> Perhaps they assume that nobody associated with > free software can afford to sue them for copyright > infringement...
I keep waiting for that to happen - the author of some piece of OSS suing SCO for licence infringement.
There must be at least one OSS author that's reasonably wealthy and could afford to do this, with or without the backing of e.g. the EFF. Chance has to be good that at least one OSS person made a fortune somewhere, somehow,...
what bone/s did they throw out to convince these guys they were (still) on a good thing?
I mean, the resellers are business people - they must be hearing grumbles from their customer base and getting worried as a result. At least some of their customers must be making noises about going somewhere else for their systems.
What nice story did SCO have to tell them? "We're suing everyone" doesn't help those guys a bit
If I own an XBox, mod it, then connect to their network, I've got no problems with them booting me off with a "You have violated the sacred seal" message and refunding whatever money I've spent to join their collective.
On the other hand, MS "fixing" *my* XBox so it can play on their network would appear to me to be *breaking* my XBox as it would no longer run my Linux stuff. On that basis, I would expect to be compensated for their code knowingly breaking my box.
This reduces to a legal issue - MS would say they're fixing *their* XBox while I would say they're breaking *my* XBox. When you buy an XBox, you don't sign any agreement, and there's no condition of any sort imposed at the point of sale that forces me to use my XBox for the good of the collective. I buy it under those conditions; it becomes mine to do with as I see fit.
If MS put a contract in front of me, which said I could have the XBox for $500 and do whatever I want with it, or $299 (here in Australia) as long as I only do with it what they want me to do, then you might have an argument.
They didn't, and there's no contract that I signed before or after purchase that limits what I can do with the box. They can feel free to offer me inducements (e.g. free games, free XBox Live hours) to do what they want me to do, and putting a contract in front of me may be a requirement for me accepting these inducements, and I can feel free to accept or decline those inducements as I see fit.
Unless/until they do this sort of thing, there's no contract and therefore no "compensation" other than what exists in MS' own collective mind.
All of the above assumes I own an XBox, which I don't...
I found myself in a similar situation to yours a few weeks back - no real interest/expertise with email, but I had to get an IMAP email server working fast.
I used Postfix on top of Mandrake, and put Courier on top of that. It works fine; there was no significant setup required; it worked straight "out of the box" and hasn't missed a beat since.
Others might be better - I didn't check - but Courier is certainly good enough for me based on this one experience with it
It's a slow, quiet day - one of those where the afternoon drags on and on and on - so I log into Slashdot.
Bingo! A gaggle of spammers exposed to the public eye! I start scrolling through the discussion, my heart filled with glee at the wizard japes my fellow/.'ers will be indulging in at this very moment.
Bzzzt! All that's there is several variations on a wget script, pointers to a few last-known home addresses, pointers to lists of users etc. All good, solid work, but nothing that's going to get you bonus marks.
Students, here's your work assignment for the next 30 minutes: I want to see Slashdot subjects like "Their hosting service has now lost power", "Just sent 50 tonnes of dung to this guy's home address", "Just ordered 5000 pizzas sent to this guy's house", "Server is now engulfed in flame - I've seen it!", "This guy's credit history has now been destroyed", "Hosting computer room now under 18 inches of water", and so on.
This assignment will form a SIGNIFICANT component of your end-of-year grade. Any references supplied will be checked; photographic evidence should be supplied where available.
Thanks for your attention, and good luck in your endeavours
Check out www.thebrain.com - they've got a product called Virtual Brain that looks pretty interesting. You create a bunch of "thoughts" with names like "Business", "Family", "Sports", "Porn", then you can create "sub-thoughts" under these to categorize things further.
You might put links to photos, or Web pages containing photos under "Family". You can then crosslink these links to "Sports" for pictures of the kids at their school sports, and so on and so on. You can link in Excel spreadsheets etc. as appropriate; I've got my company's Excel phone list linked under "Business" for example.
It looks pretty interesting - been checking it out for a few days now and haven't decided whether it's a keeper or not.
Windows only, unfortunately. My biggest gripe with it to date is that I'm trying to wean myself off MS software, and this would lock me back in again.
Anyone have any news on Chandler? For those of you that don't know about it, it's a broadly similar cross-platform PIM that was announced in a blaze of glory several months ago, and has been stuck on version 0.1 ever since. According to the Web site (www.osafoundation.org), it appears as though things are going on in the background with Chandler, but no new code's being released.
Frankly, I'd settle for just about anything to get away from the Exchange/Outlook combination
As the parent poster implied, use MS Project (or whatever project planning software you've got) and put everything you've got to do on the plan.
**Keep it maintained at all times** - it only takes a few minutes to maintain it once you've got it set up.
**Be realistic with your time estimates** - if you don't know how to build a firewall, then allow a lot of time to do it.
**Remember that you aren't productive 40 hours a week** - depending on your role, you'll probably only do productive work 30-80% of the time, and if you're the only techo guy in the shop I'm betting you'd be somewhere below 80% productive. Reading email, going to meetings, cigarette breaks - they all chew into your 40 hours per week. Once you decide how productive you truly are, factor it into the project plan by saying the resource (you!) is only e.g. 60% available.
Then, when someone comes up and asks you to manually install virus checkers on these 43 new PCs, put it in your project plan, show how every other task you've got blows out by 2 weeks and see if your boss is prepared to accept the delay.
If you're at a place where they pay for overtime, enter all your time estimates in hours and do a few "what if" scenarios on your resource allocation (i.e. you!) to show how long things will take if you work 30, 40, 50, 60,... hours per week. Either you'll get lots of overtime (if that's what you want), or they'll hire you an assistant.
Without a doubt, the best/only way to get out of a situation where you're overworked is to be extremely organised and able to show anyone at a moment's notice exactly how busy you are. Once your boss can see the true impact of giving you "just one more" task, in terms of the slippage that will impact other projects, you'll be amazed how that extra work will no longer be as important;->
PS If anyone knows an OSS MS Project replacement that can do all this stuff, please speak up. I've been dying to replace it for ages, but it's a really good fit for this particular problem space
Smartarse comments about Chinese piracy aside, how does MS get to raid schools in Shanghai?
I would have thought that these schools would not have had any reason whatsoever to let MS (or "antipiracy officials" in general) anywhere near their systems. If anything, I would have thought the Chinese education system was about as immune to this type of treatment as any group of people on the planet, courtesy of a long history of piracy being tolerated in China and the Chinese education system not taking a pro-American stance ever as far as I'm concerned.
This depends on how you measure the "success" of OSS.
Having contributed to OSS in the past, in admittedly a fairly minor way, I figured my contribution was a success when I got a few email thank you's from people who I'd helped out. I couldn't care less whether an OSS project I contribute to has 10 or 10 million users, whether they're hackers at home or large corporates, although I obviously don't speak for the maintainers of any individual OSS project.
Projects like Apache have benefited from having IBM and others employ experts specifically to work on Apache. Win-win for all concerned. As others have said, if a business wants a new OSS accounting package developed, maybe they should consider kicking in some compensation for the people who write/debug/document the package.
The thing that you and many others seem to miss is that OSS is an approach to software development; it's not a free-for-all where you ask or demand that some software be written and it magically appears. If businesses want OSS to succeed, then they should contribute something rather than just downloading software.
There's a HUGE number of unemployed coders out there right now, and many would be willing to work on OSS development for a relative pittance. Rather than complain about the lack of features in OSS software, why not track down one or more of these guys, offer them some cash and get them to write OSS code for you?
If you do that, and contribute the code you've paid for back to the OSS community, then you can say you've "got it" and I'll agree with you. If not, and you complain about OSS not being suitable for business use, then you're a parasite.
If you look closely, you can see this code in the 7th episode of the 2nd series of "Stargate SG-1", approximately 25 minutes 18 seconds into the episode.
SCO is obviously claiming ownership of code that's not only present in 5000 year old Egyptian pyramid carvings, but that originated in another galaxy and was written by non-humans.
Let's hope *their* IP property laws aren't as stupid as ours, or they might be able to claim ownership of Earth as an appropriate copyright infringement penalty.
> The scientists admit that they have no idea how > this [taking large pre-built components and > delivering them 300 mln km away] can be achieved. > However, they are certain that once the station > starts operating, all future inhabitants of Mars > will have plenty of electrical power for many > years to come.
Oh, now it all makes sense.
So what they're doing is simply equivalent to building roads to a future suburb of city. "No-one lives here yet, but we'll be ready for them when they get here". And the 6 guys, or maybe 5 guys and an extremely popular woman, who get dropped on Mars and told "make it so" are the just equivalent of the guys who build the bridges for the new roads to cross.
If there's a sudden mass disappearance of Swedish backpackers "with a thirst for adventure" in about 20-25 years time, I'll know where to direct the sniffer dogs.
"Oh boss, I've just found some more work for those Indian outsource guys"...
What's that?
Oh OK, "the Indian qualified electrician guys who specialise in handling hazardous situations that will almost certainly kill a geek techo who would only consider tackling this kind of task as a way of getting the receptionist to throw a smile in his direction for once"
Please, Apple, build in Vorbis support for your iPod. I have 30Gb of my own (i.e. not downloaded) Vorbis files, and am putting off buying a portable player in the hope that you'll come through.
Think of it: no licence fees, and *one* extra sale guaranteed!
I'm pretty sure photographic evidence exists of the Jack The Ripper killings from the late 19th century, and maybe some physical evidence still exists as well. I'm not up to date, but I think it's currently pretty well accepted that the killer was one of about 7 individuals. Furthermore, most/all of these individuals were well known identities, and I'd expect their descendants would be easy to track down.
If they could extract DNA evidence from artifacts of the Ripper killings, they could extract DNA from descendants of the 7 suspects, and try to match them. Maybe some of these descendants might not be willing to participate, but all you'd need would be one person from the suspect's direct bloodline to provide enough evidence for a DNA match.
This could be used to identify who the Ripper was, even 115 or so years after the event.
Ditto for many other unsolved cases, but the Ripper would be high profile and long enough ago that no-one's likely to be embarrassed by the outcomes.
Thanks for responding from the perspective of an MS employee.
However, you've got to know that calling the GPL a "viral" licence opens you up to criticism in this forum;->
I'd argue that MS' licences for e.g. Windows are at least as viral as the GPL. Case in point: in order to access a Windows Terminal Server, I have to buy all these client access licences. They're a paper-only item; I don't get a physical thing when I buy these licences.
There's no Linux licence issue involved here. I could simply use RDesktop running on Linux to access the Windows server, but, no, I have to buy *Windows* licences so I'm allowed to use my *Linux* systems as I want.
If that isn't a glowing example of a viral licence, I don't know what is.
They've got a new boss, Graeme Samuel, who is widely perceived as more business-friendly. If mod chips are truly going to be banned, this might be an interesting indicator of whether the ACCC is about to become less of a public enforcer of individuals' rights than before.
All pre-existing hardware and software patents are revoked in 12 months. Anyone holding these patents is free to reapply (i.e. the existing model is screwed and bad patents have been awarded. Need to weed this out)
If it's an IT-related patent, maximum patent length is 3 years.
If patent enforcement creates a court-ruled monopoly situation, patent is revoked.
Patent queries relating to prior art are investigated as a priority. If existence of prior art is established, costs of investigation are borne by Patent Office. If not established, costs of investigation up to a certain level are borne by the person/corporation requesting the investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
RIAA = Recording Industry Association of Australia
I did read the story properly - I don't quite believe that all the resellers heard was "SCO's going to make money by suing people".
They must have given them something else to cheer them up - what was it?
> Perhaps they assume that nobody associated with
...
> free software can afford to sue them for copyright
> infringement...
I keep waiting for that to happen - the author of some piece of OSS suing SCO for licence infringement.
There must be at least one OSS author that's reasonably wealthy and could afford to do this, with or without the backing of e.g. the EFF. Chance has to be good that at least one OSS person made a fortune somewhere, somehow,
what bone/s did they throw out to convince these guys they were (still) on a good thing?
I mean, the resellers are business people - they must be hearing grumbles from their customer base and getting worried as a result. At least some of their customers must be making noises about going somewhere else for their systems.
What nice story did SCO have to tell them? "We're suing everyone" doesn't help those guys a bit
> Any suggestions for the trophy design?
A picture of a bum with a fist coming out of it?
(Apologies to the "Late Show" interviewee who first suggested this as an appropriate Australian flag design - can't get the image out of my head)
Surprise, surprise, ...
Does it mention in any more detail how this licence revenue has come in? Aside from MS and Sun, who else has paid up?
I'm particularly interested in the number of people who've signed up for the $699 "bargain rate" for Linux licences
If I own an XBox, mod it, then connect to their network, I've got no problems with them booting me off with a "You have violated the sacred seal" message and refunding whatever money I've spent to join their collective.
On the other hand, MS "fixing" *my* XBox so it can play on their network would appear to me to be *breaking* my XBox as it would no longer run my Linux stuff. On that basis, I would expect to be compensated for their code knowingly breaking my box.
This reduces to a legal issue - MS would say they're fixing *their* XBox while I would say they're breaking *my* XBox. When you buy an XBox, you don't sign any agreement, and there's no condition of any sort imposed at the point of sale that forces me to use my XBox for the good of the collective. I buy it under those conditions; it becomes mine to do with as I see fit.
If MS put a contract in front of me, which said I could have the XBox for $500 and do whatever I want with it, or $299 (here in Australia) as long as I only do with it what they want me to do, then you might have an argument.
They didn't, and there's no contract that I signed before or after purchase that limits what I can do with the box. They can feel free to offer me inducements (e.g. free games, free XBox Live hours) to do what they want me to do, and putting a contract in front of me may be a requirement for me accepting these inducements, and I can feel free to accept or decline those inducements as I see fit.
Unless/until they do this sort of thing, there's no contract and therefore no "compensation" other than what exists in MS' own collective mind.
All of the above assumes I own an XBox, which I don't...
I found myself in a similar situation to yours a few weeks back - no real interest/expertise with email, but I had to get an IMAP email server working fast.
I used Postfix on top of Mandrake, and put Courier on top of that. It works fine; there was no significant setup required; it worked straight "out of the box" and hasn't missed a beat since.
Others might be better - I didn't check - but Courier is certainly good enough for me based on this one experience with it
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of ...
It's a slow, quiet day - one of those where the afternoon drags on and on and on - so I log into Slashdot.
/.'ers will be indulging in at this very moment.
Bingo! A gaggle of spammers exposed to the public eye! I start scrolling through the discussion, my heart filled with glee at the wizard japes my fellow
Bzzzt! All that's there is several variations on a wget script, pointers to a few last-known home addresses, pointers to lists of users etc. All good, solid work, but nothing that's going to get you bonus marks.
Students, here's your work assignment for the next 30 minutes: I want to see Slashdot subjects like "Their hosting service has now lost power", "Just sent 50 tonnes of dung to this guy's home address", "Just ordered 5000 pizzas sent to this guy's house", "Server is now engulfed in flame - I've seen it!", "This guy's credit history has now been destroyed", "Hosting computer room now under 18 inches of water", and so on.
This assignment will form a SIGNIFICANT component of your end-of-year grade. Any references supplied will be checked; photographic evidence should be supplied where available.
Thanks for your attention, and good luck in your endeavours
Check out www.thebrain.com - they've got a product called Virtual Brain that looks pretty interesting. You create a bunch of "thoughts" with names like "Business", "Family", "Sports", "Porn", then you can create "sub-thoughts" under these to categorize things further.
You might put links to photos, or Web pages containing photos under "Family". You can then crosslink these links to "Sports" for pictures of the kids at their school sports, and so on and so on. You can link in Excel spreadsheets etc. as appropriate; I've got my company's Excel phone list linked under "Business" for example.
It looks pretty interesting - been checking it out for a few days now and haven't decided whether it's a keeper or not.
Windows only, unfortunately. My biggest gripe with it to date is that I'm trying to wean myself off MS software, and this would lock me back in again.
Anyone have any news on Chandler? For those of you that don't know about it, it's a broadly similar cross-platform PIM that was announced in a blaze of glory several months ago, and has been stuck on version 0.1 ever since. According to the Web site (www.osafoundation.org), it appears as though things are going on in the background with Chandler, but no new code's being released.
Frankly, I'd settle for just about anything to get away from the Exchange/Outlook combination
Parent is true - nobody I know drinks Fosters in Australia. Not even my dad, and he's even less cool than me.
;->
Fosters is the crap we send to the rest of the world, and you'd better believe we keep the good stuff to ourselves
As the parent poster implied, use MS Project (or whatever project planning software you've got) and put everything you've got to do on the plan.
... hours per week. Either you'll get lots of overtime (if that's what you want), or they'll hire you an assistant.
;->
**Keep it maintained at all times** - it only takes a few minutes to maintain it once you've got it set up.
**Be realistic with your time estimates** - if you don't know how to build a firewall, then allow a lot of time to do it.
**Remember that you aren't productive 40 hours a week** - depending on your role, you'll probably only do productive work 30-80% of the time, and if you're the only techo guy in the shop I'm betting you'd be somewhere below 80% productive. Reading email, going to meetings, cigarette breaks - they all chew into your 40 hours per week. Once you decide how productive you truly are, factor it into the project plan by saying the resource (you!) is only e.g. 60% available.
Then, when someone comes up and asks you to manually install virus checkers on these 43 new PCs, put it in your project plan, show how every other task you've got blows out by 2 weeks and see if your boss is prepared to accept the delay.
If you're at a place where they pay for overtime, enter all your time estimates in hours and do a few "what if" scenarios on your resource allocation (i.e. you!) to show how long things will take if you work 30, 40, 50, 60,
Without a doubt, the best/only way to get out of a situation where you're overworked is to be extremely organised and able to show anyone at a moment's notice exactly how busy you are. Once your boss can see the true impact of giving you "just one more" task, in terms of the slippage that will impact other projects, you'll be amazed how that extra work will no longer be as important
PS If anyone knows an OSS MS Project replacement that can do all this stuff, please speak up. I've been dying to replace it for ages, but it's a really good fit for this particular problem space
Smartarse comments about Chinese piracy aside, how does MS get to raid schools in Shanghai?
I would have thought that these schools would not have had any reason whatsoever to let MS (or "antipiracy officials" in general) anywhere near their systems. If anything, I would have thought the Chinese education system was about as immune to this type of treatment as any group of people on the planet, courtesy of a long history of piracy being tolerated in China and the Chinese education system not taking a pro-American stance ever as far as I'm concerned.
What's changed?
This depends on how you measure the "success" of OSS.
Having contributed to OSS in the past, in admittedly a fairly minor way, I figured my contribution was a success when I got a few email thank you's from people who I'd helped out. I couldn't care less whether an OSS project I contribute to has 10 or 10 million users, whether they're hackers at home or large corporates, although I obviously don't speak for the maintainers of any individual OSS project.
Projects like Apache have benefited from having IBM and others employ experts specifically to work on Apache. Win-win for all concerned. As others have said, if a business wants a new OSS accounting package developed, maybe they should consider kicking in some compensation for the people who write/debug/document the package.
The thing that you and many others seem to miss is that OSS is an approach to software development; it's not a free-for-all where you ask or demand that some software be written and it magically appears. If businesses want OSS to succeed, then they should contribute something rather than just downloading software.
There's a HUGE number of unemployed coders out there right now, and many would be willing to work on OSS development for a relative pittance. Rather than complain about the lack of features in OSS software, why not track down one or more of these guys, offer them some cash and get them to write OSS code for you?
If you do that, and contribute the code you've paid for back to the OSS community, then you can say you've "got it" and I'll agree with you. If not, and you complain about OSS not being suitable for business use, then you're a parasite.
If you look closely, you can see this code in the 7th episode of the 2nd series of "Stargate SG-1", approximately 25 minutes 18 seconds into the episode.
SCO is obviously claiming ownership of code that's not only present in 5000 year old Egyptian pyramid carvings, but that originated in another galaxy and was written by non-humans.
Let's hope *their* IP property laws aren't as stupid as ours, or they might be able to claim ownership of Earth as an appropriate copyright infringement penalty.
> The scientists admit that they have no idea how
> this [taking large pre-built components and
> delivering them 300 mln km away] can be achieved.
> However, they are certain that once the station
> starts operating, all future inhabitants of Mars
> will have plenty of electrical power for many
> years to come.
Oh, now it all makes sense.
So what they're doing is simply equivalent to building roads to a future suburb of city. "No-one lives here yet, but we'll be ready for them when they get here". And the 6 guys, or maybe 5 guys and an extremely popular woman, who get dropped on Mars and told "make it so" are the just equivalent of the guys who build the bridges for the new roads to cross.
If there's a sudden mass disappearance of Swedish backpackers "with a thirst for adventure" in about 20-25 years time, I'll know where to direct the sniffer dogs.
"Oh boss, I've just found some more work for those Indian outsource guys"...
What's that?
Oh OK, "the Indian qualified electrician guys who specialise in handling hazardous situations that will almost certainly kill a geek techo who would only consider tackling this kind of task as a way of getting the receptionist to throw a smile in his direction for once"
Happy now?
Please, Apple, build in Vorbis support for your iPod. I have 30Gb of my own (i.e. not downloaded) Vorbis files, and am putting off buying a portable player in the hope that you'll come through.
Think of it: no licence fees, and *one* extra sale guaranteed!
I'm pretty sure photographic evidence exists of the Jack The Ripper killings from the late 19th century, and maybe some physical evidence still exists as well. I'm not up to date, but I think it's currently pretty well accepted that the killer was one of about 7 individuals. Furthermore, most/all of these individuals were well known identities, and I'd expect their descendants would be easy to track down.
If they could extract DNA evidence from artifacts of the Ripper killings, they could extract DNA from descendants of the 7 suspects, and try to match them. Maybe some of these descendants might not be willing to participate, but all you'd need would be one person from the suspect's direct bloodline to provide enough evidence for a DNA match.
This could be used to identify who the Ripper was, even 115 or so years after the event.
Ditto for many other unsolved cases, but the Ripper would be high profile and long enough ago that no-one's likely to be embarrassed by the outcomes.
Thanks for responding from the perspective of an MS employee.
;->
However, you've got to know that calling the GPL a "viral" licence opens you up to criticism in this forum
I'd argue that MS' licences for e.g. Windows are at least as viral as the GPL. Case in point: in order to access a Windows Terminal Server, I have to buy all these client access licences. They're a paper-only item; I don't get a physical thing when I buy these licences.
There's no Linux licence issue involved here. I could simply use RDesktop running on Linux to access the Windows server, but, no, I have to buy *Windows* licences so I'm allowed to use my *Linux* systems as I want.
If that isn't a glowing example of a viral licence, I don't know what is.
They've got a new boss, Graeme Samuel, who is widely perceived as more business-friendly. If mod chips are truly going to be banned, this might be an interesting indicator of whether the ACCC is about to become less of a public enforcer of individuals' rights than before.
...and add:
All pre-existing hardware and software patents are revoked in 12 months. Anyone holding these patents is free to reapply (i.e. the existing model is screwed and bad patents have been awarded. Need to weed this out)
If it's an IT-related patent, maximum patent length is 3 years.
If patent enforcement creates a court-ruled monopoly situation, patent is revoked.
Patent queries relating to prior art are investigated as a priority. If existence of prior art is established, costs of investigation are borne by Patent Office. If not established, costs of investigation up to a certain level are borne by the person/corporation requesting the investigation.