts, but if the stock market gives more value to SCO than a Sun or Apple, then what good is it?
Well, in a bubble like this, it does seem unfair that the market transfers money into the hands of foolish speculators who buy stocks at inflated prices, but remember that the money comes out of the hands of idiots who buy stocks at grotesquely inflated prices. It's at least a slight improvement.
What does Google lose, for instance, by staying private?
The chance to expand their business with the massive piles of cash which an IPO can bring but without all the entanglements that venture capital may require or the low-risk business plan which a bank loan or bond sale would need. In Google's case, they're doing fine with the money they have and there's no market they'd really want to expand into.
If I didn't have any morals or concerns about what they're doing to the industry, buying some of their stock to sell when it goes up again might sound pretty attractive.
Yeah, but there's better opportunities out there. I'm putting my money in tulip futures and dot com stocks!
I wonder what you'll say when SCOX goes up another 30% and these capitalists make out like crazy.
That they found an even bigger bunch of idiots. And if those idiots can sell up 60%, then they'll have found an even bigger bunch of idiots. It would be great to be in one of the earlier groups, sure, but there's just too much of a risk that the stock will be in your hands when nobody else will want to play, and then you'll be stuck with a crashed stock in an insolvent company as your "Biggest Idiot" prize.
If you want more details, I suggest researching a recent event known as the "dot com bust", which you appear to have managed to sleep through.
"I can't prove it, but I can make it sound plausible thereby making someone else prove me wrong" Sorry, that kind of logic belongs on a play ground.
There, or in an election process. The whole reason we have these time consuming certification processes is because we believe the burden of proof should be on those people involved in running an election to demonstrate that they couldn't have rigged the system. If the use of electronic voting machines without verifiable receipts (or even a simple paper output trail) makes this burden of proof too hard, then perhaps those machines shouldn't be used at all.
If a linux kernel exploit is fixed in minutes, then it was a pretty dumb bug.
Yup. The last one I remember like that was the IP stack bug in late 1997 that would crash your system; Alan Cox didn't have the fix out in minutes, but IIRC it was about three hours from discovery to patch.
He can be forgiven for the delay, though, because his patch fixed not just that particular exploit, but all it's variations. When I was booted to Windows 95, on the other hand, I was vulnerable to any prankster exploiting the same type of bug for months, not just because it would take MS weeks to come up with a patch but because Alan Cox's patch fixed the underlying problem, whereas MS would patch up one attack only to remain wide open to nearly identical exploits. Try Googling for "teardrop", "syndrop", or "newtear" if you want to find a more precise timeline than my fuzzy 6yo memory.
Linux mostly seems to do reactive fixes, at least from where I'm sitting.
You mean reactive to all those awful Linux worms that have been sweeping the net? I don't think so. Try pulling up a list of security updates (here, for example) for Linux and see just what percentage you can find exploit code for. I'm pretty sure the squirrelmail, balsa, and Xpdf developers aren't scrambling to write patches reacting to the many exploits aimed at their programs.
I really think that if Microsoft was doing so, they'd publically take a stand (a la "OSS is viral"),
They've already done that, repeatedly. "Viral" is one of the words used, "a cancer" is another phrase from a few years back that comes to mind.
rather than paying off journalists.
Aren't they where the phrase "astroturfing" comes from? This isn't nearly that bad - to get press they want, Microsoft doesn't even have to make any obvious bribes, they just have to make their advertisement dollars follow up shill articles more often than coincidence would allow.
Linksys management almost certainly did not decide to use GPLed software -- some subcontractor put it in. [...] Some engineer at Linksys (or some Indian subcontractor...there are good engineers in India, but in the current environment, there are also a *lot* of people that simply swipe code and let the company get screwed down the line) swiped some code.
Linksys isn't just using a couple swiped functions here, they're selling products based on the whole Linux kernel and a dozen other free packages. They're even providing related source code under the GPL for what they distribute; it just turns out that they're not providing the source code for the derived works they're distributing, they're providing it for the original GPLed software they started from.
There's simply no way this could be an oversight that went on underneath their management's noses - this is practically the entire software component of their product!
It's possible that this never made it to a lawyer, I suppose, and that Linksys for some reason thinks the "you must provide source code" clauses in the GPL are because we don't have enough kernel mirrors of our own... but it's more likely that they're keeping their modifications closed because they thought they could get away with it.
And before anyone makes some noise about "their execs are dumping their stock holdings now" remember
If my memory differs, can I make noise anyway?;-)
that the one exec who has been selling his stock
Yahoo lists sales from their Senior Executive Vice President Reginald Charles Broughton, their Chief Financial Officer Robert K. Bench, their Vice President Jeff Hunsaker, their Senior Vice President Michael Sean Wilson, and their Controller/Vice President Michael Olson. Last I checked the total sales were up over $2.5 million dollars, and I've been told that the only reason Darl isn't getting in on the action yet is that his contract doesn't give him his stock options until they've had four quarters of payola (er... profit) from Microsoft and Sun.
had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
And as long as they then suddenly realized that they should trump up a multibillion dollar lawsuit and have it ready to make public less than two months later, that's fine. According to analyst Laura Didio, on the other hand, SCO was deciding what to do about "blatant SGI violations" more than a year ago, in which case the fact that several of their execs filed to sell most of their stock shortly afterward seems a lot less coincidental.
A $0.01 per year tax on domain name possession. Chump change for all of us, but not for the more than 50*38^63 domain names that Verisign just took control of. If it was good enough to nail Al Capone...
I've always wondered about that, if you by assumption didn't accept the GPL, you also didn't agree to forfeit those rights.
The intention is that in that case it doesn't matter whether you forfeited rights or not because if you didn't accept the GPL you were never granted those rights. If you want to be granted those rights in the future, then you'll have to negotiate another license to receive them from, because your previous actions take you off of the list of people to whom the GPL offers redistribution rights.
IANAL, though, so your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not this intention is adequately expressed by the license and would stand up in court. I don't know if your second question should go to a lawyer, but it at least should go to someone better at half-assed guessing than I am.;-)
It would legally contaminate anyone who even had just had it much less looked at it.
It would definitely legally implicate anyone who had it (for copyright violation), but it wouldn't "contaminate" anyone who later wrote code of their own. Despite what some proprietary developers think and others fear, as long as no actual copying occurs it is perfectly okay for novelists to read other people's books, for singers to listen to other people's songs, and even for programmers to read other people's source code.
what are the chances that in a big closed source project (like Windows for example), that some developer hasn't used some open source code at one point or another?
0%. In Windows 9x (at least), for example, you can run "strings" on some of the networking utilities to get at the BSD copyright statements.
If you're asking about hidden GPL code, though, then it's anybody's guess.
How do you protect against this?
If you're part of the company in question, you could get the source code most likely to be copied (e.g. Linux if you're working on operating systems, Apache if you're writing a server, etc), try running something like Eric Raymond's new comparison program between those sources and your own code, and most importantly let your employees know that you're checking on them and that illegally claiming someone else's copyrighted material as their own is grounds for termination.
If you're someone else and only have access to the closed binaries, then you might try checking for unique symbols or debugging output, but you won't have nearly as easy a time of it.
MS threatens me with audits to check my license compliance, can I audit them to check that no open source code is in their products?
No. They may get to audit you because that's one of the rights you can sign away to get a cheap site license from them. You don't get to audit them because you've never tricked them into agreeing to it.
If GPL'd code was found in a product like Windows, would Microsoft be forced to open source the entire thing?
No. You can't force anyone to agree to the GPL. You can sue them for past copyright infringement (and probably win big if you've registered your copyrights), but (despite SCO's claims to the contrary) you can't stop them from removing your code and selling their own code no longer encumbered. In the worst case for them, if they wouldn't have a useful product without your code and are redistributing too much to reimplement themselves, then they're pretty much stuck as they've already forfeited their GPL rights and would have to negotiate new rights with every single author whose copyright they've infringed.
But the key thing is that Netscape's error reporting only occurred in the case of a fatal crash, whereas Microsoft's patent covers non-fatal program failures as well.
Well, then it's a good thing they patented that difference so that the rest of us could figure out how to do it, isn't it? Can I patent a version that covers periodic status reports, too?
These ideas and information are roped off from the public not to benifit the creators of the games, the ostensible reason for copyright
It's sad that even some of the people who are aware of copyright's problems don't know the reason it exists:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts
A limited copyright period (like the original 14-28 years) does benefit the creators of copyrightable information, but Congress is not allowed to do so for the creators' benefit, it's allowed to do so because this encourages people to create more and thus eventually enriches the public domain. There's nothing in the Constitution about securing royalty checks for the authors' publishers' grandchildren.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt in the UK or USA it would have taken years for everyone to change over to the new side.
No: I'm pretty sure that once the change started, attrition would leave all the survivors driving on the same side of the road within days.
Are you saying my post is similar to speeches given by Hitler?
Yes, but only in the unbelievably strained sense that Linux zealotry is similar to terrorism.
Are you saying if you were to compare my post to Hitler's speeches, the comparison would be flamebait?
Yes, even if it was "backed up with reasoning".
It looks as though you are saying comparing my post to Hitler's speeches would be wrong but not too bad because it wouldn't deny the existance of the OS agnostic.
No, I'm saying it would be wrong, but not as bad as the TechNewsWorld article because it would only insult a few people instead of a few thousand people.
Who's denying the existence of the OS Agnostic?
Nobody is. What the article is denying is the existance of anybody who isn't either an agnostic, a priest, or a zealot about Linux, and the insulting implication is that if you show a consistent preference for Linux over other operating systems it must because you're in one of the two irrational groups.
As to your second paragraph, I don' think he's joking when he claims that linux zealotry will undermine the SCO case in court.
He didn't claim that Linux zealotry will undermine the SCO case in court. He claimed that Linux zealotry has convinced him that SCO has a legitimate case. It's the ad hominem fallacy, where he thinks that because the thesis "SCO has no case" is supported by idiots then that thesis must be wrong. This fallacy at least isn't insulting, unlike his false trilemma, but it's surprising that anyone who spends any time on the internet could fall for it - where is the cause so noble that it doesn't have it's share of idiots supporting it?
They do, therefore, say things that are untrue, and it is human nature (and the assumed nature of the court) to think someone who has been caught in a lie will lie again.
Are there any Linux Zealots scheduled to testify in either of SCO's court cases? If not, then whether they lie or not is irrelevant. The evidence against SCO is all facts in the public record which you can check for yourself without having to trust in anybody's credibility; it's the other side of the case which is supported by a belief in secret evidence that can't be publically revealed.
Those that flat-out deny obvious truths that have been shown to them first hand in their effort to blindly hate Microsoft and love Linux are not a benefit to our community.
I agree entirely. The solution to the problem is to ignore those people, not to blindly tar anyone who happens to agree with them occasionally with the same brush.
He's not blindly saying "You zealots are terrorists so NYA!", he backs up his claims with reasoning.
If I were to compare your post (or his article) to Hitler's rhetoric, I could point out the overgeneralizations, the use of a hated group as a tool to demonize those who disagree with you, the paternalistic attitude, or other reasonable similarities... but it would still be flamebait, and of the same type: comparing a couple writers on the internet to a genocidal fascist is about as strained as comparing other writers to a group of mass murderering theocrats. It wouldn't be such bad flamebait, either, because I would only be attacking two people instead of blindly denying the existence of everyone who considers themselves neither OS agnostic nor a "Priest" or "Zealot".
C'mon, man, look at this guy's logic: "These Zealots have been the primary reason that I've come to believe SCO will likely win its lawsuit -- because if the Zealots are lying about facts I know to be true, they must be lying about facts I don't know about." He may be joking, but if he's really that stupid then I could convince him of anything just by writing to him and pretending to be a lying zealot who believes the opposite.
I just put it in the freezing compartment.
Yup; the analogy is perfect. To you, the bits on my hard drive are completely uncopyable, because you can't break into my computer any more easily than I can break into your kitchen. If I were to send you some of the bits on my hard drive, however, then any attempt I made to make them "uncopyable" would be about as effective as you sending me a cooler full of ice: it only really works as long as the recipient cooperates.
There was a good 2 months there where all DNS operations didn't work with dynamically linked libc's, and several distributions didn't work at all, so they decided to switch it back and break stuff even more. And that's just one example.
Would you provide more information about this example? Nearly every piece of software on my computer is dynamically linked to libc.so, I upgrade glibc underneath all this software regularly (from amateur package sources as well as Red Hat), and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if my DNS lookups had stopped working for two months.
Isn't the loss of something of value the same as being required to pay for something?
Only if the something of value is something you had in the first place. "An interminable support contract with Red Hat" is not something you have.
Suffering an adverse effect if you do something sure sounds like a "restriction" to me.
In that case it's not just Red Hat violating your interpretation of the GPL. I've assisted people installing and using Linux, but only done so if they were using one of the distros I'm familiar with. Am I "restricting" their GPL-given right to install other distributions? No, I'm providing something of additional value to them if they don't. HP will give you legal indemnification if you run one version of Linux on their hardware, but not if you modify your installation. Are they "restricting" their users right to modify GPLed software? No, they're providing something of additional value to their users who don't make modifications.
It's more like "I will give you help learning Linux as long as you buy me a beer, but you can't make copies without buying me a one beer per copy and getting my help on those other copies"
No, it's not. You can make copies without getting Red Hat's help on those other copies - you just have to cancel your support contract on that first copy too. You can install as many copies of their server as you want, but you have to buy support on all or none of them.
Remember that not all (actually, I believe the majority of) investments are not direct -- a group, like a mutual fund or an investment bank is managing someone else's money.
You're right, particularly in this case. It looks like 10% of SCO (which didn't have a lot of public shares floating around to begin with) is now owned by Royce and Associates and part of their mutual funds; plus there's the $20M they just got from Royal Bank of Canada.
So you could say that it's the fault of the original fund contributors and they weren't paranoid enough, but I 'm not sure that such an expectation is reasonable.
Isn't it? If you give your retirement money to someone else and tell them they can decide how to invest it, you're basically making your future dependent on their capacity for decision making. Surely some paranoia should be called for there.
Anything else can be rigged, including the paper trail it produces.
Open source can be rigged too. In order to rig a simple system of printed paper ballots (where for example a touchscreen voting system prints out a ballot which only has the desired candidate names printed, in easily scannable fonts, and the voter then folds this ballot to hide the vote from view and places it through a slot into a transparent case), one would have to physically interfere with the ballots at many separate polling places. In order to rig a system of verifiable paper ballots, one would have to crack public key encryption. In order to rig a system of open source, entirely electronic polling, one would only have to find (or create) an exploitable bug and keep it secret, or make sure that the published source code isn't the same as the source code on the running machines, which would only require those machines to be of proprietary design or to be out of inspectors' sight for a brief time.
At the time of this posting, SCO is around 41, Sun is around 3.
I'm assuming you meant 21.
You need to understand that the price of an individual share of stock is meaningless without considering how many shares of stock are outstanding. Look at the market capitalization instead: the market thinks that SCOX is worth $250 million (yes, it's still ridiculous), and that SUNW is worth $11,500 million.
I guess it's a given that the stock market is a game of sorts, but if the stock market gives more value to SCO than a Sun or Apple, then what good is it?
Well, in a bubble like this, it does seem unfair that the market transfers money into the hands of foolish speculators who buy stocks at inflated prices, but remember that the money comes out of the hands of idiots who buy stocks at grotesquely inflated prices. It's at least a slight improvement.
What does Google lose, for instance, by staying private?
The chance to expand their business with the massive piles of cash which an IPO can bring but without all the entanglements that venture capital may require or the low-risk business plan which a bank loan or bond sale would need. In Google's case, they're doing fine with the money they have and there's no market they'd really want to expand into.
If I didn't have any morals or concerns about what they're doing to the industry, buying some of their stock to sell when it goes up again might sound pretty attractive.
Yeah, but there's better opportunities out there. I'm putting my money in tulip futures and dot com stocks!
I wonder what you'll say when SCOX goes up another 30% and these capitalists make out like crazy.
That they found an even bigger bunch of idiots. And if those idiots can sell up 60%, then they'll have found an even bigger bunch of idiots. It would be great to be in one of the earlier groups, sure, but there's just too much of a risk that the stock will be in your hands when nobody else will want to play, and then you'll be stuck with a crashed stock in an insolvent company as your "Biggest Idiot" prize.
If you want more details, I suggest researching a recent event known as the "dot com bust", which you appear to have managed to sleep through.
"I can't prove it, but I can make it sound plausible thereby making someone else prove me wrong" Sorry, that kind of logic belongs on a play ground.
There, or in an election process. The whole reason we have these time consuming certification processes is because we believe the burden of proof should be on those people involved in running an election to demonstrate that they couldn't have rigged the system. If the use of electronic voting machines without verifiable receipts (or even a simple paper output trail) makes this burden of proof too hard, then perhaps those machines shouldn't be used at all.
If a linux kernel exploit is fixed in minutes, then it was a pretty dumb bug.
Yup. The last one I remember like that was the IP stack bug in late 1997 that would crash your system; Alan Cox didn't have the fix out in minutes, but IIRC it was about three hours from discovery to patch.
He can be forgiven for the delay, though, because his patch fixed not just that particular exploit, but all it's variations. When I was booted to Windows 95, on the other hand, I was vulnerable to any prankster exploiting the same type of bug for months, not just because it would take MS weeks to come up with a patch but because Alan Cox's patch fixed the underlying problem, whereas MS would patch up one attack only to remain wide open to nearly identical exploits. Try Googling for "teardrop", "syndrop", or "newtear" if you want to find a more precise timeline than my fuzzy 6yo memory.
Linux mostly seems to do reactive fixes, at least from where I'm sitting.
You mean reactive to all those awful Linux worms that have been sweeping the net? I don't think so. Try pulling up a list of security updates (here, for example) for Linux and see just what percentage you can find exploit code for. I'm pretty sure the squirrelmail, balsa, and Xpdf developers aren't scrambling to write patches reacting to the many exploits aimed at their programs.
I really think that if Microsoft was doing so, they'd publically take a stand (a la "OSS is viral"),
They've already done that, repeatedly. "Viral" is one of the words used, "a cancer" is another phrase from a few years back that comes to mind.
rather than paying off journalists.
Aren't they where the phrase "astroturfing" comes from? This isn't nearly that bad - to get press they want, Microsoft doesn't even have to make any obvious bribes, they just have to make their advertisement dollars follow up shill articles more often than coincidence would allow.
Linksys management almost certainly did not decide to use GPLed software -- some subcontractor put it in. [...] Some engineer at Linksys (or some Indian subcontractor...there are good engineers in India, but in the current environment, there are also a *lot* of people that simply swipe code and let the company get screwed down the line) swiped some code.
Linksys isn't just using a couple swiped functions here, they're selling products based on the whole Linux kernel and a dozen other free packages. They're even providing related source code under the GPL for what they distribute; it just turns out that they're not providing the source code for the derived works they're distributing, they're providing it for the original GPLed software they started from.
There's simply no way this could be an oversight that went on underneath their management's noses - this is practically the entire software component of their product!
It's possible that this never made it to a lawyer, I suppose, and that Linksys for some reason thinks the "you must provide source code" clauses in the GPL are because we don't have enough kernel mirrors of our own... but it's more likely that they're keeping their modifications closed because they thought they could get away with it.
And before anyone makes some noise about "their execs are dumping their stock holdings now" remember
;-)
If my memory differs, can I make noise anyway?
that the one exec who has been selling his stock
Yahoo lists sales from their Senior Executive Vice President Reginald Charles Broughton, their Chief Financial Officer Robert K. Bench, their Vice President Jeff Hunsaker, their Senior Vice President Michael Sean Wilson, and their Controller/Vice President Michael Olson. Last I checked the total sales were up over $2.5 million dollars, and I've been told that the only reason Darl isn't getting in on the action yet is that his contract doesn't give him his stock options until they've had four quarters of payola (er... profit) from Microsoft and Sun.
had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
And as long as they then suddenly realized that they should trump up a multibillion dollar lawsuit and have it ready to make public less than two months later, that's fine. According to analyst Laura Didio, on the other hand, SCO was deciding what to do about "blatant SGI violations" more than a year ago, in which case the fact that several of their execs filed to sell most of their stock shortly afterward seems a lot less coincidental.
I've never created any music, so compulsory licensing for music would involve me telling other people what to do, which is good.
I have written fiction and software, so compulsory licensing for those media might involve other people telling me what to do, which is bad.
I hope that clears things up for everyone.
A $0.01 per year tax on domain name possession. Chump change for all of us, but not for the more than 50*38^63 domain names that Verisign just took control of. If it was good enough to nail Al Capone...
I've always wondered about that, if you by assumption didn't accept the GPL, you also didn't agree to forfeit those rights.
;-)
The intention is that in that case it doesn't matter whether you forfeited rights or not because if you didn't accept the GPL you were never granted those rights. If you want to be granted those rights in the future, then you'll have to negotiate another license to receive them from, because your previous actions take you off of the list of people to whom the GPL offers redistribution rights.
IANAL, though, so your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not this intention is adequately expressed by the license and would stand up in court. I don't know if your second question should go to a lawyer, but it at least should go to someone better at half-assed guessing than I am.
Bullshit.
Whatever you say.
It would legally contaminate anyone who even had just had it much less looked at it.
It would definitely legally implicate anyone who had it (for copyright violation), but it wouldn't "contaminate" anyone who later wrote code of their own. Despite what some proprietary developers think and others fear, as long as no actual copying occurs it is perfectly okay for novelists to read other people's books, for singers to listen to other people's songs, and even for programmers to read other people's source code.
what are the chances that in a big closed source project (like Windows for example), that some developer hasn't used some open source code at one point or another?
0%. In Windows 9x (at least), for example, you can run "strings" on some of the networking utilities to get at the BSD copyright statements.
If you're asking about hidden GPL code, though, then it's anybody's guess.
How do you protect against this?
If you're part of the company in question, you could get the source code most likely to be copied (e.g. Linux if you're working on operating systems, Apache if you're writing a server, etc), try running something like Eric Raymond's new comparison program between those sources and your own code, and most importantly let your employees know that you're checking on them and that illegally claiming someone else's copyrighted material as their own is grounds for termination.
If you're someone else and only have access to the closed binaries, then you might try checking for unique symbols or debugging output, but you won't have nearly as easy a time of it.
MS threatens me with audits to check my license compliance, can I audit them to check that no open source code is in their products?
No. They may get to audit you because that's one of the rights you can sign away to get a cheap site license from them. You don't get to audit them because you've never tricked them into agreeing to it.
If GPL'd code was found in a product like Windows, would Microsoft be forced to open source the entire thing?
No. You can't force anyone to agree to the GPL. You can sue them for past copyright infringement (and probably win big if you've registered your copyrights), but (despite SCO's claims to the contrary) you can't stop them from removing your code and selling their own code no longer encumbered. In the worst case for them, if they wouldn't have a useful product without your code and are redistributing too much to reimplement themselves, then they're pretty much stuck as they've already forfeited their GPL rights and would have to negotiate new rights with every single author whose copyright they've infringed.
But the key thing is that Netscape's error reporting only occurred in the case of a fatal crash, whereas Microsoft's patent covers non-fatal program failures as well.
Well, then it's a good thing they patented that difference so that the rest of us could figure out how to do it, isn't it? Can I patent a version that covers periodic status reports, too?
These ideas and information are roped off from the public not to benifit the creators of the games, the ostensible reason for copyright
It's sad that even some of the people who are aware of copyright's problems don't know the reason it exists:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts
A limited copyright period (like the original 14-28 years) does benefit the creators of copyrightable information, but Congress is not allowed to do so for the creators' benefit, it's allowed to do so because this encourages people to create more and thus eventually enriches the public domain. There's nothing in the Constitution about securing royalty checks for the authors' publishers' grandchildren.
I don't want or need to reboot multiple times to play multiple games.
Neither do I, I admit.
In fact, nobody does
Sure they do. We call them "console owners", and their systems even power cycle each time they switch games.