How can this be?
Did not SCO have developers working on the code inhouse?
I'd guess they'll do the same as most companies and blame it all on the software people.
"Your Honor, at the time we were working on our Linux distribution, our software developers were too stupid to realize they were looking at their own stolen code, but later, our highly trained IP lawyers spotted the blatant and devastating piracy during a lunch-hour perusal of the Linux kernel code."
Cringely actualy knows who wrote this code Paul McKenney at Sequent (now IBM). And how the code got there (Paul copied and pasted some of his own code into the Linux kernel). And exactly why SCO is wrong (They don't own the 'general concept' of RCU and other tech thought up by Sequent).
I'm not sure I followed your argument, and I surely don't buy SCO's arguments, but I think SCO is using a different angle. From all the SCO FUD I read last week, it seems they are claiming to own all the code in AIX because it is a licensed UNIX derivative. Sequent (supposedly) developed the RCU code for AIX, therefore all your RCU are belong to SCO. I know McKenney was supposed to have developed the RCU algorithm before AIX, but AIX was where it was implemented. At least that seems to be the latest translation.
C'mon Richard, do yourself a favor and stop trying to get attention all over you and your wonderful GNU, if we could count the packages on a Linux system right now I really doubt that 20% of them would be related directly to GNU.
I'll bet that without the GNU tools, 90% of those packages wouldn't exist -- it's hard to do much without a compiler and all the other stuff we take for granted. And my statistics are bigger than yours.:)
As for examples of A, I've had customers who "want" features that violate basic laws of information theory. That's certainly not best for their business, since it is provable impossible that their attempts to build such a system will ever work.
Exactly. Thanks for proving my point. The customer knows what they want. It is up to the analyst/whatever to help them understand what they can get for their money or temper their expectations if what they want is not possible, not to give them some system the analyst thinks they "need".
Most customers do know what they want, they just can't express it in geek speak. Most analysts don't know how to drag real requirements out of the customer. I'm not saying the customer is blameless, but there are far too many projects where the software people are working on (incorrect) assumptions.
The market is demanding new bells and whistles. How many people would purchase a new version of MS Office, if it would look exactly the same as the previous one, and didn't add any new features? I've been to Microsoft sales presentations. All the people there, like me, were there to make a decision for their company to purchase the latest & greatest to come out of Redmond. You should have heard the Ooohs and Aaahs as each new (and completely pointless) feature was presented.
Well, from your description, it doesn't sound like a groundswell of demand for new features, it sounds like a bunch of people being sucked in by the usual MS marketing hype. We use MS Office at work, and most of the people wouldn't upgrade to Word 2K even though it was available -- '97 was good enough. Eventually the dept. AA got miffed because the reports coming in didn't work with her Word 2K, and the dept. manager made everyone upgrade. Lack of backwards compatibility is why most people upgrade, not some craving for new misfeatures.
Customers frequently don't really know what they want or need.
Customers know exactly what they want even if it may not be exactly what we think they need, and that's a big difference. Software types are far too willing to let their assumptions and preferences produce a solution that is what the customer "needs".
Corporate Complexity needs to be eliminated. Many corporations have built an incredibly complex structure over the years and are unwilling to redesign their business processes to make the best use of software products. I'm sorry, but you'll never convince me that the processes that have slowly built up (layer upon layer) over the last 100 years are anywhere close to optimal in today's market.
It is the individual business rules that make each company different, give each an identity, and give each a possible niche. Why should we have cookie-cutter companies just so we can install cookie-cutter software? I write software, and I believe it is the software that needs to adapt to individual companies, not the other way around. And any company that has been around for 100 years probably has some real business acumen, even if it doesn't fit well with your favorite COTS.
SCO's "experts" have also found sections of code which SCO believes have been obfuscatedâ"where the order of code execution has been rearranged in a direct attempt to hide its SCO pedigree.
SCO has a pedigree? SCO is like one of those mule clones. Whichever way you look at it, it's an abomination.
Also I think this whole case shows how desperate Microsoft has really become to try to spread FUD about linux, to resort to such crude and ineffective methods.
While I agree with the sentiment, give the devil his due. I'd say it's more devious than crude, and we'll have to wait and gauge the fallout before we can (hopefully) say it was ineffective.
Funny thing is that the new CDs at Best Buy are usually around $13 or $14, but the older ones are like $17 to $21. That kinda sucks.
It really sucks. There are old albums I've paid for twice already, once on vinyl and again on tape. If I want it on CD, it costs me another $20, more than I paid for the vinyl and tape combined. The music I'm talking about is 20-30 years old -- it's not like the RIAA hasn't made enough money off of it already. And many of the performers are dead. How does the artificially high price benefit them (the RIAA's precious artists)?
IBM strived desperately to close the Open Architecture with the PS/2 line and Microchannel.
Absolutely -- which is why I mentioned Compaq and the cloners. IBM's retake effectively killed their leadership role but left the open architecture PC for all to use.
It's really shocking how reality has been flipped on it's head. Microsoft was no hero in the year 1988, but Apple and IBM were considered a far worse threat to computing freedom.
But in 1982-83, MicroSoft was considered a poor man's hero. It was almost impossible to buy the operating system. I remember going into one of the new software boutiques and trying to buy MSDOS for my newly-built PC clone and being laughed at. It wasn't for sale, you just "got it" from someone else -- something like a virus, which may explain some of today's problems.
And I agree on the time difference in perception. One decade, IBM bad, MS good. Two decades later, IBM good, MS bad.
The lights and heat promptly switch to her preference, her email preempts yours and attempts to be heard above her choice for full-home surround entertainment...
Excellent point. If I hadn't already posted here, I'd have modded that up. Not only is it funny, but it's a real dilemma for MS which is geared toward a single user.
All Bill has to do is buy up one record label, one movie studio and one TV network. Maybe a book publisher for good measure. If he wanted to do it in one fell swoop, he could buy Disney.
I might thank Mr. Gates for the fact that we have cheap hardware around, and I don't just mean the Xbox but commodities like x86 in general. MS pushed the idea that hardware is cheap and the real business is in software. Even though I don't use their software, I wonder how the home computer revolution would have proceeded without them.
What are you talking about? It was IBM that built the PC, and they made it an open architecture so other companies would build add-on cards. If you're gong to thank someone for commodity x86 hardware and the home computer revolution, thank IBM and then Compaq and the rest of the clone makers. MicroSoft (as it was then spelled) was in a fortunate position and went along for the ride -- ultimately unfortunate for the rest of us. Microsoft has always specialized in broken, buggy software that barely gets the job done, but twenty years ago, at least it was inexpensive software.
this is the single most important thing that has ever been said on slashdot. . ..
That may be the saddest thing ever posted on Slashdot. There was a time when companies and employees were loyal to each other, even in IT -- IBM and HP come to mind. Companies believed that they owed their success to their employees and did not offshore their jobs at the first quarter-point drop in stock price. CEOs made only two to three times the average worker's pay -- not three thousand times the average employee's wage. Companies believed they needed to give something back to the local communities that had allowed them to prosper. In return, employees felt loyalty to the companies that employed them.
That trust was broken with today's employee-as-widget and offshore-the-HQ-and-jobs attitudes. I hope there is a special hell for the greedy, self-serving MBAs who are ruining not only the companies they *work for* and the country they live in but the lives of so many employees as well.
Approaching design with a technician mindset is in my opinion the wrong way. You do not want to fix somthing so it work, you want to find an optimum solution. No offence to technicans but design isn't the same job.
If your "optimum solution" design doesn't work in the real world, it's useless. An EE should be able to produce a (final) design that works and meets specifications. Period.
There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate. If we don't teach theory, we are simply producing maufacturing monkeys, not engineers.
I'd say if we only teach theory, we are simply producing theorists, not engineers. I remember taking a certain EE class where the professor informed us that the great thing about learning all the theory was that we could design anything on paper and know it would work. Several of us with real-world experience broke out laughing. Yes, the theory is necessary, but a real engineer needs to build real, working products in order to understand the practical limitations -- before s/he goes into the workforce.
Slashdot Mirror
It's as if you sold your house "as is", and while you were in the office signing over title someone stole your car and parked it in your garage.
Thanks, that really clarifies thing for me. So SCO is suing IBM for joyriding.
How can this be?
Did not SCO have developers working on the code inhouse?
I'd guess they'll do the same as most companies and blame it all on the software people.
"Your Honor, at the time we were working on our Linux distribution, our software developers were too stupid to realize they were looking at their own stolen code, but later, our highly trained IP lawyers spotted the blatant and devastating piracy during a lunch-hour perusal of the Linux kernel code."
. . .or robinson caruso, (though technically the latter was marooned).
Ah, yes. Robinson Caruso, the famous tenor who crooned while marooned. :)
Cringely actualy knows who wrote this code Paul McKenney at Sequent (now IBM). And how the code got there (Paul copied and pasted some of his own code into the Linux kernel). And exactly why SCO is wrong (They don't own the 'general concept' of RCU and other tech thought up by Sequent).
I'm not sure I followed your argument, and I surely don't buy SCO's arguments, but I think SCO is using a different angle. From all the SCO FUD I read last week, it seems they are claiming to own all the code in AIX because it is a licensed UNIX derivative. Sequent (supposedly) developed the RCU code for AIX, therefore all your RCU are belong to SCO. I know McKenney was supposed to have developed the RCU algorithm before AIX, but AIX was where it was implemented. At least that seems to be the latest translation.
C'mon Richard, do yourself a favor and stop trying to get attention all over you and your wonderful GNU, if we could count the packages on a Linux system right now I really doubt that 20% of them would be related directly to GNU.
I'll bet that without the GNU tools, 90% of those packages wouldn't exist -- it's hard to do much without a compiler and all the other stuff we take for granted. And my statistics are bigger than yours. :)
As for examples of A, I've had customers who "want" features that violate basic laws of information theory. That's certainly not best for their business, since it is provable impossible that their attempts to build such a system will ever work.
Exactly. Thanks for proving my point. The customer knows what they want. It is up to the analyst/whatever to help them understand what they can get for their money or temper their expectations if what they want is not possible, not to give them some system the analyst thinks they "need".
Well, you could google on "microsoft india campus" and come up with something like Indian campus, but that's nothing new.
Most Customers Don't Know What They Want
Most customers do know what they want, they just can't express it in geek speak. Most analysts don't know how to drag real requirements out of the customer. I'm not saying the customer is blameless, but there are far too many projects where the software people are working on (incorrect) assumptions.
Wow, that is really cruel. I like it.
The market is demanding new bells and whistles. How many people would purchase a new version of MS Office, if it would look exactly the same as the previous one, and didn't add any new features? I've been to Microsoft sales presentations. All the people there, like me, were there to make a decision for their company to purchase the latest & greatest to come out of Redmond. You should have heard the Ooohs and Aaahs as each new (and completely pointless) feature was presented.
Well, from your description, it doesn't sound like a groundswell of demand for new features, it sounds like a bunch of people being sucked in by the usual MS marketing hype. We use MS Office at work, and most of the people wouldn't upgrade to Word 2K even though it was available -- '97 was good enough. Eventually the dept. AA got miffed because the reports coming in didn't work with her Word 2K, and the dept. manager made everyone upgrade. Lack of backwards compatibility is why most people upgrade, not some craving for new misfeatures.
Customers frequently don't really know what they want or need.
Customers know exactly what they want even if it may not be exactly what we think they need, and that's a big difference. Software types are far too willing to let their assumptions and preferences produce a solution that is what the customer "needs".
Corporate Complexity needs to be eliminated. Many corporations have built an incredibly complex structure over the years and are unwilling to redesign their business processes to make the best use of software products. I'm sorry, but you'll never convince me that the processes that have slowly built up (layer upon layer) over the last 100 years are anywhere close to optimal in today's market.
It is the individual business rules that make each company different, give each an identity, and give each a possible niche. Why should we have cookie-cutter companies just so we can install cookie-cutter software? I write software, and I believe it is the software that needs to adapt to individual companies, not the other way around. And any company that has been around for 100 years probably has some real business acumen, even if it doesn't fit well with your favorite COTS.
SCO's "experts" have also found sections of code which SCO believes have been obfuscatedâ"where the order of code execution has been rearranged in a direct attempt to hide its SCO pedigree.
SCO has a pedigree? SCO is like one of those mule clones. Whichever way you look at it, it's an abomination.
I say to show our support for IBM we wear our suits to work . . . wadda ya all think?
I think you're at the wrong web site. Suits, indeed. :)
Also I think this whole case shows how desperate Microsoft has really become to try to spread FUD about linux, to resort to such crude and ineffective methods.
While I agree with the sentiment, give the devil his due. I'd say it's more devious than crude, and we'll have to wait and gauge the fallout before we can (hopefully) say it was ineffective.
If you have to resort to this kind of legal idiocy, it doesn't say much about your product line.
Agreed. It does say a lot about SCO's management, however.
Funny thing is that the new CDs at Best Buy are usually around $13 or $14, but the older ones are like $17 to $21. That kinda sucks.
It really sucks. There are old albums I've paid for twice already, once on vinyl and again on tape. If I want it on CD, it costs me another $20, more than I paid for the vinyl and tape combined. The music I'm talking about is 20-30 years old -- it's not like the RIAA hasn't made enough money off of it already. And many of the performers are dead. How does the artificially high price benefit them (the RIAA's precious artists)?
IBM strived desperately to close the Open Architecture with the PS/2 line and Microchannel.
Absolutely -- which is why I mentioned Compaq and the cloners. IBM's retake effectively killed their leadership role but left the open architecture PC for all to use.
It's really shocking how reality has been flipped on it's head. Microsoft was no hero in the year 1988, but Apple and IBM were considered a far worse threat to computing freedom.
But in 1982-83, MicroSoft was considered a poor man's hero. It was almost impossible to buy the operating system. I remember going into one of the new software boutiques and trying to buy MSDOS for my newly-built PC clone and being laughed at. It wasn't for sale, you just "got it" from someone else -- something like a virus, which may explain some of today's problems.
And I agree on the time difference in perception. One decade, IBM bad, MS good. Two decades later, IBM good, MS bad.
The lights and heat promptly switch to her preference, her email preempts yours and attempts to be heard above her choice for full-home surround entertainment...
Excellent point. If I hadn't already posted here, I'd have modded that up. Not only is it funny, but it's a real dilemma for MS which is geared toward a single user.
All Bill has to do is buy up one record label, one movie studio and one TV network. Maybe a book publisher for good measure. If he wanted to do it in one fell swoop, he could buy Disney.
Okay, now I'm scared. Satisfied?
Too bad Tramiel ran Atari like it was Iraq. He destroyed a great company.
*Sniffle* So true. I still have the Atari Technical Reference Notes holding down one of my bookshelves.
I might thank Mr. Gates for the fact that we have cheap hardware around, and I don't just mean the Xbox but commodities like x86 in general. MS pushed the idea that hardware is cheap and the real business is in software. Even though I don't use their software, I wonder how the home computer revolution would have proceeded without them.
What are you talking about? It was IBM that built the PC, and they made it an open architecture so other companies would build add-on cards. If you're gong to thank someone for commodity x86 hardware and the home computer revolution, thank IBM and then Compaq and the rest of the clone makers. MicroSoft (as it was then spelled) was in a fortunate position and went along for the ride -- ultimately unfortunate for the rest of us. Microsoft has always specialized in broken, buggy software that barely gets the job done, but twenty years ago, at least it was inexpensive software.
That may be the saddest thing ever posted on Slashdot. There was a time when companies and employees were loyal to each other, even in IT -- IBM and HP come to mind. Companies believed that they owed their success to their employees and did not offshore their jobs at the first quarter-point drop in stock price. CEOs made only two to three times the average worker's pay -- not three thousand times the average employee's wage. Companies believed they needed to give something back to the local communities that had allowed them to prosper. In return, employees felt loyalty to the companies that employed them.
That trust was broken with today's employee-as-widget and offshore-the-HQ-and-jobs attitudes. I hope there is a special hell for the greedy, self-serving MBAs who are ruining not only the companies they *work for* and the country they live in but the lives of so many employees as well.
Hilary Rosen resigned. you ought to at least target someone who's still employed by the RIAA.
She announced she will resign at the end of 2003. She is still employed by the RIAA.
Approaching design with a technician mindset is in my opinion the wrong way. You do not want to fix somthing so it work, you want to find an optimum solution. No offence to technicans but design isn't the same job.
If your "optimum solution" design doesn't work in the real world, it's useless. An EE should be able to produce a (final) design that works and meets specifications. Period.
There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate. If we don't teach theory, we are simply producing maufacturing monkeys, not engineers.
I'd say if we only teach theory, we are simply producing theorists, not engineers. I remember taking a certain EE class where the professor informed us that the great thing about learning all the theory was that we could design anything on paper and know it would work. Several of us with real-world experience broke out laughing. Yes, the theory is necessary, but a real engineer needs to build real, working products in order to understand the practical limitations -- before s/he goes into the workforce.