The problem is you need a software (bug control system) already setup to prove that it is important to have a testing framework.
But the calculation I would use goes something like this.
Needed 1. Number of bugs fixed. 2. Number of bugs returned. 3. Time added to original bug to fix additional requirements 4. Time to test properly.
Cost factor for bugs not tested properly (time to test)/(time added to original bugfix)
This would be your cost of not having a testing framework. Work this out over the period you would like to aggregate the testing framework cost.
Say there was 30 bugs that returned If took you about 60 hours to fix those 30 bugs. It would have taken you 20 hours to test the bug fixes properly. You will get (20/60)=0.3 (30 %) reduction in cost.
To calculate if it is worth the companies money to implement the testing framework. 0.3*(cost to fix returned bugs over 2 year period) if this value is less than the cost of the framework it is not necessary to setup the testing framework.
Honestly even on the simplest system it always works out cheaper to have a proper testing framework. But I understand your frustration to bring this concept under the eyes of the managers are quite difficult.
The easiest way is to try and calculate a factor of cost savings and bring it to their attention.
The problem I have is more fundamental and that is that Mastercard do not have the right to determine if something is legal or illegal sharing. This need to be determined by a court.
In the case of mastercard where there is credit card transactions involved I do understand but for normal EFT type transactions they are treading on very thin ice.
Specifically in South Africa (where I live) it is considered a fundamental human right to earn a living. It would therefore be illegal in South Africa to deny an authorized bank transaction. (EFT) credit card are different and is not concidered legal tender anyway but an agreement with the Credit Card company.
Firstly I think that copyright and Patent need a major revamp.
So why is the crackdown a good idea. It isn't except if we can get some kind of protest going:-)
1. Why should tax payers pay for this ?
Tax the copyright and patent holder for all the patents they hold on a yearly basis. Taxes gets used to enforce the patent/copyright rather than our money.
2. Why a good idea ?
If you don't want to pay you $100 a year to keep your copyright you lose it, simple as that. This would satisfy many parties. Not the ideal situation but something we can live with. This should discourage filing frivolous patents as you have to pay a maintenance fee. If you are not actively building something you will lose money.
As far as copyright is concerned by all means assign copyright to a product (book,movie) etc for the first year. Do the stats but I'm sure 1 year will be enough to recover costs. Then let the client pay a yearly fee to keep the copyright on a product active.
Just my two cents worth.
Two comments.
1. Copyright law was originally designed in a world where it was expensive to make copies of a work to distribute today it is simply not the case.
2. New copyright legislation and crackdown is specifically designed to make the super rich richer.
3. Copyright law does simply not follow the general publics idea of what it should be. (Law should follow the general publics moral attitude of fairness)
4. Intellectual property is completely artificial concepts that does not follow the standard economics laws. The resources needed to produce one more copy is completely unrelated to the price you pay.
5. Copyright law and Patents for that matter was originally designed to help the struggling writer inventor to recover development costs. Not for the super rich to become richer.
The bible specifically speak about the coming of the age of peace. Specifically the time when the world will so tightly be controlled that no one will be able to move without being monitored. That you will not be able to trasnsact without being monitored. That all freedoms will be suspended and that Christianity will die as a result.
Interesting than supposed Christians are bringing along their own destruction.
Bugger..
Considering that I need to circumvent encryption just to view a DVD. Aahh well looks like I'll just stop spending my money on buying DVD's !
I'm sorry to say making laws to protect the rich and suppress the poor does seem a bit like returning to the middle ages. Am I the only one seeing this or am I just paranoid.
There is a few comments on here about free advertising and I can honestly say that of the games that I have bought none of them would have been bought if it was not for the fact that I played them before either on a friends computer or a demo version (I can not publicly admit that I actually downloaded games illegally:-) ) But the fact is that downloads grow the games market.
I'm actually very interested in seeing what the excuse is going to be in a couple of years for bad sales... Cutting of your nose to spite your face is not a good policy.
If you are a smart games publisher you keep your mouth shut and allow the games industry to spend millions copy righting and preventing copying. Once they have done that you publish games with open copyright similar to the freedoms we have today and simply kill the competitions.
Ssshhh..
Actually the last time I checked it's actually less secure. One of the more interesting issues with windows is. Because of the high number of pop up boxes in Windows most users don't actually read it and just press 'OK' as matter of course.
Even in the DOS days we wrote programs that would ask the user to continue and delete or format the hard drive and most of the times they said go ahead. We used it more as a joke but goes to show that Dialog boxes is not the answer.
Dialog boxes needs to be used sparingly so that if something does pop up the user needs to question what is happening.
This is a major flaw in Windows that will most likely not be fixed.
We are trying to compare apples with oranges here.
It all depends on how you define security. I for example consider virus and worm propagation (and most of the Unix world) as major security flaws. Windows users consider it part of their life.
I consider it a security flaw if a user can without my permission access my files. In the windows world it standard practice.
It the difference between having a lock door. In the Linux(Unix) world a security flaw is the same as somebody gained entry into your house without your permission. In the windows world the door is open and a security flaw is when somebody removes the bolted down table that does not fit through the door in one piece. It is not the same thing.
So just taking 2 criteria (the most common attack vectors).
1. Human knowledge and awareness of security issues.
2. Ability to execute unauthorized software and the damage that software can do to your system.
Which operating system comes out on the top.
I understand why the BSA uses these stats. The BSA specifically exist to fight piracy not to advance the software industry or make money for software companies. So $51B in piracy is probably accurate. That it translates to $51B in lost sales and jobs is simply wrong.
Honestly these stats make me sad. It's surprising how blind these software companies are. If it was not for rampant piracy Microsoft would not be where they are today. The market economy would simply have taken over and they would have lost. But piracy being what it was Microsoft created a empire and is now bitting the hand that feeds it. I'm very excited about that. The BSA on the other hand really gets on my nerves.
The BSA are specifically hampering me in my FOSS efforts. Many clients will not accept a FOSS product because it is free assuming that I have pirated it. Even client that except it assumes that I have installed the software illegally. I've had cases where clients was told that Linux and Open Office was installed illegally on their computers and they where advised to purchase Windows and M$ Office.
There is also several scenarios that disprove that $51B in piracy translates to $51B in lost sales. I'll be surprised if the lost sales is even half that. There is several scenarios where stopping the piracy would not have resulted in a sales. There is also several scenarios where the piracy aided in a sale. So the stats are a bit skew in favor of the piracy watch dog not in favor of the Software industry.
As far as jobs goes. This could go both ways. But I personally think piracy probably resulted in net Job gain rather than loss.
Yes we would have lost several developers because of piracy as there would have been more custom development. On the other hand because of piracy the money that would originally have been spent on software would have gone to paying salaries or even hiring IT consultants.
So although it might have resulted in Software Development Job Losses. Chances are the it increased IT jobs in general as well as had a positive effect on the job market as a whole.
I Wonder is my life really only worth 22M pounds.
I Wonder if I can Sue the UK government for endangering my life ?
I wonder if this should be done through UN ?
Here is my question,
It does not make sense to me. The person that takes out you're trash gets compensated once for the work he has done. The person working in the supermarket get minimum wage has to pitch up every day but still only gets compensated once for their work. They have to setup a pension and special provision for old age.
Why not artists. What makes an artist work more valuable than mine ? They already get compensated millions of times for their work. Hello if you spend say 10% of you're 20 million dollar income for a pension you will never in you're life ever again need money.
Yes by all means compensate the artist for his perfomance. By all means compensate him for the work he does but why compensate him for 20 years for about a weeks worth of work (depending on the song) that is mostly about taste and luck anyway.
I've had to go through something similar myself when I was studying. There is a huge set of paranoia and the insident was almost placed on my permanent record. Eventually I just stopped telling the admins it was much safer.
I actually like gtk so I don't see why ?
In any case nothing prevents a person from setting up QT as a backend.
I'm more interested in what is happening on the Free Desktop and gobject front.
What I would like to see is Gobject as a general standard for both QT and GTK. Or more generally a gobject like system for GCC, G++ that would allow for example introspection and object use of C, C++, Python, Perl etc. Without the enormous amount of porting effort going into each one each time.
With the talk going on on GTK3 the intention is to clean up the gobject system in anycase so talk to the G++ compiler guys and see what is possible.
Everybody seems to be focusing on bugs but the most important problem with proprietary software is that you are giving control over you're live to a third party. The software we are using is becoming more and more ingrained in our lives.
For every piece of proprietary software you have on you're PC the more control you give to the company developing that software. There is no law and control in place that forces these companies to act ethically. The whole open source process force companies to act ethically and even if they don't there is a whole list of controls in place from legal to political that helps out every now and then.
Can you really trust a person you have never met or company that only responsibility is to make money.
By all means use proprietary software but know what you are doing.
Disclaimer: Anywhere you use Windows is a bad use I've been using Unix for the last 10 years on my desktop. And with every windows version starting with 98 I've given it a bash and by the third crash given up.
My question is this the MS license specifically exclude putting Windows to use in any situation where human lives might be at risk. I would expect a person making medical machines knows better.
And the worst use I've seen was my bank running there site on Windows did not last long though move to Sun and apache within weeks.
The results do not surprize me the conclusion does.
1. We know that the higher a person education the more likely they will follow some kind of exercise regime.
2. We know that fitness and mental ability are related.
3. We know that most people that are obese are also unfit.
4. We know that mental ability just like fitness diminishes if not practiced.
5. We know that because of bias people think that obese people are considered dumb and are therefore not mentally challenged.
My question therefore is how much of this is related to simply being unfit or not being mentally challenged. If I were to keep my fitness level up or keep myself mentally challenged and became obese would my mental facilities really fail ?
For that matter if I were to challenge myself mentally everyday would it affect my weight:-) [Maybe we found a nicer way to lose weight]
As everybody is going on about Enlightenment and how it's so great. I agree when Enlightenment came along it was great and I think in terms of vision Rasterman did the world a big favor. I don't think Enlightenment is the way to go. (Not becasue of the technology)
I think one of the strengths of the OpenSource community is to learn from projects. There is a reason why Enlightenment is not the default Windows Manager for Gnome. There is a reason that EVAS is not the default layer or imlib2 not the default image library. I think mostly politically.
The fact is Linus still controls the Kernel not because he is technically the best but because he can play the politics balance great new features with what is needed.
The Gnome team has done a great job and the value of what Raster has done is in learning what works and what not. But the politics still needs to be played on several levels and thats where the gnome team comes in.
I exclusivelly sell Linux products and it is a hard sell. The Open Source community do not really concentrate on Wine but this is probably the most important technology for selling Linux.
Reasons are: 1. People are afraid of change - They wan't to use their own legacy software even if there is something better out their. We have to allow them to change at their own pace. 2. It would in the minds of my clients prove that Open Source software is worth it if we can emulate Windows. 3. Clients do not lose their current investment in software.
My opinion is that Linux is growing slower than it can, purelly because of the lack of a free way of running Windows (that is already purchased) on their PC when buying Linux.
Once Linux can be run (and it is part of the standard distrutions) without needing dual boot it will not make a difference to the client if you load Windows or Linux on their PC.
You're problem sounds like something that the LGPL was designed for my personal opinion. As you are designing the general framework (LGPL it) you can attach ather parts that is not opensource.
It is relativelly easy decide (with you're benefactor) what modules should be LGPL and which not. If a module could benefit from the OpenSource movement LGPL it.
The rest you can keep nice and hidden.
You're problem of course is finding the balance. I would personally try and get the benefactor to agree to release everything to GPL once a certain time or alternativelly certain events occur (version is not maintained anymore, company goes bust). This will benefit the company as well as you in the long run as unsupported version will generate a user community and this user community will mean more potential clients.
As it's business software the chances are that there is a considerable amount of support revenue that will be generated even from old version in GPL, LGPL.
What interest me in this law suite is that nothing have been proven yet.
SCO is going ahead sueing everybody making accusations that until now have not been proven. It is time that the same tack is taken. Until now it looked like a contract dispute but SCO is now effectivelly calling Linux developers theives.
I find this very offensive. One of the primary reasons for using Linux is to keep myself legal without having to fork out thousands of dollars for the other products.
I do not have the organizational skills, money or clout to go ahead and do it myself but I think personally that a Linux organization should start contacting developers and build a case against SCO.
The first step would be to get the SCO code get an idependant organisation to audit their code and make sure no GPL code is in there. If any code was released by them through their Caldera effort will be released under GPL and thus not subject.
After that the code that is left are subject to the claim. Interesting part of course is that as far as I understand it if a part of the SCO code is under the GPL (as it was included in Linux) is there not a viral effect that a lot of the SCO code are then automatically subject to the GPL and as such must be released (just a thought).
Personall I think this is what happened and like any good strategist would know an attack is the best defence. It is and have been time for Linux developers to fight back.
As far I understand it the South African law specifically caters for that. It's interesting that the American Law does not. If a company want's to restrict you from finding new employment they have to provide for compensation for that period. If not and it is you sole income you can find employment and compete with them. It's only when you have alternative forms of income that this becomes sticky.
There is one thing technical people (including myself) often forget and that makes the difference. You are working with people. Make sure your approach is correct. A big part of what is accepted or not is purelly based on how it is presented.
Believe it or not management will be go for the solution that is packaged the best. This is where opensource fails miserably in many instances.
So basically make them like you. Don't lie but trust is a big part of what is acceptable to clients (and management). Work on your human interaction skills. You'll find that you get a lot more information accross as well as having descisions made for instead of against you.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is you need a software (bug control system) already setup to prove that it is important to have a testing framework.
But the calculation I would use goes something like this.
Needed
1. Number of bugs fixed.
2. Number of bugs returned.
3. Time added to original bug to fix additional requirements
4. Time to test properly.
Cost factor for bugs not tested properly (time to test)/(time added to original bugfix)
This would be your cost of not having a testing framework. Work this out over the period you would like to aggregate the testing framework cost.
Say there was 30 bugs that returned
If took you about 60 hours to fix those 30 bugs.
It would have taken you 20 hours to test the bug fixes properly.
You will get
(20/60)=0.3 (30 %) reduction in cost.
To calculate if it is worth the companies money to implement the testing framework.
0.3*(cost to fix returned bugs over 2 year period) if this value is less than the cost of the framework it is not necessary to setup the testing framework.
Honestly even on the simplest system it always works out cheaper to have a proper testing framework. But I understand your frustration to bring this concept under the eyes of the managers are quite difficult.
The easiest way is to try and calculate a factor of cost savings and bring it to their attention.
The problem I have is more fundamental and that is that Mastercard do not have the right to determine if something is legal or illegal sharing. This need to be determined by a court. In the case of mastercard where there is credit card transactions involved I do understand but for normal EFT type transactions they are treading on very thin ice. Specifically in South Africa (where I live) it is considered a fundamental human right to earn a living. It would therefore be illegal in South Africa to deny an authorized bank transaction. (EFT) credit card are different and is not concidered legal tender anyway but an agreement with the Credit Card company.
Firstly I think that copyright and Patent need a major revamp. So why is the crackdown a good idea. It isn't except if we can get some kind of protest going :-)
1. Why should tax payers pay for this ?
Tax the copyright and patent holder for all the patents they hold on a yearly basis. Taxes gets used to enforce the patent/copyright rather than our money.
2. Why a good idea ?
If you don't want to pay you $100 a year to keep your copyright you lose it, simple as that. This would satisfy many parties. Not the ideal situation but something we can live with. This should discourage filing frivolous patents as you have to pay a maintenance fee. If you are not actively building something you will lose money.
As far as copyright is concerned by all means assign copyright to a product (book,movie) etc for the first year. Do the stats but I'm sure 1 year will be enough to recover costs. Then let the client pay a yearly fee to keep the copyright on a product active.
Just my two cents worth.
Two comments. 1. Copyright law was originally designed in a world where it was expensive to make copies of a work to distribute today it is simply not the case. 2. New copyright legislation and crackdown is specifically designed to make the super rich richer. 3. Copyright law does simply not follow the general publics idea of what it should be. (Law should follow the general publics moral attitude of fairness) 4. Intellectual property is completely artificial concepts that does not follow the standard economics laws. The resources needed to produce one more copy is completely unrelated to the price you pay. 5. Copyright law and Patents for that matter was originally designed to help the struggling writer inventor to recover development costs. Not for the super rich to become richer.
The bible specifically speak about the coming of the age of peace. Specifically the time when the world will so tightly be controlled that no one will be able to move without being monitored. That you will not be able to trasnsact without being monitored. That all freedoms will be suspended and that Christianity will die as a result. Interesting than supposed Christians are bringing along their own destruction.
Bugger.. Considering that I need to circumvent encryption just to view a DVD. Aahh well looks like I'll just stop spending my money on buying DVD's ! I'm sorry to say making laws to protect the rich and suppress the poor does seem a bit like returning to the middle ages. Am I the only one seeing this or am I just paranoid.
There is a few comments on here about free advertising and I can honestly say that of the games that I have bought none of them would have been bought if it was not for the fact that I played them before either on a friends computer or a demo version (I can not publicly admit that I actually downloaded games illegally :-) ) But the fact is that downloads grow the games market.
I'm actually very interested in seeing what the excuse is going to be in a couple of years for bad sales ... Cutting of your nose to spite your face is not a good policy.
If you are a smart games publisher you keep your mouth shut and allow the games industry to spend millions copy righting and preventing copying. Once they have done that you publish games with open copyright similar to the freedoms we have today and simply kill the competitions.
Ssshhh..
Actually the last time I checked it's actually less secure. One of the more interesting issues with windows is. Because of the high number of pop up boxes in Windows most users don't actually read it and just press 'OK' as matter of course. Even in the DOS days we wrote programs that would ask the user to continue and delete or format the hard drive and most of the times they said go ahead. We used it more as a joke but goes to show that Dialog boxes is not the answer. Dialog boxes needs to be used sparingly so that if something does pop up the user needs to question what is happening. This is a major flaw in Windows that will most likely not be fixed.
We are trying to compare apples with oranges here. It all depends on how you define security. I for example consider virus and worm propagation (and most of the Unix world) as major security flaws. Windows users consider it part of their life. I consider it a security flaw if a user can without my permission access my files. In the windows world it standard practice. It the difference between having a lock door. In the Linux(Unix) world a security flaw is the same as somebody gained entry into your house without your permission. In the windows world the door is open and a security flaw is when somebody removes the bolted down table that does not fit through the door in one piece. It is not the same thing. So just taking 2 criteria (the most common attack vectors). 1. Human knowledge and awareness of security issues. 2. Ability to execute unauthorized software and the damage that software can do to your system. Which operating system comes out on the top.
I understand why the BSA uses these stats. The BSA specifically exist to fight piracy not to advance the software industry or make money for software companies. So $51B in piracy is probably accurate. That it translates to $51B in lost sales and jobs is simply wrong. Honestly these stats make me sad. It's surprising how blind these software companies are. If it was not for rampant piracy Microsoft would not be where they are today. The market economy would simply have taken over and they would have lost. But piracy being what it was Microsoft created a empire and is now bitting the hand that feeds it. I'm very excited about that. The BSA on the other hand really gets on my nerves. The BSA are specifically hampering me in my FOSS efforts. Many clients will not accept a FOSS product because it is free assuming that I have pirated it. Even client that except it assumes that I have installed the software illegally. I've had cases where clients was told that Linux and Open Office was installed illegally on their computers and they where advised to purchase Windows and M$ Office. There is also several scenarios that disprove that $51B in piracy translates to $51B in lost sales. I'll be surprised if the lost sales is even half that. There is several scenarios where stopping the piracy would not have resulted in a sales. There is also several scenarios where the piracy aided in a sale. So the stats are a bit skew in favor of the piracy watch dog not in favor of the Software industry. As far as jobs goes. This could go both ways. But I personally think piracy probably resulted in net Job gain rather than loss. Yes we would have lost several developers because of piracy as there would have been more custom development. On the other hand because of piracy the money that would originally have been spent on software would have gone to paying salaries or even hiring IT consultants. So although it might have resulted in Software Development Job Losses. Chances are the it increased IT jobs in general as well as had a positive effect on the job market as a whole.
I Wonder is my life really only worth 22M pounds. I Wonder if I can Sue the UK government for endangering my life ? I wonder if this should be done through UN ?
Here is my question, It does not make sense to me. The person that takes out you're trash gets compensated once for the work he has done. The person working in the supermarket get minimum wage has to pitch up every day but still only gets compensated once for their work. They have to setup a pension and special provision for old age. Why not artists. What makes an artist work more valuable than mine ? They already get compensated millions of times for their work. Hello if you spend say 10% of you're 20 million dollar income for a pension you will never in you're life ever again need money. Yes by all means compensate the artist for his perfomance. By all means compensate him for the work he does but why compensate him for 20 years for about a weeks worth of work (depending on the song) that is mostly about taste and luck anyway.
I've had to go through something similar myself when I was studying. There is a huge set of paranoia and the insident was almost placed on my permanent record. Eventually I just stopped telling the admins it was much safer.
I know I'm being nasty but I almost hope it was the problem was directly related to M$ software. And they decide to ignore the EULA and sue ..
I actually like gtk so I don't see why ? In any case nothing prevents a person from setting up QT as a backend. I'm more interested in what is happening on the Free Desktop and gobject front. What I would like to see is Gobject as a general standard for both QT and GTK. Or more generally a gobject like system for GCC, G++ that would allow for example introspection and object use of C, C++, Python, Perl etc. Without the enormous amount of porting effort going into each one each time. With the talk going on on GTK3 the intention is to clean up the gobject system in anycase so talk to the G++ compiler guys and see what is possible.
Everybody seems to be focusing on bugs but the most important problem with proprietary software is that you are giving control over you're live to a third party. The software we are using is becoming more and more ingrained in our lives. For every piece of proprietary software you have on you're PC the more control you give to the company developing that software. There is no law and control in place that forces these companies to act ethically. The whole open source process force companies to act ethically and even if they don't there is a whole list of controls in place from legal to political that helps out every now and then. Can you really trust a person you have never met or company that only responsibility is to make money. By all means use proprietary software but know what you are doing.
Disclaimer: Anywhere you use Windows is a bad use I've been using Unix for the last 10 years on my desktop. And with every windows version starting with 98 I've given it a bash and by the third crash given up. My question is this the MS license specifically exclude putting Windows to use in any situation where human lives might be at risk. I would expect a person making medical machines knows better. And the worst use I've seen was my bank running there site on Windows did not last long though move to Sun and apache within weeks.
The results do not surprize me the conclusion does. 1. We know that the higher a person education the more likely they will follow some kind of exercise regime. 2. We know that fitness and mental ability are related. 3. We know that most people that are obese are also unfit. 4. We know that mental ability just like fitness diminishes if not practiced. 5. We know that because of bias people think that obese people are considered dumb and are therefore not mentally challenged. My question therefore is how much of this is related to simply being unfit or not being mentally challenged. If I were to keep my fitness level up or keep myself mentally challenged and became obese would my mental facilities really fail ? For that matter if I were to challenge myself mentally everyday would it affect my weight :-) [Maybe we found a nicer way to lose weight]
As everybody is going on about Enlightenment and how it's so great. I agree when Enlightenment came along it was great and I think in terms of vision Rasterman did the world a big favor. I don't think Enlightenment is the way to go. (Not becasue of the technology)
I think one of the strengths of the OpenSource community is to learn from projects. There is a reason why Enlightenment is not the default Windows Manager for Gnome. There is a reason that EVAS is not the default layer or imlib2 not the default image library. I think mostly politically.
The fact is Linus still controls the Kernel not because he is technically the best but because he can play the politics balance great new features with what is needed.
The Gnome team has done a great job and the value of what Raster has done is in learning what works and what not. But the politics still needs to be played on several levels and thats where the gnome team comes in.
I exclusivelly sell Linux products and it is a hard sell. The Open Source community do not really concentrate on Wine but this is probably the most important technology for selling Linux.
Reasons are:
1. People are afraid of change - They wan't to use their own legacy software even if there is something better out their. We have to allow them to change at their own pace.
2. It would in the minds of my clients prove that Open Source software is worth it if we can emulate Windows.
3. Clients do not lose their current investment in software.
My opinion is that Linux is growing slower than it can, purelly because of the lack of a free way of running Windows (that is already purchased) on their PC when buying Linux.
Once Linux can be run (and it is part of the standard distrutions) without needing dual boot it will not make a difference to the client if you load Windows or Linux on their PC.
You're problem sounds like something that the LGPL was designed for my personal opinion. As you are designing the general framework (LGPL it) you can attach ather parts that is not opensource.
It is relativelly easy decide (with you're benefactor) what modules should be LGPL and which not. If a module could benefit from the OpenSource movement LGPL it.
The rest you can keep nice and hidden.
You're problem of course is finding the balance. I would personally try and get the benefactor to agree to release everything to GPL once a certain time or alternativelly certain events occur (version is not maintained anymore, company goes bust). This will benefit the company as well as you in the long run as unsupported version will generate a user community and this user community will mean more potential clients.
As it's business software the chances are that there is a considerable amount of support revenue that will be generated even from old version in GPL, LGPL.
What interest me in this law suite is that nothing have been proven yet.
.
SCO is going ahead sueing everybody making accusations that until now have not been proven. It is time that the same tack is taken. Until now it looked like a contract dispute but SCO is now effectivelly calling Linux developers theives.
I find this very offensive. One of the primary reasons for using Linux is to keep myself legal without having to fork out thousands of dollars for the other products.
I do not have the organizational skills, money or clout to go ahead and do it myself but I think personally that a Linux organization should start contacting developers and build a case against SCO
The first step would be to get the SCO code get an idependant organisation to audit their code and make sure no GPL code is in there. If any code was released by them through their Caldera effort will be released under GPL and thus not subject.
After that the code that is left are subject to the claim. Interesting part of course is that as far as I understand it if a part of the SCO code is under the GPL (as it was included in Linux) is there not a viral effect that a lot of the SCO code are then automatically subject to the GPL and as such must be released (just a thought).
Personall I think this is what happened and like any good strategist would know an attack is the best defence. It is and have been time for Linux developers to fight back.
As far I understand it the South African law specifically caters for that. It's interesting that the American Law does not. If a company want's to restrict you from finding new employment they have to provide for compensation for that period. If not and it is you sole income you can find employment and compete with them. It's only when you have alternative forms of income that this becomes sticky.
There is one thing technical people (including myself) often forget and that makes the difference. You are working with people. Make sure your approach is correct. A big part of what is accepted or not is purelly based on how it is presented. Believe it or not management will be go for the solution that is packaged the best. This is where opensource fails miserably in many instances. So basically make them like you. Don't lie but trust is a big part of what is acceptable to clients (and management). Work on your human interaction skills. You'll find that you get a lot more information accross as well as having descisions made for instead of against you.