Far more important than the distributed processing is the "everything is a file" method of accessing all information outside of a process.
This is a huge deal, it is a real object-oriented system interface. All these proponents of COM and Corba and.net and all that other wannabe stuff should pay attention: "object oriented" is meaningless unless the "methods" match between the objects so they can be substituted for each other. Plan9 does this (so did original Unix before they added ioctl and sockets). In Plan9 all objects have "read" and "write" methods (and a few others) and can be reused. Now some people will scoff and say that that is not the type of methods they want on their objects, but they fail to realize that if they build their methods atop these they will be able to reuse any of the base objects. The files also provide a usable method of copying an object from one point to another that respects the actual size of these objects and the fact that executable code typically does not work on any machine other than the one it was supposed to be on.
OpenBSD (the version I use, and care about) needs to be free "for use in baby-mulching machines, or to drop atomic bombs on Australia". GPL isn't free to do that.
WRONG again. Sigh.
Although there are differences between the BSD and GPL licenses, for some reason you managed to quote one area where they are identical. The GPL explicitly disallows any kinds of restrictions on use, just like the OpenBSD license, and just like your quote.
The GPL is viral because when you incorporate anything GPL and then redistribute, your whole work is then irrevocably GPL.
WRONG!!!!! When are people going to stop this FUD. You still own the copyright to your original work even after you distribute it under the GPL. If you removed the other GPL code from it you could then distribute the portion that is left (the part you wrote) under any rules you want. It is exactly the same as copyright, exactly the same as the copyright version you described:
You remove that code, you're good to go again. In other words; it is possible to 'remove' a copyright derivative-work taint by removing the portions that are derivative.
Please explain clearly why you think removing the GPL portions does not do the same thing. Don't give me any bullshit about people already having the code, that is true of your copyright example as well. If they did not break into your office and steal it, you have already granted them rights to use the code, by giving it to them, it does not matter if you said it was GPL or not.
Repeat after me: the GPL is an EXCEPTION to US and world copyright rules. It lets the receiver of the code do MORE than they could do if there was no GPL and the code was just copyrighted normally. The GPL adds no laws or anything and is entirely based on copyright. If copyright was repealed the GPL would be meaningless and you could do anything with the code.
Wrong. Revealing the code and having it removed from Linux would help their case, becasue the removal could be pointed at as proof that even the Linux hackers admit the code was stolen. They could then sue IBM and RedHat and anybody else that had knowlingly distributed the code. They can't sue end users because the end users had no idea they were buying stolen code. Also several people have suggested that it is impossible for them to sue anybody for copyright without revealing what was copyrighted and making active actions to stop the copyright violations, which means publishing the exact locations of the stolen code.
It should be obvious that the reason they don't reveal the code is that either they have no case, or that the primary motivation behind this is some entity that would prefer for IT purchasers to have some doubt about using Linux.
Having worked on Titanic, the actual change was to the miniature of the underwater propellors when the ship was put into reverse to avoid collision with the iceberg. The miniature was rigged with all the propellors turning together, so when they stopped and reversed they all went backwards. In the real Titanic the center propeller was connected to a steam turbine that could not go backwards (the outer propellors were connected to the reciprocating engines you see in the movie). To put the ship in reverse the turbine was stopped. This was pointed out in dailies before Cameron saw it, though I think he gave the request to reshoot it. The miniature was already set up so this was solved by having somebody with a pipe wrench grab the center shaft inside the model and stop it from turning backwards.
The shot of the propellors starting in the harbor was also wrong as the turbine would not have been run till later, but this was never corrected.
In the movie numerous shots were flipped so the propellors turned both directions in them, or had the blade tilt backwards.
Somebody mentioned the funnels. The rear funnel was fake (at the time people thought more funnels == better ship) and this was known and incorporated into the CG smoke. Due to it blowing directly backwards it would appear to come from that funnel anyway (as it was intended to appear by the original ship designers).
One thing about the whole comment thing is that they indicate that whoever was doing the copying (whether from/to Linux) did not at that time believe they were doing anything wrong. Otherwise they would have purposely deleted or changed the comments, as well as all the variable names, in order to disguise what they did. The fact that the actual perpretrator did not believe they were doing wrong is probably important and will eventually get this case thrown out with no monetary damages, though the code may have to be replaced in future Linux versions. Also if the code was copied by an SCO employee (which looks very likely now) then they cannot claim that he did it outside their control.
Not only that, removal of the code would help their case. They could point out that the Linux hackers agree that the code was stolen, otherwise why would they remove it?
For this reason (and many others) I believe the whole thing is an outside-funded attempt to cast FUD on Linux. Removal of the code is totally contrary to the desires of the actual people behind this, even though it would be entirely in the interest of SCO.
The original copyright holder can distribute code under multiple licenses. The only plausable reason why SCO would be forced to distribute their code under the GPL is because they combined it with GPL code from the kernel and distributed the result, this is not allowed unless all of the result is GPL. However their portions of this code would still be under their copyright and could still be sold to IBM for use in closed-source code. So this would not force IBM to GPL anything (nor would it force SCO to GPL any other hypothetical product that uses those parts of the code but no GPL stuff).
As probably 1000 or more lines were deleted for this version, it is almost certain that the 80 lines of SCO code were. Or at least you can probably tell your phb that.
My guess is that the reporter screwed up the description. I doubt Sun is stupid enough to claim that Linux and Windows don't have multithreading. It sounded more like they want to design a new processor designed to do multithreading, kind of a super version of the Intel hyperthreading but (maybe) with dozens of threads instead of 2, and that they also think the OS will have to be redesigned to take advantage of this new design processor.
Though I have no doubt there is lots of porn advertised in spam, in my experience there have been very few porno images. I would say that 95% of the images I receive in spam are for mortgage and printer cartridges. I certainly receive spam for porn sites but it is almost always all-text.
It is possible that the porno spam with images is more easily filtered than the mortgage spam, or that for some reason I don't seem to be on the lists, but my experience does not match what they are saying.
PS: after much frustration I now trash all mail with any html in it, as well as all SpamAssassin results >= 3, and use a white list to skip these. This is about the only way to get usable email anymore.
Ha ha you think you are funny. Do you know what your router is running? Which gives you more trouble, your Windows machine or your router?
You seem to be confusing amateur with professional output. Believe me a professionally designed Linux system by a commercial company will work very well.
80. Any software licensed under the GPL (including Linux) must, by its terms, not be held proprietary or confidential, and may not be claimed by any party as a trade secret or copyright property.
This is of course totally false. In fact it is an outright lie and in total contradiction to the real facts.
The GPL does not work unless somebody claims copyright. Usually the original author or the company they work for, but sometimes copyright is assigned over to the FSF.
If there is no claim to copyright then the software is public domain, and the GPL is meaningless. So by definition the GPL means the code is copyrighted property.
If nobody buys the patent then it should become public domain. Thus the company that waits will lose the ability to be the exclusive manufacturer of the patented device. So if the patent really has any value the company will buy it.
If the product takes 2 years to develop then there just has to be proof that a company has paid for rights to the patent and is also investing a reasonable amount of money into developing and marketing the device.
To keep companies from just waiting for the patent to expire, the patented idea would become public domain after the expiration date, and anybody could use it. Thus if any company sees any value in an idea they will want to buy it from the inventor since this would give them exclusive rights to make it. If they just wait then all their competitors would also be able to use the idea.
While I agree that the chances of 80 identical lines of code in completely independently written stuff, even 3 million lines of it, is vanishingly small, your analysis is quite broken because it does not take into account the way C code works.
Say the first line is "int block_number". Your estimate that there might be 10 ways of writing this is probably way low, I would say there are about 100 possible first lines. But once this matches, the odds are very high that a later line will use the text "block_number" in the same places. So even if a line can be written 100 ways it reduces the ways the next lines can be written to maybe 2. So instead of your 10^80 estimate, I would guess more like a 100^20 estimate. Still astronomically small.
Do you really serioiusly think that which lines were stolen would not be revealed by the GPL crowd? Can you honestly say that you think that would happen?
If you really believe that, you are a truly sad and pathetic individual.
There are plenty of rabid zealots on both sides of all these arguments, but I have truly never heard anything as stupid and closed-minded as what you just said. Absolutley unbelievable, and truly sad.
Similar comments don't mean anything. What if the comment is "This is described in the BSD man page this way:..." This would result in very large identical comments. For this reason I would discount any large comment blocks before or between procedures, or treat them the same way as blocks of code and analyze them to see if the obvious solution would result in identical wording.
If stuff was mindlessly copied (the most likely way it got into Linux) then the actual proof would probalby be very small comments, not great blocks. Erroneous comments that are the same would be a smoking gun. So would identical typos. So would attribution that does not make sense such as "based on work by Joe Smith" where Joe Smith is an SCO employee.
If they want to paint the Linux developers as evil they would have to show not just copying, but deliberate attempts to hide the origins. Substitution of variable names is probably worse than a direct copy. Stripping out the comments is also very bad.
By that logic I should be able to collect royalties from Stephen King for his newest book. He copied something I wrote. No I won't tell him or anybody what he copied, but he owes me!
No, the proposed law says that if you use closed formats, the government won't buy your software. You are free to sell it to anybody other than the government, and you will not go to jail no matter what you write.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 1
From what I see, the purpose of the NDA is so that you can't tell other people what the offending lines are, because then they could fix them and SCO wouldn't have a case.
Absolutely false. Removal of the offending lines would help SCO's case immensely. They could point at the changes and say "See! The Linux hackers admit that code was stolen and removed it!".
The reason for the non-disclosure is either because they have no case, or they are being paid to spread doubt about Linux, or both. This should be obvious to everybody by now.
You only get the source if the executable is delivered to you. If the US government is delivering a missle to you you probably won't have much time or incentive to use that source code!
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This is a huge deal, it is a real object-oriented system interface. All these proponents of COM and Corba and .net and all that other wannabe stuff should pay attention: "object oriented" is meaningless unless the "methods" match between the objects so they can be substituted for each other. Plan9 does this (so did original Unix before they added ioctl and sockets). In Plan9 all objects have "read" and "write" methods (and a few others) and can be reused. Now some people will scoff and say that that is not the type of methods they want on their objects, but they fail to realize that if they build their methods atop these they will be able to reuse any of the base objects. The files also provide a usable method of copying an object from one point to another that respects the actual size of these objects and the fact that executable code typically does not work on any machine other than the one it was supposed to be on.
WRONG again. Sigh.
Although there are differences between the BSD and GPL licenses, for some reason you managed to quote one area where they are identical. The GPL explicitly disallows any kinds of restrictions on use, just like the OpenBSD license, and just like your quote.
WRONG!!!!! When are people going to stop this FUD. You still own the copyright to your original work even after you distribute it under the GPL. If you removed the other GPL code from it you could then distribute the portion that is left (the part you wrote) under any rules you want. It is exactly the same as copyright, exactly the same as the copyright version you described:
You remove that code, you're good to go again. In other words; it is possible to 'remove' a copyright derivative-work taint by removing the portions that are derivative.
Please explain clearly why you think removing the GPL portions does not do the same thing. Don't give me any bullshit about people already having the code, that is true of your copyright example as well. If they did not break into your office and steal it, you have already granted them rights to use the code, by giving it to them, it does not matter if you said it was GPL or not.
Repeat after me: the GPL is an EXCEPTION to US and world copyright rules. It lets the receiver of the code do MORE than they could do if there was no GPL and the code was just copyrighted normally. The GPL adds no laws or anything and is entirely based on copyright. If copyright was repealed the GPL would be meaningless and you could do anything with the code.
It should be obvious that the reason they don't reveal the code is that either they have no case, or that the primary motivation behind this is some entity that would prefer for IT purchasers to have some doubt about using Linux.
The shot of the propellors starting in the harbor was also wrong as the turbine would not have been run till later, but this was never corrected.
In the movie numerous shots were flipped so the propellors turned both directions in them, or had the blade tilt backwards.
Somebody mentioned the funnels. The rear funnel was fake (at the time people thought more funnels == better ship) and this was known and incorporated into the CG smoke. Due to it blowing directly backwards it would appear to come from that funnel anyway (as it was intended to appear by the original ship designers).
One thing about the whole comment thing is that they indicate that whoever was doing the copying (whether from/to Linux) did not at that time believe they were doing anything wrong. Otherwise they would have purposely deleted or changed the comments, as well as all the variable names, in order to disguise what they did. The fact that the actual perpretrator did not believe they were doing wrong is probably important and will eventually get this case thrown out with no monetary damages, though the code may have to be replaced in future Linux versions. Also if the code was copied by an SCO employee (which looks very likely now) then they cannot claim that he did it outside their control.
For this reason (and many others) I believe the whole thing is an outside-funded attempt to cast FUD on Linux. Removal of the code is totally contrary to the desires of the actual people behind this, even though it would be entirely in the interest of SCO.
The original copyright holder can distribute code under multiple licenses. The only plausable reason why SCO would be forced to distribute their code under the GPL is because they combined it with GPL code from the kernel and distributed the result, this is not allowed unless all of the result is GPL. However their portions of this code would still be under their copyright and could still be sold to IBM for use in closed-source code. So this would not force IBM to GPL anything (nor would it force SCO to GPL any other hypothetical product that uses those parts of the code but no GPL stuff).
As probably 1000 or more lines were deleted for this version, it is almost certain that the 80 lines of SCO code were. Or at least you can probably tell your phb that.
My guess is that the reporter screwed up the description. I doubt Sun is stupid enough to claim that Linux and Windows don't have multithreading. It sounded more like they want to design a new processor designed to do multithreading, kind of a super version of the Intel hyperthreading but (maybe) with dozens of threads instead of 2, and that they also think the OS will have to be redesigned to take advantage of this new design processor.
It is possible that the porno spam with images is more easily filtered than the mortgage spam, or that for some reason I don't seem to be on the lists, but my experience does not match what they are saying.
PS: after much frustration I now trash all mail with any html in it, as well as all SpamAssassin results >= 3, and use a white list to skip these. This is about the only way to get usable email anymore.
You seem to be confusing amateur with professional output. Believe me a professionally designed Linux system by a commercial company will work very well.
This is of course totally false. In fact it is an outright lie and in total contradiction to the real facts.
The GPL does not work unless somebody claims copyright. Usually the original author or the company they work for, but sometimes copyright is assigned over to the FSF.
If there is no claim to copyright then the software is public domain, and the GPL is meaningless. So by definition the GPL means the code is copyrighted property.
If nobody buys the patent then it should become public domain. Thus the company that waits will lose the ability to be the exclusive manufacturer of the patented device. So if the patent really has any value the company will buy it.
If the product takes 2 years to develop then there just has to be proof that a company has paid for rights to the patent and is also investing a reasonable amount of money into developing and marketing the device.
To keep companies from just waiting for the patent to expire, the patented idea would become public domain after the expiration date, and anybody could use it. Thus if any company sees any value in an idea they will want to buy it from the inventor since this would give them exclusive rights to make it. If they just wait then all their competitors would also be able to use the idea.
While I agree that the chances of 80 identical lines of code in completely independently written stuff, even 3 million lines of it, is vanishingly small, your analysis is quite broken because it does not take into account the way C code works.
Say the first line is "int block_number". Your estimate that there might be 10 ways of writing this is probably way low, I would say there are about 100 possible first lines. But once this matches, the odds are very high that a later line will use the text "block_number" in the same places. So even if a line can be written 100 ways it reduces the ways the next lines can be written to maybe 2. So instead of your 10^80 estimate, I would guess more like a 100^20 estimate. Still astronomically small.
If you really believe that, you are a truly sad and pathetic individual.
There are plenty of rabid zealots on both sides of all these arguments, but I have truly never heard anything as stupid and closed-minded as what you just said. Absolutley unbelievable, and truly sad.
Similar comments don't mean anything. What if the comment is "This is described in the BSD man page this way: ..." This would result in very large identical comments. For this reason I would discount any large comment blocks before or between procedures, or treat them the same way as blocks of code and analyze them to see if the obvious solution would result in identical wording.
If stuff was mindlessly copied (the most likely way it got into Linux) then the actual proof would probalby be very small comments, not great blocks. Erroneous comments that are the same would be a smoking gun. So would identical typos. So would attribution that does not make sense such as "based on work by Joe Smith" where Joe Smith is an SCO employee.
If they want to paint the Linux developers as evil they would have to show not just copying, but deliberate attempts to hide the origins. Substitution of variable names is probably worse than a direct copy. Stripping out the comments is also very bad.
By that logic I should be able to collect royalties from Stephen King for his newest book. He copied something I wrote. No I won't tell him or anybody what he copied, but he owes me!
No, the proposed law says that if you use closed formats, the government won't buy your software. You are free to sell it to anybody other than the government, and you will not go to jail no matter what you write.
No, MSWord format would be acceptable if it was documented. I think this is the result the author is hoping for.
It's public domain. There is a link to get it.
Absolutely false. Removal of the offending lines would help SCO's case immensely. They could point at the changes and say "See! The Linux hackers admit that code was stolen and removed it!".
The reason for the non-disclosure is either because they have no case, or they are being paid to spread doubt about Linux, or both. This should be obvious to everybody by now.
Then the government is required to send the source in another missile.
You only get the source if the executable is delivered to you. If the US government is delivering a missle to you you probably won't have much time or incentive to use that source code!