Only if you do business with people who do business with spammers. If you don't, you won't have this problem. Even if you do, finding a new ISP or smarthost is a five minute job. Whereas deleting and filtering spam takes millions of people a significant amount of time every single day.
I think it's a fine cure. It raises the cost of doing business with spammers, which is ultimately the only real way this problem will ever be solved.
Isn't this where an expert would be called in to make the call?
I believe that that's what SCO is counting on, and who knows, perhaps that's the thing they've used to sucker Boise into taking the case in the first place.
However, before you reach that stage, you still have to produce your evidence and say 'this is what we own and IBM stole it by putting it in Linux without our consent.'
As they haven't yet done that, they can't actually get to the next stage yet. In order to get to that stage, they still have to show the court *something* that isn't patent nonsense.
I don't believe they'll ever reach that stage, and with Novell's recent intervention it's looking less and less likely.
I live in Tennessee, which is as bible-belt as anywhere else, and there would be no problem walking around here with a NetBSD logo (or FreeBSD Beastie) T-shirt unless you went looking for trouble, e.g. going into a church with that shirt on.
Opening lines that may spell trouble:
"Did you spill my drink?"
"Are you staring at my girlfriend's tits?"
"Did you wear that BSD t-shirt to church on Sunday?"
Don't be an elitist who doesn't accept others who are different than you.
I don't discriminate on the basis of difference. I do discriminate on the basis of people who wish to prevent me from exercising various freedoms. I think that that's wrong -- and I don't actually think my position is irrational. On the contrary, I think that not to discriminate against such people is irrational because by not doing so, you ultimately deny yourself a desired good -- ie, more freedom.
And I understand perfectly that some people who are involved with NetBSD might see the symbol as uncommercial, or want to increase their user base and I don't have any problem with their losing it on that basis. I personally wouldn't change it for that reason, but as I'm not involved with NetBSD, my views are just more hot air -- but if it were me, I'd prefer not to have personal or professional associations with people who are as irrationally oversensitive. I find it makes my life far easier in the long run.
I'm SURE they didn't think they were "doing battle with the true Prince of Darkness," and so are you.
I'm not sure of any such thing. I don't mean that they thought that the guy wearing the suit was Beelzebub himself. I mean they hold the belief that by displaying a representation of Satan, the person wearing the suit was doing Satan's work, and therefore by physically attacking the wearer, they were quite literally, attacking Satanism and therefore Satan and all his works.
They were offended by his arrogance and mistreating of a subject that is very important to them. They got angry, and understandably so.
I don't think it's understandable at all. Who's next? Children dressed up in Halloween costumes? There are lots of things that offend me and upset me as well, but I hope that I can avoid mistaking a representation of the thing, for the thing itself. If you ever catch *me* confusing the two, you have my full permission to commit me to an asylum for the insane.
Bear in mind that I'm not saying that these people aren't entitled to their views. I'm more than happy for them to hold them and to share them with like-minded associates. I just don't think they have any business imposing them on others -- though in this case, it isn't necessary because the NetBSD group seems more than happy to accomodate them.
No, I say it on the basis of probability, in light of what I regard as the available empirical evidence. If you have a better evidence than I've heard so far, I'm open to listening to it -- though I have to say that I don't expect to be convinced.
That's true, but trite, and it ignores an important point: what about the rational objections of rational Christians?
I do accept the existance of rational Christians. Despite my own atheism, I'm actually married to one. (OK, most of her beliefs are rational. For example, when I confront her about the miracle of transubstantiation, her excuse is that she just brackets her rational response and accepts the mystical power of the sacrament.)
But are you trying to argue that rational Christians would have a problem with representations of the BSD daemon? What possible problems would they be -- other than a simple 'it offends my supernatural beliefs'?
The swastika is a Hindu holy symbol and associated with Ganesh, the Hindu god of good luck/fortune.
So what? How is that a.) relevant to the point that I was addressing, and b.) does it invalidate anything that I said?
Meanwhile, here's a clue for you as you're clearly in need of one. Regardless of how much *you* might wish it to be so, whenever most people see a swastika, they *don't* associate it with good luck/fortune, hinduism, paganism or any of it's other postulated uses. They associate it with Dachau, Belsen and six million Jews being put to death for having the wrong genetic origins.
The four 'L's are associated with Life, Love, Luck, and Light.
Right. And I assume that this must have been because the founders of Hinduism and Buddhism wrote all of their sacred screeds using English words, and constructed their symbols using English letters?
Perhaps they might be if they existed outside of the fevered imaginations of religious fundamentalists, but as they are, at most, a metaphor it's hard to see why rational people would be bothered. And why would you try and accomodate the prospective rantings of irrational people? There's no predicting what those could be.
Cartoon or not, it's a symbol with evil connotations, which some people could feasibly find offensive.
Rather like the SCO trademark, you mean?
After all, with your logic, a swastika is just a bunch of lines.
Not really. A swastika is the symbol of an organization that verifiably eradicated six million jews and similar numbers of gay people, Romany gypsies, etc.
When people can point to similar empirically verifiable actions done in the name of a little red man with horns, a pitchfork and a pointed tail, I might take this argument seriously.
Did anyone ever see that episode of Jackass, where a guy dressed in a red devil suit was being assaulted by passers-by, who clearly thought that by punching a guy in a red suit, they were doing battle with the true Prince of Darkness?
Perhaps Net-Bsd should substitute the face of Saddam or Osama for the devil? That should really get the product shifting off the shelves. (OK then, the FTP servers for the pedants out there.)
Is it legal to publish press releases announcing "Any day now, we're going to start sending out letters threatening to break people's legs unless they pay us money," as long as you don't actually send out the letters?
So long as you don't specify whose legs it is that you're going to break, I'm afraid it probably is.
I don't believe for a moment that SCO is going to start suing anybody in the UK or anywhere else for that matter.
A quick check on Yahoo Finance shows that their stock has been dropping steadily over the last five days -- and is currently down some $2.50 from its price on Friday.
Whenever this happens, SCO simply issues yet another Press Release in order to justify their various backers' secret support of their stock price.
The various broker firms who are buying on behalf of a secret customer, *cough* Microsoft *cough*, are going to have to say they had some reason for buying when the SEC eventually investigates them. They can point to press releases like this and say:
'Look, SCO said they were going to be getting license fees from Linux users all over the world. Why *wouldn't* we buy more stock -- even though Novell had showed strong evidence that they own the copyrights and the bottom was dropping out of SCO's share price at the time?'
Downward spiral? The stock is still way up from where it fell during the recession, and it's within $7 of its 52-week high.
Take a look at it's movements over the last five days. It appears to have lost around two and a half dollars a share in value -- I'm guessing in response to their filings in the case against IBM and the information that Novell has provided regarding their contracts with SCO.
I'm not supporting their actions, but the stock is still doing great.
Great if you bought at $2 a share. Not so great if you bought at $18. Would you buy SCO stock today? I certainly wouldn't, regardless of my feelings about their ethics. And if I owned any, I'd definitely be getting shut around now. It's hard for me to see what conceivable possibility could make it rise any further in the next month or two.
It's going to take actual legal outcomes to affect this, not secret filings.
It didn't take legal outcomes for the stock price to rise, just threats and allegations. If information can make a stock go up, it sure as hell can make a stock go down again.
Having said all that, I do think only a fool or a reckless gambler with a lot of loose change would be either buying or shorting SCO stock at the moment.
I may well be incorrect about this. A good hard detailed historical coverage of the BSD case and exactly what was decided in it is something I have yet to find.
If you're looking for legal precedents, then you'll have to look again because nothing at all was decided in the BSD case. As with any case that is settled out of court, the final settlement amounts to nothing more than a contract between the two parties who agree to settle. The judge's indications as to what evidence he found persuasive and what he didn't are only important insofar as they apply to that particular case -- and as it never actually went to trial but settled out of court, really has little value at all in casting light on how any subsequent case in respect of the Unix legacy is likely to go.
This is why you can't find detailed coverage of the case. As with any case that ends in a settlement, the final details of the settlement tend to be kept between the litigating parties.
If SCO's claims that this code is in fact their own turns out to be true, doesn't that mean that their case has solid legs to stand on?
Which code would that be?
What makes you think that the document will refer to any code at all? Nothing that they've submitted in this case so far refers to any code. In fact, they seem to be making the argument that the only code that they are referring to is code that was written by IBM but constitutes a 'derivative work' and therefore belongs to them.
How interesting it would be for all versions of Linux before this code is removed to be in violation of SCO's copyright.
It would be more interesting if you had even half a clue what you were talking about before intervening in this discussion.
There really isn't any need for indemnity, because as people have pointed out, there really isn't any need to do so. The best SCO could hope for if they brought an action against an end user, is to prevent them from stopping using linux. After all, the end user isn't the person responsible for the infringement, and SCO is unlikely to recover any costs at all from end users.
So why is it that SCO keep on demanding indemnification? Because rather than going after end users, it allows them to put pressure on IBM. If IBM indemnifies, SCO is then able to go after all of IBM's customers, safe in the knowledge that the only people who will be stumping up are IBM. They don't alienate the customers, they simply present IBM with a bill for every one of their end users who happen to be using Linux. Even if they don't believe they can win, the costs alone inherent in such a stream of lawsuits have got to be a serious pain in the arse for IBM, and I think SCO's insistance that IBM should offer this indemnification is nothing more than an attempt to goad them into taking a strategically poor position which they'll later exploit -- thereby putting more pressure on Big Blue to settle.
Now given that IBM don't actually have their own distro, it makes no sense whatsoever for IBM to offer indemnification. However, IBM will now be able to recommend Suse/Novell to those customers who have anxieties about this issue, and they've got their indemnification.
And should SCO actually try and bring an action against Suse end users, Novell can then turn around and say in court, 'What the fuck are you crackheads talking about? We own this technology. We simply sold you the rights to license it to others. The copyrights are all ours.'
Novell wins by increasing sales to those who want indemnification at little risk. IBM wins, because they can now offer customers a distro that has indemnification. SCO's evil plan fails dismally as shrewder players manage this crafty end run around their nefarious scheme.
Re:Yes, but measuring webserver market share is ha
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
don't put words in my mouth.
That isn't what I was doing. I was employing a rhetorical device to draw your attention to the fact that a great many such servers also exist, and they provide a more of a problem than they do a solution.
There are authentication tools that IIS brings to the table that makes them really attractive in the intranet server market (like being able to obtain domain login information.
You mean domain in the peculiar Microsoft sense of the term, right? I can see how IIS might offer some embrace and extend-style additions to try and tie people in to their OS as well, yeah.
Re:Yes, but measuring webserver market share is ha
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
These surveys also do not count the millions of intranet-only sites that these servers serve
Are you sure you don't mean 'sites where administrator is too incompetent to turn off the default install of IIS'?
You know, all those sites that have plagued the internet with various worms and other security holes over the last few years?
and given the nature of the beast, I'm going to guess IIS is rather prevalent in that market
I don't disagree. I rather think IIS dominates at these sites.
Slashdot Mirror
This cure is definitely worse than the disesase.
Only if you do business with people who do business with spammers. If you don't, you won't have this problem. Even if you do, finding a new ISP or smarthost is a five minute job. Whereas deleting and filtering spam takes millions of people a significant amount of time every single day.
I think it's a fine cure. It raises the cost of doing business with spammers, which is ultimately the only real way this problem will ever be solved.
That's user choice.
Yeah, and it's user choice to leave an unpatched, unfirewalled computer connected to the net, with an open mail relay.
Users can choose to stick your head in a pot of boiling oil, so long as they're happy to deal with the consequences.
Let me guess, you and your friend wouldn't be called 'Terence and Philip' and be prone to farting, and then laughing hysterically, by any chance?
Do lawyers wear their underpants back to front then?
Hypocrites we may be, but at least we're hypocrites who can spell.
Isn't this where an expert would be called in to make the call?
I believe that that's what SCO is counting on, and who knows, perhaps that's the thing they've used to sucker Boise into taking the case in the first place.
However, before you reach that stage, you still have to produce your evidence and say 'this is what we own and IBM stole it by putting it in Linux without our consent.'
As they haven't yet done that, they can't actually get to the next stage yet. In order to get to that stage, they still have to show the court *something* that isn't patent nonsense.
I don't believe they'll ever reach that stage, and with Novell's recent intervention it's looking less and less likely.
Really? I read the SCO stuff pretty assiduously, and it was definitely the first time I've seen it.
So why not have the Open BSD blowfish being caught in a net?
Or a picture of Dave 'Devilfish' Uliot
The south is full of black people, and mostly we get along fine.
Well, they mostly do until they start having sex with white girls.
I live in Tennessee, which is as bible-belt as anywhere else, and there would be no problem walking around here with a NetBSD logo (or FreeBSD Beastie) T-shirt unless you went looking for trouble, e.g. going into a church with that shirt on.
Opening lines that may spell trouble:
"Did you spill my drink?"
"Are you staring at my girlfriend's tits?"
"Did you wear that BSD t-shirt to church on Sunday?"
Damn, where are those modpoints when you need 'em?
Don't be an elitist who doesn't accept others who are different than you.
I don't discriminate on the basis of difference. I do discriminate on the basis of people who wish to prevent me from exercising various freedoms. I think that that's wrong -- and I don't actually think my position is irrational. On the contrary, I think that not to discriminate against such people is irrational because by not doing so, you ultimately deny yourself a desired good -- ie, more freedom.
And I understand perfectly that some people who are involved with NetBSD might see the symbol as uncommercial, or want to increase their user base and I don't have any problem with their losing it on that basis. I personally wouldn't change it for that reason, but as I'm not involved with NetBSD, my views are just more hot air -- but if it were me, I'd prefer not to have personal or professional associations with people who are as irrationally oversensitive. I find it makes my life far easier in the long run.
I'm SURE they didn't think they were "doing battle with the true Prince of Darkness," and so are you.
I'm not sure of any such thing. I don't mean that they thought that the guy wearing the suit was Beelzebub himself. I mean they hold the belief that by displaying a representation of Satan, the person wearing the suit was doing Satan's work, and therefore by physically attacking the wearer, they were quite literally, attacking Satanism and therefore Satan and all his works.
They were offended by his arrogance and mistreating of a subject that is very important to them. They got angry, and understandably so.
I don't think it's understandable at all. Who's next? Children dressed up in Halloween costumes? There are lots of things that offend me and upset me as well, but I hope that I can avoid mistaking a representation of the thing, for the thing itself. If you ever catch *me* confusing the two, you have my full permission to commit me to an asylum for the insane.
Bear in mind that I'm not saying that these people aren't entitled to their views. I'm more than happy for them to hold them and to share them with like-minded associates. I just don't think they have any business imposing them on others -- though in this case, it isn't necessary because the NetBSD group seems more than happy to accomodate them.
Can you prove that?
No, I say it on the basis of probability, in light of what I regard as the available empirical evidence. If you have a better evidence than I've heard so far, I'm open to listening to it -- though I have to say that I don't expect to be convinced.
That's true, but trite, and it ignores an important point: what about the rational objections of rational Christians?
I do accept the existance of rational Christians. Despite my own atheism, I'm actually married to one. (OK, most of her beliefs are rational. For example, when I confront her about the miracle of transubstantiation, her excuse is that she just brackets her rational response and accepts the mystical power of the sacrament.)
But are you trying to argue that rational Christians would have a problem with representations of the BSD daemon? What possible problems would they be -- other than a simple 'it offends my supernatural beliefs'?
Bah, learn proper history before commenting.
Perhaps you should learn not to make assumptions.
The swastika is a Hindu holy symbol and associated with Ganesh, the Hindu god of good luck/fortune.
So what? How is that a.) relevant to the point that I was addressing, and b.) does it invalidate anything that I said?
Meanwhile, here's a clue for you as you're clearly in need of one. Regardless of how much *you* might wish it to be so, whenever most people see a swastika, they *don't* associate it with good luck/fortune, hinduism, paganism or any of it's other postulated uses. They associate it with Dachau, Belsen and six million Jews being put to death for having the wrong genetic origins.
The four 'L's are associated with Life, Love, Luck, and Light.
Right. And I assume that this must have been because the founders of Hinduism and Buddhism wrote all of their sacred screeds using English words, and constructed their symbols using English letters?
I'm an Evangelical Baptist pastor; I love the little guy.
;-)
You mean in the same way that Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Bakker did?
maybe it's time for the weird to turn pro
In this instance, it's more of a case of the pro turning weird, surely?
It's a devil. Devils are evil.
Perhaps they might be if they existed outside of the fevered imaginations of religious fundamentalists, but as they are, at most, a metaphor it's hard to see why rational people would be bothered. And why would you try and accomodate the prospective rantings of irrational people? There's no predicting what those could be.
Cartoon or not, it's a symbol with evil connotations, which some people could feasibly find offensive.
Rather like the SCO trademark, you mean?
After all, with your logic, a swastika is just a bunch of lines.
Not really. A swastika is the symbol of an organization that verifiably eradicated six million jews and similar numbers of gay people, Romany gypsies, etc.
When people can point to similar empirically verifiable actions done in the name of a little red man with horns, a pitchfork and a pointed tail, I might take this argument seriously.
Did anyone ever see that episode of Jackass, where a guy dressed in a red devil suit was being assaulted by passers-by, who clearly thought that by punching a guy in a red suit, they were doing battle with the true Prince of Darkness?
Perhaps Net-Bsd should substitute the face of Saddam or Osama for the devil? That should really get the product shifting off the shelves. (OK then, the FTP servers for the pedants out there.)
So long as you don't specify whose legs it is that you're going to break, I'm afraid it probably is.
I don't believe for a moment that SCO is going to start suing anybody in the UK or anywhere else for that matter.
A quick check on Yahoo Finance shows that their stock has been dropping steadily over the last five days -- and is currently down some $2.50 from its price on Friday.
Whenever this happens, SCO simply issues yet another Press Release in order to justify their various backers' secret support of their stock price.
The various broker firms who are buying on behalf of a secret customer, *cough* Microsoft *cough*, are going to have to say they had some reason for buying when the SEC eventually investigates them. They can point to press releases like this and say:
Downward spiral? The stock is still way up from where it fell during the recession, and it's within $7 of its 52-week high.
Take a look at it's movements over the last five days. It appears to have lost around two and a half dollars a share in value -- I'm guessing in response to their filings in the case against IBM and the information that Novell has provided regarding their contracts with SCO.
I'm not supporting their actions, but the stock is still doing great.
Great if you bought at $2 a share. Not so great if you bought at $18. Would you buy SCO stock today? I certainly wouldn't, regardless of my feelings about their ethics. And if I owned any, I'd definitely be getting shut around now. It's hard for me to see what conceivable possibility could make it rise any further in the next month or two.
It's going to take actual legal outcomes to affect this, not secret filings.
It didn't take legal outcomes for the stock price to rise, just threats and allegations. If information can make a stock go up, it sure as hell can make a stock go down again.
Having said all that, I do think only a fool or a reckless gambler with a lot of loose change would be either buying or shorting SCO stock at the moment.
I may well be incorrect about this. A good hard detailed historical coverage of the BSD case and exactly what was decided in it is something I have yet to find.
If you're looking for legal precedents, then you'll have to look again because nothing at all was decided in the BSD case. As with any case that is settled out of court, the final settlement amounts to nothing more than a contract between the two parties who agree to settle. The judge's indications as to what evidence he found persuasive and what he didn't are only important insofar as they apply to that particular case -- and as it never actually went to trial but settled out of court, really has little value at all in casting light on how any subsequent case in respect of the Unix legacy is likely to go.
This is why you can't find detailed coverage of the case. As with any case that ends in a settlement, the final details of the settlement tend to be kept between the litigating parties.
If SCO's claims that this code is in fact their own turns out to be true, doesn't that mean that their case has solid legs to stand on?
Which code would that be?
What makes you think that the document will refer to any code at all? Nothing that they've submitted in this case so far refers to any code. In fact, they seem to be making the argument that the only code that they are referring to is code that was written by IBM but constitutes a 'derivative work' and therefore belongs to them.
How interesting it would be for all versions of Linux before this code is removed to be in violation of SCO's copyright.
It would be more interesting if you had even half a clue what you were talking about before intervening in this discussion.
Sadly!? JOY!!! There's still time for me to sell short!
You'd better be quick then. It looks like the downward spiral has already started.
My question is: why does IBM refuse to do so?
My thoughts, for what they are worth:
There really isn't any need for indemnity, because as people have pointed out, there really isn't any need to do so. The best SCO could hope for if they brought an action against an end user, is to prevent them from stopping using linux. After all, the end user isn't the person responsible for the infringement, and SCO is unlikely to recover any costs at all from end users.
So why is it that SCO keep on demanding indemnification? Because rather than going after end users, it allows them to put pressure on IBM. If IBM indemnifies, SCO is then able to go after all of IBM's customers, safe in the knowledge that the only people who will be stumping up are IBM. They don't alienate the customers, they simply present IBM with a bill for every one of their end users who happen to be using Linux. Even if they don't believe they can win, the costs alone inherent in such a stream of lawsuits have got to be a serious pain in the arse for IBM, and I think SCO's insistance that IBM should offer this indemnification is nothing more than an attempt to goad them into taking a strategically poor position which they'll later exploit -- thereby putting more pressure on Big Blue to settle.
Now given that IBM don't actually have their own distro, it makes no sense whatsoever for IBM to offer indemnification. However, IBM will now be able to recommend Suse/Novell to those customers who have anxieties about this issue, and they've got their indemnification.
And should SCO actually try and bring an action against Suse end users, Novell can then turn around and say in court, 'What the fuck are you crackheads talking about? We own this technology. We simply sold you the rights to license it to others. The copyrights are all ours.'
Novell wins by increasing sales to those who want indemnification at little risk. IBM wins, because they can now offer customers a distro that has indemnification. SCO's evil plan fails dismally as shrewder players manage this crafty end run around their nefarious scheme.
don't put words in my mouth.
That isn't what I was doing. I was employing a rhetorical device to draw your attention to the fact that a great many such servers also exist, and they provide a more of a problem than they do a solution.
There are authentication tools that IIS brings to the table that makes them really attractive in the intranet server market (like being able to obtain domain login information.
You mean domain in the peculiar Microsoft sense of the term, right? I can see how IIS might offer some embrace and extend-style additions to try and tie people in to their OS as well, yeah.
These surveys also do not count the millions of intranet-only sites that these servers serve
Are you sure you don't mean 'sites where administrator is too incompetent to turn off the default install of IIS'?
You know, all those sites that have plagued the internet with various worms and other security holes over the last few years?
and given the nature of the beast, I'm going to guess IIS is rather prevalent in that market
I don't disagree. I rather think IIS dominates at these sites.