Mindshare... or the lack thereof
on
Changes in Lycoris
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Other than the customer service issue in not shipping to paying customers (that by itself is a big problem), Lycoris has never gained any following in the community. Lycoris is trying to make money selling Linux. Nothing wrong with that. But what have they given back to the community? They never made a profit selling shrink-wraped boxes. Well neither did Redhat (and they are the Linux market leader), but Redhat responed with Fedora and, after initial grumbling, kept their goodwill. What kind of goodwill has Lycoris tried to generate? So far the only buzz I ever see about Lycoris is just that.... buzz and PR releases, but not a lot of released software (at least none that gets any press). Has anybody seen anything from them?
Install a base debian system. When the installer asks if you want to install extra packages only select the base X packages. Once the system is installed and booted up, then install Fluxbox or IceWM using apt-get. They are both lightweight windowing environments. I'm partial to fluxbox myself.
You could also do the same with OpenBSD. I find a minimum OpenBSD to be *very* lean and fast. The package manager in OpenBSD is pkg_add.
Bingo! Novell can sell Enterprise Stack
on
Dell Teams Up With SUSE
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· Score: 2, Interesting
SuSE might be the "enterprise" Linux?
This is a good way for Novell to "get it's foot in the door" with Suse and then sell more server applications. I would expect the Dell SuSe installation to be preconfigured and marketed as "NDS ready" or "Groupwise Ready". The more Novell's existing application stack becomes integrated with Suse, the more Novell will be able to sell. Compared to Redhat, Novell's application stack is much larger, more mature, and the Novell name still has a lot of trust. This will open up an avenue for Novell to have "certified" hardware for running all of their application stuff. Novell has things like Directory Services (NDS) and ZenWorks that are as good or better than MS's Active Directory stuff. They also have Groupwise and OpenExchange in the groupware area. They have Ximian Evolution for a client that works with both. Redhat already realizes this and they know that Novell can overtake them as the perfered Linux vendor with an integrated directory service and middleware/groupware stack and that is why they bought out the Netscape Enterprise Suite & Directory Server. They had to have it to compete with Novell NDS on SuSe.
I agree. Charging enough to cover the cost of administrating the certification and of developing the test suite would be good stewardship of the UNIX trademark. Raising prices so high that only large corporations can afford to license the trademark is simply not good stewardship.
Remember the original idea was to license the trademark to systems that could meet the Single Unix Specification and thereby protect the UNIX name. Now the idea seems to be to squeeze as much licensing royalties out of the software industry as posible.
Right - BSD is a genuine descendant of the original AT&T Unix. It is a Unix in everything but name. Linux is a completely new clone
The wrong part is about what it takes to be a brand-name UNIX(TM). No descent from AT&T Unix is required and no code simularity is required. The only requirement is that the system meet certain inter-operability standards that are defined in the Unix Specification from Open Group. So a completely new clone like Linux could (theoretically) meet the standard, get certified, and call itself UNIX(TM).
IIRC, the orginal idea behind the UNIX trademark being given to the Open Group was so they would "protect" the UNIX name by making sure that anything calling itself "UNIX" would have to meet certain inter-operability standards. You could only license the UNIX(TM) name if your product met some strict standards.
That *would* have been a GOOD THING(TM). The problem is they charge mega-$$$ for certification and license royalties. They charge much much more than their costs and reap a huge profit on each certification. This basically freezes out any free/open unix-like system and it also is a barrier to entry for a start-up who would otherwise meet the standard. With a little work, there are few reasons why FreeBSD (for instance) would not be able to meet the standard, but that would require mega-bucks to be handed over to the Open Group and few open source project have that kind of money.
Cheers to IBM for meeting the standard. Jeers to Open Group for being a bunch of greedy bastards and locking out Free Software.
Can you imagine the (well-deserved) trolling this will generate if they have a comment forum? Any chance of reasoned pro vs anti discussion will be drowned hot grits.
If any real arguments on either side manges to get through, I'm going to guess the pro/anti sco ratio will be like 1 pro to 100 anti.
IIRC, Novell retained ownership of the Unix Patents (if they aren't all already expired) when they transfered the buisness to old SCO. Since Linux is mostly implenting stuff that UNIX has already done, Novell should be safe. Basically, any functionallity that Linux implements has probably already been implemented in UNIX. therefore one of two things come into play 1) Novell already owns it, or 2)The person who asserts it would have to show why they didn't assert it for UNIX also at sometime over the last 30 years of UNIX's existance.
Another thing to remember is that Novell was the big deal in networking and networked apps back in the late 80's-early 90's, so they probably hold a lot of IP from their old netware days.
When aliens have killed and continue to threaten to kill a country's citizens, it is reasonable and customary that aliens be subject to higher scrutiny than citizens.
If you piss off enough people this way eventually you will piss off somebody who will feel more sympathetic to their cause.
For what ever random reason of their own choice, there are already people "pissed off" enough to kill American civilians. And those "pissed off" people are already running loose in this country. Unless we are willing to surrender our sovereignty and submit all our policies to their approval (i.e. appease them), we are going to have to find them and either lock them up or kill them before they kill more of our citizens. There are, as you say, "vicious thugs" running loose and we don't know who they are, but we do know that they are (mostly) not citizens. A government's first priority is to protect the safety of its citizens. If non-citizens get bent out of shape, too bad. If you find that intolerable, then you are welcome to return to your own country in peace.
Perhaps a better idea would be to not give terrorists drivers licenses at all, or maybe not to give illegal alliens drivers licenses at all. Instead many states (including mine) have gone out of their way to make it easy for known illegal alliens to obtain drivers licenses! But somehow at the same time this is being used to justify making people cary one more thing that will make it extremely easy to track them.
Beside not giving licenses to illegal aliens at all, they should be able to easily filter out all non-citizens and know their visa status. Right now most states require licenses issued to minors to be superimposed with the word "MINOR" in big red letters (VA does the photo in profile to the same effect). So why not require non-citizens to have the word "ALIEN" superimposed in big red letters on their licenses and also have their visa expiration date annotated? That way there would be a quick and easy way to filter the people who need a higher level of scrutiny when passing through airport security. It would also be a way for the local police to know to double check the visa status whenever they come in contact with a non-citizen. If you remember back, several of the 9-11 hijackers had been repeatedly been pulled over for traffic violations. If the police had checked their visas (which they almost never do), they would have seen that the visas were expired and the hijackers should have been deported. That could have (and probably would have) prevented 9-11 and saved the lives of 3,000 Americans.
The hijackers got their licenses from the DMV office at the Springfield Mall through fraud.
More important than RFID, they need a quick way to identify aliens. In most states, minors have their driver licenses superimposed with big red letters that say "MINOR", which is a quick way to filter people by age. When issuing licences to non-citizens, all states should be required to have the word "ALIEN" likewise superimposed. That way, it would be a quick and easy to filter people who need a higher level of scrutiny.
the impression I got was that they (Scaled, Xprize, etc) were in favor of this
Yes, of course they want regulation. Look at the history of regulating airlines and trucking in this country. Although they were ostensibly enacted to protect the public, what they really did was protect the monopoly/oligopoly of the big carriers by acting as barriers to entry. Once the competition is shut out, the prices basically were free to rise. So then the regulators regulated the price. That was OK with the monopolist because now he has a regulated but guarenteed profit with absolutely no chance of competition. Finally, the carriers become so cushy and inefficient that their costs alone caused price distortions. However, because of the barriers to entry (i.e. no competition), they had absolutely zero incentive to become efficient and the cost was passed on the the consumer. If you remember back to the 1970s before airline deregulation, there we a bunch of regional monopolies and a few national carriers (an oligopoly). Only the rich could afford to fly and the big airlines liked it that way because profits were guaranteed. Same situation in the trucking industry - regional monopolies with national oligopoly and guaranteed profits for everyone (except the public was paying through the nose).
So yes, I am not surpised that Scaled Composites wants regulation. Right now they are ahead of everyone else and will be so forever if they can get regulations to shut out the competition.
As far as boosters dropping on the public, that is a red-herring. The legal liability alone is going to keep these companies from dropping a booster on some residential subdivision. If a company did that, the regulatory fine would be irrelevent because they would be sued out of existance first. More likely, the regulations would act to limit their liability and increase irresponsibility (what? we are not at fault! We followed all the regulations!).
Sorta ironic that the creator of UNIX (ok.. it was really their subsidiary Bell Labs now spun off as Lucent) would have to "evaluate" whether to use a unix-type system. Maybe Ma Bell's children will be welcome back home. Think of what the alternate history of computing could have been like had AT&T recognized UNIX for what it could/would/should have been and not sold off USL as a red-headed step-child. There would have never been a SCO and x86 Unix might actually have been able to overtake the much inferior MS-DOS.
If you want to know what a true fiasco is like, just Google "CoreFLS" and read the results.
At the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, some of the payroll systems date back to 1964 (that's right - no joke, they were bought when Lyndon Johnson was President), so they decided to replace them with a new system based on Oracle Financials. The new system is called CoreFLS. It has been a fiasco. So far VA has already spent over $270 Million out of an expected $472 Million total budget for the project. The project has been a failure laregly because of mis-management and plain-old stupidity.
First, they decided to do test trials at one of the busiest hospitals (that's right, they first went live at one of the *BUSIEST* hospitals) instead of a smaller test location. The user training for a critical system consisted of a self-paced web-based distance training as detailed here. No hands-on training was provided until a month after deployment and only after problems were apparent because the whole operation ground to a halt. So finally the senior managment decide to commission a $500,000 study from Carnegie Mellon to find out why it failed. The study concluded that CoreFLS was "an exemplary case study in how not to do technology transition." Yeah, they needed to spend a half-million to find the obvious.
Finally Congress got involved and all the senior managers including the Secretary himself were put on the "hot-seat" to testify. Lots of heads rolled (even senior managers like Assistant Secretaries) and lots of people were forced to resign or were fired. Now the place is crawling with federal investigators looking to put people in jail
So now the project gets cancelled. The sad thing is that VA really needed this program to succeed. I suspect that the technology has been made a scapegoat for mismanagement (not that the technology was perfect). Well.. back to 1964.
That's not part of the proposal under discussion, but a strawman argument. The proposal is to require the ISPs to have a faculty to allow interception of the target communications within their systems the same way that the telephone companies now have that faculty. That could be done anywhere in the ISP's system. Most likely it would be done at the routers in the ISP's backroom.
That's a good point, how can we reasonably establish identity? However, in order to get a warrent, the police have already proved to a judge that they had probable cause to suspect *YOU* and not some random person. Therfore, the evidence gathered through the tap would not be in isolation. There would be other evidence pointing to you and not your roomate and not to some random person using the computer.
You could make a similar argument about your car's license plate. Does the fact that a get-away car at a crime scene had your licence plate number make you undeniably part of the crime? Does it by itself undeniably point to you? It could have been stolen or spoofed. Somebody might have been using your car. All of those things could be true, but a reasonable person would conclude that you are most likely responsible for what your car does, unless you have some albi to show you were not driving it when the crime was committed.
Actually, people do all those things on the telephone every day (except the pictures - but they do have intimate conversations that could be embarrasing if made public.). So you have shown no substantial difference between phone tapping and internet tapping.
You're right about the purpose of the government being there to protect the people. It is the government's first duty. That's why they have law enforcement functions like wire-tapping to protect the public from those who would do it harm.
I'm not saying internet tapping should be wide-spread or have lax controls. But it should cause no more reason to panic than telephone tapping, which is fairly non-controversial because it is subject to strict court control.
We all (well.. all of us who aren't conspiracy nuts) recognize that the Government has the right to tap a telephone line under limited circumstances, with probable cause, and with a court order. I don't see why the "internet" or "on-line" should be any different. As long as the right checks and procedures exist (like court orders) and are followed, then there will be no problem. Remember, any information that is gathered is subject to challenge by defence lawyers in court before it gets used as evidence against the accused. So there is actually at least two levels of checks in place - one before permission is given for the tap and the second before what is gathered becomes admissable evidence.
The MS guy was comparing what novell offers "stack-for-stack" to what MS offers. Novell has things like Directory Services (NDS) and ZenWorks that are as good or better than MS's Active Directory stuff. With the acquistion of Suse and Ximian they get things like OpenExchange & Evolution that also potentially challenge the Exchange-Outlook team. Add in the fact that Ximian's Mono could help break any MS stranglehold over.Net. The question is whether Novell can get their act togather and integrate all these *potentially* great things into a coherent and polished suite that would let you run a complete "Novell Shop" with a Novell server-OS (e.g. Suse), Novell manangment solution (e.g. ZenWorks/NDS), and Novell application servers (e.g. OpenExchange) in the backroom and a Novell client-OS (Suse Desktop) and applications (Evolution) on the desktop. Add in the ability to itegrate a "legacy" windows enviroment and tie it all togather with Mono. That is Novell's potential. We will soon see if they can live up to it.
Media Defender uses "interdiction" techniques, which essentially clog networks with requests that block real download efforts.
This sounds like a classic DOS attack. Isn't that illegal? And if RIAA was knowingly having other people do this under contract on a continuous basis wouldn't they be criminally liable for conspiracy and racketeering under RICO's sections that prohibit "interfering with interstate commerce" and "wire fraud"? I would think connecting to an electronic service under false pretense to harm the service would be a form of wire fraud.
Looking at SCO's SEC filing you can see that their $7.3 million loss is roughly equal to the " Cost of SCOsource licensing revenue" (i.e. legal fees). Their Unix business itself is still (marginally) profitable. I'm willing to wager that some of their other costs (like marketing) are also related to the ScoSource FUD campaign. Now factor in the cost of lost goodwill and lost sales. If SCO would just quit the ScoSource business and stop alienating potential customers, it would actually make a profit. They are being killed by their own FUD machine.
The ScoSource unit managed to make $678K while costing $7.3M. I wonder how much of that $678,000 was from the IP-in-Linux scam versus licencing actual UNIX technology to third parties.
I think that Darl & company are finally starting to wise up to the fact that they are killing their own company. That is why they are starting to de-emphasize the legal strategy and cut their losses. The whole lawsuit was nothing more than a get-rich-quick crap shoot. Now finally they are realizing (at least I hope they realize) that few people get rich quick and they should instead concentrate on growing their UNIX business to make a (modest) profit.
A while back, a town in Missouri wanted to offer telecommunications as a public service. A bunch of lobbyists for the telecommunications industry perceived this as a threat and got the state legislature to pass a law forbidding any local government from offering telecommunications as a public service. The Missouri Municipal League sued claiming that federal law pre-empted the states from prohibiting the cities. The case was agued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was decided in favor of the state (and telecommunications industry). The case is "Nixon, Attorney General Of Missouri V. Missouri Municipal League Et Al." and
a PDF of the decision can be found here At least 11 other states have similar laws to prevent local governments from "competing" with private telecommunications businesses.
The upshot is that if Verizon (or the industry generally) feels threatened, they will just buy some state legislators and pass a state law prohibiting it.
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Other than the customer service issue in not shipping to paying customers (that by itself is a big problem), Lycoris has never gained any following in the community. Lycoris is trying to make money selling Linux. Nothing wrong with that. But what have they given back to the community? They never made a profit selling shrink-wraped boxes. Well neither did Redhat (and they are the Linux market leader), but Redhat responed with Fedora and, after initial grumbling, kept their goodwill. What kind of goodwill has Lycoris tried to generate? So far the only buzz I ever see about Lycoris is just that.... buzz and PR releases, but not a lot of released software (at least none that gets any press). Has anybody seen anything from them?
That way, the Red States can't impose their "moral values" on the Blue States, or vice versa.
I've had some success with this.
Install a base debian system. When the installer asks if you want to install extra packages only select the base X packages. Once the system is installed and booted up, then install Fluxbox or IceWM using apt-get. They are both lightweight windowing environments. I'm partial to fluxbox myself.
You could also do the same with OpenBSD. I find a minimum OpenBSD to be *very* lean and fast. The package manager in OpenBSD is pkg_add.
I agree. Charging enough to cover the cost of administrating the certification and of developing the test suite would be good stewardship of the UNIX trademark. Raising prices so high that only large corporations can afford to license the trademark is simply not good stewardship.
Remember the original idea was to license the trademark to systems that could meet the Single Unix Specification and thereby protect the UNIX name. Now the idea seems to be to squeeze as much licensing royalties out of the software industry as posible.
You Both Right and Wrong.
Right - BSD is a genuine descendant of the original AT&T Unix. It is a Unix in everything but name. Linux is a completely new clone
The wrong part is about what it takes to be a brand-name UNIX(TM). No descent from AT&T Unix is required and no code simularity is required. The only requirement is that the system meet certain inter-operability standards that are defined in the Unix Specification from Open Group. So a completely new clone like Linux could (theoretically) meet the standard, get certified, and call itself UNIX(TM).
IIRC, the orginal idea behind the UNIX trademark being given to the Open Group was so they would "protect" the UNIX name by making sure that anything calling itself "UNIX" would have to meet certain inter-operability standards. You could only license the UNIX(TM) name if your product met some strict standards.
That *would* have been a GOOD THING(TM). The problem is they charge mega-$$$ for certification and license royalties. They charge much much more than their costs and reap a huge profit on each certification. This basically freezes out any free/open unix-like system and it also is a barrier to entry for a start-up who would otherwise meet the standard. With a little work, there are few reasons why FreeBSD (for instance) would not be able to meet the standard, but that would require mega-bucks to be handed over to the Open Group and few open source project have that kind of money.
Cheers to IBM for meeting the standard. Jeers to Open Group for being a bunch of greedy bastards and locking out Free Software.
Can you imagine the (well-deserved) trolling this will generate if they have a comment forum? Any chance of reasoned pro vs anti discussion will be drowned hot grits.
If any real arguments on either side manges to get through, I'm going to guess the pro/anti sco ratio will be like 1 pro to 100 anti.
IIRC, Novell retained ownership of the Unix Patents (if they aren't all already expired) when they transfered the buisness to old SCO. Since Linux is mostly implenting stuff that UNIX has already done, Novell should be safe. Basically, any functionallity that Linux implements has probably already been implemented in UNIX. therefore one of two things come into play 1) Novell already owns it, or 2)The person who asserts it would have to show why they didn't assert it for UNIX also at sometime over the last 30 years of UNIX's existance.
Another thing to remember is that Novell was the big deal in networking and networked apps back in the late 80's-early 90's, so they probably hold a lot of IP from their old netware days.
The hijackers got their licenses from the DMV office at the Springfield Mall through fraud.
More important than RFID, they need a quick way to identify aliens. In most states, minors have their driver licenses superimposed with big red letters that say "MINOR", which is a quick way to filter people by age. When issuing licences to non-citizens, all states should be required to have the word "ALIEN" likewise superimposed. That way, it would be a quick and easy to filter people who need a higher level of scrutiny.
So yes, I am not surpised that Scaled Composites wants regulation. Right now they are ahead of everyone else and will be so forever if they can get regulations to shut out the competition.
As far as boosters dropping on the public, that is a red-herring. The legal liability alone is going to keep these companies from dropping a booster on some residential subdivision. If a company did that, the regulatory fine would be irrelevent because they would be sued out of existance first. More likely, the regulations would act to limit their liability and increase irresponsibility (what? we are not at fault! We followed all the regulations!).
Sorta ironic that the creator of UNIX (ok.. it was really their subsidiary Bell Labs now spun off as Lucent) would have to "evaluate" whether to use a unix-type system. Maybe Ma Bell's children will be welcome back home. Think of what the alternate history of computing could have been like had AT&T recognized UNIX for what it could/would/should have been and not sold off USL as a red-headed step-child. There would have never been a SCO and x86 Unix might actually have been able to overtake the much inferior MS-DOS.
If you want to know what a true fiasco is like, just Google "CoreFLS" and read the results.
At the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, some of the payroll systems date back to 1964 (that's right - no joke, they were bought when Lyndon Johnson was President), so they decided to replace them with a new system based on Oracle Financials. The new system is called CoreFLS. It has been a fiasco. So far VA has already spent over $270 Million out of an expected $472 Million total budget for the project. The project has been a failure laregly because of mis-management and plain-old stupidity.
First, they decided to do test trials at one of the busiest hospitals (that's right, they first went live at one of the *BUSIEST* hospitals) instead of a smaller test location. The user training for a critical system consisted of a self-paced web-based distance training as detailed here. No hands-on training was provided until a month after deployment and only after problems were apparent because the whole operation ground to a halt. So finally the senior managment decide to commission a $500,000 study from Carnegie Mellon to find out why it failed. The study concluded that CoreFLS was "an exemplary case study in how not to do technology transition." Yeah, they needed to spend a half-million to find the obvious.
Finally Congress got involved and all the senior managers including the Secretary himself were put on the "hot-seat" to testify. Lots of heads rolled (even senior managers like Assistant Secretaries) and lots of people were forced to resign or were fired. Now the place is crawling with federal investigators looking to put people in jail
So now the project gets cancelled. The sad thing is that VA really needed this program to succeed. I suspect that the technology has been made a scapegoat for mismanagement (not that the technology was perfect). Well.. back to 1964.
That's not part of the proposal under discussion, but a strawman argument. The proposal is to require the ISPs to have a faculty to allow interception of the target communications within their systems the same way that the telephone companies now have that faculty. That could be done anywhere in the ISP's system. Most likely it would be done at the routers in the ISP's backroom.
That's a good point, how can we reasonably establish identity? However, in order to get a warrent, the police have already proved to a judge that they had probable cause to suspect *YOU* and not some random person. Therfore, the evidence gathered through the tap would not be in isolation. There would be other evidence pointing to you and not your roomate and not to some random person using the computer.
You could make a similar argument about your car's license plate. Does the fact that a get-away car at a crime scene had your licence plate number make you undeniably part of the crime? Does it by itself undeniably point to you? It could have been stolen or spoofed. Somebody might have been using your car. All of those things could be true, but a reasonable person would conclude that you are most likely responsible for what your car does, unless you have some albi to show you were not driving it when the crime was committed.
Actually, people do all those things on the telephone every day (except the pictures - but they do have intimate conversations that could be embarrasing if made public.). So you have shown no substantial difference between phone tapping and internet tapping.
You're right about the purpose of the government being there to protect the people. It is the government's first duty. That's why they have law enforcement functions like wire-tapping to protect the public from those who would do it harm.
I'm not saying internet tapping should be wide-spread or have lax controls. But it should cause no more reason to panic than telephone tapping, which is fairly non-controversial because it is subject to strict court control.
Cue the ill-informed Ashcroft bashing.
We all (well.. all of us who aren't conspiracy nuts) recognize that the Government has the right to tap a telephone line under limited circumstances, with probable cause, and with a court order. I don't see why the "internet" or "on-line" should be any different. As long as the right checks and procedures exist (like court orders) and are followed, then there will be no problem. Remember, any information that is gathered is subject to challenge by defence lawyers in court before it gets used as evidence against the accused. So there is actually at least two levels of checks in place - one before permission is given for the tap and the second before what is gathered becomes admissable evidence.
The MS guy was comparing what novell offers "stack-for-stack" to what MS offers. Novell has things like Directory Services (NDS) and ZenWorks that are as good or better than MS's Active Directory stuff. With the acquistion of Suse and Ximian they get things like OpenExchange & Evolution that also potentially challenge the Exchange-Outlook team. Add in the fact that Ximian's Mono could help break any MS stranglehold over .Net. The question is whether Novell can get their act togather and integrate all these *potentially* great things into a coherent and polished suite that would let you run a complete "Novell Shop" with a Novell server-OS (e.g. Suse), Novell manangment solution (e.g. ZenWorks/NDS), and Novell application servers (e.g. OpenExchange) in the backroom and a Novell client-OS (Suse Desktop) and applications (Evolution) on the desktop. Add in the ability to itegrate a "legacy" windows enviroment and tie it all togather with Mono. That is Novell's potential. We will soon see if they can live up to it.
Does this mean Sun will also open source their C compiler and libs, if they are needed to build Solaris?
would be rocking! But I'm not holding my breath for either.
Looking at SCO's SEC filing you can see that their $7.3 million loss is roughly equal to the " Cost of SCOsource licensing revenue" (i.e. legal fees). Their Unix business itself is still (marginally) profitable. I'm willing to wager that some of their other costs (like marketing) are also related to the ScoSource FUD campaign. Now factor in the cost of lost goodwill and lost sales. If SCO would just quit the ScoSource business and stop alienating potential customers, it would actually make a profit. They are being killed by their own FUD machine.
The ScoSource unit managed to make $678K while costing $7.3M. I wonder how much of that $678,000 was from the IP-in-Linux scam versus licencing actual UNIX technology to third parties.
I think that Darl & company are finally starting to wise up to the fact that they are killing their own company. That is why they are starting to de-emphasize the legal strategy and cut their losses. The whole lawsuit was nothing more than a get-rich-quick crap shoot. Now finally they are realizing (at least I hope they realize) that few people get rich quick and they should instead concentrate on growing their UNIX business to make a (modest) profit.
A while back, a town in Missouri wanted to offer telecommunications as a public service. A bunch of lobbyists for the telecommunications industry perceived this as a threat and got the state legislature to pass a law forbidding any local government from offering telecommunications as a public service. The Missouri Municipal League sued claiming that federal law pre-empted the states from prohibiting the cities. The case was agued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was decided in favor of the state (and telecommunications industry). The case is "Nixon, Attorney General Of Missouri V. Missouri Municipal League Et Al." and a PDF of the decision can be found here At least 11 other states have similar laws to prevent local governments from "competing" with private telecommunications businesses.
The upshot is that if Verizon (or the industry generally) feels threatened, they will just buy some state legislators and pass a state law prohibiting it.