CFLs popped up in Germany in the early 90s under the name of "energy saving bulbs" since Germans are allergic to fluorescence. They cost 8-10 times as much as traditional bulbs and were prone to break up at the socket when screwing them on. You see, they were all wrapped up in a tiny glass bulb to look like the old ones and filter the 'cold light' in reverence to public allergy.
They also failed in the advertising department: their life was only long in a remarkably random way, their brightness would soon vacillate and then go back a lot. They were slow lighting up.
They lumbered on for 10 years with insignificant market. The two major players (Phillips, Osram) would sell nothing but Chinese junk, no need for Wal-Mart. Me and other good-doers lost plenty of money on this energy saving, meaning we were wasting energy. Then it happened: prices went down, quality improved, the advertising department started delivering. They cost now 2-3 times the old bulbs, they do not break so easily, the wrapping bulbs have disappeared, you can see the tubes, they are not depressingly white. And they last long enough to be economically sensible.
The only issue is: where will I get a source of heat for my self-made yogurt machine when the incandescent bulbs are gone?
> Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive...
One example given in the post is Qt and it is an unsuitable example. Qt was and is a commercial product. It was drawn kicking and screaming to a double licence after KDE encountered so much resistance because of their library. The final Qt step tp GPL only occurred when Gnome was launched. Trolltech is the main culprit for the Linux desktop divisions and disputes.
They certainly have the right to ask whatever they want for their products. Just do not mention them as FOSS. In this respect, they were and they are a fake.
The privileged Microsoft links that Dave Korn has discovered are all accessed via go.microsoft.com.
I searched through/windows/system32 and found 3 files that contain that address:
browselc.dll
themeui.dll
wmvcore.dll
I renamed them after booting into Bart's PE. Actually, I renamed several instances of them in different locations.
But what, if you want to access MS updates? Don't access them online, wait for a CD to be released.
Oh, but that is risky in the meantime! No, it is not: just deactivate ActiveX and jscript and go online as simple user. No firewall, no real-time anti-virus, nothing.
That's my approach and I have not been bothered by malware in years. Also consider the bonus: you are out of reach for web artists! That's happiness, folks.
Well, folks, I have to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Around anno domini 1900, Czech composer Antonin Dvorak was a director in New York where he took liberty to write a symphony 'From the New World'.
When he returned to Europe, he left behind a love child. A son of his son went on to invent and promote the Dvorak keyboard around 1940. A grandson of this inventor has now advanced to the nuttiest in the genealogy (his own children are adult and normal in the meantime). Never mind, he is the most successful computer columnist ever. Since the early 80s, he has managed to take the feedback counter to tilt once or twice a year - recently, with mighty help from Slashdot.
Two years after Windows 3.1 was introduced, he was still peddling his pet theory that the feud IBM-Microsoft was nothing but a smokescreen and that the two apparent enemies had long agreed on how to go ahead with OS/2. It is now the turn for Apple to be in cahoots with Microsoft about convergence in the OS market.
Let's wait for John's next analysis where he will explain why Microsoft has agreed with Mark Shuttleworth to fold Windows and give way to Ubuntu.
> What amazes me is that the Judge in this case has > never even once asked "can you show me any > evidence that you actually own any of this > intellectual property". You would think that would > be the first thing to get settled no?
This case (SCO vs. Novell) is essentially starting. In the run-up, the judge has already stated twice that he does not think the copyrights transferred (from Novell to SCO). SCO fully disagreed. Now, without admitting anything, they are requesting the judge to force Novell to assign the copyrights to SCO. So the copyrights didn't transfer, did they?
The case you are probably thinking of, SCO vs. IBM, is about contractual violations. And the first thing to get settled would never be about "intellectual property". This is an obfuscatory term much cherished by SCO and journos. If you want to grasp what is going on, do not babble about intellectual property, rather specify patents, copyrights, trademarks, business secrets.
> Disinformation comes in three major forms: > innocent mistakes, intentional disinformation > (aka FUD), and (self) delusion.
It has been a long time since I identified this guy's activities exactly in the form he does himself now, in the delusion he is speaking of somebody else.
Disregarding his fellows fudders and a few naive souls what are Slashdot recurring stories on this despicable character good for? Please, Editors, wake up or at least tell us what your motives are in this context.
At the beginning was the Basic Input Output System and this specialized site. Then so many readers asked for it that the author published a book and you may want to buy it.
Also, so many readers asked for a simple overview that now they get it, it is called BOG Light. To look up technical details, you may want to access their full database for a fee.
Yes, and somebody was so taken by their prowess that he managed to place a story on Slashdot - so you may want to go to the site and buy and subscribe.
- Mono (i.e. C# only without the dotnet environment) gets a native compiler
- GNOME is re-written in Mono+Qt
- Most of KDE migrates to the new GNOME (the Qt library already there, C++ to C# would be feasible)
- KDE goes the way of the dodo
Do unnderstand that KDE's strength in Europe is nothing but SuSE's strength. The day SuSE turns GNOME only (and the day will come), SuSe users will forget about KDE.
Bad news, folks. The specialist in herding cats has peaked and may well be in need of counselling:
> He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, > without actually producing any replacement for the > (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about. >... > He didn't create something new and impressive. He just tore > down something new (and impressive) because he could, and > rather than helping others, he screwed people over. And you > expect me to _respect_ that kind of behaviour?
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?ac ti on=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=2&entryID=49312&room ID=11 . Linus is referring here to Andrew Tridgell and the Bitkeeper saga. The essentials:
(1) Tridge did not use Bitkeeper at work. Nor did
he use it at home. Nor did he have any kind of
Bitkeeper licence. Nor did he disassemble any
Bitkeeper binaries.
(2) All Tridge did was to send systematic queries
over the Internet to the Bitkeeper server.
Analysing its responses, he was able to write
an application to read and export from the
Bitkeeper server.
(3) That technique is called protocol scanning and
has already been successfuly used for Samba.
It is perfectly legal otherwise Microsoft's
lawyers would have been hounding Tridge a long
time ago.
So what was Tridge's crime? He declined requests by Linus Torvalds and Larry McVoy to stop scanning Bitkeeper. For that, he is now on the receiving end of insults and innuendo.
Too bad really, both for him and for Linus. Indeed, this story is not any longer about a versioning system for the kernel. It is about Linux after Linus.
Although Maureen O'Gara is creeping quite lowly, I wonder if she is worth much attention as a person. There are enough prostitute scribblers in the media and they are totally immune to any moral outrage.
Instead, let us consider her role in SCO's delaying tactics. Last month, she was kind of announcing that SCO would charge IBM for fraud:
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46384.htm
And why? Because of a killer story unearthed from IBM e-mails SCO got during discovery. Well, if you have been following the SCO-IBM case from the beginning, you may recall that SCO charged IBM of fraud in the initial complaint of March 2003. They retracted the charge in the 2nd Amended Complaint of July 2003, which is the one currently valid. Just imagine, SCO would ask the judge for permission to revert to the initial fraud charge in a 3rd amendment. And they cannot simply amend the complaint, they need permission these days.
One month has elapsed since Maureen's Sept. 18 exercise, SCO is not murmuring any longer of fraud charges, nor is Maureen. What can they do to keep the FUD simmering and delay the case to the end of time? A 3rd Amendment would help. Maureen proclaims it is already in place (in other words, accepted by the judge after consultation with IBM) and under seal. This time the reason is non-licensed code included in AIX. Needless to say, the issue is another rotting carcass of zero importance. For details, please do a search on Groklaw.
At this point, let us refresh a few other details of the case. SCO succeeded in Summer 2003 pushing up the closure of discovery and the start of the hearings. But when Judge Kimball set November 2005 as new date for the hearings he also said very forcefully that there would be no further delays. However, a 3rd amendment would possibly make his position untenable both in respect of discovery and of hearings. If SCO gets a 3rd amendment, they will be able to request additional months for discovery and the case would skid to Spring 2006.
Parallel to the 3rd amendment dreams, SCO is also trying hard to disrupt operations of the magistrate court managing their discovery shenanigans. First they introduced papers at the very last minute before a discovery hearing so IBM could not respond. The magistrate judge postponed. They took a dislike to her and tried to get Judge Kimball to convene an emergency meeting to bypass her. He refused. In the discovery hearing on October 19, they read from confidential material and it takes two interventions by the judge to stop them. One week after the hearing, Maureen O'Gara helps spread confidential details plus blatant lies purporting to be confidential material. This is an attempt to trap the judge in formal procedural errors - from which the desired delays may hopefully follow.
Memo to los SCOjones: you will not get a 3rd amendment, not even if Maureen O'Gara and LinuxWorld present fresh fanciful reasons in November and December. The reality check is approaching, drop by drop. Next Spring one of the three pending Partial Summary Judgments requested by IBM will have been decided. It does not matter which one because that will be your end in any case.
>... the little matter of SCO's days-old Third Amended > Complaint, which, alas, is under seal...
There is no Third Amended Complaint. To file a 3rd amendment SCO needs approval by the Judge and IBM has to be consulted. Although their chances to be refused are high, it may happen that SCO ask the Judge for permission to file such an amendment because they are so desperate to extend discovery to the end of time and never have to let down their pants in court.
Note that the story about AIX using non-licensed Unixware code is more than one year old and was already dissected and debunked, see Groklaw as usual:
IBM was already accused of fraud by SCO, quite officially in the original complaint of March 2003. The accusation disappeared later on in the amended complaint.
The unsealing of all e-mails and confidential documents in the SCO-IBM case to make IBM's 'fraud' evident to the public can only be welcomed.
For the moment being the only e-mail that attracted attention in the Sept. 16 hearing before Judge Kimball, was an internal SCO e-mail of 2002. It stated that lengthy search had not found any SCO code in IBM's Linux contributions. Note the year: 2002.
OK, Slashdotters have agreed that IBM will not buy SCO.
Fine but what about Sun? They can get it for peanuts and immediately start negotiations with their ancestral enemy: they want access to IBM mainframes; they may soon need IBM's processors since they cannot afford any longer to develop their Sparc; there are differences of opinion on Java. Throw in the SCO carcass and you have the right mix.
Hello, Scott: pick up the phone and fix a meeting wilt Ralph Yarro. Do you really need Darl to serve up the coffee?
> GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has > a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java > plaform is "free" in many senses...
Yet another fudder playing around on the word "free". Too bad it is Gosling.
It is a handicap that free beer and free thought have to use the same adjective in English. In latin languages, the difference is visible at first glance. But the import of 'libre' from Spanish has failed so far.
Can we try once more? Dear RMS, please consider
phree
ffree
Or issue an invitation to all genial word twisters. There are a few around.
This rhymes well with the recent agreement between SCO and a small LInux company in Germay. In it, they oblige they will not threaten Linux users with litigation except (!) users of SCO/Caldera Linux.
There were quite a number of jokes here on Slashdot about this clause and how ironic it was. It turns out to be quite serious for those who decided to buy their Linux from SCO/Caldera when it was available.
The morale of the story: keep your distance from SCO. If you are running any SCO software, start now your migration to safer shores. It is not only about escaping the parasites. It is about keeping in synch with updates. Will there be a new gcc version with SCO support? The odds are against, SCO's dropping has started: version 6.1 of Midnight Commander does not support SCO any longer. The link is:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc/2003-December/ ms g00019.html
David Berlind argues as if his reasoning would apply to all the three SCO court cases on the roll. It does not.
The first case (IBM) is based on allegations of contractual infringements. And the alleged infringements rely on a new definition of derivative work: since AIX is a derivative of Unix System V any components extracted from AIX (whether they have common code with UNIX System V or not) are a derivative. Accordingly, IBM's contributions to Linux out of AIX are a violations of SCO' rights. Or so they hope.
The second case (RedHat) is a request for a declaratory judgment that RedHat distro does not violate SCO copyrights. SCO is trying to have the case dismissed but in this respect will certainly fail. When the case really starts, the only way for SCO to avoid defeat is to show that their copyrights have been infringed: they have to show common code between their Unix and RedHat's Linux. They will pass.
Finally, the only case where Berlin's cogitations apply: Novell vs. SCO. The current case is actually about slander of title and as such will be dismissed. But it will resurface quickly as a contractual dispute and there indeed the judge will have to decide whether SCO bought the Brooklin bridge.
In between, Berlin manages to call Linux an unauthorized close: meaning what, who should have authorized it, on the basis of what? He does not clarify any issues in the SCO saga but throws up a new question: is he naive or dishonest?
Slashdot Mirror
They thought of buyout defense long ago
and have the pill and the statutes. No
chance here.
CFLs popped up in Germany in the early 90s under the name of "energy saving bulbs" since Germans are allergic to fluorescence. They cost 8-10 times as much as traditional bulbs and were prone to break up at the socket when screwing them on. You see, they were all wrapped up in a tiny glass bulb to look like the old ones and filter the 'cold light' in reverence to public allergy.
They also failed in the advertising department: their life was only long in a remarkably random way, their brightness would soon vacillate and then go back a lot. They were slow lighting up.
They lumbered on for 10 years with insignificant market. The two major players (Phillips, Osram) would sell nothing but Chinese junk, no need for Wal-Mart. Me and other good-doers lost plenty of money on this energy saving, meaning we were wasting energy. Then it happened: prices went down, quality improved, the advertising department started delivering. They cost now 2-3 times the old bulbs, they do not break so easily, the wrapping bulbs have disappeared, you can see the tubes, they are not depressingly white. And they last long enough to be economically sensible.
The only issue is: where will I get a source of heat for my self-made yogurt machine when the incandescent bulbs are gone?
> ... why bother... their stock is toast, so couldn't IBM just buy a controlling
> interest for $11.2M and wind it down?
No. They tought of such a turn two years ago and built into the statutes voting restrictions for new shareholders with more than 15% of stock.
> Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive...
One example given in the post is Qt and it is an unsuitable example. Qt was and is a commercial product. It was drawn kicking and screaming to a double licence after KDE encountered so much resistance because of their library. The final Qt step tp GPL only occurred when Gnome was launched. Trolltech is the main culprit for the Linux desktop divisions and disputes.
They certainly have the right to ask whatever they want for their products. Just do not mention them as FOSS. In this respect, they were and they are a fake.
The privileged Microsoft links that Dave Korn has discovered
/windows/system32 and found 3 files that
are all accessed via go.microsoft.com.
I searched through
contain that address:
browselc.dll
themeui.dll
wmvcore.dll
I renamed them after booting into Bart's PE. Actually, I
renamed several instances of them in different locations.
But what, if you want to access MS updates? Don't access them
online, wait for a CD to be released.
Oh, but that is risky in the meantime! No, it is not: just
deactivate ActiveX and jscript and go online as simple user.
No firewall, no real-time anti-virus, nothing.
That's my approach and I have not been bothered by malware
in years. Also consider the bonus: you are out of reach for
web artists! That's happiness, folks.
Well, folks, I have to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Around anno domini 1900, Czech composer Antonin Dvorak was a director in New York where he took liberty to write a symphony 'From the New World'.
When he returned to Europe, he left behind a love child. A son of his son went on to invent and promote the Dvorak keyboard around 1940. A grandson of this inventor has now advanced to the nuttiest in the genealogy (his own children are adult and normal in the meantime). Never mind, he is the most successful computer columnist ever. Since the early 80s, he has managed to take the feedback counter to tilt once or twice a year - recently, with mighty help from Slashdot.
Two years after Windows 3.1 was introduced, he was still peddling his pet theory that the feud IBM-Microsoft was nothing but a smokescreen and that the two apparent enemies had long agreed on how to go ahead with OS/2. It is now the turn for Apple to be in cahoots with Microsoft about convergence in the OS market.
Let's wait for John's next analysis where he will explain why Microsoft has agreed with Mark Shuttleworth to fold Windows and give way to Ubuntu.
> What amazes me is that the Judge in this case has
> never even once asked "can you show me any
> evidence that you actually own any of this
> intellectual property". You would think that would
> be the first thing to get settled no?
This case (SCO vs. Novell) is essentially
starting. In the run-up, the judge has already
stated twice that he does not think the copyrights
transferred (from Novell to SCO). SCO fully
disagreed. Now, without admitting anything, they
are requesting the judge to force Novell to assign
the copyrights to SCO. So the copyrights didn't
transfer, did they?
The case you are probably thinking of, SCO vs.
IBM, is about contractual violations. And the
first thing to get settled would never be about
"intellectual property". This is an obfuscatory
term much cherished by SCO and journos. If you
want to grasp what is going on, do not babble
about intellectual property, rather specify
patents, copyrights, trademarks, business secrets.
> Disinformation comes in three major forms:
> innocent mistakes, intentional disinformation
> (aka FUD), and (self) delusion.
It has been a long time since I identified
this guy's activities exactly in the form
he does himself now, in the delusion he is
speaking of somebody else.
Disregarding his fellows fudders and a few
naive souls what are Slashdot recurring
stories on this despicable character
good for? Please, Editors, wake up or
at least tell us what your motives are
in this context.
At the beginning was the
Basic Input Output System and this specialized
site. Then so many readers asked for it that the
author published a book and you may want to buy it.
Also, so many readers asked for a simple overview
that now they get it, it is called BOG Light. To
look up technical details, you may want to access
their full database for a fee.
Yes, and somebody was so taken by their prowess
that he managed to place a story on Slashdot - so
you may want to go to the site and buy and subscribe.
Here is the solution:
- Qt is released under the LGPL.
- Mono (i.e. C# only without the dotnet environment) gets a native compiler
- GNOME is re-written in Mono+Qt
- Most of KDE migrates to the new GNOME
(the Qt library already there, C++ to C#
would be feasible)
- KDE goes the way of the dodo
Do unnderstand that KDE's strength in Europe
is nothing but SuSE's strength. The day SuSE
turns GNOME only (and the day will come),
SuSe users will forget about KDE.
Before joining Ziff-Davis, John Dvorak
had a column in Infoworld. He left almost
at the same time as Steve Jobs left Apple.
In his last column for Infoworld, Dvorak
heaped p_ss and s_it on Jobs.
The article is not online. Any Slashdotter
has access to it and would be ready to
post it here? It is really enjoyable.
> When he gave a "trivial" example, at least half > the class would understand what he had
> been trying to explain for 15 minutes.
And when are we going to get manpages with
trivial examples? At least, I would understand
something.
Bad news, folks. The specialist in herding cats
...
c ti on=detail&PostNum=3322&Thread=2&entryID=49312&room ID=11
has peaked and may well be in need of counselling:
> He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was,
> without actually producing any replacement for the
> (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about.
>
> He didn't create something new and impressive. He just tore
> down something new (and impressive) because he could, and
> rather than helping others, he screwed people over. And you
> expect me to _respect_ that kind of behaviour?
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?a
.
Linus is referring here to Andrew Tridgell and the
Bitkeeper saga. The essentials:
(1) Tridge did not use Bitkeeper at work. Nor did
he use it at home. Nor did he have any kind of
Bitkeeper licence. Nor did he disassemble any
Bitkeeper binaries.
(2) All Tridge did was to send systematic queries
over the Internet to the Bitkeeper server.
Analysing its responses, he was able to write
an application to read and export from the
Bitkeeper server.
(3) That technique is called protocol scanning and
has already been successfuly used for Samba.
It is perfectly legal otherwise Microsoft's
lawyers would have been hounding Tridge a long
time ago.
So what was Tridge's crime? He declined requests by Linus Torvalds and Larry McVoy to stop scanning
Bitkeeper. For that, he is now on the receiving end of insults and innuendo.
Too bad really, both for him and for Linus. Indeed, this story is not any longer about a versioning system for the kernel. It is about Linux after Linus.
Although Maureen O'Gara is creeping quite lowly, I wonder if she is worth much attention as a person. There are enough prostitute scribblers in the media and they are totally immune to any moral outrage.
Instead, let us consider her role in SCO's delaying tactics. Last month, she was kind of announcing that SCO would charge IBM for fraud:
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46384.htm
And why? Because of a killer story unearthed from IBM e-mails SCO got during discovery. Well, if you have been following the SCO-IBM case from the beginning, you may recall that SCO charged IBM of fraud in the initial complaint of March 2003. They retracted the charge in the 2nd Amended Complaint of July 2003, which is the one currently valid. Just imagine, SCO would ask the judge for permission to revert to the initial fraud charge in a 3rd amendment. And they cannot simply amend the complaint, they need permission these days.
One month has elapsed since Maureen's Sept. 18 exercise, SCO is not murmuring any longer of fraud charges, nor is Maureen. What can they do to keep the FUD simmering and delay the case to the end of time? A 3rd Amendment would help. Maureen proclaims it is already in place (in other words, accepted by the judge after consultation with IBM) and under seal. This time the reason is non-licensed code included in AIX. Needless to say, the issue is another rotting carcass of zero importance. For details, please do a search on Groklaw.
At this point, let us refresh a few other details of the case. SCO succeeded in Summer 2003 pushing up the closure of discovery and the start of the hearings. But when Judge Kimball set November 2005 as new date for the hearings he also said very forcefully that there would be no further delays. However, a 3rd amendment would possibly make his position untenable both in respect of discovery and of hearings. If SCO gets a 3rd amendment, they will be able to request additional months for discovery and the case would skid to Spring 2006.
Parallel to the 3rd amendment dreams, SCO is also trying hard to disrupt operations of the magistrate court managing their discovery shenanigans. First they introduced papers at the very last minute before a discovery hearing so IBM could not respond. The magistrate judge postponed. They took a dislike to her and tried to get Judge Kimball to convene an emergency meeting to bypass her. He refused. In the discovery hearing on October 19, they read from confidential material and it takes two interventions by the judge to stop them. One week after the hearing, Maureen O'Gara helps spread confidential details plus blatant lies purporting to be confidential material. This is an attempt to trap the judge in formal procedural errors - from which the desired delays may hopefully follow.
Memo to los SCOjones: you will not get a 3rd amendment, not even if Maureen O'Gara and LinuxWorld present fresh fanciful reasons in November and December. The reality check is approaching, drop by drop. Next Spring one of the three pending Partial Summary Judgments requested by IBM will have been decided. It does not matter which one because that will be your end in any case.
Scribbler O'Hara misunderstood her SCO input:
... the little matter of SCO's days-old Third Amended ...
>
> Complaint, which, alas, is under seal
There is no Third Amended Complaint. To file a 3rd amendment
SCO needs approval by the Judge and IBM has to be
consulted. Although their chances to be refused are high,
it may happen that SCO ask the Judge for permission to file
such an amendment because they are so desperate to extend
discovery to the end of time and never have to let down
their pants in court.
Note that the story about AIX using non-licensed
Unixware code is more than one year old and was already
dissected and debunked, see Groklaw as usual:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=132
IBM was already accused of fraud by
SCO, quite officially in the
original complaint of March 2003.
The accusation disappeared later on
in the amended complaint.
The unsealing of all e-mails and
confidential documents in the
SCO-IBM case to make IBM's 'fraud'
evident to the public can only be welcomed.
For the moment being the only e-mail
that attracted attention in the Sept. 16
hearing before Judge Kimball, was an
internal SCO e-mail of 2002. It
stated that lengthy search had not
found any SCO code in IBM's Linux
contributions. Note the year: 2002.
So much for Maureen O'Gara.
OK, Slashdotters have agreed that IBM will not buy
SCO.
Fine but what about Sun? They can get it for
peanuts and immediately start negotiations with
their ancestral enemy: they want access to IBM
mainframes; they may soon need IBM's processors
since they cannot afford any longer to develop
their Sparc; there are differences of opinion on
Java. Throw in the SCO carcass and you have the
right mix.
Hello, Scott: pick up the phone and fix a meeting
wilt Ralph Yarro. Do you really need Darl to serve
up the coffee?
> GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has ...
> a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java
> plaform is "free" in many senses
Yet another fudder playing around on the word
"free". Too bad it is Gosling.
It is a handicap that free beer and free thought
have to use the same adjective in English. In latin
languages, the difference is visible at first glance.
But the import of 'libre' from Spanish has failed so
far.
Can we try once more? Dear RMS, please consider
phree
ffree
Or issue an invitation to all genial word twisters.
There are a few around.
This rhymes well with the recent agreement between SCO and a
/ ms g00019.html
small LInux company in Germay. In it, they oblige they will
not threaten Linux users with litigation except (!) users of
SCO/Caldera Linux.
There were quite a number of jokes here on Slashdot about
this clause and how ironic it was. It turns out to be quite
serious for those who decided to buy their Linux from
SCO/Caldera when it was available.
The morale of the story: keep your distance from SCO. If you
are running any SCO software, start now your migration to
safer shores. It is not only about escaping the parasites.
It is about keeping in synch with updates. Will there be a
new gcc version with SCO support? The odds are against, SCO's
dropping has started: version 6.1 of Midnight Commander does
not support SCO any longer. The link is:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc/2003-December
David Berlind argues as if his reasoning would apply to all
the three SCO court cases on the roll. It does not.
The first case (IBM) is based on allegations of contractual
infringements. And the alleged infringements rely on a new
definition of derivative work: since AIX is a derivative of
Unix System V any components extracted from AIX (whether
they have common code with UNIX System V or not) are a
derivative. Accordingly, IBM's contributions to Linux out of
AIX are a violations of SCO' rights. Or so they hope.
The second case (RedHat) is a request for a declaratory
judgment that RedHat distro does not violate SCO copyrights.
SCO is trying to have the case dismissed but in this respect
will certainly fail. When the case really starts, the only
way for SCO to avoid defeat is to show that their copyrights
have been infringed: they have to show common code between
their Unix and RedHat's Linux. They will pass.
Finally, the only case where Berlin's cogitations apply:
Novell vs. SCO. The current case is actually about slander
of title and as such will be dismissed. But it will
resurface quickly as a contractual dispute and there indeed
the judge will have to decide whether SCO bought the
Brooklin bridge.
In between, Berlin manages to call Linux an unauthorized
close: meaning what, who should have authorized it, on the
basis of what? He does not clarify any issues in the SCO
saga but throws up a new question: is he naive or dishonest?