Has anybody pondered how IBM might benefit if the GPL fails in court? It isn't a clearcut truth that they would be hurt one way or the other, however the GPL is defined in court. IBM isn't a party using the Linux kernal in a way that they couldn't afford to make royalty payments if necessary. It's a lot of other people who face a dimmer future than IBM with that possibility.
The GPL could end up nullified in such a way that the Linux kernal became sort of a free-for-all public domain piece of code. In that case, IBM wouldn't lose, nor would they lose if the GPL as it's interpreted by most people is upheld. It could be a win-win situation for IBM.
If you pay taxes, you have a right to a say in how those taxes are spent, wether or not you buy into a fraud-prone 'election' scheme for deciding which lackeys will rubberstamp the spending decision that government bureaucrats decide upon.
I am tired of political activists saying 'you better STFU if you didn't vote.' That's like saying I can't think softball is a stupid game unless I play it regularly.
Its actually illegal to require people to show their ID at the polling place. That would discriminate against candidates who couldn't be elected without massive 'get out the vote' efforts and other forms of voting fraudl.
When you're done, do you want it to be Microsoft's product, the FSF's product, or your product. How much of your source code do you want to be forced to release?
With Microsoft you own your work, but you're a sharecropper because you don't own the platform your work runs on.
With Linux, you're a member of a 'cooperative' with an open membership so you have no control over which of your competitors will be climbing around in your code and releasing it in a competing product.
With a BSD OS, you have full control of the source code for all layers of the product and you can screw the lid down on the source code when you have a finished product and just sell your hardware with a binary stuck inside.
They can take pieces (meaning seperate components like commands, etc.) out of the RH distro, they can compile the kernal source however they wish, with whatever switches in the config they like. Unless they've actually changed the source and/or added to it, they're not required to give you anything. And it's your responsibility to prove that they changed the source. You can get the source from the same place they got it, wherever that was.
That depends on whom you bought your Windows license from. If you buy a 'retail box' version of Windows, seperate from a computer, you can transfer it from machine to machine, or even sell it to another person. If you run the 'free' version of Windows that comes bundled with your machine, then it's 'bound' to that machine and the license can't be transferred to another machine. In the first instance you made a purchase direct from Microsoft, and your license is transferrable. In the second instance, you bought your license from your hardware vendor at a significantly lower cost and the license is for the software specifically bundled with that hardware.
You sound like the high-tech version of an Amway salesman. You're hardly unbiased.
Cisco is a company with a dirty, dirty past. They basically stole their initial tech off campus, made it commercial and proprietary. That's an aside to this discussion, but get real: Cisco is not a company that 'really try to get things right'.
I bought a pallet of Macs. There were about fifteen of them. I paid $1 for the pallet of Macs.
They were early PCI Power Macs. 7200's and 7500's. The idea of somebody transferring the software over to me in such a deal seems a bit silly. Wish they had, of course. I had to buy a MacOS 8 CD on eBay. Paid a lot more than one dollar for that.
I downloaded my ISOs of Solaris 8 before they imposed the 'One CPU only' limit. So the agreement that I signed (digitally) doesn't impose that limit on my use of Solaris 8. I can (and do) put it on multiple-CPU boxes here. But it's all non-commercial use here anyway. But unless you're 'grandfathered in' that way, you're not even allowed to load Solaris 8 on your Sparc 10 or 20 (or 'above') even if it only has one CPU, because it's capable of having more.
I believe this is the case with more than just Microsoft. I know that all the Macs I've bought used have had wiped drives. And all the Sparcs I bought last week were wiped as well, except one SparcServer 10 which happened to have SunOS 2.5 on it.
This isn't a case of 'evile Microsoft' so much as it's a general practice with most companies.
I buy used hardware at auction all the time. It's common practice that all you're buying is a piece of hardware, and that the drive in the box is going to be wiped. To bemoan that when somebody buys old hardware on eBay and they don't get a license for the software in it is ridiculous. I thought this was going to be an article about hardware price gouging, not another license transfer whine.
There are other historical factors in the case of BSD that are relevant. When BSD won their lawsuit, it wasn't time yet for a free UNIX to make it's way in the world the way Linux has. The hardware that the free BSD variants ran on at the time (*) was expensive and the whole world wasn't networked with the TCP/IP protocol.
These days, any scruffy nerd in a basement has hardware adequate to run Linux.
(* a 386 box with a reasonable amount of memory wasn't something people could casually experiment with back then. That was an expensive production machine.)
Since when is the Open Source community a bunch of beggars?
Certainly the OS Community can be choosers. And if Apple opts not to be a full member of the community, that's Apple's problem more than anyone else's.
Apple wanted to use a mature kernel for their OS. So they used it.
And the way I see it is this:
Apple flopped dismally at their efforts in the 90's to produce their 'next generation operating system.' They spent millions and millions of dollars on the effort, going through cute 'code words' and the other marketing detris that, umm, makes Apple what it is. Finally, they gave up. They just didn't have the talent or resources. So they bought NeXT and put some new greasepaint on NeXTStep, and called it their new OS.
This is MAJOR egg on the face of all the pundits, so-called 'gurus' and various other sorts on the development staff at Apple. They couldn't code their way out of a cooperative kinda-sorta multitasking kludge. So they bought their new OS, the same way Microsoft does 'innovative' things.
I used to enjoy manually editing the text message on the boot sector of DOS boot diskettes to say something more 'clever' and then leaving them in co-workers drives.
or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron
Everybody knows that only real gurus wield a soldering iron. All that's required to be a 'pc technician' is a phillips screwdriver. Or should I say 'all that's needed to be a computer engineer. heh.
As outlandish as I ever got with a ten meg hard drive was that I once had one with scratches or some other damage at track zero. It was a fine drive otherwise but it couldn't be bootable. I superglued on a little piece of metal onto the 'indexer wheel' that shifted track zero in slightly, and moved the 'top end' tracks in a bit too, but there was enough area out there for a few more cylinders. The drive was fixed and bootable. I never opened a 'bubble' and went inside and messed with platters. That's the kind of thing one does to recover data on a drive that one isn't going to use anymore after the data recovery, because dust particles ARE going to get in there and then it's just a matter of time.
Hell, I got a really, really, nice hard case at auction last month for a dollar. And this was in a big crowd full of technical types who should have snapped it up. The reason I got it for a dollar? It had an IBM PC Convertible (early 8088 based laptop from IBM that's basically a 15 pound XT) in it that scared everybody off. People look at something like that and all they see is 'old laptop, can't bid on that!!!' So I got it for a buck. I may eventually list it on eBay (minus the laptop, which goes in my collection) and I'll probably get $20-30 for it.
At the last Ham social gathering I was at, I was scoffed a little bit because I'm still using PIC embedded controllers with EEPROM in them. Flash is the way forward. There was also an interesting old gent who was impressed that I know what a sharp cutoff pentode was for, of course.
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Has anybody pondered how IBM might benefit if the GPL fails in court? It isn't a clearcut truth that they would be hurt one way or the other, however the GPL is defined in court. IBM isn't a party using the Linux kernal in a way that they couldn't afford to make royalty payments if necessary. It's a lot of other people who face a dimmer future than IBM with that possibility.
The GPL could end up nullified in such a way that the Linux kernal became sort of a free-for-all public domain piece of code. In that case, IBM wouldn't lose, nor would they lose if the GPL as it's interpreted by most people is upheld. It could be a win-win situation for IBM.
Just some idle thoughts. Flame away.
If you pay taxes, you have a right to a say in how those taxes are spent, wether or not you buy into a fraud-prone 'election' scheme for deciding which lackeys will rubberstamp the spending decision that government bureaucrats decide upon.
I am tired of political activists saying 'you better STFU if you didn't vote.' That's like saying I can't think softball is a stupid game unless I play it regularly.
Its actually illegal to require people to show their ID at the polling place. That would discriminate against candidates who couldn't be elected without massive 'get out the vote' efforts and other forms of voting fraudl.
When you're done, do you want it to be Microsoft's product, the FSF's product, or your product. How much of your source code do you want to be forced to release?
With Microsoft you own your work, but you're a sharecropper because you don't own the platform your work runs on.
With Linux, you're a member of a 'cooperative' with an open membership so you have no control over which of your competitors will be climbing around in your code and releasing it in a competing product.
With a BSD OS, you have full control of the source code for all layers of the product and you can screw the lid down on the source code when you have a finished product and just sell your hardware with a binary stuck inside.
I can see a whole E. F. Schumacher 'Small Is Beautiful' image in my head.
They can take pieces (meaning seperate components like commands, etc.) out of the RH distro, they can compile the kernal source however they wish, with whatever switches in the config they like. Unless they've actually changed the source and/or added to it, they're not required to give you anything. And it's your responsibility to prove that they changed the source. You can get the source from the same place they got it, wherever that was.
Have you provided proof that they modified their kernel?
Maybe it's a stock kernel that they compiled with specific switches. Go download the kernal source and figure out what switches they applied yourself.
I've never seen a Sun box sold on eBay bundled with Solaris. They sometimes do have an OS installed, but it's not part of the deal.
Sun does play some other tricks, i.e. Solaris won't install on a third-party drive installed in one of their boxes without going through contortions.
And for anybody who buys a Sun box on eBay for personal use, you can download Solaris for free anyway.
That depends on whom you bought your Windows license from. If you buy a 'retail box' version of Windows, seperate from a computer, you can transfer it from machine to machine, or even sell it to another person. If you run the 'free' version of Windows that comes bundled with your machine, then it's 'bound' to that machine and the license can't be transferred to another machine. In the first instance you made a purchase direct from Microsoft, and your license is transferrable. In the second instance, you bought your license from your hardware vendor at a significantly lower cost and the license is for the software specifically bundled with that hardware.
You sound like the high-tech version of an Amway salesman. You're hardly unbiased.
Cisco is a company with a dirty, dirty past. They basically stole their initial tech off campus, made it commercial and proprietary. That's an aside to this discussion, but get real: Cisco is not a company that 'really try to get things right'.
I bought a pallet of Macs. There were about fifteen of them. I paid $1 for the pallet of Macs.
They were early PCI Power Macs. 7200's and 7500's. The idea of somebody transferring the software over to me in such a deal seems a bit silly. Wish they had, of course. I had to buy a MacOS 8 CD on eBay. Paid a lot more than one dollar for that.
You omitted all the messy details about derivative works.
I downloaded my ISOs of Solaris 8 before they imposed the 'One CPU only' limit. So the agreement that I signed (digitally) doesn't impose that limit on my use of Solaris 8. I can (and do) put it on multiple-CPU boxes here. But it's all non-commercial use here anyway. But unless you're 'grandfathered in' that way, you're not even allowed to load Solaris 8 on your Sparc 10 or 20 (or 'above') even if it only has one CPU, because it's capable of having more.
I believe this is the case with more than just Microsoft. I know that all the Macs I've bought used have had wiped drives. And all the Sparcs I bought last week were wiped as well, except one SparcServer 10 which happened to have SunOS 2.5 on it.
This isn't a case of 'evile Microsoft' so much as it's a general practice with most companies.
I buy used hardware at auction all the time. It's common practice that all you're buying is a piece of hardware, and that the drive in the box is going to be wiped. To bemoan that when somebody buys old hardware on eBay and they don't get a license for the software in it is ridiculous. I thought this was going to be an article about hardware price gouging, not another license transfer whine.
There are other historical factors in the case of BSD that are relevant. When BSD won their lawsuit, it wasn't time yet for a free UNIX to make it's way in the world the way Linux has. The hardware that the free BSD variants ran on at the time (*) was expensive and the whole world wasn't networked with the TCP/IP protocol.
These days, any scruffy nerd in a basement has hardware adequate to run Linux.
(* a 386 box with a reasonable amount of memory wasn't something people could casually experiment with back then. That was an expensive production machine.)
Since when is the Open Source community a bunch of beggars?
Certainly the OS Community can be choosers. And if Apple opts not to be a full member of the community, that's Apple's problem more than anyone else's.
And the way I see it is this:
Apple flopped dismally at their efforts in the 90's to produce their 'next generation operating system.' They spent millions and millions of dollars on the effort, going through cute 'code words' and the other marketing detris that, umm, makes Apple what it is. Finally, they gave up. They just didn't have the talent or resources. So they bought NeXT and put some new greasepaint on NeXTStep, and called it their new OS.
This is MAJOR egg on the face of all the pundits, so-called 'gurus' and various other sorts on the development staff at Apple. They couldn't code their way out of a cooperative kinda-sorta multitasking kludge. So they bought their new OS, the same way Microsoft does 'innovative' things.
I made my first modem cable, using a soldering iron.
It was to connect my DECWriter printing terminal to my acoustic coupler.
Much later on I got my own computer.
I used to enjoy manually editing the text message on the boot sector of DOS boot diskettes to say something more 'clever' and then leaving them in co-workers drives.
No computer that has a current Microsoft OS has to be rebooted to change (basic) network settings.
Just so you know. Hope the tech support drone syncs up eventually, too.
or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron
Everybody knows that only real gurus wield a soldering iron. All that's required to be a 'pc technician' is a phillips screwdriver. Or should I say 'all that's needed to be a computer engineer. heh.
Swap out 'dem modules, boys.
As outlandish as I ever got with a ten meg hard drive was that I once had one with scratches or some other damage at track zero. It was a fine drive otherwise but it couldn't be bootable. I superglued on a little piece of metal onto the 'indexer wheel' that shifted track zero in slightly, and moved the 'top end' tracks in a bit too, but there was enough area out there for a few more cylinders. The drive was fixed and bootable. I never opened a 'bubble' and went inside and messed with platters. That's the kind of thing one does to recover data on a drive that one isn't going to use anymore after the data recovery, because dust particles ARE going to get in there and then it's just a matter of time.
Hell, I got a really, really, nice hard case at auction last month for a dollar. And this was in a big crowd full of technical types who should have snapped it up. The reason I got it for a dollar? It had an IBM PC Convertible (early 8088 based laptop from IBM that's basically a 15 pound XT) in it that scared everybody off. People look at something like that and all they see is 'old laptop, can't bid on that!!!' So I got it for a buck. I may eventually list it on eBay (minus the laptop, which goes in my collection) and I'll probably get $20-30 for it.
At the last Ham social gathering I was at, I was scoffed a little bit because I'm still using PIC embedded controllers with EEPROM in them. Flash is the way forward. There was also an interesting old gent who was impressed that I know what a sharp cutoff pentode was for, of course.