But people don't give a shit, and they don't work as well, and they certainly don't work seamlessly. Windows won because you have to present an alternative thats worth making the effort to switch to (anyone who's second to market will tell you this is hard). Telling someone that they have to spend time (and often money) in order to get back to where they are now because "Linux is better" is just going to get them pissed off.
And, of course, in many ways Linux is NOT better. Evangelizing is all well and good, but know your audience.
The parent is correct. You are not. It's not optimal, or even fair, but it's true. Arguing with people that "you can have everything you want" under Linux won't get you far because its clearly false.
This has nothing to do with whether or not it was a a legal download (it was, period). This has to do with whether or not SCO was distributing Linux in violation of the GPL - the existence of that server is distribution. Period.
As a side note, if you're running an FTP server on a public server with a login banner that gives you anonymous access, and the files on that server are accompanied by license files that give you a free right to download them, you'd have a heck of a time pushing a copyright infringment claim.
At least 2 weeks after the filing of the lawsuit against IBM, which is certainly long after the plans for the suit were laid. Files on the ftp server (it's anonymous access at ftp.caldera.com - hardly hidden in any way) certainly count as distribution, however. Whether or not it's advertised is really irrelevant.
Short answer: no. The GPL doesn't require you to make the source public (a common misconception), but it does require you to provide the source to anyone who you provide with binaries. Because you also can't restrict the people you give the source to from re-distributing it, most people simple have public source tarballs or rpms or CVS or whatever, but it's not strictly required.
The Q&A is totally accurate because it's talking about the only thing with any legal weight, which is the SCO vs IBM lawsuit. Any unauthorized use of SCOs source by anyone except IBM hasn't even been alleged.
And the provenance of those 80 lines shown under the NDA has never been stated by anyone, SCO or not, so I don't know where you get that from.
A clarification: You can't CONTINUE to use the code after the lawsuit, assuming that part of the settlement is an injunction, and a settlement without that wouldn't be considered a win for SCO. The damages are for (theoretical) past damages, not future one.
There's lots of people who try to scam other people too. Here's a hint: Your premiums are only very loosely correlated with fraud costs - the cost of legitimate claims far outweighs fraud. Your premiums are calculated to ensure a profit for the ensurer - if there's a million more LEGITIMATE claims, your costs will go up.
Part of a DMCA letter is the avowing, under penalty of perjury, that you have good-faith reason to believe the infaction occured, and that you have legal authority to act on behalf of whoever holds the copyright on whatever you're complaning about.
It's for a court to decide, I guess, but personlly I feel that good-faith would require human supervision of a these systems.
On the other hand, maybe they do, and these are just ones that slip through. It's gotta be mind-numbing reviewing these things all day.
In cases like this, I recommend going to your closest technical bookstore and getting a half dozen of the biggest, heaviest, books you can find and beating the bejeezus out of your co-workers.
here is a link to the offical Windows XP visual style guidelines. I know theres some earlier versions as well, just do some searching on MSDN. Be aware that MS often violates these guidelines, so your developers may dismiss them.
It's very simple. Because you can't legally modify and then re-distribute someone elses work. Period. You can have all kinds of arguments about what defines free, and what kind of freedom we want, but those are idealogical arguments, and not legal ones. In the absence of permission from the author (usually, but not always, in the form of a license), you cannot re-distribute copyrighted works, or create & distribute derivitive works. Period.
I'm going to reply to my own post because I've re-read some of the context of your original post and I want to clarify. You're certainly permitted to put a notice in all your Slashdot posts stating that reproducing them entails acceptance of the terms on your website (provide a link) and that I'll pay you ONE MILLION DOLLARS for reproducing them.
Now, your license terms can't do anything to me so long as I copy your articles within the limits of fair use - selective quoting in my replies, for example. If, on the other hand, I decide to make a book out of Slashdot comments, you'll be perfectly entitled to come after me for copyright infringment.
Basically, the GPL is an open offer for licensing, just as your.sig license would be. If a company finds it's terms disagreeable, they have the option of contacting the author for other terms, or using it anyway in violation of the law. It's possible that the court decision for such a violation would include compliance with the original license.
Now, as for EULAs. An EULA is the equivilent of a.sig that says "by reading this post you agree to pay me ONE MILLION DOLLARS". See the difference here? In the first case, you're making an open offer to license rights that aren't normally granted, either in return for ONE MILLION DOLLARS or with certain conditions. In the second case, you're attempting to make an informal contract without consideration.
You are correct, to a degree that this is possible. The limit there is whether or not your work is a derived work of the original GPLed product that you're patching. The FSF says it is, but it'd really take a court case to decide. In fact, what you describe is very close to how binary-only kernel modules work.
Smart judges are very aware of the difference between "we will allow you to do this thing that you normally cannot legally do, as long as you follow these guidelines" and "you can't do these things because we said so".
Copyright law certainly DOES permit the author of the work to allow redistribution. Such a thing is called a redistribution license. They're pretty common in the world of IP. Read up on it sometime.
This isn't you holding a CD for your friend. This is a company that makes it's buisness the storing and compiling of this information. Say instead that you run a buisness out of your home and your buisness is the storing of CD collections. If you're broken into and those CDs stolen, you certainly would be liable - this is why people who do this sort of thing have insurance against it. The insurance company is going to be really pissed off that there was an unsecured FTP server running, too...
Did you read the article? This isn't a router from Best Buy we're talking about here. It's resales (most likely from bankruptcy settlements) of high end networking equipment - the list price of one of the items is 60 grand. The guy got it for 4.
Maybe you can use a sort of 2-step publishing? Tell em that if they don't fix it within 60 days that you'll notify everyone. If they don't, or after 30 days if they blow you off or don't respond or something, post an announcement of the vulnerability, but not the details. Make this announcement somewhere that schools can find out about it. After the 60 days, go ahead and do the full release.
As for academic protection, talking to someone in the school that you can trust (maybe you're close friends with a prof?) and getting some sort of verification of your grades might be a really good idea. It's entirely possible that some asshole beancounter will decide to expell you, just because you had the ability to change your grades.
Sexual harrasment is just as much an atmosphere as smoking is. If a boss wants to make the decision that all his secretaries have to be 19-21, female, attractive, and naked, how long do you think he's going to last without a suit? (Note: strippers & such aren't sued [successfully] because physical attractiveness is a characteristic of the work done. For the same reason, someone in a wheelchair couldn't sue for not being hired to do something that required mobility - say mountain rescue or something). Why is it inappropriate and illegal anywhere, even in the workplace (Note again: It's not. I can sexually harrass women all I want in private or on my own time. The worst I'd get would be a convetional harrasment suit if I didn't leave her alone when asked).
And, actually, most people DO consider the right to work a basic human right. The UN does. Most US courts interpert "pursuit of happiness" as including the right to work. Its in the interest of society for the work market to be fair.
Okay. Call your boss and tell him that you're willing to sign a document that forgoes all your legal protection under all the various workers rights statues. Be sure to bring this up in every job interview you go to, too. Or, more simply, simply move to, say, Ethiopia.
Restricting distribution (especially private distribution) of material certainly is a free speech issue. 'You're free to write whatever you want, but nobody else can see it or look at it' isn't exactrly freedom of the press.
You actually would be really amazed by the kinds of things colonials got up to behind closed doors. On the other hand, you're probably 100% correct that they wouldn't defend anyones right to sell those things, since doing naughty things in private while decrying them in public was something of a hallmark of the era.
I make it a point to stand beside them and blow as directly in their face as I can.
If you did that to me you'd be swallowing your cigarettes. Just because your disgusting personal habits bother people (I cough around smokers because I have scarred lungs. Put your fucking irritants somewhere else) doesn't mean you get any sort of moral high ground.
You don't DESERVE any cooperation - it's like me saying that if I want to piss in public I will, and if you say anything about it I'll just piss on you.
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And, of course, in many ways Linux is NOT better. Evangelizing is all well and good, but know your audience.
The parent is correct. You are not. It's not optimal, or even fair, but it's true. Arguing with people that "you can have everything you want" under Linux won't get you far because its clearly false.
"I'm not giving away money any more. Here's 20 bucks". You should read things BEFORE you reply to them.
As a side note, if you're running an FTP server on a public server with a login banner that gives you anonymous access, and the files on that server are accompanied by license files that give you a free right to download them, you'd have a heck of a time pushing a copyright infringment claim.
At least 2 weeks after the filing of the lawsuit against IBM, which is certainly long after the plans for the suit were laid. Files on the ftp server (it's anonymous access at ftp.caldera.com - hardly hidden in any way) certainly count as distribution, however. Whether or not it's advertised is really irrelevant.
Short answer: no. The GPL doesn't require you to make the source public (a common misconception), but it does require you to provide the source to anyone who you provide with binaries. Because you also can't restrict the people you give the source to from re-distributing it, most people simple have public source tarballs or rpms or CVS or whatever, but it's not strictly required.
And the provenance of those 80 lines shown under the NDA has never been stated by anyone, SCO or not, so I don't know where you get that from.
A clarification: You can't CONTINUE to use the code after the lawsuit, assuming that part of the settlement is an injunction, and a settlement without that wouldn't be considered a win for SCO. The damages are for (theoretical) past damages, not future one.
An old phone, a cell with bad reception, or a good thick sheet should provide all the protection you need against this.
There's lots of people who try to scam other people too. Here's a hint: Your premiums are only very loosely correlated with fraud costs - the cost of legitimate claims far outweighs fraud. Your premiums are calculated to ensure a profit for the ensurer - if there's a million more LEGITIMATE claims, your costs will go up.
It's for a court to decide, I guess, but personlly I feel that good-faith would require human supervision of a these systems.
On the other hand, maybe they do, and these are just ones that slip through. It's gotta be mind-numbing reviewing these things all day.
In cases like this, I recommend going to your closest technical bookstore and getting a half dozen of the biggest, heaviest, books you can find and beating the bejeezus out of your co-workers.
here is a link to the offical Windows XP visual style guidelines. I know theres some earlier versions as well, just do some searching on MSDN. Be aware that MS often violates these guidelines, so your developers may dismiss them.
It's very simple. Because you can't legally modify and then re-distribute someone elses work. Period. You can have all kinds of arguments about what defines free, and what kind of freedom we want, but those are idealogical arguments, and not legal ones. In the absence of permission from the author (usually, but not always, in the form of a license), you cannot re-distribute copyrighted works, or create & distribute derivitive works. Period.
Now, your license terms can't do anything to me so long as I copy your articles within the limits of fair use - selective quoting in my replies, for example. If, on the other hand, I decide to make a book out of Slashdot comments, you'll be perfectly entitled to come after me for copyright infringment.
Basically, the GPL is an open offer for licensing, just as your .sig license would be. If a company finds it's terms disagreeable, they have the option of contacting the author for other terms, or using it anyway in violation of the law. It's possible that the court decision for such a violation would include compliance with the original license.
Now, as for EULAs. An EULA is the equivilent of a .sig that says "by reading this post you agree to pay me ONE MILLION DOLLARS". See the difference here? In the first case, you're making an open offer to license rights that aren't normally granted, either in return for ONE MILLION DOLLARS or with certain conditions. In the second case, you're attempting to make an informal contract without consideration.
You are correct, to a degree that this is possible. The limit there is whether or not your work is a derived work of the original GPLed product that you're patching. The FSF says it is, but it'd really take a court case to decide. In fact, what you describe is very close to how binary-only kernel modules work.
Copyright law certainly DOES permit the author of the work to allow redistribution. Such a thing is called a redistribution license. They're pretty common in the world of IP. Read up on it sometime.
This isn't you holding a CD for your friend. This is a company that makes it's buisness the storing and compiling of this information. Say instead that you run a buisness out of your home and your buisness is the storing of CD collections. If you're broken into and those CDs stolen, you certainly would be liable - this is why people who do this sort of thing have insurance against it. The insurance company is going to be really pissed off that there was an unsecured FTP server running, too...
Did you read the article? This isn't a router from Best Buy we're talking about here. It's resales (most likely from bankruptcy settlements) of high end networking equipment - the list price of one of the items is 60 grand. The guy got it for 4.
As for academic protection, talking to someone in the school that you can trust (maybe you're close friends with a prof?) and getting some sort of verification of your grades might be a really good idea. It's entirely possible that some asshole beancounter will decide to expell you, just because you had the ability to change your grades.
And, actually, most people DO consider the right to work a basic human right. The UN does. Most US courts interpert "pursuit of happiness" as including the right to work. Its in the interest of society for the work market to be fair.
Okay. Call your boss and tell him that you're willing to sign a document that forgoes all your legal protection under all the various workers rights statues. Be sure to bring this up in every job interview you go to, too. Or, more simply, simply move to, say, Ethiopia.
Restricting distribution (especially private distribution) of material certainly is a free speech issue. 'You're free to write whatever you want, but nobody else can see it or look at it' isn't exactrly freedom of the press.
You actually would be really amazed by the kinds of things colonials got up to behind closed doors. On the other hand, you're probably 100% correct that they wouldn't defend anyones right to sell those things, since doing naughty things in private while decrying them in public was something of a hallmark of the era.
If you did that to me you'd be swallowing your cigarettes. Just because your disgusting personal habits bother people (I cough around smokers because I have scarred lungs. Put your fucking irritants somewhere else) doesn't mean you get any sort of moral high ground.
You don't DESERVE any cooperation - it's like me saying that if I want to piss in public I will, and if you say anything about it I'll just piss on you.