I think a 24% crash in SCOs stock price today shows what the market thinks of this news, and exactly how much Linus has to fear.
The threat to get Linus is as hollow as the rest, no Judge will allow a suit to be brought when the ownership of the IP is in question, and given that Novell own a vast majority of the patents (832 unix and novell vs 117 Sco and Unix), according to the USPTO, the fact that Novell have taken some time and obviously a lot of expensive Legal advice before making such a series of claims vis a vis the ownership of the Unix IP and seems willing to step in the way of SCOs legal bullets, I'd say SCO's battle to steal Linux from the community has just got infinitely more difficult.
The situation is similar but not analogous as my home use of Photoshop, produces no net loss for Adobe, even in the short term. As the product is not marketed towards home users, but at more serious hobbiests and professionals who are willing to pay the large upfront cost of such a software package
Stealing money from a bank does result in a net loss and as the result is uncertain would if repeated by many result in no gain at all.
But to look at the bank analogy a little deeper,
You go to the bank and borrow money to start a business or send yourself to business school, whatever, you cant afford the fees upfront but the bank lets you take a loan because by doing so your chances of being able to afford to pay that money back with plenty of interest is increased, sure some people would laugh and run off with the money others would waste it, some would fail abjectly, but more than enough do succeed for the banks to keep throwing money at their loan customers. Overall your potential ability to repay that money is increased by the very fact they gave you the money in the first place.
Most unemployed people I know would not have the spare capital to buy a copy of Photoshop which retails for $600+ today and noting that you can use Photoshop 'Elements' or 'PhotoAlbum' will not assist you greatly on your CV, so lets say Adobe, would license for no cost a personal use version of Photoshop, fully featured as per the commercial version, they simply ask that when you turn pro you upgrade to a full license, and for that you get a full manual set, regular upgrades and technical support, everything you get when you buy a boxed set now. Plus you don't run the risk of being sued by Adobe for abusing their license.
Basically by giving you the product they are increasing not only the chances that you could afford to buy it in the future but also the chances that you will buy it.
We could argue about net loss to competitors to Adobe, but that would be as bad as arguing that all banks should have the same interest rates.
I actually think, and I am sure that many would agree, that big software houses would benefit enourmously from giving their software away to home users so they could profit from business users.
However I have a little secret to tell, in that I am a registerd licensed user of Photoshop and a couple of other Adobe products which I bought before I bit the free software bug. I might add that I did obtain a non authorised copy before I bought, so I feel free to prognosticate ex cathedra on the matter;) Which is not an endorsement of 'piracy' but rather an honest question about why software companies should care about non commercial use of their products, when the next generation of potential young designers decide that with all the draconian nonsense about license costs and threats to remove their liberty cause them to investigate the increasingly popular free alternatives.
I guess what I'm saying is that Commercial, Closed Source, per seat license style software houses are going to have to evolve a smarter business model to survive in a future which _will_ be dominated by Free Software.
It would, and I did think that the plan would be doable simply by buying a majority share in the company from the general shareholders, ignoring the arseholes on the board, but another poster educated me on this matter with regards to buyout laws and the fact that we would have to reward the arseholes, so the plan is dead in the water.
If I were to download Photoshop with Kazaa, spend time learning how to use it, and enhancing my job prospects I would quite likely end up joining a company who would buy a Photoshop license for me to use. So my Piracy would have directly resulted in economic gain for Adobe, why the hell they should be bothered about the everyday Joe dling it I don't know.
I agree with you about Gimp, it's good but Photoshop is better and it's nic eto know that Codeweavers have made some updates in crossover so that Photoshop can now be run without having to buy a windoze license.
Whilst I do agree with the principal of that, I don't really want to wait the 2-3 years that it might take for IBM to get their day in court, whilst in the mean time, dear Uncle Bill reaps the dividends of the SCO fud, I'd rather kill off SCO and figure out the wrongs and rights with a post mortem of all their code.
Hopefully esr will prove all their trade secrets to be invalid and render the point moot.
Oh, I get it alright and I would hate the thought of those fuckers getting the money, but they would in fact be getting nothing, we would be buying the shares from other shareholders on a publically listed exchange, just enough to get a controling interest then GPL all their IP and see how much the directors shares are worth:)
According to the OSDN site there are 2.9 Million Active visitors to slashdot, which means if we each pony up $50 or so into a fund we could buy the SCO Group outright and release the source into the wilds of the Public Domain or GPL it.
Seems like a nice use for the playstation2 and rather nice of Sony to provide a Linux kit for the machine, it is a bit expensive though but I imagine it is quite a bit cheaper than a cluster of comprable SGI Mips boxes. In fact it wouldn't surprise me to find out that this cluster cost less than a single SGI Workstation.
Looks like cash strapped science labs all around the world may soon be rolling in CPU cycles on a failover cluster built of Kids game consoles and Linux, and the heavy duty workstation manufacturers will see their stock slip even further.
Well in all seriousness, I suspect it has, now that HP have let Linux out of the bottle and onto the Laptop in Thailand, I expect it won't be too long till they release it elsewhere, and other manufacturers will wnat a piece of this pie.
I for one can't wait as I'd like to sell a good well supported Laptop with a good OS, and HP tech support has always had an excellent reputation.
I think in a coupla years time when the suits have had time to play around with their Linux laptops, they won't be so unhappy to wave goodbye to Microsoft, after all if this Linux thing turns out to be shit they can always call them back in to clean up the mess.
However Linux isn't and won't be shit.
Re:SCO - Too bad they ruined the name
on
OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 1
I couldn't agree more, in fact to see just how shoddy they have made SCO look almost brings me to tears, I still remember looking forward to recieving the regular Skunkware disks and playing with the new tools they contained, its one of the main reasons I insist in calling this company Caldera, despite the pretense Sco is dead. What we have now is a rerun of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in corporate form.
Except for the fact that you dont lose points from your health, you die in the game or become injured and less effective as a soldier and if you do die which is not uncommon you then have to wait until the round is over, and many AAO noobs find it very difficult, not at all like they expected from playing Quake3 etc.
AAO seems to promote teamwork and so what if it is blatant propaganda, its a great game and it teaches young people that if they do join the army and don't follow orders then chances are they will die. So perhaps the US Army's game will result in a more carefull and determined recruit.
Its sad but very true in our high power consumer society of today, the current UK hoardings advertising Reloaded seen from a distance look like a series of Prada adverts, it's really only the images of HK MP5s etc that give the game away
For me, Tim O'Reilly is a close to a perfect model of what every businessman should be as possible.
After hearing of this a few months back, I emailed him If I were American I would vote for him as President, he gently told me he was Irish, and with me being British, I guess it would have to be President of the EU if he ever decides to come home:)
Perfectly put, and the sooner people get over the idea that Mercantilistic protectionism is working Capitalism and disgard things like the DMCA the sooner the market will find the true value of a product, and I think the real market value of a CD Album is about $3-5 based on second hand fairs and market pirates.
The RIAA is just a cartel attempting to fix higher than market prices for their desired if low quality product.
One day budding artists will wake up, realise they can buy a $1500 PC, produce an album using some free software they downloaded, burn off 1000s of copies and persuade a filling station chain to sell them on the counter at $3 a pop to drivers, thus cutting out the 'traditional' distribution chain and directly targetting consumers who are most likely to make an impulse purchase of a CD they have never heard of, and dont mind loosing their $3 by throwing the disc out of the window if it transpires to be shit.
Once a producer of a reasonable Linux, which with a little polishing could have been a contender, buy out a crippled and dying Unix House and procede to give themselves a blood transfusion from the probably dead Sco, then they put on his clothes and begin talking, what they think is Unix talk. I'll sue your ass etc.
Make claims about source code, which as itself is unpatentable (are 'Caldera' suggesting they own the 'do while' loop?, due it's reusability and the fact that there are only so many ways to do things, and that any programmers will probably come up with the same thing from time to time on a totally independant basis.
Caldera's claim that their source has somehow ended up in the Kernel of various companies is debatable particularly the comments about 'obfuscated code'
which is a way of saying that the code in question bares no resemablance to their code at all, other than it was written using the same programming language and perfoms a similar function.
It really is all about the money, Caldera had no involvement in the original creation of the Intellectual property and have no moral right to lecture the world on how sad it is when such property is debased, dressing up as Sco and pretending to be Sco won't change anything here.
I've no doubt the original angle was for a buyout but now we've got to the point where it is abundantly clear that IBM have no intention at all of buying them the game is up, and so Caldera/Sco will become a shell of a company file for Chap 11 and fire all it's staff, hire a few lawyers instead and float along with whatever cash they have left until they sink, then somebody will buy the Unix IP at a firesale price, hopefully they will cast it into the public domain lest it corrupt any other mortals.
Thats fair comment Leandro, but once we do get a truly reliable open source rdbms, and people are convinced of it's worth, the pain involved in a once only migration process will be mitigated by the long term cost savings, or Oracle will reduce their license fees to something that allows it's big customers to feel that the cost of moving away simply isn't worth the trouble. I believe that things will reach that point in 2-3 years, then we will see fireworks.
I have worked with data, though not in a big way, and I have malingered on the edges of the OpenACS project where they converted an Oracle based project to Postgres, and from time to time they convert old ACS customers data from Oracle SQL to ANSI without too much trouble.
I realise that such simplicity is born of experience and that there are some major differences and pure nightmares to be overcome, but the conversion process is possible and almost certainley won't cost as much as an Oracle license.
Maybe, but one day they will suffer from the same effect IBM did, and see half their customers disapear overnight after watching a few 'headline' customers try out the alternatives and realise that they were capable of doing the job.
When by hiring a decent DBadmin who has experience with both types of RDBMs and can write a script to convert all that pretty Oracle specific SQL into ANSI-92 compliant SQL and feed it into whatever server you like without shovelling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Larry's/IBM's/Msoft's pockets for processor licenses plus per user deals etc. it begins to look like a seriously tempting proposal, even if only for a small, say, largely unimportant database, like the internal telephone number directory etc etc.
People will always by oracle because "No one ever got fired for choosing Oracle". If something goes wrong, you always have someone to blame. With open source, your job is more on the line because you have to take responsability.
Prior to Oracle taking off in a big way people used to say:
People will always by IBM because "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM". If something goes wrong, you always have someone to blame. With the Seven Dwarfs (the common name for IBMs competitors back then), your job is more on the line because you have to take responsability.
Then Larry E. shamelessly put together a cool SQL database which copied every major innovation IBM had made and added in a few more for good measure.
He also cut the price by a third, IBMs database customers deserted in droves, after all if this Oracle thing turned out to be shit, they could always get IBM to come clean up the mess. It turned out though, that Oracle wasn't and isn't shit.
That does not mean that Oracle is immortal and will always be top of the pile, Postgres now replicates almost all of the major features and is proven in the reliability stakes, tools like this are only going to make it more likely that corporate data departments will dip their toes into the Free software waters, after all if it turns out to be shit, they could always get Oracle to come clean up the mess.
I read your post with some interest ands thought I would add a couple more points to be considered here.
Yes the US does have a form of Imperialism, which is both cultural and commercial, it using the WTO as a proxy has opened many markets to US and European trade, the large problem as far as I can see is the refusal to truly open the US, East Asian and European markets to outside trade, the huge subsidies given to American and European farmers which allow grain to be profitably sold at a quarter of its production cost is one example, which results in serious problems for African domestic farmers.
There are other examples, the French for example do not allow imports of processed good into France/EU without huge tarrifs which perversely cause EU tinned and packeted foodstuff to be cheaper than locally manufactered produce.
Still, by themselves this would still allow a small but growing manufacturing centre to develop in these nations to meet local needs and this is where we come to the issue of China.
It is in my opinion the key to whole situation, the people of China are living in what might be considered abject slavery to a small and increasingly wealth few. Many factory workers live in dormatories at the factory the work for, they also need police permission to move or change jobs, unions are forbidden on pain of death.
These people work 80-90 hour weeks for around $10, which just in case anybody is deluding themselves, is around a quarter of the 'living' wage estimated for China.
This situation has and is resulting in a serious and continuing drop in the standard of living and real terms wages across the Asia-Pacific basin and beyond, manufacting is increasingly being moved to China leaving communities devastated by lack of jobs and we see the increasing emergence of special Free trade zones in many poor countries which replicate chinese conditions and in many cases are run by the military of the nations involved.
As for the issue of Iraq past and present, in the past Saddam was seen as a bulwark against militant Islam and it's anti western hatered, supporting Saddam, and France in particular held him close to it's bosom with visits to Paris and stays at Jacque Chirac's own home for Saddam, was, as in many other cases, simple expediency to counter Soviet or Islamic power and can justifiably be seen as an extension of the long war over ideologies which ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberation for the baltic and south of the Urals republics, which careful examination of US Govt strategic papers from the 50s 60s etc will show was the intended resolution of the cold war.
It's fair to critisize the US on many grounds for it's cold war actions, but do not forget the equal and opposite actions by the USSR, such as its evil interventions in Hungary, Checkoslovakia, Angola, Afganistan, North China, Korea, Cuba.
Please just because the cold war was cold, do not con yourself with the illusion that it wasn't a war.
I am not American in fact I am British but I do feel that overall America has stood for Liberty versus Tyranny, even if the methods it used were sometimes as dark as those of whom they fought against, the world is today a better place because of it.
It could prove very useful to companies who have extensive back catlogs of software and utilities wich work fine on NT4 and don't want to upgrade to Win20XX in order to keep up2date with security patches, in the big world of corporate storage good enough is good enough.
Perhaps then you and Hollywood should seek not only to make sure that the 'integrity' of the film is maintained but also that everyone who watches it gets the exact same message and experience from it, because I am sure they don't. Only the director knows what he truly wanted from the film and in a huge number of cases his original vision is cut away by the studios for commercial reasons.
In some cases a'la James Cameron this can mean cutting hours from the film (thank god) and in others such as Ridley Scott it might mean adding in lots of fluff and changing the ending and this makes the whole argument of 'maintaining the artistic vision' bogus. This is a fight to make sure that consumers don't begin to expect such technology and use it, as one previous poster mentions, advanced versions of such could allow you to change the actors in films, Imagine using your 'Morphbox tm' to watch the Rocky Horror Picture show and replacing Tim Curry with Tom Hanks. Or watching Casablanca with Ronald Reagan playing the lead he auditioned for. Or partnering Bradd Pitt and Jenifer Aniston in every love movie you own.
It is this that worries the film industry more than anything, you can have your favourite actor and your favourite film and they get none of the cash from your doing so, and you are more likely to stay home playing around with your old film collection than spending money with them.
They are playing this game for keeps because this technology has the potential to make every one of us directors.
Slashdot Mirror
The threat to get Linus is as hollow as the rest, no Judge will allow a suit to be brought when the ownership of the IP is in question, and given that Novell own a vast majority of the patents (832 unix and novell vs 117 Sco and Unix), according to the USPTO, the fact that Novell have taken some time and obviously a lot of expensive Legal advice before making such a series of claims vis a vis the ownership of the Unix IP and seems willing to step in the way of SCOs legal bullets, I'd say SCO's battle to steal Linux from the community has just got infinitely more difficult.
Stealing money from a bank does result in a net loss and as the result is uncertain would if repeated by many result in no gain at all.
But to look at the bank analogy a little deeper, You go to the bank and borrow money to start a business or send yourself to business school, whatever, you cant afford the fees upfront but the bank lets you take a loan because by doing so your chances of being able to afford to pay that money back with plenty of interest is increased, sure some people would laugh and run off with the money others would waste it, some would fail abjectly, but more than enough do succeed for the banks to keep throwing money at their loan customers.
Overall your potential ability to repay that money is increased by the very fact they gave you the money in the first place.
Most unemployed people I know would not have the spare capital to buy a copy of Photoshop which retails for $600+ today and noting that you can use Photoshop 'Elements' or 'PhotoAlbum' will not assist you greatly on your CV, so lets say Adobe, would license for no cost a personal use version of Photoshop, fully featured as per the commercial version, they simply ask that when you turn pro you upgrade to a full license, and for that you get a full manual set, regular upgrades and technical support, everything you get when you buy a boxed set now. Plus you don't run the risk of being sued by Adobe for abusing their license.
Basically by giving you the product they are increasing not only the chances that you could afford to buy it in the future but also the chances that you will buy it.
We could argue about net loss to competitors to Adobe, but that would be as bad as arguing that all banks should have the same interest rates.
I actually think, and I am sure that many would agree, that big software houses would benefit enourmously from giving their software away to home users so they could profit from business users.
However I have a little secret to tell, in that I am a registerd licensed user of Photoshop and a couple of other Adobe products which I bought before I bit the free software bug. I might add that I did obtain a non authorised copy before I bought, so I feel free to prognosticate ex cathedra on the matter ;) Which is not an endorsement of 'piracy' but rather an honest question about why software companies should care about non commercial use of their products, when the next generation of potential young designers decide that with all the draconian nonsense about license costs and threats to remove their liberty cause them to investigate the increasingly popular free alternatives.
I guess what I'm saying is that Commercial, Closed Source, per seat license style software houses are going to have to evolve a smarter business model to survive in a future which _will_ be dominated by Free Software.
Those kind words earned you a trip to my friends list philman :)
It would, and I did think that the plan would be doable simply by buying a majority share in the company from the general shareholders, ignoring the arseholes on the board, but another poster educated me on this matter with regards to buyout laws and the fact that we would have to reward the arseholes, so the plan is dead in the water.
If I were to download Photoshop with Kazaa, spend time learning how to use it, and enhancing my job prospects I would quite likely end up joining a company who would buy a Photoshop license for me to use. So my Piracy would have directly resulted in economic gain for Adobe, why the hell they should be bothered about the everyday Joe dling it I don't know.
I agree with you about Gimp, it's good but Photoshop is better and it's nic eto know that Codeweavers have made some updates in crossover so that Photoshop can now be run without having to buy a windoze license.
Oh well, thats another fine plan put to grass
Hopefully esr will prove all their trade secrets to be invalid and render the point moot.
Oh, I get it alright and I would hate the thought of those fuckers getting the money, but they would in fact be getting nothing, we would be buying the shares from other shareholders on a publically listed exchange, just enough to get a controling interest then GPL all their IP and see how much the directors shares are worth :)
According to the OSDN site there are 2.9 Million Active visitors to slashdot, which means if we each pony up $50 or so into a fund we could buy the SCO Group outright and release the source into the wilds of the Public Domain or GPL it.
But to pedanticaly correct you:
North Carolina State University girls rock!
Looks like cash strapped science labs all around the world may soon be rolling in CPU cycles on a failover cluster built of Kids game consoles and Linux, and the heavy duty workstation manufacturers will see their stock slip even further.
I for one can't wait as I'd like to sell a good well supported Laptop with a good OS, and HP tech support has always had an excellent reputation.
I think in a coupla years time when the suits have had time to play around with their Linux laptops, they won't be so unhappy to wave goodbye to Microsoft, after all if this Linux thing turns out to be shit they can always call them back in to clean up the mess.
However Linux isn't and won't be shit.
What we have now is a rerun of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in corporate form.
Except for the fact that you dont lose points from your health, you die in the game or become injured and less effective as a soldier and if you do die which is not uncommon you then have to wait until the round is over, and many AAO noobs find it very difficult, not at all like they expected from playing Quake3 etc. AAO seems to promote teamwork and so what if it is blatant propaganda, its a great game and it teaches young people that if they do join the army and don't follow orders then chances are they will die. So perhaps the US Army's game will result in a more carefull and determined recruit.
Its sad but very true in our high power consumer society of today, the current UK hoardings advertising Reloaded seen from a distance look like a series of Prada adverts, it's really only the images of HK MP5s etc that give the game away
After hearing of this a few months back, I emailed him If I were American I would vote for him as President, he gently told me he was Irish, and with me being British, I guess it would have to be President of the EU if he ever decides to come home :)
The RIAA is just a cartel attempting to fix higher than market prices for their desired if low quality product.
One day budding artists will wake up, realise they can buy a $1500 PC, produce an album using some free software they downloaded, burn off 1000s of copies and persuade a filling station chain to sell them on the counter at $3 a pop to drivers, thus cutting out the 'traditional' distribution chain and directly targetting consumers who are most likely to make an impulse purchase of a CD they have never heard of, and dont mind loosing their $3 by throwing the disc out of the window if it transpires to be shit.
I'll sue your ass etc.
Make claims about source code, which as itself is unpatentable (are 'Caldera' suggesting they own the 'do while' loop?, due it's reusability and the fact that there are only so many ways to do things, and that any programmers will probably come up with the same thing from time to time on a totally independant basis.
Caldera's claim that their source has somehow ended up in the Kernel of various companies is debatable particularly the comments about 'obfuscated code' which is a way of saying that the code in question bares no resemablance to their code at all, other than it was written using the same programming language and perfoms a similar function.
It really is all about the money, Caldera had no involvement in the original creation of the Intellectual property and have no moral right to lecture the world on how sad it is when such property is debased, dressing up as Sco and pretending to be Sco won't change anything here.
I've no doubt the original angle was for a buyout but now we've got to the point where it is abundantly clear that IBM have no intention at all of buying them the game is up, and so Caldera/Sco will become a shell of a company file for Chap 11 and fire all it's staff, hire a few lawyers instead and float along with whatever cash they have left until they sink, then somebody will buy the Unix IP at a firesale price, hopefully they will cast it into the public domain lest it corrupt any other mortals.
Thats fair comment Leandro, but once we do get a truly reliable open source rdbms, and people are convinced of it's worth, the pain involved in a once only migration process will be mitigated by the long term cost savings, or Oracle will reduce their license fees to something that allows it's big customers to feel that the cost of moving away simply isn't worth the trouble. I believe that things will reach that point in 2-3 years, then we will see fireworks.
I realise that such simplicity is born of experience and that there are some major differences and pure nightmares to be overcome, but the conversion process is possible and almost certainley won't cost as much as an Oracle license.
When by hiring a decent DBadmin who has experience with both types of RDBMs and can write a script to convert all that pretty Oracle specific SQL into ANSI-92 compliant SQL and feed it into whatever server you like without shovelling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Larry's/IBM's/Msoft's pockets for processor licenses plus per user deals etc. it begins to look like a seriously tempting proposal, even if only for a small, say, largely unimportant database, like the internal telephone number directory etc etc.
Prior to Oracle taking off in a big way people used to say:
Then Larry E. shamelessly put together a cool SQL database which copied every major innovation IBM had made and added in a few more for good measure. He also cut the price by a third, IBMs database customers deserted in droves, after all if this Oracle thing turned out to be shit, they could always get IBM to come clean up the mess. It turned out though, that Oracle wasn't and isn't shit.
That does not mean that Oracle is immortal and will always be top of the pile, Postgres now replicates almost all of the major features and is proven in the reliability stakes, tools like this are only going to make it more likely that corporate data departments will dip their toes into the Free software waters, after all if it turns out to be shit, they could always get Oracle to come clean up the mess.
Yes the US does have a form of Imperialism, which is both cultural and commercial, it using the WTO as a proxy has opened many markets to US and European trade, the large problem as far as I can see is the refusal to truly open the US, East Asian and European markets to outside trade, the huge subsidies given to American and European farmers which allow grain to be profitably sold at a quarter of its production cost is one example, which results in serious problems for African domestic farmers.
There are other examples, the French for example do not allow imports of processed good into France/EU without huge tarrifs which perversely cause EU tinned and packeted foodstuff to be cheaper than locally manufactered produce.
Still, by themselves this would still allow a small but growing manufacturing centre to develop in these nations to meet local needs and this is where we come to the issue of China.
It is in my opinion the key to whole situation, the people of China are living in what might be considered abject slavery to a small and increasingly wealth few. Many factory workers live in dormatories at the factory the work for, they also need police permission to move or change jobs, unions are forbidden on pain of death.
These people work 80-90 hour weeks for around $10, which just in case anybody is deluding themselves, is around a quarter of the 'living' wage estimated for China.
This situation has and is resulting in a serious and continuing drop in the standard of living and real terms wages across the Asia-Pacific basin and beyond, manufacting is increasingly being moved to China leaving communities devastated by lack of jobs and we see the increasing emergence of special Free trade zones in many poor countries which replicate chinese conditions and in many cases are run by the military of the nations involved.
As for the issue of Iraq past and present, in the past Saddam was seen as a bulwark against militant Islam and it's anti western hatered, supporting Saddam, and France in particular held him close to it's bosom with visits to Paris and stays at Jacque Chirac's own home for Saddam, was, as in many other cases, simple expediency to counter Soviet or Islamic power and can justifiably be seen as an extension of the long war over ideologies which ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberation for the baltic and south of the Urals republics, which careful examination of US Govt strategic papers from the 50s 60s etc will show was the intended resolution of the cold war.
It's fair to critisize the US on many grounds for it's cold war actions, but do not forget the equal and opposite actions by the USSR, such as its evil interventions in Hungary, Checkoslovakia, Angola, Afganistan, North China, Korea, Cuba.
Please just because the cold war was cold, do not con yourself with the illusion that it wasn't a war.
I am not American in fact I am British but I do feel that overall America has stood for Liberty versus Tyranny, even if the methods it used were sometimes as dark as those of whom they fought against, the world is today a better place because of it.
It could prove very useful to companies who have extensive back catlogs of software and utilities wich work fine on NT4 and don't want to upgrade to Win20XX in order to keep up2date with security patches, in the big world of corporate storage good enough is good enough.
Perhaps then you and Hollywood should seek not only to make sure that the 'integrity' of the film is maintained but also that everyone who watches it gets the exact same message and experience from it, because I am sure they don't. Only the director knows what he truly wanted from the film and in a huge number of cases his original vision is cut away by the studios for commercial reasons.
In some cases a'la James Cameron this can mean cutting hours from the film (thank god) and in others such as Ridley Scott it might mean adding in lots of fluff and changing the ending and this makes the whole argument of 'maintaining the artistic vision' bogus.
This is a fight to make sure that consumers don't begin to expect such technology and use it, as one previous poster mentions, advanced versions of such could allow you to change the actors in films, Imagine using your 'Morphbox tm' to watch the Rocky Horror Picture show and replacing Tim Curry with Tom Hanks. Or watching Casablanca with Ronald Reagan playing the lead he auditioned for. Or partnering Bradd Pitt and Jenifer Aniston in every love movie you own.
It is this that worries the film industry more than anything, you can have your favourite actor and your favourite film and they get none of the cash from your doing so, and you are more likely to stay home playing around with your old film collection than spending money with them.
They are playing this game for keeps because this technology has the potential to make every one of us directors.