There are perfectly pragmatic reasons why this isn't likely. Private forks of large OSS projects become harder and harder to maintain over time. The fork has to be regularly ported to new versions of the public project or fixes from the public project have to be ported to the fork. Either way, it starts out being a little bit of work and turns into a lot of work. Alternatively, the fork could be turned into a different animal altogether. The last option would need a dev team comparable in size to Linux itself. Every package in the distro that is forked adds to the difficulty and expense even more.
Sure, these two companies could do exactly what you say. But how long would they be able to keep the product fresh and relevant? Continually maintaining the fork is usually going to be less costly than just passing your changes to the upstream project.
"Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb."
- Dark Helmet
The other side is playing extremely dirty and somewhat effectively because they are backed by Sun and MS money. If we turn the other cheek, they will be more than happy to slap it with a lead filled sock. The high road only works if the bad guys don't intend to dynamite it from under you.
I'm not advocating anything like DDOS attacks or threats. Other than things that are blatently unethical and immoral, we should give as good as we get.
This is not strictly speaking a pump and dump. I call what SCO is doing "pump and squeeze". SCO is very thinly traded. That means most shares of SCOX are held by insiders and institutional funds. Only a small amount of stock is being sold on the open market. Small buys and sells of the stock move its price wildly. This means SCO can't just dump their shares on the market and make a killing. The price would drop too rapidly for them to move it all at a good price. What insiders can do is register planned sales of stock with the SEC and time their press releases to shortly proceed those sales. This allows them move chunks of stock at the high rate. Anytime the price dips too low for public consumption or a planned sale, they can make another outrageous announcement and pump it back up. The longer they have to unload their stock, the better this works. This is why they do everything humanly possible to delay the IBM and RedHat suits. Either one of those coming to a quick finish would destroy the pump before it finishes extracting money from the market.
They can also use the paper value of the stock as collateral to buy things. This seemed to work best by their buying Vultus (another Canopy Group company). In this way, they can allow the Canopy Group to show real profits with real money even though its really the Canopy Group shuffling things around. It would be risky for them to acquire outside companies this way since it would expose their scheme to more parties who either want their cut or sue them as well.
The tape deck in my car has an input jack. I don't like mucking with cds or tapes anymore but I don't have $300 for any sort of decent hard drive player either. A 2Gig player would be roughly equivalent to a 25 disc CD changer as far as the number of tracks go. It would be a hell of a lot more convienient than that changer too. A small player will fit in a cup holder just fine and it wouldn't be a big deal to bring in the house every once in a while and change the music out. I'd give a hundred for something like that.
For 95, MS had big download packages that contained all patches up to the product's end of life. I suspect they'll do the same for 98. Now, that only gets the machine current as of when MS EOLs 98 but it would be better than nothing.
I was able to google for it once. Of course, the full installer package didn't come from MS and was therefore suspect but it was the only way a reasonably modern IE was getting on the machine. I found the installer on a small college's tech support site.
Of course, I explained that the machine wasn't even remotely safe to put on the net unprotected but it went in one ear and out the other.
On the other hand, what if the probe failed to elude the "Mars Defense System" and crashed like other recent missions? The entire country would have been all pumped up for NASA's version of Al Capone's Vault. I suspect the powers that be aren't confident enough of success to pump these things up anymore.
You're assuming that monetary payout is the motivation for taking a GPL violator to court. Even in the absence of payout whatsover, the violator has to come into compliance. The judge has any number of penalties for failing to do this. The judge can certainly stop the violator from making further profit from the GPL violation.
Speaking of payouts, punitive damages would still be possible even if there were no compensatory damages. Those punitive damages could even be set ridiculously high because of the willfull "kiss off". There is also the possibility of paying the copyright holders' legal bills because the the violator had to be a dick and get himself taken to court.
In the case of companies like MySQL or Trolltech, compensatory damages aren't as unlikely as you believe. Viable businesses that employ GPL software can prove economic harm. Not all (or even most) GPL software is put out by some hobbyist working out of his parents' basement.
A few years back some feminists made some noise about men being allowed to be topless in public but not women. The upshot of this is that it is perfectly legal for a woman to be topless in downtown Columbus. Unfortunately, there aren't scads of hot looking women asserting their topless rights in the spring and summer. However, a few years ago an exotic dancer promoted the Columbus leg of her tour by posing and signing autographs topless downtown during the rush hour. I've got some spiffy jpegs of it.
Alan Ralsky dies and re-incorporates in Hell. Startled, Ralsky asks "What am I doing here? I never killed or raped anybody." A bureaucratic looking demon in wireframe glasses sat him down at at a battered desk overflowing with paper and said "Look you're not here permanently. You just have to atone for your sins and you can go...well..to the other place."
"Oh! But what did I do?" asked Ralsky.
"You've sent a multitude of unwanted emails. You couldn't take no for an answer several billion times over. Look at this desk. Do you think that is all paperwork?" Ralsky pulled nervously at his collar as he noticed that some of the papers did indeed promise the demon a larger penis or fantastic real estate deals. "So what do I have to do?"
"Well", said the demon getting up from his chair and leading Ralsky out of the room. "You have clean up the spam." He led Ralsky to a vast warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with herbal viagra ads and other such 'valuable' offers. "How am I supposed to clean this up?!?!" fretted Ralsky.
The demon grinned maliciously as he wadded up a breast enlargement ad and said "Turn around and drop your pants."
There is another aspect that escapes most people. Is prison truly a punishment for physically intimidating rapists, child molesters and other sex criminals? Yeah, murderers get their "just desserts" but the rapist has been sent to smorgasbord heaven. How wonderful and considerate of the state to provide him with an endless stream of victims.
Show me an example in American history of employee welfare having one iota of influence on corporate direction?
Henry Ford's first assembly lines payed what were at the time very high wages. The idea was that his workers should be able to afford one of Ford's autos and help create a market for inexpensive automobiles. This had a seemier side since Ford liked to send investigators around autoworker neighborhoods to make sure his employees' private lives met his standards.
To be sure, Ford probably didn't give a rat's ass for worker welfare in and of itself. At best, he had some paternalistic tendencies. For a time he did have a long term goal that was served by paying his workers well.
I showed the Monkeyboy clip to a non-techie friend of mine. He had the best take yet on it. "My God! This is the way those Amway assholes act!" Yeah, Monkeyboy made for a lot of snide comments but there is no context whatsover in which it looks good. It's indicative of a huge grape Flavr-Aid happening.
Macs tends to come with Nvidia chipsets now. If you want hardware 3D under Linux on Macs, you're SOL. The opensource nv driver won't do it and the wrapped Windows drivers availiable on x86 are a no-go.
Not only is there no straw and twigs involved, all three pigs are packing the legal equivalent of howitzers. Ever see wild boars tear something apart? The little pigs are going to dine on SCO giblets.
Attempting to plunder the hard work of thousands of developers with this "GPL is public domain." nonsense. For that matter, they are trying to win plunder off the hard work of the kernel devs right now. SCO's management are nothing more than common thieves. That they wear suits and are using lawyers to commit the theft do not change that. As such, they deserve every bit of scorn that has been heaped on them. What SCO is doing is EVERY bit as low as mugging people.
There is another element to the "terrorist bomb". Inefficient nuclear weapons that require lots of fuel (more than 15kg Pu-239 say) are relatively easy to design and build. Given an obscene amount of fuel, the technical section of a large terrorist organization could probably build a Hiroshima style weapon. Gun type weapons are especially easy to engineer. Of course, getting your hands on enough fuel to power 10 well made weapons is even more of a problem. If we're talking fusion weapons than large amounts of lithium deteuride are needed as well. A fusion weapon isn't going to get by with a gun-type trigger either.
On the other hand, a Davy-Crockett style weapon that uses less than a kilo of fuel and can vaporize a city block are much tougher to build. An incorrectly assembled small nuke will just be a dirty bomb. There are inefficient weapons that are easy to build or efficient ones that are difficult. I think any would be nuclear terrorist would just buy a weapon ready made.
The initiators in these weapons also tend to decay and there are other storage problems. Nuclear weapons don't sit on shelves very well. They have to be continually maintained. Our nuclear terrorist is going to have to be ready to use his bomb immediately upon receipt. I'm not saying it isn't possible but terrorists have lots of other low-hanging fruit to go after.
Microsoft lawyer gets up and asks, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have any of you actually used realplayer? If one of them has, chances are the jury will be a hung jury. If all of them have, you can count on a quick dismissal.
Neither side is going to want any tech savvy on the jury. Not that I care. MS will probably squash Real like a bug. If not, Real will cost MS a somewhat nice chunk of change. This is like choosing sides between Pol Pot and Idi Amin. Is there any way both can lose?
Open relays are becoming less important to spammers all of the time. Now I love a good MS bash same as any good Slashdotter but we really can't blame this on them. More and more spam is coming from trojaned machines both 'nix and Windows. You would do better to save your barbs for non-diligent sysadmins.
"Evil will always win because Good is dumb."
- Dark Helmet
The "moral high ground" isn't worth much if a little FUD and bought legislation shoots it out from under you. SCO is playing dirty and they are playing for keeps. You advocate turning the other cheek but SCO has a billy club poised to slap it with.
Fyodor may be a little extreme fixing his auto scripts to detect and refuse to compile on SCO products. I wouldn't do anything like that myself. I would however refuse to spend time on a SCO problem or refuse a SCO patch that doesn't have benefits for other platforms.
SCO products are bitrotting with no help from any of us. SCO is drowning and I'm not militant enough to throw them and their users an anvil. But I will damn well keep my life preservers to myself as far as they are concerned. Mature adults would be foolish to rescue a psychotic screaming loudly that he will stab the first one to help him on board.
Unfortunately or fortunely depending on how you want to look at it, Unixware doesn't represent that much userbase. Being a Unix, things like Apache and a myriad of apps not working on SCO products is more of a problem for them than us. SCO products don't have access to Win32 projects of any stripe. Basically, one can choose to run ever smaller number of vertical market apps on SCO products. FOSS products is becoming ever more important if SCO wants an expanded market for their product. Explicit support for a militant enemy is a liability.
Anyway you're analogy is backwards. It's as if Windows could run fewer and fewer apps from the catalogs because MS angered the software publishers. The publishers' products run well elsewhere. Why support a vendor who publically froths at the mouth for your destruction?
It isn't practical to deny important apps to Windows and wouldn't mean much if you could, it isn't much a problem to deny them to SCO.
Since SCO products have few unique virtues, significant liabilities, and are overpriced, "moving to a solution that works" means dumping SCO. It doesn't even have to be Linux or a BSD. Really, what can SCO products do that Solaris can't and cheaper to boot?
Slashdot Mirror
You guys were playing Warp Core Breach?
There are perfectly pragmatic reasons why this isn't likely. Private forks of large OSS projects become harder and harder to maintain over time. The fork has to be regularly ported to new versions of the public project or fixes from the public project have to be ported to the fork. Either way, it starts out being a little bit of work and turns into a lot of work. Alternatively, the fork could be turned into a different animal altogether. The last option would need a dev team comparable in size to Linux itself. Every package in the distro that is forked adds to the difficulty and expense even more.
Sure, these two companies could do exactly what you say. But how long would they be able to keep the product fresh and relevant? Continually maintaining the fork is usually going to be less costly than just passing your changes to the upstream project.
"Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb."
- Dark Helmet
The other side is playing extremely dirty and somewhat effectively because they are backed by Sun and MS money. If we turn the other cheek, they will be more than happy to slap it with a lead filled sock. The high road only works if the bad guys don't intend to dynamite it from under you.
I'm not advocating anything like DDOS attacks or threats. Other than things that are blatently unethical and immoral, we should give as good as we get.
This is not strictly speaking a pump and dump. I call what SCO is doing "pump and squeeze". SCO is very thinly traded. That means most shares of SCOX are held by insiders and institutional funds. Only a small amount of stock is being sold on the open market. Small buys and sells of the stock move its price wildly. This means SCO can't just dump their shares on the market and make a killing. The price would drop too rapidly for them to move it all at a good price. What insiders can do is register planned sales of stock with the SEC and time their press releases to shortly proceed those sales. This allows them move chunks of stock at the high rate. Anytime the price dips too low for public consumption or a planned sale, they can make another outrageous announcement and pump it back up. The longer they have to unload their stock, the better this works. This is why they do everything humanly possible to delay the IBM and RedHat suits. Either one of those coming to a quick finish would destroy the pump before it finishes extracting money from the market.
They can also use the paper value of the stock as collateral to buy things. This seemed to work best by their buying Vultus (another Canopy Group company). In this way, they can allow the Canopy Group to show real profits with real money even though its really the Canopy Group shuffling things around. It would be risky for them to acquire outside companies this way since it would expose their scheme to more parties who either want their cut or sue them as well.
The tape deck in my car has an input jack. I don't like mucking with cds or tapes anymore but I don't have $300 for any sort of decent hard drive player either. A 2Gig player would be roughly equivalent to a 25 disc CD changer as far as the number of tracks go. It would be a hell of a lot more convienient than that changer too. A small player will fit in a cup holder just fine and it wouldn't be a big deal to bring in the house every once in a while and change the music out. I'd give a hundred for something like that.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=b4bbb52c-4e59-4cd6-acbd-fbeadfdd676b&Displa yLang=en
You'll have to massage that somewhat. Slashcode insists on screwing up long URLs. You can also search MS downloads on Windows 95 for "service packs."
For 95, MS had big download packages that contained all patches up to the product's end of life. I suspect they'll do the same for 98. Now, that only gets the machine current as of when MS EOLs 98 but it would be better than nothing.
I was able to google for it once. Of course, the full installer package didn't come from MS and was therefore suspect but it was the only way a reasonably modern IE was getting on the machine. I found the installer on a small college's tech support site.
Of course, I explained that the machine wasn't even remotely safe to put on the net unprotected but it went in one ear and out the other.
On the other hand, what if the probe failed to elude the "Mars Defense System" and crashed like other recent missions? The entire country would have been all pumped up for NASA's version of Al Capone's Vault. I suspect the powers that be aren't confident enough of success to pump these things up anymore.
You're assuming that monetary payout is the motivation for taking a GPL violator to court. Even in the absence of payout whatsover, the violator has to come into compliance. The judge has any number of penalties for failing to do this. The judge can certainly stop the violator from making further profit from the GPL violation.
Speaking of payouts, punitive damages would still be possible even if there were no compensatory damages. Those punitive damages could even be set ridiculously high because of the willfull "kiss off". There is also the possibility of paying the copyright holders' legal bills because the the violator had to be a dick and get himself taken to court.
In the case of companies like MySQL or Trolltech, compensatory damages aren't as unlikely as you believe. Viable businesses that employ GPL software can prove economic harm. Not all (or even most) GPL software is put out by some hobbyist working out of his parents' basement.
A few years back some feminists made some noise about men being allowed to be topless in public but not women. The upshot of this is that it is perfectly legal for a woman to be topless in downtown Columbus. Unfortunately, there aren't scads of hot looking women asserting their topless rights in the spring and summer. However, a few years ago an exotic dancer promoted the Columbus leg of her tour by posing and signing autographs topless downtown during the rush hour. I've got some spiffy jpegs of it.
Alan Ralsky dies and re-incorporates in Hell. Startled, Ralsky asks "What am I doing here? I never killed or raped anybody." A bureaucratic looking demon in wireframe glasses sat him down at at a battered desk overflowing with paper and said "Look you're not here permanently. You just have to atone for your sins and you can go...well..to the other place."
"Oh! But what did I do?" asked Ralsky.
"You've sent a multitude of unwanted emails. You couldn't take no for an answer several billion times over. Look at this desk. Do you think that is all paperwork?" Ralsky pulled nervously at his collar as he noticed that some of the papers did indeed promise the demon a larger penis or fantastic real estate deals. "So what do I have to do?"
"Well", said the demon getting up from his chair and leading Ralsky out of the room. "You have clean up the spam." He led Ralsky to a vast warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with herbal viagra ads and other such 'valuable' offers. "How am I supposed to clean this up?!?!" fretted Ralsky.
The demon grinned maliciously as he wadded up a breast enlargement ad and said "Turn around and drop your pants."
There is another aspect that escapes most people. Is prison truly a punishment for physically intimidating rapists, child molesters and other sex criminals? Yeah, murderers get their "just desserts" but the rapist has been sent to smorgasbord heaven. How wonderful and considerate of the state to provide him with an endless stream of victims.
I rub my forefinger and thumb greasily together....
"This is the World's Smallest Violin playing My Heart Pumps Purple Piss For You."
Show me an example in American history of employee welfare having one iota of influence on corporate direction?
Henry Ford's first assembly lines payed what were at the time very high wages. The idea was that his workers should be able to afford one of Ford's autos and help create a market for inexpensive automobiles. This had a seemier side since Ford liked to send investigators around autoworker neighborhoods to make sure his employees' private lives met his standards.
To be sure, Ford probably didn't give a rat's ass for worker welfare in and of itself. At best, he had some paternalistic tendencies. For a time he did have a long term goal that was served by paying his workers well.
I showed the Monkeyboy clip to a non-techie friend of mine. He had the best take yet on it. "My God! This is the way those Amway assholes act!" Yeah, Monkeyboy made for a lot of snide comments but there is no context whatsover in which it looks good. It's indicative of a huge grape Flavr-Aid happening.
Macs tends to come with Nvidia chipsets now. If you want hardware 3D under Linux on Macs, you're SOL. The opensource nv driver won't do it and the wrapped Windows drivers availiable on x86 are a no-go.
Not only is there no straw and twigs involved, all three pigs are packing the legal equivalent of howitzers. Ever see wild boars tear something apart? The little pigs are going to dine on SCO giblets.
Let's not forget:
Attempting to plunder the hard work of thousands of developers with this "GPL is public domain." nonsense. For that matter, they are trying to win plunder off the hard work of the kernel devs right now. SCO's management are nothing more than common thieves. That they wear suits and are using lawyers to commit the theft do not change that. As such, they deserve every bit of scorn that has been heaped on them. What SCO is doing is EVERY bit as low as mugging people.
There is another element to the "terrorist bomb". Inefficient nuclear weapons that require lots of fuel (more than 15kg Pu-239 say) are relatively easy to design and build. Given an obscene amount of fuel, the technical section of a large terrorist organization could probably build a Hiroshima style weapon. Gun type weapons are especially easy to engineer. Of course, getting your hands on enough fuel to power 10 well made weapons is even more of a problem. If we're talking fusion weapons than large amounts of lithium deteuride are needed as well. A fusion weapon isn't going to get by with a gun-type trigger either.
On the other hand, a Davy-Crockett style weapon that uses less than a kilo of fuel and can vaporize a city block are much tougher to build. An incorrectly assembled small nuke will just be a dirty bomb. There are inefficient weapons that are easy to build or efficient ones that are difficult. I think any would be nuclear terrorist would just buy a weapon ready made.
The initiators in these weapons also tend to decay and there are other storage problems. Nuclear weapons don't sit on shelves very well. They have to be continually maintained. Our nuclear terrorist is going to have to be ready to use his bomb immediately upon receipt. I'm not saying it isn't possible but terrorists have lots of other low-hanging fruit to go after.
Microsoft lawyer gets up and asks, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have any of you actually used realplayer? If one of them has, chances are the jury will be a hung jury. If all of them have, you can count on a quick dismissal.
Neither side is going to want any tech savvy on the jury. Not that I care. MS will probably squash Real like a bug. If not, Real will cost MS a somewhat nice chunk of change. This is like choosing sides between Pol Pot and Idi Amin. Is there any way both can lose?
Open relays are becoming less important to spammers all of the time. Now I love a good MS bash same as any good Slashdotter but we really can't blame this on them. More and more spam is coming from trojaned machines both 'nix and Windows. You would do better to save your barbs for non-diligent sysadmins.
So you're saying you don't have to imagine a Beowulf cluster of ......
Neeevvvveeerr miiind!
"Evil will always win because Good is dumb."
- Dark Helmet
The "moral high ground" isn't worth much if a little FUD and bought legislation shoots it out from under you. SCO is playing dirty and they are playing for keeps. You advocate turning the other cheek but SCO has a billy club poised to slap it with.
Fyodor may be a little extreme fixing his auto scripts to detect and refuse to compile on SCO products. I wouldn't do anything like that myself. I would however refuse to spend time on a SCO problem or refuse a SCO patch that doesn't have benefits for other platforms.
SCO products are bitrotting with no help from any of us. SCO is drowning and I'm not militant enough to throw them and their users an anvil. But I will damn well keep my life preservers to myself as far as they are concerned. Mature adults would be foolish to rescue a psychotic screaming loudly that he will stab the first one to help him on board.
Unfortunately or fortunely depending on how you want to look at it, Unixware doesn't represent that much userbase. Being a Unix, things like Apache and a myriad of apps not working on SCO products is more of a problem for them than us. SCO products don't have access to Win32 projects of any stripe. Basically, one can choose to run ever smaller number of vertical market apps on SCO products. FOSS products is becoming ever more important if SCO wants an expanded market for their product. Explicit support for a militant enemy is a liability.
Anyway you're analogy is backwards. It's as if Windows could run fewer and fewer apps from the catalogs because MS angered the software publishers. The publishers' products run well elsewhere. Why support a vendor who publically froths at the mouth for your destruction?
It isn't practical to deny important apps to Windows and wouldn't mean much if you could, it isn't much a problem to deny them to SCO.
Since SCO products have few unique virtues, significant liabilities, and are overpriced, "moving to a solution that works" means dumping SCO. It doesn't even have to be Linux or a BSD. Really, what can SCO products do that Solaris can't and cheaper to boot?