You would be surprised at the number of journalists that read slashdot, and the frequency of references it gets in the popular press...
I see slashdot mentioned occassionally, but it doesn't mean they're reading it.
I'll believe that it means something the first time I see a story outside of slashdot about the nmap creators disallowing SCO the right of redistribution. Until then, I rest my case.
This is very important IMHO. We need each and every GPL project being distributed by SCO to do this.
Yeah, great, so all the journalists who read through the nmap release notes or read slashdot will know all about it.
Hint: No journalists do either of those things.
Instead of putting witty comments in release notes, we need someone who'll back it up with a lawsuit. I'll chip in $100 to help them file a suit against SCO. It shouldn't be too difficult to win; they're very publicly infringing.
This might be the "Big Test" everyone has been waiting for.
There's no need for a "big test", copyright law is alive and well, thank you, and has been tested recently and always stands up.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until these stupid "test the GPL" posts start getting modded down to -1 where they belong: SCO had better pray to God that the GPL is valid, because they have no other license (i.e. right) to distribute the copyrighted works of others. Without the GPL, they are automatically infringing copyright on a massive scale, and at $150K/infringement tops, it's not long until the Baystar money comes to an end...
1. Linux is "Diet Coke" while Windows is a #5 value meal. 2. Linux is just used at the "edges", you know, firewalls, routers, that sort of mickey mouse stuff. Yeah, we've thought about making some Windows things do that [ed note: ROFL] 3. A bunch of people looking at your code doesn't help, I mean, are they high-quality? 4. ISV's are ignoring Linux. 5. Linux is hard. There's a lot of complexity in supporting it.
I'm left wondering if the Microsoft folks are really as self-deluded as this article would lead me to believe, or if they're just trying to downplay Linux as "no big deal".
Keep in mind the source: CRN. They have foisted their paper on me (I specifically told the telemarketer "I don't want it" and they started sending it, anyway) so I have a chance to thumb through it occassionally. I wish I had the issue in front of me, but last fall they had a survey about Linux, and the number of people in their interview who felt Linux was usable today and in 6 months was maybe half of the industry average.
Their readership are a bunch of older ISV types who probably just changed to Windows from SCO Unix a couple of years ago, and they're going to be very nervous about changing to Linux. My feeling is that the whole point of this interview is to help convince those types that Linux is too difficult for them, and it's no big deal anyway so might as well ignore it.
In a similar case in Germany SCO Group received an injunction from the court, so SCO never sold Linux licenses in Germany
Remember that they're not actually *selling* the license here in the US, only claiming to. More than one person has documented the effort of attempting to buy a license, only to be ignored by SCO.
They probably realize that they have the potential to get into serious trouble here if they do sell a fraudulent license. They can yell about it all they want, however, to keep the stock price buoyed, and the clueless journalists who write about it never seem to think to do a little more research into the process of buying one.
He needs to read more Groklaw. Pity, his article is long enough that he could have backed it up with research.
First, regardless of who owns SysV, SCO can't find any of it in Linux. Therefore, the "who own SysV?" question is moot.
Second, this case hinges on SCO's alleged contracts with IBM. I'm not a party to those contracts. If IBM put stuff into Linux that they weren't supposed to, then, that's a tussle between IBM and SCO. Not "me and SCO", or "Lehman Bros. and SCO". IBM and SCO. Period.
SCO's case rests on their bastardized idea of "intellectual property" that no lawyer that I know of (outside of their paid counsel) has bought into. Plenty of lawyers are laughing at them.
My feeling is that the "SCO case", and I mean all of it, will be over far quicker than most people think. It'll be sudden, unexpected, and leave everybody with their jaws dropped. You heard it here first...
The following quotes of his just make him sound unprofessional and mannerless more than anything else:
But the casual equation between "open source" and "zero revenue" suggests that on another level you don't really know what you're talking about.
On the other hand, this is written in Scott McNealy's (whose name rhymes with "Mr. McFeely") native tongue. Seriously, this is how McNealy talks when he speaks publicly, why assume he holds anyone else to a higher standard?
We always referred to it as the "elbow test" since it is best done by using your elbows blindly on the keyboard. And, honestly, if you have a 1 year old kid around the house, all the better.
Too late for most people to see this, but here goes.
My wife is from the Philippines, a place which has decent medical care. When we had a trip over there a couple of years ago, we asked the insurance company if they would cover us while there. The lady said "Yes, it's not a problem, just send your medical bills in when you get back and we'll reimburse you. And, by the way, we recommend Makati Medical Center if you need a hospital, but anywhere will be reimbursed."
Now, coming from an insurance company, that sounded wierd. In the US, you have to go to certain facilities, etc.
Anyway, long story short, my son ended up with some horrible virus and had to go in to the hospital for three days. The total, bill, which was padded when they realized my wife lived in America, was about US$200.
I joked with my wife then that the insurance company will probably require us to go back there for care if it's not life-threatening. Given the cost of a hospital room in the US, it would be cheaper to fly over there (about $1K/ticket) for anything more than an overnight stay.
Anyway, I saw this coming. It'll force the insurance/medical industry in the US to start competing, which is a good thing.
Is whatever they're being paid to say at any given moment. I'm amazed that they have any credibility left. Anyway, careful digging through their "research" can come up with either a group of "for" cases or a group of "against" cases, so be careful.
I love it when someone hands me a cold call list, ripe at that given SCO's market standing. I wonder how many of these companies know that they're on SCO's web site....
Get into Day of Defeat, learn it, and don't worry about how well you do compared to others. There are plenty of clans, don't let it bother you. It's rare that a server is domainated by a clan at any given time.
Another game to consider is Ricochet. It has few players, but there are no clans and it's extremely fast-paced with no teams, just everybody vs. everybody. Of course, as a newb you'll get your ass kicked in ways that you didn't even know possible, but you'll catch on.
If we all paypal a couple of dollars into the pot, we can use it in order to help buy out SCO so that we can go on as usual without all this SCO gibberish.
This has been discussed. Less than half their stock is publicly traded, so buying them isn't an option.
Actually, it is. We have a rogue company claiming to own the collective work of thousands of programmers, sending threat letters, tarnishing the reputation of open source software, and causing any trouble that they can. All this at a crucial time in the adoption of open source software.
Sorry if we come off as emotional, but many of us have a lot of time, effort, and even money invested in making open source software a viable alternative to companies like SCO. I served for 3 years as president of a LUG, run my own business, and rely on people adopting OSS to make a living. Darl is, even if in a small way for some of us, affecting our livelihood. All to line his own pockets.
The love of money is the root of all evil. That was true 2000 years ago when Paul wrote it, and it's true today. SCO is evil. You might not see it, but we do.
A hundred gigabytes of usage a month may not strain the system but some abusers, he said, consume more than a terabyte of data each month -- equal to about 1,000 gigabytes,
A terabyte is 34GB/day:
34B/86400 sec=393KB/sec
So, he's going to get me to believe that someone is pumping 400KB/sec 24/7. I can sometimes reach the theoretical maximum (which is a little above 500KB/sec around here), but this is preposterous. Even 100GB in a month would be hard to achieve.
People who received Comcast's bandwidth abuse letters and were willing to discuss their usage patterns publicly were shocked at the "Twilight Zone" experiences they had with customer support.
They've apparently never had problems with their service and had to call...
Every time I think Darl has hit the low point, he makes a bigger fool of himself than I thought possible. I honestly have to wonder where it's going to end.
Speaking of stock, 30+% of SCO stock is held by mutual funds and other institutional owners, so if you believe that SCO is going to lose this case, which seems likely, expect all the shareholders to take huge losses when this stock sinks.
Take a look at the size of these funds. For most funds, the SCO investment won't be a big deal when it goes to $0.
I see this all the time (and cringe), so here's a short list of what to not do:
1. Don't complain about it on Slashdot (not saying the poster is). We see this all the time here. The offender probably isn't reading, and frankly doesn't care.
2. Don't email them or use a web contact form. This has no legal ramifications, and the person reading it will probably just delete it thinking you're a loon.
Now, for what to do. IANAL, etc.
1. Send a certified letter to their corporate legal counsel if you can find out who it is, otherwise an officer of the corporation. Outline what is infringing, and explain why you own it. For your first letter, no threats, just tell them (not ask: tell) to deal with the infringement within 30 days or so and to inform you when they've done so. Their options are to remove the code or GPL their product.
2. If that doesn't work, hire an attorney. He'll send a nastier letter.
My guess is that for 95% of the cases out there, the first letter will solve the problem. For another 4%, the attorney's letter will. You'd better be willing to go the distance for the other 1%. Note that the attorney may take it on contingency if the other party has enough money to make it worth his while.
I spent my college years working at an unskilled job with unskilled people. There was a lot of "clock me in when you get there" and "clock me out when you leave". There was also plenty of "clock in from break then finish the cigarette".
You may think it's terrible, just terrible, that they have to "prove" their identity with their palm print. Sorry, it's not. There's very little difference between that and regular punch-in/punch-out, except that this is harder to fake.
anyone else noticed that the entire campaign to get new laws to aid their "war" against their customers will result in the STATE paying to investigate and prosecute copyright violations rather than the copyright owner?
Yes, we have noticed. When the MPAA was trying to push the SDMCA through the Tennessee legislature last year, we all caught on to the fact that they were simply trying to burden the state with doing investigative work for what would otherwise be a civil action. The language of the bill actually required the DA to investigate and subsequently prosecute (if appropriate) anyone the cable company said was stealing service.
One of our primary oppositions was that we barely have enough cash to run the state as it is, we don't need to find more things to pay for...
No time for a thorough refutation of this incredibly overrated post. Other clueful folks should feel free to jump in.
The GPL has never been tested in court,
It doesn't have to be. SCO is distributing software under the GPL now (Linux kernel, Samba, et al). If the GPL is invalid, fine, that software is still copyrighted by the original author. With the GPL out of the way, those authors would be free to sue SCO for violating their copyrights (SCO has no other right to distribute this software) and receive up to $150K per incident in statutory damages.
SCO had better hope the GPL is valid, otherwise they're guilty of massive copyright infringement, nay, piracy.
There are good reasons why they wouldn't release this code. If they did, the Linux community would make sure that the offending code wasn't in the next kernal release (which would probably be all of a week in coming) and then SCO could only go after users for past use of their code. That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out. That's much more enforcable as well.
Watch Judge Judy for an hour or two. She goes through this daily. You *have* to mitigate your damages. What that means is that SCO must tell us what the code is so that it can be removed. Failure to do that does not mean that they will receive more damages. At best, they can hope to receive damages for the time from when the mythical code first entered Linux to the start of their lawsuit.
The fact that Darl doesn't understand mitigation of damages was brought up by IBM at the initial hearing last month, where they pointed out that Darl himself said he doesn't want to reveal the code because he thinks that $1B in damages are racking up each week. The judge didn't buy it.
If SCO was just smoke and mirrors don't you think some analysts would be crying that?
Well, we know that SCO is smoke & mirrors (those of us who have followed the case on Groklaw), so what more is there to know? The public demonstrations that they've done have been disastrous to their position among the tech community, but frankly most of their claims are too complex to be thoroughly evaluated by a non-programmer. And let's face it, these analysts aren't reading slashdot.
Surely at least one arbitrage firm would be setting up a short position
This has been covered elsewhere, but the stock is so shorted that there's none left to short.
I would recommend that you read Groklaw (www.groklaw.net) to find out more about this case. You have a strong misunderstanding of many of the fundamentals of the case.
Slashdot Mirror
I see slashdot mentioned occassionally, but it doesn't mean they're reading it.
I'll believe that it means something the first time I see a story outside of slashdot about the nmap creators disallowing SCO the right of redistribution. Until then, I rest my case.
Yeah, great, so all the journalists who read through the nmap release notes or read slashdot will know all about it.
Hint: No journalists do either of those things.
Instead of putting witty comments in release notes, we need someone who'll back it up with a lawsuit. I'll chip in $100 to help them file a suit against SCO. It shouldn't be too difficult to win; they're very publicly infringing.
There's no need for a "big test", copyright law is alive and well, thank you, and has been tested recently and always stands up.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until these stupid "test the GPL" posts start getting modded down to -1 where they belong: SCO had better pray to God that the GPL is valid, because they have no other license (i.e. right) to distribute the copyrighted works of others. Without the GPL, they are automatically infringing copyright on a massive scale, and at $150K/infringement tops, it's not long until the Baystar money comes to an end...
Odd how they never seem to "remember" the folks at the NSA, the 300 programmers at IBM, etc. etc. etc.
The advertisement, er, interview, in a nutshell:
1. Linux is "Diet Coke" while Windows is a #5 value meal.
2. Linux is just used at the "edges", you know, firewalls, routers, that sort of mickey mouse stuff. Yeah, we've thought about making some Windows things do that [ed note: ROFL]
3. A bunch of people looking at your code doesn't help, I mean, are they high-quality?
4. ISV's are ignoring Linux.
5. Linux is hard. There's a lot of complexity in supporting it.
I'm left wondering if the Microsoft folks are really as self-deluded as this article would lead me to believe, or if they're just trying to downplay Linux as "no big deal".
Keep in mind the source: CRN. They have foisted their paper on me (I specifically told the telemarketer "I don't want it" and they started sending it, anyway) so I have a chance to thumb through it occassionally. I wish I had the issue in front of me, but last fall they had a survey about Linux, and the number of people in their interview who felt Linux was usable today and in 6 months was maybe half of the industry average.
Their readership are a bunch of older ISV types who probably just changed to Windows from SCO Unix a couple of years ago, and they're going to be very nervous about changing to Linux. My feeling is that the whole point of this interview is to help convince those types that Linux is too difficult for them, and it's no big deal anyway so might as well ignore it.
Remember that they're not actually *selling* the license here in the US, only claiming to. More than one person has documented the effort of attempting to buy a license, only to be ignored by SCO.
They probably realize that they have the potential to get into serious trouble here if they do sell a fraudulent license. They can yell about it all they want, however, to keep the stock price buoyed, and the clueless journalists who write about it never seem to think to do a little more research into the process of buying one.
He needs to read more Groklaw. Pity, his article is long enough that he could have backed it up with research.
First, regardless of who owns SysV, SCO can't find any of it in Linux. Therefore, the "who own SysV?" question is moot.
Second, this case hinges on SCO's alleged contracts with IBM. I'm not a party to those contracts. If IBM put stuff into Linux that they weren't supposed to, then, that's a tussle between IBM and SCO. Not "me and SCO", or "Lehman Bros. and SCO". IBM and SCO. Period.
SCO's case rests on their bastardized idea of "intellectual property" that no lawyer that I know of (outside of their paid counsel) has bought into. Plenty of lawyers are laughing at them.
My feeling is that the "SCO case", and I mean all of it, will be over far quicker than most people think. It'll be sudden, unexpected, and leave everybody with their jaws dropped. You heard it here first...
On the other hand, this is written in Scott McNealy's (whose name rhymes with "Mr. McFeely") native tongue. Seriously, this is how McNealy talks when he speaks publicly, why assume he holds anyone else to a higher standard?
Anyone who's been hiking with a 4 year old knows what that's like.
We always referred to it as the "elbow test" since it is best done by using your elbows blindly on the keyboard. And, honestly, if you have a 1 year old kid around the house, all the better.
Too late for most people to see this, but here goes.
My wife is from the Philippines, a place which has decent medical care. When we had a trip over there a couple of years ago, we asked the insurance company if they would cover us while there. The lady said "Yes, it's not a problem, just send your medical bills in when you get back and we'll reimburse you. And, by the way, we recommend Makati Medical Center if you need a hospital, but anywhere will be reimbursed."
Now, coming from an insurance company, that sounded wierd. In the US, you have to go to certain facilities, etc.
Anyway, long story short, my son ended up with some horrible virus and had to go in to the hospital for three days. The total, bill, which was padded when they realized my wife lived in America, was about US$200.
I joked with my wife then that the insurance company will probably require us to go back there for care if it's not life-threatening. Given the cost of a hospital room in the US, it would be cheaper to fly over there (about $1K/ticket) for anything more than an overnight stay.
Anyway, I saw this coming. It'll force the insurance/medical industry in the US to start competing, which is a good thing.
Is whatever they're being paid to say at any given moment. I'm amazed that they have any credibility left. Anyway, careful digging through their "research" can come up with either a group of "for" cases or a group of "against" cases, so be careful.
I love it when someone hands me a cold call list, ripe at that given SCO's market standing. I wonder how many of these companies know that they're on SCO's web site....
Get into Day of Defeat, learn it, and don't worry about how well you do compared to others. There are plenty of clans, don't let it bother you. It's rare that a server is domainated by a clan at any given time.
Another game to consider is Ricochet. It has few players, but there are no clans and it's extremely fast-paced with no teams, just everybody vs. everybody. Of course, as a newb you'll get your ass kicked in ways that you didn't even know possible, but you'll catch on.
1. Less functionality than XP Home? Ouch!
2. I suppose it'll maintain backward compatibility with the common bugs and viruses...
If we all paypal a couple of dollars into the pot, we can use it in order to help buy out SCO so that we can go on as usual without all this SCO gibberish.
This has been discussed. Less than half their stock is publicly traded, so buying them isn't an option.
This more than inconvenienced the owners of that site, who had to move pages and ended up displaying this page instead.
Which will now be nicely slashdotted....
This is not some battle of good v. evil
Actually, it is. We have a rogue company claiming to own the collective work of thousands of programmers, sending threat letters, tarnishing the reputation of open source software, and causing any trouble that they can. All this at a crucial time in the adoption of open source software.
Sorry if we come off as emotional, but many of us have a lot of time, effort, and even money invested in making open source software a viable alternative to companies like SCO. I served for 3 years as president of a LUG, run my own business, and rely on people adopting OSS to make a living. Darl is, even if in a small way for some of us, affecting our livelihood. All to line his own pockets.
The love of money is the root of all evil. That was true 2000 years ago when Paul wrote it, and it's true today. SCO is evil. You might not see it, but we do.
A hundred gigabytes of usage a month may not strain the system but some abusers, he said, consume more than a terabyte of data each month -- equal to about 1,000 gigabytes,
A terabyte is 34GB/day:
34B/86400 sec=393KB/sec
So, he's going to get me to believe that someone is pumping 400KB/sec 24/7. I can sometimes reach the theoretical maximum (which is a little above 500KB/sec around here), but this is preposterous. Even 100GB in a month would be hard to achieve.
People who received Comcast's bandwidth abuse letters and were willing to discuss their usage patterns publicly were shocked at the "Twilight Zone" experiences they had with customer support.
They've apparently never had problems with their service and had to call...
Every time I think Darl has hit the low point, he makes a bigger fool of himself than I thought possible. I honestly have to wonder where it's going to end.
Speaking of stock, 30+% of SCO stock is held by mutual funds and other institutional owners, so if you believe that SCO is going to lose this case, which seems likely, expect all the shareholders to take huge losses when this stock sinks.
Take a look at the size of these funds. For most funds, the SCO investment won't be a big deal when it goes to $0.
I see this all the time (and cringe), so here's a short list of what to not do:
1. Don't complain about it on Slashdot (not saying the poster is). We see this all the time here. The offender probably isn't reading, and frankly doesn't care.
2. Don't email them or use a web contact form. This has no legal ramifications, and the person reading it will probably just delete it thinking you're a loon.
Now, for what to do. IANAL, etc.
1. Send a certified letter to their corporate legal counsel if you can find out who it is, otherwise an officer of the corporation. Outline what is infringing, and explain why you own it. For your first letter, no threats, just tell them (not ask: tell) to deal with the infringement within 30 days or so and to inform you when they've done so. Their options are to remove the code or GPL their product.
2. If that doesn't work, hire an attorney. He'll send a nastier letter.
My guess is that for 95% of the cases out there, the first letter will solve the problem. For another 4%, the attorney's letter will. You'd better be willing to go the distance for the other 1%. Note that the attorney may take it on contingency if the other party has enough money to make it worth his while.
I spent my college years working at an unskilled job with unskilled people. There was a lot of "clock me in when you get there" and "clock me out when you leave". There was also plenty of "clock in from break then finish the cigarette".
You may think it's terrible, just terrible, that they have to "prove" their identity with their palm print. Sorry, it's not. There's very little difference between that and regular punch-in/punch-out, except that this is harder to fake.
So what's the gripe?
anyone else noticed that the entire campaign to get new laws to aid their "war" against their customers will result in the STATE paying to investigate and prosecute copyright violations rather than the copyright owner?
Yes, we have noticed. When the MPAA was trying to push the SDMCA through the Tennessee legislature last year, we all caught on to the fact that they were simply trying to burden the state with doing investigative work for what would otherwise be a civil action. The language of the bill actually required the DA to investigate and subsequently prosecute (if appropriate) anyone the cable company said was stealing service.
One of our primary oppositions was that we barely have enough cash to run the state as it is, we don't need to find more things to pay for...
No time for a thorough refutation of this incredibly overrated post. Other clueful folks should feel free to jump in.
The GPL has never been tested in court,
It doesn't have to be. SCO is distributing software under the GPL now (Linux kernel, Samba, et al). If the GPL is invalid, fine, that software is still copyrighted by the original author. With the GPL out of the way, those authors would be free to sue SCO for violating their copyrights (SCO has no other right to distribute this software) and receive up to $150K per incident in statutory damages.
SCO had better hope the GPL is valid, otherwise they're guilty of massive copyright infringement, nay, piracy.
There are good reasons why they wouldn't release this code. If they did, the Linux community would make sure that the offending code wasn't in the next kernal release (which would probably be all of a week in coming) and then SCO could only go after users for past use of their code. That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out. That's much more enforcable as well.
Watch Judge Judy for an hour or two. She goes through this daily. You *have* to mitigate your damages. What that means is that SCO must tell us what the code is so that it can be removed. Failure to do that does not mean that they will receive more damages. At best, they can hope to receive damages for the time from when the mythical code first entered Linux to the start of their lawsuit.
The fact that Darl doesn't understand mitigation of damages was brought up by IBM at the initial hearing last month, where they pointed out that Darl himself said he doesn't want to reveal the code because he thinks that $1B in damages are racking up each week. The judge didn't buy it.
If SCO was just smoke and mirrors don't you think some analysts would be crying that?
Well, we know that SCO is smoke & mirrors (those of us who have followed the case on Groklaw), so what more is there to know? The public demonstrations that they've done have been disastrous to their position among the tech community, but frankly most of their claims are too complex to be thoroughly evaluated by a non-programmer. And let's face it, these analysts aren't reading slashdot.
Surely at least one arbitrage firm would be setting up a short position
This has been covered elsewhere, but the stock is so shorted that there's none left to short.
I would recommend that you read Groklaw (www.groklaw.net) to find out more about this case. You have a strong misunderstanding of many of the fundamentals of the case.