We don't have to knock out the GPL for us to succeed on the copyright issue. The GPL itself supports, in a lot of ways, our positions. Section 0 of the GPL states that the legit copyright holder has to place a notice assigning the copyright over to the GPL.
All these contributions of our IP did not have an assignment by SCO saying here, 'We assign these copyrights to the GPL.' The fact that we participated with Linux does not mean that we inadvertently contributed our code to the GPL. You can't contribute inadvertently to Linux. We feel we have a very strong position based on the GPL.
Sorry, but you don't assign copyrights to the GPL. The GPL is a licence. A licence is not a potental copyright holder. You don't need to assign the copyright to anyone in order to licence your work under the terms of this licence.
Even better, lets look at section 0 of the GPL to see what it really says.
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License.
Where does it talk about copyright assignment here? Where?
That's the case with most distros these days. Debian has had apt-get for long enough, and that is pretty good. Mandrake has urpmi, which also does the job pretty well. Red Hat has yum. I haven't tried it. SuSE has the rpm version of apt-get.
Well, I'm sure MS keep at least some of their money in european bank accounts. Their customers aren't going to wire the money to an american bank account, and their suppliers and staff won't want paying from an american bank account either.
They do have offices in europe, which are probably worth a fair bit, and these offices have lots of computers and other bits and pieces, which are probably also worth something. So the courts would grab those and sell them off to pay the fine.
Also, europe is about the same size as the US at the moment. After 1st May, when the new members join, it will be a lot bigger, so we are talking about a fairly sizeable proportion of MS's income. A lot more than EUR500m anyway.
If MS were to go in EU, then the likes of SuSE and Mandrakesoft would move in very quickly to fill the gap, and it would give them the perfect base to take on the rest of the world as well.
If MS were to do a runner, they would be effectively unable to enforce their copyrights and any money they made would go straight to paying the fines anyway, so it isn't going to stop people from using MS software if they want to.
So, on balance, they probably won't say goodbye to EU.
When I look at http://www.netcraft.com/?restriction=site+ends+wit h&host=.microsoft.com it seems that a fair number of their websites run on linux, so I guess it isn't that suspicious.
It probably costs more to make a cup of coffee, than to make a CD. Yes the coffee beans are pretty cheap, but the person who makes it for you, and the place you sit down to drink it are not.
You can buy a jar of coffee powder and make your own, and Starbucks won't complain. Or you could set up your own coffee shop. Many people do.
If you get infected with a virus, you have to take the computer network down while you clean up and restore from the last backup.
The main cost is from downtime while the network is cleaned up, and from redoing everything that was done since the last clean backup. The money you pay to the guy who does the cleaning up is miniscule in comparison.
If you want a feature complete competitor to MS Office then use oo.o. If you want a well designed, fast, but not yet complete suite to try out, and contribute to the development process, then use koffice.
MLDonkey is free software and offers access to the EDonkey network, Overnet, Fast-track, Gnutella, Bit torrent, Direct Connect and Soulseek.
It is on Savannah, but they haven't put the binaries back up since Savannah was compromised.
giFT is also free software, and offers access to the Open-FT network, the Fast-track network and the Gnutella network. You can find it on sourceforge. The PLF provides binaries for Mandrake, and I believe Debian binaries are available in unstable, otherwise you can compile from source.
There are plenty of others, like emule/lmule/xmule/amule, bittorrent and various gnutella clients.
Quoted as posted by an ac: That's not particularly true. If Timothy Zahn wants to take "his part" of the Star Wars universe and incorporate it into another sci fi series, I'm sure George Lucas would have a thing or two to say (and a court system ready to back him up).
I don't know about Star Wars, but lets take another example.
Celine Dion wrote some music that is included in the Titanic Movie. So we have a derivative work here.
Celine Dion owns the copyright to the music, and is entitled to control how the movie is distributed. So are the copyright holders of the movie its self.
If Celine Dion were to allow this music to be included in another movie, the authors of The Titanic would have no rights *under copyright law* to control the distribution of this movie.
They may have a contract with Celine Dion that says she can't allow this to happen, but they would have no right to sue record stores for distributing copies of this other movie. The record stores have permission from Celine Dion, the copyright holder, and that's all that matters.
Again, if they didn't own the copyrights to either part of the derivative work, as is the case with SCO, they would have absolutely no case.
The companies that tend to do well in the long term are companies like IBM that can make money out of their product (very important) and keep reinventing themselves as the market changes.
Amazon is fine - they are a book shop, and they make money out of selling books. There are other book shops around, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Borders, Blackwells, etc etc etc. It's quite a stable market. I don't really consider Amazon to be a tech company.
If everyone was to start switching to ebooks, then they might have problems. When people make the switch from CDs to downloaded music, they switch from the likes of HMV and Virgin to Apple's ITunes.
EBay seem to be in quite a good market, and make good money out of it. Things may change of course, but they should probably be OK.
Google. They seem to be stuck in one particular market - algorithmic search. If you are looking for websites, then they are pretty good most of the time, but other sites could take away their crown at any time, particularly now that Inktomi, Altavista and Fast are in Yahoo's hands, and MSN are working on something. For commercial search, they aren't that good at all. When I was looking for insurance, I found Yahoo was better. When I was looking to buy a car, I found MSN was better. If I was looking for a new job, then one of the recruitment sites would be a better choice. If I was looking for a plumber, I would probably have better luck in Yellow Pages or Scoot.
They are all pay for placement sites - but there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, and it does make money for the site.
Hardware companies are difficult to predict. It all depends on their future R&D and their marketing, and nobody can know what that will bring.
Most of the drives I see these days support both +r/rw and -r/rw, so it is going to be pretty much a non-issue. Besides, you can generally read the other format on the other type of drive, and most people will be using them for internal use only.
Remember 56k modems. There was US Rebotic's X2, and Rockwells K56Flex. Which one was the winner? V90.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, from reading the article -
We don't have to knock out the GPL for us to succeed on the copyright issue. The GPL itself supports, in a lot of ways, our positions. Section 0 of the GPL states that the legit copyright holder has to place a notice assigning the copyright over to the GPL.
All these contributions of our IP did not have an assignment by SCO saying here, 'We assign these copyrights to the GPL.' The fact that we participated with Linux does not mean that we inadvertently contributed our code to the GPL. You can't contribute inadvertently to Linux. We feel we have a very strong position based on the GPL.
Sorry, but you don't assign copyrights to the GPL. The GPL is a licence. A licence is not a potental copyright holder. You don't need to assign the copyright to anyone in order to licence your work under the terms of this licence.
Even better, lets look at section 0 of the GPL to see what it really says.
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
under the terms of this General Public License.
Where does it talk about copyright assignment here? Where?
That's the case with most distros these days. Debian has had apt-get for long enough, and that is pretty good. Mandrake has urpmi, which also does the job pretty well. Red Hat has yum. I haven't tried it. SuSE has the rpm version of apt-get.
Well, I'm sure MS keep at least some of their money in european bank accounts. Their customers aren't going to wire the money to an american bank account, and their suppliers and staff won't want paying from an american bank account either.
They do have offices in europe, which are probably worth a fair bit, and these offices have lots of computers and other bits and pieces, which are probably also worth something. So the courts would grab those and sell them off to pay the fine.
Also, europe is about the same size as the US at the moment. After 1st May, when the new members join, it will be a lot bigger, so we are talking about a fairly sizeable proportion of MS's income. A lot more than EUR500m anyway.
If MS were to go in EU, then the likes of SuSE and Mandrakesoft would move in very quickly to fill the gap, and it would give them the perfect base to take on the rest of the world as well.
If MS were to do a runner, they would be effectively unable to enforce their copyrights and any money they made would go straight to paying the fines anyway, so it isn't going to stop people from using MS software if they want to.
So, on balance, they probably won't say goodbye to EU.
When I look at http://www.netcraft.com/?restriction=site+ends+wit h&host=.microsoft.com it seems that a fair number of their websites run on linux, so I guess it isn't that suspicious.
That's where IBM comes in.
IBM are pretty popular in the banking sector, and they seem to like all things linux.
Mandrake have already made it available on bittorrent. I believe the original article gave the link.
Debian is inlikely to have 2.6 by default for quite some time. Have they switched to 2.4 yet?
> You've obviously never lived somewhere where
> judges are elected to fixed terms and need to run
> for reelection have you?
No I certainly have not. I can't imagine anything worse.
Apparently it has exactly the same equation editor as MS Office - last time I looked anyway.
It won't. The default theme is always the one used for the screenshots in the documentation, and that at the monent is Keramic.
It may become the default in a later version.
Of course, distros will make their own choice about what default to use.
It probably costs more to make a cup of coffee, than to make a CD. Yes the coffee beans are pretty cheap, but the person who makes it for you, and the place you sit down to drink it are not.
You can buy a jar of coffee powder and make your own, and Starbucks won't complain. Or you could set up your own coffee shop. Many people do.
If you get infected with a virus, you have to take the computer network down while you clean up and restore from the last backup.
The main cost is from downtime while the network is cleaned up, and from redoing everything that was done since the last clean backup. The money you pay to the guy who does the cleaning up is miniscule in comparison.
IAAA
If you want a feature complete competitor to MS Office then use oo.o. If you want a well designed, fast, but not yet complete suite to try out, and contribute to the development process, then use koffice.
Presumably we won't see these anytime soon, unless someone is kind enough to volunteer?
The Sinclair C5, OK not exactly a car but a complete disaster nonetheless, or some of the older Skodas? They produced many jokes at the time.
Why do Skodas have heated rear windows? To keep your hands warm while you push it.
What do you call a Skoda with a twin exhaust? A wheelbarrow.
What do you call a Skoda with a sun roof? A skip.
MLDonkey is free software and offers access to the EDonkey network, Overnet, Fast-track, Gnutella, Bit torrent, Direct Connect and Soulseek.
It is on Savannah, but they haven't put the binaries back up since Savannah was compromised.
giFT is also free software, and offers access to the Open-FT network, the Fast-track network and the Gnutella network. You can find it on sourceforge. The PLF provides binaries for Mandrake, and I believe Debian binaries are available in unstable, otherwise you can compile from source.
There are plenty of others, like emule/lmule/xmule/amule, bittorrent and various gnutella clients.
Quoted as posted by an ac:
That's not particularly true. If Timothy Zahn wants to take "his part" of the Star Wars universe and incorporate it into another sci fi series, I'm sure George Lucas would have a thing or two to say (and a court system ready to back him up).
I don't know about Star Wars, but lets take another example.
Celine Dion wrote some music that is included in the Titanic Movie. So we have a derivative work here.
Celine Dion owns the copyright to the music, and is entitled to control how the movie is distributed. So are the copyright holders of the movie its self.
If Celine Dion were to allow this music to be included in another movie, the authors of The Titanic would have no rights *under copyright law* to control the distribution of this movie.
They may have a contract with Celine Dion that says she can't allow this to happen, but they would have no right to sue record stores for distributing copies of this other movie. The record stores have permission from Celine Dion, the copyright holder, and that's all that matters.
Again, if they didn't own the copyrights to either part of the derivative work, as is the case with SCO, they would have absolutely no case.
You don't "own" derivative works. You have rights to your contribution towards it.
If IBM takes their part of the work and uses it elsewhere, SCO doesn't have any claim to IBM's part.
Of course they don't own Unix anyway, Novell does. So it is a moot point.
Novell can't do that. I think it is agreed that SCO do have the right to sell unix to people.
How well depends on the options you select. The default is 40 bit encryption, which can be brute forced in a few weeks on a reasonably fast computer.
is that this is not real money, unless you sell now to some other victim.
Stock market bubbles, and pyramid schemes are quite common. Nobody really makes money except those that started them.
You could look back and say "if I bought then, and sold then, I would have made loads of money."
But how do you know when to sell. It is going to collapse at some point. When? Who knows?
Probably because we weren't popular enough when Google/(Backrub) first came out
It demonstrates the scale of the spam problem more than anything else.
The companies that tend to do well in the long term are companies like IBM that can make money out of their product (very important) and keep reinventing themselves as the market changes.
Amazon is fine - they are a book shop, and they make money out of selling books. There are other book shops around, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Borders, Blackwells, etc etc etc. It's quite a stable market. I don't really consider Amazon to be a tech company.
If everyone was to start switching to ebooks, then they might have problems. When people make the switch from CDs to downloaded music, they switch from the likes of HMV and Virgin to Apple's ITunes.
EBay seem to be in quite a good market, and make good money out of it. Things may change of course, but they should probably be OK.
Google. They seem to be stuck in one particular market - algorithmic search. If you are looking for websites, then they are pretty good most of the time, but other sites could take away their crown at any time, particularly now that Inktomi, Altavista and Fast are in Yahoo's hands, and MSN are working on something. For commercial search, they aren't that good at all. When I was looking for insurance, I found Yahoo was better. When I was looking to buy a car, I found MSN was better. If I was looking for a new job, then one of the recruitment sites would be a better choice. If I was looking for a plumber, I would probably have better luck in Yellow Pages or Scoot.
They are all pay for placement sites - but there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, and it does make money for the site.
Hardware companies are difficult to predict. It all depends on their future R&D and their marketing, and nobody can know what that will bring.
Most of the drives I see these days support both +r/rw and -r/rw, so it is going to be pretty much a non-issue. Besides, you can generally read the other format on the other type of drive, and most people will be using them for internal use only.
Remember 56k modems. There was US Rebotic's X2, and Rockwells K56Flex. Which one was the winner? V90.