How about? So far up that they now need a glass navel to see where they're going. I think that's one of the patents that IBM is going after them on.
Math note: Topologically, it doesn't matter which way they bend, they still need a glass navel to see. Over backwards tends to work best since at least that way you're not in your own way when it comes to seeing where you're going. Also an IBM patent.
Step 1: SCO sues IBM over supposedly contributing confidential, proprietary SCO information to Linux and thus disclosing it. IBM tells SCO to shove it.
Step 2: SCO starts FUD campaign to scare people into not using Linux. Part of their FUD is to sell a license for their intellectual property that has been included in Linux which they have also distributed. Selling this license violates the GPL.
Step 3: SCO now finds itself in the position of having made probably unproveable claims about copyright infringement against IBM and Linux and having committed very public and thus proveable violations of the GPL. The only way SCO can continue their FUD campaign and charge people to use Linux is if they can now also get the GPL declared invalid.
The original lawsuit between SCO and IBM had absolutely nothing to do with the GPL. SCO brought the GPL into the mess by asserting they could sell licenses to Linux users for the portion of Linux that was based on their IP. This violates the GPL becuase they had distributed Linux with the offending code which makes it subject to the GPL.
If the issue had been strictly about copyright violations, it would have burried on the back page of some legal journal. SCO and their behind the scenes backers (think about who benefits from Linux and open source being discredited) have turned it into a public attack on Linux and free/open source software.
If they catch the perp, the punishment should be something really heinous like locking them up with a computer that has Microsoft "Bob" installed and have continuous "Barney" tunes piped into their cell. That'll teach 'em.
Sorry. Not off the top of my head and its been long enough ago I just don't remember. Pick one and give them a call. Be prepared for having to wind your way through a menu system that is designed to not let you talk to a real person.
Also, you can instruct the credit reporting services that you do not want "instant credit." These are the deals you see at various stores where you can get one of that store's credit cards simply by showing you already have a Master Card, Visa, Discover, etc. and a driver's license. They even offer you 10% off your purchases as an additional incentive for signing up on the spot. If your wallet gets stolen, these deals make it all too easy for someone to open up a bunch of accounts at a variety of places and you *don't even know the accounts exist* until they don't get paid and a collection agency backtracks the applications to you.
Its a hassle since you can't get a credit card on the spot but its one less way for someone to easily pretend to be you.
Err um, no. No more than you could claim that owning a single share of Microsoft stock entitles you to use any of their IP for no additional charge. Otherwise you would see a lot of people each buying a single share of lots of different companies since it would entitle them to use whatever they wanted as a part owner.
I hear you but I think the FSF people are playing this extremely well. As I pointed out in another post, README.SCO is the lawyerless equivalent of a "cease and desist" letter. Everyone in the free/open source software community has an interest in enforcing the GPL. README.SCO simply points out that SCO is violating the GPL and a consequence of that violation may be withdrawl of support for SCO Unix.
Actually, I see the free software community handling this in an open, responsible and reasonable manner as being good for the the image of free software. README.SCO strikes a good ballance between those saying "cut 'em off" or "insert bugs" and those saying "do nothing." Doing nothing weakens the GPL. Taking rash action that harms SCO users would do exactly what you are suggesting would happen. Warning that there are consequences to violating the GPL is a reasonable middle ground.
On a different note...
What if Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds get into a seriously major spat over Linus' continued use of Bitkeeper? Or Richard Stallman and the rest of the world for referring to Linux instead of GNU/Linux.
This has already happened; you aparently missed it.:-)
The README.SCO is not FUD. It is a lawyerless equivalent of giving SCO a "cease and desist" letter with regard to violating the GPL. IANAL, but a cease and desist letter tells you to stop a current behavior or you will be liable to future remedies and actions. That's all the README.SCO has done. It just does it without making a lawyer rich in the process.
But it makes SCO Unix even more expensive which makes SCO Unix even more unattractive to organizations. Short term SCO may make a little more money but long term they become even less economically viable as a company. Why pay for SCO Unix and pay even more for their compiler when you can get Linux and gcc for free?
Having read the "README.SCO", I would take it more as a warning from the gcc folks to SCO that SCO's recent activities regarding licensing their IP supposedly contain in the Linux kernel is inconsistent with the GPL. What the free/open source software community lacks in high priced lawyers they can make up for by choosing to continue support for or not support commercial operating systems that are distributed by companies who violate the GPL.
I would hardly call this approach "against making money." If I violate Microsoft's license for any of their products (e.g., install a single copy of Windows on multiple systems), I should not be surprised if they withold support from me. The gcc folks are simply issuing a similar warning to SCO that the sense of the community is that SCO is violating the GPL and as a consequence, continued support for SCO products may be discontinued if they continue violating the GPL. This is probably more slack than they would get from a commercial software vendor had the violated the terms of the license.
Finally, both Linux and gcc are distributed under the terms of the GPL. If SCO sees fit to violate the GPL with regard to Linux, what is to say that they won't at some point in the future decide to violate the GPL with regard to gcc? As some of the other other posts have pointed out, if FSF decides to no longer support SCO OSes, SCO is free to continue to maintain their own branch of gcc *so long as they observe the GPL* with regard to how they distribute it. If this were to happen, I would be very surprised if SCO wouldn't pull the same stunt with regard to an SCO specific version of gcc (i.e., have a license for undisclosed SCO IP embedded in their binary only version of gcc).
The latest Robert X. Cringely impersonator at InfoWorldagrees with me. Although that isn't to say that there couldn't be someone else who wants to curry favor with the ambulance chasers at SCO and has a vested interest in stopping Linux. Sun in particular comes to mind as does HP. A free Unix definitely is hard to compete with and Linux has definitely cut into the margins for Solaris and HP-UX. Does HP even still offer a HP-UX solution?
I just see Microsquish as having the spare pocket change and I don't remember whether Sun or HP is still a Fortune 500 company. Also, Sun seems to have been fairly successful at utilizing Linux as an introductory product that gets customers into the *nix world and then they can sell them Solaris.
If it was anybody else they wouldn't have a reason for keeping it a secret. SCO has a huge incentive for being able to publicize any big names besides Micro$oft who pony up. I would think they would be more than willing to cut a deal on the licensing fees just to be able to publicize whoever paid... but that assumes its a company who has a significant number of Linux boxes and who doesn't mind telling the world that they use Linux.
I like your analogy. I have two cats. They are quiet, choosey, indifferent, and independent. They are playful and boisterous when they want to be. They sometimes want companionship and there are times they just want to be left alone. They do not seek my approval; if anything, they could care less what I think unless I think its time to feed them.
I won't start a flame war by expounding on the dogs and extroverts part of your analogy but it sure fits.
Could be because there's lots of competition in the game market and people have lots of other games and game platforms to choose from. A poorly written, buggy game that crashes all the time will be a flop and will quite possibly take the company down with it. Also, if the game is a dud, people don't have to buy it if they don't want to.
Turn this around and take a look at commercial consumer and office desktop operating systems and office suites. Does one specific company who dominates the field and has a reputation for buggy bloatware come to mind? Thought so.
This is not a coincidence. Competition is good for quality.
First you want people to read the articles before commenting and now you want them to remember what they've read. Where will it end? What's next? You want people to spell check and grammar check their posts? Sheesh!
Variation: subscription service for intelligence improvement pills. Charge $9.95 for a month's supply. When you get smart enough to stop sending me $9.95 a month for sugar pills I have proof that they obviously worked.
They didn't have to do anything to clean them up. High intensity radioactivity can only be sustained in isotopes with a short half life. In order for something that is radioactive to keep throwing off high energy particles, gamma rays, x-rays, etc., some piece of it has to decay. As more of it decays there's less of it around to be radioactive. Besides the radiation from the actual explosions, the radioactivity was fairly intense immediately after the bombs went off but then subsided to near normal levels fairly rapidly.
I get a more intense radiation dose living in the Denver area with lots of graitic soil and living at 6,000+ ft above sea level than most of the inhabitants of Hiroshima or Nagaski get in a normal day. If I go skiing or climb a mountain, I really get nuked. So far, no spare hand growing out of my forehead but I have mutated into being more politically conservative the older I get and the longer I live here.
> Anyone else find/. doesn't display right lately (maybe only in Mozilla 1.4)?
Yeah. I keep getting all these whiney, "I'm a victim, you're a victim" comments posted in otherwise rational discussions. Any idea what the problem is?
Seriously, I haven't noticed any rendering problems for/. under Mozilla 1.4.
There's also the theory that college is a sorting process that separates those who can concentrate on, and complete, a task from those who can't. People may also learn a few things during the sorting process but that's a side benefit.
Ask some people in professional positions how often they use any of the advanced material they were required to master in order to get their degree. If they're in advanced R&D, they are in front of anything they were required to learn. If they're not in R&D, they're lucky if they use anything beyond topics from their freshman classes. But they made it through and that means they can probably do a "professional" assignment.
Businesses aren't interested in erratic geniuses. They want people in the trenches (ever notice how much a cubicle warren ressembles the trenches of WWI?) who will do what they're told no matter how boring and tedious. So learning the discipline to complete an assignment may be more important than anything they get out of the assignment. (you can scream "Noooooo!!!!" now if you want to)
BTW, the person who posed the original question might try putting up a sign above their computer that says, "You want fries with that?" Sometimes clarity of the consequences is all it takes. One advantage of working my way through college in a series of what would otherwise have been "dead end" jobs was I was constantly reminded of the consequences of failing.
I find it sad commentary on either the/. readership or the times that someone saying, "Suck it up and just do it." is this far down the page. I worked my way through college finishing my senior year working full time on third shift and going to classes *after* I'd worked all night so it can be done under more difficult conditions. You just have to decide on what your priorities are. If its play then get used to asking, "Do you want fries with that?" Think about that as a career choice the next time you're feeling "distracted."
The disgusting thought is that a number of us probably *DO* own SCO stock and just don't know it because its actually owned through a mutual fund. I'd guess quite a few technology funds and small/mid cap index funds own chunks of SCO.
So the good news is most of us can use the SEC complaint form. The bad news is that we own (indirectly) some SCO stock.
Unfortunately, the hospital example isn't the greatest but the idea is to add such a record with contradictory information such that known/legitimate uses of the database will not extract it. In this case that might be setting both the "is a patient" and the "deceased" indicators to true or "discharged on" and "in room number" fields or showing the patient as being in a non-existant room. This approach works best when designed into the data from the start since checking multiple, supposedly redundant fields can be specified as a requirement for all systems accessing the data.
A variantion on this in the non-digital world is using either different middle initials, different first names, adding a mail-stop, etc. to the address you use for signing up for a magazine subscription, etc. When you start getting junk mail with that address, you know they sold your address to someone else. People have been doing this for a long time.
Sorry. It could be taken that way. After reading all the other claptrap (sometimes I wonder why I bother), I may have been a little biased toward assuming the worst.
I used to use a quote from RR as my sig here. "Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings." It was amazing how many knee jerk reactions I got just because RR said it. I cycle through sigs so I didn't take it down because of the reaction but it was amusing when I was running it. Kind of an instant barometer of the politics of someone responding to my posts.
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How about? So far up that they now need a glass navel to see where they're going. I think that's one of the patents that IBM is going after them on.
Math note: Topologically, it doesn't matter which way they bend, they still need a glass navel to see. Over backwards tends to work best since at least that way you're not in your own way when it comes to seeing where you're going. Also an IBM patent.
Step 1: SCO sues IBM over supposedly contributing confidential, proprietary SCO information to Linux and thus disclosing it. IBM tells SCO to shove it.
Step 2: SCO starts FUD campaign to scare people into not using Linux. Part of their FUD is to sell a license for their intellectual property that has been included in Linux which they have also distributed. Selling this license violates the GPL.
Step 3: SCO now finds itself in the position of having made probably unproveable claims about copyright infringement against IBM and Linux and having committed very public and thus proveable violations of the GPL. The only way SCO can continue their FUD campaign and charge people to use Linux is if they can now also get the GPL declared invalid.
The original lawsuit between SCO and IBM had absolutely nothing to do with the GPL. SCO brought the GPL into the mess by asserting they could sell licenses to Linux users for the portion of Linux that was based on their IP. This violates the GPL becuase they had distributed Linux with the offending code which makes it subject to the GPL.
If the issue had been strictly about copyright violations, it would have burried on the back page of some legal journal. SCO and their behind the scenes backers (think about who benefits from Linux and open source being discredited) have turned it into a public attack on Linux and free/open source software.
If they catch the perp, the punishment should be something really heinous like locking them up with a computer that has Microsoft "Bob" installed and have continuous "Barney" tunes piped into their cell. That'll teach 'em.
Sorry. Not off the top of my head and its been long enough ago I just don't remember. Pick one and give them a call. Be prepared for having to wind your way through a menu system that is designed to not let you talk to a real person.
Also, you can instruct the credit reporting services that you do not want "instant credit." These are the deals you see at various stores where you can get one of that store's credit cards simply by showing you already have a Master Card, Visa, Discover, etc. and a driver's license. They even offer you 10% off your purchases as an additional incentive for signing up on the spot. If your wallet gets stolen, these deals make it all too easy for someone to open up a bunch of accounts at a variety of places and you *don't even know the accounts exist* until they don't get paid and a collection agency backtracks the applications to you.
Its a hassle since you can't get a credit card on the spot but its one less way for someone to easily pretend to be you.
Err um, no. No more than you could claim that owning a single share of Microsoft stock entitles you to use any of their IP for no additional charge. Otherwise you would see a lot of people each buying a single share of lots of different companies since it would entitle them to use whatever they wanted as a part owner.
Actually, I see the free software community handling this in an open, responsible and reasonable manner as being good for the the image of free software. README.SCO strikes a good ballance between those saying "cut 'em off" or "insert bugs" and those saying "do nothing." Doing nothing weakens the GPL. Taking rash action that harms SCO users would do exactly what you are suggesting would happen. Warning that there are consequences to violating the GPL is a reasonable middle ground.
On a different note...
This has already happened; you aparently missed it.The README.SCO is not FUD. It is a lawyerless equivalent of giving SCO a "cease and desist" letter with regard to violating the GPL. IANAL, but a cease and desist letter tells you to stop a current behavior or you will be liable to future remedies and actions. That's all the README.SCO has done. It just does it without making a lawyer rich in the process.
But it makes SCO Unix even more expensive which makes SCO Unix even more unattractive to organizations. Short term SCO may make a little more money but long term they become even less economically viable as a company. Why pay for SCO Unix and pay even more for their compiler when you can get Linux and gcc for free?
Having read the "README.SCO", I would take it more as a warning from the gcc folks to SCO that SCO's recent activities regarding licensing their IP supposedly contain in the Linux kernel is inconsistent with the GPL. What the free/open source software community lacks in high priced lawyers they can make up for by choosing to continue support for or not support commercial operating systems that are distributed by companies who violate the GPL.
I would hardly call this approach "against making money." If I violate Microsoft's license for any of their products (e.g., install a single copy of Windows on multiple systems), I should not be surprised if they withold support from me. The gcc folks are simply issuing a similar warning to SCO that the sense of the community is that SCO is violating the GPL and as a consequence, continued support for SCO products may be discontinued if they continue violating the GPL. This is probably more slack than they would get from a commercial software vendor had the violated the terms of the license.
Finally, both Linux and gcc are distributed under the terms of the GPL. If SCO sees fit to violate the GPL with regard to Linux, what is to say that they won't at some point in the future decide to violate the GPL with regard to gcc? As some of the other other posts have pointed out, if FSF decides to no longer support SCO OSes, SCO is free to continue to maintain their own branch of gcc *so long as they observe the GPL* with regard to how they distribute it. If this were to happen, I would be very surprised if SCO wouldn't pull the same stunt with regard to an SCO specific version of gcc (i.e., have a license for undisclosed SCO IP embedded in their binary only version of gcc).
I just see Microsquish as having the spare pocket change and I don't remember whether Sun or HP is still a Fortune 500 company. Also, Sun seems to have been fairly successful at utilizing Linux as an introductory product that gets customers into the *nix world and then they can sell them Solaris.
If it was anybody else they wouldn't have a reason for keeping it a secret. SCO has a huge incentive for being able to publicize any big names besides Micro$oft who pony up. I would think they would be more than willing to cut a deal on the licensing fees just to be able to publicize whoever paid... but that assumes its a company who has a significant number of Linux boxes and who doesn't mind telling the world that they use Linux.
"Undisclosed Fortune 500 company" my a$$.
I like your analogy. I have two cats. They are quiet, choosey, indifferent, and independent. They are playful and boisterous when they want to be. They sometimes want companionship and there are times they just want to be left alone. They do not seek my approval; if anything, they could care less what I think unless I think its time to feed them.
I won't start a flame war by expounding on the dogs and extroverts part of your analogy but it sure fits.
Could be because there's lots of competition in the game market and people have lots of other games and game platforms to choose from. A poorly written, buggy game that crashes all the time will be a flop and will quite possibly take the company down with it. Also, if the game is a dud, people don't have to buy it if they don't want to.
Turn this around and take a look at commercial consumer and office desktop operating systems and office suites. Does one specific company who dominates the field and has a reputation for buggy bloatware come to mind? Thought so.
This is not a coincidence. Competition is good for quality.
First you want people to read the articles before commenting and now you want them to remember what they've read. Where will it end? What's next? You want people to spell check and grammar check their posts? Sheesh!
Variation: subscription service for intelligence improvement pills. Charge $9.95 for a month's supply. When you get smart enough to stop sending me $9.95 a month for sugar pills I have proof that they obviously worked.
They didn't have to do anything to clean them up. High intensity radioactivity can only be sustained in isotopes with a short half life. In order for something that is radioactive to keep throwing off high energy particles, gamma rays, x-rays, etc., some piece of it has to decay. As more of it decays there's less of it around to be radioactive. Besides the radiation from the actual explosions, the radioactivity was fairly intense immediately after the bombs went off but then subsided to near normal levels fairly rapidly.
I get a more intense radiation dose living in the Denver area with lots of graitic soil and living at 6,000+ ft above sea level than most of the inhabitants of Hiroshima or Nagaski get in a normal day. If I go skiing or climb a mountain, I really get nuked. So far, no spare hand growing out of my forehead but I have mutated into being more politically conservative the older I get and the longer I live here.
Yeah. I keep getting all these whiney, "I'm a victim, you're a victim" comments posted in otherwise rational discussions. Any idea what the problem is?
Seriously, I haven't noticed any rendering problems for /. under Mozilla 1.4.
There's also the theory that college is a sorting process that separates those who can concentrate on, and complete, a task from those who can't. People may also learn a few things during the sorting process but that's a side benefit.
Ask some people in professional positions how often they use any of the advanced material they were required to master in order to get their degree. If they're in advanced R&D, they are in front of anything they were required to learn. If they're not in R&D, they're lucky if they use anything beyond topics from their freshman classes. But they made it through and that means they can probably do a "professional" assignment.
Businesses aren't interested in erratic geniuses. They want people in the trenches (ever notice how much a cubicle warren ressembles the trenches of WWI?) who will do what they're told no matter how boring and tedious. So learning the discipline to complete an assignment may be more important than anything they get out of the assignment. (you can scream "Noooooo!!!!" now if you want to)
BTW, the person who posed the original question might try putting up a sign above their computer that says, "You want fries with that?" Sometimes clarity of the consequences is all it takes. One advantage of working my way through college in a series of what would otherwise have been "dead end" jobs was I was constantly reminded of the consequences of failing.
I find it sad commentary on either the /. readership or the times that someone saying, "Suck it up and just do it." is this far down the page. I worked my way through college finishing my senior year working full time on third shift and going to classes *after* I'd worked all night so it can be done under more difficult conditions. You just have to decide on what your priorities are. If its play then get used to asking, "Do you want fries with that?" Think about that as a career choice the next time you're feeling "distracted."
The disgusting thought is that a number of us probably *DO* own SCO stock and just don't know it because its actually owned through a mutual fund. I'd guess quite a few technology funds and small/mid cap index funds own chunks of SCO.
So the good news is most of us can use the SEC complaint form. The bad news is that we own (indirectly) some SCO stock.
Even scarier: maybe the original poster thinks these *are* "godlike" levels of infallibility.
I sure hope not but then again, he may be in management or marketing.
Unfortunately, the hospital example isn't the greatest but the idea is to add such a record with contradictory information such that known/legitimate uses of the database will not extract it. In this case that might be setting both the "is a patient" and the "deceased" indicators to true or "discharged on" and "in room number" fields or showing the patient as being in a non-existant room. This approach works best when designed into the data from the start since checking multiple, supposedly redundant fields can be specified as a requirement for all systems accessing the data.
A variantion on this in the non-digital world is using either different middle initials, different first names, adding a mail-stop, etc. to the address you use for signing up for a magazine subscription, etc. When you start getting junk mail with that address, you know they sold your address to someone else. People have been doing this for a long time.
Then how about the rail gun? ...Blaster? ...Multi-shotgun? ...Sub-machinegun? ...Hand grenade?
Wait! I know! The BFG!
(But I still like the sound effects from the rocket launcher)
Sorry. It could be taken that way. After reading all the other claptrap (sometimes I wonder why I bother), I may have been a little biased toward assuming the worst.
I used to use a quote from RR as my sig here. "Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings." It was amazing how many knee jerk reactions I got just because RR said it. I cycle through sigs so I didn't take it down because of the reaction but it was amusing when I was running it. Kind of an instant barometer of the politics of someone responding to my posts.