I agree with the samba team that nothing should be done to stop SCO or SCO customers from using samba.
However, if it were my program I'd seriously consider adding in a hard-to-turn-off warning that would run every time samba runs or performs some action that would show up prominently in user windows (OK, so I'm not sure how to do that offhand).
The warning might say something like :
SCO are lying sleazebags who are taking your money for things (including SAMBA) that you should be getting for free under the GPL. Other options include... (insert list of good URLS for other bsd/linux sources here). Since SCO also has a habit of suing or threatening to sue everyone in sight, you might want to stop using their software and switch to something better.
Your comment just underscores my point: You are only granted rights to the extent that those rights help make a profit.
Allow me to recount a simple tale about cattle ranching on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land.
In a dry area where I lived, there'd been a drought for four or five years. Things were normally dry and the drought made things very dry. Cattle grazing on BLM land had the grass cropped down to the point where there was almost no grass left. Water holes that once had water were mud at best, dry often.
One rancher complained that his cattle were dying because of the drought. So he petitioned the BML to grant him the right to graze twice the number of cattle that he'd had previously. The BML granted him that right.
It made no sense to me - grazing more cattle on already overgrazed land seemed a bit futile. Till I discovered that he was also getting government subsidized insurance on his cattle and that subsidy had been increased because of the drought. Every animal that died meant money in his pocket.
Letting land lie fallow to allow grasses to grow back, to allow precipitation to soak into the ground and help the water table, to allow local species of vegetation and animal life to regain a foothold on that land that "belonged to the people" seems to me to be a good investment in the land - more so than continuing a practice of overgrazing. I'd also note that if you look at lands held by private owners who graze cattle, the land is cared for far more carefully and overgrazing is nowhere near as bad. Similarly, it can be instructive to compare forest lands held by private landowners who harvest and public lands harvested - even when the harvesting is done by the same groups.
I've used the Visual Age for Java environment and found it very nice indeed. It was rather a memory hog and startup was slow (glacial may be more accurate), but once started it worked very well indeed and was by far the most impressive IDE type environment I've ever used.
I wish they'd made it open source and released it - I think it would be quite a bit nicer even now with a bunch of people poking at it.
If you're not revealing classified information you can say whatever the hell you want.
Try telling a customer that you do business with Israel. Or disagreeing with the Shrubbery. Or getting on a plane with a button saying "Suspected Terrorist". Or getting on a plane if you have the wrong name.
Tiny cracks in liberty will more surely destroy it than will the big and public threats.
To quote from Emily Dickenson (yup, that poetry you had to read in school is sometimes to the point) :
Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays.
...
Ruin is formal - Devil's work
Consecutive and slow -
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping - is Crash's law.
McBride actually admitted today that their attack is about destroying free software which is just disgusting considering that one of the core principals of IP law is that the author should be able to disseminate his work as he wishes - SCO apparently wants to destroy this choice.
But this is completely in keeping with the way American capitalism works. For instance the Department of the Interior sells leases to ranchers to put cattle on (often overgrazed land). But groups like the Sierra Club have been refused those leases, even though high bidder, because they planned on leaving the land fallow.
The rule seems to be "you must profit by your rights or your rights don't count".
The US isn't alone. How about this story about a Canadian city that won't give a place a liquor license unless they server liquor (they want it so patrons can smoke tobacco).
Is it possible that this action by SCO will enable faster actions by IBM/Redhat...?
By terminating IBM's license, SCO is saying that IBM can't make money now on related products now. Since the scheduled court date is more than a year off, this could impose a serious hardship (so to speak) on IBM.
It would seem to me that that would give IBM a way to push for an injunction stopping this quickly, or a way to push for a faster trial.
A while back I was getting the electricity changed to my name when moving. The electric company refused to do it unless I gave them my SSN. I told them I didn't have to do that and that they should just assign me an account number. They refused. I called the SSN people - they said that I can not be required to give my SSN to the electric company, but that the electric company was free to not do business with me.
It would seem that the scores that the credit bureaus give you are calculated based on some secret algoritm. (Told to me recently by someone who got a credit report on me, who showed me the scores and who said I could not make a photocopy of the page.)
So if someone is basing a decision on those scores it is based on potentially unreliable data (since there's no effective way to change the data once its in the databases) run through a secret algorithm. Now, thats a really good way to convince me of the reliability of the process.
And I got to pay for the right to not see the raw data or the methods used. Yah, this is really a good system.
So, why not write a quick script that cuts the files up into small chunks with some code to reassemble them when all the chunks are there. (I'd be seriously tempted to write the reassembly code in something fun - say intercal, or some nice language that only runs on one system...) Then mail all the chunks to them with a brief explanation on how they should reassemble them and verify that they're not Arnie.
Better still, get the email for their legal counsel and send them there.
You do look like an interesting candidate and if I lived in California I'd very likely vote for you.
Since I don't live in California and dont have a lot of disposable income at the nonce, do you have any suggestions for people who might like to support you using the internet?
However things go, I hope you have fun, learn cool things, meet interesting people, tweak the noses of all those in need of nose tweaking and generally say the things that need to be said.
I'm a college professor (or profess to be) and I agree with some of the posters here that at least some of the problems stem from users who are computer illiterate - often even though they spend much of their time (at work, school, home) working with computers.
Often enough they're considered "literate" if not even "power users". Why? Because someplace along the road they learned how to use MS Word or Excel.
To complicate things, they're usually considered computer "literate" by someone - completely on the basis of having once put together a tiny spreadsheet in Excel and changed a font or two in Word.
To me this is literacy in the small - about fourth grade level in literacy-as-reading terms.
The analogy is always made with cars. Many people drive and drive well - but they are often said to be "car illiterate" because they don'tunderstand the internal combustion engine and can not adjust a cars timing with a yardstick and an alarm clock. So, the argument then goes, why should anyone need to know anything more about computing?
I find this analogy unpersuasive. Think about it - almost everyone who drives is "driving literate" in some sense. They know the basics of how to drive a car (not entirely simple) and how a car works (enough anyway to know that you need to put gas in it and change the oil ) and usually things like how to change tires. They also know the basic mechanics/physics of driving, the general rules of the road, basic road etiquette, how to read a map (well, mostly) and so on. "Driving literacy" is really pretty complicated. A good driver who's had some years of driving experience in a variety of conditions knows a whole lot. (Admittedly, much of this is not usually taught - Driver's Ed notwithstanding.)
But even so, a car is a pretty simple device compared to a computer. Cars do one basic thing - carry their contents from one place to another (serious reductionism here!). Computers are complex and very flexible in comparison to cars. Most computers can run software that does many different (and sometimes very different) kinds of things (think Word vs Excel vs Blender vs Mozilla vs Big Complicated Game).
So, counting someone as "computer literate" because they can turn on a windows machine and use a specific version of word (or whatever) just doesn't work for me.
Computer literacy for me is much more. I'm not sure what I'd consider computer literate, but at a minimum it would involve :
knowing a basic approach for learning new software
understand how to start to diagnose relatively simple problems -- that is, instead of calling the help desk immediately, at least look through help, search web sites if the web is accessible, get error numbers, try a couple of different things
have some kind of basic model about how files work
understand that the whole world is not insert os name here
understand some simple email etiquette (don't send huge binary attachments if text will do, don't just quote a whole mail message at the bottom of your message, don't automatically forward the latest collection of light bulb jokes)
understand that things do need verifying and debugging (spreadsheets often have errors - but the people who write them don't usually even think about checking/debugging them)
and a few more things....
The most important parts for me are the meta knowledge. Not knowing how to change a font, but knowing how to approach finding the information about how to change a font. This can not be taught simply by teaching a couple simple applications.
I've proposed "computer literacy" requirements in a couple of different universities that would at least go a step or two beyond MS Word (even if not to the meta-knowledge I mentioned above) and the bulk of the faculty have responded predictably. Most common is the attitude of "We dont know that. Our students don't need to.", next is "But why? All anyone ever needs to know
"Hey, we've got someone coming from Deutsche Bankk to look at our code!"
"Quick make a copy of something interesting for him, change a couple small variable names, maybe a number or two. Add a couple comments that look like change logs. Print both of them out. "
... later...
"He bought it. He says it was copied."
General rejoicing as the opinion appears in print, the stock goes up a bit more and everyone sells a few more shares...
It looks to me like SCO is really claiming that they own the idea of Unix somehow (their phrase "an operating system that is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX") and that they may then go after the BSD branch next.
Legally this may be untenable, I don't know - but it would probably pump up SCO stock prices and I think this is all they care about.
Just that comment makes me wonder if Forbes really intends to be seen as a professional organization.To me, it makes them look like middle schoolers writing a newsletter.
Of course it also makes me suspect that the editor responsible probably owns both SCO and Microsoft stock.
Better still, to quote ROT (Roger O Thornhill - Cary Grant's character in "North by Northwest"):
In advertising there is no such thing as a lie, there is only expedient exaggeration.
OK. I apologize, I meant the Patent Office for "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". I was led to elision by the sheer weight of the phrase.
But I'll admit to curiousity - is there a "Less Britain" or a "Lesser Britain" or something to compare "Great Britain" with that thence requires "Great" as an adjective? Or is "Great" a statement of Goodness and Niceness? Or an implication that it subsumes all of that "Little Island" (vis Randy Newman's "Faust").
I just spent some time browsing google for information on plagiarism and copy detection and ran into a very interesting point. If you were to post your essay on the web, its likely to be found as
a plagiarized source. So, put your essay on the web, pass it in to turnitin, get zapped, then show the instructor that it was your web copy that was cited as the source material and watch the fun.
Best to have a good grade going in. Be ready to drop the course and avoid the instructor in the future.
OK, so I admit to being a bit of a subversive. But I've also noticed that the instructors most likely to use a service like this are the ones I have the least respect for. (And the ones who'd be most likely to give me a hard time for using a preposition at the end of a sentence. Something up with which they will not put.)
They've updated their legal page quite a bit since I first looked at it (a couple years ago) and the information is much more complete. However, in several places it looks to me like they may be trying to make the law just by saying it is the law.
I'm not in favor of students copying papers - though I do believe a fair amount of that problem is due to the laziness of the instructors - many of whom give the same assignments year after year after year. Still, turnitin
feels more than a bit distasteful to me.
One of the author's comments is that the British patent office recommends that schoolchildren copyright (and mark as copyright) their essays.
This raises an interesting question. turnitin claims to detect plagiarism in essays turned in by students. But those essays are then stored by turnitin in order to detect future plagiarism (of course since we can't track the use of the essay, I have wondered if turnitin isn't feeding the essays out to one of the essay sales sites). If the essay is copyright by the author, this seems to me to be out of the realm of fair use. Perhaps a few students should go after turnitin in the courts.
Its not easy going by any means(!!), but Spivak's "Calculus" is my favorite book on calculus - and does a very good job of trying to get at the mathematical why of the subject rather than just the "how to". I'm pretty sure this is out of print, but its well worth finding.
I don't have a copy myself, but spent more than an hour one day reading "Who was Fourier?" in a bookstore and trying to figure out how I could use it in a class. Certainly worth looking at.
I recently worked at a university which was in the process of determining that no student could graduate without a hefty dose of "service based learning". As it developed, what they meant by that was the idea that the university would require as a graduation requirement that all students volunteer for a term or two at "approved" local organizations.
It was not approved on that cycle, but is still one of the approved ideas in the local power elite and will most likely be pushed through eventually.
A very bad idea indeed - but appealing to those who want to instill the Proper Notions of Goodness and Niceness in students. (Think Political Correctness.)
Sounds feasible to me. If you read the article it looks very much like you could replace "Linux" with "Windows MMIV" (or whatever) everywhere and it would work. The distinction between the two MS OS's might end up requiring a bit more explanation, thats all.
Slashdot Mirror
However, if it were my program I'd seriously consider adding in a hard-to-turn-off warning that would run every time samba runs or performs some action that would show up prominently in user windows (OK, so I'm not sure how to do that offhand).
The warning might say something like : ... (insert list of good URLS for other bsd/linux sources here). Since SCO also has a habit of suing or threatening to sue everyone in sight, you might want to stop using their software and switch to something better.
SCO are lying sleazebags who are taking your money for things (including SAMBA) that you should be getting for free under the GPL. Other options include
Right! My figuring is this :
You are only granted rights to the extent that those rights help make a profit.
Allow me to recount a simple tale about cattle ranching on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land.
In a dry area where I lived, there'd been a drought for four or five years. Things were normally dry and the drought made things very dry. Cattle grazing on BLM land had the grass cropped down to the point where there was almost no grass left. Water holes that once had water were mud at best, dry often.
One rancher complained that his cattle were dying because of the drought. So he petitioned the BML to grant him the right to graze twice the number of cattle that he'd had previously. The BML granted him that right.
It made no sense to me - grazing more cattle on already overgrazed land seemed a bit futile. Till I discovered that he was also getting government subsidized insurance on his cattle and that subsidy had been increased because of the drought. Every animal that died meant money in his pocket.
Letting land lie fallow to allow grasses to grow back, to allow precipitation to soak into the ground and help the water table, to allow local species of vegetation and animal life to regain a foothold on that land that "belonged to the people" seems to me to be a good investment in the land - more so than continuing a practice of overgrazing. I'd also note that if you look at lands held by private owners who graze cattle, the land is cared for far more carefully and overgrazing is nowhere near as bad. Similarly, it can be instructive to compare forest lands held by private landowners who harvest and public lands harvested - even when the harvesting is done by the same groups.
I wish they'd made it open source and released it - I think it would be quite a bit nicer even now with a bunch of people poking at it.
I now wonder. Is this the first time Emily Dickinson has been quoted on slashdot (except perhaps for a snippit in a signature) ?
Try telling a customer that you do business with Israel. Or disagreeing with the Shrubbery. Or getting on a plane with a button saying "Suspected Terrorist". Or getting on a plane if you have the wrong name.
Tiny cracks in liberty will more surely destroy it than will the big and public threats.
To quote from Emily Dickenson (yup, that poetry you had to read in school is sometimes to the point) :
Crumbling is not an instant's Act
...
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays.
Ruin is formal - Devil's work
Consecutive and slow -
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping - is Crash's law.
But this is completely in keeping with the way American capitalism works. For instance the Department of the Interior sells leases to ranchers to put cattle on (often overgrazed land). But groups like the Sierra Club have been refused those leases, even though high bidder, because they planned on leaving the land fallow.
The rule seems to be "you must profit by your rights or your rights don't count".
The US isn't alone. How about this story about a Canadian city that won't give a place a liquor license unless they server liquor (they want it so patrons can smoke tobacco).
Ain't humanity wonderfully silly?
By terminating IBM's license, SCO is saying that IBM can't make money now on related products now. Since the scheduled court date is more than a year off, this could impose a serious hardship (so to speak) on IBM.
It would seem to me that that would give IBM a way to push for an injunction stopping this quickly, or a way to push for a faster trial.
Now theres a law with a lot of sense to it.
And I got to pay for the right to not see the raw data or the methods used. Yah, this is really a good system.
Better still, get the email for their legal counsel and send them there.
Since I don't live in California and dont have a lot of disposable income at the nonce, do you have any suggestions for people who might like to support you using the internet?
However things go, I hope you have fun, learn cool things, meet interesting people, tweak the noses of all those in need of nose tweaking and generally say the things that need to be said.
Good luck!
Often enough they're considered "literate" if not even "power users". Why? Because someplace along the road they learned how to use MS Word or Excel.
To complicate things, they're usually considered computer "literate" by someone - completely on the basis of having once put together a tiny spreadsheet in Excel and changed a font or two in Word.
To me this is literacy in the small - about fourth grade level in literacy-as-reading terms.
The analogy is always made with cars. Many people drive and drive well - but they are often said to be "car illiterate" because they don'tunderstand the internal combustion engine and can not adjust a cars timing with a yardstick and an alarm clock. So, the argument then goes, why should anyone need to know anything more about computing?
I find this analogy unpersuasive. Think about it - almost everyone who drives is "driving literate" in some sense. They know the basics of how to drive a car (not entirely simple) and how a car works (enough anyway to know that you need to put gas in it and change the oil ) and usually things like how to change tires. They also know the basic mechanics/physics of driving, the general rules of the road, basic road etiquette, how to read a map (well, mostly) and so on. "Driving literacy" is really pretty complicated. A good driver who's had some years of driving experience in a variety of conditions knows a whole lot. (Admittedly, much of this is not usually taught - Driver's Ed notwithstanding.)
But even so, a car is a pretty simple device compared to a computer. Cars do one basic thing - carry their contents from one place to another (serious reductionism here!). Computers are complex and very flexible in comparison to cars. Most computers can run software that does many different (and sometimes very different) kinds of things (think Word vs Excel vs Blender vs Mozilla vs Big Complicated Game).
So, counting someone as "computer literate" because they can turn on a windows machine and use a specific version of word (or whatever) just doesn't work for me.
Computer literacy for me is much more. I'm not sure what I'd consider computer literate, but at a minimum it would involve :
The most important parts for me are the meta knowledge. Not knowing how to change a font, but knowing how to approach finding the information about how to change a font. This can not be taught simply by teaching a couple simple applications.
I've proposed "computer literacy" requirements in a couple of different universities that would at least go a step or two beyond MS Word (even if not to the meta-knowledge I mentioned above) and the bulk of the faculty have responded predictably. Most common is the attitude of "We dont know that. Our students don't need to.", next is "But why? All anyone ever needs to know
Scene at SCO:
"Hey, we've got someone coming from Deutsche Bankk to look at our code!"
"Quick make a copy of something interesting for him, change a couple small variable names, maybe a number or two. Add a couple comments that look like change logs. Print both of them out. "
... later ...
"He bought it. He says it was copied."
General rejoicing as the opinion appears in print, the stock goes up a bit more and everyone sells a few more shares ...
Legally this may be untenable, I don't know - but it would probably pump up SCO stock prices and I think this is all they care about.
Of course it also makes me suspect that the editor responsible probably owns both SCO and Microsoft stock.
Better still, to quote ROT (Roger O Thornhill - Cary Grant's character in "North by Northwest"):
In advertising there is no such thing as a lie, there is only expedient exaggeration.
But I'll admit to curiousity - is there a "Less Britain" or a "Lesser Britain" or something to compare "Great Britain" with that thence requires "Great" as an adjective? Or is "Great" a statement of Goodness and Niceness? Or an implication that it subsumes all of that "Little Island" (vis Randy Newman's "Faust").
Best to have a good grade going in. Be ready to drop the course and avoid the instructor in the future.
OK, so I admit to being a bit of a subversive. But I've also noticed that the instructors most likely to use a service like this are the ones I have the least respect for. (And the ones who'd be most likely to give me a hard time for using a preposition at the end of a sentence. Something up with which they will not put.)
They've updated their legal page quite a bit since I first looked at it (a couple years ago) and the information is much more complete. However, in several places it looks to me like they may be trying to make the law just by saying it is the law. I'm not in favor of students copying papers - though I do believe a fair amount of that problem is due to the laziness of the instructors - many of whom give the same assignments year after year after year. Still, turnitin feels more than a bit distasteful to me.
This raises an interesting question. turnitin claims to detect plagiarism in essays turned in by students. But those essays are then stored by turnitin in order to detect future plagiarism (of course since we can't track the use of the essay, I have wondered if turnitin isn't feeding the essays out to one of the essay sales sites). If the essay is copyright by the author, this seems to me to be out of the realm of fair use. Perhaps a few students should go after turnitin in the courts.
I don't have a copy myself, but spent more than an hour one day reading "Who was Fourier?" in a bookstore and trying to figure out how I could use it in a class. Certainly worth looking at.
It was not approved on that cycle, but is still one of the approved ideas in the local power elite and will most likely be pushed through eventually.
A very bad idea indeed - but appealing to those who want to instill the Proper Notions of Goodness and Niceness in students. (Think Political Correctness.)
Sure be fun to see someone try it.