Lets be clear on this: SCO has never even claimed to have Unix patents. They do claim to hold the copyrights, but their suit against IBM does not claim copyright infringment at this time, just violation of their license contract. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are all very different. Don't let their claims of holding "Intellectual Property" muddle your thinking.
Patents have only come up in this case when IBM counter-sued and threw in claims of patent violations on 4 different patents that they say cover all of SCO's products. I think there was a message there. And the message was: "We hold more patents than any other company in the world, and we can cut you off from all your revenue with just 4 of our patents. If the judge doesn't like those, we'll find 4 more. Welcome to the big leagues." I'm sort of surprised that more stock analysts have not taken note of this little tidbit.
"The IBM case is unrelated to the ownership of the IP I suspect. The IBM case is about breach of contract."
No, they are very much related. The details of the Novell-SCO sale contract determine if SCO-IBM even have a licensing contract to break. Novell may be the one party with rights to enforce the terms of IBM's Unix license.
Wait a minute, are you suggesting that Google does not have the right to serve you Microsoft ads when you search for Linux? No, I wouldn't agree with that.
When you say Excite and Netscape were profiting on PEI's TMs', I think that is a little vague. They are not displaying PEI's TM's, nor confusingly similar images or words to sell something else. They are not trading on PEI's names. What they are doing is more like comparison advertising, but they are not even using the competitor's name when doing so. Comparison advertising is a kind of leveraging off of someone's good trade name to sell your own product, and that is clearly legal. Product positioning and targeted advertising have to remain lawful. And IMHO Google has done a good job of clearly separating ads from results so that a reasonable person would not think an ad would link them to the searched word.
"They like having Microsoft/Apple update their software for them. Look how popular Norton is. I just don't see how the open source movement will ever be motivated to work on usability issues related to Linux."
Do you smell that? Hmmm. It smells like a business opportunity. Best fit is probably hardware vendors (IBM) offering it as a value-added for their Linux PC hardware. Yeah, I can imagine that.
"SCO argues that the authority of Congress under the U.S. Constitution to "promote the Progress of Science and the useful arts..." inherently includes a profit motive, and that protection for this profit motive includes a Constitutional dimension. We believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a profit from their work. "
Note that their position in no way gives them right to earn a profit from other people's work. And yet their threat to charge money for Linux is exactly that.
As I understand it, kernel contributors would have a difficult time when it comes to showing damage because they charge $0 for that code. IANAL, but it looks like one could win a case against SCO for copyright infringement and get little or no money. If you could win enough money to make it worthwhile wouldn't Linus or RMS be sueing SCO?
If you just want to hurt SCO why not leave it to RedHat and IBM? They seem motivated and capable, and I think they can get the job done. In fact, if you start a copyright lawsuit right now, and even if you could win a big judgement, don't you think IBM and/or RedHat will have bankrupted SCO before you get yours?
Why bother with "Death by a thousand cuts" when it is going to take longer than the scheduled beheading?
I think your command economy vs. capitalism analogy is even better that you make it out to be, since Linus mostly commands respect rather than a fluid resource pool. The resources don't do his bidding, they are self directed to meet needs or anticipated needs. All analogys have limitations, but I think yours is pretty good.
"Anti-Linux peple will say "Oh, you have this one guy who runs the kernel like a tyrant.. what if what he does doesn't match up with what big business wants?"
An even better answer that one can give this question is: Linus is only a tyrant of what is called Linux, not of the underlying code, and everyone is free to build what they want from it. If Big Business wants something Linus doesn't provide, then they can fork Linux and make BigBuisnux to do what they want. AND if it is for internal use only, then they don't even have to open their source. But if they turn BigBuisnux free, then they might get improvements and expansions coming back to them. Everyone wins.
"So I wonder, why are devices like Hubble not built to be retooled - built with some type of standard socket connections so batteries, comupters, lenses, etc. could be more easily upgraded by swapping out major units and bolting them together on a frame just like a computer?"
Maintainance cost more than making a new one. But the bigger reason to consider a disposable, no-maintainance Hubble2 is that maintainance requires that the telescope be in a regular Low Earth Orbit. LEO means that the HST orbit is 95 minutes, so it cycles from very hot to very cold and back again 15 times per day. While it is heating up or cooling off it shudders and vibrates from the expansion/contraction, and it is unsuitable for imaging during those times. IMHO, the HST2 should be in an irregular elliptical orbit like the Chandra X-Ray telescope so that it spends days at a time out away from the Earth. It could take far more pictures in a shorter amount of time so that if it only lasted 5-7 years it could do the work that HST does in 15.
The HST also had design requirements to be no heavier than the shuttle could land with and no larger than can fit inside a shuttle cargo bay. NASA would do well to remove those design requirements from the HST2. If a big Russian rocket is the best lifter available, then we should use it until a better one is available if it makes the HST2 better.
It seems to me that the best way to get the projector out of the way and avoid blocking the beam would be to hang a box from the ceiling to hold the projector. For those of you out there that have projectors, is this what you guys are doing?
I just wonder about the logistics of connecting the projector to video sources, and the sources to your receiver and speakers, etc. I'm sure there are some cable length restrictions for some signals and I wonder how you all deal with them.
"...but not IBM's countersuit, which if found to be true will force SC0 to stop distributing Linux and probably their Linux personality kit too."
IIRC, IBM's counter-suit also includes patent claims that would not just shut down SCO's Linux and Linux-related products, but ALL their products. And if the courts don't find that those patents apply, IBM has others. So we may not only get the GPL vidicated, but SCO may be left with no products and no revenue and SCO would be remembered in cautionary tales about what happens to those who challange the GPL in such ways.
More specifically, its the network promos. It was hard to sit and watch the World Series with another ad for Skin and then Joe Millionaire 2 every 10 minutes. I watch 2 TV shows all week. I was trying to watch a third last night and got antsy after 20 minutes because of the ads and went upstairs and played Day of Defeat.
Yeah, I should probably read more instead of playing video games, but they are better than TV. If I had a TiVo or if they gave us uninterrupted television I might watch more.
And the performance is comparable, isn't it? How much performance difference do to see between 100% petrol, half-and-half, and 100% bio?
Wait, I just re-read that. You didn't have to make ANY modifications to your Beetle TDI? That is so cool.
Whom do you buy the BioDiesl from? Can you provide me a link, please? I don't have a diesel yet, but your information is making it much more applealing.
BioDiesel is really just vegetable oil, which burns pretty well and is a fairly dense energy storage medium. It is not as powerfull as petrolium diesel or gasoline, but it is in the ballpark. There is no need to compress it so much that it turns into petrolium oil, and I expect you would expend a great deal of energy in that unneeded process.
The 150F and 20psi quoted in the earlier linked article are just for extracting/refining the oils.
It is odd to me that Forbes seemed to complain that the TZero ONLY has 280-300 miles in range on a single charge.
My first car, which had a 16 gallon tank only did about 300 miles before it needed a refill. I think many of today's SUV's have a similar range. Yeah for a serious road-trip it becomes a problem because you can't just stop at a gas station, but I don't think this little roadster is a long-haul kind of vehicle anyways.
"Is it really fair to call it technological regression? There's more to flight than raw speed...
You have a similar situation with the SR-71..."
The retirement of the SR-71 only makes sense to me if a newer and more advanced (and secret) spy plane replaced it. With all the advancement in materials sciences since the SR-71 was designed, I think it would be very possible to improve on that design. Of course I could be wrong, and maybe they were telling the truth when they said that spy satellites and U2s fill that role and a fast spy plane isn't needed any more, but I won't be surprised if they declassify the existence of a mach 3+ stealth spyplane or maybe some successor to the F-117 that isn't quite that fast but has very low observability and also does spy missions. I guess we won't know for 10 or 15 years but if I'm right then the retirement of the SR-71 isn't regression at all.
Thats a good article. The better quote to me was that "Skiba acknowledges that his call on SCO may be taken as heresy in the Linux community, but said it's important to separate the stock from the company." Separate the stock from the company sounds to me like separate the price from reality, or separate fools from their money. Even the analysts know it is all hot air, but they compete on being louder in the hype engine.
The real gold is on page two though: Another analyst predicts $6 after they lose and notes 12% of the float is holding short positions. He says SCO might possibly convince a jury, but IBM will win on appeal because "I think it's a stretch to think that an appellate court is going to overturn 100 years of copyright law."
I'd like to point out the unintended humor of SunComm's claim that MediaMax provides "an incredible amount of security." Yep, it is incredible allright. It is also unbelievable, unreal, fantastic, unimaginable, unprecedented, absurd, and outrageous. It might even be the penultimate security product.
But if I were one of their customers, I would prefer some credible security instead.
You'd think marketing people would at least know what the words really meant wouldn't you, since using words is their job.
"obviously blatant rip-off of the way our patents
are written"
I know you are just making a joke at SCO's expense, but I think it is important to clarify what "intellecual property" SCO has. They have no unix patents. They don't have the unix trademark either. They might have some copyrights on some unix, or they might only have the right to license that unix. They also have the licensing contracts with IBM, Sequent, SGI, and just about everyone else who developed for Unix. They could also claim "trade secrets" on anything that had not already been made un-secret.
Don't give them more credit then they deserve, even when making fun of them.
It still plays DVDs just fine, and wouldn't have made your "investment" worthless if it had lived. On the contrary, I think if Divx had lived it would not have killed DVDs, but new release DVDs would still be $13 instead of $20. There is no reason why the two formats couldn't have coexisted and competed.
As for the DRM issues, do you think your privacy is any more secure with Blockbuster or your cable company? Do you ever use a credit card?
I understand why for certain special movies people want to "own" a DVD of it, but I don't think Divx ever threatened that. Killing Divx was in Warner Bros. best interest, not yours, and its death is just as much a money grab by the studios as you claim divx was a money grab by CC.
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"... even if SCO did have the patents."
Lets be clear on this: SCO has never even claimed to have Unix patents. They do claim to hold the copyrights, but their suit against IBM does not claim copyright infringment at this time, just violation of their license contract. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are all very different. Don't let their claims of holding "Intellectual Property" muddle your thinking.
Patents have only come up in this case when IBM counter-sued and threw in claims of patent violations on 4 different patents that they say cover all of SCO's products. I think there was a message there. And the message was: "We hold more patents than any other company in the world, and we can cut you off from all your revenue with just 4 of our patents. If the judge doesn't like those, we'll find 4 more. Welcome to the big leagues." I'm sort of surprised that more stock analysts have not taken note of this little tidbit.
"The IBM case is unrelated to the ownership of the IP I suspect. The IBM case is about breach of contract."
No, they are very much related. The details of the Novell-SCO sale contract determine if SCO-IBM even have a licensing contract to break. Novell may be the one party with rights to enforce the terms of IBM's Unix license.
Wait a minute, are you suggesting that Google does not have the right to serve you Microsoft ads when you search for Linux? No, I wouldn't agree with that.
When you say Excite and Netscape were profiting on PEI's TMs', I think that is a little vague. They are not displaying PEI's TM's, nor confusingly similar images or words to sell something else. They are not trading on PEI's names. What they are doing is more like comparison advertising, but they are not even using the competitor's name when doing so. Comparison advertising is a kind of leveraging off of someone's good trade name to sell your own product, and that is clearly legal. Product positioning and targeted advertising have to remain lawful. And IMHO Google has done a good job of clearly separating ads from results so that a reasonable person would not think an ad would link them to the searched word.
"They like having Microsoft/Apple update their software for them. Look how popular Norton is. I just don't see how the open source movement will ever be motivated to work on usability issues related to Linux."
Do you smell that? Hmmm. It smells like a business opportunity. Best fit is probably hardware vendors (IBM) offering it as a value-added for their Linux PC hardware. Yeah, I can imagine that.
Well, your greenhouse does offer a bit of perspective, but here is your counter-point: How many golden eagles has your greenhouse killed?
"SCO argues that the authority of Congress under the U.S. Constitution to "promote the Progress of Science and the useful arts..." inherently includes a profit motive, and that protection for this profit motive includes a Constitutional dimension. We believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a profit from their work. "
Note that their position in no way gives them right to earn a profit from other people's work. And yet their threat to charge money for Linux is exactly that.
Damages has a specific meaning, and what you are proposing doesn't fit it.
As I understand it, kernel contributors would have a difficult time when it comes to showing damage because they charge $0 for that code. IANAL, but it looks like one could win a case against SCO for copyright infringement and get little or no money. If you could win enough money to make it worthwhile wouldn't Linus or RMS be sueing SCO?
If you just want to hurt SCO why not leave it to RedHat and IBM? They seem motivated and capable, and I think they can get the job done. In fact, if you start a copyright lawsuit right now, and even if you could win a big judgement, don't you think IBM and/or RedHat will have bankrupted SCO before you get yours?
Why bother with "Death by a thousand cuts" when it is going to take longer than the scheduled beheading?
I think your command economy vs. capitalism analogy is even better that you make it out to be, since Linus mostly commands respect rather than a fluid resource pool. The resources don't do his bidding, they are self directed to meet needs or anticipated needs. All analogys have limitations, but I think yours is pretty good.
"Anti-Linux peple will say "Oh, you have this one guy who runs the kernel like a tyrant.. what if what he does doesn't match up with what big business wants?"
An even better answer that one can give this question is: Linus is only a tyrant of what is called Linux, not of the underlying code, and everyone is free to build what they want from it. If Big Business wants something Linus doesn't provide, then they can fork Linux and make BigBuisnux to do what they want. AND if it is for internal use only, then they don't even have to open their source. But if they turn BigBuisnux free, then they might get improvements and expansions coming back to them. Everyone wins.
"So I wonder, why are devices like Hubble not built to be retooled - built with some type of standard socket connections so batteries, comupters, lenses, etc. could be more easily upgraded by swapping out major units and bolting them together on a frame just like a computer?"
Maintainance cost more than making a new one. But the bigger reason to consider a disposable, no-maintainance Hubble2 is that maintainance requires that the telescope be in a regular Low Earth Orbit. LEO means that the HST orbit is 95 minutes, so it cycles from very hot to very cold and back again 15 times per day. While it is heating up or cooling off it shudders and vibrates from the expansion/contraction, and it is unsuitable for imaging during those times. IMHO, the HST2 should be in an irregular elliptical orbit like the Chandra X-Ray telescope so that it spends days at a time out away from the Earth. It could take far more pictures in a shorter amount of time so that if it only lasted 5-7 years it could do the work that HST does in 15.
The HST also had design requirements to be no heavier than the shuttle could land with and no larger than can fit inside a shuttle cargo bay. NASA would do well to remove those design requirements from the HST2. If a big Russian rocket is the best lifter available, then we should use it until a better one is available if it makes the HST2 better.
Sounds like they are just trying to prove they can't replace the resident alien they have in that position.
It seems to me that the best way to get the projector out of the way and avoid blocking the beam would be to hang a box from the ceiling to hold the projector. For those of you out there that have projectors, is this what you guys are doing?
I just wonder about the logistics of connecting the projector to video sources, and the sources to your receiver and speakers, etc. I'm sure there are some cable length restrictions for some signals and I wonder how you all deal with them.
"...but not IBM's countersuit, which if found to be true will force SC0 to stop distributing Linux and probably their Linux personality kit too."
IIRC, IBM's counter-suit also includes patent claims that would not just shut down SCO's Linux and Linux-related products, but ALL their products. And if the courts don't find that those patents apply, IBM has others. So we may not only get the GPL vidicated, but SCO may be left with no products and no revenue and SCO would be remembered in cautionary tales about what happens to those who challange the GPL in such ways.
More specifically, its the network promos. It was hard to sit and watch the World Series with another ad for Skin and then Joe Millionaire 2 every 10 minutes. I watch 2 TV shows all week. I was trying to watch a third last night and got antsy after 20 minutes because of the ads and went upstairs and played Day of Defeat.
Yeah, I should probably read more instead of playing video games, but they are better than TV. If I had a TiVo or if they gave us uninterrupted television I might watch more.
And the performance is comparable, isn't it? How much performance difference do to see between 100% petrol, half-and-half, and 100% bio?
Wait, I just re-read that. You didn't have to make ANY modifications to your Beetle TDI? That is so cool.
Whom do you buy the BioDiesl from? Can you provide me a link, please? I don't have a diesel yet, but your information is making it much more applealing.
BioDiesel is really just vegetable oil, which burns pretty well and is a fairly dense energy storage medium. It is not as powerfull as petrolium diesel or gasoline, but it is in the ballpark. There is no need to compress it so much that it turns into petrolium oil, and I expect you would expend a great deal of energy in that unneeded process.
The 150F and 20psi quoted in the earlier linked article are just for extracting/refining the oils.
So 2 inaccuracies and a wild assertion are labeled as insightful, huh? The only thing correct is that the car is small. YHBT
It is odd to me that Forbes seemed to complain that the TZero ONLY has 280-300 miles in range on a single charge.
My first car, which had a 16 gallon tank only did about 300 miles before it needed a refill. I think many of today's SUV's have a similar range. Yeah for a serious road-trip it becomes a problem because you can't just stop at a gas station, but I don't think this little roadster is a long-haul kind of vehicle anyways.
"Is it really fair to call it technological regression? There's more to flight than raw speed... You have a similar situation with the SR-71..."
The retirement of the SR-71 only makes sense to me if a newer and more advanced (and secret) spy plane replaced it. With all the advancement in materials sciences since the SR-71 was designed, I think it would be very possible to improve on that design. Of course I could be wrong, and maybe they were telling the truth when they said that spy satellites and U2s fill that role and a fast spy plane isn't needed any more, but I won't be surprised if they declassify the existence of a mach 3+ stealth spyplane or maybe some successor to the F-117 that isn't quite that fast but has very low observability and also does spy missions. I guess we won't know for 10 or 15 years but if I'm right then the retirement of the SR-71 isn't regression at all.
Thats a good article. The better quote to me was that "Skiba acknowledges that his call on SCO may be taken as heresy in the Linux community, but said it's important to separate the stock from the company." Separate the stock from the company sounds to me like separate the price from reality, or separate fools from their money. Even the analysts know it is all hot air, but they compete on being louder in the hype engine.
The real gold is on page two though: Another analyst predicts $6 after they lose and notes 12% of the float is holding short positions. He says SCO might possibly convince a jury, but IBM will win on appeal because "I think it's a stretch to think that an appellate court is going to overturn 100 years of copyright law."
I'd like to point out the unintended humor of SunComm's claim that MediaMax provides "an incredible amount of security." Yep, it is incredible allright. It is also unbelievable, unreal, fantastic, unimaginable, unprecedented, absurd, and outrageous. It might even be the penultimate security product.
But if I were one of their customers, I would prefer some credible security instead.
You'd think marketing people would at least know what the words really meant wouldn't you, since using words is their job.
"obviously blatant rip-off of the way our patents are written"
I know you are just making a joke at SCO's expense, but I think it is important to clarify what "intellecual property" SCO has. They have no unix patents. They don't have the unix trademark either. They might have some copyrights on some unix, or they might only have the right to license that unix. They also have the licensing contracts with IBM, Sequent, SGI, and just about everyone else who developed for Unix. They could also claim "trade secrets" on anything that had not already been made un-secret.
Don't give them more credit then they deserve, even when making fun of them.
I did, and I understand the issues perfectly.
It still plays DVDs just fine, and wouldn't have made your "investment" worthless if it had lived. On the contrary, I think if Divx had lived it would not have killed DVDs, but new release DVDs would still be $13 instead of $20. There is no reason why the two formats couldn't have coexisted and competed.
As for the DRM issues, do you think your privacy is any more secure with Blockbuster or your cable company? Do you ever use a credit card?
I understand why for certain special movies people want to "own" a DVD of it, but I don't think Divx ever threatened that. Killing Divx was in Warner Bros. best interest, not yours, and its death is just as much a money grab by the studios as you claim divx was a money grab by CC.
"If Intuit folds, it could mean bad things for the industry."
When Divx died, DVDs went up in price.