Red Hat contributed to the OSDL defense fund, so that means they're already putting their money where their mouth is and better yet doing it with everyone else in a way which covers us all, not just licensees of RH Enterprise. Anyone know what the fund is up to now?
It's a shame they're bitching about what NASA is doing to deprive them of their instrument when they've had it's benefits for years. Geeze, talk about glass half empty. There are new missions, other priorities and in context ESA spends a pittance on this kind of stuff.
The idea that once it's up you have to service it long past it's anticipated life or put up with endless politicking by scientists over it's fate makes me want to object to launching another bird for these dufi. How long are we going to service the next one for? Costs up front please so we can say no at the outset to slipping cost overruns and extended mission support. Heck we're even spending a hundred million bringing this hunk of tin down in the ocean which is insane when you consider the natural asteroud impacts we have. At least the next one is going up to the L2 where we can't send a repair mission, so we'll have the blessing of not having to listen to more griping from scientists that billion dollar space programs are somehow disappointing to them.
Shuttle missions are obscenely expensive compared to other launch vehicles and we've already had two service missions to this thing. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars (OUR DOLLARS!), probably upwards of a billion on one telescope and they want to keep sending the missions up. Time to get a grip. Manned service missions to space telescopes are more expensive than launching new instruments, but because it's their sandbox perspective goes out the window, enough of the politics already.
Geeze for a billion bucks you could have had an amazing instrument on Earth that would do useful work for the next 100 years and at a lower ongoing operating cost.
P.S. This case is about an overly broad interpretation of derivitive works under a SCO IBM *contract*. It is doubly irrelevant, and dangerous for that reason. If SCO get's their fishing expedition and can look at the code, any subsequent decision has no meaning for Linux w.r.t. derivitive works because copyrights to authored works do not transfer the same way the would under a contract which stipulates they all lead to SCO.
SCO is already unscrupulously trying to leverage a contract dispute into a copyright play on Linux based on a public perception of what this case is about, a false perception they have deliberately cultivated. Their message is far from the legal situation, win lose or draw, and I want SCO to lose and *soon*.
The fishing expeditions was one of my observations before you contributed which obviously bore repeating.
Moreover it is ridiculous to suggest that IBM should go through this just to satisfy geekdom & Linux. It's not even a serious suggestion. You can never prove a negative. Defense against SCO in a *contract* dispute merely means SCO loses, not GPL wins. Even if SCO loses the case there's no guarantee that this won't happen in future with some other nut. SCO is a particularly ineffective nut given that even today they ship......drum roll.... LINUX! Under the GPL no less. I mean holy mother of pearl. They contributed code to Linux (SMP code) and their rights to Unix (the cause of their delusion) look about as watertight as a slice of swiss cheese.
Better scenario, SCO loses their case ASAP, SCO then loses IBM's case, because that's barelling down the tracks straight at them, IBM asset strips SCO as settlement, including Unix which they can buy for a song. I'd rather see SCO tied up in court in defense after having their own case dismissed than watch them hatching ever more desperate FUD against Linux. The case dismissed will be a big enough message to counter a lot of the damage SCO has done.
SCOs case is ludicrous on so many levels, not least because they still ship GPLd Linux even TODAY.
You might as well fear IBM turning round tomorrow and suing everyone over Linux copyrights for stuff they've donated if you're in the chicken little business.
The greatest damage SCO could have done (would have been to sue end users and OSDL mitigated that threat a few days ago). SCO's biggest weapon is perception, and it's the perception that needs to change dramatically ASAP. They can't sue for copyright infringement, all they can do is wander around scaring people, and hoping they get another mug to pump their next quarters numbers. Hence the Google shakedown. No coincidence that Google is looking at an IPO, it's a pure shakedown play and it's all about perception of risk.
The SCO situation has nothing to do with future Linux GPL theft cases. You can keep saying it. You can hold your breath until you turn blue. It won't change the facts. I've explained very clearly that TODAY you can't do this because that's the law. TOMORROW you won't be able to do this either because it'll still be the law. If SCO does get so peek at code it'll be because of contracts and proof, not a pipe dream, and reguardless Linux will NOT, I repeat for your slow mind, ABSOLUTELY NOT be able to go on fishing expeditions in code without proof. Not YESTERDAY, not TODAY and not TOMORROW.
This is nonsense. There is no precedent at issue. You cannot TODAY wander into court and ask for someone's code without evidence. Nobody can do this, not you, not me and not SCO.
Your pipedream about this hurting Linux does not affect the law. Fishing trips are not allowed. You need some evidenciary pretext, not a wish and a prayer. SCO cannot say we have A), Linux is C) we want to see IBM's B) unless they have very good justification. Moreover the idea of derivative works is not the catchall SCO implies it is. SCO hasn't written any NUMA code. Infact, other companies such as SGI have worked for years on NUMA architectures and Operating systems, mostly independent of AIX. The derivative works issue is a SCO contractual issue but even so is not of the scope that SCO claims.
The point is you need *evidence*, BEFORE you get into court. Some idea rattling around between your ears is not sufficient reason for a judge to compell anyone to do anything, let alone hand over corporate secrets to an avowed enemy.
How do you know they haven't already taking GPL code? (notwithstanding the availability of their code under certain circumstances)
Look you can't walk into court today and claim you *think* Microsoft has stolen your code and you want to see theirs to confirm it. It's patently ridiculous to expect you could. You require proof. It's not a bad thing, it's a good thing that prevents frivilous time wasters like SCO going on fishing expeditions.
If someone stole your GPL code then you'd need checksums, assembly fragments, data tables, testimony or some other form of evidence before you'd get anywhere in court. This is as it should be. In cases where GPL work has been stolen this has been deduced without seeing code, (obviously!). That deduction using available evidence could be leveraged in court to see the original source code, this is very different from simply walking in on faith and demanding code based on a whim.
You *CAN'T* do it with GPL claims now without evidence, (precedence in SCO's case has got nothing to do with it), and SCO can't do it with AIX. This in not a bad thing, the sky is not falling, you can go back to rooting for the good guys.
No, I'm saying you can not accuse them of it and see their code etc unless you have some evidence that they did. Which ofcourse you could. However, how do you know they haven't stolen GPL code now? Do you think you could go to a judge and ask for their code so you can check (assuming no other options which exist noe). Heck no you couldn't! You'd be laughed out of court.
This is pretty amazing, since they've been claiming all along that Linux infringes and they have proof. When asked for proof they have now said in writing that they can't produce that proof without seeing code they don't have.
In other words they've never had specific proof.
So their whole case is apparently hinged upon their tenuous claim to ownership of IBM authored code which they claim they own, but have never seen. They hope they can claim ownership of that code on the basis of a very broad interpretation of derivitive works and that code IBM wrote into AIX was derived (by their incredible definition) from their copyright works (the missing link) and that they then moved this into Linux.
IANAL but you can't run around claiming someone infringes on your copyrights and then go on a fishing expedition for the evidence, you need something evidence to present to the court in the first place.
This bubble may burst much sooner than I had anticipated.
I doubt there's ever been as much scanning & loading of bank notes into Photoshop and as much awareness that this was possible. All thanks to Adobe's nannying attempt to stop it. One wonders how this happened. I mean did the Secret Service ask them or did they do this all on their own, it seems very strange that they'd instigate this feature by themselves unless they were trying to head off legislation.
Oh well, looks like we have another counterproductive attempt to control what people do with technology.
That is NOT what was reported. They were actually refused time because the objects were too feint and they thought the observations weren't possible with their instruments.
This is a smart move, in helping others to resist SCO's shakedown they undermine SCO's ability to fund additional litigation and limit the impact of their legal intimidation. Companies who otherwise might have given SCO some money and furthered SCO's PR campaign are now likely to refuse and they'll be backed by the slush fund put in place to defeat SCO.
The panorama is still arriving AFAIK. I think the camera may be mono with left & right positions on an arm from what I've seen of the lander, besides the stereo difference should drop off pretty quickly though and be zero at the horizon, so again this only accounts for near field in a stereo pan of the camera so even sets stiched from left & right images should only have minor issues in the distance. You really want cyclops for accurate stitching but all of these errors exceed anything explicable. Heck there's even vertical anomalies indicating stitching issues you can't explain with left & right stereo.
The instrument may be not be entirely visible spectrum either explaining the color, but there are many things about these images that are pretty bad. The missing blues are pretty darned deep, it kinda goes beyond the mundane color balance difference. The examples shown in the article aren't even in the same ballpark, it does look like blues are completely hosed in it. But there may be parts of the blue spectrum missing from incident light the spectral responce of the test card and the filters on the sensor are critical.
I'm not assuming any such thing. However with no audit anything else is just simple blind faith that a black box voting system works. It may be 1.5% didn't choose, but you're the one making all the assumptions there. You want to assume they didn't vote. I want it checked, so it should be.
An audit trail means more than merely auditing the cast votes. It means a software audit of these systems, this has never been subject to public scrutiny and there's more than enough info to cause concern.
I believe these systems are a good move, but we cannot take something so fundamental on trust.
Software never simply does 1+1=2. It has records to keep and communication to conduct. All sorts of things could technically happen with software. It is incredibly naive to make the assumptions you are.
As for Jeb Bush doiung something. What are you saying? What do you expect him to do? I mean take a clear position so people can understand what the heck you are trying to say.
As for overcast vs blue sky; dust in the atmosphere would not automatically stop sharp shadows, to do that it would have to be thick enough to completely diffuse the light source. Light on Earth get's scattered a lot in the atmosphere, enough to make the sky look blue, but the shadows are sharp. Turbidity could scatter other frequencies on Mars enough to make it look brown and still leave sharp shadows. So your argument is very uncompelling.
The color correction reminds me that NASA had to correctly set the white ballance on one of the Viking missions based on the appearance of a tube of known color they happened to spot on the lander. There are also a couple of ways of looking at this, there's adjustment for incident light color which may match what we'd perceive and then there's the actual color reflected which doesn't always match what we perceive but is a true spectral representation of the colors reaching the sensor. The first is what's considered normal color ballance, but either may be considered a resonable image. The latter would make the colors on the card very unlike those you'd see under white illumination.
Also bear in mind that some wavelengths of the incident light may be dramatically different than on Earth thanks to the atmosphere & dust (the same problem as above really) and if the spectral response from the color card may such that the resulting image could even be missing information needed to reconstruct the color, (that's actually a bit of a long shot IMHO).
In general the most disappointing thing about these images is the horrible stitching and reprojection that NASA has done. I'm not just talking about the near field where a rotating sensor (off center) might cause problems, but the entire image is awash with geometric missmatches even in the middle distance and out to the Horizon, which is just inexcusable. This really is attrocious image processing and rank amatures on Earth have done better with far fewer resources. NASA is making a complete mess of these images, but mostly it's the geometry that's a mess IMHO. Sood spectral callibration would be good too I agree, but I get the distinct impression that the 'A' team is not working on these puplic release images. Maybe these are just for initial release and they'll tidy the data up with more time & effort.
Without any audit it is impossible to tell if the problem was their stupidity. I have no problem expecting people to be smart enough to do this, but for all we know those votes could have been lost through any number of technical errors, there's absolutely no means to check this with no audit trail and secretive software practices. The only available audit, tallying people showing up vs casting votes shows a significant discrepancy. That is cause for concern, and indicates the need for a better audit trail. Something that is simply being ignored and denied at every request.
Wow, It this letter is what it appears to be then SCO are going after their own customer base who were unfortunate enough to license software from them in the past. If ever there was a case for staying the heck away from SCO's and their agreements this is it.
It's at the lagrange, so it would be a constant pull the entire way around. That would make us orbit faster. The Earth's orbit is already slightly eliptical, not that it greatly matters IMHO, SOHO station keeps and must at L1 anyway. The Earth's pull on soho makes it's orbital period longer and circular for it's distance from the Sun, being periodic with the Earth. It has a similar, opposite very slight effect on the Earth, I'm postulating.
Let me frame the suggestion another way that fits your model more readily. With SOHO station keeping at L1 I think we can consider the Earth and SOHO as a single orbiting body, and the SOHO at the L1 lagrange means that the 'average' orbit is actually therefore closer to the Sun. So the question is what is the new orbital distance from the Sun if we integrate the masses and positions. I'm postulating that new orbit it's sufficiently closer to make a second difference.
The key point is that the orbital period of two close masses pulling on each other around a third distant more massive mass is the integration of the masses. In this case SOHO's mass isn't orbiting the Earth but locked at L1 so it shifts the orbit.
GPL theft is GPL theft, but my eyes roll when these self serving police start to claim that libjpeg strings are in there too, as they are now claiming on their site. libjpeg is LGPL, it instantly calls into question their objectivity.
In most circles any moron spouting this kind of nonsense wouldn't be taken seriously, but in the business world the hackneyd old "grow or die" mantra keeps getting trotted out. It is obviously specious and is often the cause of disaster at companies when they try too hard to grow and wind up dying as a result. Linux doesn't have to grow or die. Only a moron would make such a claim. As for crisis, the "they" they keep talking about is us, and frankly, Red Hat's abandonment of the desktop is a bigger crisis than SCO's insanity will ever be.
SCO will dry up and blow away in the wind one day and in the mean time everyone seems to be ignoring them except Linux's biggest competitors who fund them and take every opportunity to boost their case.
That all said, Linux will grow, no thanks to idiotic proclamations.
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Red Hat contributed to the OSDL defense fund, so that means they're already putting their money where their mouth is and better yet doing it with everyone else in a way which covers us all, not just licensees of RH Enterprise. Anyone know what the fund is up to now?
It's a shame they're bitching about what NASA is doing to deprive them of their instrument when they've had it's benefits for years. Geeze, talk about glass half empty. There are new missions, other priorities and in context ESA spends a pittance on this kind of stuff.
The idea that once it's up you have to service it long past it's anticipated life or put up with endless politicking by scientists over it's fate makes me want to object to launching another bird for these dufi. How long are we going to service the next one for? Costs up front please so we can say no at the outset to slipping cost overruns and extended mission support. Heck we're even spending a hundred million bringing this hunk of tin down in the ocean which is insane when you consider the natural asteroud impacts we have. At least the next one is going up to the L2 where we can't send a repair mission, so we'll have the blessing of not having to listen to more griping from scientists that billion dollar space programs are somehow disappointing to them.
Shuttle missions are obscenely expensive compared to other launch vehicles and we've already had two service missions to this thing. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars (OUR DOLLARS!), probably upwards of a billion on one telescope and they want to keep sending the missions up. Time to get a grip. Manned service missions to space telescopes are more expensive than launching new instruments, but because it's their sandbox perspective goes out the window, enough of the politics already.
Geeze for a billion bucks you could have had an amazing instrument on Earth that would do useful work for the next 100 years and at a lower ongoing operating cost.
P.S. This case is about an overly broad interpretation of derivitive works under a SCO IBM *contract*. It is doubly irrelevant, and dangerous for that reason. If SCO get's their fishing expedition and can look at the code, any subsequent decision has no meaning for Linux w.r.t. derivitive works because copyrights to authored works do not transfer the same way the would under a contract which stipulates they all lead to SCO.
SCO is already unscrupulously trying to leverage a contract dispute into a copyright play on Linux based on a public perception of what this case is about, a false perception they have deliberately cultivated. Their message is far from the legal situation, win lose or draw, and I want SCO to lose and *soon*.
The fishing expeditions was one of my observations before you contributed which obviously bore repeating.
......drum roll.... LINUX! Under the GPL no less. I mean holy mother of pearl. They contributed code to Linux (SMP code) and their rights to Unix (the cause of their delusion) look about as watertight as a slice of swiss cheese.
Moreover it is ridiculous to suggest that IBM should go through this just to satisfy geekdom & Linux. It's not even a serious suggestion. You can never prove a negative. Defense against SCO in a *contract* dispute merely means SCO loses, not GPL wins. Even if SCO loses the case there's no guarantee that this won't happen in future with some other nut. SCO is a particularly ineffective nut given that even today they ship
Better scenario, SCO loses their case ASAP, SCO then loses IBM's case, because that's barelling down the tracks straight at them, IBM asset strips SCO as settlement, including Unix which they can buy for a song. I'd rather see SCO tied up in court in defense after having their own case dismissed than watch them hatching ever more desperate FUD against Linux. The case dismissed will be a big enough message to counter a lot of the damage SCO has done.
SCOs case is ludicrous on so many levels, not least because they still ship GPLd Linux even TODAY.
You might as well fear IBM turning round tomorrow and suing everyone over Linux copyrights for stuff they've donated if you're in the chicken little business.
The greatest damage SCO could have done (would have been to sue end users and OSDL mitigated that threat a few days ago). SCO's biggest weapon is perception, and it's the perception that needs to change dramatically ASAP. They can't sue for copyright infringement, all they can do is wander around scaring people, and hoping they get another mug to pump their next quarters numbers. Hence the Google shakedown. No coincidence that Google is looking at an IPO, it's a pure shakedown play and it's all about perception of risk.
You seem to have completely lost the thread of the conversation. It's all there on the record, I invite you to read it.
The SCO situation has nothing to do with future Linux GPL theft cases. You can keep saying it. You can hold your breath until you turn blue. It won't change the facts. I've explained very clearly that TODAY you can't do this because that's the law. TOMORROW you won't be able to do this either because it'll still be the law. If SCO does get so peek at code it'll be because of contracts and proof, not a pipe dream, and reguardless Linux will NOT, I repeat for your slow mind, ABSOLUTELY NOT be able to go on fishing expeditions in code without proof. Not YESTERDAY, not TODAY and not TOMORROW.
Got it? Is it sinking in yet?
This is nonsense. There is no precedent at issue. You cannot TODAY wander into court and ask for someone's code without evidence. Nobody can do this, not you, not me and not SCO.
Your pipedream about this hurting Linux does not affect the law. Fishing trips are not allowed. You need some evidenciary pretext, not a wish and a prayer. SCO cannot say we have A), Linux is C) we want to see IBM's B) unless they have very good justification. Moreover the idea of derivative works is not the catchall SCO implies it is. SCO hasn't written any NUMA code. Infact, other companies such as SGI have worked for years on NUMA architectures and Operating systems, mostly independent of AIX. The derivative works issue is a SCO contractual issue but even so is not of the scope that SCO claims.
The point is you need *evidence*, BEFORE you get into court. Some idea rattling around between your ears is not sufficient reason for a judge to compell anyone to do anything, let alone hand over corporate secrets to an avowed enemy.
How do you know they haven't already taking GPL code? (notwithstanding the availability of their code under certain circumstances)
Look you can't walk into court today and claim you *think* Microsoft has stolen your code and you want to see theirs to confirm it. It's patently ridiculous to expect you could. You require proof. It's not a bad thing, it's a good thing that prevents frivilous time wasters like SCO going on fishing expeditions.
If someone stole your GPL code then you'd need checksums, assembly fragments, data tables, testimony or some other form of evidence before you'd get anywhere in court. This is as it should be. In cases where GPL work has been stolen this has been deduced without seeing code, (obviously!). That deduction using available evidence could be leveraged in court to see the original source code, this is very different from simply walking in on faith and demanding code based on a whim.
You *CAN'T* do it with GPL claims now without evidence, (precedence in SCO's case has got nothing to do with it), and SCO can't do it with AIX. This in not a bad thing, the sky is not falling, you can go back to rooting for the good guys.
No, I'm saying you can not accuse them of it and see their code etc unless you have some evidence that they did. Which ofcourse you could. However, how do you know they haven't stolen GPL code now? Do you think you could go to a judge and ask for their code so you can check (assuming no other options which exist noe). Heck no you couldn't! You'd be laughed out of court.
This is pretty amazing, since they've been claiming all along that Linux infringes and they have proof. When asked for proof they have now said in writing that they can't produce that proof without seeing code they don't have.
In other words they've never had specific proof.
So their whole case is apparently hinged upon their tenuous claim to ownership of IBM authored code which they claim they own, but have never seen. They hope they can claim ownership of that code on the basis of a very broad interpretation of derivitive works and that code IBM wrote into AIX was derived (by their incredible definition) from their copyright works (the missing link) and that they then moved this into Linux.
IANAL but you can't run around claiming someone infringes on your copyrights and then go on a fishing expedition for the evidence, you need something evidence to present to the court in the first place.
This bubble may burst much sooner than I had anticipated.
Seems downright bizzarre that anyone would suggest homegrown as a cost effective option.
IT is full of idiots yelling at the tide though, move along, there's nothing to see here folks.
I doubt there's ever been as much scanning & loading of bank notes into Photoshop and as much awareness that this was possible. All thanks to Adobe's nannying attempt to stop it. One wonders how this happened. I mean did the Secret Service ask them or did they do this all on their own, it seems very strange that they'd instigate this feature by themselves unless they were trying to head off legislation.
Oh well, looks like we have another counterproductive attempt to control what people do with technology.
That is NOT what was reported. They were actually refused time because the objects were too feint and they thought the observations weren't possible with their instruments.
This is a smart move, in helping others to resist SCO's shakedown they undermine SCO's ability to fund additional litigation and limit the impact of their legal intimidation. Companies who otherwise might have given SCO some money and furthered SCO's PR campaign are now likely to refuse and they'll be backed by the slush fund put in place to defeat SCO.
The panorama is still arriving AFAIK. I think the camera may be mono with left & right positions on an arm from what I've seen of the lander, besides the stereo difference should drop off pretty quickly though and be zero at the horizon, so again this only accounts for near field in a stereo pan of the camera so even sets stiched from left & right images should only have minor issues in the distance. You really want cyclops for accurate stitching but all of these errors exceed anything explicable. Heck there's even vertical anomalies indicating stitching issues you can't explain with left & right stereo.
The instrument may be not be entirely visible spectrum either explaining the color, but there are many things about these images that are pretty bad. The missing blues are pretty darned deep, it kinda goes beyond the mundane color balance difference. The examples shown in the article aren't even in the same ballpark, it does look like blues are completely hosed in it. But there may be parts of the blue spectrum missing from incident light the spectral responce of the test card and the filters on the sensor are critical.
I'm not assuming any such thing. However with no audit anything else is just simple blind faith that a black box voting system works. It may be 1.5% didn't choose, but you're the one making all the assumptions there. You want to assume they didn't vote. I want it checked, so it should be.
An audit trail means more than merely auditing the cast votes. It means a software audit of these systems, this has never been subject to public scrutiny and there's more than enough info to cause concern.
I believe these systems are a good move, but we cannot take something so fundamental on trust.
Not at all sure what you're rambling about.
Software never simply does 1+1=2. It has records to keep and communication to conduct. All sorts of things could technically happen with software. It is incredibly naive to make the assumptions you are.
As for Jeb Bush doiung something. What are you saying? What do you expect him to do? I mean take a clear position so people can understand what the heck you are trying to say.
As for overcast vs blue sky; dust in the atmosphere would not automatically stop sharp shadows, to do that it would have to be thick enough to completely diffuse the light source. Light on Earth get's scattered a lot in the atmosphere, enough to make the sky look blue, but the shadows are sharp. Turbidity could scatter other frequencies on Mars enough to make it look brown and still leave sharp shadows. So your argument is very uncompelling.
The color correction reminds me that NASA had to correctly set the white ballance on one of the Viking missions based on the appearance of a tube of known color they happened to spot on the lander. There are also a couple of ways of looking at this, there's adjustment for incident light color which may match what we'd perceive and then there's the actual color reflected which doesn't always match what we perceive but is a true spectral representation of the colors reaching the sensor. The first is what's considered normal color ballance, but either may be considered a resonable image. The latter would make the colors on the card very unlike those you'd see under white illumination.
Also bear in mind that some wavelengths of the incident light may be dramatically different than on Earth thanks to the atmosphere & dust (the same problem as above really) and if the spectral response from the color card may such that the resulting image could even be missing information needed to reconstruct the color, (that's actually a bit of a long shot IMHO).
In general the most disappointing thing about these images is the horrible stitching and reprojection that NASA has done. I'm not just talking about the near field where a rotating sensor (off center) might cause problems, but the entire image is awash with geometric missmatches even in the middle distance and out to the Horizon, which is just inexcusable. This really is attrocious image processing and rank amatures on Earth have done better with far fewer resources. NASA is making a complete mess of these images, but mostly it's the geometry that's a mess IMHO. Sood spectral callibration would be good too I agree, but I get the distinct impression that the 'A' team is not working on these puplic release images. Maybe these are just for initial release and they'll tidy the data up with more time & effort.
Without any audit it is impossible to tell if the problem was their stupidity. I have no problem expecting people to be smart enough to do this, but for all we know those votes could have been lost through any number of technical errors, there's absolutely no means to check this with no audit trail and secretive software practices. The only available audit, tallying people showing up vs casting votes shows a significant discrepancy. That is cause for concern, and indicates the need for a better audit trail. Something that is simply being ignored and denied at every request.
You need to read the memo and get with the program :-)
Only kidding.
Wow, It this letter is what it appears to be then SCO are going after their own customer base who were unfortunate enough to license software from them in the past. If ever there was a case for staying the heck away from SCO's and their agreements this is it.
It's at the lagrange, so it would be a constant pull the entire way around. That would make us orbit faster. The Earth's orbit is already slightly eliptical, not that it greatly matters IMHO, SOHO station keeps and must at L1 anyway. The Earth's pull on soho makes it's orbital period longer and circular for it's distance from the Sun, being periodic with the Earth. It has a similar, opposite very slight effect on the Earth, I'm postulating.
Let me frame the suggestion another way that fits your model more readily. With SOHO station keeping at L1 I think we can consider the Earth and SOHO as a single orbiting body, and the SOHO at the L1 lagrange means that the 'average' orbit is actually therefore closer to the Sun. So the question is what is the new orbital distance from the Sun if we integrate the masses and positions. I'm postulating that new orbit it's sufficiently closer to make a second difference.
The key point is that the orbital period of two close masses pulling on each other around a third distant more massive mass is the integration of the masses. In this case SOHO's mass isn't orbiting the Earth but locked at L1 so it shifts the orbit.
GPL theft is GPL theft, but my eyes roll when these self serving police start to claim that libjpeg strings are in there too, as they are now claiming on their site. libjpeg is LGPL, it instantly calls into question their objectivity.
In most circles any moron spouting this kind of nonsense wouldn't be taken seriously, but in the business world the hackneyd old "grow or die" mantra keeps getting trotted out. It is obviously specious and is often the cause of disaster at companies when they try too hard to grow and wind up dying as a result. Linux doesn't have to grow or die. Only a moron would make such a claim. As for crisis, the "they" they keep talking about is us, and frankly, Red Hat's abandonment of the desktop is a bigger crisis than SCO's insanity will ever be.
SCO will dry up and blow away in the wind one day and in the mean time everyone seems to be ignoring them except Linux's biggest competitors who fund them and take every opportunity to boost their case.
That all said, Linux will grow, no thanks to idiotic proclamations.