Nobody loses anything from having BSDL code out there. If people want to use the free version they still will. If they really need the extra features they'll pay of it. Can you imagine how much more they'd have to pay if "Some Company Inc" had to code the BSDL portion as well?
Nobody loses from BSDL code.
except the user who needs to make changes to some company, inc's code to adapt it to their needs.
i think the main dofference between the GPL and the BSD license is this: the BSD license aims at the code being adopted by as many developers as possible, presumably to further interoperability between all products that incorporate their code (apparently they couldn't think of cases like what MS did to kerberos). the GPL, othoh, tries to ensure the end user's ability to modify any code they get according to his needs
different objectives, different forms of free licences
Take your ignorance elsewhere
take your inability to understand the issues elsewhere
Why hasn't MS used this *already* on Linux? Or are we just hearing the opening shots?
cynic's view: because it probably very dangerous to go to court over patent claims.
basically, all the patent office does these days is register your IP claims for a fee without due diligence whether the claim is justified. i strongly suspect that quite a few patents would be declared invalid in a trial.
still sore about the germans not falling for your weapons of mass deception?
i've been to germany, and i've been to the US. while germany still has a few nationalists, neither their number nor their jingoism comes even close to what you routinely can see in the US
note to US citizens and residents: i am well aware that not all americans are like this idiot
it might be useful to get the facts straight before spewing nonsense:
1. bertelmann didn't "blatantly create a program for copyright violation". rather, they wanted to convert napster (which existed already) into a service that the pigopolists would consider legit. for that purpose they gave them some financial backing
2. they claim (and apparently they have enough documentation to back that up) that the companies suing now had similar ideas, and they all had discussions about a joint venture for that. that didn't go thrugh because they couldn't agree on how to divvy up the shares. if your attention span is long enough to remember that time, after bertelmann started backing napster there were big announcements of converting napster to a pay service after some software glitches were fixed and the payment software was added
3. based on that, bertelmann claims that the suit is without merit and should be thrown out. they have filed a request for that with the court were the other pigopolists have filed their suit
4. until that request has been ruled on, they consider proceeding with the suit illegal legal harrassment of a competitor, which is illegal under german law.
5. the decision by the german supreme court is to stop delivery of the notice until that is settled, nothing more.
so there is a little bit more to this than your extremely simplistic analysis
any pointer? MS used to be shareholder of the old SCO, but i believe even that was terminated long before caldera bought out their unix operations and renamed themselves.
the only relations between MS and caldera/scox i am aware of are the law suite over drdos and ms buying some license "to show that they respect IP". i am not aware of any direct investment
the first thing that struck me was his claim (very early in the article) that the BSDs are not genetic unices.
and it said somewhere in the introduction that his research was done in 3 or 4 days. come on, what beyond the batantly obvious can you come up with in that time frame
based on this crappy argument, unix is related to some old PDP-11 operating system like rsx-11 or multics or some ibm mainframe OS (the early kernel code was written on a minix machine, but the early unix kernel code certainly wasn't written on unix).
Sco does infact own the IP while the opengroup owns the copyright.
let's try to get our facts straight: SCO in fact owns the copyright to unixware aka system v, while the opn group owns the tradee mark. and the IP SCO owns are tose copyrights. they don't own the patents
apparently nobody sees "the code". everybody who signs the NDA sees a few snippets, and i bet no two NDA signers see the same snippets. that would let them trace the leak. you wouldn't do whoever passes the information to you any favour
Of course, if I'm wrong Linux will be a thing of the past and BSD will take the place of Linux as Open Source Champion, but I'd bet money that that isn't going to happen.
the BSD license might hold a few contributers back from moving to BSD. It is one thing to contribute your work to a GPL project in the knowledge that dervative work will be contributed back, and a completely different thing to contribude to a BSD licensed project.
i am pretty sure that IBM would never have contributed RCU and NUMA to a BSD project
they haven' been shut down. they shut down their website because a few interested parties got a cease and desist order regarding their claim about their IP being in the linux kernel. They are only allowed to repeat that claim if they provide proof. the company sco germany still operates and does (hopefully lousy) business
exactly the same was poste a while ago to comp.os.linux.misc by a guy with the cute handle "Eggtroll". He had a few similar posts (not only about Linux, one of them exposing the "advantages" of visual basic over C/C++ or something similar.
, I'm just not sure whether the guy can actually be funny. i"m just not sure whether it is intentional
This seems suspicious to me, just as suspicious as my claims against you should seem. If SCO's copyrighted code is in fact being infringed upon then they have nothing to lose by publicizing the offending portions.
what i find especially intriguing is that the areas they claim have been lifted from unixware (since it's copyright infringement now tha's what must have happened) and that make linux so much better than unixware that it hurts their sales are exactly those where unixware is supposedly very week. according to raymond's sco-vs-ibm publication unixware has problems with 8 cpus. and yet the "lifted code" in linux scales up to 32 or 64 cpus. how can that happen?
could it be that the code wasn't copied from unixware but somewhere else, e.g. a product that the donator wrote himself? how can that violate sco's copyrights?
not quite. right now they aren't distributing anything, so they can't break the GPL. wht they do instead is claim that they that the kernel contains some of their IP that they didn't authorize to be put there, so anybody running linux is running afoul of their rights.
and they don't license linux either. instead they offer a license to their product that they claim got ripped off. but they don't care how you use the IP whose use you buy the license for, so if you continue to run linux, it's ok with them
interesting logic, esp. in light of the fact that it was not sco that bought caldera, but caldera that bought SCO and subsequently changed its name to SCO.
even if you were right, according to them they discovered the "infringements" at some time last fall, but continued distributing (under the GPL) until today (maybe even now)
2) from personal experience GCC sucks, its inefficient and wastes cycles, borland or Solarises compilers beat the crap out of GCC on their respective platforms. so when is apple going to have a highly optimized 970 based compiler that will make x86 whine in the corner after being raped, and made to look like the bad market whore that it is.
IBM has a very good optimizing compiler for the PoerPC (xlc, aka VisualC++). i believe it's available for macs
you should have waited a minute before posting this::
Aside from the nigh-universal ranting about skewed benchmarks that has been circulating recently, there's another aspect the Power Mac G5 not many have touched upon.
benchmarking is an art where you can twist anything that you can get the tresults you want. OSnews recently had an article comparing powerpc and x86 architecture. he also made a few remarks about the dispute about this benchmark dispute: he seems to think that apple's figures are more realistic as far as a normal user is concerned (not having looked at either benchmark, i can't offer an opinion, but from the reasons he gave, it's at least credible).
Mac OS X is a 32-bit operating system, and since the PowerPC 970 is a 64-bit chip, Mac OS X will effectively be running at 800, 900, and 1,000MHz in the new Power Macs. Not 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0GHz as Apple claims. Let's stick to the specs and stats and look a little deeper into this problem.
this is absolute nonsense. the hardware still is 64 bits and runs at the stated speed. it's only that most programs will perform integer operatins on 32 bit date, not really a big deal in most cases.
One just can't scale an operating system to 64-bit mode on a whim
i suspect what apple is planning is to gradually move the system to 64 bits. the first step will be to enable applicatoions running in 64 bit mode, and you should be able to see that very soon (if it isn't there yet)
In two months we have the G5 systems shipping to consumers, with an operating system that will half the clock since it can't use half the bits of the chip it will run on!
no offense, but this is absolute crap. please tell us what you are smoking. it must be pretty potent stuff. alternatively, you might consider getting a clue before postin
it was registered already, first to AT&T, then to USL/Novell. when Novell sold to SCO, there seems to have been some foulup that caused the registration to be transferred. no it has been officially transferred to the new SCO
i believe they said their linux license would be like the unixware license, i.e. it is not the unixware license but something similar, though probably less expensive and more profitable to SCO (imagine cashing in without investing any work of your own). prices haven't been released so far
Both AT&T and Microsoft have put stolen intelectual property in their operating systems. Microsoft Windows TCP/IP stack contained stolen intelectual property from Berkeley Systems, and AT&T SysIV and SysV unix contained stolen IP from Berekely Systems.
you are wrong at least regarding microsoft: the BSD license permits including BSD code anywhaere and under any condition, provided you keep the BSD copyright notice in there and credit Berkley. afaik, microsoft satisfied that condition. otoh, USL allegedly swiped lots of BSD code and replaced the copyright notice with their own copyright notice
BSD never went after the users. SCO wants to change this by trying to charge Linux users a license fee. If they set this new precedent, BSD would then have a case for going after all Windows at SysV users.
no, beause the copying was not a license violation
actually, the way they seem to be twisting this is that they don't distribute at all (never mind the ftp server), but make the "illegal derivatives" legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody loses from BSDL code.
except the user who needs to make changes to some company, inc's code to adapt it to their needs.
i think the main dofference between the GPL and the BSD license is this: the BSD license aims at the code being adopted by as many developers as possible, presumably to further interoperability between all products that incorporate their code (apparently they couldn't think of cases like what MS did to kerberos). the GPL, othoh, tries to ensure the end user's ability to modify any code they get according to his needs
different objectives, different forms of free licences
Take your ignorance elsewhere
take your inability to understand the issues elsewhere
cynic's view: because it probably very dangerous to go to court over patent claims.
basically, all the patent office does these days is register your IP claims for a fee without due diligence whether the claim is justified. i strongly suspect that quite a few patents would be declared invalid in a trial.
i've been to germany, and i've been to the US. while germany still has a few nationalists, neither their number nor their jingoism comes even close to what you routinely can see in the US
note to US citizens and residents: i am well aware that not all americans are like this idiot
1. bertelmann didn't "blatantly create a program for copyright violation". rather, they wanted to convert napster (which existed already) into a service that the pigopolists would consider legit. for that purpose they gave them some financial backing
2. they claim (and apparently they have enough documentation to back that up) that the companies suing now had similar ideas, and they all had discussions about a joint venture for that. that didn't go thrugh because they couldn't agree on how to divvy up the shares. if your attention span is long enough to remember that time, after bertelmann started backing napster there were big announcements of converting napster to a pay service after some software glitches were fixed and the payment software was added
3. based on that, bertelmann claims that the suit is without merit and should be thrown out. they have filed a request for that with the court were the other pigopolists have filed their suit
4. until that request has been ruled on, they consider proceeding with the suit illegal legal harrassment of a competitor, which is illegal under german law.
5. the decision by the german supreme court is to stop delivery of the notice until that is settled, nothing more.
so there is a little bit more to this than your extremely simplistic analysis
the only relations between MS and caldera/scox i am aware of are the law suite over drdos and ms buying some license "to show that they respect IP". i am not aware of any direct investment
and it said somewhere in the introduction that his research was done in 3 or 4 days. come on, what beyond the batantly obvious can you come up with in that time frame
based on this crappy argument, unix is related to some old PDP-11 operating system like rsx-11 or multics or some ibm mainframe OS (the early kernel code was written on a minix machine, but the early unix kernel code certainly wasn't written on unix).
let's try to get our facts straight: SCO in fact owns the copyright to unixware aka system v, while the opn group owns the tradee mark. and the IP SCO owns are tose copyrights. they don't own the patents
apparently nobody sees "the code". everybody who signs the NDA sees a few snippets, and i bet no two NDA signers see the same snippets. that would let them trace the leak. you wouldn't do whoever passes the information to you any favour
the BSD license might hold a few contributers back from moving to BSD. It is one thing to contribute your work to a GPL project in the knowledge that dervative work will be contributed back, and a completely different thing to contribude to a BSD licensed project.
i am pretty sure that IBM would never have contributed RCU and NUMA to a BSD project
they haven' been shut down. they shut down their website because a few interested parties got a cease and desist order regarding their claim about their IP being in the linux kernel. They are only allowed to repeat that claim if they provide proof. the company sco germany still operates and does (hopefully lousy) business
, I'm just not sure whether the guy can actually be funny. i"m just not sure whether it is intentional
admit it, you are pissed off because they don't keep you informed about what they are doing.
i take any bet that they have all the wheels spinning to fight this. they are also clever enough not to make a media circus out of their activities
it will be done as soon as you let us know what it is. so far sco has refused to identify it
what i find especially intriguing is that the areas they claim have been lifted from unixware (since it's copyright infringement now tha's what must have happened) and that make linux so much better than unixware that it hurts their sales are exactly those where unixware is supposedly very week. according to raymond's sco-vs-ibm publication unixware has problems with 8 cpus. and yet the "lifted code" in linux scales up to 32 or 64 cpus. how can that happen?
could it be that the code wasn't copied from unixware but somewhere else, e.g. a product that the donator wrote himself? how can that violate sco's copyrights?
and they don't license linux either. instead they offer a license to their product that they claim got ripped off. but they don't care how you use the IP whose use you buy the license for, so if you continue to run linux, it's ok with them
are you sure you are articipating in the right discussion? torvaldt provides the kernel, and that's exactly what sco is complaining about
even if you were right, according to them they discovered the "infringements" at some time last fall, but continued distributing (under the GPL) until today (maybe even now)
IBM has a very good optimizing compiler for the PoerPC (xlc, aka VisualC++). i believe it's available for macs
Aside from the nigh-universal ranting about skewed benchmarks that has been circulating recently, there's another aspect the Power Mac G5 not many have touched upon.
benchmarking is an art where you can twist anything that you can get the tresults you want. OSnews recently had an article comparing powerpc and x86 architecture. he also made a few remarks about the dispute about this benchmark dispute: he seems to think that apple's figures are more realistic as far as a normal user is concerned (not having looked at either benchmark, i can't offer an opinion, but from the reasons he gave, it's at least credible).
Mac OS X is a 32-bit operating system, and since the PowerPC 970 is a 64-bit chip, Mac OS X will effectively be running at 800, 900, and 1,000MHz in the new Power Macs. Not 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0GHz as Apple claims. Let's stick to the specs and stats and look a little deeper into this problem.
this is absolute nonsense. the hardware still is 64 bits and runs at the stated speed. it's only that most programs will perform integer operatins on 32 bit date, not really a big deal in most cases.
One just can't scale an operating system to 64-bit mode on a whim
i suspect what apple is planning is to gradually move the system to 64 bits. the first step will be to enable applicatoions running in 64 bit mode, and you should be able to see that very soon (if it isn't there yet)
In two months we have the G5 systems shipping to consumers, with an operating system that will half the clock since it can't use half the bits of the chip it will run on!
no offense, but this is absolute crap. please tell us what you are smoking. it must be pretty potent stuff. alternatively, you might consider getting a clue before postin
it was registered already, first to AT&T, then to USL/Novell. when Novell sold to SCO, there seems to have been some foulup that caused the registration to be transferred. no it has been officially transferred to the new SCO
i believe they said their linux license would be like the unixware license, i.e. it is not the unixware license but something similar, though probably less expensive and more profitable to SCO (imagine cashing in without investing any work of your own). prices haven't been released so far
you are wrong at least regarding microsoft: the BSD license permits including BSD code anywhaere and under any condition, provided you keep the BSD copyright notice in there and credit Berkley. afaik, microsoft satisfied that condition. otoh, USL allegedly swiped lots of BSD code and replaced the copyright notice with their own copyright notice
BSD never went after the users. SCO wants to change this by trying to charge Linux users a license fee. If they set this new precedent, BSD would then have a case for going after all Windows at SysV users.
no, beause the copying was not a license violation
but breaking the license breaks copyright law
Also if the GPL License, as a contract, is invalid or uninforcable then it can't even be broken.
if the GPL is invalid, so is copyright. the GPL is a license under copyright law
actually, the way they seem to be twisting this is that they don't distribute at all (never mind the ftp server), but make the "illegal derivatives" legal.