Not that I have to say this on Slashdot, but...
on
Red Hat Recap
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· Score: 1
Please don't go read the article. It's another troll piece by Dan Lyons, a reputed dimwit who likes to get on slashdot and groklaw with trash like this to pump up the web hits. It's not worth reading, he says nothing new, move along.
I received an email at our lug webmaster account asking for help with some questions about Linux from an MIS student. Here are the questions that her instructor had given them to research and answer:
1.What is Linux and who created it? 2.Why was it released into the public domain rather than copyrighted? 3. Is it possible to copyright anything that relates to Linux? If so, in what way?
I gave *long* answers, showed examples of copyright statements from the Linux source, explained that everybody who contributes to it, such as Linus or IBM, keep copyright, etc. I really wanted to meet her clueless instructor, but, maybe next time.
Keep in mind that these guys were pushing cobol up until about 3 years ago, so they probably think it's extremely cutting edge to push windows nt.
Luckily, we have s202 of the Copyright Act which says that it's illegal in Australia to make groundless threats of legal proceedings.
If your legal system is based on English common law, which seems to almost certainly be the case given Australia's history, then such threats would be illegal anyway without the copyright act.
He wasn't the one who decided (or even proposed) to open source Netscape Navigator; he's just a guy that got rich off of someone else's idea.
You're being too kind to the guy. Look, he left UIUC where he had been working on open source (although not Free) web products, the NCSA httpd and NCSA Mosaic. He then founded a company to directly compete against those products. They gave away the web browser (oh, did you think Microsoft started that tactic?) and sold the server for some ungodly sum of money. After gaining a monopoly, they abused their position to keep the monopoly by staying one step ahead of everybody else with new proprietary features. Within a couple of years, most of the web had turned into a big "This site works with Netscape Navigator, Download Netscape Now" button.
In a wierd turn of events, the only company that had the resources to keep up with them- Microsoft- finally put an end to their monopoly position by using similar tactics (free browser, etc.) and were finally able to establish a monopoly position themselves when Netscape ran out of money and couldn't quickly create a decent browser to replace the terrible 4.x series.
Andreesen made his money by being the antithesis of the open source programmer. He took a page out of Bill Gates playbook and found that Gates still knew how to play that game better than he could imagine.
After it was all said and done, Netscape decided to create an open source project to get free programming for their browser, since they didn't have the cash to do it themselves. The result, of course, is the browser that I'm using right now.
But I don't see Andreesen as some sort of open source luminary, and never will. History will remember him, instead, as the guy who started the first dotcom.
Yes, but they're also helping it. I think the negative and positives are cancelling each other out.
The irony is that the "legal issues" have been one of the "drawbacks" for some time now with respect to FLOSS. Now that the legal issues are out in the open and it's being made blatantly obvious that there are no real concerns, they are very much helping FLOSS.
News.com reports that SCO is now targetting the Feds and their supercomputers (the Beowulf clusters, etc.). Looks like they bit off more than they can chew, even before winning a single case.
They're not trying to win a single case, they're trying to get back in the press in a positive or semi-positive light and get the stock back above $10/share. Suing the federal government will give them exactly what they want: attention.
Darl and company will likely end up enjoying the last of their days relaxing on a south pacific beach somewhere. Microsoft wants them to do as much damage to FLOSS before they have to flee the country. Winning the lawsuits isn't one of their goals. Understand those facts and the whole thing starts to make some amount of sense.
There are two views on this, and both have validity. If you do it right, it'll pay in spades. Do it wrong, and you'll end up pretty lonely.
Personally, I'm all about doing business with my family. Simply put, they are the people that I know and trust. If you hire someone, you really don't know them beyond what their resume says and what you can learn in an hour or two of interviewing, which is not much.
Money magazine had an excellent article on the subject last year, here it is in the archive:
"Any report that we made a cash payment of seven figures is highly exaggerated, and it disappoints me that that quote is out there in the media," Marsh said. "The contract that we signed with SCO specifically prohibits any party from discussing the economics of the transaction. If you have an agreement that calls for certain aspects to be protected, then you would hope that that would be respected."
This guy doesn't get it. You don't hope for anything; you sue them when they breach the contract. If you're smart, you get damages (and yes, EV1 is being damaged by SCO's breach) and maybe even your money back.
I keep seeing this "I wish they wouldn't do that" quote from him. If you wish they wouldn't do it, you get a lawyer and sue.
I just bought the rights to calculus from Novell a couple of years ago. I'm going to look through these books to see if any of my intellectual property is there.
I read this story a couple of days ago when it showed up on FC. I would also recommend that people go and read the other "Hall of Shame" stories on that site, you'll start to see a common theme, which is that people just don't know how to deal with situations like this.
In this situation, the lady who was robbed is, let's face it, dumb as a rock. She paid them for stuff that they know she owns. Holy crap. This was already being handled by the police.
The police are idiots. There's a quote in there about "we think they're breaking the law by not holding the stuff for 15 days." Well, Barney Fife, here's a clue: You are the police! If they're breaking the law, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, CRETIN. Duh. The EB admitted to trafficking in stolen goods. Selling her stuff that they know she owns is trafficking in stolen goods. Why were no arrests made?
Read the rest of them, though, it's a common theme. People are getting ripped off for $20,000 in some cases (pool work, kitchen work, etc.) and saying stupid stuff like "I don't know how they get away with it". Well, genius, they get away with it because you're going to the TV station instead of an attorney.
There's another lady who was being evicted from her apartment because they said she'd been late paying. In fact, she had proof (all the cancelled checks) that she had paid on time, yet it wasn't until the TV station took those checks to the court that the eviction stopped. The apartment was retaliating against her for turning them in for codes violations. Here she'd been to court and didn't even know to just show the court that the other side was lying.
Anyway, it's sad. People don't know what to do, the police apparently don't know what to do, it's just stupidity all around.
Your hint for the day: It's a hell of a lot easier to not grant these stupid patents in the first place than to be forced to go back and invalidate them.
Pull your heads out of your asses and quit handing out patents like candy. You're ruining the tech industry.
(blatant_plug)
Well, don't host with that guy, come host with Tigerhost.com. We only charge $100/month for businesses! (And $16 for personal sites.)
(/blatant_plug)
Well, I would, but you don't seem to know xml too well...
The whole thing stinks, but I'm not completely sure this is correct information. 86M is a lot of money to be giving (and not investing) in a company.
How you got modded up to 5 is amazing. Let me clue you in. Microsoft has about $50B in cash on hand right now. Yes: Fifty billion dollars. Knock 6 zeros off each number. If Microsoft had $50,000, they've given SCO $86, or about 1/500th. For all the harm they've done to Linux, is likely *is* an investment, and it's cost them essentially nothing.
I'd been guessing all along that Darl and company were acting so recklessly in public (they're obviously not trying to win these lawsuits or they'd be quiet) because that was part of the deal.
They had to do something to keep their stock from tanking on the financial results, I guess.
It's 12PM CST and their stock is off by $1.55 since opening. These tactics don't have anywhere near the power that they did 6 months ago, although I'm guessing the drop would have been much larger without the lawsuits.
That's oddly the exact opposite of my company. We use Linux, and SCO can come and get it if they think they can handle it.
Since SCO will be a smoking crater by IBM's lawsuit before this is over, I guess I'd have a pierce the corporate veil and go after Darl's house, cars, wives, etc. No problem.
Those of you who modded this up might want to take 10 seconds and read the linked articles. Since you're too lazy:
CNN story: from Sept. 1999, story about some updates to Slashdot.
AP story: talks about a new website at MIT, mentions that the moderation system will be similar to slashdot.
Business link: Andover buys slashdot, in French. pages link: French story about decss, mentions slashdot.
If this is the best set of links that you can come up with, then I'm afraid that you've simply proven my point.
As I said, when I see something about nmap in the mainstream press, then I'll believe it. So far we've had a story in Australia (where SCO seems to be taking a well-deserved beating), but I don't think we'll see it here in the states.
And we're certainly not going to see that some journalist was reading through the nmap changelog or hanging out on slashdot and found the story.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't go read the article. It's another troll piece by Dan Lyons, a reputed dimwit who likes to get on slashdot and groklaw with trash like this to pump up the web hits. It's not worth reading, he says nothing new, move along.
I received an email at our lug webmaster account asking for help with some questions about Linux from an MIS student. Here are the questions that her instructor had given them to research and answer:
1.What is Linux and who created it?
2.Why was it released into the public domain rather than copyrighted?
3. Is it possible to copyright anything that relates to Linux? If so, in what way?
I gave *long* answers, showed examples of copyright statements from the Linux source, explained that everybody who contributes to it, such as Linus or IBM, keep copyright, etc. I really wanted to meet her clueless instructor, but, maybe next time.
Keep in mind that these guys were pushing cobol up until about 3 years ago, so they probably think it's extremely cutting edge to push windows nt.
remember netscape?
Remember NCSA Mosaic? Didn't think so...
Luckily, we have s202 of the Copyright Act which says that it's illegal in Australia to make groundless threats of legal proceedings.
If your legal system is based on English common law, which seems to almost certainly be the case given Australia's history, then such threats would be illegal anyway without the copyright act.
You're being too kind to the guy. Look, he left UIUC where he had been working on open source (although not Free) web products, the NCSA httpd and NCSA Mosaic. He then founded a company to directly compete against those products. They gave away the web browser (oh, did you think Microsoft started that tactic?) and sold the server for some ungodly sum of money. After gaining a monopoly, they abused their position to keep the monopoly by staying one step ahead of everybody else with new proprietary features. Within a couple of years, most of the web had turned into a big "This site works with Netscape Navigator, Download Netscape Now" button.
In a wierd turn of events, the only company that had the resources to keep up with them- Microsoft- finally put an end to their monopoly position by using similar tactics (free browser, etc.) and were finally able to establish a monopoly position themselves when Netscape ran out of money and couldn't quickly create a decent browser to replace the terrible 4.x series.
Andreesen made his money by being the antithesis of the open source programmer. He took a page out of Bill Gates playbook and found that Gates still knew how to play that game better than he could imagine.
After it was all said and done, Netscape decided to create an open source project to get free programming for their browser, since they didn't have the cash to do it themselves. The result, of course, is the browser that I'm using right now.
But I don't see Andreesen as some sort of open source luminary, and never will. History will remember him, instead, as the guy who started the first dotcom.
Yes, but they're also helping it. I think the negative and positives are cancelling each other out.
The irony is that the "legal issues" have been one of the "drawbacks" for some time now with respect to FLOSS. Now that the legal issues are out in the open and it's being made blatantly obvious that there are no real concerns, they are very much helping FLOSS.
They're not trying to win a single case, they're trying to get back in the press in a positive or semi-positive light and get the stock back above $10/share. Suing the federal government will give them exactly what they want: attention.
Darl and company will likely end up enjoying the last of their days relaxing on a south pacific beach somewhere. Microsoft wants them to do as much damage to FLOSS before they have to flee the country. Winning the lawsuits isn't one of their goals. Understand those facts and the whole thing starts to make some amount of sense.
Hey, why didn't someone call me?
a beowulf cluster of picture frames...
Sorry, mod me down, I have karma to burn.
There are two views on this, and both have validity. If you do it right, it'll pay in spades. Do it wrong, and you'll end up pretty lonely.
Personally, I'm all about doing business with my family. Simply put, they are the people that I know and trust. If you hire someone, you really don't know them beyond what their resume says and what you can learn in an hour or two of interviewing, which is not much.
Money magazine had an excellent article on the subject last year, here it is in the archive:
Silver Spoon - In Praise of Nepotism
The article is an interview with the author of a book called "In Praise of Nepotism", and makes some excellent points.
So, Microsoft is now offering indemnity? Cool!
This guy doesn't get it. You don't hope for anything; you sue them when they breach the contract. If you're smart, you get damages (and yes, EV1 is being damaged by SCO's breach) and maybe even your money back.
I keep seeing this "I wish they wouldn't do that" quote from him. If you wish they wouldn't do it, you get a lawyer and sue.
I just bought the rights to calculus from Novell a couple of years ago. I'm going to look through these books to see if any of my intellectual property is there.
I read this story a couple of days ago when it showed up on FC. I would also recommend that people go and read the other "Hall of Shame" stories on that site, you'll start to see a common theme, which is that people just don't know how to deal with situations like this.
In this situation, the lady who was robbed is, let's face it, dumb as a rock. She paid them for stuff that they know she owns. Holy crap. This was already being handled by the police.
The police are idiots. There's a quote in there about "we think they're breaking the law by not holding the stuff for 15 days." Well, Barney Fife, here's a clue: You are the police! If they're breaking the law, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, CRETIN. Duh. The EB admitted to trafficking in stolen goods. Selling her stuff that they know she owns is trafficking in stolen goods. Why were no arrests made?
Read the rest of them, though, it's a common theme. People are getting ripped off for $20,000 in some cases (pool work, kitchen work, etc.) and saying stupid stuff like "I don't know how they get away with it". Well, genius, they get away with it because you're going to the TV station instead of an attorney.
There's another lady who was being evicted from her apartment because they said she'd been late paying. In fact, she had proof (all the cancelled checks) that she had paid on time, yet it wasn't until the TV station took those checks to the court that the eviction stopped. The apartment was retaliating against her for turning them in for codes violations. Here she'd been to court and didn't even know to just show the court that the other side was lying.
Anyway, it's sad. People don't know what to do, the police apparently don't know what to do, it's just stupidity all around.
Your hint for the day: It's a hell of a lot easier to not grant these stupid patents in the first place than to be forced to go back and invalidate them.
Pull your heads out of your asses and quit handing out patents like candy. You're ruining the tech industry.
Well, I would, but you don't seem to know xml too well...
The whole thing stinks, but I'm not completely sure this is correct information. 86M is a lot of money to be giving (and not investing) in a company.
How you got modded up to 5 is amazing. Let me clue you in. Microsoft has about $50B in cash on hand right now. Yes: Fifty billion dollars. Knock 6 zeros off each number. If Microsoft had $50,000, they've given SCO $86, or about 1/500th. For all the harm they've done to Linux, is likely *is* an investment, and it's cost them essentially nothing.
I'd been guessing all along that Darl and company were acting so recklessly in public (they're obviously not trying to win these lawsuits or they'd be quiet) because that was part of the deal.
Camp No-Be-Bo-SCO
No idea what the hell that is, but I think I'm going to send my kids there next summer.
They had to do something to keep their stock from tanking on the financial results, I guess.
It's 12PM CST and their stock is off by $1.55 since opening. These tactics don't have anywhere near the power that they did 6 months ago, although I'm guessing the drop would have been much larger without the lawsuits.
That's oddly the exact opposite of my company. We use Linux, and SCO can come and get it if they think they can handle it.
Since SCO will be a smoking crater by IBM's lawsuit before this is over, I guess I'd have a pierce the corporate veil and go after Darl's house, cars, wives, etc. No problem.
Did they fare well, also?
In a surprise turn of events...
Surprise to whom? Seriously, they've been "postponing" this since last year, why would anyone be surprised?
Who's side are you attempting to argue on?
Those of you who modded this up might want to take 10 seconds and read the linked articles. Since you're too lazy:
CNN story: from Sept. 1999, story about some updates to Slashdot.
AP story: talks about a new website at MIT, mentions that the moderation system will be similar to slashdot.
Business link: Andover buys slashdot, in French.
pages link: French story about decss, mentions slashdot.
If this is the best set of links that you can come up with, then I'm afraid that you've simply proven my point.
As I said, when I see something about nmap in the mainstream press, then I'll believe it. So far we've had a story in Australia (where SCO seems to be taking a well-deserved beating), but I don't think we'll see it here in the states.
And we're certainly not going to see that some journalist was reading through the nmap changelog or hanging out on slashdot and found the story.
Page 7:
"The court stated that trade secret status should not be deemed destroyed merely because the information was posted on the Internet..."
Holy crap, what exactly *would* destroy trade secret status if posting to the internet doesn't do the job?
Good! I doubt it'll show up in the US, though. Probably the Lee Gomes column in the WSJ is our only hope.