I am saying that their case cannot be based on copyright law (in my humble IANAL opinion), because according to my understanding of copyright law, their claims simply have no basis. The references SCO have made to "copyright law" that I have seen so far are pure fantasy. Therefore, I conclude that SCO's case is no more built upon copyright law than it is built upon drink-driving law, or air law, or any other branch of the law as we know it today.
I don't see what claim the FSF (or any other Linux copyright holder) would have against "Company X" (the so-far mythical Fortune 1000 Company).
The GPL is a distribution license, it does not cover usage at all. You do not have to accept the GPL to use GPL software, only to distribute it. If Company X want to give some charity money to SCO, they are free to do so but that has nothing to do with the GPL, and cannot limit their rights to freely distribute the kernel.
The only way this would turn into a GPL violation by Company X would be if they re-distributed the kernel with their own additional restrictions. eg, if they said "we will give you Linux, but only if you buy a license from SCO", that would be a GPL violation. But why would anyone say that? SCO have certainly never made any moves to restrict distribution (indeed, they are [or were] distributing it freely themselves) so there is no issue of Company X saying such a thing under duress from SCO.
Now possibly SCO are violating some trading laws. eg, if they sent an invoice to anyone in Australia, it would almost certainly be a violation of the Trade-Practices Act. Presumably other countries have similar laws (although not the USA it seems?). But I don't see the direct breach of the GPL by SCO here either. Again, the GPL covers distribution only, so the only direct GPL violation could be if SCO went after people who obtained Linux from SCO themselves (which they are in fact doing, but this presumably doesn't cover the case of the mythical Fortune 1000 Company). Otherwise, any argument against SCO would be rather indirect.
Exactly. If SCO are actually correct, and there is a non-trivial amount of code in Linux which is infringing SCO copyrights, then it is not possible to distribute Linux under the GPL. In principle, anyone with a copyright claim to linux could sue anyone else who distributed such a kernel.
All SCO have to do is show a single convincing demonstration, and they can halt all linux distribution - well, for the 5 minutes it takes to remove the offending code (and it might not compile for a day or two:-)
SCO is not going to take action against you. The only thing they could claim is that you violated the GPL. But if you did it unknowingly, and SCO themselves refuse to provide the evidence, they have no case. They have no claim under copyright law itself (think of the analagous case if it were a book rather than software).
No, the kernel is licensed under the GPL. If (in some dream-world) a non-trivial amount of SCO-copyrighted code has made its way into the kernel, then there are exactly two options that do not violate the GPL:
1. SCO licenses their code under the GPL. Everything continues as it always has, SCO have no legal framework in which to demand license fees.
2. SCO refuses to license their code under the GPL. It is a violation of the GPL to distribute said code. Linus accepts a patch that removes said code from the kernel and everything continues as it always has, but maybe a few things don't compile for a release or two. SCO have no legal framework in which to demand license fees, whether before or after the infringing code is removed (an analogous case would be a book publisher distributing a book that violated someone else's copyright - there is no claim that can be made against anyone who obtained a copy of the book in good faith).
Conclusion: SCO's argument cannot be based on copyright law. What then is it based on? I have no idea.
You will never be able to play them under Linux. The whole idea of DRM requires that the user cannot intercept the music stream on the way from the software decoder to the sound card (and there is a big push to extend this and encrypt the connection from the sound card to the speakers, too). That is completely opposite to the nature of Linux.
While I think that law has well and truely passed its USE BY date, there are important cultural reasons why France imposed them.
For something that is on the same page (although at a completely different scale), I imagine most Americans would be offended at trading in Sept. 11 memorabilia.
Given that you apparantly had no cooling problems prior to your modifications, and rather severe cooling problems afterwards, I suggest you reexamine your claim that
"...added a superior cooling system to the machine, quietened it, IMPROVED it in every way..."
But it would be a tragedy if the Americans used this as an excuse to weaponize space. A manned space program has very few military purposes (that I am aware of), their primary purpose is science and engineering.
Really? How does the synchronization work? And if there was any form of local caching (which there would need to be, otherwise you would need a separate RPC message pretty much for each machine word that is accessed remotely), how is that kept in sync with the remote node?
Again, can you provide any links to back-up your claim that the machine has this capability?
The phrase "Kernel license" means, duh, the license the Kernel is licensed under, ie the GPL. I don't see how you could have misunderstood that.
Secondly, Linus certainly does have a particular interpretation of the GPL. For example, many people argue that a strict reading of the GPL forbids binary-only modules. But they exist essentially because Linus said "I won't sue you".
The meaning of my post was that user-land apps are taken to be not derivative works of the Kernel, even if they are bundled together, eg in an embedded system. Just because the Kernel is GPL'ed, doesn't mean your user-land app needs to be GPL'ed too. Normally, linking something against a GPL'ed library requires that the linker is also GPL'ed. So the case of a user-land app making system calls into a GPL'ed kernel is not as straightforward as it might appear.
The Kernel license doesn't cover user-land applications. I can't remember whether Linus just 'interprets' the GPL that way or whether there is a specific exemption.
This is the crux of the argument. As I understand it, this is what makes EULA's enforceable in the first place. But I think it is a crock of shit.
By the same arguments, you 'copy' the contents of a book onto the back of your retina when you read it, therefore you need permission from the copyright holder to read a book.
If there is ever a court case where this becomes an important point, I would expect that such 'copying' that is required for normal usage of the material falls squarely under fair use.
The slashdot heading (and maybe the article - I havn't read it:-) is wildly misleading. The $38 million for the Dell machine is the total cost, including administration, support and maintenance, application development etc, for 5 years.
The '1/7 cost' for the Apple machine is for the hardware only.
Someone should wake up and smell the coffee. In these days of commodity hardware, differences like a factor of 7 (overall a factor 28 in price/performance!) is at best highly improbable.
Umm, can you provide some links to back this up? NUMA machines certainly offer this capability, but they are relatively rare and this cluster is certainly not NUMA. I have used several high-performance scientific clusters and I have never yet encountered one that is configured in this way. Surely it would require some substantial hardware support?
To the parent, the focus in high performance computing nowdays is on "portable perforamnce"; for the most part, libraries are written so that the performance critical components are either very small, or self-optimizing (or both). For most applications, the most you might need to do is optimize some of the kernels (eg BLAS) for the architecure.
Of course, the US has no qualms about breaking treaties. The problem with WTO treaties though, is that there is a well-defined (and often used) mechanism for dealing with countries that violate them. ie, no one else trades with them in that particular market. Usually very effective!
Yeah its a shame really, I didn't realize how much of an "Australian icon" he is until I left Australia - mostly because in Australa, he isn't!
I suspect that most Australians feel along the same lines that I do when I see him on TV, "embarassingly enthusiastic" is not a good way of describing it, but its the best I can come up with at the moment. It just doesn't fit in with how Australians view themselves (or at least, how Australians view what an Australian stereotype should look like:-))
You misunderstand; I have open field lines which terminate at the stellar surface (where the field is generated).
This certainly is a (later corrected) claim that you had terminating field lines in a circumstance which ought to be a magnetic monopole.
Field lines that 'terminate' at infinity do not produce a monopole because, of course, they do not actually 'terminate'. div B = 0 everywhere.
This is completely consistent with bcrowell's earlier comment: That's an unphysical artifact of unrealistic boundary conditions. A monopole would make open field lines that terminated at the monopole, not at infinity. I would not go as far as saying 'unphysical', but unless the universe is actually infinite then it is indeed an unrealistic boundary condition. If you have a bounded domain, then open field lines cannot exist. This is completely ignoring general (or even special) relativity, at which point it no longer makes sense to consider a static configuration of field lines independent of how they got there. It is irrelevant anyway, because this is way outside the domain of the computational simulation you cite.
I never said that open field lines imply monopoles. All I said was that terminating field lines imply monopoles. In fact I cannot find anywhere in this entire thread where anyone claimed that open field lines imply monopoles. Way back, someone erroneously claimed that open field lines do not exist (they do, but only on an unbounded domain), but there was no link to monopoles at that time. I don't know what you are arguing about. None of the work you have cited has any connection (no matter how loose) to monopoles.
Except that the existence (or not) of magnetic monopoles radically changes the symmetry of the fields. In particular, a U(1) vector potential is no longer enough.
Well, I would consider that the lines DO meet at infinity. But this is just a matter of how exactly you define the boundary, it is not physical anyway. The important point is that it is much larger than 6 radii away and div B = 0 everywhere in the physical domain. Hence no terminating field lines anywhere in the physical domain and no monopoles.
Ok, I had a quick glance at the paper. There is a misunderstanding; By "open field lines" they mean a radial arrangement where the field lines extend well beyond the stellar surface, it doesn't mean that the field lines actually terminate (which would imply monopoles). They are simply making an assumption that, within the vicinity of the star (meaning 6 x radii - see section 2.3) the field lines can be assumed to be radial. In a more detailed calculation, the field lines would meet at a distance much larger than 6 radii away.
It is unrealistic because it violates the continuity equations. If the magnetic field is divergence-less then there should be no terminating field lines, end of story. Of course, in a simulation with finite-precision arithmetic, it is not possible to rigorously enforce div B = 0 so some extreme field configurations might produce this (how 'extreme' must ultimately depend on the precision).
Check the data again, it is quite possible that field lines can appear to terminate, but on closer inspection they do not. Frankly, I do not believe your claim that there is experimental evidence of such an effect in some stars. This would, of course, be experimental evidence for monopoles. Not out of the question, but unlikely (and big enough news that the astronomers whom I just asked about this would probably have heard about it before). Any citation links around?
This is a good point; copyright is essentially not enforcable against propritary software. Microsoft (or anyone else, for that matter) are free to misappropriate as much source code as they like, and they will get away with it for as long as they can keep the source code a secret.
To actually get an injunction to force them to show the code would require some evidence *first*. If they were sufficiently good at obsfucating the executable, then that evidence can be arbitarily hard to obtain.
This really sucks, it smacks of the secret patents issued to the US military and contractors; the patent is secret, the only way you find out about it is if it is independently rediscovered, at which point you get a knock on the door by the Feds telling you to shut up about it or go to prison. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration, I actually have no idea what happens when someone inside the USA rediscovers something that is subject to a secret patent.
Internationally, it is slightly humerous. Teflon was discovered by a French company (IIRC). But when they tried to patent it, the USA suddenly comes out and said it was already patented! Of course, it was a secret patent (Teflon had been used from very early days to coat the inside of pipes used in Uranium processing), but the USA wanted to enforce the prior patent anyway! Fortunately, the French told them to go jump.
Slashdot Mirror
I am saying that their case cannot be based on copyright law (in my humble IANAL opinion), because according to my understanding of copyright law, their claims simply have no basis. The references SCO have made to "copyright law" that I have seen so far are pure fantasy. Therefore, I conclude that SCO's case is no more built upon copyright law than it is built upon drink-driving law, or air law, or any other branch of the law as we know it today.
The GPL is a distribution license, it does not cover usage at all. You do not have to accept the GPL to use GPL software, only to distribute it. If Company X want to give some charity money to SCO, they are free to do so but that has nothing to do with the GPL, and cannot limit their rights to freely distribute the kernel.
The only way this would turn into a GPL violation by Company X would be if they re-distributed the kernel with their own additional restrictions. eg, if they said "we will give you Linux, but only if you buy a license from SCO", that would be a GPL violation. But why would anyone say that? SCO have certainly never made any moves to restrict distribution (indeed, they are [or were] distributing it freely themselves) so there is no issue of Company X saying such a thing under duress from SCO.
Now possibly SCO are violating some trading laws. eg, if they sent an invoice to anyone in Australia, it would almost certainly be a violation of the Trade-Practices Act. Presumably other countries have similar laws (although not the USA it seems?). But I don't see the direct breach of the GPL by SCO here either. Again, the GPL covers distribution only, so the only direct GPL violation could be if SCO went after people who obtained Linux from SCO themselves (which they are in fact doing, but this presumably doesn't cover the case of the mythical Fortune 1000 Company). Otherwise, any argument against SCO would be rather indirect.
All SCO have to do is show a single convincing demonstration, and they can halt all linux distribution - well, for the 5 minutes it takes to remove the offending code (and it might not compile for a day or two :-)
SCO is not going to take action against you. The only thing they could claim is that you violated the GPL. But if you did it unknowingly, and SCO themselves refuse to provide the evidence, they have no case. They have no claim under copyright law itself (think of the analagous case if it were a book rather than software).
1. SCO licenses their code under the GPL. Everything continues as it always has, SCO have no legal framework in which to demand license fees.
2. SCO refuses to license their code under the GPL. It is a violation of the GPL to distribute said code. Linus accepts a patch that removes said code from the kernel and everything continues as it always has, but maybe a few things don't compile for a release or two. SCO have no legal framework in which to demand license fees, whether before or after the infringing code is removed (an analogous case would be a book publisher distributing a book that violated someone else's copyright - there is no claim that can be made against anyone who obtained a copy of the book in good faith).
Conclusion: SCO's argument cannot be based on copyright law. What then is it based on? I have no idea.
You will never be able to play them under Linux. The whole idea of DRM requires that the user cannot intercept the music stream on the way from the software decoder to the sound card (and there is a big push to extend this and encrypt the connection from the sound card to the speakers, too). That is completely opposite to the nature of Linux.
For something that is on the same page (although at a completely different scale), I imagine most Americans would be offended at trading in Sept. 11 memorabilia.
Unfortunately it seems to becoming increasingly necessary to check a poster's history before taking them at all seriously :-(
"...added a superior cooling system to the machine, quietened it, IMPROVED it in every way..."
I suspect the USA spent at least that much in Russia during the first space race, trying to keep tabs on them! (And vice-versa too)
Again, can you provide any links to back-up your claim that the machine has this capability?
The phrase "Kernel license" means, duh, the license the Kernel is licensed under, ie the GPL. I don't see how you could have misunderstood that.
Secondly, Linus certainly does have a particular interpretation of the GPL. For example, many people argue that a strict reading of the GPL forbids binary-only modules. But they exist essentially because Linus said "I won't sue you".
The meaning of my post was that user-land apps are taken to be not derivative works of the Kernel, even if they are bundled together, eg in an embedded system. Just because the Kernel is GPL'ed, doesn't mean your user-land app needs to be GPL'ed too. Normally, linking something against a GPL'ed library requires that the linker is also GPL'ed. So the case of a user-land app making system calls into a GPL'ed kernel is not as straightforward as it might appear.
The Kernel license doesn't cover user-land applications. I can't remember whether Linus just 'interprets' the GPL that way or whether there is a specific exemption.
By the same arguments, you 'copy' the contents of a book onto the back of your retina when you read it, therefore you need permission from the copyright holder to read a book.
If there is ever a court case where this becomes an important point, I would expect that such 'copying' that is required for normal usage of the material falls squarely under fair use.
The '1/7 cost' for the Apple machine is for the hardware only.
Someone should wake up and smell the coffee. In these days of commodity hardware, differences like a factor of 7 (overall a factor 28 in price/performance!) is at best highly improbable.
But whatabout a network? That is the essential difference between a "render farm" cluster and a real parallel machine.
To the parent, the focus in high performance computing nowdays is on "portable perforamnce"; for the most part, libraries are written so that the performance critical components are either very small, or self-optimizing (or both). For most applications, the most you might need to do is optimize some of the kernels (eg BLAS) for the architecure.
Of course, the US has no qualms about breaking treaties. The problem with WTO treaties though, is that there is a well-defined (and often used) mechanism for dealing with countries that violate them. ie, no one else trades with them in that particular market. Usually very effective!
I suspect that most Australians feel along the same lines that I do when I see him on TV, "embarassingly enthusiastic" is not a good way of describing it, but its the best I can come up with at the moment. It just doesn't fit in with how Australians view themselves (or at least, how Australians view what an Australian stereotype should look like :-))
You misunderstand; I have open field lines which terminate at the stellar surface (where the field is generated).
This certainly is a (later corrected) claim that you had terminating field lines in a circumstance which ought to be a magnetic monopole.
Field lines that 'terminate' at infinity do not produce a monopole because, of course, they do not actually 'terminate'. div B = 0 everywhere.
This is completely consistent with bcrowell's earlier comment: That's an unphysical artifact of unrealistic boundary conditions. A monopole would make open field lines that terminated at the monopole, not at infinity. I would not go as far as saying 'unphysical', but unless the universe is actually infinite then it is indeed an unrealistic boundary condition. If you have a bounded domain, then open field lines cannot exist. This is completely ignoring general (or even special) relativity, at which point it no longer makes sense to consider a static configuration of field lines independent of how they got there. It is irrelevant anyway, because this is way outside the domain of the computational simulation you cite.
I never said that open field lines imply monopoles. All I said was that terminating field lines imply monopoles. In fact I cannot find anywhere in this entire thread where anyone claimed that open field lines imply monopoles. Way back, someone erroneously claimed that open field lines do not exist (they do, but only on an unbounded domain), but there was no link to monopoles at that time. I don't know what you are arguing about. None of the work you have cited has any connection (no matter how loose) to monopoles.
Except that the existence (or not) of magnetic monopoles radically changes the symmetry of the fields. In particular, a U(1) vector potential is no longer enough.
Well, I would consider that the lines DO meet at infinity. But this is just a matter of how exactly you define the boundary, it is not physical anyway. The important point is that it is much larger than 6 radii away and div B = 0 everywhere in the physical domain. Hence no terminating field lines anywhere in the physical domain and no monopoles.
Ok, I had a quick glance at the paper. There is a misunderstanding; By "open field lines" they mean a radial arrangement where the field lines extend well beyond the stellar surface, it doesn't mean that the field lines actually terminate (which would imply monopoles). They are simply making an assumption that, within the vicinity of the star (meaning 6 x radii - see section 2.3) the field lines can be assumed to be radial. In a more detailed calculation, the field lines would meet at a distance much larger than 6 radii away.
Check the data again, it is quite possible that field lines can appear to terminate, but on closer inspection they do not. Frankly, I do not believe your claim that there is experimental evidence of such an effect in some stars. This would, of course, be experimental evidence for monopoles. Not out of the question, but unlikely (and big enough news that the astronomers whom I just asked about this would probably have heard about it before). Any citation links around?
To actually get an injunction to force them to show the code would require some evidence *first*. If they were sufficiently good at obsfucating the executable, then that evidence can be arbitarily hard to obtain.
This really sucks, it smacks of the secret patents issued to the US military and contractors; the patent is secret, the only way you find out about it is if it is independently rediscovered, at which point you get a knock on the door by the Feds telling you to shut up about it or go to prison. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration, I actually have no idea what happens when someone inside the USA rediscovers something that is subject to a secret patent.
Internationally, it is slightly humerous. Teflon was discovered by a French company (IIRC). But when they tried to patent it, the USA suddenly comes out and said it was already patented! Of course, it was a secret patent (Teflon had been used from very early days to coat the inside of pipes used in Uranium processing), but the USA wanted to enforce the prior patent anyway! Fortunately, the French told them to go jump.