Granted this is nice vindication for Slashdot rants, but wouldn't it be even nicer to have the mainstream press laughing at SCOX for not knowing the pedigree of their own code?
(of course, IANAL, so that doesn't mean a judge wouldn't buy it)
That clause refers to "this License", which seems to me to be referring to the particular GPL license on a particular piece of software, not to the GPL license on every piece of software.
The bottom line is that they may be able to take direct action: change the license to "GPL-SCO." That's a stock GPL license with an extra clause superceding all others and explicitly prohibiting the use of the software on SCO systems, on any system owned by SCO regardless of the OS used, or distribution in any form by SCO or its successors.
That extra clause would make the "GPL-SCO" license incompatible with the GPL. So, to change it in the first place, they'd have to round up every copyright holder on (which probably means every author of) GPLed code and get them all to volunteer to change their license.
And even if they did, it probably wouldn't matter: SCO could just take the last GPL'ed version of Samba and work from there. That's kind of the point of the GPL: to ensure that you still have your free software even if the authors go crazy, get bought out, or get all 'political' on you.
Another poster did have a point, though: SCO's arguments about the GPL being "invalid" could be interpreted as a public statement that they do not agree to the GPL, in which case their redistribution of any GPLed code is just copyright violation. However, I personally wouldn't want to try to sue them unless they were actually breaking the terms of the GPL on my software (which so far they're only doing to the Linux kernel authors) not just babbling about their perceived right to do so.
AFAIK, SCO is only violating copyright on the Linux kernel, not on Samba or any other free software. If that's the case, then only kernel copyright owners (like Red Hat and IBM, both of which have already filed their countersuits) could go after SCO for copyright infringement.
"believe they have total control over because of their interpretation of a contract that supposedly reassigns to them any code that ever gets linked with a line of System V"
Funny, the GPL is the same dam way...
The GPL, whether you agree to it or not, does not reassign any copyrights on any code you link to GPLed code or remove your right to do anything you wish with code you wrote.
Also, despite popular Slashdot urban legend, the GPL does not automatically turn your code into GPLed code if you release it linked to GPLed code. It offers you that option (as well as the option of releasing your code under any other GPL-compatible license) as one way to allow you to redistribute works derived from GPLed code without having to negotiate a new license with the author or violate copyright law. If you ignore these options and release an amalgam of your own code and GPLed code, it means that you're violating copyright law, not that you've accidentally relicensed your code or relinquished your copyright to it.
And the fact that you don't relinquish rights to anything you write is the most important distinction between the GPL license and the contracts that SCO claim to have with Sequent and IBM: code that you write and link to GPL'ed code is still your code. If you want to legally distribute this code linked with the GPL'ed code, then you have to distribute it under a GPL-compatible license, but while that license does grant additional rights to others it does not remove any rights from you. If, say, you write a new feature for Emacs, you cannot legally redistribute your modified Emacs except under a mixed GPL+compatible license, but you can then take your new code and tack it on to your own text editor which you may distribute under any license you want.
According to SCO's claims, as soon as someone linked NUMA code with System V code, somehow SCO gained the right not just to use that NUMA code themselves, but to prevent the original authors from using the code how they wish! Under that theory SCO could have sued IBM for distributing "their" code in AIX even if IBM had never touched Linux. It's of course theoretically possible that Sequent or IBM signed such a contract, or even that at some point IBM signed a contract which transfers ownership of the whole damn company to SCO, but I wouldn't take SCO's lawyers' (much less their executives') word for it after reading about their ludicrous ideas about copyright law "invalidating" the GPL.
It's RCU, it's NUMA, it's SMP, it's a whole bunch of code that SCO didn't write, didn't buy, and doesn't own, but that they believe they have total control over because of their interpretation of a contract that supposedly reassigns to them any code that ever gets linked with a line of System V.
If you want to see their evidence, you'll need to start reading their contracts, not their source code. Any attempt to compare binaries will be hampered by the fact that SCO thinks they own code that they've never even seen, much less compiled.
Perhaps you've wondered why Linux isn't on all of these computers already when it's free? By the logic you spouse, everyone would have already done so.
A physicist and a market economist are walking down the street. The physicist says, "I see a ten dollar bill fallen in the grass over there; let's go pick it up!" The economist says, "That's impossible - if it were really there, somebody would have taken it already."
Why does it have to be installed in large scale environnments for productivity gains? The article states that the training required is the same. If that is the case then it should be good for any size business???
The training for end users is the same, but that doesn't mean that the costs of administration are the same. If it costs more to hire a Linux admin than a Windows admin but the Linux admin can handle more computers unassisted, for instance, then you might only see ongoing savings in large installations.
Personally, I think Linux is good to go in any situation where the list of applications it needs to run is well-defined and falls within the range of Internet/Office/Scientific problems for which it's easy to find good *nix solutions. Now that we've got OpenOffice/StarOffice, that covers a whole lot of workplace environments. It's the home users who may want to pick up video games and random Win32 apps at any time who shouldn't be switching to Linux soon.
Btw.. i still cant understand the logic behind the reasoning that some countries have an inherent right to keep nuclear weapons, while the rest should live without them. Why dont we all give it up???
Because if nobody had (publically known) nuclear weapons, then the first country to privately redevelop them would have a weapon they could use without fear of retaliation. Thus, some countries "have an inherent right to keep nuclear weapons" simply because they got them first and their existance in multiple hands acts as a deterrent to their use by anyone.
However, if enough countries had nuclear weapons, they would be more dangerous not just as weapons of war (do what I say or your city is toast) but as weapons of terrorism (I hate you: your city is toast) or accident (There's a bug in our early warning software; what's that launching?), partly because each state that has nuclear weapons is an additional opportunity for them to fall into the wrong hands or be misinstalled, and partly because nuclear sales to terrorists would be less deterred if it were harder to track where the weapons came from. Oh, and let's not forget that using nuclear weapons is nearly always a bad thing, and since we don't need more than a few countries' nuclear arsenals as a deterrent then we don't really need more nuclear arsenals at all. Combine that with a non-proliferation treaty that nearly every country on the planet signed and you've got a good reason for most of the world to live without nukes.
Software such as APT-GET (and freshrpm.net's aptget for rpm) are good, but see the list of software on FreshRpms and you'll see that it only has a few hundred packages (which is what -- 5% of Linux software having an easy installation?).
# apt-cache stats Total Package Names : 13094 (524k)
Normal Packages: 3142...
Granted, I've got nine different repositories that I'm pulling from, but three thousand packages isn't too shabby. I don't have too much trouble with RPMs outside of the repositories, either - generally anyone whose dependancies are that esoteric provides a link to them on his download page. Some non-RPMs are a big hassle, on the other hand, as I usually prefer hacking up my own.spec file to doing a "make install" on anything I may want to uninstall later.
You see, we old-timers remember the good old days, when Slashdot was like an exclusive club, patronized only by those netizens "in the know", and when moderation was not just unimplemented but irrelevant, because none of those thoughtful and intelligent first users would have even thought of submitting a comment to a story unless they already knew it was insightful and interesting.
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Naah, I'm just yanking your chain. It's always been like this.
A few years ago I was playing with fork bombs (Allocate 10k memory, attempt to open a file for read, and then fork this thread 10 times) and was able to consistently freeze any linux box even when I only had a simple user account.
If you have still have an interest in this sort of thing, you might want to try sticking a "ulimit" command in the appropriate startup scripts. I think Linux supports limits on both the number of processes a single user can spawn and on the amount of RAM a single process+children can allocate. I don't think it'll be enough to prevent a malicious local user from hobbling your system (if you give your user fewer than 50 processes they might hit that limit with idle processes honestly, but if you give him more than 20 processes they can probably squeeze you out of 95% of scheduled timeslices by hogging the CPU with everything) but it might be fun to experiment with.
I'm currently using Linux, which also gives drivers such low-level access that a bad driver can crash the whole machine. I was under the impression that this was a design decision which couldn't be changed without sacrificing performance.
Yet another clueless person who doesn't realise that WinXP doesn't come with many applications, therefore decreasing the risk of bugs in code.
There's a reason I wrote "and many aren't in software that even has an equivalent included with Windows", you know. Try reading to the end of the post next time.
It's just the same claim they made before: that they have some sort of super-contract that transfers the copyright ownership of any code which ever gets linked to Unix code to them, whether they wrote it or not.
They'll be putting their ass on the line by either showing any copied code that they actually own or by showing some basis for their "we own everything you wrote" claim other than a misunderstanding of what a "derivative work" is.
No, really. List your choice of replacement system and give a thorough list of past remote exploits for it before you bash Microsoft.
Microsoft actually seems to be getting better about security. They still have holes that you have to patch, but so does everybody. Here's a list of the security updates for my OS distribution of choice, for instance:
Most of these aren't as bad as the recent Windows hole (and many aren't in software that even has an equivalent included with Windows), but there have been a lot of them recently, and they're not Red Hat specific problems either.
1998 is the date that the patent was issued and has nothing to do with the date required for prior art. The patent was filed on October 17, 1994, this is the date that you have to consider when looking at prior art.
You know, you're right, but I didn't even bother to look at the Filed date, because I glanced at the dozen references dated 1989 through 1997 and figured it would be hard to reference a 1997 patent in 1995. Eolas should probably forget this "browser plugin" junk and patent their time machine!;-)
Looks like the Java applets don't count
Are you sure? I mentioned 1995 as the date the public got to play with Java - Sun had a Java-enabled browser running internally in 1994, and so probably had the idea of running applets from hypertext documents (the idea, the only thing Eolas created while Sun built a working implementation) years before (like when they started Java in 1991 or when they thought of hooking it up to Mosaic in 1993).
In any case, it's not like Sun was the only one working on that sort of thing. This guy appears to have had working "infringing" code in 1991.
And you know who has some of the best prior art? Microsoft. They'd had "applet inside a word processor document" and "applet inside a spreadsheet document" technology working for years; does anybody really think that "applet inside a hypertext document" technology would have eluded them if it were not for the wonderful inventors at Eolas? Eolas just managed to be one of the first companies to pull off the "take existing invention or task, add 'with the internet' to the description, file patent" scam that's made the patent office a joke today.
A federal jury in Chicago awarded the University of California and a browser technology company $520.6 million after finding on Monday that their patents were infringed by Microsoft Corp.
Any jury of Microsoft Corp.'s peers would have looked at the patent dated 1998, noticed that the patent's claims applied to the Java applets they were running in 1995, and thrown the case out. I doubt that jury duty calls up a huge fraction of programmers, though; Eolas' lawyers probably didn't even have to kick many people off for being too smart.
that because the GPL is too "vague", the coders who published under it have effectively (albeit accidentally) released their work into the public domain. Right...
Of course, if you suggest that perhaps SCO's deliberately publishing their own code on a public FTP server with an attached license allows people to take advantage of that license, then they'll be the first ones to swear that you can't "accidentally" give your copyrighted material a less restrictive license than you would like. They want to have their kernel cake and eat it too.
The fact that SCO themselves distributed Linux under the GPL is one piece of evidence against SCO, there's nothing about the case that would cause the validity of the GPL to be a major issue. Or am I missing something?
You're missing the countersuits. IIRC copyright infringement was one of IBM's claims against SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll notify the one guy who designs all internet protocols and tell him to switch tasks.
Granted this is nice vindication for Slashdot rants, but wouldn't it be even nicer to have the mainstream press laughing at SCOX for not knowing the pedigree of their own code?
(of course, IANAL, so that doesn't mean a judge wouldn't buy it)
That clause refers to "this License", which seems to me to be referring to the particular GPL license on a particular piece of software, not to the GPL license on every piece of software.
The bottom line is that they may be able to take direct action: change the license to "GPL-SCO." That's a stock GPL license with an extra clause superceding all others and explicitly prohibiting the use of the software on SCO systems, on any system owned by SCO regardless of the OS used, or distribution in any form by SCO or its successors.
That extra clause would make the "GPL-SCO" license incompatible with the GPL. So, to change it in the first place, they'd have to round up every copyright holder on (which probably means every author of) GPLed code and get them all to volunteer to change their license.
And even if they did, it probably wouldn't matter: SCO could just take the last GPL'ed version of Samba and work from there. That's kind of the point of the GPL: to ensure that you still have your free software even if the authors go crazy, get bought out, or get all 'political' on you.
Another poster did have a point, though: SCO's arguments about the GPL being "invalid" could be interpreted as a public statement that they do not agree to the GPL, in which case their redistribution of any GPLed code is just copyright violation. However, I personally wouldn't want to try to sue them unless they were actually breaking the terms of the GPL on my software (which so far they're only doing to the Linux kernel authors) not just babbling about their perceived right to do so.
No, card counting is cheating. Blackjack is a game that you are supposed to play hand to hand, and you are to bet on the situation.
Is this a rule you found in Hoyle's, or one you just made up?
AFAIK, SCO is only violating copyright on the Linux kernel, not on Samba or any other free software. If that's the case, then only kernel copyright owners (like Red Hat and IBM, both of which have already filed their countersuits) could go after SCO for copyright infringement.
"believe they have total control over because of their interpretation of a contract that supposedly reassigns to them any code that ever gets linked with a line of System V"
Funny, the GPL is the same dam way...
The GPL, whether you agree to it or not, does not reassign any copyrights on any code you link to GPLed code or remove your right to do anything you wish with code you wrote.
Also, despite popular Slashdot urban legend, the GPL does not automatically turn your code into GPLed code if you release it linked to GPLed code. It offers you that option (as well as the option of releasing your code under any other GPL-compatible license) as one way to allow you to redistribute works derived from GPLed code without having to negotiate a new license with the author or violate copyright law. If you ignore these options and release an amalgam of your own code and GPLed code, it means that you're violating copyright law, not that you've accidentally relicensed your code or relinquished your copyright to it.
And the fact that you don't relinquish rights to anything you write is the most important distinction between the GPL license and the contracts that SCO claim to have with Sequent and IBM: code that you write and link to GPL'ed code is still your code. If you want to legally distribute this code linked with the GPL'ed code, then you have to distribute it under a GPL-compatible license, but while that license does grant additional rights to others it does not remove any rights from you. If, say, you write a new feature for Emacs, you cannot legally redistribute your modified Emacs except under a mixed GPL+compatible license, but you can then take your new code and tack it on to your own text editor which you may distribute under any license you want.
According to SCO's claims, as soon as someone linked NUMA code with System V code, somehow SCO gained the right not just to use that NUMA code themselves, but to prevent the original authors from using the code how they wish! Under that theory SCO could have sued IBM for distributing "their" code in AIX even if IBM had never touched Linux. It's of course theoretically possible that Sequent or IBM signed such a contract, or even that at some point IBM signed a contract which transfers ownership of the whole damn company to SCO, but I wouldn't take SCO's lawyers' (much less their executives') word for it after reading about their ludicrous ideas about copyright law "invalidating" the GPL.
It's RCU, it's NUMA, it's SMP, it's a whole bunch of code that SCO didn't write, didn't buy, and doesn't own, but that they believe they have total control over because of their interpretation of a contract that supposedly reassigns to them any code that ever gets linked with a line of System V.
If you want to see their evidence, you'll need to start reading their contracts, not their source code. Any attempt to compare binaries will be hampered by the fact that SCO thinks they own code that they've never even seen, much less compiled.
Perhaps you've wondered why Linux isn't on all of these computers already when it's free? By the logic you spouse, everyone would have already done so.
A physicist and a market economist are walking down the street. The physicist says, "I see a ten dollar bill fallen in the grass over there; let's go pick it up!" The economist says, "That's impossible - if it were really there, somebody would have taken it already."
Why does it have to be installed in large scale environnments for productivity gains? The article states that the training required is the same. If that is the case then it should be good for any size business???
The training for end users is the same, but that doesn't mean that the costs of administration are the same. If it costs more to hire a Linux admin than a Windows admin but the Linux admin can handle more computers unassisted, for instance, then you might only see ongoing savings in large installations.
Personally, I think Linux is good to go in any situation where the list of applications it needs to run is well-defined and falls within the range of Internet/Office/Scientific problems for which it's easy to find good *nix solutions. Now that we've got OpenOffice/StarOffice, that covers a whole lot of workplace environments. It's the home users who may want to pick up video games and random Win32 apps at any time who shouldn't be switching to Linux soon.
Btw .. i still cant understand the logic behind the reasoning that some countries have an inherent right to keep nuclear weapons, while the rest should live without them. Why dont we all give it up???
Because if nobody had (publically known) nuclear weapons, then the first country to privately redevelop them would have a weapon they could use without fear of retaliation. Thus, some countries "have an inherent right to keep nuclear weapons" simply because they got them first and their existance in multiple hands acts as a deterrent to their use by anyone.
However, if enough countries had nuclear weapons, they would be more dangerous not just as weapons of war (do what I say or your city is toast) but as weapons of terrorism (I hate you: your city is toast) or accident (There's a bug in our early warning software; what's that launching?), partly because each state that has nuclear weapons is an additional opportunity for them to fall into the wrong hands or be misinstalled, and partly because nuclear sales to terrorists would be less deterred if it were harder to track where the weapons came from. Oh, and let's not forget that using nuclear weapons is nearly always a bad thing, and since we don't need more than a few countries' nuclear arsenals as a deterrent then we don't really need more nuclear arsenals at all. Combine that with a non-proliferation treaty that nearly every country on the planet signed and you've got a good reason for most of the world to live without nukes.
"So that will be 699 billion dollars, please..."
"Ok, we'll be sending the check any time soon"
The proper response to SCO's demands is "We've already written you the check, but we can't tell you where it is unless you sign this NDA."
Software such as APT-GET (and freshrpm.net's aptget for rpm) are good, but see the list of software on FreshRpms and you'll see that it only has a few hundred packages (which is what -- 5% of Linux software having an easy installation?).
...
.spec file to doing a "make install" on anything I may want to uninstall later.
# apt-cache stats
Total Package Names : 13094 (524k)
Normal Packages: 3142
Granted, I've got nine different repositories that I'm pulling from, but three thousand packages isn't too shabby. I don't have too much trouble with RPMs outside of the repositories, either - generally anyone whose dependancies are that esoteric provides a link to them on his download page. Some non-RPMs are a big hassle, on the other hand, as I usually prefer hacking up my own
All you need to reverse the intake and exaust and it is an engine (was orignally designed as an engine)
Since the apparatus described in your link is axisymmetric: when you put air through it, which way do you expect it to turn?
You must be new here.
Wild speculation is our business.
*Sees 4-digit UID* oh...wait
You see, we old-timers remember the good old days, when Slashdot was like an exclusive club, patronized only by those netizens "in the know", and when moderation was not just unimplemented but irrelevant, because none of those thoughtful and intelligent first users would have even thought of submitting a comment to a story unless they already knew it was insightful and interesting.
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Naah, I'm just yanking your chain. It's always been like this.
A few years ago I was playing with fork bombs (Allocate 10k memory, attempt to open a file for read, and then fork this thread 10 times) and was able to consistently freeze any linux box even when I only had a simple user account.
If you have still have an interest in this sort of thing, you might want to try sticking a "ulimit" command in the appropriate startup scripts. I think Linux supports limits on both the number of processes a single user can spawn and on the amount of RAM a single process+children can allocate. I don't think it'll be enough to prevent a malicious local user from hobbling your system (if you give your user fewer than 50 processes they might hit that limit with idle processes honestly, but if you give him more than 20 processes they can probably squeeze you out of 95% of scheduled timeslices by hogging the CPU with everything) but it might be fun to experiment with.
That's so cute. But no, they sold all their computers months ago, to pay for more lawsuits.
I'm currently using Linux, which also gives drivers such low-level access that a bad driver can crash the whole machine. I was under the impression that this was a design decision which couldn't be changed without sacrificing performance.
Yet another clueless person who doesn't realise that WinXP doesn't come with many applications, therefore decreasing the risk of bugs in code.
There's a reason I wrote "and many aren't in software that even has an equivalent included with Windows", you know. Try reading to the end of the post next time.
It's just the same claim they made before: that they have some sort of super-contract that transfers the copyright ownership of any code which ever gets linked to Unix code to them, whether they wrote it or not.
They'll be putting their ass on the line by either showing any copied code that they actually own or by showing some basis for their "we own everything you wrote" claim other than a misunderstanding of what a "derivative work" is.
No, really. List your choice of replacement system and give a thorough list of past remote exploits for it before you bash Microsoft.
Microsoft actually seems to be getting better about security. They still have holes that you have to patch, but so does everybody. Here's a list of the security updates for my OS distribution of choice, for instance:
Red Hat Linux 9 Security Advisories
Most of these aren't as bad as the recent Windows hole (and many aren't in software that even has an equivalent included with Windows), but there have been a lot of them recently, and they're not Red Hat specific problems either.
1998 is the date that the patent was issued and has nothing to do with the date required for prior art. The patent was filed on October 17, 1994, this is the date that you have to consider when looking at prior art.
;-)
You know, you're right, but I didn't even bother to look at the Filed date, because I glanced at the dozen references dated 1989 through 1997 and figured it would be hard to reference a 1997 patent in 1995. Eolas should probably forget this "browser plugin" junk and patent their time machine!
Looks like the Java applets don't count
Are you sure? I mentioned 1995 as the date the public got to play with Java - Sun had a Java-enabled browser running internally in 1994, and so probably had the idea of running applets from hypertext documents (the idea, the only thing Eolas created while Sun built a working implementation) years before (like when they started Java in 1991 or when they thought of hooking it up to Mosaic in 1993).
In any case, it's not like Sun was the only one working on that sort of thing. This guy appears to have had working "infringing" code in 1991.
And you know who has some of the best prior art? Microsoft. They'd had "applet inside a word processor document" and "applet inside a spreadsheet document" technology working for years; does anybody really think that "applet inside a hypertext document" technology would have eluded them if it were not for the wonderful inventors at Eolas? Eolas just managed to be one of the first companies to pull off the "take existing invention or task, add 'with the internet' to the description, file patent" scam that's made the patent office a joke today.
A federal jury in Chicago awarded the University of California and a browser technology company $520.6 million after finding on Monday that their patents were infringed by Microsoft Corp.
Any jury of Microsoft Corp.'s peers would have looked at the patent dated 1998, noticed that the patent's claims applied to the Java applets they were running in 1995, and thrown the case out. I doubt that jury duty calls up a huge fraction of programmers, though; Eolas' lawyers probably didn't even have to kick many people off for being too smart.
that because the GPL is too "vague", the coders who published under it have effectively (albeit accidentally) released their work into the public domain. Right...
Of course, if you suggest that perhaps SCO's deliberately publishing their own code on a public FTP server with an attached license allows people to take advantage of that license, then they'll be the first ones to swear that you can't "accidentally" give your copyrighted material a less restrictive license than you would like. They want to have their kernel cake and eat it too.
The fact that SCO themselves distributed Linux under the GPL is one piece of evidence against SCO, there's nothing about the case that would cause the validity of the GPL to be a major issue. Or am I missing something?
You're missing the countersuits. IIRC copyright infringement was one of IBM's claims against SCO.