For any person living in a country run by a benevolent government, it's easy to agree with you (public accountability). That is however also the key to the problem with surveillance of the general public.
We tend to assume (we definitely hope) that our governments will continue to be benevolent. Yet, looking in the history books we see democracies going over the edge into the -ism of the day, becoming more or less totalitarian. It seems reasonable to assume that this will happen again in the future, only then with a dictator's dream of surveillance systems readily installed and in use.
Those of you who have read Ross Anderson's FAQ on Trusted Computing, can easily add a further dimension to that "dream", remote censorship.
One of the news stories today in Sweden is how a swedish TV reporter, Cats Falck, was murdered in Stockholm by the DDR government's Stasi security agency 19 years ago, after she had digged into and found out too much about technology, weapons and ammunitions smuggling from Sweden to the DDR according to today's Berliner Zeitung. The case is still open and a person has now been arrested, but the commando group that killed Falck and her friend apparently consisted of three persons. Stasi, it has been revealed after the fall of the DDR, even collected the smell of people's behind by having them sit down on cushions and then stored (archived, really) the cushions in plastic bags. These were to be used when they wanted to use dogs to hunt someone down. Now think about it. Would Stasi have wanted ubiquitous video surveillance? Would they have wanted Microsoft's version of Trusted Computing (where Microsoft holds the key to your computer and you are the untrusted party)? You bet.
It seems the meaning of the word has changed over the years. I now looked it up in the Longman Dictionary of Business English (1989 edition) and it comes up as:
revenue FIN. & ACCTS. (1) money received in the form of cash, cheques, etc. during a particular period. (2) in public finance, the income received by the State from taxation.
But dict.org serves up this old definition, opposing the above:
"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (
1913)"
Revenue Rev"e*nue, n. F. revenu, OF. revenue, fr. revenir to
return, L. revenire; pref. re- re- + venire to come. See
Come.
1. That which returns, or comes back, from an investment; the
annual rents, profits, interest, or issues of any species
of property, real or personal; income.
Do not anticipate your revenues and live upon air
till you know what you are worth. --Gray.
2. Hence, return; reward; as, a revenue of praise.
3. The annual yield of taxes, excise, customs, duties, rents,
etc., which a nation, state, or municipality collects and
receives into the treasury for public use.
Revenue cutter, an armed government vessel employed to
enforce revenue laws, prevent smuggling, etc.
Finally, though, a more recent dead tree Webster's gives both meanings for the word. No wonder I was confused.;-)
Ah, should have said sales, not revenue;-). But then again, those are just the sales at two companies. There are large numbers of small business worldwide living off Linux.
For the year, IBM calculated Linux sales of $1 billion, inducing HP's Carly Fiorina to make a more extravagant claim of $2 billion in Linux revenue at HP.
That was article dated February 3rd, 2003, so by now those numbers are likely significantly higher.
The original link in the/. story goes to a page with some ad(s), however, the ads never materialize from the 3rd party server, which blocks the story from being shown at all! Control that ad server and censor what The Economist publishes on the web;-). Smart people use CSS instead, not HTML tables.
The rest of this comment is quoted verbatim from InnoDB News
MySQL/InnoDB-4.0.1 and Oracle 9i win the database server
benchmark of PC Magazine and eWEEK. February 27, 2002 -
In the benchmark eWEEK measured the performance
of an e-commerce application
on leading commercial databases IBM DB2, Oracle, MS SQL Server,
Sybase ASE, and MySQL/InnoDB.
The application server in the test was BEA WebLogic.
The operating system was Windows 2000 Advanced Server running
on a 4-way Hewlett-Packard Xeon server with 2 GB RAM and
24 Ultra3 SCSI hard drives.
eWEEK writes: "Of the five databases we tested, only Oracle9i
and MySQL were able to run our Nile application as originally
written for 8 hours without problems."
The diagrams linked below may be news to you. The article in eWeek, originally from February 2002, was updated in July 2003 and now has the actual code and data for the test. Note how DB2 and SQL Server are left in the dust, while MySQL and Oracle 9i perform about the same. So what's interesting here? eWEEK Labs/PC Lab writes:
To our knowledge, this is the first time a computer publication has published database benchmark results tested on the same hardware since PC Magazine did so in October 1993.
That much said, not all problems are nails, so choose your tools carefully. "Better" depends on your particular nail. But if you're about to leave out free databases, at least do so for the right reason.
Two other MySQL products I found interesting (neither of which is open source at this time):
The rest of this comment is quoted verbatim from InnoDB News
MySQL/InnoDB-4.0.1 and Oracle 9i win the database server
benchmark of PC Magazine and eWEEK. February 27, 2002 -
In the benchmark eWEEK measured the performance
of an e-commerce application
on leading commercial databases IBM DB2, Oracle, MS SQL Server,
Sybase ASE, and MySQL/InnoDB.
The application server in the test was BEA WebLogic.
The operating system was Windows 2000 Advanced Server running
on a 4-way Hewlett-Packard Xeon server with 2 GB RAM and
24 Ultra3 SCSI hard drives.
eWEEK writes: "Of the five databases we tested, only Oracle9i
and MySQL were able to run our Nile application as originally
written for 8 hours without problems."
The WAASA PROCESS, developed by Citec, has a reputation for being the most wide-ranging digestion experience in the world.
The WAASA PROCESS is in operation in Mustasaari outside city of Vaasa, Finland and in Kil, Sweden and in Tokyo, Japan. One of the largest MSW digestion plants in the world is a WAASA PROCESS in Groningen, Netherlands.
FYI: I worked at this company a couple of years back.
IBM says that the GPL:d software was preloaded (ie. copied to the disk drive), which would mean that the GPL is in full force.
I very much doubt that the drives were shipped to Caldera for copying the software onto them (without compensation from IBM) and then shipped back to IBM, or that Caldera personnel did the installation without compensation at IBM factories (if they were contracted by IBM to copy the files, then IBM was copying).
It seems the most reasonable explanation is that IBM has made copies of the software, thus agreeing to be bound by the GPL, then distributed the copies. If that's not the case, it would be interesting to hear IBM's official explanation. Can someone verify how the preloaded Caldera Linux software actually ended up on the disk drives of the IBM ThinkPad T21 and T22?
I don't really have the time to do this properly now, so I just throw these links in with some comments, in case someone's interested in digesting it further.
TP T21, T22 - General Overview (Linux models) (interestingely, the page says it was last modified in June, 2003; and it's Caldera Linux of all things - surely it would be a good idea for IBM to stop distributing this;-)
"In response to growing worldwide customer demand for systems configured with the Linux operating system, IBM is among the first major vendors to offer competitively priced ThinkPad computers that include the OpenLinux eDesktop(TM) 2.4 operating system distributed by Caldera(TM) Systems, Incorporated."
I doubt that the phrase "distributed by Caldera" matter much, unless the media actually comes under separate cover from Caldera (I'm pretty sure it doesn't/didn't). IBM may want to twist inside and out in its attempts to avoid the GPL, but this Linux distribution is handed out by IBM so they are bound to the GPL.
You mention "a passthrough, *not* a resale". What IBM does, or doesn't do, with the money isn't the point at issue. "Who gave the customer the GPL'd code?" is. Did IBM? So it seems to me.
The GPL is all about passing rights along, whenever the software shifts hands. The GPL is money stream agnostic.
I do find it a bit ironic that IBM is now set to defend the GPL in court --many, many thanks for doing that, IBM!-- while doing its best to evade being affected by the license themselves. Changing the past is difficult, though.
If the above reasoning holds and since it's a complete distribution, you also get a license from IBM for any of the other GPL:d software, such as the GUIs.
Specifically, IBM doesn't actually distribute Linux, it partners with Suse and RedHat who do that for them. Sure they produce patches, but that's all you'll get from them, not the whole kernel.
IBM has in the past distributed Linux pre-installed on at least their ThinkPad series. So there's no escape from the GPL for IBM, either.
"I've even had the experience of supporting IBM President Sam Palmisano and
his team as he delivered his LinuxWorld NYC 2001 keynote address using a
Linux-preloaded IBM ThinkPad T21."
Try the IBM shop in the US though and you'll find a couple of models in the ThinkPad A and T series with Caldera OpenLinux preinstalled. Linux isn't exactly in your face on the site, and the system doesn't allow you to say 'I want a Linux computer' and then get a handy list of all the IBM kit that's appropriate, but if you check the model comparison chart you'll possibly notice that over in the right hand column there's a couple of Linux units.
Note that the GPL isn't about who put together a distribution, but about who distributes.
In Linux 2.6 the old NTFS driver support was removed and new better code installed instead. The NTFS write support is there, but very, very limited; the only good use for NTFS write support I know about is Topologi-Linux, which allows you to run Linux installed in a large loop-mounted file on an NTFS disk (don't need to partition your MS Windows disk to try out Linux, yet get a full "normal" install).
See http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.htm l#write for more info on the old vs new NTFS support in Linux.
BTW, the kernel config help is outdated on this subject and gives seriously wrong advice. Hopefully we can fix that soon.
Regarding SCO's positioning on UNIX, The Open Group would like to make it clear that
SCO holds the rights only to the operating system source code originally licensed by AT&T and does not own the UNIX trademark itself or definition of what a UNIX system is. [...]
Neither SCO/Caldera nor old SCO has ever owned the UNIX trademark. IBM neither requested nor required SCO's permission to call their AIX offering a Unix. That decision lies not with the adventitious owner of the historical Bell Labs source code, but with The Open Group.
You may have seen recent press articles announcing
that SCO is the owner of UNIX or has licensed UNIX to Microsoft. Such
statements are inaccurate, misleading
and cause considerable confusion. The Open Group has owned the registered trademark
UNIX since 1994. Here is
what we said in response to a Linux Weekly News article last week. Also available
is a backgrounder that explains
the history and reasons why The Open Group takes action on trademark misuse.
The Open Group owns UNIX. SCO just owns the copyright on some old source code that *implements* UNIX and nobody could care less. Furthermore
Why add just one scripting language, when you can get them all? If you're lucky enough;-) to develop in Java, you'll be interested in the open source Bean Scripting Framework from IBM.
The Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) is an architecture for incorporating scripting into Java applications and applets. Scripting languages such as Netscape Rhino (Javascript), VBScript, Perl, Tcl, Python, NetRexx and Rexx are commonly used to augment an application's function or to script together a set of application components to form an application.
There are many scripting languages implemented in Java, including Netscape's Rhino implementation of ECMAScript, Jacl and JPython. While each of these is embeddable in Java and provides the ability to interact with Java from the language, using a specific scripting language binds an application to that single language.
The Java world currently does not have a well-defined scripting architecture that allows Java applications to incorporate scripting easily - BSF is such an architecture. The BSF architecture allows an application to be scripted from any BSF supported language, without any scripting language dependencies.
BSF supports both directions of scripting: in one case where the Java-side is in charge and runs/evaluates scripts at will, and in the other case the script runs and controls Java beans. Notice that while we use the word "bean", it is used loosely - BSF works with any Java object and not just a true bean.
None of that really matters, though, as it seems RCU technology is now public domain, due to the expiration of the patent US4809168, "Passive serialization in a multitasking environment".
"Even IBM doesn't own it. It's in the public domain. Because it was invented by IBM 3 times (hey, it's a big company). Once in the mid 80's in VM/XA Rel 2 (patent 4,809,168 now expired), once at Sequent which was acquired by IBM and where RCU was coined, and once as part of the K42 project at IBM research."
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that the GPL has already been tested in court, and won?
Thanks for the link. There's also a related web site for the U.K. Information Commissioner, http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/.
We tend to assume (we definitely hope) that our governments will continue to be benevolent. Yet, looking in the history books we see democracies going over the edge into the -ism of the day, becoming more or less totalitarian. It seems reasonable to assume that this will happen again in the future, only then with a dictator's dream of surveillance systems readily installed and in use.
Those of you who have read Ross Anderson's FAQ on Trusted Computing, can easily add a further dimension to that "dream", remote censorship.
One of the news stories today in Sweden is how a swedish TV reporter, Cats Falck, was murdered in Stockholm by the DDR government's Stasi security agency 19 years ago, after she had digged into and found out too much about technology, weapons and ammunitions smuggling from Sweden to the DDR according to today's Berliner Zeitung. The case is still open and a person has now been arrested, but the commando group that killed Falck and her friend apparently consisted of three persons. Stasi, it has been revealed after the fall of the DDR, even collected the smell of people's behind by having them sit down on cushions and then stored (archived, really) the cushions in plastic bags. These were to be used when they wanted to use dogs to hunt someone down. Now think about it. Would Stasi have wanted ubiquitous video surveillance? Would they have wanted Microsoft's version of Trusted Computing (where Microsoft holds the key to your computer and you are the untrusted party)? You bet.
BEING WATCHED. A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
See also Central London webcams go dark for anti-war demo at The Register.
Ah, should have said sales, not revenue ;-). But then again, those are just the sales at two companies. There are large numbers of small business worldwide living off Linux.
Which part of billions of dollars in Linux revenue don't you understand?
The original link in the /. story goes to a page with some ad(s), however, the ads never materialize from the 3rd party server, which blocks the story from being shown at all! Control that ad server and censor what The Economist publishes on the web ;-). Smart people use CSS instead, not HTML tables.
Use this link to the article instead:s p
Database Server Clash Revisited
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1238712,00.a
- CLUSTERING IN TUNE WITH APACHE AND MYSQL (Free registration might be required. Also see Emic Application Cluster
for MySQL
- InnoDB Hot Backup (with point in time backup)
The rest of this comment is quoted verbatim from InnoDB NewsMySQL/InnoDB-4.0.1 and Oracle 9i win the database server benchmark of PC Magazine and eWEEK. February 27, 2002 - In the benchmark eWEEK measured the performance of an e-commerce application on leading commercial databases IBM DB2, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase ASE, and MySQL/InnoDB. The application server in the test was BEA WebLogic. The operating system was Windows 2000 Advanced Server running on a 4-way Hewlett-Packard Xeon server with 2 GB RAM and 24 Ultra3 SCSI hard drives.
eWEEK writes: "Of the five databases we tested, only Oracle9i and MySQL were able to run our Nile application as originally written for 8 hours without problems."
The whole story. The throughput chart.
A search for "GPS jammer" can be interesting for the bored.
Two other MySQL products I found interesting (neither of which is open source at this time):
- CLUSTERING IN TUNE WITH APACHE AND MYSQL (Free registration might be required. Also see Emic Application Cluster
for MySQL)
- InnoDB Hot Backup (with point in time backup)
The rest of this comment is quoted verbatim from InnoDB NewsMySQL/InnoDB-4.0.1 and Oracle 9i win the database server benchmark of PC Magazine and eWEEK. February 27, 2002 - In the benchmark eWEEK measured the performance of an e-commerce application on leading commercial databases IBM DB2, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase ASE, and MySQL/InnoDB. The application server in the test was BEA WebLogic. The operating system was Windows 2000 Advanced Server running on a 4-way Hewlett-Packard Xeon server with 2 GB RAM and 24 Ultra3 SCSI hard drives.
eWEEK writes: "Of the five databases we tested, only Oracle9i and MySQL were able to run our Nile application as originally written for 8 hours without problems."
The whole story. The throughput chart.
FYI: I worked at this company a couple of years back.
I very much doubt that the drives were shipped to Caldera for copying the software onto them (without compensation from IBM) and then shipped back to IBM, or that Caldera personnel did the installation without compensation at IBM factories (if they were contracted by IBM to copy the files, then IBM was copying).
It seems the most reasonable explanation is that IBM has made copies of the software, thus agreeing to be bound by the GPL, then distributed the copies. If that's not the case, it would be interesting to hear IBM's official explanation. Can someone verify how the preloaded Caldera Linux software actually ended up on the disk drives of the IBM ThinkPad T21 and T22?
TP T21, T22 - Product information
Slashdot article discussing the announcement I linked to in grand-parent comment: IBM Dropping Laptop Linux Support
TP T21, T22 - General Overview (Linux models) (interestingely, the page says it was last modified in June, 2003; and it's Caldera Linux of all things - surely it would be a good idea for IBM to stop distributing this ;-)
I doubt that the phrase "distributed by Caldera" matter much, unless the media actually comes under separate cover from Caldera (I'm pretty sure it doesn't/didn't). IBM may want to twist inside and out in its attempts to avoid the GPL, but this Linux distribution is handed out by IBM so they are bound to the GPL.
You mention "a passthrough, *not* a resale". What IBM does, or doesn't do, with the money isn't the point at issue. "Who gave the customer the GPL'd code?" is. Did IBM? So it seems to me.
The GPL is all about passing rights along, whenever the software shifts hands. The GPL is money stream agnostic.
I do find it a bit ironic that IBM is now set to defend the GPL in court --many, many thanks for doing that, IBM!-- while doing its best to evade being affected by the license themselves. Changing the past is difficult, though.
If the above reasoning holds and since it's a complete distribution, you also get a license from IBM for any of the other GPL:d software, such as the GUIs.
Two links out of history:
IBM's ThinkPad/Linux support project being dropped
Buying a Linux ThinkPad: IBM's mission impossible.
Note that the GPL isn't about who put together a distribution, but about who distributes.
See http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.htm l#write for more info on the old vs new NTFS support in Linux.
BTW, the kernel config help is outdated on this subject and gives seriously wrong advice. Hopefully we can fix that soon.
In fact, SCO has never owned UNIX or the definition of what a UNIX system is. From the OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint:
From http://opengroup.org/:
The Open Group owns UNIX. SCO just owns the copyright on some old source code that *implements* UNIX and nobody could care less. Furthermore
For the rest of the site, uh, well, no comments. ;-)
Thanks to xyote for pointing this out: