At the pace of this industry, as soon as code is released, it's almost obsolete. But the ability to generate the ideas, or further develop them is what's important. If you're 'looking over your shoulder' all the time, then you've already behind.
I think that Tom Peters said the same thing - that companies who think they can sit back and rely on defending copyrights and patents will shorten their existence.
So, SCO are making a legal threat, for which no evidence has been produced, in which they have constantly changed the statement of the case (80 lines/thousands of lines/infringement of contract/copyright).
What you are looking at putting up is a Linux file server. What's the very worst that could happen? SCO send you a cease and desist letter, you rush out and get either Free BSD or Windows XP and copy the files on to that instead.
And bear this in mind... if there's any code copied (and I'm aching to see SCO produce the 'thousands' of lines of code), you can bet there will be people willing to rewrite the infringed code, in such a controlled manner that SCO won't be able to touch it. Probably take a couple of weeks from the offending functions being known.
Someone will take the function in question, and reverse engineer it into a specification, and delete the code for the function. They will then give the source without the offending code to a programmer who has never seen the Linux source code, who will then write the procedure based on the spec provided. IIRC that's how IBMs PC market was killed - by someone reverse engineering the BIOS.
BTW Can I have your boss' email address? I have some emails to send him from some guys in Nigeria.
But then there are the infamous 80 lines that are allegedly in SCO's SYSV code and also Linux.
I'm dying to see these 80 lines, along with SCO's Evidence that the code was written by them and not there beforehand.
Even if they are there, I'm sure we'll know where they are after the case. I personally would be glad to join the long queue of developers rewriting the code.
Many of the Wall Street analysts hyping up the SCO stock to their clients have no idea about the ease with which the disputed code can be re-written by capable graduate students of computer science. The analysts are fools, and so are their clients.
The bottom line is that if you can create a fools' gold market, you are fine - you buy because the market is going to go up - is self-perpetuating. Eventually, it has to fall and some people get hurt.
People who bought into.com companies often didn't believe they had the fundamentals to support their share price. They just believed that other people believed it, and so the price would rise.
Whenever I've bought shares, I've always done it on the fundamentals. Can I see what the company does? Do they look like they are doing the right things in their shops? Is the market right for buying into (such as property after a long slump)?
Unfortunately, like most things in the US, for the last ten years it's been sucked up by big labels and packaged for sale to middle-class suburban kids. Not a bad deal for inner-city youth looking for a way out, but I think it's sad to see the culture of a group of people being sold bit by bit to big corporations.
To me, the rap/hip hop music scene is now one of the most corporate, sick and dull forms of music around. The rap music of the 80s was creative and inventive. It's now about bling and violence.
P Diddy drinking Cristal, Missy Elliot advertising Gap? Boring.
Where's the new Mantronix, Run DMC or Public Enemy?
And the trade secret rubish is nonsense. How can it be a secret if you can get the code from their website?
IANAL, but as far as I know, trade secrets are not like copyrights, but are more like unpatented inventions (or things which cannot be patented for which you want to keep control).
A trade secret is something like Microsoft's word file format or the recipe for Coca-cola. If you want to keep a trade secret, you have to look after it yourself.
The thing is, some of us have bragging rights. While the cute girls were happily bobbing their heads to "You spin me round round, baby, round round--like a record, baby..." (retch, retch) some of us knew that it sucked while it sucked, and some of us said so and how and why. You Brits would call us wankers as a consequence of our principled aesthetic stance. Oh well. It all comes out in the wash, huh? (snicker)
Thing is, that was a good disco record, written and performed by Dead of Alive, a real band with some credibility who had cut their teeth in clubs, and Pete Burns had worked with a number of luminaries in Liverpool.
It was produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman who eventually inflicted Sonia, Jason Donovan and early Kylie on the UK population, but they were not involved in the writing. It was SAW's first UK #1 production, and a superb job (particularly the 12" mixes).
If you don't like the record, then fine, but it was fun and they certainly weren't some manufactured band. The record took ages to reach #1 in the UK, had no initial air play and spread largely by word of mouth.
Like you say, they "may" have rights. They have filed a copyright registration. I could file a copyright registration for Windows 2000. Microsoft would come along and beat me over the head, but I could file - there's no checking at time of filing.
I'm glad to see that SCO's FUD has worked on you. I wouldn't give it the time of day. If SCO had a genuine problem with infringement, they'd point out the area of infringement and let people remove and replace it. THAT is the decent thing to do.
The fact that they want to spread the doubt that they have a case without showing any evidence of it suggests to me that they don't have a case.
Well, my post was in response to a post about popular music, so that was what we were talking about. Not local or independent bands.
In the late 80s, I was mostly listening to independent bands being championed by people like John Peel and stuff lent to me by friends.
As for local bands, you are probably lucky in Seattle as it's quite a large town with a rich seam of musical history. Where I live is a small town, and because of there being nothing but pubs, the quality of bands is pretty poor - derivatives of Limp Bizkit or Coldplay.
Looks good. What's the deal concerning usage after the period? For instance, can I sign up for a month, download a ton of stuff and then cancel and still listen to the downloaded tracks?
BTW There's a ton of stuff by The Fall. Have a listen.
I always trace the official start of the 90s to "Kinky Afro" by the Happy Mondays and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana.
Seems to me that there are two states of the music industry, the "creative" and the "marketed", like a yin and yang. Mostly it is run as 'marketed' but every so often (late 60s, late 70s, early 90s), the 'marketed' just gets too vapid, too crappy and the 'creative' gets a chance. After a while, the 'creative' self-destructs and the 'marketed' creeps back in.
The Cheeky Girls are a sign that we have reached so low that the 'creative' is probably around the corner.
The funny thing is when I saw the RIAA web site stating what percentage goes into publicity of a CD's production (near 50%).
This was supposed to justify the fact that CDs cost something like 15pence to produce and cost £15.
To me it said something else - the publicity overhead is too much.
Historically, musicians made money by performing, because recording is really took off in the 20th century.
This eventually led to people who performed making records. At the time of the growth in making records (the late 40s/50s) the only ways to buy a record were to get someone to make a record for you and sell it through a shop. As the cost of making records (studios, pressings etc.) was very costly, people signed to record companies.
Had the internet existed in the 1940s or 1950s, I doubt record companies would have ever taken off. What may have taken off could have been sites offering music for sale, but likely the model would have been more of a commission rather than ownership model.
The bottom line is that eventually, record companies in their huge, bloated form will die. The margin difference for someone to either make records in a home studio and post to their website compared to signing up with a record company will make it so.
What may survive more is independent record companies where artists are treated well by people who really care about music first and profit 2nd.
How about "Linux Success on Desktop (but a few issues)"?
It seems to me that from reading this, that I could probably switch to it pretty soon.
Updating GAIM? I can do that, pretty easy.
Palm Sync missing a few fields? No sweat.
Windows permissions? No big deal.
One thing that someone should get busy on is writing a web-based Open Source replacement for Microsoft Access. That's a real killer app with no replacement.
I think that for Microsoft, the only way is down. XBox has been a disaster, Hotmail and MSN too. Tablet PC is gonna be a financial disaster.
On the desktop: Hardly anyone needs an office suite with anything more than they already have, or certainly they'll work around it. Nearly everyone who wants a PC has one. In addition, most people have fast enough PCs at home/work and won't rush for upgrades.
On servers: For those not already on MS, they probably won't switch now. They'll stick with Unix or switch to Linux. A lot of new work is going onto Linux because of cost.
What really will start to hit MS is companies using Mozilla and Open Office on MS software. Apart from the lack of revenue for Office, once people can use these applications, switching to Linux is easier.
The best defenders are probably the press. If enough people in the free press (not that there is much in the USA) can realise what is happening, get Gates put on the spot with a "what evidence of IP infringement is there?" questions.
We have to start blocking the FUD in a more direct way, not just whingeing on/.
Any good ideas gratefully received.
I used to be with NTL, who used to sell PPV movies for £3 for a showing. I could instead go to my video shop and pay £3.50.
I opted for the video shop, because I know that when a company streams video across a network, they don't have the same media/staff/premises costs that a local video shop does. All they pay is the cost of the staff for billing and dealing with rights/transmission. And that's a cost that scales well over the country. I've got a good feeling that PPV videos are a major profit area.
I also think that media companies are going to have big problems selling the idea of DRM virtual media to people. Here's some reasons why:-
DRM audio offers nothing better than Cd audio, so most folks won't go for it UNLESS it is much cheaper per track. Remember that CD and DVD offered considerable improvements over tapes and VHS and so could initially sell for a premium.
When joe public pays for and downloads a DRM file, and a virus wipes it off, what happens then? If he can't get it then, he'll be well pissed!
You can't buy your brother a DRM file as a present, or it's certainly not as cool as a Pearl Jam CD with cover notes to look through. Who's going to drop a DRM code off at a girl's house for valentine's?
Rack of CD/DVDs with beautiful artwork in your lounge, or DRM files buried somewhere in your file system?
I'm starting to think that targetting the RIAA in every way possible should be done.
What about if website owners started forbidding access to "employees of, and families of employees of the RIAA", and started checking IP addresses/email addresses used. How much of the non-corporate internet could be blocked?
Anyone know any juicy gossip on RIAA members, live near one that they can rat to the police for a minor misdemeanour?
Maybe we should add a little shock and awe to these motherfuckers lives?
They'd never be able to get away with the old "we hold no liability" thing on say safety in motor cars anyway. The courts in the US would decree that making sure something was safe before deploying it in a car was too fundamental for contractual exclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that Tom Peters said the same thing - that companies who think they can sit back and rely on defending copyrights and patents will shorten their existence.
What you are looking at putting up is a Linux file server. What's the very worst that could happen? SCO send you a cease and desist letter, you rush out and get either Free BSD or Windows XP and copy the files on to that instead.
And bear this in mind... if there's any code copied (and I'm aching to see SCO produce the 'thousands' of lines of code), you can bet there will be people willing to rewrite the infringed code, in such a controlled manner that SCO won't be able to touch it. Probably take a couple of weeks from the offending functions being known.
Someone will take the function in question, and reverse engineer it into a specification, and delete the code for the function. They will then give the source without the offending code to a programmer who has never seen the Linux source code, who will then write the procedure based on the spec provided. IIRC that's how IBMs PC market was killed - by someone reverse engineering the BIOS.
BTW Can I have your boss' email address? I have some emails to send him from some guys in Nigeria.
How would you write it?
I have a huge amount of money sitting in my Nigerian bank account which needs to be taken out of the country. Only $699 in fees for the paperwork.
I'm dying to see these 80 lines, along with SCO's Evidence that the code was written by them and not there beforehand.
Even if they are there, I'm sure we'll know where they are after the case. I personally would be glad to join the long queue of developers rewriting the code.
The bottom line is that if you can create a fools' gold market, you are fine - you buy because the market is going to go up - is self-perpetuating. Eventually, it has to fall and some people get hurt.
People who bought into .com companies often didn't believe they had the fundamentals to support their share price. They just believed that other people believed it, and so the price would rise.
I never bought because of balance sheets.
To me, the rap/hip hop music scene is now one of the most corporate, sick and dull forms of music around. The rap music of the 80s was creative and inventive. It's now about bling and violence.
P Diddy drinking Cristal, Missy Elliot advertising Gap? Boring.
Where's the new Mantronix, Run DMC or Public Enemy?
IANAL, but as far as I know, trade secrets are not like copyrights, but are more like unpatented inventions (or things which cannot be patented for which you want to keep control).
A trade secret is something like Microsoft's word file format or the recipe for Coca-cola. If you want to keep a trade secret, you have to look after it yourself.
Thing is, that was a good disco record, written and performed by Dead of Alive, a real band with some credibility who had cut their teeth in clubs, and Pete Burns had worked with a number of luminaries in Liverpool.
It was produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman who eventually inflicted Sonia, Jason Donovan and early Kylie on the UK population, but they were not involved in the writing. It was SAW's first UK #1 production, and a superb job (particularly the 12" mixes).
If you don't like the record, then fine, but it was fun and they certainly weren't some manufactured band. The record took ages to reach #1 in the UK, had no initial air play and spread largely by word of mouth.
I'm glad to see that SCO's FUD has worked on you. I wouldn't give it the time of day. If SCO had a genuine problem with infringement, they'd point out the area of infringement and let people remove and replace it. THAT is the decent thing to do.
The fact that they want to spread the doubt that they have a case without showing any evidence of it suggests to me that they don't have a case.
In the late 80s, I was mostly listening to independent bands being championed by people like John Peel and stuff lent to me by friends.
As for local bands, you are probably lucky in Seattle as it's quite a large town with a rich seam of musical history. Where I live is a small town, and because of there being nothing but pubs, the quality of bands is pretty poor - derivatives of Limp Bizkit or Coldplay.
I get most of my music by word-of-mouth.
BTW There's a ton of stuff by The Fall. Have a listen.
Seems to me that there are two states of the music industry, the "creative" and the "marketed", like a yin and yang. Mostly it is run as 'marketed' but every so often (late 60s, late 70s, early 90s), the 'marketed' just gets too vapid, too crappy and the 'creative' gets a chance. After a while, the 'creative' self-destructs and the 'marketed' creeps back in.
The Cheeky Girls are a sign that we have reached so low that the 'creative' is probably around the corner.
A friend of mine has thousands of mail items, and he searches them for research. OE doesn't support multiple word searches which Thunderbird does.
He also gets far too much spam, and can use the spam filtering.
This was supposed to justify the fact that CDs cost something like 15pence to produce and cost £15.
To me it said something else - the publicity overhead is too much.
Historically, musicians made money by performing, because recording is really took off in the 20th century.
This eventually led to people who performed making records. At the time of the growth in making records (the late 40s/50s) the only ways to buy a record were to get someone to make a record for you and sell it through a shop. As the cost of making records (studios, pressings etc.) was very costly, people signed to record companies.
Had the internet existed in the 1940s or 1950s, I doubt record companies would have ever taken off. What may have taken off could have been sites offering music for sale, but likely the model would have been more of a commission rather than ownership model.
The bottom line is that eventually, record companies in their huge, bloated form will die. The margin difference for someone to either make records in a home studio and post to their website compared to signing up with a record company will make it so.
What may survive more is independent record companies where artists are treated well by people who really care about music first and profit 2nd.
It seems to me that from reading this, that I could probably switch to it pretty soon.
Updating GAIM? I can do that, pretty easy.
Palm Sync missing a few fields? No sweat.
Windows permissions? No big deal.
One thing that someone should get busy on is writing a web-based Open Source replacement for Microsoft Access. That's a real killer app with no replacement.
I think that for Microsoft, the only way is down. XBox has been a disaster, Hotmail and MSN too. Tablet PC is gonna be a financial disaster.
On the desktop: Hardly anyone needs an office suite with anything more than they already have, or certainly they'll work around it. Nearly everyone who wants a PC has one. In addition, most people have fast enough PCs at home/work and won't rush for upgrades.
On servers: For those not already on MS, they probably won't switch now. They'll stick with Unix or switch to Linux. A lot of new work is going onto Linux because of cost.
What really will start to hit MS is companies using Mozilla and Open Office on MS software. Apart from the lack of revenue for Office, once people can use these applications, switching to Linux is easier.
Thanks. I wasn't thinking of it as a budget item, more that if people could get a superfast booting Linux box, it'd gain some more market.
The best defenders are probably the press. If enough people in the free press (not that there is much in the USA) can realise what is happening, get Gates put on the spot with a "what evidence of IP infringement is there?" questions. We have to start blocking the FUD in a more direct way, not just whingeing on /.
Any good ideas gratefully received.
Could you put a linux distro on a large smart media card, so as to reduce boot times? Surely that would be better than a slow CD loader.
I used to be with NTL, who used to sell PPV movies for £3 for a showing. I could instead go to my video shop and pay £3.50.
I opted for the video shop, because I know that when a company streams video across a network, they don't have the same media/staff/premises costs that a local video shop does. All they pay is the cost of the staff for billing and dealing with rights/transmission. And that's a cost that scales well over the country. I've got a good feeling that PPV videos are a major profit area.
I also think that media companies are going to have big problems selling the idea of DRM virtual media to people. Here's some reasons why:-
DRM audio offers nothing better than Cd audio, so most folks won't go for it UNLESS it is much cheaper per track. Remember that CD and DVD offered considerable improvements over tapes and VHS and so could initially sell for a premium.
When joe public pays for and downloads a DRM file, and a virus wipes it off, what happens then? If he can't get it then, he'll be well pissed!
You can't buy your brother a DRM file as a present, or it's certainly not as cool as a Pearl Jam CD with cover notes to look through. Who's going to drop a DRM code off at a girl's house for valentine's?
Rack of CD/DVDs with beautiful artwork in your lounge, or DRM files buried somewhere in your file system?
What about if website owners started forbidding access to "employees of, and families of employees of the RIAA", and started checking IP addresses/email addresses used. How much of the non-corporate internet could be blocked?
Anyone know any juicy gossip on RIAA members, live near one that they can rat to the police for a minor misdemeanour?
Maybe we should add a little shock and awe to these motherfuckers lives?
They'd never be able to get away with the old "we hold no liability" thing on say safety in motor cars anyway. The courts in the US would decree that making sure something was safe before deploying it in a car was too fundamental for contractual exclusions.
Please send me your bank details.