True, I should have written "monitary profit". But SCO is certainly ignoring the larger interpretation of "profit" and is referring only to money. I suspect that the politicians and lawyers who will thrash this all out will do the same. We're entering their world now, and we have to argue our case with their terms.
Hardly. SCO has to prove that the code IBM released (in this case the journaling filesystem originally written to run on AIX) is derivitive under the terms of their contract. Because filesystems are conceptually "a part of" the "operating system" to many people, SCO is trying to claim that IBM just extended the OS and therefore it's a derivitive work. But in UNIX, filesystems are not part of the kernel: there are well-defined interfaces designed so that separate filesystems can be created and then used by the kernel. You can create these without access to the UNIX source, so they're really no different from any application program in terms of being "derived from" UNIX.
If SCO's claim were valid, then they would own all UNIX filesystems, and Veritas and ClearCase and the like would be out of business. Heck, they'd own any software that used any binary interface to UNIX, which means all UNIX software. Reductio ad absurdum.
1. While the profit motive may be recognized by the Supreme Court as "the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors" (Eldred v. Ashcroft), it is not the only one. The very existance of Open Source software demonstrates that motives other than profit can produce a public benefit and proliferation of knowledge.
2. The so-called "viral" provisions in the GPL that require any derivitive software to be governed by the same license is perfectly consistent with U.S. Copyright laws. Many software source licenses contain similar provisions regarding derivitive works. The SCO case against IBM is partially built on such a derivitive work provision.
3. The GPL, like all software licenses, defines the terms under which the software may be used. If someone doesn't like the terms, then they should not use the software. They can develop their own.
4. The GPL does not require that the software be given away for zero cost, and many proprietary software products exist that make use of (but are not derived from) Open Source software.
Anyone got some more? We need to address the national security FUD too. Let's build a list here!
Good thing I'm keeping track of the time I've spent trying to fix the things Verisign broke! They poked a big hole in my spam filter, and some tools I use to test my network connectivity are now broken in strange ways. It will probably cost me over $1000 to fix this, but probably not enough to make it worth it to hire a lawyer.:-(
When the Blaster and SoBig viruses went around recently, lots of people started filtering ICMP packets at their routers, and my tools that used ping stopped working. I had to code around that. The results of Verisign's actions are causing me some similar problems.
Will someone please explain to me how the effects of Verisign's actions are different from some effects of a virus incident? They have directly interferred with the workings and integrity of my systems. Aren't they in violation of a whole bunch of anti-cracker laws here? Heck, they've directly interfeered with the workings an integrity of millions of computer systems around the world! Where the Attorney General when you need him?
If you wanted to do this right now, you could cut a deal with a mid-range ISP. Buy an account on every server for use only during off-peak periods, run standard clustering software, and crunch all night. Run on a server farm with large numbers of identical machines interconnected with massive bandwidth. A true Beowulf cluster application.
No, you can't. Just try finding an ISP that would risk disrupting their systems to let you do that. The promise of the Grid is that it creates a standardized method of sharing computing resources, with a rich security model, so that ISPs could deploy grid software on their systems and know that grid applications are well-behaved.
In the Globus Toolkit framework, for example, all grid applications run within an application server container, such as Tomcat, which means they're in a Java sandbox and can't muck with things they're not supposed to.
Yes, the Grid can provide true parallelism, but it doesn't just do that by itself; the programmer has to divide the job up into tasks and distribute them. What the Grid provides is the framework to make that possible, and the security infrastructure to make it more likely that the owners of compute servers will allow other people to use their resources.
The computing model really is the mainframe one: you submit jobs to a queue and they get run and come back to you. You don't care or know when or where they get run. This model may be ancient, but it's how much of "business computing" is done.
I agree that SCO's Intel UNIX was crap back the, but what do you expect? It was based on System 3! It wasn't until around November 1995 that they bought UnixWare from Novell. I was contracting for Novell back then, and transitioned to SCO along with lots of people getting piped from AT&T to USL to Novell to SCO.
Of course, UnixWare wan't wasn't particularly user-friendly either, but it *was* far more beefier and stable than SCO's older UNIX. I ran UnixWare for years as my home OS, and only had to take it down for PMs. It was a good, solid UNIX with the usual X11 tools of the day, which means not much at all compared to what we have now.
McBride's statements about being positioned to enter the UNIX enterprise market in the early 90's is probably a bit of wishful thinking, because they didn't really have a UNIX to do that with until the end of '95. Then they decided to shove the SysV core underneath SCO's desktop and UI tools layer, creating UnixWare 7. But as far as I could tell (my contract was over by then), they were unable to market that effectively against Sun and SGI. Enterprise people still considered Intel boxes to be toys, so it was a hard sell. Perhaps that's why they were partnering with HP to create a 64-bit UNIX out of the AT&T base?
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True, I should have written "monitary profit". But SCO is certainly ignoring the larger interpretation of "profit" and is referring only to money. I suspect that the politicians and lawyers who will thrash this all out will do the same. We're entering their world now, and we have to argue our case with their terms.
If SCO's claim were valid, then they would own all UNIX filesystems, and Veritas and ClearCase and the like would be out of business. Heck, they'd own any software that used any binary interface to UNIX, which means all UNIX software. Reductio ad absurdum.
1. While the profit motive may be recognized by the Supreme Court as "the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors" (Eldred v. Ashcroft), it is not the only one. The very existance of Open Source software demonstrates that motives other than profit can produce a public benefit and proliferation of knowledge.
2. The so-called "viral" provisions in the GPL that require any derivitive software to be governed by the same license is perfectly consistent with U.S. Copyright laws. Many software source licenses contain similar provisions regarding derivitive works. The SCO case against IBM is partially built on such a derivitive work provision.
3. The GPL, like all software licenses, defines the terms under which the software may be used. If someone doesn't like the terms, then they should not use the software. They can develop their own.
4. The GPL does not require that the software be given away for zero cost, and many proprietary software products exist that make use of (but are not derived from) Open Source software.
Anyone got some more? We need to address the national security FUD too. Let's build a list here!
When the Blaster and SoBig viruses went around recently, lots of people started filtering ICMP packets at their routers, and my tools that used ping stopped working. I had to code around that. The results of Verisign's actions are causing me some similar problems.
Will someone please explain to me how the effects of Verisign's actions are different from some effects of a virus incident? They have directly interferred with the workings and integrity of my systems. Aren't they in violation of a whole bunch of anti-cracker laws here? Heck, they've directly interfeered with the workings an integrity of millions of computer systems around the world! Where the Attorney General when you need him?
No, you can't. Just try finding an ISP that would risk disrupting their systems to let you do that. The promise of the Grid is that it creates a standardized method of sharing computing resources, with a rich security model, so that ISPs could deploy grid software on their systems and know that grid applications are well-behaved. In the Globus Toolkit framework, for example, all grid applications run within an application server container, such as Tomcat, which means they're in a Java sandbox and can't muck with things they're not supposed to.
Yes, the Grid can provide true parallelism, but it doesn't just do that by itself; the programmer has to divide the job up into tasks and distribute them. What the Grid provides is the framework to make that possible, and the security infrastructure to make it more likely that the owners of compute servers will allow other people to use their resources.
The computing model really is the mainframe one: you submit jobs to a queue and they get run and come back to you. You don't care or know when or where they get run. This model may be ancient, but it's how much of "business computing" is done.
I agree that SCO's Intel UNIX was crap back the, but what do you expect? It was based on System 3! It wasn't until around November 1995 that they bought UnixWare from Novell. I was contracting for Novell back then, and transitioned to SCO along with lots of people getting piped from AT&T to USL to Novell to SCO. Of course, UnixWare wan't wasn't particularly user-friendly either, but it *was* far more beefier and stable than SCO's older UNIX. I ran UnixWare for years as my home OS, and only had to take it down for PMs. It was a good, solid UNIX with the usual X11 tools of the day, which means not much at all compared to what we have now. McBride's statements about being positioned to enter the UNIX enterprise market in the early 90's is probably a bit of wishful thinking, because they didn't really have a UNIX to do that with until the end of '95. Then they decided to shove the SysV core underneath SCO's desktop and UI tools layer, creating UnixWare 7. But as far as I could tell (my contract was over by then), they were unable to market that effectively against Sun and SGI. Enterprise people still considered Intel boxes to be toys, so it was a hard sell. Perhaps that's why they were partnering with HP to create a 64-bit UNIX out of the AT&T base?