Dunno, I've called 1-800-726-8649 twice, leaving my name and number saying they would "call me back". I havn't heard from them.
I used their web feedback form and actually got a personal email back, requesting my address information as well as details on which Linux installations are in use at my place.
Which I provided, accompanied by a long list of points I'd like to see clarified (compiled from the many posts, not least ESR's pages). Much of it 'Show me the code'.
At the end of my letter, I made a counterproposal for how much I should pay them (proportional to the amount of infringing code), and added that requests for less than $1 would not be honored.
If all Linux users do this, their customer service department will be DoS'ed:)
How much influence has SCO on the developers, e.g. make them response to the SCO FUD instead of fixing bugs in the kernel?
Almost none, I'd guess. It's only the top brass (ESR, Linus, Perens) who take any time out to reply, and of these only Linus is working full-time on the kernel. Everyone else is hacking away merrily, fixing all kinds of more or less obscure problems.
I subscribed a week to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and the volume and intensity is unaffected (meaning 'extremly high':)
Elephants don't care about a few thorny bushes, they'll go where they want anyway.
IBM is an evil corporation, don't get me wrong, but it's nice to see them excercising a little enlightened self interest and playing chicken with SCO.
Actually, I think not. They're damn good businessmen with good lawyers, but they truely changed their ways since the 1970-1990. Back then, they believed they could own the world, but market proved them wrong.
And what's really fascinating is the fact that they seem to Get Linux and Open Source as well as anyone else. They're still in to do business, and they find that using a top-tuned, free and commoditized OS is much better than anything else they can come up with - and maintain - themselves.
I looked up the code in O'Reily Linux Kernel book:
NUMA is inconsequential on the 386 architecture - applies only to other architectures.
RCU is SMP only, not significant enough to be even mentioned.
JFS is an IBM contribution to the kernel, but since we have other jfs's, it could be removed with little pain.
Ext3, OTOH, is the only item being used by your average Linux user.
The SMP code in general is not in question.
And remember, it's between SCO and IBM. Anyone else got their Linux under the GPL license distributed by RedHat, SuSE etc, and shouldn't bother with SCO (except kicking any SCO products they might have).
And I thought SCO doesn't run on any 64 but arch? Can anyone explain how we copied code for 64 bit arch processors from SCO sources, of all places?
Two words:
Project Monterey
A joint IBM-SCO project that was later scrapped. IBM developed a lot of the disputed code under this project, donated it later to Linux, and now SCO claims they're not allowed to do that.
BTW, amusing to see that some of the 'infringing' code might be the stuff that AT&T stole from BSD? If they can't do better than that, the case will be too boring:)
Siemens Business Systems, after conducting an extensive survey on non technical workers ("secretaries and managers, not IT people") is predicting that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within the next 5 years.
That's probably a gross understatement. When Linux breaks the desktop (like it did for servers), a couple things will happen.
First, development of the desktop will be relatively much cheaper, due to the large mass of users. More slickness and more applications (finally...)
And second, MS will be in deep trouble. They can't keep hiking the price to sustain their profit level. They'll also have trouble reducing the prices significantly, as shareholders would panic. And if they introduce a new desktop OS, it'll have to compete head on with a seriously tough enemy - the perfected (and still free) Linux desktop.
While Linux lives just fine with 5%, 10% or 20% of the desktop, Windows doesn't - a major drop MS-Windows marketshare would cause the confidence in the platform to erode, and thus create an interesting snowball effect, leading to great savings and great freedom:)
You're also on pretty shaky ground in the claim that Windows doesn't push the line with patents or other intellectual property (viz. Stac.)
OTOH, since Windows is closed source, noone will ever figure out how much of that code is stolen. I remember something about BSD TCP/IP stack, whoknows if there's more?
In general, their latest quarterly SEC filing contains lots of interesting bits and pieces. Like you can find that the MS licensing deal they had was probably worth some 8,25 million dollars? Guaranteed no more, unlikely to be less, seeing that previous quarter licensing revenue was $0.
You'll find that SCO Group still owes Novell a noticable sum ($1.7 million) for Unix rights. You'll find they've burned more than $200.000.000 of venture capital, with little hope of recovering any of that except by a miracle ('Sue IBM? Brilliant idea!').
Their forward-looking statements also makes for interesting reading:
The Company anticipates that participants in the Linux industry will seek to influence participants in the markets in which we sell our products to reduce or eliminate the amount of our products and services that they purchase.
IOW, they've already filed with the SEC that they might stop selling any actual products. There's a truckload of warnings of potential hazards, most of which are very familiar to what has been discussed here and in other press.
The latest quarterly filing can be found at SEC or on:
TheStreet.com
'Supernova' probably best describes what they're doing.
I'm aware that many have endorsed Linux in particular, and free software in general, but I was wondering about actual funding.
When some government agency needs, it'll commission it. In Germany, Kroupware (Exchange replacement) is the prime example. They commissioned it, and the winner of the bid just happened to be doing Open Source.
For OpenOffice.org, here in Denmark and in Norway, public institutions at a lower level have hired people to coordinate or make translations into our languages.
Unfortunately for them, right now is the time between the close of last quarter and the official annoucement of results. The SEC generally frowns on insider sales during this time period. Gotta love Red Hat's timing.
They managed to unload quite a bit the previous two months:
In general, their latest quarterly SEC filing contains lots of interesting bits and pieces. Like you can find that the MS licensing deal they had was probably worth some 8,25 million dollars? Guaranteed no more, unlikely to be less, seeing that previous quarter licensing revenue was $0.
You'll find that SCO Group still owes Nowell a noticable sum ($1.7 million) for Unix rights. You'll find they've burned more than $200.000.000 of venture capital, with little hope of recovering any of that except by a miracle ('Sue IBM? Brilliant idea!').
Their forward-looking statements also makes for interesting reading:
The Company anticipates that participants in the Linux industry will seek to influence participants in the markets in which we sell our products to reduce or eliminate the amount of our products and services that they purchase.
IOW, they've already filed with the SEC that they might stop selling any actual products. There's a truckload of warnings of potential hazards, most of which are very familiar to what has been discussed here and in other press.
The latest quarterly filing can be found at SEC or on:
TheStreet.com
'Supernova' probably best describes what they're doing.
I still believe that Red Hat SHOUDLN'T have sued SCO. Red Hat is going to be drained of money for a loooong time in court. Or do you simply think that by suing, they would win in a few weeks.
Given that RedHat is roughly 10 x the size of SCO, only way SCO could last longer is if they're funded from.. Redmond?
Countersuing is the Right thing to do. SCO is doing their thing way out of proportion to the claims they're making (and the 'proofs' they've provided). RedHat and a decent judge should be able to kill SCO on this issue alone.
How does the time it takes to download anything off of the internet effect you?
A lot. If I want to watch something tonight, Internet is just not an option.
Even if I do download it (can take days), what I get is less than DVD/cinema. Downloading is plain not worth the effort (at current tech level), will rather spend the bucks to get either the DVD or a cinema ticket, they're priced fair.
CD's, OTOH, are very frequently not worth the price. RIAA knows that, and wants to stop us from previewing the songs before deciding about buying an album...
Strange people. Downloading movies off the internet is not even worth the time you spend on it - you're better off going to the cinema for the real experience.
Getting a camcopy or a DivX complete can take days - if your time is worth anything (mine is), it's cheaper to get a couple tickets for a real cinema, or rent/buy the DVD. Goes better with girls too, they do not appreciate watching movies off the computer screen:)
So what's the easiest way to use new versions, use something like Gentoo or Linux From Scratch?
Actually, just download the source from [a mirror of] kernel.org. Then:
Unpack
make xconfig (takes time to get right!)
make
make install (must be root to do this)
reboot and check the boot messages
Something might blow up. I tend to do something that makes the kernel unable to remount the root drive in R/W mode, causing all Hell to break loose:) Then reboot with usable kernel, make xconfig again and repeat. I've also had grub.conf be messed up slightly.
Actually TIFF is a larger challenge, as TIFF now can be compressed at no cost. At work I used TIFF's to exchange with the layout folks, but switched to PNG and am convincing people left and right to do the same. When you reduce a 7 MB TIFF to an 80 KB PNG with no loss of quality, it's pretty convincing.
BTW, I'm not using it for WWW purposes, we do traditional magazine publishing.
Slashdot Mirror
We've replaced the front page, not quite closed the site (we need it for our OOo work).
I used their web feedback form and actually got a personal email back, requesting my address information as well as details on which Linux installations are in use at my place.
Which I provided, accompanied by a long list of points I'd like to see clarified (compiled from the many posts, not least ESR's pages). Much of it 'Show me the code'.
At the end of my letter, I made a counterproposal for how much I should pay them (proportional to the amount of infringing code), and added that requests for less than $1 would not be honored.
If all Linux users do this, their customer service department will be DoS'ed :)
Almost none, I'd guess. It's only the top brass (ESR, Linus, Perens) who take any time out to reply, and of these only Linus is working full-time on the kernel. Everyone else is hacking away merrily, fixing all kinds of more or less obscure problems.
I subscribed a week to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and the volume and intensity is unaffected (meaning 'extremly high' :)
Elephants don't care about a few thorny bushes, they'll go where they want anyway.
The Andrew Morton must-fix list dates back from May! No use...
Use this
Count OpenOffice.org (Danish) in for tomorrow.
Actually, I think not. They're damn good businessmen with good lawyers, but they truely changed their ways since the 1970-1990. Back then, they believed they could own the world, but market proved them wrong.
And what's really fascinating is the fact that they seem to Get Linux and Open Source as well as anyone else. They're still in to do business, and they find that using a top-tuned, free and commoditized OS is much better than anything else they can come up with - and maintain - themselves.
No, I'm not paid by IBM :)
NUMA is inconsequential on the 386 architecture - applies only to other architectures.
RCU is SMP only, not significant enough to be even mentioned.
JFS is an IBM contribution to the kernel, but since we have other jfs's, it could be removed with little pain.
Ext3, OTOH, is the only item being used by your average Linux user.
The SMP code in general is not in question.
And remember, it's between SCO and IBM. Anyone else got their Linux under the GPL license distributed by RedHat, SuSE etc, and shouldn't bother with SCO (except kicking any SCO products they might have).
Two words:
Project Monterey
A joint IBM-SCO project that was later scrapped. IBM developed a lot of the disputed code under this project, donated it later to Linux, and now SCO claims they're not allowed to do that.
BTW, amusing to see that some of the 'infringing' code might be the stuff that AT&T stole from BSD? If they can't do better than that, the case will be too boring :)
That's probably a gross understatement. When Linux breaks the desktop (like it did for servers), a couple things will happen.
First, development of the desktop will be relatively much cheaper, due to the large mass of users. More slickness and more applications (finally...)
And second, MS will be in deep trouble. They can't keep hiking the price to sustain their profit level. They'll also have trouble reducing the prices significantly, as shareholders would panic. And if they introduce a new desktop OS, it'll have to compete head on with a seriously tough enemy - the perfected (and still free) Linux desktop.
While Linux lives just fine with 5%, 10% or 20% of the desktop, Windows doesn't - a major drop MS-Windows marketshare would cause the confidence in the platform to erode, and thus create an interesting snowball effect, leading to great savings and great freedom :)
Optimist, and proud of it!
One of the execs have sold all he had, many still has a sizeable amount of SCO stock.
Details at SEC, search for SCO Group.
OTOH, since Windows is closed source, noone will ever figure out how much of that code is stolen. I remember something about BSD TCP/IP stack, whoknows if there's more?
You'll find that SCO Group still owes Novell a noticable sum ($1.7 million) for Unix rights. You'll find they've burned more than $200.000.000 of venture capital, with little hope of recovering any of that except by a miracle ('Sue IBM? Brilliant idea!').
Their forward-looking statements also makes for interesting reading:
The Company anticipates that participants in the Linux industry will seek to influence participants in the markets in which we sell our products to reduce or eliminate the amount of our products and services that they purchase.
IOW, they've already filed with the SEC that they might stop selling any actual products. There's a truckload of warnings of potential hazards, most of which are very familiar to what has been discussed here and in other press.
The latest quarterly filing can be found at SEC or on: TheStreet.com
'Supernova' probably best describes what they're doing.
When some government agency needs, it'll commission it. In Germany, Kroupware (Exchange replacement) is the prime example. They commissioned it, and the winner of the bid just happened to be doing Open Source.
For OpenOffice.org, here in Denmark and in Norway, public institutions at a lower level have hired people to coordinate or make translations into our languages.
It's small scale yet, though.
They managed to unload quite a bit the previous two months:
SEC filings on SCO Group
In general, their latest quarterly SEC filing contains lots of interesting bits and pieces. Like you can find that the MS licensing deal they had was probably worth some 8,25 million dollars? Guaranteed no more, unlikely to be less, seeing that previous quarter licensing revenue was $0.
You'll find that SCO Group still owes Nowell a noticable sum ($1.7 million) for Unix rights. You'll find they've burned more than $200.000.000 of venture capital, with little hope of recovering any of that except by a miracle ('Sue IBM? Brilliant idea!').
Their forward-looking statements also makes for interesting reading:
The Company anticipates that participants in the Linux industry will seek to influence participants in the markets in which we sell our products to reduce or eliminate the amount of our products and services that they purchase.
IOW, they've already filed with the SEC that they might stop selling any actual products. There's a truckload of warnings of potential hazards, most of which are very familiar to what has been discussed here and in other press.
The latest quarterly filing can be found at SEC or on: TheStreet.com
'Supernova' probably best describes what they're doing.
Given that RedHat is roughly 10 x the size of SCO, only way SCO could last longer is if they're funded from .. Redmond?
Countersuing is the Right thing to do. SCO is doing their thing way out of proportion to the claims they're making (and the 'proofs' they've provided). RedHat and a decent judge should be able to kill SCO on this issue alone.
Good someone finally realizes the true value of Linux :)
I hear sounds like puppets in the dark...
You guys realize how much cash RedHat has still in the bank from its IPO/SPO's? Not that I know the exact figure, but they're far from poor.
Nice to see them strike back against FUD big way - when this is over, the legal foundation for Open Source could end up being proven solid :)
Novell acknowledge that the copyrights have been transferred to SCO (*sigh*).
Still, this looks like a Good Thing for the Novell product lineup, as well as for Open Source in general.
A lot. If I want to watch something tonight, Internet is just not an option.
Even if I do download it (can take days), what I get is less than DVD/cinema. Downloading is plain not worth the effort (at current tech level), will rather spend the bucks to get either the DVD or a cinema ticket, they're priced fair.
CD's, OTOH, are very frequently not worth the price. RIAA knows that, and wants to stop us from previewing the songs before deciding about buying an album...
Getting a camcopy or a DivX complete can take days - if your time is worth anything (mine is), it's cheaper to get a couple tickets for a real cinema, or rent/buy the DVD. Goes better with girls too, they do not appreciate watching movies off the computer screen :)
Relax, MPAA, it's the RIAA who's in real trouble.
Something might blow up. I tend to do something that makes the kernel unable to remount the root drive in R/W mode, causing all Hell to break loose :) Then reboot with usable kernel, make xconfig again and repeat. I've also had grub.conf be messed up slightly.
Have fun!
We used that in the caption for an article on Google lately in Komputer for alle. Good that people pick it up :)
Actually TIFF is a larger challenge, as TIFF now can be compressed at no cost. At work I used TIFF's to exchange with the layout folks, but switched to PNG and am convincing people left and right to do the same. When you reduce a 7 MB TIFF to an 80 KB PNG with no loss of quality, it's pretty convincing.
BTW, I'm not using it for WWW purposes, we do traditional magazine publishing.