Its not the hardware that they care about. Its selling you Solaris and software integration services. Kind of like when MS sells the X-box at a loss to get you to buy the games.
Sun has admitted that they will lose if they keep pushing Sparc. The alternative x86 hardware is a commodity and there is not much profit there. So instead, they are switching gears to sell the software and services. In the long run, they probably don't care where you buy your cheap commodity x86 hardware, as long as you install Solaris/SunOne on it and sign up for the multi-10s of thousands of dollars integration and support contracts. So they are not so much competing with Dell on the hardware side as they are competing with IBM & Linux on the software/services side.
Absolutely not the end of Solaris. Sun is shifting some of their focus (if not most) from producing hardware to being a software and services company. Although this was announced along with the Red Hat deal, this is actually an attempt by Sun to compete Solaris against Linux at the low end. Sun is basically admitting and re-acting to what people have been saying for months (if not years) - Linux has been eating at Solaris by replacing high-cost sparcs with low cost x86.
The Red Hat deal is an obfuscation. The real aim here is to co-opt Linux by having current Solaris shops stay with Solaris. Lots of these shops that would have replaced the Sparc/Solaris platform with Linux are now going to be induced to stay with Solaris on x86. Sun figures that it is better to sell Solaris services without Sparc than to sell nothing at all.
Up until now, Solaris on x86 was always a "redheaded stepchild" at Sun. The hardware support was terrible and limited (very few video cards, for example). Hopefully, Sun will now give x86 good hardware support.
As far as the "buy me whining", MS didn't buy them out-right , but they did find a backdoor way to help fund the anti-Linux effort without being too obvious about it. I don't know how much money changed hands here, but for a struggling company like SCO going up against a behemoth like IBM, every little bit helps. If the amount is significant, it could help SCO prolong the lawsuit.
If MS were to buy SCO, or make another significant stock investment, it would certainly give SCO the financial resources to fight IBM. But that would probably be *way too obvious* and bring the scrutiny of the Government anti-trust regulators. This way, with the license deal, MS can funnel money to SCO without the Goverment breathing down their necks.
Disclosure would Nullify Trade Secret
on
What if SCO is Right?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The reason they won't publically disclose the code in question is because they claim the code is a *Trade Secret*. The law requires they perform due diligence to protect their own trade secrets from public disclosure and also do everything posible to mitigate their own damages. If they publically release the code (even for comparision), they will legally destory their own trade secret. That's why they will only disclose it under Non-Disclosure Agreements.
This brings us back to the question, did they already distroy the trade secret by publishing the open source of Linux? Although similar, this is a completely seperate legal issue from whether they already GPLed it.
What might save them on this issue (and its a stretch but possible, and I would argue it if I was their lawyer) is that Linux was distributed by Caldera *before* it bought SCO or had any knowledge of what was in the SCO-Unix code . So Caldera had no more reason to believe that Linux contained Unix code than anybody else did. When Caldera bought SCO, they now had access to Unix code and whammo! -- they suddenly saw the infringement.
The reason they are no longer distributing Linux is because they are trying to demonstrate to the court that they are taking the "due diligence" mentioned above to protect their trade secrets and mitigate their damage. The question is now whether they acted fast enough to stop the discloure and mitigate the damage. The fact that the spent a few months distributing "SCO Linux" after they had knowlege of the infringment might work against them. But to save themselves there, they might argue that they were under dueling obligations between their own interest and fulfilling contracts as Caldera/United Linux and therefore ended it as soon as practicable without breaching the previous contracts.
Here is a cut-n-paste contrast-compare from the NASA report:
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) attempts to strike a middle ground between promoting
free source development by commercial enterprises and protecting free source developers.
Like the GPL, it requires that any and all changes to code (derivative works)
covered by the license must be made publicly available. However, it also allows you
to combine covered code with other code to create a larger work without requiring that
other code to be covered by the license. This is similar to, but even less restrictive, than
the LGPL
I agree with you that this is basically an ISP problem and that ISPs have responsibility to police their user-base. But what about an ISP who does finally clean up his act and eliminates the spammers on his sub-net? Shouldn't he have a process by which to get his addresses de-listed?
I must say that generally, I support blackholes, as long a process of review exists. Blocking a whole block of IPs or even a single IP *forever* without appeal is simply not fair to follow-on users who get assigned a spammers old IP address.
When a spammer finds out he is blocked, he changes his address or ISP, so blackholes are only a temporary impediment to him. But what about a new subscriber to an ISP who gets assigned the old address? Its like moving to a new apartment and getting arrested by the police because a criminal *used-to* live at your apartment. There should be a clear method to say "please de-list me because I'm a new person at this address".
I doubt they'll collect any damages. But they'll succeed in making linux look like a grey-market stolen piece of software and drive corporate adoption of it back 10 years.
Exactly right. When AT&T/USL sued UC Berkley over BSD, they crippled BSD for a decade. Now they are trying to do the same thing to Linux. The AT&T vs BSD lawsuit introduced enough FUD and left a big enough cloud over BSD to drive commercial users away from BSD and make vendors license SysV "just to be safe". Even a strong BSD varient like the orginal SunOS has been supplanted by a SysV varient Solaris. I suspect that one of Sun's reasons in switching to SysV was to avoid legal issues, in addition to getting the "newer and improved" features of SysV. It is only very recently, with Mac OS-X, that BSD is finally coming out from under the cloud and starting to become mainstream again.
I find it interesting that the letter claims control over UNIX "methods". It sounds like they are contending that they have a lock over all "UNIX-Like" systems, even those with non-encumbered code because the ideas and methods are facsimilies of proprietery methods. I think they are actually saying that they have a monopoly on *nix-likeness. So regardless of the cut-and-paste issue with the code, they are still going to fight over the implementation itself. How they expect this to hold up in court is going to be interesting because the already "gave it up" when they cleared the BSD settlement.
IANAL, but I do remember my college political economics class. This is predatory pricing. It is illegal in the US for a monopoly to engage in this behavior, especially when they are already under court order.
However, when dealing with overseas governments, the US law may not apply.
All (and I mean *ALL*, even SysV derived) Unix(tm) systems contain code from the BSD-Berkley Research Unix. Before AT&T turned Unix over to Berkley for development, Unix was low-feature (but high future potential) and sutiable only for the limited internal use of AT&T. BSD made Unix into a usable system by adding many many features and re-writing large portions of AT&T's work. These enhancements were rolled back into the "official" Unix. There is not a single Unix system on the planet today that does not include BSD code and enhancements. The post-lawsuit 4.4BSD-lite was only 6 files short. Six files out of hundreds. The only thing that keeps BSD from calling itself "Unix" is a trademark issue.
Apple had a hard time convincing the music companies to support iTunes in the first place. People doing things like this might cause the music companies to withdraw support from iTunes. Just when something was finally starting to go right with download music, some knothead wants to srcrew it up for everybody.
Right now the "no warrenty" clause in microsoft's EULA protects them. But this is outragous. They are SELLING a product and make many advertising claims about how great it is. The law needs to be changed so that when you sell closed-source software, you are required to warrent your product regardless of the EULA.
So far over the horizon that its dropped of the radar screen. I think most organizations have this on the back-burner if it has been thought of at all.
Amen.. but it Depends on how it is used
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
Trusted binaries are an example of "good DRM". It keeps the nasty trojans and viruses away. I am fully in favor of that kind of use.
On the other hand, using DRM to prohibit "fair use" on copyrighted material is "bad DRM". Unfortunately, I think people like RIAA and MPAA are watering at the mouth at the prospect of legally and forcibly requiring "bad DRM" in any kind of media read/store/playback device.
Like Linus said in his messages, its kind of like the nuclear scientist Oppenheimer. Nuclear science can make electricity or can be used as a weapon. The science is not evil, its the people who might use it wrongly. It depends on who is using it and how.
From what I have read, DARPA is saying that they don't want to have advanced cryto technologies out there free for the bad guys to use. This is what they mean when they talk about "capable nation states". Basically they don't want to give this capability to spies or terrorists when a large part of the war on terrorism is intercepting and cracking the communications between terrorist cells. This is probably the same reason OpenBSD is based in Canada anyway; to aviod the US ban on exporting advanced cryptography.
Might there be some bad feelings about Theo's statments? Perhaps, but that is not the reason that was stated for the cancellation of the grant.
Right now I'm stuck with Cox cable because DSL is not available in my neighborhood. If and when DSL becomes available, I'm going to go with speakeasy.net . They have a "sysadmin" package for around $60 per month that explicitly allows servers and gives you 2 static IPs. Go to their website and click on the sitemap and check out the home packages. I hope this helps.
Internet access as a public utility? It would be politically controlled (as are all government services). So the same people who decide what books to ban at the libarary based on "community values" are going to be deciding what content to filter and what URLs to block. I don't even want to think about the logging policy. No thanks I value both my freedom and my anonimity too much.
Berkley did a lot of development with DARPA money in the 70's and early 80's. That's how BSD was born. Does that mean Theo should have a moral problem with his own project?
ICANN should just go away and the U.S. Government should take direct control. The internet in its earliest incarnations was funded and created by and for the use of the U.S. Government through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project). The interet is now essential to the American economy and the economy is a matter of national security. At least half of internet traffic runs through Northern Virigia alone. The USA made it, we administer most of it, and it is essential to our well-being. Consequently, the Amercian people ought to have control of something created in their name and with their tax dollars. Everybody else is just a guest that we are nice enough to accomodate. For these reasons, no private corporations and no foreigners should have any binding vote on something created by and essential to the well-being of Americans. Let the assignment of addresses, the root domain, and even TLDs be run by the public. And while we are at it, we should take the assignment of telephone numbers away from private corporations too because all the baby bells have managed to screw that up with those lovely "overlay" area codes.
But can they do it for $20 per month?
on
8.6 GB Internet?
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· Score: 1
What is really needed is reasearch to make this kind of thing cheap. It doesn't really matter to the average consumer or even a small/medium size business that some lab or super well funded corporation can get extreme speed for outragous amounts of money. Heck, OC12 has been around for years but it still goes for over $30,000 per month and we are all stuck using cable or DSL or 56K dialup.
Ok here is a plan. We have to realize that plain-old-telephone services (POTS) is the bread and butter of the telecoms. Only when this is threatened will they get off their butts to deploy broadband. Require the telecoms to provide broadband availibilty to all new construction/new customers. If they say they can't do it, then forbid them from providing retail POTS to the *NEW* customers in that area and require them to lease out the trunk connections and let somebody else service the new customers. As there is more and more turn-over of customers/new construction, the stodgy old telecoms will either have to start providing broadband or go extinct for lack of new customers to replace the old ones. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming telecoms will be able to get a foot in the door with POTS at least. This will be especially dramitic in new subdivisions as it would completely exclude the monopolies unless they provide broadband. With the critical mass of a entire subdivsion (some of which are small cities in themselves), the newer companies might be able to get enough customers to cover the cost of deploying broadband.
In criminal matters, you are legally innocent until proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". You will be detained in the interim, otherwise you could flee justice.
In civil matters, you can be proven legally and financially liable (which is different from criminal guilt) by "preponderance of the evidence"
Slashdot Mirror
Make that "Visual PeerReview.Net#"
In it's newest patented process, MS has just invented PeerReview.Net++.
Its not the hardware that they care about. Its selling you Solaris and software integration services. Kind of like when MS sells the X-box at a loss to get you to buy the games.
Sun has admitted that they will lose if they keep pushing Sparc. The alternative x86 hardware is a commodity and there is not much profit there. So instead, they are switching gears to sell the software and services. In the long run, they probably don't care where you buy your cheap commodity x86 hardware, as long as you install Solaris/SunOne on it and sign up for the multi-10s of thousands of dollars integration and support contracts. So they are not so much competing with Dell on the hardware side as they are competing with IBM & Linux on the software/services side.
are we going to see the end of solaris soon?
Absolutely not the end of Solaris. Sun is shifting some of their focus (if not most) from producing hardware to being a software and services company. Although this was announced along with the Red Hat deal, this is actually an attempt by Sun to compete Solaris against Linux at the low end. Sun is basically admitting and re-acting to what people have been saying for months (if not years) - Linux has been eating at Solaris by replacing high-cost sparcs with low cost x86.
The Red Hat deal is an obfuscation. The real aim here is to co-opt Linux by having current Solaris shops stay with Solaris. Lots of these shops that would have replaced the Sparc/Solaris platform with Linux are now going to be induced to stay with Solaris on x86. Sun figures that it is better to sell Solaris services without Sparc than to sell nothing at all.
Up until now, Solaris on x86 was always a "redheaded stepchild" at Sun. The hardware support was terrible and limited (very few video cards, for example). Hopefully, Sun will now give x86 good hardware support.
As far as the "buy me whining", MS didn't buy them out-right , but they did find a backdoor way to help fund the anti-Linux effort without being too obvious about it. I don't know how much money changed hands here, but for a struggling company like SCO going up against a behemoth like IBM, every little bit helps. If the amount is significant, it could help SCO prolong the lawsuit.
If MS were to buy SCO, or make another significant stock investment, it would certainly give SCO the financial resources to fight IBM. But that would probably be *way too obvious* and bring the scrutiny of the Government anti-trust regulators. This way, with the license deal, MS can funnel money to SCO without the Goverment breathing down their necks.
The reason they won't publically disclose the code in question is because they claim the code is a *Trade Secret* . The law requires they perform due diligence to protect their own trade secrets from public disclosure and also do everything posible to mitigate their own damages. If they publically release the code (even for comparision), they will legally destory their own trade secret. That's why they will only disclose it under Non-Disclosure Agreements.
This brings us back to the question, did they already distroy the trade secret by publishing the open source of Linux? Although similar, this is a completely seperate legal issue from whether they already GPLed it.
What might save them on this issue (and its a stretch but possible, and I would argue it if I was their lawyer) is that Linux was distributed by Caldera *before* it bought SCO or had any knowledge of what was in the SCO-Unix code . So Caldera had no more reason to believe that Linux contained Unix code than anybody else did. When Caldera bought SCO, they now had access to Unix code and whammo! -- they suddenly saw the infringement.
The reason they are no longer distributing Linux is because they are trying to demonstrate to the court that they are taking the "due diligence" mentioned above to protect their trade secrets and mitigate their damage. The question is now whether they acted fast enough to stop the discloure and mitigate the damage. The fact that the spent a few months distributing "SCO Linux" after they had knowlege of the infringment might work against them. But to save themselves there, they might argue that they were under dueling obligations between their own interest and fulfilling contracts as Caldera/United Linux and therefore ended it as soon as practicable without breaching the previous contracts.
Here is a cut-n-paste contrast-compare from the NASA report:
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) attempts to strike a middle ground between promoting free source development by commercial enterprises and protecting free source developers. Like the GPL, it requires that any and all changes to code (derivative works) covered by the license must be made publicly available. However, it also allows you to combine covered code with other code to create a larger work without requiring that other code to be covered by the license. This is similar to, but even less restrictive, than the LGPL
I agree with you that this is basically an ISP problem and that ISPs have responsibility to police their user-base. But what about an ISP who does finally clean up his act and eliminates the spammers on his sub-net? Shouldn't he have a process by which to get his addresses de-listed?
I must say that generally, I support blackholes, as long a process of review exists. Blocking a whole block of IPs or even a single IP *forever* without appeal is simply not fair to follow-on users who get assigned a spammers old IP address. When a spammer finds out he is blocked, he changes his address or ISP, so blackholes are only a temporary impediment to him. But what about a new subscriber to an ISP who gets assigned the old address? Its like moving to a new apartment and getting arrested by the police because a criminal *used-to* live at your apartment. There should be a clear method to say "please de-list me because I'm a new person at this address".
Exactly right. When AT&T/USL sued UC Berkley over BSD, they crippled BSD for a decade. Now they are trying to do the same thing to Linux. The AT&T vs BSD lawsuit introduced enough FUD and left a big enough cloud over BSD to drive commercial users away from BSD and make vendors license SysV "just to be safe". Even a strong BSD varient like the orginal SunOS has been supplanted by a SysV varient Solaris. I suspect that one of Sun's reasons in switching to SysV was to avoid legal issues, in addition to getting the "newer and improved" features of SysV. It is only very recently, with Mac OS-X, that BSD is finally coming out from under the cloud and starting to become mainstream again.
I find it interesting that the letter claims control over UNIX "methods". It sounds like they are contending that they have a lock over all "UNIX-Like" systems, even those with non-encumbered code because the ideas and methods are facsimilies of proprietery methods. I think they are actually saying that they have a monopoly on *nix-likeness. So regardless of the cut-and-paste issue with the code, they are still going to fight over the implementation itself. How they expect this to hold up in court is going to be interesting because the already "gave it up" when they cleared the BSD settlement.
IANAL, but I do remember my college political economics class. This is predatory pricing. It is illegal in the US for a monopoly to engage in this behavior, especially when they are already under court order. However, when dealing with overseas governments, the US law may not apply.
All (and I mean *ALL*, even SysV derived) Unix(tm) systems contain code from the BSD-Berkley Research Unix. Before AT&T turned Unix over to Berkley for development, Unix was low-feature (but high future potential) and sutiable only for the limited internal use of AT&T. BSD made Unix into a usable system by adding many many features and re-writing large portions of AT&T's work. These enhancements were rolled back into the "official" Unix. There is not a single Unix system on the planet today that does not include BSD code and enhancements. The post-lawsuit 4.4BSD-lite was only 6 files short. Six files out of hundreds. The only thing that keeps BSD from calling itself "Unix" is a trademark issue.
Apple had a hard time convincing the music companies to support iTunes in the first place. People doing things like this might cause the music companies to withdraw support from iTunes. Just when something was finally starting to go right with download music, some knothead wants to srcrew it up for everybody.
Right now the "no warrenty" clause in microsoft's EULA protects them. But this is outragous. They are SELLING a product and make many advertising claims about how great it is. The law needs to be changed so that when you sell closed-source software, you are required to warrent your product regardless of the EULA.
So far over the horizon that its dropped of the radar screen. I think most organizations have this on the back-burner if it has been thought of at all.
Trusted binaries are an example of "good DRM". It keeps the nasty trojans and viruses away. I am fully in favor of that kind of use.
On the other hand, using DRM to prohibit "fair use" on copyrighted material is "bad DRM". Unfortunately, I think people like RIAA and MPAA are watering at the mouth at the prospect of legally and forcibly requiring "bad DRM" in any kind of media read/store/playback device.
Like Linus said in his messages, its kind of like the nuclear scientist Oppenheimer. Nuclear science can make electricity or can be used as a weapon. The science is not evil, its the people who might use it wrongly. It depends on who is using it and how.
From what I have read, DARPA is saying that they don't want to have advanced cryto technologies out there free for the bad guys to use. This is what they mean when they talk about "capable nation states". Basically they don't want to give this capability to spies or terrorists when a large part of the war on terrorism is intercepting and cracking the communications between terrorist cells. This is probably the same reason OpenBSD is based in Canada anyway; to aviod the US ban on exporting advanced cryptography. Might there be some bad feelings about Theo's statments? Perhaps, but that is not the reason that was stated for the cancellation of the grant.
Right now I'm stuck with Cox cable because DSL is not available in my neighborhood. If and when DSL becomes available, I'm going to go with speakeasy.net . They have a "sysadmin" package for around $60 per month that explicitly allows servers and gives you 2 static IPs. Go to their website and click on the sitemap and check out the home packages. I hope this helps.
Internet access as a public utility? It would be politically controlled (as are all government services). So the same people who decide what books to ban at the libarary based on "community values" are going to be deciding what content to filter and what URLs to block. I don't even want to think about the logging policy. No thanks I value both my freedom and my anonimity too much.
Berkley did a lot of development with DARPA money in the 70's and early 80's. That's how BSD was born. Does that mean Theo should have a moral problem with his own project?
ICANN should just go away and the U.S. Government should take direct control. The internet in its earliest incarnations was funded and created by and for the use of the U.S. Government through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project). The interet is now essential to the American economy and the economy is a matter of national security. At least half of internet traffic runs through Northern Virigia alone. The USA made it, we administer most of it, and it is essential to our well-being. Consequently, the Amercian people ought to have control of something created in their name and with their tax dollars. Everybody else is just a guest that we are nice enough to accomodate. For these reasons, no private corporations and no foreigners should have any binding vote on something created by and essential to the well-being of Americans. Let the assignment of addresses, the root domain, and even TLDs be run by the public. And while we are at it, we should take the assignment of telephone numbers away from private corporations too because all the baby bells have managed to screw that up with those lovely "overlay" area codes.
What is really needed is reasearch to make this kind of thing cheap. It doesn't really matter to the average consumer or even a small/medium size business that some lab or super well funded corporation can get extreme speed for outragous amounts of money. Heck, OC12 has been around for years but it still goes for over $30,000 per month and we are all stuck using cable or DSL or 56K dialup.
Ok here is a plan. We have to realize that plain-old-telephone services (POTS) is the bread and butter of the telecoms. Only when this is threatened will they get off their butts to deploy broadband. Require the telecoms to provide broadband availibilty to all new construction/new customers. If they say they can't do it, then forbid them from providing retail POTS to the *NEW* customers in that area and require them to lease out the trunk connections and let somebody else service the new customers. As there is more and more turn-over of customers/new construction, the stodgy old telecoms will either have to start providing broadband or go extinct for lack of new customers to replace the old ones. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming telecoms will be able to get a foot in the door with POTS at least. This will be especially dramitic in new subdivisions as it would completely exclude the monopolies unless they provide broadband. With the critical mass of a entire subdivsion (some of which are small cities in themselves), the newer companies might be able to get enough customers to cover the cost of deploying broadband.
In criminal matters, you are legally innocent until proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". You will be detained in the interim, otherwise you could flee justice. In civil matters, you can be proven legally and financially liable (which is different from criminal guilt) by "preponderance of the evidence"