I read and re-read it and I can't make heads or tails out of what they are saying. Reminds me of this thread. Sure glad they aren't after me.
I can help you out with that. SCO is still distributing the Linux kernel sources from their ftp site. That kernel contains work contributed by IBM. IBM still has the copyright on that work. The GPL says that if you can't meet all of the obligations of the license then you can't distribute a covered work at all.
SCO would not have been as open to this if they had ceased all distribution of Linux as soon as they started this foofraw. As it is, they left an opening for IBM and everyone who holds copyright on various components of the kernel to sue them. RedHat is nailing them for GPL violation as well.
Thats easy to handle. Take the money you save on the software and use it to buy bigger iron, gigabit switches, and so forth. If you saved a lot of money then hire some people. Managers in public service love to grow their departments.
A friend of man had a little fun with Channel One when he was in HS. He made a tape that was filled with an extra nasty Ron Jeremy scene looped over and over. The Channel One master VCR was in a little room all by itself. He went in there switched their tape for his, locked the door AND put superglue in the lock.
For once, the kiddies actually paid attention to Channel One that day.
Apparantly great minds think alike. A job ago, a couple of troublemakers in one the high schools I worked in did the same thing. They knew they would get the blame so they just turned themselves in after the gag came off.
With SCO being counter-sued for IP theft they don't have enough money in their coffers (nor in the Canopy Group coffers) to sustain a legal battle against the charges, and they've exhausted all takers for their bogus Unix 'license'. MS and Sun can only do that once, and no one else is interested.
Unfortunately, MS and Sun DO have a way to continue funding SCO's harrassment. Ever wonder why the SCOX price keeps rising in spite of bad news for SCO? A major reason is because an investment firm that has Melinda Gates on it's board buys up SCOX as it becomes availiable. I wouldn't be surprised to find out Sun is buying up SCOX through a cut-out as well. Those purchases keep the stock price up and reward SCO for their actions against Linux and IBM.
A popular meme here is that SCO is pumping and dumping. That isn't quite it. They're pumping and squeezing. They aren't going to sell so much stock that they lose control of the company or leave MS and Sun with some 'splainin' to do with the SEC. What they will do is prolong this as long as possible or least as long as MS and Sun make it worth their while.
With a sufficiently complex model, we should have the ability to record an entire concert as little more than a MIDI-like file, containing the excitiation parameters for each instrument involved.
Thats the sticky part though. A really good model of a musical instrument or human vocal tract will require significant memory and CPU resources. Compression has always entailed a tradeoff between filesize and resources to decode it. Your proposal represents one of the extremes. Even with today's tech, I don't think you could make a synth reproduce a concert convincingly. If you can, it won't be the size of an iPod.
Let me get this straight. This guy is saying that Linux has a place on the desktop but not the server? I thought it was supposed to be the opposite. (I know. I know. Linux desktops are tastier than they used to be.)
This guy is seriously reaching. He's also wrong about his customers. At one time, if truly necessary, I would have considered Solaris for high IO applications. Not now. He all but came right out and said that SCO is a business partner. I also would have considered purchasing StarOffice at work. Not now.
Sun you're known by the company you keep. Publically distance yourself from them before you really hurt yourselves.
Password protected ssl on an odd port would be even better. If I'm going to the trouble to set up such a server, I wouldn't open it to just any Tom, Dick, and Harry. You'll have to know me.
Actually, I've run ssh on a RoadRunner connection for years. If knowing what you're doing is a requirement then that is even better. The only people using it are a very small circle of technically inclined friends.
Konqueror can do that as well as use sftp and scp as well. Well, I may have to bookmark them but it isn't that much trouble. Kioslaves are pretty nifty.
Re:Predicted Predicted response
on
Booting Linux Faster
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Kernel vulnerabilities are fairly rare. A new kernel is the only thing that mandates a complete system restart when upgraded. Linux and the BSDs got this right; it's the one overall thing I don't like about OS X. At most, OS X should only have to restart the GUI and close apps for most system patches....but nnnnooooo. Sheesh guys, you trumpet "the Power Of Unix"; use some of it.
Selling a game for $40 that Windows users can grab out of a bargain bin for $10 won't work and it has nothing to do with how supposedly cheap Linux users are. With that kind of price differential, I'd check out how well it works in Wine.
If Loki had way to be in on the process from the beginning and get Linux ports out no more than a month or two after the Windows debut then that is something else. I did pick up the QIII tin box. That came out when the Windows stuff did and was no more expensive.
Destroying MS' monopoly doesn't necessarily imply destroying MS. Anyway, monopolies aren't static and absolute. MS has had a good 10-13 year run as an effective desktop monopoly and have turned it into 40 billion of liquid assets. Nothing to complain about by any means (for them...chill out!). In the process, MS has largely inspired the forces that will destroy their monopoly.
RTFA. Substantially or totally replacing MS in an enterprise is possible and even rewarding. It isn't easy and requires substantial commitments from the organizations' highest management. If MS desktops could easily replaced with turnkey solutions they'd really be in trouble. As it is, MS should be concerned.
If MS is smart, they won't fight this forever. Yes, they can realize gains from delaying their nascent compitition through means fair and foul. That will be governed by the law of diminishing returns and hopefully they'll know when to quit. MS has plenty of time to diversfy and design a new business model.
What I'm trying to say is that monopolies aren't necessarily immune to competition; they're just highly resistant. It took 10-13 years but they motivated business and developers enough to code and implement replacements to their tools from scratch. They don't have a monopoly on a natural resource like DeBeers...nothing will dethrone them soon. They have a monopoly on the functionality provided by a rather large collection of bits. Come up with a set of bits thats "Good Enough" and monopoly begins to fracture. They are an altogether easier target than the likes of DeBeers. IBM has had monopolies before. Those days are gone but IBM is still around. They even manage to be the good guys much of the time.
Why? Why shouldn't Microsoft have the right to invest in, design, manufacture, and sell a game machine that will play only Microsoft games? Why should you have a "right" to hack such a machine and run non-MS games or Linux on it?
Philosopically, the simple answer to your question is property rights. If I pay the 200 dollars for that physical piece of hardware then I own it. The plastic case? Mine. The GPU? Mine. The CPU? Mine. The only thing in that chunk of crap that wouldn't be mine is the code in the firmware. Even then, the only things I really can't do with it is distribute copies or derivative works.
If I can make that chunk of crap + firmware behave in ways it isn't designed to well.....it's mine isn't it? As long as I paid for as in not rented that X-Box and don't use illegal copies of games then I have done nothing unethical.
There is nothing sacred about a business model. Business models do not trump property rights. Since I can buy (not rent) an X-Box in ordinary retail establishments then I have every right to do whatever I want with it. The person behind the cash register doesn't make me sign a contract before I walk out with it.
If MS raises the price on account of this and the apocalypse ensues, fine. That means it was a stupid business model. Does MS have a right to behave stupidly because they employ people? Was Digital Convergence entitled to millions because they gave cheesy bar-code scanners away with Shack catalogs? Every dot bomb business that went under had a business model. It didn't entitle them to anything and yes a lot of people lost their jobs over it. IT businesses got burned and the ones that survived got a bit wiser. Nobody seriously suggested forcing people to abdicate their property rights.
Your next thought may be "Don't buy an X-Box then if you won't use it the way MS intends". It's my money. It's those pesky individual property rights again. If I want to make a media player out of it then that is my business. If MS wants to diddle the X-Box to make that difficult, fine. But if I can get around the diddling then thats fine too.
This would suck but OSS systems could just build support for all common MIME types right into the browser. Then it wouldn't be a "plugin".
It could be less painful if say Mozplugger were built right into the browser. Mozplugger just makes external programs work like plugins but you need some lines in a config file just like browser "helpers". Such a system is arguably an extension of mime types rather than a "plugin" yet we wouldn't have to recompile the browser to support new MIME types.
The problem is that SCO doesn't own every kernel contributor's work. SCO has thus far accused the kernel devs of theft. SCO "taking control" of Linux is undisputably theft and if they try it they should pay for it with their corporate existance. Even if we did start over with 2.2, SCO or some other theiving scumbag would make the same sort of "undisclosable" accusation. No, SCO has to be called decisively on this issue. If you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
The problem with your premise is that the penalty should be:
"All contributors and users to an OSS work should lose the vast majority of the work since it was contaminated with an undisclosable small infringement.:
SCO's IP is not more valuable than everybody else's. That they have IP does not entitle them to willy-nilly hold OSS projects hostage. If there is infringement then they can prove it or shut up. It would take a long time, but the kernel could be audited for provenance and the results of that audit could be used to seek legal relief from SCO harrassment. That relief should be punitive since the time waste involved is not necessary. The cat is out of the bag and we are not talking about instructions to make efficient nuclear weapons.
Re:When you are in a hole...stop digging....
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 1
By itself, the shread comparison of two codebases doesn't mean much. With the help of a party in possession of the SysV codebase, the good guys could build a concordance of matches between the two codebases and establish their provenance. Properly indexed and annotated, that concordance could be used to quickly counteract anything SCO raises in court or in public.
When this whole debacle got rolling, the first thing that occurred to me was IBM has it's own copy of the SysV sources.. The shred idea is clever but I don't think its so clever that it didn't immediately occur to the IBM engineers that have been sicced on this issue. Blowing SCO's so-called evidence out of the water is too obvious for IBM to miss. They have to be doing something like this. Its also another good reason for IBM to drag this out(in addition to making them burn through cash). Establishing the exact provenance of the matches to courtroom perfection and then indexing them will take time. Everytime time SCO introduces some of their tripe into evidence, you want to find the counter evidence immediately.
On the other hand, RedHat does not have this handly clueclub sitting around to beat Darl senseless with. They'll need something like this.
As for doing SCO's work for them, they should already know their "evidence" is shit. All "turning the shotgun into a rifle" (as one poster put it) will do is make it that much easier to remove any legitimate residue that may have found it's way into Linux. Actually, that would help the good guys out. The immediate removal of anything that infringes demonstrates the good faith the SCO is demonstrably void of.
The most damning outcome SCO can hope for is some small infringements that will be removed immediately. MS, Sun, and SCO aren't going to get the apocalyptic outcome they lusting after.
There is very little SCOX on the open market. It is much easier to manipulate a small pool of stock than a large one. Also they are only getting negative tech press. The business press seems willing to take them more seriously.
There is only a very small amount of SCOX availiable on the open market. Many posters suggest buying their stock out and scuttling them. Its a bad idea on a number of levels but it is nothing more than intellectual wanking. The vast majority of SCO is held by insiders, some collaborating investment firms (see the Melinda Gates/Drugstore.com connection at Greplaw), and a few chunks are held by companies like Sun.
The fact that they hold the majority of the stock means they just can't just dump it. If they did, the price would quickly crash..probably all the way back to penny stock levels. Like VA at the height of the bubble, they're only worth a pile of money on paper. They have to know this.
Instead, they have to quietly sell off small chunks over a long period of time. They need to drag this debacle out as long as possible so they can sell as much of the stock at the current inflated levels as possible. Actually, I doubt they're very interested in getting rid of the stock as such. MS and Sun can work through cut-outs to buy the stock and keep the price up. In this way, they can fund the FUD war and the legal battles without seeming to be directly involved.
It may be a good idea to concentrate less on SCOs frothing at the mouth and look more into who buys their stock. Follow the money and we'll see who's really hoping to profit from this.
The only problem with that scenario is all the code they very demonstrably didn't develop. Does anyone any of the several hundred hacked off kernel devs are going to give SCO alternative licensing terms? They're already violating those copyrights as we speak. Apparantly SCO believes that only their IP has value.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, its all about the Pentiums isn't it?
FUD...Invented by IBM ......Perfected by Microsoft.
Microsoft: Where do we want you to go today?
I read and re-read it and I can't make heads or tails out of what they are saying. Reminds me of this thread. Sure glad they aren't after me.
I can help you out with that. SCO is still distributing the Linux kernel sources from their ftp site. That kernel contains work contributed by IBM. IBM still has the copyright on that work.
The GPL says that if you can't meet all of the obligations of the license then you can't distribute a covered work at all.
SCO would not have been as open to this if they had ceased all distribution of Linux as soon as they started this foofraw. As it is, they left an opening for IBM and everyone who holds copyright on various components of the kernel to sue them. RedHat is nailing them for GPL violation as well.
Thats easy to handle. Take the money you save on the software and use it to buy bigger iron, gigabit switches, and so forth. If you saved a lot of money then hire some people. Managers in public service love to grow their departments.
A friend of man had a little fun with Channel One when he was in HS. He made a tape that was filled with an extra nasty Ron Jeremy scene looped over and over. The Channel One master VCR was in a little room all by itself. He went in there switched their tape for his, locked the door AND put superglue in the lock.
For once, the kiddies actually paid attention to Channel One that day.
Apparantly great minds think alike. A job ago, a couple of troublemakers in one the high schools I worked in did the same thing. They knew they would get the blame so they just turned themselves in after the gag came off.
Doesn't seem to be working very well though, as of this writing, their stock is down .72 ;)
That's OK for SCO. It just means that Melinda Gates investment firm has to buy up the selloff and pump the price back up.
With SCO being counter-sued for IP theft they don't have enough money in their coffers (nor in the Canopy Group coffers) to sustain a legal battle against the charges, and they've exhausted all takers for their bogus Unix 'license'. MS and Sun can only do that once, and no one else is interested.
Unfortunately, MS and Sun DO have a way to continue funding SCO's harrassment. Ever wonder why the SCOX price keeps rising in spite of bad news for SCO? A major reason is because an investment firm that has Melinda Gates on it's board buys up SCOX as it becomes availiable. I wouldn't be surprised to find out Sun is buying up SCOX through a cut-out as well. Those purchases keep the stock price up and reward SCO for their actions against Linux and IBM.
A popular meme here is that SCO is pumping and dumping. That isn't quite it. They're pumping and squeezing. They aren't going to sell so much stock that they lose control of the company or leave MS and Sun with some 'splainin' to do with the SEC. What they will do is prolong this as long as possible or least as long as MS and Sun make it worth their while.
You just haaaad to spray it all over Slashdot didn't you.............
With a sufficiently complex model, we should have the ability to record an entire concert as little more than a MIDI-like file, containing the excitiation parameters for each instrument involved.
Thats the sticky part though. A really good model of a musical instrument or human vocal tract will require significant memory and CPU resources. Compression has always entailed a tradeoff between filesize and resources to decode it. Your proposal represents one of the extremes. Even with today's tech, I don't think you could make a synth reproduce a concert convincingly. If you can, it won't be the size of an iPod.
Let me get this straight. This guy is saying that Linux has a place on the desktop but not the server? I thought it was supposed to be the opposite. (I know. I know. Linux desktops are tastier than they used to be.)
This guy is seriously reaching. He's also wrong about his customers. At one time, if truly necessary, I would have considered Solaris for high IO applications. Not now. He all but came right out and said that SCO is a business partner. I also would have considered purchasing StarOffice at work. Not now.
Sun you're known by the company you keep. Publically distance yourself from them before you really hurt yourselves.
Password protected ssl on an odd port would be even better. If I'm going to the trouble to set up such a server, I wouldn't open it to just any Tom, Dick, and Harry. You'll have to know me.
Actually, I've run ssh on a RoadRunner connection for years. If knowing what you're doing is a requirement then that is even better. The only people using it are a very small circle of technically inclined friends.
Konqueror can do that as well as use sftp and scp as well. Well, I may have to bookmark them but it isn't that much trouble. Kioslaves are pretty nifty.
Kernel vulnerabilities are fairly rare. A new kernel is the only thing that mandates a complete system restart when upgraded. Linux and the BSDs got this right; it's the one overall thing I don't like about OS X. At most, OS X should only have to restart the GUI and close apps for most system patches....but nnnnooooo. Sheesh guys, you trumpet "the Power Of Unix"; use some of it.
Selling a game for $40 that Windows users can grab out of a bargain bin for $10 won't work and it has nothing to do with how supposedly cheap Linux users are. With that kind of price differential, I'd check out how well it works in Wine.
If Loki had way to be in on the process from the beginning and get Linux ports out no more than a month or two after the Windows debut then that is something else. I did pick up the QIII tin box. That came out when the Windows stuff did and was no more expensive.
Destroying MS' monopoly doesn't necessarily imply destroying MS. Anyway, monopolies aren't static and absolute. MS has had a good 10-13 year run as an effective desktop monopoly and have turned it into 40 billion of liquid assets. Nothing to complain about by any means (for them...chill out!). In the process, MS has largely inspired the forces that will destroy their monopoly.
RTFA. Substantially or totally replacing MS in an enterprise is possible and even rewarding. It isn't easy and requires substantial commitments from the organizations' highest management. If MS desktops could easily replaced with turnkey solutions they'd really be in trouble. As it is, MS should be concerned.
If MS is smart, they won't fight this forever. Yes, they can realize gains from delaying their nascent compitition through means fair and foul. That will be governed by the law of diminishing returns and hopefully they'll know when to quit. MS has plenty of time to diversfy and design a new business model.
What I'm trying to say is that monopolies aren't necessarily immune to competition; they're just highly resistant. It took 10-13 years but they motivated business and developers enough to code and implement replacements to their tools from scratch. They don't have a monopoly on a natural resource like DeBeers...nothing will dethrone them soon. They have a monopoly on the functionality provided by a rather large collection of bits. Come up with a set of bits thats "Good Enough" and monopoly begins to fracture. They are an altogether easier target than the likes of DeBeers. IBM has had monopolies before. Those days are gone but IBM is still around. They even manage to be the good guys much of the time.
Why? Why shouldn't Microsoft have the right to invest in, design, manufacture, and sell a game machine that will play only Microsoft games? Why should you have a "right" to hack such a machine and run non-MS games or Linux on it?
Philosopically, the simple answer to your question is property rights. If I pay the 200 dollars for that physical piece of hardware then I own it. The plastic case? Mine. The GPU? Mine. The CPU? Mine. The only thing in that chunk of crap that wouldn't be mine is the code in the firmware. Even then, the only things I really can't do with it is distribute copies or derivative works.
If I can make that chunk of crap + firmware behave in ways it isn't designed to well.....it's mine isn't it? As long as I paid for as in not rented that X-Box and don't use illegal copies of games then I have done nothing unethical.
There is nothing sacred about a business model. Business models do not trump property rights. Since I can buy (not rent) an X-Box in ordinary retail establishments then I have every right to do whatever I want with it. The person behind the cash register doesn't make me sign a contract before I walk out with it.
If MS raises the price on account of this and the apocalypse ensues, fine. That means it was a stupid business model. Does MS have a right to behave stupidly because they employ people? Was Digital Convergence entitled to millions because they gave cheesy bar-code scanners away with Shack catalogs? Every dot bomb business that went under had a business model. It didn't entitle them to anything and yes a lot of people lost their jobs over it. IT businesses got burned and the ones that survived got a bit wiser. Nobody seriously suggested forcing people to abdicate their property rights.
Your next thought may be "Don't buy an X-Box then if you won't use it the way MS intends". It's my money. It's those pesky individual property rights again. If I want to make a media player out of it then that is my business. If MS wants to diddle the X-Box to make that difficult, fine. But if I can get around the diddling then thats fine too.
This would suck but OSS systems could just build support for all common MIME types right into the browser. Then it wouldn't be a "plugin".
It could be less painful if say Mozplugger were built right into the browser. Mozplugger just makes external programs work like plugins but you need some lines in a config file just like browser "helpers". Such a system is arguably an extension of mime types rather than a "plugin" yet we wouldn't have to recompile the browser to support new MIME types.
The problem is that SCO doesn't own every kernel contributor's work. SCO has thus far accused the kernel devs of theft. SCO "taking control" of Linux is undisputably theft and if they try it they should pay for it with their corporate existance. Even if we did start over with 2.2, SCO or some other theiving scumbag would make the same sort of "undisclosable" accusation. No, SCO has to be called decisively on this issue. If you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
The problem with your premise is that the penalty should be:
"All contributors and users to an OSS work should lose the vast majority of the work since it was contaminated with an undisclosable small infringement.:
SCO's IP is not more valuable than everybody else's. That they have IP does not entitle them to willy-nilly hold OSS projects hostage. If there is infringement then they can prove it or shut up. It would take a long time, but the kernel could be audited for provenance and the results of that audit could be used to seek legal relief from SCO harrassment. That relief should be punitive since the time waste involved is not necessary. The cat is out of the bag and we are not talking about instructions to make efficient nuclear weapons.
At this point we should start chucking in anvils.
By itself, the shread comparison of two codebases doesn't mean much. With the help of a party in possession of the SysV codebase, the good guys could build a concordance of matches between the two codebases and establish their provenance. Properly indexed and annotated, that concordance could be used to quickly counteract anything SCO raises in court or in public.
When this whole debacle got rolling, the first thing that occurred to me was IBM has it's own copy of the SysV sources.. The shred idea is clever but I don't think its so clever that it didn't immediately occur to the IBM engineers that have been sicced on this issue. Blowing SCO's so-called evidence out of the water is too obvious for IBM to miss. They have to be doing something like this. Its also another good reason for IBM to drag this out(in addition to making them burn through cash). Establishing the exact provenance of the matches to courtroom perfection and then indexing them will take time. Everytime time SCO introduces some of their tripe into evidence, you want to find the counter evidence immediately.
On the other hand, RedHat does not have this handly clueclub sitting around to beat Darl senseless with. They'll need something like this.
As for doing SCO's work for them, they should already know their "evidence" is shit. All "turning the shotgun into a rifle" (as one poster put it) will do is make it that much easier to remove any legitimate residue that may have found it's way into Linux. Actually, that would help the good guys out. The immediate removal of anything that infringes demonstrates the good faith the SCO is demonstrably void of.
The most damning outcome SCO can hope for is some small infringements that will be removed immediately. MS, Sun, and SCO aren't going to get the apocalyptic outcome they lusting after.
There is very little SCOX on the open market. It is much easier to manipulate a small pool of stock than a large one. Also they are only getting negative tech press. The business press seems willing to take them more seriously.
There is only a very small amount of SCOX availiable on the open market. Many posters suggest buying their stock out and scuttling them. Its a bad idea on a number of levels but it is nothing more than intellectual wanking. The vast majority of SCO is held by insiders, some collaborating investment firms (see the Melinda Gates/Drugstore.com connection at Greplaw), and a few chunks are held by companies like Sun.
The fact that they hold the majority of the stock means they just can't just dump it. If they did, the price would quickly crash..probably all the way back to penny stock levels. Like VA at the height of the bubble, they're only worth a pile of money on paper. They have to know this.
Instead, they have to quietly sell off small chunks over a long period of time. They need to drag this debacle out as long as possible so they can sell as much of the stock at the current inflated levels as possible. Actually, I doubt they're very interested in getting rid of the stock as such. MS and Sun can work through cut-outs to buy the stock and keep the price up. In this way, they can fund the FUD war and the legal battles without seeming to be directly involved.
It may be a good idea to concentrate less on SCOs frothing at the mouth and look more into who buys their stock. Follow the money and we'll see who's really hoping to profit from this.
The only problem with that scenario is all the code they very demonstrably didn't develop. Does anyone any of the several hundred hacked off kernel devs are going to give SCO alternative licensing terms? They're already violating those copyrights as we speak. Apparantly SCO believes that only their IP has value.