Even if SCO managed to overturn the GPL it is still only a distribution mechanism. The copyright for code included by other kernel programmers will remain with those who contributed it.
If these people desired, they could withdraw the right to use their code from SCO and that would be it - SCO screwed - permanently unless of course they can rewrite the millions of lines of code that have nothing whatsoever to do with them.
Why is it that if I heard this speech below from a current politician I would find it hard to believe it was said with anything other than a forked tongue.
"I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father's house to believe in democracy. Trust the people - that was his message.... I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own.... I owe my advancement entirely to the House of Commons, whose servant I am. In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters." - Winston Churchill
This could be part of a new UK Government scheme to cut the outsourcing of IT based labour to India, the far east etc.
For instance, it costs 25,000 pa to employ a coder in the UK but only 3000 pa to employ his/her counterpart in India. Tech savvy people are quite likely to use peer to peer or copying so by criminalising even reasonable acts, e.g. ripping a CD to play tracks on your MP3 player, you can then fill prisons with tech savvy people and force them to code or remote administer networks without having to pay them more than an ounce of tobacco a month.
Business benefits from free labour and the rapid growth in the need for prison officers will end unemployment overnight.
I'd better shut up mow or that twat Blunkett might start getting ideas.
I don't know the details of WTO law but I remember last time there was one of these spats (over Bananas), Single catagories of products were specified i.e. Scottish Knitwear and a few others but no companies were specified.
All US software would be a possibilty and I reckon the phone lines to the whitehouse would melt within 10 mins of that one.
If you're a complete Linux newbie try the download but for the full effect get the Power Pack boxed release. Two printed manuals, and you get non-oss stuff like flash-player, java runtime environment, realplayer etc. that can be installed from the CDs saving you pulling stuff down from the Mandrake Club site.
Having used Linux since Redhat 5 and been through SuSE, Debian, Slackware and most of the others, Mandrake is the easiest to get your head round. If you want to get your hands dirty you can go command line but there are wizards to do practically everything. Mandrake's hardware detection is also way out in front on practically every machine I've tried it on.
SuSE is getting there as a newbies distro but M9.2 is the easiest so far.
There's always the Steel tariff issue. Under WTO law, the EU can legally retaliate against the US for interfering with free markets by placing tariffs on EU made products.
10% of annual turnover as an Anti-trust fine + x% import tariff on all MS products? May be the first time you see Gates and Ballmer really eating humble pie.
"I view this as an attempt to bully and intimidate analysts--to try to cow them into silence," says Christopher Sontag, executive vice president at SCO, in Lindon, Utah.
Unlike SCO who's attempts at bullying and intimidating users, Distro vendors and anyone or everyone else with anything to do with Linux doesn't make their "poor us" wimperings sound at all hypocritical.
Maybe this is why the head nerd stepped back and let Monkey Boy take the top position just before the Anti-trust verdict was due.
A bit like "Congratulations on your promotion, here's the signed letter of resignation I've prepared for you for when the shit hits the fan. Now I'll be hiding in the software development department when the men in blue uniforms with the shiny handcuffs get here. Been nice knowing you and thanks, this is just the sort of futile gesture that will get you a long in the software industry when they let you out.
"McBride points out that Hollywood studios, keen to protect their movies from being pirated on the Internet, have preached the need to respect copyrights. 'It's hypocritical for them to be going around saying that they don't want their stuff to be given away for free, but at the same time saying, "Boy, this free stuff sure is cool,"' he says."
Errrrmm, this may be because Hollywood generally pays someone to write a script or buys one from someone else, hires the actors, CGI guys, film crews, director etc., maintains a level of control over the production process then credits (and pays) those responsible for their contribution.
This differs from your claim which is based on the concept of "we didn't actually contribute any effort, development funding, or anything really but feel we deserve money because IBM included software THEY'D developed to work on UNIX into Linux" a concept that is stretching the term "derivative work" to the limit.
The two are wholly different claims and your idea as expressed above is akin to wholesale distribution of Windows or your proprietry UNIX or ripped of movies via the net.
Again, it's fairly easy to spot when a movie has stolen the plot of another movie makers work and you can bet Hollywood would jump on the back of anyone who stole significant chunks of a film script without crediting the original.
One more time:
YOU HAVE NOT PROVIDED A SHRED OF CONVINCING EVIDENCE TO BACK UP YOUR CASE! YOU HAVE NOT PROVIDED ME OR ANY OTHER LINUX USER WITH ANY CONVINCING SOLID REASON WHY WE SHOULD BELIEVE A WORD YOU SAY!
So until you are willing to put the proof to public scrutiny, and I can download the kernel source from any Linux distro or kernel.org so don't give us this "it'll be revealing our trade secrets crap, shut the fuck up and start behaving like an adult.
and it turns out that SCO have been lying all the way does this make MS guilty of conspiracy to defraud?
If so, who at MS will be held responsible for the decision because it's quite hard to believe that a minion at Microsoft could take a decision of this magnitude.
Scene 1:
Prison Cell containing two men. The fatter of the two seems to be dancing in a style something akin to a monkey......
Fat man....
That's another fine mess you've got us into Darl....
Darl McBride. You currently breath air which is provided by Planet Earth Inc for free.
You pay me $299 to breath proprietry carbon monoxide from the exhaust pipe of my car for say, errrrr, forever and I'll pay you so I can use some piss poor commercial subsistute for my nice reliable Linux box.
Every press release that goes out gets more and more nuts!
They've claimed, retracted, changed their terms of reference, claimed IP, dropped IP and gone for "contractual terms", reclaimed IP etc. I mean this is the sort of thing judges hate i.e. being pissed around by claimants who know not the difference twixt arse and elbow.
I can't wait for the press release that reads:
It all started when a guy in the legal department started having traumatic flashbacks to a Vietnam movie he watched in 1991. This may or may not have had something to do with the half pound of red leb he'd been smoking while watching 'cos he was still at law school at the time. The resulting hysteria was like, infectious, and spread to the management, and like, before anyone realised what was happening we'd turned charlie into evil commie open source developers that had to be wiped out at any cost.
By the time anyone came round and realised that no-one was taking notice of anything we said it was too late. Our customers had migrated to Linux and mailed us telling us to piss off and it took 3 days to stop the management squatting on the roof and howling at the moon.
Maybe we Open Source types should turn ultra-honest and grass up all those business users of hooky MS Office copies we may come accross to the BSA. I mean hardly a day goes by without MS spouting on about the evils of piracy so we should do our best to help them by dropping those nasty pirates in it up to their necks by booking them a software audit.
By the time the BSA has done an RIAA on a significant percentage of companies it would interesting to see what happens to OO.org's market share. And if MS don't aggressively pursue major infringers there's cause for previous victims to sue for malicious treatment.
And the ultimate would be to see Steve Ballmer having to stand up and say "This is a positive thing for Microsoft to see all those pirates bought to book even though our market share has fallen 50%" and look like he really means it. On the other hand, maybe he'd like to turn the press statement in an interpretive dance for the nest MS conference.
This really is such a stupid "brain off" list of idiotic statements. Apache crashes all the time? Yeah OK that's why 60% of the worlds web servers run it.
Please, oh please publish your name so that companies can avoid hiring your "consultancy" services and save themselves vast amounts of money in the process.
BTW, there's a guy from SCO at the door want's to hire you for their press office.
That Microsoft paid for tests and surveys generally say what Microsoft would like them to e.g. running Win 2003 server against a Linux install that just happens to be running the slowest Linux file system on or running a heavily Microsft Engineer tuned 2k server against a Red hat default install.
The question is will people be stupid enough to believe it without scrutinising the results
Joseph Stalin controlled more land mass than the US and possessed wealth that outstrips McBride's and napolean controlled much of Europe. Both recieved the adulation of millions.
Does your point deny any madness in the Stalins, Hitlers and napoleons of this world or do you consider the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and militaristic expansionist empires to be demonstrations of "rational" thought and behaviour. Just because he's a CEO and has lot's of money doesn't prove sanity in the same way that the above mentioned leader's success as presidents/emporors doesn't. On the contrary, it's a known fact that poor people are more likely to repay debts than the rich. A gratuitous excess of wealth has the power to turn the bearer into an arrogant, greedy, amoral shitwit and there's more than enough evidence in the world to prove that.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if SCO managed to overturn the GPL it is still only a distribution mechanism. The copyright for code included by other kernel programmers will remain with those who contributed it.
If these people desired, they could withdraw the right to use their code from SCO and that would be it - SCO screwed - permanently unless of course they can rewrite the millions of lines of code that have nothing whatsoever to do with them.
Interest of the shareholders? My arse
The way are behaving at the moment "because he's there"
1: It was taken to serve as an emergency landing site for damaged B-29's coming back from Japan.
2: Folks like to dramaticize the importance of the island
For the guys in the B-29's I suspect the island was considered pretty important and needed little dramatisation.
Why is it that if I heard this speech below from a current politician I would find it hard to believe it was said with anything other than a forked tongue.
"I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father's house to believe in democracy. Trust the people - that was his message.... I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own.... I owe my advancement entirely to the House of Commons, whose servant I am. In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters." - Winston Churchill
Oh how times change eh?
This could be part of a new UK Government scheme to cut the outsourcing of IT based labour to India, the far east etc.
For instance, it costs 25,000 pa to employ a coder in the UK but only 3000 pa to employ his/her counterpart in India. Tech savvy people are quite likely to use peer to peer or copying so by criminalising even reasonable acts, e.g. ripping a CD to play tracks on your MP3 player, you can then fill prisons with tech savvy people and force them to code or remote administer networks without having to pay them more than an ounce of tobacco a month.
Business benefits from free labour and the rapid growth in the need for prison officers will end unemployment overnight.
I'd better shut up mow or that twat Blunkett might start getting ideas.
I don't know the details of WTO law but I remember last time there was one of these spats (over Bananas), Single catagories of products were specified i.e. Scottish Knitwear and a few others but no companies were specified.
All US software would be a possibilty and I reckon the phone lines to the whitehouse would melt within 10 mins of that one.
If you're a complete Linux newbie try the download but for the full effect get the Power Pack boxed release. Two printed manuals, and you get non-oss stuff like flash-player, java runtime environment, realplayer etc. that can be installed from the CDs saving you pulling stuff down from the Mandrake Club site.
Having used Linux since Redhat 5 and been through SuSE, Debian, Slackware and most of the others, Mandrake is the easiest to get your head round. If you want to get your hands dirty you can go command line but there are wizards to do practically everything. Mandrake's hardware detection is also way out in front on practically every machine I've tried it on.
SuSE is getting there as a newbies distro but M9.2 is the easiest so far.
Well worth it.
There's always the Steel tariff issue. Under WTO law, the EU can legally retaliate against the US for interfering with free markets by placing tariffs on EU made products.
10% of annual turnover as an Anti-trust fine + x% import tariff on all MS products? May be the first time you see Gates and Ballmer really eating humble pie.
"I view this as an attempt to bully and intimidate analysts--to try to cow them into silence," says Christopher Sontag, executive vice president at SCO, in Lindon, Utah.
Unlike SCO who's attempts at bullying and intimidating users, Distro vendors and anyone or everyone else with anything to do with Linux doesn't make their "poor us" wimperings sound at all hypocritical.
This is just the sort of example of Microsoft's history of innovation that should be shown to Judge Kollar Kottely to back up their case.
Erm, OK then, probably not.
Maybe this is why the head nerd stepped back and let Monkey Boy take the top position just before the Anti-trust verdict was due.
A bit like "Congratulations on your promotion, here's the signed letter of resignation I've prepared for you for when the shit hits the fan.
Now I'll be hiding in the software development department when the men in blue uniforms with the shiny handcuffs get here. Been nice knowing you and thanks, this is just the sort of futile gesture that will get you a long in the software industry when they let you out.
Most of the posts on article are modded "5 Funny", anyone would think that no-one's taking SCO's claim seriously.
Except Uncle Darl that is.
"McBride points out that Hollywood studios, keen to protect their movies from being pirated on the Internet, have preached the need to respect copyrights. 'It's hypocritical for them to be going around saying that they don't want their stuff to be given away for free, but at the same time saying, "Boy, this free stuff sure is cool,"' he says."
Errrrmm, this may be because Hollywood generally pays someone to write a script or buys one from someone else, hires the actors, CGI guys, film crews, director etc., maintains a level of control over the production process then credits (and pays) those responsible for their contribution.
This differs from your claim which is based on the concept of "we didn't actually contribute any effort, development funding, or anything really but feel we deserve money because IBM included software THEY'D developed to work on UNIX into Linux" a concept that is stretching the term "derivative work" to the limit.
The two are wholly different claims and your idea as expressed above is akin to wholesale distribution of Windows or your proprietry UNIX or ripped of movies via the net.
Again, it's fairly easy to spot when a movie has stolen the plot of another movie makers work and you can bet Hollywood would jump on the back of anyone who stole significant chunks of a film script without crediting the original.
One more time:
YOU HAVE NOT PROVIDED A SHRED OF CONVINCING EVIDENCE TO BACK UP YOUR CASE! YOU HAVE NOT PROVIDED ME OR ANY OTHER LINUX USER WITH ANY CONVINCING SOLID REASON WHY WE SHOULD BELIEVE A WORD YOU SAY!
So until you are willing to put the proof to public scrutiny, and I can download the kernel source from any Linux distro or kernel.org so don't give us this "it'll be revealing our trade secrets crap, shut the fuck up and start behaving like an adult.
lol
I was talking more in the context of the "with Microsoft being the number one" thing they'd want you to move to.
Apologies to all UNIX vendors who may take offence at the incorrect impression I gave except SCO of course who can go suck Monkey balls
and it turns out that SCO have been lying all the way does this make MS guilty of conspiracy to defraud?
If so, who at MS will be held responsible for the decision because it's quite hard to believe that a minion at Microsoft could take a decision of this magnitude.
Scene 1:
Prison Cell containing two men. The fatter of the two seems to be dancing in a style something akin to a monkey......
Fat man....
That's another fine mess you've got us into Darl....
Darl...... (add own blubbery weeping noise here)
Darl McBride. You currently breath air which is provided by Planet Earth Inc for free.
You pay me $299 to breath proprietry carbon monoxide from the exhaust pipe of my car for say, errrrr, forever and I'll pay you so I can use some piss poor commercial subsistute for my nice reliable Linux box.
dial 800-problem-solved to make the arrangements.
Every press release that goes out gets more and more nuts!
They've claimed, retracted, changed their terms of reference, claimed IP, dropped IP and gone for "contractual terms", reclaimed IP etc. I mean this is the sort of thing judges hate i.e. being pissed around by claimants who know not the difference twixt arse and elbow.
I can't wait for the press release that reads:
It all started when a guy in the legal department started having traumatic flashbacks to a Vietnam movie he watched in 1991. This may or may not have had something to do with the half pound of red leb he'd been smoking while watching 'cos he was still at law school at the time. The resulting hysteria was like, infectious, and spread to the management, and like, before anyone realised what was happening we'd turned charlie into evil commie open source developers that had to be wiped out at any cost.
By the time anyone came round and realised that no-one was taking notice of anything we said it was too late. Our customers had migrated to Linux and mailed us telling us to piss off and it took 3 days to stop the management squatting on the roof and howling at the moon.
I mean, what happened man?......
Maybe we Open Source types should turn ultra-honest and grass up all those business users of hooky MS Office copies we may come accross to the BSA. I mean hardly a day goes by without MS spouting on about the evils of piracy so we should do our best to help them by dropping those nasty pirates in it up to their necks by booking them a software audit.
By the time the BSA has done an RIAA on a significant percentage of companies it would interesting to see what happens to OO.org's market share. And if MS don't aggressively pursue major infringers there's cause for previous victims to sue for malicious treatment.
And the ultimate would be to see Steve Ballmer having to stand up and say "This is a positive thing for Microsoft to see all those pirates bought to book even though our market share has fallen 50%" and look like he really means it. On the other hand, maybe he'd like to turn the press statement in an interpretive dance for the nest MS conference.
This really is such a stupid "brain off" list of idiotic statements. Apache crashes all the time? Yeah OK that's why 60% of the worlds web servers run it.
Please, oh please publish your name so that companies can avoid hiring your "consultancy" services and save themselves vast amounts of money in the process.
BTW, there's a guy from SCO at the door want's to hire you for their press office.
That Microsoft paid for tests and surveys generally say what Microsoft would like them to e.g. running Win 2003 server against a Linux install that just happens to be running the slowest Linux file system on or running a heavily Microsft Engineer tuned 2k server against a Red hat default install.
The question is will people be stupid enough to believe it without scrutinising the results
Clue: You don't achieve that by being irrational.
Joseph Stalin controlled more land mass than the US and possessed wealth that outstrips McBride's and napolean controlled much of Europe. Both recieved the adulation of millions.
Does your point deny any madness in the Stalins, Hitlers and napoleons of this world or do you consider the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and militaristic expansionist empires to be demonstrations of "rational" thought and behaviour. Just because he's a CEO and has lot's of money doesn't prove sanity in the same way that the above mentioned leader's success as presidents/emporors doesn't. On the contrary, it's a known fact that poor people are more likely to repay debts than the rich. A gratuitous excess of wealth has the power to turn the bearer into an arrogant, greedy, amoral shitwit and there's more than enough evidence in the world to prove that.
Oh yeah, and while I'm at it, more hours than I can count answering questions on mail lists and bbs's for various open source packages.
That is, after all one of open sources claims i.e. that it is a community that provides mutual support. What have you done that's worhtwhile?
If your not willing to put your name to what you say, it probably isn't worth saying
None, but enough bug reports and other end user contributions which play a part in the overall development of Open Source.
And no contributions under the name "anonymous coward".