The last article makes it sound like IBM bought NUMA and worked with SCO to include it in Monterey. IBM also bought RCU from Sequent and may have possible worked with SCO to include it into Monterey. It's possible that SCO can claim some ownership because they worked with IBM on the technologies. But if IBM was the one that bought NUMA and RCU, then SCO is going to have a tough time claiming any rights to it. But there is not enough details available to be sure what really happened.
It's really too bad that SCO didn't include any of their contracts with IBM regarding the Monterey project in their initial court filing. Is this just because at the time they didn't think it was Monterey code that was involved? I'd really like to see exactly what that contract says regarding ownership of contributed code/IP by the various memebers.
Proprietary software (if SCO's stunt miraculously works): Even if your license is supposedly perpetual by contract with the vendor another company that had no business with you can come by and say that due to a dispute between them and said vendor your version is illegal. No need for a court ruling or to prove anything you assert (according to SCO). You cannot modify the software to make it legal (no code) and it is unlikely that the vendor will be willing to modify all the older versions still used by their clients so they don't need to upgrade it.
And, as others have pointed out here, toss in DRM and you don't even have the option of ignoring any of this (or perhaps even legal protections in non-US jurisdictions). The remote shut-off time-bomb in your software gets flipped on and you are SOL.
That could violate the conditions of the GNU GPL, which states that any amendments to open-source code used in a commercial product must be given back to the community or a copyright notice must be displayed attributable to Linux, [the anonymous source] said.
Seems to me that he doesn't quite have a clear concept of the GPL. Let's hope he has a clearer concept of what actually happened.
Of course, make sure you are using the same patched compiler that was used to make the original binaries, as well as the same compiler switches/optimisations. Ditto for all the libraries.
Seems to me that even compiling it to prove the binaries are identical will be difficult, whether you are compiling SCO or Linux code.
The choice of lawyer for SCO may well have come down to the fact that they need someone to handle a very high profile technology/IP case on a contingency basis. It may have boiled down to Boies being the best available.
The fact that Boies used to work for IBM's law firm may have something to do with it as well.
You are correct, both on the date and on the 8-k filing.
I had gone searching for it and found a number of filings like this 10K. In part IV, section 3 (page 21), titled "3. Exhibit Listing," you find the following:
2.0 Asset Purchase Agreement By and Between The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. and Novell, Inc. (4)
I had misread this as referring to note 2 in the notes instead of the correct note 4. Note 4 reads:
(4) Incorporated by reference to the Form 8-K filed on December 20, 1995.
However, there is no 8-K online for Santa Cruz Operation, or in fact, any pre-1996 items. Hope this helps. If you find it, can you post a copy!!!
Todd Weiss of Computer World asked for a copy of the Asset Purchase Agreement between Novell and SCO. I think the court is going to want a copy of that, too, and SCO didn't file one with its complaint. McBride dodged that by saying it was available in "SEC filings on the Internet". I think that was a bullshit evasion.
In fact, that does not appear to be correct. There are numerous SEC filings that reference that document. All ultimately indicate it was included in a filing in Dec. of 1993. (Date sounds weird, but that is what they all say.)
Nevertheless, Santa Cruz Operation SEC filings only go back to 1996 in the online databases, unless I'm missing something.
Putin has been involved in a SCO Summit in Russia and France!! See the
article. You have to search, but buried down in the third question to Putin, you see these words:
after the SCO summit and the series of major international meetings in St. Petersburg and Evian
What do you want to bet that the German court's attempt to shut down the SCO website was just a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are involved as well.
Is it just me, or is there something scary about a judge, who may or may not use his/her computer for anything other than e-mail and word processing, trying to interpret two snippets of source code to determine if one uses the other in an illegal way?
In particular, the final opinion in that case shows that the judge did take the time to understand everything.
I also find it rather enlightening to see just how poorly a copyright/trade secret suit was to prove when it was AT&T funding the fight. Makes me believe even less in SCO's chances.
Prescient comment from BSD judge
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There is an enormous difference between an expert programmer sitting down with a pile of textbooks and disjointed segments of code to write out an operating system from scratch, and that same programmer downloading the operating system intact from a public network.
No, as others have pointed out, if IBM makes an offer, Microsoft might make one as well. Don't you think MS would love to own something that brings all of linux into question in the minds of CEOs and CIOs?
I loved office hours. It was when I knew I had uninterrupted time for pleasure reading. The only time the students would show up was around midterms and during the last two weeks of classes. For the most part, it was a nice block of uninterrupted time.
As to how to tell if a bot has harvested from a website, if you are unlucky enough to have a single e-mail address, it would not be possible. However, if you have your own domain, it is likely that you can set things up so that any non-existing userid@yourdomain.com comes into a catch-all account.
Then, all you do is use different e-mail addresses for everyplace you are forced to supply one. Joe-Bob's Meat Cleavers site won't let you browse his site without an e-mail and you just have to read the link you followed from a slashdot post? Sign up as joe-bob-meat-cleavers@yourdomain.com. Then when you get spam using that e-mail address, you know where it came from.
I have a few that have recently become very active for spammers, and I know exactly where they were harvested from. These are addresses that I am conviced were harvested, not ones that were sold by the website they were used at. Either way, were I so inclined and legally permitted, if I could sue, I would know exactly where to start the discovery requests to try to determine where these addresses came from.
Of course, the Tribune also has a CYA article in which they explain that the hype may not match reality. They explain that you cannot compare the statistics showing the jobs that will need to be filled to the numbers representing available employees because an employed person can wear two hats and knock two items off of the needed jobs list.
Assuming the predictions hold out, how many of those programming jobs, which the Tribune lists as the single biggest growing job need, are actually going to be filled by programmers in the US instead of being filled by cheap programming labor from overseas?
The point of homework is to make sure that you understand the material.
Is it really? If that is the case, then shouldn't a student who can score 100% on tests and quizes be excused from homework?
I ask, because I am not really sure myself. I used to believe that the point of homework was to make sure you understood the material, and I was one of those persons who rarely did homework in high school or undergad. (Grad school was a different story.) I scored well. Did great at standardized testing.
Math was one of my stronger areas. All the way through 4 quarters of calculus and even in a college senior level number theory class, I could read and/or listen to a professor explain a concept and just 'get it.' And get A's or A-'s in the class without doing any of the homework. I might need to do one or two problems to reinforce or or clarify my understanding, but that was it. I was in the 700s on my math SATs and higher than that on my math section of the GRE.
However, I hit a brick wall hard when I took differential equations. That wonderful capacity to 'just get it' wasn't there for dif EQ. I took the class twice. The first time, I intentionally blew the final so that I would get a D. (Doing so allowed me to retake the class and wipe out the D. Had it been a C, retaking the class would have meant that the C was averaged in with the second grade.) So, I was able to use much simpler math skills to calculate exactly which questions I had to get correct to get the D instead of the F:)
I retook it and squeaked by with a B. Now, that B probably represented a better understanding than the bulk of the students in the class, but it was nothing like my understanding of any other math classes I had taken up to that point. I didn't have any intuitive conception of anything more than simple problems. I couldn't look at a problem and have a sense of what the correct answer might be or an ability to look at an answer and make a quick judgement as to whether it seemed a likely answer like I could for really nasty integration problems.
I suspect that had I developed the skills to slog through homework while in high school, that I might have had the ability to work harder at differential equations and gotten to the point where I understood them in the way that I had understood most other mathematical concepts that I had been presented with up to that point. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I would really trade the hours of free time I racked up not doing homework for many, many years just to assuage my wounded pride in this area.
Be that as it may, I think that there is an element of homework that represents more than just certifying that you have mastered the material. I think it can be seen as skills training for learning how to master more difficult material in the future. I also think that it can be seen as innoculation for much of the mindnumbing work that many people will end up doing in their professional lives. (Luckily, I have been able to avoid a profession filled with mind-numbing work, but I know many for which that is not the case.)
A Google search turned up Rout's web site which includes The White Feather Letter mentioned in the High Court transcript, as well as many other interesting items. Though, I could not find any conplete explanation of his theories.
There was this interesting piece:
25th Jan 1994: I have proven, the 1st law of thermodynamics being, Newton's Law of conservation of energy is wrong. Using the famous Hubble red shift of 1929, that revealed light from distant galaxies was stretched into the red on a light spectrum, proving the universe was expanding. Proof:
What they all have failed to perceive in 65 yrs of brain blindness is that energy is contained in the wavelength of light and the expanding universe is stretching the wavelength, so straightening it, and in straightening it is causing energy to cease to exist. The expanding universe is converting energy into nothing. This confirms my statements in the past that NOTHING is of a higher and different state of energy.
Genocide where the 'soldiers' commanding the actual genocide weren't even aware what they were doing had any connection to reality. In fact, were actively discouraged from discovering that.
I did take a sci-fi grad course in college, but I would not recommend contacting that prof. However, in working through that course, I learned that Kent State not only published a scholarly journal in sci-fi, but had a few professors on staff that specialized in it. This was many years ago, but the journal is still going.
Indiana passed legislation putting one into effect in 2002. I signed up as soon as I could. The effect has been amazing.
Unfortunately, I remember some discussion when the U.S. do-not-call legislation was first proposed stating that Indiana's was more restrictive as to exceptions (basically, charities within 50 miles using unpaid volunteers, newspapers, political campaigns and something else).
My understanding is that the U.S. legislation may be able to trump the state based on the non-restriction of interstate trade laws in the constitution. Though, I don't understand how it couldn't have been restriction of trade before the U.S. passed legislation.
Isn't weather kind of a perpetual motion machine?
In the sense that forever is as long as we live, then yes, it is. However, by definition a perpetual motion machine is one that keeps going without external energy. Ultimately, the wind moving around the globe and the clouds/rain/snow that go along with it all come from the heating energy of the sun, with the rotational force of the earth helping to direct some of the motion. Eventually, the earth will be subsumed within the boundary of the sun and the sun will eventually burn out.
So, no, weather is not a perpetual motion machine. However, for our existences, it will not stop its motion.
I'm in NW Indiana less than a mile from the Illinois border. I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom with the lights off so it wouldn't wake my wife. The flash made me jump and nearly miss what I was aiming at. It was like lightning, but much brighter. I figured it was a close lightning strike, but was a bit surprised when there was no thunder. I didn't hear about the meteor strikes until the commute home the next day.
Slashdot Mirror
The last article makes it sound like IBM bought NUMA and worked with SCO to include it in Monterey. IBM also bought RCU from Sequent and may have possible worked with SCO to include it into Monterey. It's possible that SCO can claim some ownership because they worked with IBM on the technologies. But if IBM was the one that bought NUMA and RCU, then SCO is going to have a tough time claiming any rights to it. But there is not enough details available to be sure what really happened.
It's really too bad that SCO didn't include any of their contracts with IBM regarding the Monterey project in their initial court filing. Is this just because at the time they didn't think it was Monterey code that was involved? I'd really like to see exactly what that contract says regarding ownership of contributed code/IP by the various memebers.
Proprietary software (if SCO's stunt miraculously works): Even if your license is supposedly perpetual by contract with the vendor another company that had no business with you can come by and say that due to a dispute between them and said vendor your version is illegal. No need for a court ruling or to prove anything you assert (according to SCO). You cannot modify the software to make it legal (no code) and it is unlikely that the vendor will be willing to modify all the older versions still used by their clients so they don't need to upgrade it.
And, as others have pointed out here, toss in DRM and you don't even have the option of ignoring any of this (or perhaps even legal protections in non-US jurisdictions). The remote shut-off time-bomb in your software gets flipped on and you are SOL.
That could violate the conditions of the GNU GPL, which states that any amendments to open-source code used in a commercial product must be given back to the community or a copyright notice must be displayed attributable to Linux, [the anonymous source] said.
Seems to me that he doesn't quite have a clear concept of the GPL. Let's hope he has a clearer concept of what actually happened.
And I did a worse job a few replies later. Mod this parent up. (And make my other reply in this thread redundant, if you want.)
Of course, make sure you are using the same patched compiler that was used to make the original binaries, as well as the same compiler switches/optimisations. Ditto for all the libraries.
Seems to me that even compiling it to prove the binaries are identical will be difficult, whether you are compiling SCO or Linux code.
The choice of lawyer for SCO may well have come down to the fact that they need someone to handle a very high profile technology/IP case on a contingency basis. It may have boiled down to Boies being the best available.
The fact that Boies used to work for IBM's law firm may have something to do with it as well.
You are correct, both on the date and on the 8-k filing.
I had gone searching for it and found a number of filings like this 10K. In part IV, section 3 (page 21), titled "3. Exhibit Listing," you find the following:
2.0 Asset Purchase Agreement By and Between The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. and Novell, Inc. (4)
I had misread this as referring to note 2 in the notes instead of the correct note 4. Note 4 reads:
(4) Incorporated by reference to the Form 8-K filed on December 20, 1995.
However, there is no 8-K online for Santa Cruz Operation, or in fact, any pre-1996 items. Hope this helps. If you find it, can you post a copy!!!
Todd Weiss of Computer World asked for a copy of the Asset Purchase Agreement between Novell and SCO. I think the court is going to want a copy of that, too, and SCO didn't file one with its complaint. McBride dodged that by saying it was available in "SEC filings on the Internet". I think that was a bullshit evasion. In fact, that does not appear to be correct. There are numerous SEC filings that reference that document. All ultimately indicate it was included in a filing in Dec. of 1993. (Date sounds weird, but that is what they all say.) Nevertheless, Santa Cruz Operation SEC filings only go back to 1996 in the online databases, unless I'm missing something.
Putin has been involved in a SCO Summit in Russia and France!! See the article. You have to search, but buried down in the third question to Putin, you see these words:
after the SCO summit and the series of major international meetings in St. Petersburg and Evian
What do you want to bet that the German court's attempt to shut down the SCO website was just a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are involved as well.
I bet you that Evian water is designed to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!!!
Is it just me, or is there something scary about a judge, who may or may not use his/her computer for anything other than e-mail and word processing, trying to interpret two snippets of source code to determine if one uses the other in an illegal way?
I thought the same thing, but I just got done looking at the some of the legal documents from the Original AT&T/BSD case.
In particular, the final opinion in that case shows that the judge did take the time to understand everything.
I also find it rather enlightening to see just how poorly a copyright/trade secret suit was to prove when it was AT&T funding the fight. Makes me believe even less in SCO's chances.
There is an enormous difference between an expert programmer sitting down with a pile of textbooks and disjointed segments of code to write out an operating system from scratch, and that same programmer downloading the operating system intact from a public network.
---US District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise ruling in the AT&T/BSD lawsuit
No, as others have pointed out, if IBM makes an offer, Microsoft might make one as well. Don't you think MS would love to own something that brings all of linux into question in the minds of CEOs and CIOs?
I loved office hours. It was when I knew I had uninterrupted time for pleasure reading. The only time the students would show up was around midterms and during the last two weeks of classes. For the most part, it was a nice block of uninterrupted time.
As to how to tell if a bot has harvested from a website, if you are unlucky enough to have a single e-mail address, it would not be possible. However, if you have your own domain, it is likely that you can set things up so that any non-existing userid@yourdomain.com comes into a catch-all account.
Then, all you do is use different e-mail addresses for everyplace you are forced to supply one. Joe-Bob's Meat Cleavers site won't let you browse his site without an e-mail and you just have to read the link you followed from a slashdot post? Sign up as joe-bob-meat-cleavers@yourdomain.com. Then when you get spam using that e-mail address, you know where it came from.
I have a few that have recently become very active for spammers, and I know exactly where they were harvested from. These are addresses that I am conviced were harvested, not ones that were sold by the website they were used at. Either way, were I so inclined and legally permitted, if I could sue, I would know exactly where to start the discovery requests to try to determine where these addresses came from.
For code, give extra weight to easy to maintain code. i.e. good internal documentation, coded in such a way that making changes are very easy
Here is the correct Slashdot link for the Felten interview.
Of course, the Tribune also has a CYA article in which they explain that the hype may not match reality. They explain that you cannot compare the statistics showing the jobs that will need to be filled to the numbers representing available employees because an employed person can wear two hats and knock two items off of the needed jobs list.
Assuming the predictions hold out, how many of those programming jobs, which the Tribune lists as the single biggest growing job need, are actually going to be filled by programmers in the US instead of being filled by cheap programming labor from overseas?
The point of homework is to make sure that you understand the material.
:)
Is it really? If that is the case, then shouldn't a student who can score 100% on tests and quizes be excused from homework?
I ask, because I am not really sure myself. I used to believe that the point of homework was to make sure you understood the material, and I was one of those persons who rarely did homework in high school or undergad. (Grad school was a different story.) I scored well. Did great at standardized testing.
Math was one of my stronger areas. All the way through 4 quarters of calculus and even in a college senior level number theory class, I could read and/or listen to a professor explain a concept and just 'get it.' And get A's or A-'s in the class without doing any of the homework. I might need to do one or two problems to reinforce or or clarify my understanding, but that was it. I was in the 700s on my math SATs and higher than that on my math section of the GRE.
However, I hit a brick wall hard when I took differential equations. That wonderful capacity to 'just get it' wasn't there for dif EQ. I took the class twice. The first time, I intentionally blew the final so that I would get a D. (Doing so allowed me to retake the class and wipe out the D. Had it been a C, retaking the class would have meant that the C was averaged in with the second grade.) So, I was able to use much simpler math skills to calculate exactly which questions I had to get correct to get the D instead of the F
I retook it and squeaked by with a B. Now, that B probably represented a better understanding than the bulk of the students in the class, but it was nothing like my understanding of any other math classes I had taken up to that point. I didn't have any intuitive conception of anything more than simple problems. I couldn't look at a problem and have a sense of what the correct answer might be or an ability to look at an answer and make a quick judgement as to whether it seemed a likely answer like I could for really nasty integration problems.
I suspect that had I developed the skills to slog through homework while in high school, that I might have had the ability to work harder at differential equations and gotten to the point where I understood them in the way that I had understood most other mathematical concepts that I had been presented with up to that point. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I would really trade the hours of free time I racked up not doing homework for many, many years just to assuage my wounded pride in this area.
Be that as it may, I think that there is an element of homework that represents more than just certifying that you have mastered the material. I think it can be seen as skills training for learning how to master more difficult material in the future. I also think that it can be seen as innoculation for much of the mindnumbing work that many people will end up doing in their professional lives. (Luckily, I have been able to avoid a profession filled with mind-numbing work, but I know many for which that is not the case.)
A Google search turned up Rout's web site which includes The White Feather Letter mentioned in the High Court transcript, as well as many other interesting items. Though, I could not find any conplete explanation of his theories.
There was this interesting piece:
25th Jan 1994: I have proven, the 1st law of thermodynamics being, Newton's Law of conservation of energy is wrong. Using the famous Hubble red shift of 1929, that revealed light from distant galaxies was stretched into the red on a light spectrum, proving the universe was expanding. Proof:
What they all have failed to perceive in 65 yrs of brain blindness is that energy is contained in the wavelength of light and the expanding universe is stretching the wavelength, so straightening it, and in straightening it is causing energy to cease to exist. The expanding universe is converting energy into nothing. This confirms my statements in the past that NOTHING is of a higher and different state of energy.
Genocide where the 'soldiers' commanding the actual genocide weren't even aware what they were doing had any connection to reality. In fact, were actively discouraged from discovering that.
I did take a sci-fi grad course in college, but I would not recommend contacting that prof. However, in working through that course, I learned that Kent State not only published a scholarly journal in sci-fi, but had a few professors on staff that specialized in it. This was many years ago, but the journal is still going.
Indiana passed legislation putting one into effect in 2002. I signed up as soon as I could. The effect has been amazing.
Unfortunately, I remember some discussion when the U.S. do-not-call legislation was first proposed stating that Indiana's was more restrictive as to exceptions (basically, charities within 50 miles using unpaid volunteers, newspapers, political campaigns and something else).
My understanding is that the U.S. legislation may be able to trump the state based on the non-restriction of interstate trade laws in the constitution. Though, I don't understand how it couldn't have been restriction of trade before the U.S. passed legislation.
Isn't weather kind of a perpetual motion machine? In the sense that forever is as long as we live, then yes, it is. However, by definition a perpetual motion machine is one that keeps going without external energy. Ultimately, the wind moving around the globe and the clouds/rain/snow that go along with it all come from the heating energy of the sun, with the rotational force of the earth helping to direct some of the motion. Eventually, the earth will be subsumed within the boundary of the sun and the sun will eventually burn out. So, no, weather is not a perpetual motion machine. However, for our existences, it will not stop its motion.
I'm in NW Indiana less than a mile from the Illinois border. I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom with the lights off so it wouldn't wake my wife. The flash made me jump and nearly miss what I was aiming at. It was like lightning, but much brighter. I figured it was a close lightning strike, but was a bit surprised when there was no thunder. I didn't hear about the meteor strikes until the commute home the next day.