I discussed this problem briefly with Patrick Volkerding of Slackware fame. I've been teaching Linux courses at a community college using Red Hat. Even though I mainly use Slackware, I decided to use Red Hat because of its popularity and the Common Criteria certification. The big problem I've had with Red Hat is that it modifies _EVERYTHING_. I've been bit and embarrassed a number of times because I'd try to show the students something that would work with any other distribution, but doesn't with Red Hat. One of my students asked for an easy way to check the status on user accounts, so I started to show them the -S option for the passwd command. Red Hat modifies passwd so that different and useless (IMHO) information is displayed.
Becuase of the problems and non-standard way Red Hat has of doing things, I've been thinking of using another distribution in class. Patrick complained that Red Hat does a lot of non-standard things with their distribution without thinking of the problems they are causing. His big complaint is that Red Hat's mess then becomes an ad-hoc standard.
In a criminal trial, the government must prove the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to every member of a jury of twelve citizens. However, this standard is applicable only in criminal cases, not to civil actions like those brought by private industry. Civil actions are governed by a lower standard of proof.
The SCO vs. IBM lawsuit is a civil case. While everyone here "knows" that SCO's claims couldn't hold water, they may have enough "evidence" to satify the "preponderence of evidence" required to prove civil cases.
I don't blame IBM for keeping quite over the lawsuit. It's not uncommon to hear of large dollar awards in civil suits. From one of the answers, it's easy to see how SCO come up with it's $3 billion dollar figure (or what ever they are claiming today). Assuming that they they used the cost of an averaged boxed set and then multiply that by the number of estimated Linux users, then you end up with an outragiously large number. It sounds crazy to everyone here, but we tend to forget that this is a civil lawsuit.
I really need to finish the one for 9.0. There are not too many changes (line numbers in the rc.scripts, logrotate, etc), but verifying everything else is time consuming. Eventually I'll get around to finishing documenting the whole thing. I'm about a third of the way through it now. My only problem is I hate to write.;)
I taught an Installing and Using Linux class at a community college over the summer. The last class I did was on security. I spent the last half hour explaining what I do in that doc. I stopped about half way through when I noticed everyone's eyes had glazed over. Computer security is a little too complex for some people.
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I discussed this problem briefly with Patrick Volkerding of Slackware fame. I've been teaching Linux courses at a community college using Red Hat. Even though I mainly use Slackware, I decided to use Red Hat because of its popularity and the Common Criteria certification. The big problem I've had with Red Hat is that it modifies _EVERYTHING_. I've been bit and embarrassed a number of times because I'd try to show the students something that would work with any other distribution, but doesn't with Red Hat. One of my students asked for an easy way to check the status on user accounts, so I started to show them the -S option for the passwd command. Red Hat modifies passwd so that different and useless (IMHO) information is displayed.
Becuase of the problems and non-standard way Red Hat has of doing things, I've been thinking of using another distribution in class. Patrick complained that Red Hat does a lot of non-standard things with their distribution without thinking of the problems they are causing. His big complaint is that Red Hat's mess then becomes an ad-hoc standard.
I don't blame IBM for keeping quite over the lawsuit. It's not uncommon to hear of large dollar awards in civil suits. From one of the answers, it's easy to see how SCO come up with it's $3 billion dollar figure (or what ever they are claiming today). Assuming that they they used the cost of an averaged boxed set and then multiply that by the number of estimated Linux users, then you end up with an outragiously large number. It sounds crazy to everyone here, but we tend to forget that this is a civil lawsuit.
I taught an Installing and Using Linux class at a community college over the summer. The last class I did was on security. I spent the last half hour explaining what I do in that doc. I stopped about half way through when I noticed everyone's eyes had glazed over. Computer security is a little too complex for some people.