There is no requirement that copyright infringement be done "knowingly". You obviously have no clue how copyright law works. That might affect the extent to which statutory damages would be awarded, but it does not affect actual damages which include all profits that result from the infringement, whether it was knowingly done or not.
As to the GPL being "viral", SCO got affected by it only because they chose to distribute code under the GPL without examining what they were shipping. Under these conditions, the GPL is no more viral than any other copyright licence.
You're missing the point. If File X was never licensed under the GPL to begin with, then subsequent changes to that file are nothing more or less than copyright infringement.
No, YOU are missing the point. Every file in the Linux tree was, in fact, "licensed under the GPL to begin with". The idea that whole files were picked up verbatim from UnixWare and simply inserted into the Linux tree is even more laughable than SCO's claims. It is provably false by direct examination of the CVS history.
But more importantly, if Linus writes GPL'd code set A and SCO owns non-GPL'd code set B and IBM (allegedly) creates C by mixing A and B (regardless of which came first between A and B) and Linus and SCO both distribute C, then BOTH Linus and SCO have committed copyright infringement (SCO against A and Linus against B), except that Linus can say he relied on both IBM and SCO's face value assertion that C was GPL'd. Since SCO has never told Linus what B is, his infringment will be non-willful and he will simply have to remove the offending parts upon receiving notice of what they are (which he has stated he is willing to do). However, SCO willfully distributed C in violation of A's licence for two months after they identified that C was improperly licenced under the GPL.
SCO is arguing that because they never released their code under the GPL, and because nobody else could do so legally, then the code was never covered by the GPL.
The stuff that SCO received that was licensed under the GPL was distributed under the authority imbued by the GPL.
Your two statements are directly contradictory. It makes me wonder if you have basic thinking skills. The code SCO "received" and distributed can only be distributed by SCO if they follow 2b, which can only be done if your first statement is false.
Please be precise: Linus writes code set A under the GPL, SCO owns B under non-GPL, and SCO distributes C=A+B. By what authority does SCO distribute C? Please decide whether SCO distributed C under the GPL in compliance with 2b or not. Answer Yes or No or shut the hell up.
If you say "Yes", then this act by SCO places B under the GPL per 2b whether they do so knowingly or not. If you say "No" then C is not properly licenced at all in which case SCO's distribution of C infringes A in what can only be a willful and for-profit way.
SCO has not complied with the GPL section 2b, which requires DISTRIBUTORS to independently licence the work as a whole under the terms of the GPL if any part of it is licenced under the GPL.
The GPL's not an all-or-nothing thing. It applies to every source file separately. So for the stuff that was stolen from SCO, SCO has the authority to distribute it because they hold the copyright. For the stuff that didn't come from SCO, the authority came from the GPL.
Utterly False. While it is true that the GPL applies to each file separately, you seem to infer that this is its complete scope. It applies to the "Program" aggregate and to the executable as well. In particular, all files that compile into code that is statically linked are parts of a combined derived work that must itself be authorized. The GPL provides as follows:
The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it
it continues...
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
But if your argument is true, then by the same reasoning, SCO has no claim.
But your argument isn't even sensible, because each and every file in the entire linux source code has been modified many times by people who licenced their contributions under the terms of the GPL.
So I ask again, for those files that contain, according to SCO, part GPL code and part UnixWare code, by what authority does SCO distribute those files?
By what authority did SCO distribute linux? It isn't the GPL because SCO claims the inclusion of their code invalidated the GPL. So what is it?
SCO committed copyright infringement against any and all legitimate parts of the Linux kernel by distributing it without licence. Each and every legitimate contributor can and should sue them. Unlike the other distributors, SCO did this believing they had no valid licence.
That is their point. They have explicitly admitted that they have violated section 2b of the GPL which places a burden on the distributor of code "that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the [GPL'd] Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License".
Unless they have some other licence from Torvalds and Co, they are stipulating to 2 months of knowing, willful, for-profit copyright infringement for the part of the code that is legitimate Linux based GPL'd code.
So they admit that by distributing this improperly licenced code that they were commiting infringement against any author they don't have a proper licence from.
This is total crap. Under SCO's theory, they are admitting violating many, many authors copyrights. If they are distributing ANY non-SCO GPL code mixed with non-GPL'd code (owned by SCO or not) then they have commited a violation of the GPL'd code's copyright. They are practically stipulating to the fact that they have commited copyright infringement.
The hypocracy of SCO's position is amazing. Let's think about this... Linus and Co. wrote codeset A, the parts of Linux which are their original work. SCO claims it owns codeset B (the UnixWare stuff) and that IBM created codeset C=A+B. If SCO distributed C then they are infringing the licence on A for exactly the same reason that they claim everyone else is violating the licence to B by distributing C. In fact, for them to distribute C is worse from a legal point of view, because they believed that it was infringing, whereas nobody else does. Since SCO has refused to even notify anyone else who distributes C (including the authors of A) of which parts of codeset C they believe are infringing, they are the ONLY ones who could prevent the infringement since they are the only ones with the knowledge to prevent the infringement.
If their view of the facts turns out to be true, then their distribution of Linux was willful for-profit infringement, practically by stipulation, and Linus, Alan Cox, Dave Miller and every other legitimate code author should get statutory damages from SCO as well as any profits that SCO earned as a result of their infringement.
IF YOU WROTE ANY PART OF LINUX, YOU SHOULD SUE SCO FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT FOR DISTRIBUTING YOUR CODE IN VIOLATION OF YOUR LICENCE
Profits that arise as a result of infringement are considered part of "actual damages". There is also a provision for getting "statutory" damages, which can be quite high for willful for-profit infringement.
No, "it's a mistake" doesn't cut it. Unless the code they distributed is, was, and stays licenced by the GPL they have mistkenly committed for-profit copyright infringement against every valid GPL contributor to the linux kernel.
It's completely odd that they would claim their own infringement would be a harmless "mistake", while simultaneously asking for $1G for a similar mistake.
Even if the worst case is true and IBM knowingly attempted to incorporate SCO code into the linux code, SCO stood by and continued to distribute and profit from the very code they claim is infringing while simultaneuously telling the customers who paid for that it was not only non-infringing but explicitly allowed to copy and modify the code.
SCO's intent was to licence Caldera Linux under the GPL to paying customers. What is your point?
If they claim to not have understand the implications of what they were agreeing to, the law will basically turn a cold shoulder. Hell, even when the other side chooses the contract and you don't read it you are still accountable if you agree. If you were the side that chose it, you will lose every time.
The vulnerability in question is now well documented and has been patched a long time.
The exploits are written by crackers who don't want to publish their source precisely because it would lead to a faster identification and fixing of the vulnerability.
I assume you mean a torrent to pirated content. If so, then you are more like Napster than P2P, because you have the power to control access and prevent the piracy of the specific work and you would be expected to know whether it was pirated or not.
It's odd that you think this is clearer under other laws -- it's mostly only the US that has actually tested these legal waters.
#1 There are probably 15000 Java projects in existence today that use XML heavily for all the things you listed.
#2 If you know the method names and parameters, you know enough to get whatever information the class designer thinks you need to have to use the class. I have never once been in a situation where I needed more. This is a "so what" improvement.
#3 The two supposed advantages ("unique identities" and "reflection") seem harmful to me. It's like the language designers forgot everything about OO programming. I do want my code to NOT be tightly coupled to its packaging for the same reason I don't want my controller layer tightly couple to the presentation layer. In fact, I want YOUR code to not be tightly coupled to its packaging (at least if you want me to use it). This basically guarantees that.NET code can never be cross-platform.
#4 You obviously didn't read my point carefully. Nobody cares about cross-language interoperability, the important issue is cross-platform interoperability. It doesn't matter at all if the other platform's language has to run in a JVM: just do it. But since you mention it, the JVM supports a lot more languages than.net does.
I don't find #1 persuasive. If you want XML in Java, you use XML tools. Properties aren't XML, they are properties. They SHOULD be simple as in my.properties.property2="bingo" . If you want XML, just use XML. Java has the best XML tools of any language there is.
#2 is OK, but if you can find the methods, you can find anything, so what is the advantage?
#3 is just odd. Java has jar, war, ejb-jar, etc... archives and also has classes by their lonesome..Net has only archives. How is this better?
#4 is a joke. RMI is cake if you can rely on the OS being the same. The hard part is cross-platform, not cross-language RMI. This is still a problem which java solves well and in multiple ways by relying on open standards (surprise) which explains why it is the dominant language for enterprise computing and middleware. I want a language that I can write code for and be assured that I can deploy that code in a client app on Windows or Mac or Linux, in a web server running windows or linux, and on a data tier box running Unix or Linux..Net doesn't meet this requirement and basically isn't usefull to me.
The cost of an employee or contractor's time is of course very high, but it is budgeted in a different column than the cost of support. The latter is generally paid to vendors, the former to employees. If you can eliminate the former without increasing the latter, then it is literally free. What you are considering is the "cost of quality" (aka "Total Cost of Ownership") of software, not the cost of support. Open source wins hands down on TCO.
Also, to make things easy lets say your support process takes 1 hour at best, 16 hours at worst. That would mean that the cost of support is anywhere from $160 to $2560. This is for one incident.
You have to do the same calculation even in the "for-pay" support model. I will argue that it will usually take longer to solve the same problem, thus incurring even bigger numbers. This happens because the technical information is systematically fragmented so that access to it can be sold. That adds waste and waste always adds cost.
The other thing that happens is that you purchase support up to level X only be told that your problem's solution is at level X+1. I had a problem with the raid aacraid driver once under SuSE. I called. They said "we don't support THAT". I emailed the guy who wrote the driver. He fixed it in the next release. If it had been proprietary, it would have taken months. Instead it was about a week. This phenomonon adds enormous cost because you have to either go through the purchase order process to up your support level or you have to leave the problem unsolved for longer.
And since you are tracking total cost, you tallied the cost of the support PO's and the licence tracking into your cost of support, right?
In what world do you live in where a secretary is going to actually call a tech support line?
The secretary will call the person that physically connected her box to the internet and tell them that her PC doesn't work and that they better fix it. This person will do step 1 and fix the problem, because secretaries never have anything but basic setup problems like "How do I print?" or "My email always bounces".
Linux support is "free" in the sense that it does not incur additional expense above what you already have available.
The whole issue with support is infected with the proprietary thinking model, which is based on the idea that you are stupid, the vendor is smart, and even if you aren't stupid the vendor has access to the real information, which they won't share because it would harm their support revenue.
Support for open source IS FREE (dammit!). The support process is as follows.
1) Use google to search the web for keywords on your question. This give you access to info in howtos, FAQ's, and basic documentation. IF your question is basic it will be solved here.
2) If this doesn't work, use google groups tp search for keywords on your question. This gives you access to USENET posting. If your question isn't answered in the basic docs, but is common enough that somebody else has had the issue, then it will be solved here. This is about the level of question that standard 1st level for-pay support will be able to solve.
3) If the above two steps fail, it's probably a hard problem or an obscure problem or a very new problem. Join the mailing list for the project in question. Search and read the archives for related issues. Then POST to the list and state your question and what you were able to find. Often you will be able to solve your issue. This is about the level of 2nd level for-pay support.
4) If contacting the mailing list reveals that the problem is a known issue or can't diagnose it, then you should at least be able to find out what part of the code causes the problem. Go get the code and figure out who the maintainer is. Write to them personally and explain what the problem is and what you have done and what steps can demonstrate the problem. If the project has a bug tracking database, enter your bug in it and refer the maintainer to it. Some times you will get a patch emailed to you. This is about the level of very expensive 3rd-level for-pay support.
5) If all of the above fails, download the source and start hacking. You have everything you need with open source. While you are doing this, continue to use methods 1 to 4, and for god's sake, post the patch back to the mailing list when you are done. This level of support is not available at any price from proprietary software vendors.
The point of the story was to show that when enterprise systems fail, the costs can be enormous and can affect the viability of the business. Big businesses rely heavily on IT system. Those that don't aren't competitive and go under. This is why large enterprises are willing to pay big $$ for "The Best" when it comes to their mission critical systems.
My analysis of the situation would have included the observation that, a worker on his knees labeling parts bins was an effective, essential part of the system that could have been met by hiring a single employee with the skillset used by your "VP."
The VP required everyone, including "desk job" people to work 12 hour shifts fixing the materials problem. He included himself and literally everyone below him. The purpose of this was so that managment could understand what was reliable and what was not using first hand knowledge. The "skillset" required was to be able to figure out how to figure out how the material flow was messed up and how to fix it. Not too many people have that skillset.
Turns out a small crew of modestly skilled laborers could do what a few million in IT resources could not.
"small crew"!?!? There were probably 800 people working this problem.
They should have audited the results of the manual process against the automated process.
Brilliant! They should have hired you as a consultant.
Oracle is now more expensive than the Sun hardware that it needs to run on. Support costs for Oracle are tied to initial licensing costs and if you botch it, Oracle will leave you to hang out to dry. Unless you're a really large customer, Oracle will treat you as if you are irrelevant.
Yes. You act surprised. Oracle is a tool for solving the data management problems of really large enterprises. If you aren't a Fortune 1000 company or a government agency, you don't have these kinds of problems and you don't have the kind of revenue stream that can afford or need Oracle. Hardware is a commodity product now. If your box poops out, you replace it. Big deal. If you data integrity poops out, you replace your company execs and it IS a big deal.
I have personally seen a corporate VP on his knees labeling parts bins because of a data integrity problem caused by a warehouse materials move project using MS Access when it wasn't appropriate. (I respect him to this day for understanding the criticality of the problem). A few weeks later customers were threating to leave because of late shipments and a few months later our accounting firm was threatening to not sign our books because of missing inventory. Had that happened, you would have heard about it on CNN. Do you think that guy is going to blink next time he sees a five or six digit PO for service and support on an enterprise system? Systems pricing follows according to business need.
Their product is based on a open standard that already has suitable commercial replacements and will eventually have suitable copylefted replacements.
That is flat out false. The only suitable commercial replacement is DB2, which is probably more expensive. It certainly is comparably priced. And at the high end, RDBMS's are not standards compliant enough to be interchangable. This is true just for SQL. Forget trigger and stored procedure languages. Trying to write RDBMS independent apps has been the ruin of many a project. I consider it an anti-pattern.
As to open source alternatives, if you had a magic lamp and every open source RDBMS could instantly have all the items on their "ToDo" list implemented, there still would be no open source RDBMS that was viable for large enterprise systems.
MS SQL Server should be worried from competition from PostgreSQL and perhaps Firebird on the low end, but not Oracle or DB2. These OSS RDBMS's are fighting to replace the help desk database, not the production database.
The high and mid-range enterprise computing gap has increased, not decreased each of the last few years. I'd say that PostgreSQL is roughly equivalent to Oracle 7.0, which is where Oracle was maybe 10 years ago.
Sooner or later someone is going to come along to rescue companies from Oracle licensing and support costs.
Perhaps, but you are dreaming if you see that happening in the next 2-4 years. Again, maybe for the help desk server, but not for the production server (eg not where the big revenue is).
Also, the LAST people you want doing Oracle support for you is Oracle consulting.
Oracle consulting doesn't do "support", they do "consulting". The former is accessed via Oracle Metalink and is used to ask for configuration help, install help, performance help, backup help, etc... Maybe occasionally you submit a bug and launch a TAR to get it fixed.
Oracle consulting provides design and development assistance. They will stand up your ERP system, develop application screens, help you do data modelling for your data warehouse and that sort of thing.
MySQL is not a competitor to Oracle. Maybe in a few years is will support the minimum functionality needed to respectably call itself an RDBMS (it currently doesn't), but today no enterprise would consider it.
PostgreSQL and Firebird are real RDBMS's, but I think they are both aimed at the department level server. MS SQL has a lot more to be worried about in the near term. Neither currently has much in the way of scalability, reliablity, performance, warehousing, and high availability features. Could that change? Yes. Is it going to change in the near future (say 1 to 2 years)? No, because if you go and read the "To Do" list, you don't see the kinds of features needed to compete with Oracle 9i or with DB2 as they are today (while Oracle's ToDo list is adding buttloads of enterprise stuff in every release).
As for GUI and reporting tools, these should not be tightly coupled to the RDBMS. Instead you should be using a MVC design pattern with data access provided by a JDBC/ODBC/DBI data access layer. You can develop perfectly good java/perl/python/php apps against all of the above. You could also be using any good report writer. I think there is an open source one called JasperReports that might be decent. You can always write reports with JSP or your fav apache module.
As far as Oracle being near the bottom of the list, that is rather nutty. The whole world runs off of reports running out of Oracle databases. Looking solely at Oracle products, Oracle Reports is a fine report writer, and for business intelligence, Oracle Discoverer is quite good. You can also use Oracle JDeveloper to create JSP page reports. If you don't like Oracle products, any other commercial report writer (Crystal Reports) or BI tool works out of the box with Oracle.
If the market size keeps growing for *REALLY LARGE* databases, then Oracle's user base could stay constant, or even increase... for awhile. But not over the long term.)
Ding. The Fortune 1000 and the government have no end in sight to the demand for large databases. (I suspect that what you and I call "REALLY" large is a bit different). Oracle's business has a bright future because they are the most trusted name in enterprise data for good reason.
But my original post was about the support and services markets increasing. Enterprise systems have lifespans in the decades and I've seen many large companies replace legacy systems with Oracle based ERP's. The service and support from the installed base will sustain Oracle for a very long time even if nothing changes. Most companies simply won't even consider changing their ERP systems architecture for another 20-25 years, so even if there was a viable OSS competitor to Oracle immediately, it wouldn't matter much. If you don't believe me, simply consider the staying power that COBOL has had despite the fact that it's been considered an awful programming language for at least 30 years.
Oracle's long term prospects are very good. Perhaps their pure packaged software business is not going to be the revenue pig that it has been, but their enterprise services business (support and consulting) has a bright future. I think Larry is making this pitch about software being dead because he sees that he needs to move his business even more to the services side, like IBM has done.
I think he's reacting to the open source phenomonon. He's declared that Linux will wipe MS out of the datacenter. He knows it will be a while before OS databases compete with Oracle and DB2 there, but he can't be so naive to think that this cannot happen. He's looking out in his industry and saying "where is the revenue going to come from?". He sees IBM making money in services.
And this ultimately is why the original poster need not fret. He probably won't work for a software pure-play. Instead he'll work in an IT department or a consulting company. Unfortunately, this industry will be highly cyclical because it will track the economy as a whole.
I will agree with you once the free software subculture actually comes out with something that is NOT A CLONE of a commercial product.
Hmmm. Think of the innovative software ideas of the last few years for enterprise computing. I think of extreme programming and web middleware.
Then I think of Junit and Ant for XP, and Tomcat, Struts and Cocoon for web middleware.
So, I'm confused. To me it looks like MOST innovation that is occuring for business computing is being lead in the open source realm. The Java world has embraced the open source paradigm big-time for new ideas and these are the ideas that MS is trying to CLONE with.net .
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
Unless Caldera offers recipiants of its distribution of the linux kernel a GPL licence for the portions of its IP that are included, then Caldera's attempt to require a separate licence voids its GPL licence and means it has no licence to distribute linux, which means it is committing copyright infringement. Unlike Torvalds and other distos, SCO/Caldera is doing so knowing (if their claims are true) that they are distributing a combination of their own IP mixed with linux but not GPL'd as a whole.
Note that it makes no difference if they created the modification that produced the mixing. Just as they claim distributors of linux violate their copyright for distributing an improper mixture of GPL code and their non-GPL code, they too have distributed such a mixture. So if they are correct in their claims, the prove their own guilt and have commited knowning and willful copyright infringement for commercial gain.
If copied code has been there for a long time, the Caldera Linux includes them and this lawsuit will go absolutley nowhere, because SCO itself has authorized their use by distributing them under the terms of the GPL. One could simply go back to the GPL code released by Caldera, reapply all original patches since then and continue on without fear of reprisal.
I think the absolute worst outcome here is that a judge would order Linux to purge all copied code from its sources. There is very little chance of damages because any supposed infringement is at best unknowing by anyone besides the person who submitted the first infringing patch.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no requirement that copyright infringement be done "knowingly". You obviously have no clue how copyright law works. That might affect the extent to which statutory damages would be awarded, but it does not affect actual damages which include all profits that result from the infringement, whether it was knowingly done or not.
As to the GPL being "viral", SCO got affected by it only because they chose to distribute code under the GPL without examining what they were shipping. Under these conditions, the GPL is no more viral than any other copyright licence.
You're missing the point. If File X was never licensed under the GPL to begin with, then subsequent changes to that file are nothing more or less than copyright infringement.
No, YOU are missing the point. Every file in the Linux tree was, in fact, "licensed under the GPL to begin with". The idea that whole files were picked up verbatim from UnixWare and simply inserted into the Linux tree is even more laughable than SCO's claims. It is provably false by direct examination of the CVS history.
But more importantly, if Linus writes GPL'd code set A and SCO owns non-GPL'd code set B and IBM (allegedly) creates C by mixing A and B (regardless of which came first between A and B) and Linus and SCO both distribute C, then BOTH Linus and SCO have committed copyright infringement (SCO against A and Linus against B), except that Linus can say he relied on both IBM and SCO's face value assertion that C was GPL'd. Since SCO has never told Linus what B is, his infringment will be non-willful and he will simply have to remove the offending parts upon receiving notice of what they are (which he has stated he is willing to do). However, SCO willfully distributed C in violation of A's licence for two months after they identified that C was improperly licenced under the GPL.
SCO is arguing that because they never released their code under the GPL, and because nobody else could do so legally, then the code was never covered by the GPL.
The stuff that SCO received that was licensed under the GPL was distributed under the authority imbued by the GPL.
Your two statements are directly contradictory. It makes me wonder if you have basic thinking skills. The code SCO "received" and distributed can only be distributed by SCO if they follow 2b, which can only be done if your first statement is false.
Please be precise: Linus writes code set A under the GPL, SCO owns B under non-GPL, and SCO distributes C=A+B. By what authority does SCO distribute C? Please decide whether SCO distributed C under the GPL in compliance with 2b or not. Answer Yes or No or shut the hell up.
If you say "Yes", then this act by SCO places B under the GPL per 2b whether they do so knowingly or not. If you say "No" then C is not properly licenced at all in which case SCO's distribution of C infringes A in what can only be a willful and for-profit way.
SCO has not complied with the GPL section 2b, which requires DISTRIBUTORS to independently licence the work as a whole under the terms of the GPL if any part of it is licenced under the GPL.
The GPL's not an all-or-nothing thing. It applies to every source file separately. So for the stuff that was stolen from SCO, SCO has the authority to distribute it because they hold the copyright. For the stuff that didn't come from SCO, the authority came from the GPL.
Utterly False. While it is true that the GPL applies to each file separately, you seem to infer that this is its complete scope. It applies to the "Program" aggregate and to the executable as well. In particular, all files that compile into code that is statically linked are parts of a combined derived work that must itself be authorized. The GPL provides as follows:
it continues...
But if your argument is true, then by the same reasoning, SCO has no claim.
But your argument isn't even sensible, because each and every file in the entire linux source code has been modified many times by people who licenced their contributions under the terms of the GPL.
So I ask again, for those files that contain, according to SCO, part GPL code and part UnixWare code, by what authority does SCO distribute those files?
By what authority did SCO distribute linux? It isn't the GPL because SCO claims the inclusion of their code invalidated the GPL. So what is it?
SCO committed copyright infringement against any and all legitimate parts of the Linux kernel by distributing it without licence. Each and every legitimate contributor can and should sue them. Unlike the other distributors, SCO did this believing they had no valid licence.
That is their point. They have explicitly admitted that they have violated section 2b of the GPL which places a burden on the distributor of code "that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the [GPL'd] Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License".
Unless they have some other licence from Torvalds and Co, they are stipulating to 2 months of knowing, willful, for-profit copyright infringement for the part of the code that is legitimate Linux based GPL'd code.
So they admit that by distributing this improperly licenced code that they were commiting infringement against any author they don't have a proper licence from.
You forgot his participation in the most dramatic legal defeat of our time: Bush v Gore.
This is total crap. Under SCO's theory, they are admitting violating many, many authors copyrights. If they are distributing ANY non-SCO GPL code mixed with non-GPL'd code (owned by SCO or not) then they have commited a violation of the GPL'd code's copyright. They are practically stipulating to the fact that they have commited copyright infringement.
The hypocracy of SCO's position is amazing. Let's think about this... Linus and Co. wrote codeset A, the parts of Linux which are their original work. SCO claims it owns codeset B (the UnixWare stuff) and that IBM created codeset C=A+B. If SCO distributed C then they are infringing the licence on A for exactly the same reason that they claim everyone else is violating the licence to B by distributing C. In fact, for them to distribute C is worse from a legal point of view, because they believed that it was infringing, whereas nobody else does. Since SCO has refused to even notify anyone else who distributes C (including the authors of A) of which parts of codeset C they believe are infringing, they are the ONLY ones who could prevent the infringement since they are the only ones with the knowledge to prevent the infringement.
If their view of the facts turns out to be true, then their distribution of Linux was willful for-profit infringement, practically by stipulation, and Linus, Alan Cox, Dave Miller and every other legitimate code author should get statutory damages from SCO as well as any profits that SCO earned as a result of their infringement.
IF YOU WROTE ANY PART OF LINUX, YOU SHOULD SUE SCO FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT FOR DISTRIBUTING YOUR CODE IN VIOLATION OF YOUR LICENCE
Profits that arise as a result of infringement are considered part of "actual damages". There is also a provision for getting "statutory" damages, which can be quite high for willful for-profit infringement.
No, "it's a mistake" doesn't cut it. Unless the code they distributed is, was, and stays licenced by the GPL they have mistkenly committed for-profit copyright infringement against every valid GPL contributor to the linux kernel.
It's completely odd that they would claim their own infringement would be a harmless "mistake", while simultaneously asking for $1G for a similar mistake.
Even if the worst case is true and IBM knowingly attempted to incorporate SCO code into the linux code, SCO stood by and continued to distribute and profit from the very code they claim is infringing while simultaneuously telling the customers who paid for that it was not only non-infringing but explicitly allowed to copy and modify the code.
SCO's intent was to licence Caldera Linux under the GPL to paying customers. What is your point?
If they claim to not have understand the implications of what they were agreeing to, the law will basically turn a cold shoulder. Hell, even when the other side chooses the contract and you don't read it you are still accountable if you agree. If you were the side that chose it, you will lose every time.
You are confusing exploits with vulnerabilities.
The vulnerability in question is now well documented and has been patched a long time.
The exploits are written by crackers who don't want to publish their source precisely because it would lead to a faster identification and fixing of the vulnerability.
I assume you mean a torrent to pirated content. If so, then you are more like Napster than P2P, because you have the power to control access and prevent the piracy of the specific work and you would be expected to know whether it was pirated or not.
It's odd that you think this is clearer under other laws -- it's mostly only the US that has actually tested these legal waters.
I've got this option, but then, I installed the tabbed browsing extensions via Tools->Options->Extensions->Get New Extensions
#1 There are probably 15000 Java projects in existence today that use XML heavily for all the things you listed.
#2 If you know the method names and parameters, you know enough to get whatever information the class designer thinks you need to have to use the class. I have never once been in a situation where I needed more. This is a "so what" improvement.
#3 The two supposed advantages ("unique identities" and "reflection") seem harmful to me. It's like the language designers forgot everything about OO programming. I do want my code to NOT be tightly coupled to its packaging for the same reason I don't want my controller layer tightly couple to the presentation layer. In fact, I want YOUR code to not be tightly coupled to its packaging (at least if you want me to use it). This basically guarantees that
#4 You obviously didn't read my point carefully. Nobody cares about cross-language interoperability, the important issue is cross-platform interoperability. It doesn't matter at all if the other platform's language has to run in a JVM: just do it. But since you mention it, the JVM supports a lot more languages than
I don't find #1 persuasive. If you want XML in Java, you use XML tools. Properties aren't XML, they are properties. They SHOULD be simple as in my.properties.property2="bingo" . If you want XML, just use XML. Java has the best XML tools of any language there is.
.Net has only archives. How is this better?
.Net doesn't meet this requirement and basically isn't usefull to me.
#2 is OK, but if you can find the methods, you can find anything, so what is the advantage?
#3 is just odd. Java has jar, war, ejb-jar, etc... archives and also has classes by their lonesome.
#4 is a joke. RMI is cake if you can rely on the OS being the same. The hard part is cross-platform, not cross-language RMI. This is still a problem which java solves well and in multiple ways by relying on open standards (surprise) which explains why it is the dominant language for enterprise computing and middleware. I want a language that I can write code for and be assured that I can deploy that code in a client app on Windows or Mac or Linux, in a web server running windows or linux, and on a data tier box running Unix or Linux.
The cost of an employee or contractor's time is of course very high, but it is budgeted in a different column than the cost of support. The latter is generally paid to vendors, the former to employees. If you can eliminate the former without increasing the latter, then it is literally free. What you are considering is the "cost of quality" (aka "Total Cost of Ownership") of software, not the cost of support. Open source wins hands down on TCO.
Also, to make things easy lets say your support process takes 1 hour at best, 16 hours at worst. That would mean that the cost of support is anywhere from $160 to $2560. This is for one incident.
You have to do the same calculation even in the "for-pay" support model. I will argue that it will usually take longer to solve the same problem, thus incurring even bigger numbers. This happens because the technical information is systematically fragmented so that access to it can be sold. That adds waste and waste always adds cost.
The other thing that happens is that you purchase support up to level X only be told that your problem's solution is at level X+1. I had a problem with the raid aacraid driver once under SuSE. I called. They said "we don't support THAT". I emailed the guy who wrote the driver. He fixed it in the next release. If it had been proprietary, it would have taken months. Instead it was about a week. This phenomonon adds enormous cost because you have to either go through the purchase order process to up your support level or you have to leave the problem unsolved for longer.
And since you are tracking total cost, you tallied the cost of the support PO's and the licence tracking into your cost of support, right?
In what world do you live in where a secretary is going to actually call a tech support line?
The secretary will call the person that physically connected her box to the internet and tell them that her PC doesn't work and that they better fix it. This person will do step 1 and fix the problem, because secretaries never have anything but basic setup problems like "How do I print?" or "My email always bounces".
Linux support is "free" in the sense that it does not incur additional expense above what you already have available.
The whole issue with support is infected with the proprietary thinking model, which is based on the idea that you are stupid, the vendor is smart, and even if you aren't stupid the vendor has access to the real information, which they won't share because it would harm their support revenue.
Support for open source IS FREE (dammit!). The support process is as follows.
1) Use google to search the web for keywords on your question. This give you access to info in howtos, FAQ's, and basic documentation. IF your question is basic it will be solved here.
2) If this doesn't work, use google groups tp search for keywords on your question. This gives you access to USENET posting. If your question isn't answered in the basic docs, but is common enough that somebody else has had the issue, then it will be solved here. This is about the level of question that standard 1st level for-pay support will be able to solve.
3) If the above two steps fail, it's probably a hard problem or an obscure problem or a very new problem. Join the mailing list for the project in question. Search and read the archives for related issues. Then POST to the list and state your question and what you were able to find. Often you will be able to solve your issue. This is about the level of 2nd level for-pay support.
4) If contacting the mailing list reveals that the problem is a known issue or can't diagnose it, then you should at least be able to find out what part of the code causes the problem. Go get the code and figure out who the maintainer is. Write to them personally and explain what the problem is and what you have done and what steps can demonstrate the problem. If the project has a bug tracking database, enter your bug in it and refer the maintainer to it. Some times you will get a patch emailed to you. This is about the level of very expensive 3rd-level for-pay support.
5) If all of the above fails, download the source and start hacking. You have everything you need with open source. While you are doing this, continue to use methods 1 to 4, and for god's sake, post the patch back to the mailing list when you are done. This level of support is not available at any price from proprietary software vendors.
The point of the story was to show that when enterprise systems fail, the costs can be enormous and can affect the viability of the business. Big businesses rely heavily on IT system. Those that don't aren't competitive and go under. This is why large enterprises are willing to pay big $$ for "The Best" when it comes to their mission critical systems.
My analysis of the situation would have included the observation that, a worker on his knees labeling parts bins was an effective, essential part of the system that could have been met by hiring a single employee with the skillset used by your "VP."
The VP required everyone, including "desk job" people to work 12 hour shifts fixing the materials problem. He included himself and literally everyone below him. The purpose of this was so that managment could understand what was reliable and what was not using first hand knowledge. The "skillset" required was to be able to figure out how to figure out how the material flow was messed up and how to fix it. Not too many people have that skillset.
Turns out a small crew of modestly skilled laborers could do what a few million in IT resources could not.
"small crew"!?!? There were probably 800 people working this problem.
They should have audited the results of the manual process against the automated process.
Brilliant! They should have hired you as a consultant.
Oracle is now more expensive than the Sun hardware that it needs to run on. Support costs for Oracle are tied to initial licensing costs and if you botch it, Oracle will leave you to hang out to dry. Unless you're a really large customer, Oracle will treat you as if you are irrelevant.
Yes. You act surprised. Oracle is a tool for solving the data management problems of really large enterprises. If you aren't a Fortune 1000 company or a government agency, you don't have these kinds of problems and you don't have the kind of revenue stream that can afford or need Oracle. Hardware is a commodity product now. If your box poops out, you replace it. Big deal. If you data integrity poops out, you replace your company execs and it IS a big deal.
I have personally seen a corporate VP on his knees labeling parts bins because of a data integrity problem caused by a warehouse materials move project using MS Access when it wasn't appropriate. (I respect him to this day for understanding the criticality of the problem). A few weeks later customers were threating to leave because of late shipments and a few months later our accounting firm was threatening to not sign our books because of missing inventory. Had that happened, you would have heard about it on CNN. Do you think that guy is going to blink next time he sees a five or six digit PO for service and support on an enterprise system? Systems pricing follows according to business need.
Their product is based on a open standard that already has suitable commercial replacements and will eventually have suitable copylefted replacements.
That is flat out false. The only suitable commercial replacement is DB2, which is probably more expensive. It certainly is comparably priced. And at the high end, RDBMS's are not standards compliant enough to be interchangable. This is true just for SQL. Forget trigger and stored procedure languages. Trying to write RDBMS independent apps has been the ruin of many a project. I consider it an anti-pattern.
As to open source alternatives, if you had a magic lamp and every open source RDBMS could instantly have all the items on their "ToDo" list implemented, there still would be no open source RDBMS that was viable for large enterprise systems.
MS SQL Server should be worried from competition from PostgreSQL and perhaps Firebird on the low end, but not Oracle or DB2. These OSS RDBMS's are fighting to replace the help desk database, not the production database.
The high and mid-range enterprise computing gap has increased, not decreased each of the last few years. I'd say that PostgreSQL is roughly equivalent to Oracle 7.0, which is where Oracle was maybe 10 years ago.
Sooner or later someone is going to come along to rescue companies from Oracle licensing and support costs.
Perhaps, but you are dreaming if you see that happening in the next 2-4 years. Again, maybe for the help desk server, but not for the production server (eg not where the big revenue is).
Also, the LAST people you want doing Oracle support for you is Oracle consulting.
Oracle consulting doesn't do "support", they do "consulting". The former is accessed via Oracle Metalink and is used to ask for configuration help, install help, performance help, backup help, etc... Maybe occasionally you submit a bug and launch a TAR to get it fixed.
Oracle consulting provides design and development assistance. They will stand up your ERP system, develop application screens, help you do data modelling for your data warehouse and that sort of thing.
Reasons why inlcude: Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, FireBird, SleepyCat.
MySQL is not a competitor to Oracle. Maybe in a few years is will support the minimum functionality needed to respectably call itself an RDBMS (it currently doesn't), but today no enterprise would consider it.
PostgreSQL and Firebird are real RDBMS's, but I think they are both aimed at the department level server. MS SQL has a lot more to be worried about in the near term. Neither currently has much in the way of scalability, reliablity, performance, warehousing, and high availability features. Could that change? Yes. Is it going to change in the near future (say 1 to 2 years)? No, because if you go and read the "To Do" list, you don't see the kinds of features needed to compete with Oracle 9i or with DB2 as they are today (while Oracle's ToDo list is adding buttloads of enterprise stuff in every release).
As for GUI and reporting tools, these should not be tightly coupled to the RDBMS. Instead you should be using a MVC design pattern with data access provided by a JDBC/ODBC/DBI data access layer. You can develop perfectly good java/perl/python/php apps against all of the above. You could also be using any good report writer. I think there is an open source one called JasperReports that might be decent. You can always write reports with JSP or your fav apache module.
As far as Oracle being near the bottom of the list, that is rather nutty. The whole world runs off of reports running out of Oracle databases. Looking solely at Oracle products, Oracle Reports is a fine report writer, and for business intelligence, Oracle Discoverer is quite good. You can also use Oracle JDeveloper to create JSP page reports. If you don't like Oracle products, any other commercial report writer (Crystal Reports) or BI tool works out of the box with Oracle.
If the market size keeps growing for *REALLY LARGE* databases, then Oracle's user base could stay constant, or even increase... for awhile. But not over the long term.)
Ding. The Fortune 1000 and the government have no end in sight to the demand for large databases. (I suspect that what you and I call "REALLY" large is a bit different). Oracle's business has a bright future because they are the most trusted name in enterprise data for good reason.
But my original post was about the support and services markets increasing. Enterprise systems have lifespans in the decades and I've seen many large companies replace legacy systems with Oracle based ERP's. The service and support from the installed base will sustain Oracle for a very long time even if nothing changes. Most companies simply won't even consider changing their ERP systems architecture for another 20-25 years, so even if there was a viable OSS competitor to Oracle immediately, it wouldn't matter much. If you don't believe me, simply consider the staying power that COBOL has had despite the fact that it's been considered an awful programming language for at least 30 years.
Sun is hurting, clearly. But Oracle?
Oracle's long term prospects are very good. Perhaps their pure packaged software business is not going to be the revenue pig that it has been, but their enterprise services business (support and consulting) has a bright future. I think Larry is making this pitch about software being dead because he sees that he needs to move his business even more to the services side, like IBM has done.
I think he's reacting to the open source phenomonon. He's declared that Linux will wipe MS out of the datacenter. He knows it will be a while before OS databases compete with Oracle and DB2 there, but he can't be so naive to think that this cannot happen. He's looking out in his industry and saying "where is the revenue going to come from?". He sees IBM making money in services.
And this ultimately is why the original poster need not fret. He probably won't work for a software pure-play. Instead he'll work in an IT department or a consulting company. Unfortunately, this industry will be highly cyclical because it will track the economy as a whole.
I will agree with you once the free software subculture actually comes out with something that is NOT A CLONE of a commercial product.
.net .
Hmmm. Think of the innovative software ideas of the last few years for enterprise computing. I think of extreme programming and web middleware.
Then I think of Junit and Ant for XP, and Tomcat, Struts and Cocoon for web middleware.
So, I'm confused. To me it looks like MOST innovation that is occuring for business computing is being lead in the open source realm. The Java world has embraced the open source paradigm big-time for new ideas and these are the ideas that MS is trying to CLONE with
Unless Caldera offers recipiants of its distribution of the linux kernel a GPL licence for the portions of its IP that are included, then Caldera's attempt to require a separate licence voids its GPL licence and means it has no licence to distribute linux, which means it is committing copyright infringement. Unlike Torvalds and other distos, SCO/Caldera is doing so knowing (if their claims are true) that they are distributing a combination of their own IP mixed with linux but not GPL'd as a whole.
Note that it makes no difference if they created the modification that produced the mixing. Just as they claim distributors of linux violate their copyright for distributing an improper mixture of GPL code and their non-GPL code, they too have distributed such a mixture. So if they are correct in their claims, the prove their own guilt and have commited knowning and willful copyright infringement for commercial gain.
If copied code has been there for a long time, the Caldera Linux includes them and this lawsuit will go absolutley nowhere, because SCO itself has authorized their use by distributing them under the terms of the GPL. One could simply go back to the GPL code released by Caldera, reapply all original patches since then and continue on without fear of reprisal.
I think the absolute worst outcome here is that a judge would order Linux to purge all copied code from its sources. There is very little chance of damages because any supposed infringement is at best unknowing by anyone besides the person who submitted the first infringing patch.