brief history: IBM developped the power architecture in the late 1980s. the first system that came out with it was the RS/6000 (1990?). at that time the CPU was a 3 chip set. around the same time, apple came to realize that the 68000 was running out of steam, and they had a look at the then available architectures and came to the conclusion that the power architecture was their best bet, so they approached IBM. at that time they had a very cozy relationship with motorola, so they insisted on motorola being part of the deal. the first result of this cooperation was a revised architecture, basically the IBM architecture with some modifications base on input from motorola and apple (i suspect this was about the first time that IBM accepted that other people understood CPU architecture as well).
the powerpc is an implementation of this architecture on a single chip. unless i am grossly mistaken, the power cpus on IBM's high end systems were multichip, at least until very recently
The PPC doesn't seem to be particularly taking off just on its own-- either in terms of performance or in terms of public adoption
not in the desktop market, but PPC (also ARM and MIPS) outsells x86 in the embedded market and is a pretty strong force on servers.
the problem with the desktop market is/was that when the PPC came out, the x86 was already established as the dominant platform in an environment where closed source applications got distributed in binary form only, which makes it pretty hard to get marketshare, since programs either won't run at all or extremely slow (on an emulator). and since the marketshare is so small it's almost impossible to get anyone to port his/her programs to the new architecture. combine that with microsoft's tendency and ability to sabotage such ports (e.g. by buying the company and dropping the port "for lack of demand" as they have done several times when OS/2 started to gain some popularity), and you can understand why its hard for a new architecture to take off (could that be the reason for IBM getting behind open source?)
in terms of performance
until pretty recently (until intel started to riscify the x86) RISC style CPU were performance leaders, and the G5 seems to hold up pretty good.
all three of the major video game consoles in the next generation (GC2, PS3 and XBox) will be using some workalike of the PPC chip
What is with the restriction on filenames (in the migration checklist)?
next to this recommendation was the (somewhat cryptic) remark that it would make your life easier when pulling the files into the installed linux.
unless there is a character allowed by Windows which is not allowed by Unix - probably true - but I couldn't find a reference
unless i'm grossly mistaken, you can use any chararcter in unix file names, but in some cases (e.g. when filenames contain characters that have special meaning in the shell) accessing the files from the command line can be a pain in the neck
depends on what you want to install. the problem with diskdruid is that it puts the partitions where it wants to, and in some situations that can be bad. fdisk gives you better control (the last time i used diskdruid was almost 4 years ago, so it might have improved)
PHB: you'll have to buy yourself a catheter and you are expected to bring your own lunch and eat at your desk from now on... I'm going off to type a memo about people remaining on duty at the desks at all times, no exceptions and still no cell phones.
two days later:
PHB: why didn't you answer the phone>
Dilbert: the phone is mounted to the wall and i can't reach it from my desk
a week later (after desk phones were installed):
PHB: please come over to the directors' dining room. we need you to explain something essential to an important client before closing the deal.
Dilbert: i just got this memo that tells me that after having a desk phone there simply is no excuse for ever leaving your desk
neither am i, but i would suspect that it would depend on what the submitter is trying to prove
in this case it might be used (together with the two already filed cases) to establish that SCO is systematically harassing former customers who switched to IBM. if that can be established, IBM probably could sue their pants off
the only focus i can detect in the autozone, daimler cases and whatever was revealed about there BoA preparations is
1. sue former customers that have gone to IBM
2. avoid mentioning SCO code ending up in the linux kernel, rather bring up unrelated issues
3. try to tie it to linux in press releases
they might have some success getting media attention, but i strongly doubt that this will get them anywhere in court
But this case should be a wake-up call for anyone who has actually copied SCO's shared libs.... to either replace them with the GPL's alternative, or do a true port and make a clean break away from anything remoting having to do with compatibility with OpenServer and UnixWare.
actually, this should be a wakeup call to anybody using an SCO product to get out as soon as possible. SCO's claim seems to be that once you have used one of their products, you can't move your software software to any other platform without copying their libraries (cf the groklaw post by the autozone guy who did the linux port). the ultimate lockin
one reason is that the customer can modify whatever he is getting. you can give only protection for what you are handing out, so whatever they would be doing would go with the requirement that the customer touch not anything. this would run counter ro the open source concept.
besides, some linux vendors have done so (with the abovementioned restriction)
are you going to church on sundays? technology enables me to go up to the entrance with a powerful speaker and advise the parish about this great new strip club in town, and that in the middle of the sermon
> wouldn't every driver and DLL linked into the kernel space belong to Microsoft under SCO's logic
Actually, that's Richard Stallman logic, not SCO logic. Microsoft has never tied their linking mechanism to intellectual property rights.
that's absolute BS. The GPL doesn't make any claims about property rights. it grants permissin to use the GPLed code under certain conditions and spells out where it applies
I wonder what you'll say when SCOX goes up another 30% and these capitalists make out like crazy.
the only way you can make money on this is to keep track of courses and developments and dump the stock when a neat profit is guaranteed. without that, my guess is that buying lottery tickets is a more prudent investment. SCO has no competitive product (i have the misfortune to have to use their top of the line product at work), no chance having their product catch up to the competition. beyond that, only wild and strongly contested IP claims
In other words, if I write one single line of code for your GPLd work, I own that single line. I don't own the combination of your work and my work, but I do own my line.
that's what i suspected. somehow i read your remark as claiming that with adding a line you would own the whole derivative
For a more realistic example, and one that happens all the time, consider a GPL library that I use to create an application. If this application is not statically linked, then I own 100% of it. The library author has zero property claims over it.
are you sure? i thought it was entirely dependent on the license the library is under (GPL vs LGPL e.g.) and that static vs dynamic linkage didn't matter
And I suspect companies like Apple had damned good business reasons to pick a BSD licensed product to contribute to.
no doubt. different business model
But IBM doesn't need to, because IBM doesn't sell the software, it sells the service. Their business model would be identical if they used a BSD instead.
did they contribute any patented stuff to apache? i suspect that they would think twice before contributinging stuff like RCU to a BSD licensed codebase. i might be wrong, though
But isn't that what the GPL is doing? It's telling the copyright holder of a derivative work how to release it. If you check the law, the copyright holder of a derivative work is *not* the original author.
wrong. it allows people to use the GPLed code as base of derived work under certain conditions, namely that the derived work is distributed under the same license. whoever plans to develop the derived work is free to accept the condition or not. if not he has to look for another base, or he can try to negotiate different terms with the copyright holder (something the GPL does not forbid).
i am not familiar enough with copyright law to comment on your claim that the author of the derived work is sole owner of the copyright, but it sounds dubious to me
Why is it rude for an application developer to demand a certain class of license from the library developer, but somehow polite for that same latter to demand a specific license from the former? Or are double standards in etiquette okay just because it's the FSF and the GPL?
well, the copyright holder of the original work is the owner. if you want to use other peoples' property you have to play by the terms they are setting. if you don't like the terms you'll have to find another property whose owner sets terms to your liking
nothing against FreeBSD or any other of the BSDs (which, afaik, use an idetical license), but i suspect that companies like IBM had damned good business reasons to pick a GPLed product to contribute to. i'm sure they didn't like the idea that somebody would take their code and run away with it. with the GPL they have an opportunity to benefit from whatever improvements are made to their contributions, just like theauthor of the derivative benefitted from their efforts. so much for the claim that the GPL is unfriendly to business. it seems to depend very much on which business'es case you are looking at
this is a very simplistic view. in essence, the GPL is trying to protect the user's freedom to modify the software according to his needs. not that the conditions of the GPL apply only to distributing the code or derivative work. if you don't redistribute, you are free to do whatever you want.
obviously, the BSD license is providing another freedom
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not very likely as long as windows runs only on intel cpus.
the powerpc is an implementation of this architecture on a single chip. unless i am grossly mistaken, the power cpus on IBM's high end systems were multichip, at least until very recently
well, motorola (or their chip spinoff) is selling their PPCs to the embedded market
btw, what makes you think that the PPC is vaporware? ever heard of servers and embedded systems? why do you think intel had to license ARM?
not in the desktop market, but PPC (also ARM and MIPS) outsells x86 in the embedded market and is a pretty strong force on servers.
the problem with the desktop market is/was that when the PPC came out, the x86 was already established as the dominant platform in an environment where closed source applications got distributed in binary form only, which makes it pretty hard to get marketshare, since programs either won't run at all or extremely slow (on an emulator). and since the marketshare is so small it's almost impossible to get anyone to port his/her programs to the new architecture. combine that with microsoft's tendency and ability to sabotage such ports (e.g. by buying the company and dropping the port "for lack of demand" as they have done several times when OS/2 started to gain some popularity), and you can understand why its hard for a new architecture to take off (could that be the reason for IBM getting behind open source?)
in terms of performance
until pretty recently (until intel started to riscify the x86) RISC style CPU were performance leaders, and the G5 seems to hold up pretty good.
all three of the major video game consoles in the next generation (GC2, PS3 and XBox) will be using some workalike of the PPC chip
just an example of the embedded market
next to this recommendation was the (somewhat cryptic) remark that it would make your life easier when pulling the files into the installed linux.
unless there is a character allowed by Windows which is not allowed by Unix - probably true - but I couldn't find a reference
unless i'm grossly mistaken, you can use any chararcter in unix file names, but in some cases (e.g. when filenames contain characters that have special meaning in the shell) accessing the files from the command line can be a pain in the neck
1. i didn't see anything about reformatting the HD
2. which part of part 1 did you not understand?
depends on what you want to install. the problem with diskdruid is that it puts the partitions where it wants to, and in some situations that can be bad. fdisk gives you better control (the last time i used diskdruid was almost 4 years ago, so it might have improved)
well, the rules included clauses that inhibited working fast
two days later:
PHB: why didn't you answer the phone>
Dilbert: the phone is mounted to the wall and i can't reach it from my desk
a week later (after desk phones were installed):
PHB: please come over to the directors' dining room. we need you to explain something essential to an important client before closing the deal.
Dilbert: i just got this memo that tells me that after having a desk phone there simply is no excuse for ever leaving your desk
in this case it might be used (together with the two already filed cases) to establish that SCO is systematically harassing former customers who switched to IBM. if that can be established, IBM probably could sue their pants off
1. sue former customers that have gone to IBM
2. avoid mentioning SCO code ending up in the linux kernel, rather bring up unrelated issues
3. try to tie it to linux in press releases
they might have some success getting media attention, but i strongly doubt that this will get them anywhere in court
sigh, time for a history lesson. carthage was destroyed after the 3rd war
actually, this should be a wakeup call to anybody using an SCO product to get out as soon as possible. SCO's claim seems to be that once you have used one of their products, you can't move your software software to any other platform without copying their libraries (cf the groklaw post by the autozone guy who did the linux port). the ultimate lockin
wasn't that done by somebody who had access to the system, i.e. an insider job? any suggestion about how to prevent them with windows?
besides, some linux vendors have done so (with the abovementioned restriction)
sorry, but the GPL deals with redistribution issues, not use
are you going to church on sundays? technology enables me to go up to the entrance with a powerful speaker and advise the parish about this great new strip club in town, and that in the middle of the sermon
can brain tumor be epidemic (it isn't just mcbride)?
Actually, that's Richard Stallman logic, not SCO logic. Microsoft has never tied their linking mechanism to intellectual property rights.
that's absolute BS. The GPL doesn't make any claims about property rights. it grants permissin to use the GPLed code under certain conditions and spells out where it applies
true, but only because in all cases that have come up so far the FSF was successful to convince the violators that it would stand up in court.
but the jaws of the GPL is that if a project becomes tainted like this then the tainted software must be GPL'd as well.
or the GPLed code has to be removed or replaced
the only way you can make money on this is to keep track of courses and developments and dump the stock when a neat profit is guaranteed. without that, my guess is that buying lottery tickets is a more prudent investment. SCO has no competitive product (i have the misfortune to have to use their top of the line product at work), no chance having their product catch up to the competition. beyond that, only wild and strongly contested IP claims
that's what i suspected. somehow i read your remark as claiming that with adding a line you would own the whole derivative
For a more realistic example, and one that happens all the time, consider a GPL library that I use to create an application. If this application is not statically linked, then I own 100% of it. The library author has zero property claims over it.
are you sure? i thought it was entirely dependent on the license the library is under (GPL vs LGPL e.g.) and that static vs dynamic linkage didn't matter
And I suspect companies like Apple had damned good business reasons to pick a BSD licensed product to contribute to.
no doubt. different business model
But IBM doesn't need to, because IBM doesn't sell the software, it sells the service. Their business model would be identical if they used a BSD instead.
did they contribute any patented stuff to apache? i suspect that they would think twice before contributinging stuff like RCU to a BSD licensed codebase. i might be wrong, though
wrong. it allows people to use the GPLed code as base of derived work under certain conditions, namely that the derived work is distributed under the same license. whoever plans to develop the derived work is free to accept the condition or not. if not he has to look for another base, or he can try to negotiate different terms with the copyright holder (something the GPL does not forbid).
i am not familiar enough with copyright law to comment on your claim that the author of the derived work is sole owner of the copyright, but it sounds dubious to me
Why is it rude for an application developer to demand a certain class of license from the library developer, but somehow polite for that same latter to demand a specific license from the former? Or are double standards in etiquette okay just because it's the FSF and the GPL?
well, the copyright holder of the original work is the owner. if you want to use other peoples' property you have to play by the terms they are setting. if you don't like the terms you'll have to find another property whose owner sets terms to your liking
nothing against FreeBSD or any other of the BSDs (which, afaik, use an idetical license), but i suspect that companies like IBM had damned good business reasons to pick a GPLed product to contribute to. i'm sure they didn't like the idea that somebody would take their code and run away with it. with the GPL they have an opportunity to benefit from whatever improvements are made to their contributions, just like theauthor of the derivative benefitted from their efforts. so much for the claim that the GPL is unfriendly to business. it seems to depend very much on which business'es case you are looking at
obviously, the BSD license is providing another freedom