The SCO litigation obviously has enough bite to warrant a significant SCO stock response
We'll start by going back to 1999, when some people still thought that stock bubbles were necessarily a reflection of reality.
a reassessment by IT consulting firms
Now we're traveling back to the early 1990s, when some people still thought of Gartner as an independent research group and not the corporate equivalent of those magazine advertisements that masquerade as articles.
and some hesitation by the corporate world
And finally we're back to the 19th century, when only the evil Communists would suggest that our corporate benefactors might not be beacons of the bold leadership necessary to steer modern society.
the big Linux players (IBM, Red Hat, the Kernel developers and maintainers) seem to have decided that ignoring or belittling the SCO threat is the best approach.
The best approach is to wait until SCO decides what it's claiming and takes the claims to court, then defeat them there. Suing SCO for their current copyright violations in distributing Linux kernels without a GPL-compatible license strikes me as the second best approach, but maybe I'm just petty.
Well, it's not working!
It's not? My Linux installation still seems to be working just fine; in fact Mozilla in particular is performing extra-well, accessing a new entertainment section on Slashdot: the SCO soap opera.
Just this week, Microsoft publicized the fact that they fixed that problem, by providing you indemnity in the event that such a thing happens.
And how much indemnity are they willing to provide? According to ZDNet:
"If it is determined that Microsoft infringed a third party's intellectual property, the new contract states that Microsoft will procure a licence so its customers can continue to use the infringing product, replace the existing product, modify the code so it no longer infringes, or refund that portion of the licence."
In other words, if Microsoft chooses to "refund that portion of the license" then you're in exactly the same position you would be in in the worst case scenario with free software: you've paid $0 for a program that you can no longer legally use.
In the second worst case scenario with free software (proprietary code may have made it into a free software product, but the proprietary copyright holder isn't hiding which code they claim in order to extort money a la SCO) then you'll probably be provided with options 2, 3, AND 4 from the free software community: you'll be able to choose an equivalent product (like FreeBSD), to continue using the existing product after it's maintainers remove or replace any infringing code (What, you think Linus and Alan Cox are going to give up and become novelists if it turns out there really were illegal contributions to Linux? No; anything improper will be replaced in no time.), AND to do both without paying any license fees.
So are there some advantages to Microsoft's offer that ZDNet didn't mention, or is this just PR?
Because, needless to say, even if your election officials publish source code for voting software, it's still a bit tricky to be certain that said voting software is actually what's running on the voting machines.
I'd like to see a really verifiable election process; check out http://www.vreceipt.com/ for an example system, which makes it essentially impossible for anyone to change or not count your vote. (It doesn't seem to prevent votes from being added, but that's a much easier problem to solve in meatspace, just by making sure that the number of ballots a polling place's computer submits matches the number of people an observer saw entering the booths)
2^52 gives us 4.5e15 addresses, which is roughly a million times more addresses than IPv4's 32 bits allow.
What, do you think that while we're colonizing every star in the Universe we're going to stop at just one colony planet per star?
Take a look at our own solar system, for example. At the Earth's orbit, the Sun puts out radiant energy over 2.8e17 square kilometers of space, at a density of about a kilowatt per square meter, of which at least 200 watts could be converted into useful work. So, that's about 5.7e22 kilowatts at our disposal. If we give everyone a generous.1 square kilometers (more than 20 acres, and a larger share of area than people on Earth today enjoy) for food production and nature preserves then that takes up 20,000 kW per person; we'll give everyone another enormous 5 MW for personal and industrial use. That gives us a total energy expenditure for which we can support 2.3e18 people around our (fairly average) star.
In other words, once we've fully converted every star in the universe into Dyson spheres, we'll have hundreds of people for every available IP address! You were simply being short-sighted to assume otherwise.;-)
Not really no. Even in America, you can't sue something that doesn't exist, and the chances of SCO existing after they've lost are very low indeed.
By this do you mean that the chances of SCO the organization remaining solvent are very low, or that the chances of the current SCO leadership not being assassinated by berzerk Linux zealots are very low?
(note for the humor impaired: even as a borderline Linux zealot I would not support acts of violence against any SCO executive... although forcing them to to spend a long time incarcerated for securities fraud while in constant fear of prison rape is kind of a grey area, particularly if the other inmates make apropos jokes like "So you think if I inject you with a tiny bit of my property, that means I own you, right?")
There is a tiny possibility that SCO holds the copyright to some code in the Linux kernel, and there is also a tiny possibility that a judge will rule that for some reason downloading SCO's code from SCO's website with an included GPL license does not give you all the rights to the code specified in that license.
If the worst happens and these two possibilities both occur, then although downloading your Linux kernel from SCO should indemnify you from being sued for violating their copyright with that copy of the kernel, you will still not be legally allowed to make further copies of that code internally (until SCO identifies and Linus strips out any infringing bits).
In other words, the only way to be totally safe from a SCO lawsuit is to download a copy of that 25MB kernel file for every computer you own that runs Linux. I've got one for myself, and I'm getting a half dozen more to give friends and family now. I'm still getting 200+ kB/sec from SCO's servers, though, so apparantly most other Slashdot users just aren't as paranoid (or as pissed?) as I am.
I think GDK is a replacement for XLib (draw line here; draw pixmap there), and GTK is all the higher level stuff (draw button here and hook it to this function; draw and operate spinbox there).
It's only $10 or $15 million rather than the $150 million the market is valuing them at now, but they've got some assets, mostly cash.
Of course, the important reason to sue them is to provide a court venue to publicize whatever evidence (or lack thereof) they've been keeping secret so far, to thereby show that the executive officers who are currently selling off their stock at ten times its natural price have been inflating that price by keeping relevant information secret, and to make them pay for those hundreds of thousands of dollars of deception (and millions of dollars worth of FUD) with hard prison time.
For instance, if SCO is still distributing 2.2.17 on their FTP server, we can assume that the infringing code came later. The fact that later versions may have at one time been available from SCO is not neccessarily an indication that those versions are clean, since the licenser can't accidentally license something, particularly if the licenser makes moves to rectiufy the situation afterwards.
I downloaded 2.4.13 from ftp.caldera.com this morning. Some of the included patch files bear dates of May 3, months after SCO claims to have discovered their own code in the Linux kernel (which is also included, as is the GPL therein).
Perhaps you're right, and SCO has discovered a wonderful loophole in copyright law which allows them to knowingly distribute their code under a license which they then get to "take back" later, but even in that case (which assumes that their unproven, self-contradictory, and deliberately unsubstantiated claims about owning code in the Linux kernel are true) that just means they're currently knowingly violating the copyright of everyone else who contributed to the kernel and are at risk of being sued by any of the 400 or so other contributors.
The UI on gimp-1.3 looks much nicer (at first glance, that is; I haven't used it much yet). I think the new icons have more to do with it than the toolkit change, though.
You know, the one where they want to make placing even a single copyrighted file on the internet against the copyright holders' wishes/license a felony?
If not, do you think it would be too risky or confuse my senator too much if I were to lobby for passing this law, let it sit on the books long enough to let McBride and everyone else in that company redistributing Linux in violation of the GPL get sent to federal, "pound me in the ass" prison, then lobby to get the law repealed afterward?
If you read the article, you'd know the whole thing is supervised by human operators. It isn't a case that a machine automatically matches faces and raises an alarm.
Well, even if you didn't read the article, you've got to realize that there will be a human in the loop somewhere. We aren't quite up to replacing security guards with ED-209 yet.
Robot: "HALT. PRESENT RECEIPT. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY." Customer: "It's right here." Robot: "YOU NOW HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO COMPLY." Customer: "It... It's right here!" Robot: "3...2...1... I AM NOW AUTHORIZED TO PREVENT SHOPLIFTING WITH PHYSICAL FORCE." (gatling guns spin up) Customer: "Aaahhh!!!"
Granted, it's not like they were getting $100 a year out of me before - for every boxed set I would pick up (because I was in a time/place where downloading would be inconvenient or just because I wanted to support the company) I've probably downloaded three sets of ISOs off mirror sites... but that still works out to $20 or $30 a year of my money that Red Hat saw. Were the boxed sets really a losing proposition for them?
Let's realise that Linux is successful 'cos MS divided the h/w folks, and that led to competition and commodity pricing, at the same time market aggregation.
Of course, this is also why MS is successful; if they had tied themselves to a single hardware vendor who was therefore also capable of selling with fat profit margins and little competition, many more of us would be using Macs right now.
OTOH if they make a modified XBox, say XXBox (what about XXXBox:->) and put Palladium on it, that could cut off Linux entirely, since this XXBox would be $150 for h/w and s/w would be $50 per year!
They've already got the equivalent of Palladium on the XBox, and it's already been cracked. The XXBox would be cracked too, as will Palladium for the PC. In order to make Palladium work, even if they had magic reverse engineering proof hardware, Microsoft would need to only sign software that is 100% free of exploitable errors. I doubt they could write software like that themselves, much less expect everyone else in the world to write it, if they still expect to sign other companies' software to maintain a facade of market competition.
Shouldn't the threshold for airplane sensitivity to RF interference from passengers be much higher now that we've realized the possibility that any of the passengers may be malicious and suicidal? If we're worried about stuff like CD players that is designed to run for hours with minimized EM emissions, then aren't we completely vulnerable to electronics of the same size designed to put 100% of their power output into EM interference, to do so in a big burst at the worst possible time, and to superficially look just like any of the other electronic gadgetry that gets by airport luggage screeners with no trouble?
Explain to me again why uploading and sharing legal files to a P2P network is a felony?
It's not. The bill states that the file you upload has to be "a copyrighted work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, on a computer network accessible to members of the public who are able to copy the work through such access". Uploading something in the public domain or something you hold the copyright for to a P2P network would still be just fine.
It's not that this bill would be targeting non-crimes, it's that it would be targeting misdemeanor-scale crimes with felony-scale punishments. A law that would (if totally enforced right now) put tens of millions of Americans in jail for years and remove their right to vote when they get out is practically tyrannical.
While it then goes on to specify that (if I'm reading the nigh-unparseable sentence correctly) if you leave the file up over 180 days
If I'm reading it correctly, it's specifying that leaving the file up for 180 seconds (or however long it takes them to catch you) on a public network means the law pretends that you've left it there for 180 days.
NASA is just having a lousy time spending it, because it's mostly earmarked for attempting to use experimental prototypes as operational vehicles cost-be-damned (Space Shuttle: $6 billion per year), for throwing good money after bad (ISS: $10 billion before any metal was cut, and a whole lot more since), and for design studies with no concrete product or actual tests (The "Venturestar" version of X-33).
Today's level of funding would have been sufficient for Apollo missions (assuming that today's NASA could work to the same efficiency as the 1960s NASA, which is probably a false assumption at the root of the problem) every few months, or to launch the unmanned probes that NASA is still quite good at every few weeks. It would also have been sufficient for NASA to have taken the X-33 program seriously (fund all 4 proposed initial vehicles for $4 billion, with the understanding that only the two best initial efforts would be funded for larger test vehicles, and perhaps only the best of those would be funded for an orbital prototype) and replace the Shuttle with something cost effective in a decade.
Of course, I'm just bitching because I don't know how to fix it now. Back when there were four large aerospace firms (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas) with an interest in creating new launch vehicles, funding competition between them to do so probably would have worked. Now mergers have brought us down to two companies who both have a multibillion dollar vested interest in the status quo, and a bunch of a little scrappers competing for the vastly less difficult XPrize goals.
/me drives car back and forth through giant magstripe reader
Magstripe Reader: Unable to Read Car
Me: Damn, the strip on this thing must be getting worn down. Wait, I know a trick./me wraps a thin plastic tarp around car and drives car back and forth through giant magstripe reader again
Magstripe Reader: Unable to Read Car
Me: Damn!
Girl: Please drive onto the sheet over there./me drives onto a 200 square foot sheet of carbonless copy paper, which acquires the credit card number from the raised numbers on the tire tread.
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel I downloaded from their FTP server last week wasn't there tonight.
The SCO litigation obviously has enough bite to warrant a significant SCO stock response
We'll start by going back to 1999, when some people still thought that stock bubbles were necessarily a reflection of reality.
a reassessment by IT consulting firms
Now we're traveling back to the early 1990s, when some people still thought of Gartner as an independent research group and not the corporate equivalent of those magazine advertisements that masquerade as articles.
and some hesitation by the corporate world
And finally we're back to the 19th century, when only the evil Communists would suggest that our corporate benefactors might not be beacons of the bold leadership necessary to steer modern society.
This time travel trip has been brought to you by tabdelgawagad... tabeldawg... fhqwhgads?
the big Linux players (IBM, Red Hat, the Kernel developers and maintainers) seem to have decided that ignoring or belittling the SCO threat is the best approach.
The best approach is to wait until SCO decides what it's claiming and takes the claims to court, then defeat them there. Suing SCO for their current copyright violations in distributing Linux kernels without a GPL-compatible license strikes me as the second best approach, but maybe I'm just petty.
Well, it's not working!
It's not? My Linux installation still seems to be working just fine; in fact Mozilla in particular is performing extra-well, accessing a new entertainment section on Slashdot: the SCO soap opera.
Just this week, Microsoft publicized the fact that they fixed that problem, by providing you indemnity in the event that such a thing happens.
And how much indemnity are they willing to provide? According to ZDNet:
"If it is determined that Microsoft infringed a third party's intellectual property, the new contract states that Microsoft will procure a licence so its customers can continue to use the infringing product, replace the existing product, modify the code so it no longer infringes, or refund that portion of the licence."
In other words, if Microsoft chooses to "refund that portion of the license" then you're in exactly the same position you would be in in the worst case scenario with free software: you've paid $0 for a program that you can no longer legally use.
In the second worst case scenario with free software (proprietary code may have made it into a free software product, but the proprietary copyright holder isn't hiding which code they claim in order to extort money a la SCO) then you'll probably be provided with options 2, 3, AND 4 from the free software community: you'll be able to choose an equivalent product (like FreeBSD), to continue using the existing product after it's maintainers remove or replace any infringing code (What, you think Linus and Alan Cox are going to give up and become novelists if it turns out there really were illegal contributions to Linux? No; anything improper will be replaced in no time.), AND to do both without paying any license fees.
So are there some advantages to Microsoft's offer that ZDNet didn't mention, or is this just PR?
Because, needless to say, even if your election officials publish source code for voting software, it's still a bit tricky to be certain that said voting software is actually what's running on the voting machines.
I'd like to see a really verifiable election process; check out http://www.vreceipt.com/ for an example system, which makes it essentially impossible for anyone to change or not count your vote. (It doesn't seem to prevent votes from being added, but that's a much easier problem to solve in meatspace, just by making sure that the number of ballots a polling place's computer submits matches the number of people an observer saw entering the booths)
2^52 gives us 4.5e15 addresses, which is roughly a million times more addresses than IPv4's 32 bits allow.
.1 square kilometers (more than 20 acres, and a larger share of area than people on Earth today enjoy) for food production and nature preserves then that takes up 20,000 kW per person; we'll give everyone another enormous 5 MW for personal and industrial use. That gives us a total energy expenditure for which we can support 2.3e18 people around our (fairly average) star.
;-)
What, do you think that while we're colonizing every star in the Universe we're going to stop at just one colony planet per star?
Take a look at our own solar system, for example. At the Earth's orbit, the Sun puts out radiant energy over 2.8e17 square kilometers of space, at a density of about a kilowatt per square meter, of which at least 200 watts could be converted into useful work. So, that's about 5.7e22 kilowatts at our disposal. If we give everyone a generous
In other words, once we've fully converted every star in the universe into Dyson spheres, we'll have hundreds of people for every available IP address! You were simply being short-sighted to assume otherwise.
Not really no. Even in America, you can't sue something that doesn't exist, and the chances of SCO existing after they've lost are very low indeed.
By this do you mean that the chances of SCO the organization remaining solvent are very low, or that the chances of the current SCO leadership not being assassinated by berzerk Linux zealots are very low?
(note for the humor impaired: even as a borderline Linux zealot I would not support acts of violence against any SCO executive... although forcing them to to spend a long time incarcerated for securities fraud while in constant fear of prison rape is kind of a grey area, particularly if the other inmates make apropos jokes like "So you think if I inject you with a tiny bit of my property, that means I own you, right?")
There is a tiny possibility that SCO holds the copyright to some code in the Linux kernel, and there is also a tiny possibility that a judge will rule that for some reason downloading SCO's code from SCO's website with an included GPL license does not give you all the rights to the code specified in that license.
If the worst happens and these two possibilities both occur, then although downloading your Linux kernel from SCO should indemnify you from being sued for violating their copyright with that copy of the kernel, you will still not be legally allowed to make further copies of that code internally (until SCO identifies and Linus strips out any infringing bits).
In other words, the only way to be totally safe from a SCO lawsuit is to download a copy of that 25MB kernel file for every computer you own that runs Linux. I've got one for myself, and I'm getting a half dozen more to give friends and family now. I'm still getting 200+ kB/sec from SCO's servers, though, so apparantly most other Slashdot users just aren't as paranoid (or as pissed?) as I am.
I think GDK is a replacement for XLib (draw line here; draw pixmap there), and GTK is all the higher level stuff (draw button here and hook it to this function; draw and operate spinbox there).
It's only $10 or $15 million rather than the $150 million the market is valuing them at now, but they've got some assets, mostly cash.
Of course, the important reason to sue them is to provide a court venue to publicize whatever evidence (or lack thereof) they've been keeping secret so far, to thereby show that the executive officers who are currently selling off their stock at ten times its natural price have been inflating that price by keeping relevant information secret, and to make them pay for those hundreds of thousands of dollars of deception (and millions of dollars worth of FUD) with hard prison time.
For instance, if SCO is still distributing 2.2.17 on their FTP server, we can assume that the infringing code came later. The fact that later versions may have at one time been available from SCO is not neccessarily an indication that those versions are clean, since the licenser can't accidentally license something, particularly if the licenser makes moves to rectiufy the situation afterwards.
I downloaded 2.4.13 from ftp.caldera.com this morning. Some of the included patch files bear dates of May 3, months after SCO claims to have discovered their own code in the Linux kernel (which is also included, as is the GPL therein).
Perhaps you're right, and SCO has discovered a wonderful loophole in copyright law which allows them to knowingly distribute their code under a license which they then get to "take back" later, but even in that case (which assumes that their unproven, self-contradictory, and deliberately unsubstantiated claims about owning code in the Linux kernel are true) that just means they're currently knowingly violating the copyright of everyone else who contributed to the kernel and are at risk of being sued by any of the 400 or so other contributors.
The UI on gimp-1.3 looks much nicer (at first glance, that is; I haven't used it much yet). I think the new icons have more to do with it than the toolkit change, though.
You can get the Linux kernel from them, GPL license included, as a free download from ftp.caldera.com.
You know, the one where they want to make placing even a single copyrighted file on the internet against the copyright holders' wishes/license a felony?
If not, do you think it would be too risky or confuse my senator too much if I were to lobby for passing this law, let it sit on the books long enough to let McBride and everyone else in that company redistributing Linux in violation of the GPL get sent to federal, "pound me in the ass" prison, then lobby to get the law repealed afterward?
I got gimp-1.3 from Matthew Hall's apt/rpm repository (http://people.ecsc.co.uk/~matt/downloads/apt) a couple weeks ago; it's using gtk-2.
If you read the article, you'd know the whole thing is supervised by human operators. It isn't a case that a machine automatically matches faces and raises an alarm.
Well, even if you didn't read the article, you've got to realize that there will be a human in the loop somewhere. We aren't quite up to replacing security guards with ED-209 yet.
Robot: "HALT. PRESENT RECEIPT. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY."
Customer: "It's right here."
Robot: "YOU NOW HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO COMPLY."
Customer: "It... It's right here!"
Robot: "3...2...1... I AM NOW AUTHORIZED TO PREVENT SHOPLIFTING WITH PHYSICAL FORCE." (gatling guns spin up)
Customer: "Aaahhh!!!"
Granted, it's not like they were getting $100 a year out of me before - for every boxed set I would pick up (because I was in a time/place where downloading would be inconvenient or just because I wanted to support the company) I've probably downloaded three sets of ISOs off mirror sites... but that still works out to $20 or $30 a year of my money that Red Hat saw. Were the boxed sets really a losing proposition for them?
Let's realise that Linux is successful 'cos MS divided the h/w folks, and that led to competition and commodity pricing, at the same time market aggregation.
:->) and put Palladium on it, that could cut off Linux entirely, since this XXBox would be $150 for h/w and s/w would be $50 per year!
Of course, this is also why MS is successful; if they had tied themselves to a single hardware vendor who was therefore also capable of selling with fat profit margins and little competition, many more of us would be using Macs right now.
OTOH if they make a modified XBox, say XXBox (what about XXXBox
They've already got the equivalent of Palladium on the XBox, and it's already been cracked. The XXBox would be cracked too, as will Palladium for the PC. In order to make Palladium work, even if they had magic reverse engineering proof hardware, Microsoft would need to only sign software that is 100% free of exploitable errors. I doubt they could write software like that themselves, much less expect everyone else in the world to write it, if they still expect to sign other companies' software to maintain a facade of market competition.
Perhaps he's planning to visit a conference in the United States and wants to be able to escape again.
Shouldn't the threshold for airplane sensitivity to RF interference from passengers be much higher now that we've realized the possibility that any of the passengers may be malicious and suicidal? If we're worried about stuff like CD players that is designed to run for hours with minimized EM emissions, then aren't we completely vulnerable to electronics of the same size designed to put 100% of their power output into EM interference, to do so in a big burst at the worst possible time, and to superficially look just like any of the other electronic gadgetry that gets by airport luggage screeners with no trouble?
Explain to me again why uploading and sharing legal files to a P2P network is a felony?
It's not. The bill states that the file you upload has to be "a copyrighted work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, on a computer network accessible to members of the public who are able to copy the work through such access". Uploading something in the public domain or something you hold the copyright for to a P2P network would still be just fine.
It's not that this bill would be targeting non-crimes, it's that it would be targeting misdemeanor-scale crimes with felony-scale punishments. A law that would (if totally enforced right now) put tens of millions of Americans in jail for years and remove their right to vote when they get out is practically tyrannical.
While it then goes on to specify that (if I'm reading the nigh-unparseable sentence correctly) if you leave the file up over 180 days
If I'm reading it correctly, it's specifying that leaving the file up for 180 seconds (or however long it takes them to catch you) on a public network means the law pretends that you've left it there for 180 days.
It adds teeth to existing laws, because the existing laws obviously aren't acting as a deterrent.
Perhaps it would help if they tried enforcing some of the existing laws first.
NASA is just having a lousy time spending it, because it's mostly earmarked for attempting to use experimental prototypes as operational vehicles cost-be-damned (Space Shuttle: $6 billion per year), for throwing good money after bad (ISS: $10 billion before any metal was cut, and a whole lot more since), and for design studies with no concrete product or actual tests (The "Venturestar" version of X-33).
Today's level of funding would have been sufficient for Apollo missions (assuming that today's NASA could work to the same efficiency as the 1960s NASA, which is probably a false assumption at the root of the problem) every few months, or to launch the unmanned probes that NASA is still quite good at every few weeks. It would also have been sufficient for NASA to have taken the X-33 program seriously (fund all 4 proposed initial vehicles for $4 billion, with the understanding that only the two best initial efforts would be funded for larger test vehicles, and perhaps only the best of those would be funded for an orbital prototype) and replace the Shuttle with something cost effective in a decade.
Of course, I'm just bitching because I don't know how to fix it now. Back when there were four large aerospace firms (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas) with an interest in creating new launch vehicles, funding competition between them to do so probably would have worked. Now mergers have brought us down to two companies who both have a multibillion dollar vested interest in the status quo, and a bunch of a little scrappers competing for the vastly less difficult XPrize goals.
/me drives car back and forth through giant magstripe reader
/me wraps a thin plastic tarp around car and drives car back and forth through giant magstripe reader again
/me drives onto a 200 square foot sheet of carbonless copy paper, which acquires the credit card number from the raised numbers on the tire tread.
Magstripe Reader: Unable to Read Car
Me: Damn, the strip on this thing must be getting worn down. Wait, I know a trick.
Magstripe Reader: Unable to Read Car
Me: Damn!
Girl: Please drive onto the sheet over there.
Or did the Wachowski brothers lose about a thousand geek points by not naming their sequels something like "Matrix Product" and "Matrix Inverse"?