You haven't been paying attention. There was a squeeze play involving a major creditor and Novell at the exact moment that Chairman Bill showed up with his suspiciously precisely correctly sized truckload of cash. Had Novell declined they may have been insolvent.
Was Bill holding the gun? After the Baystar thing who can tell?
Just re-read the marketing agreement. Yup, this is the best thing that could happen for Novell. MS can't return the coupons. If they can't distribute them, MS can't compete with Novell in the same market with the same product. Like I said at the time, MS just bought some really expensive wallpaper for their Redmond office. I'm sure it will look lovely.
I'm pretty sure Cuba has war plans for the invasion of Florida. That doesn't mean they intend to do it. The processes involved in making and executing plans are skills that require training and practice. One makes ridiculous example plans as well as ones more credible, for practice or for blue sky contingencies one knows will never occur. To fail to practice is to be unprepared for the real mission, which would be disastrous since the plans often must be drawn up in short order because the unforeseen contingencies are the ones that get ya into a fight. We have war games off of South Korea in international waters all the time. I'm quite certain those sailors are not going ashore, for anything other than R&R, while they're there. That is to them what them having war games in the Gulf of California would be like to us, and they are not that provocative.
China is holding an economically, not a militarily aggressive posture. If occasionally they fire a rocket over the sea, well, did not Teddy Roosevelt say "walk softly and carry a big stick"? His wisdom wasn't just for Americans. I don't believe we have anything more to fear from them than what comes naturally from being too free with your money, to eager to buy everything on the shelf, too swift to borrow - eventually you become indentured to your debtor or go bankrupt. China has enough issues to deal with without attacking the US today: like desertification, overpopulation, aging population, economy conversion, political unrest, corruption, food quality, and of course they share a HUGE land border with a host of people with issues of their own. They have enough on their plate without opening up a whole US can of worms.
Several people have mistaken me in this thread. I like China. Not just the people either -- I believe the government of China has seen the benefits of freedom. They have undertaken the most dangerous and difficult task of converting to a more enlightened and free society at great peril to themselves for the benefit of their people. I am in no place to criticize the pace of their efforts -- to proceed too fast is to ensure descent into anarchy. That they are competing effectively and aggressively with us in the field of global trade is a testament to how well they understand their duty to succeed for the benefit of their people. If we want our government to compete better, why should that be China's fault? Yeah, they've done some bad stuff, but I've got enough bad government activity going on in my own country to worry about before I go criticizing other peoples' -- especially since I haven't done the background on the issues.
That said, my comment is about the duty of the US wardens of infrastructure and secrets -- and to a certain extent all people in IT and essential services to consider carefully all aspects of their charges in the light of the certain knowledge that there are many qualified and resourceful people who seek weaknesses everywhere they can find them. As others have pointed out, the source code is not so scarce at all -- China and several other countries may have it under license, but in fact rumors abound that it's "out there" for the miscreants both foreign and domestic to exploit for reasons both militaristic and avaricious. It would not surprise me if the stuff were available to everyone except the people who were able and motivated to fix it. I need no more proof of this than the fact that you know what day of the month is "Exploit Wednesday".
If TFA were about more lost personal info (again) I probably would have posted something like "do you encrypt your backups and all data on physical media for transit?"
In short, I'm being a captain obvious karma whore. Get it?
This one works for me. Tiny, 1GB, $50, plays mp3, mp4, wmv, etc. Charges USB, formats fat. Works with linux. I blogged about this earlier today. There are instructions there for converting DVDs to a format it can use. They have bigger ones, but who needs to load up three days worth of AV?
It is notable here that China is one of the state entities that enjoys access to the source code for Window under Microsoft's SharedSource program. If you're in IT for a government agency in the US, it's your duty to ask 'what does China know about my critical infrastructure that I don't know?'
Unfortunately for the people who rely on you, the answer is undiscoverable.
I've been watching RMS and Bruce Perens for more than 20 years. I don't always agree with them, though they have contributed far more to the cause than I. RMS in particular can get carried away with enthusiasm.
Having considered the issues myself however, it is my belief that they had considered these issues with what I would consider mathematical rigor long before I was even interested in them. You could see that I sometimes disagree with them about important issues if you were a contributor here, since it's in slashdot's record. I must confess however that where I've felt they were wrong over the years subsequent events have proven them right more often than not.
I perceive that the problem you have with them is a problem they have that I share. They are not good at suffering fools.
If you really think that peace exists within the FOSS development community, maybe you should spend some time reading about the recent internal conflicts that have been plaguing both the Debian and Gentoo projects.
Passion can be scary -- anyone who's stood at an altar to be married can tell you that. Passion is a powerful motivator for a lot of things, including innovative problem solving. Yes, passionate people who care about their work can engage in strident discussion. Should it rise to the necessary level, alliances will form and there will be yet another fork. Customers, especially business customers, need not be afraid of this process - X.org teaches us that often a fork brings clarity and cohesion to a passionate team and outstanding results are almost immediately forthcoming.
Disagreements in the secret back room deals process, however, are something businessmen need to fear. They can lead to warring law firms, legal liabilities, and injunctions against almost any non-open technology that a company has leveraged to compete effectively. This can bring multinational firms to a halt, prevent essential communications for emergency personnel, or completely break a supply chain overnight. These are not minor risk at all. These are bet-the-company risks. Every business school teaches the same mantra: "risk is essential to good business. Embrace risk. But do not bet the company."
To bring this back on topic, there is a course of action Novell can pursue that will eventually bring them absolution. Microsoft demonstrated this technique in their deal with Sendo. Basically their deal involved providing the OS for the Sendo phone. If the product failed to launch by a set date for any reason, including Microsoft's inability to deliver the OS, the terms of the deal resulted in Microsoft ownership of all of Sendo's phone related IP. Unsurprisingly, Sendo is no more. Also unsurprisingly, other phone vendors are reluctant to reap the benefits of partnering with the PC software market leader.
Novell can deliver the goods - developing C# and Mono, Visual Basic for Open Office for the Linux platform. They can leverage the economics of overseas labor markets to hire an army of paralegals to document in the source code specifically by number (or more subtly with easily searchable keywords) which patents are violated. They can identify leaky workers and assign them to positions of responsibility, identifying them anonymously to L'inq. They can make the project their organizational strategy lab and send a new manager (or better yet, a failed engineer) to reorganize it every 90 days. They can hire Scott Adams as a motivational speaker. Site security can be overseen by the cousin of the accountant that does the inventory, who is the Aunt of the payroll accountant who is the cousin of the head of HR who seems not to notice that the majority of employees exist only in the payroll. This is the customary practice in Banaglore anyway - everybody is related to everybody else and if you can't indulge in a little nepotism how important could you be? Since failure is not only the expected, but the desired outcome, the place can be a plush corporate retreat where junkets by excecutives can be organized for minimal oversight and maximum recreation where it is understood that inspection tours will only be a strictly scheduled and carefully guided interlude between morning golf and discussion with open bar. They can dogfood the heck out of the thing, insisting that pre-alpha tools be used for management, production and accounting. When their committed investment is gone, they can appeal for more cash (bleed the beast!) or just shrug and say it's not their fault - offshoring wasn't guaranteed and it just didn't work - but see what strides
In the new dawn emerging from the FOSS revolution we are finally getting what we really need to move technology forward: light. These back room deals for contingent permission to use intangible ideas and leverage market share will not stand the light of day. All deals are eventually exposed. This leads to some business ethics lessons that should have been the standard all along:
Don't do business with someone who can't cut a straight deal.
Muggers can't be partners. If you make a deal to squeeze out a third party, your partner is already negotiating with the fourth party for your demise.
Don't partner with someone who has a history of feasting on the corpses of their former partners.
The more desperately you need a deal, the less likely it is to work out well for you.
Don't borrow. If you must borrow, choose your lender with exceeding care -- they may be your friend today but they are as subject to the whims of fate and usages of power as you. Lenders can be leveraged too.
Now let us set out to innovate good products and sell them on their merits, m'k?
I wrote here at the time that the point of a secret covenant was for the companies to be able to sell the same peace more than once.
PHBs need to understand they can't buy peace -- Not ever. They have to take it by choosing to be Free and Open.
Novell's contributions to the OIN need to be reassessed now because the value of the patents they contributed may have been wiped out by this agreement. How many other OIN partners have worked a deal like this or outright licensed away their patents? Is the Open Invention Network a complete sham?
Novell took money from Microsoft. Microsoft always gets something valuable in return. I continue to believe the "something of value" was a pledge for Novell programmers to leverage MS IP in their products so that when this deal expired their customers would be hooked into paying MS licensing fees for products that run in Linux. It's the only way Microsoft encouraging deployment of Linux makes sense from a Microsoft point of view.
It certainly will be easier to do with Novell offshoring most of their development. High profile evacuations in their onshore development teams show an important trend. The FOSS developers who create great work because they have both skill and a passion for the "free as in liberty" aspect of open source software have fled. Offshore they can hire coders who are interested in personal liberty from the oppressed economic conditions of their community and are less concerned with the Freedom of others who fare better than them at a minimum. It's not a formula for good code. Passion adds considerable quality to the output - perhaps quality that cannot be had any other way. A software system is not a microwave oven.
Novell desperately needed that money from Microsoft because delays in their financial reporting caused by an audit of options grants allowed their major creditor to call loans that would have seriously impacted their operation. Somebody needs to have a close look at how this squeeze play was engineered. Its timing is suspicious in the extreme. It would not surprise me if both the investigation that triggered the audits and the creditor were both suspiciously motivated. All FOSS companies need to have a close look at their exposure to being leveraged in this way.
It is my hope and belief that Novell regrets their dance with the devil and they're trying to escape his fee. We will see if they can do it. In any case it should be more clear to all that dancing with the devil is a dangerous game.
SCOX shares have become a bizarre game. The company has expended a quarter billion dollars in paid-in capital to achieve a market cap of $20M. Nobody is playing this game on the business merits of the company any more. Current speculation is that today's stock price has to do with mutual fund rating periods.
It's sad that the patent trolls won't go away because the lawyers can always sell it as a good gamble.
IMHO this smear campaign against linux fails for two reasons:
Vista bombs - It was a holding action to prevent people from adopting linux before Vista arrived to save the day. The cavalry isn't coming in this case because Vista is the Millenium Edition Sequel.
Novell isn't going to extend the holding action - Initially I thought they had sold out. Today's disclosure of most of the patent agreement in their financial statement seems to indicate they're not committed to that plan. There is some hope that the PHBs of the world will see how desperate MS is to fight linux and be curious about why. I certainly hope other prospective partners will look at this and see how toxic a deal with MS can be.
We shall see in the end, of course. Perhaps by mid June we'll have some rulings on Novell that shed some light.
The urban environment is also an excellent vehicle for denying benefits of an advanced society to vast numbers of people, like the US where millions have less access to medicine than their impoverished Mexican neighbors because they have no 'coverage'.
This leads to 'medical tourism' where people leave the US to a go to a more rational country where doctors take 'cash'.
This sheltered whitey, you see, grew up the poor kid of a sometimes employed single cocktail waitress in Watts. Often hungry, never offered medical care, sickly and thin, I was an opressed minority in an area where a lot of people had an axe to grind against people that looked like me. I was orphaned at a young age, so didn't even get the opportunities afforded someone with parents to help them along.
I did what I had to do -- I got the heck out of there. I know what it means to abandon everything you know in hope of finding a survivable environment.
I'm doing ok now, but along the way I've been beaten near to death, stabbed and shot; I've nearly starved and frozen to death. I've been opressed by The Man just like every poor person trying to pull himself up. I've been used and exploited.
You should let go of your racist presumptions and look at the issues rationally, not attack me for who you mistakenly think I am based on how I look.
sahel:A band across Africa 2400 miles long, the Sahel forms the border between the saharan zone to the north and the sudanian zone to the south. Varying from semi-arid grasslands to thorn savannah, it receives between.15 and.5m of rainfall each year, primarily during monsoon season.
During the 1960s, more rain fell in the sahel, leading to governments supported programs of northern expansion into the region for farming and grazing. In 1968 the drought resumed, grazing collasped and famine was widespread. Currently looked at as an indicator for effects of global weather and climate change, it is expected that global warming will reduce precipitation in the sahel by up to 25% on average. Historically the region has been prone to intermittent drought.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't been paying attention. There was a squeeze play involving a major creditor and Novell at the exact moment that Chairman Bill showed up with his suspiciously precisely correctly sized truckload of cash. Had Novell declined they may have been insolvent.
Was Bill holding the gun? After the Baystar thing who can tell?
Just re-read the marketing agreement. Yup, this is the best thing that could happen for Novell. MS can't return the coupons. If they can't distribute them, MS can't compete with Novell in the same market with the same product. Like I said at the time, MS just bought some really expensive wallpaper for their Redmond office. I'm sure it will look lovely.
No returns. Thanks for the millions. Sorry you can't use the coupons as you intended. They make lovely wallpaper, though.
I'm pretty sure Cuba has war plans for the invasion of Florida. That doesn't mean they intend to do it. The processes involved in making and executing plans are skills that require training and practice. One makes ridiculous example plans as well as ones more credible, for practice or for blue sky contingencies one knows will never occur. To fail to practice is to be unprepared for the real mission, which would be disastrous since the plans often must be drawn up in short order because the unforeseen contingencies are the ones that get ya into a fight. We have war games off of South Korea in international waters all the time. I'm quite certain those sailors are not going ashore, for anything other than R&R, while they're there. That is to them what them having war games in the Gulf of California would be like to us, and they are not that provocative.
China is holding an economically, not a militarily aggressive posture. If occasionally they fire a rocket over the sea, well, did not Teddy Roosevelt say "walk softly and carry a big stick"? His wisdom wasn't just for Americans. I don't believe we have anything more to fear from them than what comes naturally from being too free with your money, to eager to buy everything on the shelf, too swift to borrow - eventually you become indentured to your debtor or go bankrupt. China has enough issues to deal with without attacking the US today: like desertification, overpopulation, aging population, economy conversion, political unrest, corruption, food quality, and of course they share a HUGE land border with a host of people with issues of their own. They have enough on their plate without opening up a whole US can of worms.
Several people have mistaken me in this thread. I like China. Not just the people either -- I believe the government of China has seen the benefits of freedom. They have undertaken the most dangerous and difficult task of converting to a more enlightened and free society at great peril to themselves for the benefit of their people. I am in no place to criticize the pace of their efforts -- to proceed too fast is to ensure descent into anarchy. That they are competing effectively and aggressively with us in the field of global trade is a testament to how well they understand their duty to succeed for the benefit of their people. If we want our government to compete better, why should that be China's fault? Yeah, they've done some bad stuff, but I've got enough bad government activity going on in my own country to worry about before I go criticizing other peoples' -- especially since I haven't done the background on the issues.
That said, my comment is about the duty of the US wardens of infrastructure and secrets -- and to a certain extent all people in IT and essential services to consider carefully all aspects of their charges in the light of the certain knowledge that there are many qualified and resourceful people who seek weaknesses everywhere they can find them. As others have pointed out, the source code is not so scarce at all -- China and several other countries may have it under license, but in fact rumors abound that it's "out there" for the miscreants both foreign and domestic to exploit for reasons both militaristic and avaricious. It would not surprise me if the stuff were available to everyone except the people who were able and motivated to fix it. I need no more proof of this than the fact that you know what day of the month is "Exploit Wednesday".
If TFA were about more lost personal info (again) I probably would have posted something like "do you encrypt your backups and all data on physical media for transit?"
In short, I'm being a captain obvious karma whore. Get it?
Me I prefer the keychain size for convenience AV. So much stuff, only so much pocket.
I know, not the question you asked.
Anyway apparently the answer is yes.
This one works for me. Tiny, 1GB, $50, plays mp3, mp4, wmv, etc. Charges USB, formats fat. Works with linux. I blogged about this earlier today. There are instructions there for converting DVDs to a format it can use. They have bigger ones, but who needs to load up three days worth of AV?
Note: this is new, not remaindered I don't think.
TFA is about China. Don't try to read anything into my comment that isn't there. I can be enough of a controversial jerk all by myself, thanks.
It is notable here that China is one of the state entities that enjoys access to the source code for Window under Microsoft's SharedSource program. If you're in IT for a government agency in the US, it's your duty to ask 'what does China know about my critical infrastructure that I don't know?'
Unfortunately for the people who rely on you, the answer is undiscoverable.
Your proposal only buys time, it doesn't solve the problem.
In fifty years the population doubles again and then we're back where we started.
Or worse.
Don't project negative moderation in the subject of your comment.
I've been watching RMS and Bruce Perens for more than 20 years. I don't always agree with them, though they have contributed far more to the cause than I. RMS in particular can get carried away with enthusiasm.
Having considered the issues myself however, it is my belief that they had considered these issues with what I would consider mathematical rigor long before I was even interested in them. You could see that I sometimes disagree with them about important issues if you were a contributor here, since it's in slashdot's record. I must confess however that where I've felt they were wrong over the years subsequent events have proven them right more often than not.
I perceive that the problem you have with them is a problem they have that I share. They are not good at suffering fools.
Passion can be scary -- anyone who's stood at an altar to be married can tell you that. Passion is a powerful motivator for a lot of things, including innovative problem solving. Yes, passionate people who care about their work can engage in strident discussion. Should it rise to the necessary level, alliances will form and there will be yet another fork. Customers, especially business customers, need not be afraid of this process - X.org teaches us that often a fork brings clarity and cohesion to a passionate team and outstanding results are almost immediately forthcoming.
Disagreements in the secret back room deals process, however, are something businessmen need to fear. They can lead to warring law firms, legal liabilities, and injunctions against almost any non-open technology that a company has leveraged to compete effectively. This can bring multinational firms to a halt, prevent essential communications for emergency personnel, or completely break a supply chain overnight. These are not minor risk at all. These are bet-the-company risks. Every business school teaches the same mantra: "risk is essential to good business. Embrace risk. But do not bet the company."
To bring this back on topic, there is a course of action Novell can pursue that will eventually bring them absolution. Microsoft demonstrated this technique in their deal with Sendo. Basically their deal involved providing the OS for the Sendo phone. If the product failed to launch by a set date for any reason, including Microsoft's inability to deliver the OS, the terms of the deal resulted in Microsoft ownership of all of Sendo's phone related IP. Unsurprisingly, Sendo is no more. Also unsurprisingly, other phone vendors are reluctant to reap the benefits of partnering with the PC software market leader.
Novell can deliver the goods - developing C# and Mono, Visual Basic for Open Office for the Linux platform. They can leverage the economics of overseas labor markets to hire an army of paralegals to document in the source code specifically by number (or more subtly with easily searchable keywords) which patents are violated. They can identify leaky workers and assign them to positions of responsibility, identifying them anonymously to L'inq. They can make the project their organizational strategy lab and send a new manager (or better yet, a failed engineer) to reorganize it every 90 days. They can hire Scott Adams as a motivational speaker. Site security can be overseen by the cousin of the accountant that does the inventory, who is the Aunt of the payroll accountant who is the cousin of the head of HR who seems not to notice that the majority of employees exist only in the payroll. This is the customary practice in Banaglore anyway - everybody is related to everybody else and if you can't indulge in a little nepotism how important could you be? Since failure is not only the expected, but the desired outcome, the place can be a plush corporate retreat where junkets by excecutives can be organized for minimal oversight and maximum recreation where it is understood that inspection tours will only be a strictly scheduled and carefully guided interlude between morning golf and discussion with open bar. They can dogfood the heck out of the thing, insisting that pre-alpha tools be used for management, production and accounting. When their committed investment is gone, they can appeal for more cash (bleed the beast!) or just shrug and say it's not their fault - offshoring wasn't guaranteed and it just didn't work - but see what strides
In the new dawn emerging from the FOSS revolution we are finally getting what we really need to move technology forward: light. These back room deals for contingent permission to use intangible ideas and leverage market share will not stand the light of day. All deals are eventually exposed. This leads to some business ethics lessons that should have been the standard all along:
Now let us set out to innovate good products and sell them on their merits, m'k?
I wrote here at the time that the point of a secret covenant was for the companies to be able to sell the same peace more than once.
PHBs need to understand they can't buy peace -- Not ever. They have to take it by choosing to be Free and Open.
Novell's contributions to the OIN need to be reassessed now because the value of the patents they contributed may have been wiped out by this agreement. How many other OIN partners have worked a deal like this or outright licensed away their patents? Is the Open Invention Network a complete sham?
Novell took money from Microsoft. Microsoft always gets something valuable in return. I continue to believe the "something of value" was a pledge for Novell programmers to leverage MS IP in their products so that when this deal expired their customers would be hooked into paying MS licensing fees for products that run in Linux. It's the only way Microsoft encouraging deployment of Linux makes sense from a Microsoft point of view.
It certainly will be easier to do with Novell offshoring most of their development. High profile evacuations in their onshore development teams show an important trend. The FOSS developers who create great work because they have both skill and a passion for the "free as in liberty" aspect of open source software have fled. Offshore they can hire coders who are interested in personal liberty from the oppressed economic conditions of their community and are less concerned with the Freedom of others who fare better than them at a minimum. It's not a formula for good code. Passion adds considerable quality to the output - perhaps quality that cannot be had any other way. A software system is not a microwave oven.
Novell desperately needed that money from Microsoft because delays in their financial reporting caused by an audit of options grants allowed their major creditor to call loans that would have seriously impacted their operation. Somebody needs to have a close look at how this squeeze play was engineered. Its timing is suspicious in the extreme. It would not surprise me if both the investigation that triggered the audits and the creditor were both suspiciously motivated. All FOSS companies need to have a close look at their exposure to being leveraged in this way.
It is my hope and belief that Novell regrets their dance with the devil and they're trying to escape his fee. We will see if they can do it. In any case it should be more clear to all that dancing with the devil is a dangerous game.
SCOX shares have become a bizarre game. The company has expended a quarter billion dollars in paid-in capital to achieve a market cap of $20M. Nobody is playing this game on the business merits of the company any more. Current speculation is that today's stock price has to do with mutual fund rating periods.
It's sad that the patent trolls won't go away because the lawyers can always sell it as a good gamble.
IMHO this smear campaign against linux fails for two reasons:
We shall see in the end, of course. Perhaps by mid June we'll have some rulings on Novell that shed some light.
The urban environment is also an excellent vehicle for denying benefits of an advanced society to vast numbers of people, like the US where millions have less access to medicine than their impoverished Mexican neighbors because they have no 'coverage'.
This leads to 'medical tourism' where people leave the US to a go to a more rational country where doctors take 'cash'.
That Gartner didn't get a cut of the money.
"Assignee: Sun Microsystems, Inc"
The cited patent doesn't belong to Microsoft.
++++!!!++++!!!!++++ Excellent link, would follow again. Hilarious.
But for the sake of slashdot consistency this article needs a link to the fix for this problem, and I don't see it here yet.
Otherwise those poor folks in China might never get their computers working again.
If you can't call the number from the "Get Human" database at get human, AT&T usually gets you a human if you press 0 repeatedly, ignoring prompts.
Sometimes silence works. Try not saying or pressing anything.
Has anybody tried using a dialup botnet to DOS an 800-helpline yet? That would be an interesting comment on the lousy phone help we get from offshore.
If we wrote how we talked voice recognition might be helpful. We don't. Written communication is different and should be.
Sheltered whitey, not so much.
This sheltered whitey, you see, grew up the poor kid of a sometimes employed single cocktail waitress in Watts. Often hungry, never offered medical care, sickly and thin, I was an opressed minority in an area where a lot of people had an axe to grind against people that looked like me. I was orphaned at a young age, so didn't even get the opportunities afforded someone with parents to help them along.
I did what I had to do -- I got the heck out of there. I know what it means to abandon everything you know in hope of finding a survivable environment.
I'm doing ok now, but along the way I've been beaten near to death, stabbed and shot; I've nearly starved and frozen to death. I've been opressed by The Man just like every poor person trying to pull himself up. I've been used and exploited.
You should let go of your racist presumptions and look at the issues rationally, not attack me for who you mistakenly think I am based on how I look.
sahel:A band across Africa 2400 miles long, the Sahel forms the border between the saharan zone to the north and the sudanian zone to the south. Varying from semi-arid grasslands to thorn savannah, it receives between .15 and .5m of rainfall each year, primarily during monsoon season.
During the 1960s, more rain fell in the sahel, leading to governments supported programs of northern expansion into the region for farming and grazing. In 1968 the drought resumed, grazing collasped and famine was widespread. Currently looked at as an indicator for effects of global weather and climate change, it is expected that global warming will reduce precipitation in the sahel by up to 25% on average. Historically the region has been prone to intermittent drought.
It's a rough trip out of there. Staying is worse.