But come September, I fully expect SCO's days to be numbered. As long as the judge doesn't give them more time to respond/file motions etc. SCO's game will go down in flames.
I hope after that IBM will than set their sites on the Canopy group and if there's any evidence at all of 3rd party intervention(you know who I mean), that they take them down too(to the turn of oh I don't know $5 billion dollars sounds good). Of course this last part is wishful thinking but I don't doubt they might be able to get at the Canopy group if they wanted.
I have to respectfully disagree. If SCO had any shread of a case and IBM was using their hammer to get rid of that shread than you'd have a point. SCO hasn't presented ANY evidence that their claims are with merit.
Also SCO is "big enough" to hire competent lawyers, they don't have to be IBM class but they have to be better than what they've gotten so far. So it can't even be claimed that SCO didn't have the money to hire a good lawyer.
I usually take "big vs little" to imply that the "little guy" has at least a shread of "goodness" attached. They're argument somehow has merit and the big guy is forced to use their "bigness" to crush them. But that's not what's happened here. I get the distinct feeling that a second year law student could pick apart SCO's case, maybe not so eloquently as IBM's high priced(and very good) lawyers, but they'd still have no problem defending against this.
Hell what is there to defend against when SCO has presented NO evidence?
SCO has violated the GPL by requiring a binary only license from people running Linux. There's not even any doubt in this regard.
However, that still doesn't mean the validity of the GPL will be tested in this case. SCO has also repudiated the GPL both publicly and in court filings. As such they have no license to distribute the copyrighted works of others. This is what IBM is suing for in their 8th counter claim. So it's like SCO clicked on "no" on the license agreement and than went ahead and distributed the software anyway.
No. They are impressing on the world that if you assert IP you better damn well have a case!
This isn't about "big" vs "little" as SCO would try to contend. This is about "right" vs "wrong". In other words if you file a lawsuit you better have something to back it up.
Far be it from me to disparage your motivations, your company's actions speak for you, whether good or bad is of course from the perspective of the observer.
As for your comment about the "GPL" holding back Linux in the embedded market, it's hard for me to see how this is true given the various surveys released in 2003 & 2004 showing Linux with equal or greater market share in the embedded space. For reference go check out LinuxDevices.com. Now, I'm not an embedded developer so maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't look to me that the GPL is harming Linux uptake in this area as much as you'd have us believe.
I didn't notice anything about "in-house-use-only" software, but if we are narrowing the discussion to only that subset of all software, than there is even less reason not to go to a GPL/LGPL model. Frankly, any Open Source License would do in that scenario, but the GPL/LGPL has greater "benefit" in that reduced subset because they speak only about distribution. In-House software need not be released if a company so chooses.
As for what IBM is using or at least intends to use as we don't know how far along they are, you can check out this article indicating IBM is going to Linux on the Desktop by the end of 2005,
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13485
I wasn't claiming that IBM used ONLY the GPL, but the post to which I responded claimed a lawyer would have to be insane to use the GPL. Clearly the poster over played his/her argument. In fact such a statement was pure FUD, as the extensive use by millions of people and thousands of companies has shown that the GPL is not an inhibitor to uptake of software licensed under it.
Without information as to what type of product your developing that requires this embedded kernel it's impossible for me to rebut your statements.
However, if your so concerned about your competitors getting any advantage why not build your own kernel from scratch? Presumably they would have even a harder time reverse engineering the whole damn thing wouldn't they?
Here's a question for ya, do you really believe that if the iPods's kernel was GPL'd and released that it would have less of a market share than it already enjoys?
The fact is your company has no qualms about taking somebody else's hard work, so I guess I can see why you'd be paranoid.
Actually I didn't think you were the profit of doom, I simply thought your speculation was without merit.:-)
And I tried to point out why.
I actually just thought of something that might happen if all the GPL were found invalid. As my previous post indicated I don't think IBM,Redhat, all the Linux contributors et. al. would want a copyright free for all, so...let IBM come up with an iron clad version of the GPL(not exactly the same but something that meets whatever objection the judge had). IBM's lawyers have more smarts than most given the quality of their submissions that I've read(and I've pretty much read them all), I'm fairly certain they could do a bang up job.
Now, having said that, I can't see any way that the GPL would be found completely invalid. There may be clauses that somehow get struck down(e.g. the "viral" clause "you must give away yours to give away mine"), certainly the exact nature of a "derivative work" is paramount to what a person must release. But I don't think the "viral" nature really has any hope of getting invalidated and the "derivative work" part of it is no worse than any other source license.
The contribution is the returning of your code should you modify the original and distribution of the original source should you distribute a binary version, e.g. the "value" is your contribution.
Furthermore, I don't know of anything in copyright law that says I must place "value" on a copyrighted work. I can "give" away my copywritten work for all to use and still not give up my copyright or the rights derived from it.
The only people I've ever seen claim the argument you have is the SCO group. In other words noone except SCO(and now you) disputes the validity of the copyright on a GPL'd work. So this isn't at the "heart" of any challenge to the GPL.
Disputes over the validity of the GPL are with respect to its supposed "viral" nature and to what constitutes "linking" or a "derived work" of a GPL'd work.
Lastly as far as I know you can't place something in the public domain without expressly stating so. E.g. it can't be "assumed" that you put something in to the public domain you must say you have. After reading the documents regarding the SCO v Novell suit, I gather this would be called a 204a writing, which apparently requires an explicit assignment of copyright. The issue over copyright in SCO v Novell is that SCO says their contract Amendment 2 is a valid 204a writing and Novell claims it isn't. So far the judge agrees with Novell. If the contract between SCO & Novell can't be considered a 204a writing I'm pretty damn sure the GPL isn't as it doesn't say anything about assigning copyright to anyone.
And to fully put this one to bed, again in reading the documents in the SCO v Novell suit, the copyright law is clearly written so as to avoid a copyright holder "accidently" giving up their copyright(thus the reason for an explicit assignment in a 204a writing). Again since the GPL doesn't say anything about assigning copyright it is unlikely in the extreme that any federal judge would void a person's valid copyright and place a GPL'd work in the public domain without their consent.
Sorry for the length of the reply, I had time to kill. oh yeah, and IANAL so take this for what it's worth.
That may be their arguement...oh look at the wookiee...
Sorry, but that's EXACTLY what SCO is doing here. SCO can say whatever they want, it doesn't make it even reasonably valid, and no judge with half the experience of this one will buy it.
No judge is going to say, "The license you thought you were using is invalid therefore you forfeit your copyright." It just doesn't work that way. SCO knows this but they have no other argument.
At worst you will have cross-licensing agreements.
No way in hell IBM was to ruin their Linux business by getting in to a bunch of lawsuits.
Not to worry, IBM will not let it come to having the GPL found "invalid". This would be tantamount to having every source code license found invalid, the Artistic license, IBM's own Open Source compatible license, etc. etc.
And don't get it wrong, as much as this is before a judge and he has the final say, it is IBM's lawyers who are now stearing the ship and they know exactly what they are doing.
I know that sounds like a "fanboy" but seriously, go read the documents on Groklaw filed by IBM, clearly these lawyers are incredibly good and deserve every penny they make.
As I attempted to make clear in my post I said "these are my impressions", "this is my understand", "if so this is how I feel". Someone else has kindly pointed out the errors in my understandings and I have admitted to being wrong, I don't see there's much more I can do there.
On the other hand, I would like to comment on my comparison to being a thief. Clearly I made this as a moral judgement as I'm in a blog on the net, and not meant as a legal assessment as to them having to be charged with a crime. As such I equated them to the moral equivalent of a thief for taking something, earning good profit from that something, and than not returning any benefit back to the original owner. Just to be clear I'm not claiming Apple did this here I've been thoroughly corrected on that, I'm simply stating this as an example to clarify my position on "thief".
I equate the above action to someone who has been on welfare, ate at soup kitchens etc., finds some way to pull him/herself out of the gutter, possibly with the help of a charitable organization. The person goes on to making a nice living and never once turns around to give back to the people who helped him/her. Certainly this is "legally" acceptable. The churchs/charitable organizations do what they do out of the goodness of their heart, but regardless, this person is a dispicable ingrate and I would feel no qualms in classifying that person as the moral equivalent of a thief.
Not trying to be negative, but is the base system & kernel open sourced from Apple or didn't Apple take somebody else's work and lock it down?
In other words I have the understanding that Apple took FreeBSD which is somebodyelses hard work and added their own stuff on top without releasing the stuff on top or how it interacts with the stuff provided by FreeBSD, or any changes they might have made to FreeBSD to make it better.
While this is certainly valid given the license of FreeBSD, strictly speaking that's just being a thief as far as I'm concerned.(Yes I know MS has done this too with it's Unix Services layer).
I also understand however, that Apple has given some changes back to the KDE community for the web browser, locking up other changes however behind a proprietary license. In other words it looks to me like Apple is trying to garner some favor while stealing the "open source" community blind.
I know where from Microsoft comes from, they don't even attempt to curry favor so at least it's obvious they can be "hated". But Apple is trying to play the "get away come closer" game which I detest even more than the "piss off I don't like you" one. With the latter I pay no attention, with the former I waste time looking to see if it's actually any good before I find out all the really good stuff is off limits.
Anyway, this is just the impression I get, I could easily be wrong.
Sorry, I just had to do that, not trying to be flippant.
Anyway, it is unfair if you pick a quality of one product that puts it in a bad light that the other product is not generally vunerable to.
In other words, a bug in a single Open source library included in 9 different Linux distributions is 1 bug not 9, just as 1 bug in a Windows 98 library is 1 bug given that the library is not likely to be included in Windows 98,ME,2000 & XP. Furthermore, why would they bother to count anything to do with Win98,ME,2000 since Newham was going towards XP/latest version of Linux?
Actually to be closer to "fair" they should have counted bugs in Windows XP coming preinstalled from HP,Dell,IBM and directly from MS. This is more akin to what we have with Linux distributions than counting different versions of Windows.
Anyway, the point still stands that counting 1 bug that exists in a product from 9 different vendors is still just 1 bug.
Maybe because your personal experience seems to be totally at odds with the general one.
The worst complaints I've ever seen or experienced against OOo is that it doesn't always deal with MS Word/Powerpoint formats very well(although it generally does a hell of a job) and the Writer layout management is different than Word. In the latter case its a training issue for advanced users. In the former case I will only hold it against OOo when/if MS releases a completely open specification of their formats and 6 months afterwards OOo still has problems.
So the vast majority of users of OOo are generally happy doing even complicated work and your experience is that it is sh*t when you do relatively simple work.
Now, ask yourself if you don't think that would qualify as flamebait.
Finally consider that the core of OOo is a mature and well respected application to begin with. StarOffice has been in development for close to 10 years I believe.
So maybe you didn't intend to be flamebait, that may have honestly been your experience. But even so you extrapolated your personal experience to the general case and than suggested that the Open Source camp was FUDing. Remember you were "shocked!".
So here's a little tip for you. Next time you feel like claiming the Open Source groups aren't really being on the up-and-up because you've had a supposedly terrible experience with an OS product, maybe ask first what others have experienced, tell people where, when and under what circumstances you were having such incredible problems. Maybe, just maybe you'll get a response like "oh you were using release fuzzel 1.0.3 on Windows XP with patch TYQ which had known severe problems, it was immediately corrected you should have just upgraded to 1.0.3a". Posting this kind of thing on the mail group for the appropriate product would be much better of course than a general purpose blog.
If this contract was worth any "largish" amount of money it would easily have been funded by an "independent" contractor(e.g. IBM, they don't really care if you choose Linux or Windows). I'm sure Novell would have funded it as well, they aren't independent but you weren't asking for that, you just asked who would fund it.
As well, if the study was as costly as you make it out to be, than the cost should be counted against the MS part of the solution as there is no presumption of innocence, you have to believe there is some fudging going on.
Lastly, again if the contract is big enough than the customer will fund it themselves in order to ensure they make the best decision. That's what studies are supposed to be for. The cost would simply be added to the cost of the total project.
This contract MUST have been worth several million dollars otherwise the hype wouldn't be worth it and certainly MS wouldn't have paid any attention. As such $100,000 extra to make the correct, unbiased decision is more than doable.
As such, until the study is released(if it ever is), the presumption that MS cooked the result is the only reasonable suggestion.
You should be painfully aware that my analysis putting this at early December was based on the idea that the judge don't hold no more quarter for wiggling, and the obligatory IANAL. So there could be alot of legitimate wiggle room that the judge can't do anything about and must give them or risk having it thrown out on appeal.
Our best indication will come in September. If the first motion for summary judgement is heard when it is expected to be, than IMHO it's much more likely that December will be when this motion will be heard.
Except that the most important and scathing factor against it isn't that I could do these things now, but for how long in the future are you going to be able to do this?
Do you really think that if DRM'd songs are "accepted" by the general populace that your restrictions for use will not become tighter and tighter until you have virtually none left?
Think about it. If there is virtually no real difference between the DRM'd songs and MP3's why do Apple and others put the DRM on the songs to begin with? Answering "because the RIAA forces them to" isn't constructive, as it is the RIAA that will mandate the use of the DRM in the end. So whether it is the RIAA or Apple increasing your restrictions it's all the same in the end.
How is not capitulating to the demands of an "oppressive" system being "in the buggywhip business"?
It is not at all guaranteed yet that all future music will be DRM'd. Hell, the fact that I can get significant amounts of music on-line that isn't DRM'd specifically goes against your premise.
Furthermore, your own recognition that Apple(and others) can change the terms of their contract on a whim will guarantee a significant market for non-DRM'd music. Just wait until your limited to 1 "same-playlist burn limit" and tell me who is in the "buggywhip" business.
You may be right but from reading the filings from IBM's lawyers I'd much rather trust them to nail Darl to the wall than the SEC. When IBM's lawyers get riled they take no prisoners.
mea culpa - your right SCOG must be kept seperate from oldSCO. Thanks for the clarification.
Even so, my point was really that somebody paid something to Novell for the rights to produce UnixWare etc. etc. not just for acting as a licensing agent.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad? Downright disgusting.
But come September, I fully expect SCO's days to be numbered. As long as the judge doesn't give them more time to respond/file motions etc. SCO's game will go down in flames.
I hope after that IBM will than set their sites on the Canopy group and if there's any evidence at all of 3rd party intervention(you know who I mean), that they take them down too(to the turn of oh I don't know $5 billion dollars sounds good). Of course this last part is wishful thinking but I don't doubt they might be able to get at the Canopy group if they wanted.
"this is about big vs little too"
I have to respectfully disagree. If SCO had any shread of a case and IBM was using their hammer to get rid of that shread than you'd have a point. SCO hasn't presented ANY evidence that their claims are with merit.
Also SCO is "big enough" to hire competent lawyers, they don't have to be IBM class but they have to be better than what they've gotten so far. So it can't even be claimed that SCO didn't have the money to hire a good lawyer.
I usually take "big vs little" to imply that the "little guy" has at least a shread of "goodness" attached. They're argument somehow has merit and the big guy is forced to use their "bigness" to crush them. But that's not what's happened here. I get the distinct feeling that a second year law student could pick apart SCO's case, maybe not so eloquently as IBM's high priced(and very good) lawyers, but they'd still have no problem defending against this.
Hell what is there to defend against when SCO has presented NO evidence?
SCO has violated the GPL by requiring a binary only license from people running Linux. There's not even any doubt in this regard.
However, that still doesn't mean the validity of the GPL will be tested in this case. SCO has also repudiated the GPL both publicly and in court filings. As such they have no license to distribute the copyrighted works of others. This is what IBM is suing for in their 8th counter claim. So it's like SCO clicked on "no" on the license agreement and than went ahead and distributed the software anyway.
Why don't you check out DeveloperWorks or just go to the Eclipse web site. IBM has plenty of IP that the "average Slashbot" would use.
That's not even to mention the major contributions to Linux they have made. Which, if you've missed it, is exactly what is under fire in this lawsuit.
No. They are impressing on the world that if you assert IP you better damn well have a case!
This isn't about "big" vs "little" as SCO would try to contend. This is about "right" vs "wrong". In other words if you file a lawsuit you better have something to back it up.
Far be it from me to disparage your motivations, your company's actions speak for you, whether good or bad is of course from the perspective of the observer.
As for your comment about the "GPL" holding back Linux in the embedded market, it's hard for me to see how this is true given the various surveys released in 2003 & 2004 showing Linux with equal or greater market share in the embedded space. For reference go check out LinuxDevices.com. Now, I'm not an embedded developer so maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't look to me that the GPL is harming Linux uptake in this area as much as you'd have us believe.
I didn't notice anything about "in-house-use-only" software, but if we are narrowing the discussion to only that subset of all software, than there is even less reason not to go to a GPL/LGPL model. Frankly, any Open Source License would do in that scenario, but the GPL/LGPL has greater "benefit" in that reduced subset because they speak only about distribution. In-House software need not be released if a company so chooses.
As for what IBM is using or at least intends to use as we don't know how far along they are, you can check out this article indicating IBM is going to Linux on the Desktop by the end of 2005,
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13485
I wasn't claiming that IBM used ONLY the GPL, but the post to which I responded claimed a lawyer would have to be insane to use the GPL. Clearly the poster over played his/her argument. In fact such a statement was pure FUD, as the extensive use by millions of people and thousands of companies has shown that the GPL is not an inhibitor to uptake of software licensed under it.
Without information as to what type of product your developing that requires this embedded kernel it's impossible for me to rebut your statements.
However, if your so concerned about your competitors getting any advantage why not build your own kernel from scratch? Presumably they would have even a harder time reverse engineering the whole damn thing wouldn't they?
Here's a question for ya, do you really believe that if the iPods's kernel was GPL'd and released that it would have less of a market share than it already enjoys?
The fact is your company has no qualms about taking somebody else's hard work, so I guess I can see why you'd be paranoid.
So you are implying that IBM's lawyers are insane? Right, some of the best IP lawyers in the world are insane? I really can't buy that.
Actually I didn't think you were the profit of doom, I simply thought your speculation was without merit. :-)
And I tried to point out why.
I actually just thought of something that might happen if all the GPL were found invalid. As my previous post indicated I don't think IBM,Redhat, all the Linux contributors et. al. would want a copyright free for all, so...let IBM come up with an iron clad version of the GPL(not exactly the same but something that meets whatever objection the judge had). IBM's lawyers have more smarts than most given the quality of their submissions that I've read(and I've pretty much read them all), I'm fairly certain they could do a bang up job.
Now, having said that, I can't see any way that the GPL would be found completely invalid. There may be clauses that somehow get struck down(e.g. the "viral" clause "you must give away yours to give away mine"), certainly the exact nature of a "derivative work" is paramount to what a person must release. But I don't think the "viral" nature really has any hope of getting invalidated and the "derivative work" part of it is no worse than any other source license.
Just another 2 cents.
The contribution is the returning of your code should you modify the original and distribution of the original source should you distribute a binary version, e.g. the "value" is your contribution.
Furthermore, I don't know of anything in copyright law that says I must place "value" on a copyrighted work. I can "give" away my copywritten work for all to use and still not give up my copyright or the rights derived from it.
The only people I've ever seen claim the argument you have is the SCO group. In other words noone except SCO(and now you) disputes the validity of the copyright on a GPL'd work. So this isn't at the "heart" of any challenge to the GPL.
Disputes over the validity of the GPL are with respect to its supposed "viral" nature and to what constitutes "linking" or a "derived work" of a GPL'd work.
Lastly as far as I know you can't place something in the public domain without expressly stating so. E.g. it can't be "assumed" that you put something in to the public domain you must say you have. After reading the documents regarding the SCO v Novell suit, I gather this would be called a 204a writing, which apparently requires an explicit assignment of copyright. The issue over copyright in SCO v Novell is that SCO says their contract Amendment 2 is a valid 204a writing and Novell claims it isn't. So far the judge agrees with Novell. If the contract between SCO & Novell can't be considered a 204a writing I'm pretty damn sure the GPL isn't as it doesn't say anything about assigning copyright to anyone.
And to fully put this one to bed, again in reading the documents in the SCO v Novell suit, the copyright law is clearly written so as to avoid a copyright holder "accidently" giving up their copyright(thus the reason for an explicit assignment in a 204a writing). Again since the GPL doesn't say anything about assigning copyright it is unlikely in the extreme that any federal judge would void a person's valid copyright and place a GPL'd work in the public domain without their consent.
Sorry for the length of the reply, I had time to kill. oh yeah, and IANAL so take this for what it's worth.
That may be their arguement...oh look at the wookiee...
Sorry, but that's EXACTLY what SCO is doing here. SCO can say whatever they want, it doesn't make it even reasonably valid, and no judge with half the experience of this one will buy it.
No judge is going to say, "The license you thought you were using is invalid therefore you forfeit your copyright." It just doesn't work that way. SCO knows this but they have no other argument.
At worst you will have cross-licensing agreements.
No way in hell IBM was to ruin their Linux business by getting in to a bunch of lawsuits.
Not to worry, IBM will not let it come to having the GPL found "invalid". This would be tantamount to having every source code license found invalid, the Artistic license, IBM's own Open Source compatible license, etc. etc.
And don't get it wrong, as much as this is before a judge and he has the final say, it is IBM's lawyers who are now stearing the ship and they know exactly what they are doing.
I know that sounds like a "fanboy" but seriously, go read the documents on Groklaw filed by IBM, clearly these lawyers are incredibly good and deserve every penny they make.
As I attempted to make clear in my post I said "these are my impressions", "this is my understand", "if so this is how I feel". Someone else has kindly pointed out the errors in my understandings and I have admitted to being wrong, I don't see there's much more I can do there.
On the other hand, I would like to comment on my comparison to being a thief. Clearly I made this as a moral judgement as I'm in a blog on the net, and not meant as a legal assessment as to them having to be charged with a crime. As such I equated them to the moral equivalent of a thief for taking something, earning good profit from that something, and than not returning any benefit back to the original owner. Just to be clear I'm not claiming Apple did this here I've been thoroughly corrected on that, I'm simply stating this as an example to clarify my position on "thief".
I equate the above action to someone who has been on welfare, ate at soup kitchens etc., finds some way to pull him/herself out of the gutter, possibly with the help of a charitable organization. The person goes on to making a nice living and never once turns around to give back to the people who helped him/her. Certainly this is "legally" acceptable. The churchs/charitable organizations do what they do out of the goodness of their heart, but regardless, this person is a dispicable ingrate and I would feel no qualms in classifying that person as the moral equivalent of a thief.
Anyway, this is offtopic now so I'll just quit.
"Ahhh another clueless windows fanboy"
Hee,Hee,Hee...Hoo,Hoo,Hoo...
Regardless of the truth or veracity of the rest of your claims, this in itself was worth any Karma I might have burned.
If you only knew...
Like I said I could EASILY be wrong.
I'm big enough to admit when I was, although I was only claiming "my understanding" and was hoping for clarification.
You've provided it.
thanks.
Not trying to be negative, but is the base system & kernel open sourced from Apple or didn't Apple take somebody else's work and lock it down?
In other words I have the understanding that Apple took FreeBSD which is somebodyelses hard work and added their own stuff on top without releasing the stuff on top or how it interacts with the stuff provided by FreeBSD, or any changes they might have made to FreeBSD to make it better.
While this is certainly valid given the license of FreeBSD, strictly speaking that's just being a thief as far as I'm concerned.(Yes I know MS has done this too with it's Unix Services layer).
I also understand however, that Apple has given some changes back to the KDE community for the web browser, locking up other changes however behind a proprietary license. In other words it looks to me like Apple is trying to garner some favor while stealing the "open source" community blind.
I know where from Microsoft comes from, they don't even attempt to curry favor so at least it's obvious they can be "hated". But Apple is trying to play the "get away come closer" game which I detest even more than the "piss off I don't like you" one. With the latter I pay no attention, with the former I waste time looking to see if it's actually any good before I find out all the really good stuff is off limits.
Anyway, this is just the impression I get, I could easily be wrong.
Bzzt, wrong!
Sorry, I just had to do that, not trying to be flippant.
Anyway, it is unfair if you pick a quality of one product that puts it in a bad light that the other product is not generally vunerable to.
In other words, a bug in a single Open source library included in 9 different Linux distributions is 1 bug not 9, just as 1 bug in a Windows 98 library is 1 bug given that the library is not likely to be included in Windows 98,ME,2000 & XP. Furthermore, why would they bother to count anything to do with Win98,ME,2000 since Newham was going towards XP/latest version of Linux?
Actually to be closer to "fair" they should have counted bugs in Windows XP coming preinstalled from HP,Dell,IBM and directly from MS. This is more akin to what we have with Linux distributions than counting different versions of Windows.
Anyway, the point still stands that counting 1 bug that exists in a product from 9 different vendors is still just 1 bug.
Maybe because your personal experience seems to be totally at odds with the general one.
The worst complaints I've ever seen or experienced against OOo is that it doesn't always deal with MS Word/Powerpoint formats very well(although it generally does a hell of a job) and the Writer layout management is different than Word. In the latter case its a training issue for advanced users. In the former case I will only hold it against OOo when/if MS releases a completely open specification of their formats and 6 months afterwards OOo still has problems.
So the vast majority of users of OOo are generally happy doing even complicated work and your experience is that it is sh*t when you do relatively simple work.
Now, ask yourself if you don't think that would qualify as flamebait.
Finally consider that the core of OOo is a mature and well respected application to begin with. StarOffice has been in development for close to 10 years I believe.
So maybe you didn't intend to be flamebait, that may have honestly been your experience. But even so you extrapolated your personal experience to the general case and than suggested that the Open Source camp was FUDing. Remember you were "shocked!".
So here's a little tip for you. Next time you feel like claiming the Open Source groups aren't really being on the up-and-up because you've had a supposedly terrible experience with an OS product, maybe ask first what others have experienced, tell people where, when and under what circumstances you were having such incredible problems. Maybe, just maybe you'll get a response like "oh you were using release fuzzel 1.0.3 on Windows XP with patch TYQ which had known severe problems, it was immediately corrected you should have just upgraded to 1.0.3a". Posting this kind of thing on the mail group for the appropriate product would be much better of course than a general purpose blog.
Right, give it a rest.
If this contract was worth any "largish" amount of money it would easily have been funded by an "independent" contractor(e.g. IBM, they don't really care if you choose Linux or Windows). I'm sure Novell would have funded it as well, they aren't independent but you weren't asking for that, you just asked who would fund it.
As well, if the study was as costly as you make it out to be, than the cost should be counted against the MS part of the solution as there is no presumption of innocence, you have to believe there is some fudging going on.
Lastly, again if the contract is big enough than the customer will fund it themselves in order to ensure they make the best decision. That's what studies are supposed to be for. The cost would simply be added to the cost of the total project.
This contract MUST have been worth several million dollars otherwise the hype wouldn't be worth it and certainly MS wouldn't have paid any attention. As such $100,000 extra to make the correct, unbiased decision is more than doable.
As such, until the study is released(if it ever is), the presumption that MS cooked the result is the only reasonable suggestion.
You should be painfully aware that my analysis putting this at early December was based on the idea that the judge don't hold no more quarter for wiggling, and the obligatory IANAL. So there could be alot of legitimate wiggle room that the judge can't do anything about and must give them or risk having it thrown out on appeal.
Our best indication will come in September. If the first motion for summary judgement is heard when it is expected to be, than IMHO it's much more likely that December will be when this motion will be heard.
Except that the most important and scathing factor against it isn't that I could do these things now, but for how long in the future are you going to be able to do this?
Do you really think that if DRM'd songs are "accepted" by the general populace that your restrictions for use will not become tighter and tighter until you have virtually none left?
Think about it. If there is virtually no real difference between the DRM'd songs and MP3's why do Apple and others put the DRM on the songs to begin with? Answering "because the RIAA forces them to" isn't constructive, as it is the RIAA that will mandate the use of the DRM in the end. So whether it is the RIAA or Apple increasing your restrictions it's all the same in the end.
How is not capitulating to the demands of an "oppressive" system being "in the buggywhip business"?
It is not at all guaranteed yet that all future music will be DRM'd. Hell, the fact that I can get significant amounts of music on-line that isn't DRM'd specifically goes against your premise.
Furthermore, your own recognition that Apple(and others) can change the terms of their contract on a whim will guarantee a significant market for non-DRM'd music. Just wait until your limited to 1 "same-playlist burn limit" and tell me who is in the "buggywhip" business.
You may be right but from reading the filings from IBM's lawyers I'd much rather trust them to nail Darl to the wall than the SEC. When IBM's lawyers get riled they take no prisoners.
mea culpa - your right SCOG must be kept seperate from oldSCO. Thanks for the clarification.
Even so, my point was really that somebody paid something to Novell for the rights to produce UnixWare etc. etc. not just for acting as a licensing agent.