SCO disputed Perens' claims. "We're the owners of the Unix (AT&T) System V code, and so we would know what it would look like," he said. "Until it comes to court, it's going to be our word against theirs."
Hmm, SCO's word against Bruce's and Linus's. I wonder who I should trust. My head hurts.
In a recent press release, SCO has claimed that Linux, Windows, and, yes, even Nature herself are violating its IP. "Our pattern recognition experts, after verifying our Linux ownership, found that Windows is basically Linux sans fork(2), so we clearly own it too," says Darl McBride, SCO's CEO and intellectual property rights advocate. "But the real breakthrough was when we found crabs were finding shells with algorithms that we own."
"It turns out that when crabs outgrow their shell, they look in ('iterate through,' in programmer's lingo) a pile ('array') of shells, and when they find one that fits, they move in," explains Yahkee group analyst and industry visionary Laura DiDio. "Although Nature's algorithm is implemented as a neural net, it has been copied line by line from SCO's malloc code. It's time people realized that while a free, massively parallel, evolving population looks good on paper, it needs to face the reality, which is that SCO will enforce it's rights."
Open source advocates point out that crabs had perfected their algorithm long before SCO existed, but McBride says he owns the rights, because of an ammendment letter God sent him that nobody can find. He also says that although Caldera released the crab algorithm under the old BSD license, crabs do not include the copyright notice, and besides, SCO has "absolutely no idea what it's doing."
Well, yeah, but do you really think Microsoft will make a fair agreement with a project whose initial resolves to GNU? And besides, why is an agreement necessary in the first place? "Security" is a bullshit excuse; the clients aren't trusted anyway.
I think it's a little narrow-minded to dismiss someone based on language technicalities. Consider that in your post, you misspelled one word, you neglected to capitalize two proper nouns several times, you used "they" with a singular antecedent twice, you put a comma outside quotes twice, and you swore. And I just wrote a run-on sentence, and am currently composing a compound fragment. But it makes absolutely no difference, because we can easily understand each other.
There's a balance between ease of writing and ease of reading. Past a certain point, it takes much longer to reduce the errors than it does to increase the tolerance. It takes less time for me to understand what you mean when you say slashdot that it does for you to type Slashdot instead. So while it's reasonable to dismiss completely indecipherable communication, I think you may be setting your standards too high, perhaps because you're a bit lazy yourself.
Any communication is optimized for it's medium. Books are optimized for reading time and author prestiege, because many people will read them and they take forever to write anyway. Slashdot is almost a balance, because there are only a few readers for each comment. IRC would be similar to Slashdot, except that it's real time and conversational, so it's higly optimized for typing speed. When you correct typos on IRC, you're actually wasting everyone else's time. Remember that they're staring at a blank screen waiting for your reply, and it takes longer for you to fix an error than it takes for them to mentally correct it.
Also, consider that there are different dialects of English, and there are people for whom English isn't their first language, and for whom many mistakes aren't obvious. My point is that you should form your opinion on somebody's intelligence based on what they say, not on how perfectly they say it.
Seriously, informal writing in English class is bad because you're supposed to be learning formal, proper English. Formal English in an election campaign (on Slashdot!) shouldn't matter, because you're supposed to be demonstrating your ability to govern, and endearing yourself to your audience, the Slashdot readers. What you're doing is somewhat akin to flaming Linus for odd English usage. I care much more about his kernel design, management, and C skills.
One interesting way of fighting back is a realspace DDoS, contacting SCO in any way possible with our (valid!) "concerns". It would be especially useful to clog SCO's media and licensing channels with such communications, as this could lead the media to believe SCO's clamming up.
The only problem is that it takes more time to compose something like the parent's letter than it does to ignore it. Perhaps an automated letter generator, taking pre-written paraphrases of key points, is in order.
If you're willing to give your name and address or phone number, snail mail and POTS is probably the best way, but email isn't horrible either (and it's easier to automate).
Well, (I'm trying not to be too insensitive), the SCO fiasco is as close as you can get to terrorism in the IT world without actually killing somebody. It's a few angry religious nuts doing insane things to cause fear in an vein attempt to destroy an idea which the terrorists fear. Everyone else is shaping languages to suit them (piracy, Digital Rights Management, Trusted Computing, Shared Source, GNU/Linux, doublethink, etc.), we may as well join them and call it what it is.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the day I have to pay $1000 just to write some Windows software is the day I (and many, many others) stop writing free software.
Most people wouldn't stop writing free software, they'd just stop writing it for Windows. Ironically, Microsoft seems bent on increasing it's TCO, and forcing open source to concentrate on it's own OSes.
When I first used Linux, I was trying to be a Windows coder, but I didn't want to pay $300 for an optimizing C++ compiler, after having just found GCC, the GNU tools, Linux, etc. It's not smart for Microsoft to raise the barrier of entry for Windows developers; they're already hemorrhaging mindshare.
There's really only a very small chance that [Microsoft's implementation] could be detrimental to the Free Software movement.
Microsoft wants to harm free software; and they certainly won't mind if they accidently hurt it with their Palladium implentation.
For one, while it might stop viruses and trojans (until the users are conditioned to clicking "Run unsigned code"), it won't do anything against worms and overflow expliots. Second, as you say, it would be required that source code be submitted to "MS's inspectors" and compiled by them. And as you say, they won't sign "viral" code. Consider what kind of code Microsoft considers viral. And finally, a $1000 - $2000 fee certainly isn't economically viable for open source developers.
In order to be able to write my own software, there must be the provision to run untrusted code - they cannot shutdown an entire industry (shareware/freeware) simply to try to stop viruses.
You're right, they can't do that, but they can still try. And it's quite possible that shutting down non-proprietary software is the goal, and stopping viruses is the public justification.
You're unfamiliar with corporate logic. This branch of thought stems from the self-evident truth that one is entitled to increasing profits. This axiom supercedes laws of supply and demand, copyright law and theory, basic human rights, and many other equally false conjectures.
For example, suppose you sell overpriced and unoriginal music. Suddenly it's easy to copy and distribute music, so sales lag. The solution? Under the "old" logic, you would improve the quality (both artistic quality and media convenience) and reduce the price. The new logic, on the other hand, dictates that you should lower the your product's quality and ease of use, and that you should sue your customers. This is justified, because you have a right to a bigger profit than last year.
Suppose you are a Unix vendor whose product sucks. You try to catch the Linux bandwagon, but you have nothing to offer, and your company is on the verge of bankruptcy. Under the old logic, you would diversify your business away from proprietary Unix, using your name to sell services. But remember, your rights have been taken away! You cannot sit idly by; you must inflate your stock with insane claims about your competitors, annoy large companies, and completely destroy your name. The courts, the media, and the investors are your friends, and you must trust they will return to you your much-deserved profits.
Now that you know more about the logic that runs the world, you can understand the ideal course of action for the MPAA. Do you succumb to the outmoded free market theories, improve your products, and stop saturating the market with overhyped films? No! You should lash out against free speech, a discredited idea which has been pirating your profits for far too long.
/* $Id: ate_utils.c,v 1.1 2002/02/28 17:31:25 marcelo Exp $ * * This file is subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public * License. See the file "COPYING" in the main directory of this archive * for more details. * * Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. */
I don't understand why nobody has grepped the code earlier. I just grepped for a short, memorable line, and found it in about 10 seconds. Nothing would stop me from remembering it at a presentation and grepping for it a few hours later in a hotel room. (Except the NDA, of course.) The genesis and ownership of this code is left as an excercise to the reader, but I still think SCO is full of it.
This is confusing. The RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, the BSA, the FSF, and now SCO all have their own ethics, their own copyright law, and in some cases their own math. My head hurts.
Well, if that's the case, grandparent's point is certainly true, and Red Hat screwed up as much as Microsoft has. I started Linux with Red Hat 6.2, and that was before DSL. I'm pretty sure I didn't run an FTP server, though. And I suppose it has gotten better: Just now I installed Mandrake 9.1, and it asks you if you really want to install any servers. Anything above "Normal" security activates the firewall, too.
I'm half expecting the next "Ask Slashdot" to start, "Dear Slashdot, This morning I was diagnosed with acute Apendicitis. I've fooled around a little with self dentistry in the past, but I'm not entirely sure I'm up to a job of this magnitude..."
The one after that will read, "Dear Slashdot, after some glitches the other day, my boss asked me to upgrade our SCADA / IIS box, and maybe add some DCOM and ActiveX scripting so he can check the grid from home. Now, I'm no MSCE, but I have installed AOL a few times. Any suggestions?
No matter what you're doing, if you don't know what you're doing, you should stop doing it (or hire someone who does know how). We're just lucky bad IT people don't do as much damage as bad electricians, surgeons, drivers, pilots, etc.
Actually, I think you could probably have Linux live on a filesystem image in NTFS. You're right, you can change a file if the size stays the same. You could probably mount root as loopback on the NTFS partition, similar to what UMSDOS does with FAT32. I'm not sure how the boot process would go, though, and it might take some kernel hacking.
Why wasn't the machine behind a firewall? If it was your first Linux install, why did you install wu-ftp and set it to listen to the net, before checking for security issues? That's certainly not the default. Just because it's Linux doesn't mean you don't have to be careful.
The brute-force proofs, whether you do them by hand or computer, are like saying you know how to drive because you can call a taxi.
I'd say it's more like driving to the airport and taking a private jet. Sure, it doesn't involve much of driving skill, but you can get to places that are impractical or impossible to drive to. And even if you don't know how to drive, you (hopefully) know how to fly.
I know that, that's what I meant by a trusted network. A critical network should be completely isolated. That means no laptops, and no computers that aren't absolutely necessary, controlled by competent IT people, and physically protected. You can't trust employee's laptops (or even their desktops) any more than you can trust the Internet.
And before someone misreads me, I don't believe the worm had anything to do with the blackout.
Do we blame Bill Gates or do we blame the guy who wrote the worm?
If this was the cause, we would blame the idiot who used an unpatched Microsoft product on an untrusted homogenous network with no firewalls and no redundancy to control critical power infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, SCO's word against Bruce's and Linus's. I wonder who I should trust. My head hurts.
Well, yeah, but do you really think Microsoft will make a fair agreement with a project whose initial resolves to GNU? And besides, why is an agreement necessary in the first place? "Security" is a bullshit excuse; the clients aren't trusted anyway.
There's a balance between ease of writing and ease of reading. Past a certain point, it takes much longer to reduce the errors than it does to increase the tolerance. It takes less time for me to understand what you mean when you say slashdot that it does for you to type Slashdot instead. So while it's reasonable to dismiss completely indecipherable communication, I think you may be setting your standards too high, perhaps because you're a bit lazy yourself.
Any communication is optimized for it's medium. Books are optimized for reading time and author prestiege, because many people will read them and they take forever to write anyway. Slashdot is almost a balance, because there are only a few readers for each comment. IRC would be similar to Slashdot, except that it's real time and conversational, so it's higly optimized for typing speed. When you correct typos on IRC, you're actually wasting everyone else's time. Remember that they're staring at a blank screen waiting for your reply, and it takes longer for you to fix an error than it takes for them to mentally correct it.
Also, consider that there are different dialects of English, and there are people for whom English isn't their first language, and for whom many mistakes aren't obvious. My point is that you should form your opinion on somebody's intelligence based on what they say, not on how perfectly they say it.
Well, there are ways to get around filters against words like "Iicense". And of course, there's always snail mail.
Seriously, informal writing in English class is bad because you're supposed to be learning formal, proper English. Formal English in an election campaign (on Slashdot!) shouldn't matter, because you're supposed to be demonstrating your ability to govern, and endearing yourself to your audience, the Slashdot readers. What you're doing is somewhat akin to flaming Linus for odd English usage. I care much more about his kernel design, management, and C skills.
The only problem is that it takes more time to compose something like the parent's letter than it does to ignore it. Perhaps an automated letter generator, taking pre-written paraphrases of key points, is in order.
If you're willing to give your name and address or phone number, snail mail and POTS is probably the best way, but email isn't horrible either (and it's easier to automate).
http://www.sco.com/company/feedback/index.html ,
licensing@sco.com ,
http://www.sco.com/licensing/piracy.html ,
webreg@caldera.com ,
1-800 726-8649,
And probably many others I don't have time to find, including investors relations and any media channels.
Well, (I'm trying not to be too insensitive), the SCO fiasco is as close as you can get to terrorism in the IT world without actually killing somebody. It's a few angry religious nuts doing insane things to cause fear in an vein attempt to destroy an idea which the terrorists fear. Everyone else is shaping languages to suit them (piracy, Digital Rights Management, Trusted Computing, Shared Source, GNU/Linux, doublethink, etc.), we may as well join them and call it what it is.
Most people wouldn't stop writing free software, they'd just stop writing it for Windows. Ironically, Microsoft seems bent on increasing it's TCO, and forcing open source to concentrate on it's own OSes.
When I first used Linux, I was trying to be a Windows coder, but I didn't want to pay $300 for an optimizing C++ compiler, after having just found GCC, the GNU tools, Linux, etc. It's not smart for Microsoft to raise the barrier of entry for Windows developers; they're already hemorrhaging mindshare.
Microsoft wants to harm free software; and they certainly won't mind if they accidently hurt it with their Palladium implentation.
For one, while it might stop viruses and trojans (until the users are conditioned to clicking "Run unsigned code"), it won't do anything against worms and overflow expliots. Second, as you say, it would be required that source code be submitted to "MS's inspectors" and compiled by them. And as you say, they won't sign "viral" code. Consider what kind of code Microsoft considers viral. And finally, a $1000 - $2000 fee certainly isn't economically viable for open source developers.
You're right, they can't do that, but they can still try. And it's quite possible that shutting down non-proprietary software is the goal, and stopping viruses is the public justification.
For example, suppose you sell overpriced and unoriginal music. Suddenly it's easy to copy and distribute music, so sales lag. The solution? Under the "old" logic, you would improve the quality (both artistic quality and media convenience) and reduce the price. The new logic, on the other hand, dictates that you should lower the your product's quality and ease of use, and that you should sue your customers. This is justified, because you have a right to a bigger profit than last year.
Suppose you are a Unix vendor whose product sucks. You try to catch the Linux bandwagon, but you have nothing to offer, and your company is on the verge of bankruptcy. Under the old logic, you would diversify your business away from proprietary Unix, using your name to sell services. But remember, your rights have been taken away! You cannot sit idly by; you must inflate your stock with insane claims about your competitors, annoy large companies, and completely destroy your name. The courts, the media, and the investors are your friends, and you must trust they will return to you your much-deserved profits.
Now that you know more about the logic that runs the world, you can understand the ideal course of action for the MPAA. Do you succumb to the outmoded free market theories, improve your products, and stop saturating the market with overhyped films? No! You should lash out against free speech, a discredited idea which has been pirating your profits for far too long.
I don't understand why nobody has grepped the code earlier. I just grepped for a short, memorable line, and found it in about 10 seconds. Nothing would stop me from remembering it at a presentation and grepping for it a few hours later in a hotel room. (Except the NDA, of course.) The genesis and ownership of this code is left as an excercise to the reader, but I still think SCO is full of it.
For someone working at a nuclear power plant, that's a pretty scary sig.
This is confusing. The RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, the BSA, the FSF, and now SCO all have their own ethics, their own copyright law, and in some cases their own math. My head hurts.
Well, if that's the case, grandparent's point is certainly true, and Red Hat screwed up as much as Microsoft has. I started Linux with Red Hat 6.2, and that was before DSL. I'm pretty sure I didn't run an FTP server, though. And I suppose it has gotten better: Just now I installed Mandrake 9.1, and it asks you if you really want to install any servers. Anything above "Normal" security activates the firewall, too.
The one after that will read, "Dear Slashdot, after some glitches the other day, my boss asked me to upgrade our SCADA / IIS box, and maybe add some DCOM and ActiveX scripting so he can check the grid from home. Now, I'm no MSCE, but I have installed AOL a few times. Any suggestions?
No matter what you're doing, if you don't know what you're doing, you should stop doing it (or hire someone who does know how). We're just lucky bad IT people don't do as much damage as bad electricians, surgeons, drivers, pilots, etc.
Actually, I think you could probably have Linux live on a filesystem image in NTFS. You're right, you can change a file if the size stays the same. You could probably mount root as loopback on the NTFS partition, similar to what UMSDOS does with FAT32. I'm not sure how the boot process would go, though, and it might take some kernel hacking.
Why wasn't the machine behind a firewall? If it was your first Linux install, why did you install wu-ftp and set it to listen to the net, before checking for security issues? That's certainly not the default. Just because it's Linux doesn't mean you don't have to be careful.
I'd say it's more like driving to the airport and taking a private jet. Sure, it doesn't involve much of driving skill, but you can get to places that are impractical or impossible to drive to. And even if you don't know how to drive, you (hopefully) know how to fly.
msblaster.exe. I haven't tried it, but I heard it from this post.
I'm told it works in Wine.
And before someone misreads me, I don't believe the worm had anything to do with the blackout.
If this was the cause, we would blame the idiot who used an unpatched Microsoft product on an untrusted homogenous network with no firewalls and no redundancy to control critical power infrastructure.