I wonder if this will provoke Desperate Darl McFraud to even greater acts of lunacy if he thinks Linux has been given an unfair advantage?
BTW I hope this also applies to xBSD and any other free OS, and I hope it marks the beginning of a trend towards standards being free and open, but somehow I think not, because the standards bodies have not yet devised an alternative way of funding their work.
Sad, but the cost of acquiring lots of standards, in order to be able to do essential work, really damages small to medium buisnesses, whereas the big boys nuy one copy and distribute it, usually illegally, on their intranet.
BTW I am all for standards compliance, it is best for everyone, but first there has to be a standard, and then it has to be properly documented and published with full disclosure, by a competent standards organisation, or it is worthless, like the slogan "We set the standard" which IIRC originated some years ago from the vile, later to be convicted, Monopolist. Standard? Windoze? I think not, more like a randomly drifting set of obscure, inaccurately documented, and convoluted APIs which may change at any time without prior warning.
......and blew them all away. I was using Ximian Evolution as my email client and Mozilla as my browser, and can't say that I noticed if the url had been faked or not, but I strongly suspect not!
It is a bit pointless sending spam which purports to be something to do with a US bank account to a UK email address, and guarantees their immediate deletion.
Since I stopped using Lookout and Inept Exploder, I have had no problems at all with scams like this, or virii and trojans either.
The simple answer to IE bugs is to get rid of IE, it is a pathetic browser anyway.
Are there not laws and treaties relating to free trade, to which all the relevant countries are signatories, which make this blatantly illegal?
IANAL, so perhaps someone who is can enlighten me. Surelty it is not right that an industry which exists purely to exploit both the artistes and the buying public can ride roughshod over international trade agreements? If we can purchase almost anything else abroad at the local price, and import it quite legally, paying all proper taxes, why should mere entertainment material be any different?
I think his ending is what one might say to someone not professionally competent but just plain stupid, and was therefore quite OK in that context. McFraud is just a puppet, we all know who is pulling his strings, and I would not give him the credence of the slightest trace of professional competence (except in the field of creating Illegal Monopolies) either.
Good point, I always thought that decrypting on any hardware or software you have at home for personal use would be untouchable by law, anywhere. In theory, you could construct your won DVD player at home, and why would that be illegal? You could also tap into the digital datastream in a commercial DVD player, just prior to the DAC for example, to get true unencrypted but still digital video. Again, why would that be wrong to use personally? And why did anyone think that doing the same thing in software instead would be outlawed?
IMHO they need expert engineers, as well as lawyers, to be reviewing prospective legislation for stupid errors such as this, before the politicians, who are rarely technically astute, decide.
IMHO the fact remains, as you seem to be reinforcing, that when you buy or hire a DVD, you are entitled to play it in any way you want, with any equipment you want, for private or personal use. That is how copyright applies to a book, for example, you can read it under daylight, tungsten or fluorescent light, indoors or out, with a magnifer if you need one.... I have always thought that the same must apply to software and entertainment media, and indeed would apply in all countries which are signatory to the Berne convention, so I am amazed that this piece of nonsense ever became law.
Of course, using the book analogy, it might become illegal to distribute photocopiers, but not to keep one at home for private use.......
In the UK you simply report the facts to your local Trading Standards Office. I hope that lots of people will do so, it will at least get teh fraudulent products off the market here, which will be a start. Not only that, but their reputation will be irrevocably damaged, no doubt published in the net, so their sales will drop off in countries which do not seem to have legislation to protect the consumer, or who make the process too difficult.
In the UK we also have the Small Claims Court, but the case here might be against teh small corner shop who sold you the stuff, and they might defend the case....
No system of legislation is perfect, but it seems to me that fraudulent claims like this should automatically be actioned by the authorities everywhere, with no need for private individuals to have to pay for lawyers.
In any case, if you have been ripped off, first politely request a refund and compensation, and if they refuse, report them to whatever official body deals with such things locally. They will soon get the message.
BTW I have no sympathy whatsoever for any overclocker who has had a meltdown. Overclocking is a very unsound practice, for a number of reasons, which I have aired on/. before and will not bother repeating. It DEFINITELY shortens the life of your equipment, that is provable fact. But, I don't condone fraud, and no silver look-alike is likely to have adequate thermal conductivity.
BTW, copper is almost as good as silver, you would never be able to detect the difference in practice, in fact it might be better because it could be used in higher concentration, and being slightly softer in pure form, the individual particles might deform better to give more contact area. Other metals such as gold or platinum are absolutely useless, despite any spurious claims that may be made. Any testbook on material properties, with tables of thermal conductivity, will show why.
No good just proposing, go and raise an Internet Draft, which can then make its way through the process of becoming an RFC. It is your idea, no need to wait for someone else to take the credit and/or do the work, or simply do nothing.
Seriously, this would be of use in lots of circumstances where the response to a topical event results in a server being overloaded, and in many cases the management of the server would probably be quite relieved if someone put up a short-term mirror.
There could well be a way of automating the entire process, the original site would set up a file defining permission to do this and for how long a period, then mirroring sites worldwide would be able to grab the site for the allotted period, and add a modest, predetermined amount of their own such as a banner advert, to cover the cost.
It would be very nice to have this in place before McFraud and hopefully his Convicted Monopolist paymaster go to jail, folowing collapse of the SCO case, an event which surely will trigger a massive server overload!
It is not his fantasy world, it is that of his paymaster, who is simply trying to circumvent to circumvent the ruling of the court which made his gang of third-rate software developers a Convicted Monopolist.
Gates and Ballmer have been behaving in exactly this way for years, but now they have to keep in line with the judgment, so they have resorted to using a third party to do their dirty work. Sad for them that they picked one as discredited as McFraud, but maybe he was the only one they could easily get a financial hold over.
... particularly the US government, who persistently refure to sign up to every international treaty, because it might damage the economy. US voters, wake up please, you have elections coming soon. Do the world a favour by actually electing a president this time, so we will not have to continue to suffer the effects of the present mentally deficient, non elected incumbent.
BTW a few other governments, Chinese for example, are as bad,if not worse, where pollution is concerned. I will give Tony B Liar credit for one, and only one thing, he does try, at least a little bit, to make progress on environmental issues. On other issues he is as devious, corrupt, and dishonest as a politician can be.
In the UK we have had VERY strict law about copying currency for as long as anyone can remember, and no-one complains. If it is built in to products, it will make no difference, you can't legally scan a 10 note anyway, far less print it.
AFAIK you have to get special currency with SPECIMEN or something like that superimposed before you can let the face of a note be seen in a picture, even an advert. It seems fair enough to me.
The only silly case I remember was when an artist was prosecuted for painting a huge copy of a note, the difference between a painting and a copy is rather obvious, even without the size. Maybe they were scared that it would look reak when scaled down.
In some countries the currency is so poorly printed that duplication would be easy, and potentially disastrous for the economy. There was a program on TV the other night about how Hitler's cronies tried to bring the UK down during WW2 by printing bogus currency. The output of an inkjet or colour laser could fool some people so I am all for blocking it. The key thing is to ensure that it does not spoil other legitimate uses, by identifying harmless things as currency, which would be a real nuisance.
Re:This is one area the US could get left behind..
on
The State of IPv6
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· Score: 1
Of course it will not happen unless Bill can get the code from BSD or somewhere, like the last time..... Or, maybe a lazy programmer will copy the protocol stack from Linux, or even SCO. Now that would be interesting!
But, I confidently predict that it will be at most weeks, certainly not years, before a worm or virus brings down IIS running IPv6. IIS has more holes than code....
That being the case, I don't see how any Microtrash product would ever get even level 1. It would fail on the undisclosed or badly documented APIs for a start. But, reading these definitions, the whole thing is worthless because there is no INDEPENDENT review and only a subset of the junk is tested, even at level 4.
Best to stick to something where the security model is open to inspection, such as OpenBSD.
In any case, was the particular Win 2000 configuration which was tested not subsequently found to have serious deficiencies, hence the constant service packs, which you can't actually install?
This stupid certification does far more harm than good as it makes users think they are secure when as a matter of proven fact they are not.
Maybe it is easier in Australian law, as it has been already in Germany, where SCO had to put up or shut up. AFAIK they had to do the latter.
SCO's conduct is a recipie for disaster, McFraud has battles running in how many countries now? Is he stupid enough to take on the whole world? Or is it his paymaster/puppetmaster Bill who is pulling the strings?
Either way, they are fools. They only need to get a good thrashing in one court in a major country, remembering that they, like the entire industry, supposedly do business world-wide, and the game is over. The sooner the better!
I wonder where the Australians keep their convicts nowadays? I hope it is not too comfortable.
Can you believe that a M$ program would create or edit "well-formed" XML? They can't even consistently write their own abominable.doc format, I sometimes have to use OpenOffice.org to rescue a file that Word has saved and can't open again.
In any case, as I think lots of people are saying, there is lots of prior art. Who do they think they are kidding? It is simply another of the Convicted Monopolist's blatantly dishonest tactics. IIRC Bill stole computer time from a university to get his dodgy software business started. He started as he meant to continue.....
One day it will all go horribly wrong, like his trashware.
....because it spreads McFraud and his schysters even more thinly than before. The more fronts on which he does battle, the quicker will he be destroyed, by the legal bills, if nothing else.
If he gets into enough battles, it may even bring down his paymaster, the Convicted Monopolist.....
Yes, I gave F-prot a look, and will be downloading it at home. I also need to set up a mail server, F-prot is $299 for Linux, or $410 for Exchange. The choice is obvious, and for many more reasons than just cost! I will have about 30 users, they will gladly pay $10 per year each to cover the cost.
I really like the way updates can be set up via a Perl script run from a crom job, so you can get much better control than most of the other products. Also a big plus for me is that it is available for all major BSD dialects as well as Linux, because I play with both at home.
Maybe, but Symantec are not the most truthful people I have ever dealt with. I got hit by a 2 year old javascript virus a while ago, which every time I went to a page, shut the browser down. Norton was fully up to date.... When I told them exactly what was happening, they said I was protected. I was not, it was very easy to prove, I had to turn off javascript in Netscape to get it to go away.
Now this incident did no damage, but the point is that they lied. as to my certain knowledge others have done, including McAfraud and Panda. I would never, ever trust any one of these companies as the primary means of securing my data.
Not very far off, if you get a good distro. But, as I may have suggested before, if the people who work on the kernel were to take a break, and attend to the installation and configuration issues instead, it would be there in a year.
Stupid things still happen, last night I was putting the Nvidia drivers on my latest Linux box, and yet again, the latest version of SuSE failed totally to configure anything, and trashed my XF86Config. Their configuration program, SAX, has been broken ever since Nvidia released a Linux driver, with no sign of it ever being fixed. I am using the latest SuSE 9.0. This sort of stupidity (the relevant developer could probably fix it in 5 minutes, as he will know his code), where the leading brand of graphics card can't be configured except by an expert, is what is wrong.
Maybe Novell will get this particular one fixed, or if it annoys me much longer, I may have a go myself (but the developer could do it in 0.000001% of the time I will take). (I can of course edit XF86Config by hand to make it work, TwinView included, but the first time SAX is run it blows it all away.)
Another stupid thing is that updating via the net is badly broken on every distro that uses RPM, a very ugly thing anyway. Some of the updates are HUGE and most of the world is on 56k (or less) dialup, with a 2 hour or less timeout. The update procedure invariably has no way of resuming where it left off after a timeout, so you can't, no way, do some of the updates, and some of them are security fixes.
Fix this sort of stupidity, and Linux will rise rapidly on the desktop. Oh, and dump Fedora as a distro, it is junk. And why not move to source patching, most people have a machine which will do the compiles OK and the much smaller amount of data would overcome the bandwidth issues. Strange that BSD can get it right!
Please, distro suppliers, deal with these sort of things....or move away from Linux, to FreeBSD. I don't care which, as long as it is made useable.
What security products? None of themn work properly, including Norton, McAfraud, and worst of the lot, Panda, which trashes everything in sight and still lets virii through.
At home, my email etc comes through a series of diverse operating systems, each doing at least some checking and filtering, none by M$ of course, before it arrives at the client program. I no longer ever use a M$ product on the internet. At work of course, I must use what is there, sadly a very disfunctional browser (IE) and Lotus Notes. So far, no problems at home, but we had a virus alert again at work today, despite all the (NT) firewalls etc.
First rule of security is to make the program functionality open to scrutiny, which means seeing the source code!
I even wonder if M$ have deliberately incorporated security holes (otherwise how could their products be so bad?) as another part of their deceptive tactics, to further their monopoly. The average user does not even think of blaming M$ when he gets a virus, any more than he does when Word trashes the format of his document, or blows away 2 days work. They have been conned into thinking such things are normal.
The next phase of the deception will be (and IMHO it started about 2 years ago) to shift the emphasis so that gradually people are persuaded that M$ is the only software that is actually secure.
Of course, anyone who listens to any rubbish any Convicted Monopolist puts out is a fool, but sadly the world is full of them.
They are not closed source. There may be some proprietary executables in there, but that is expressely allowed by the GPL. If you go to the right place the source of all the GPL bits will be there. There is a big difference between packaging something up nicely, automating its installation and updating procedures, etc, and closing the source. Most Lindows users will never want source, or even know what it is, so they do not need to see it. But, if they want to, they can. Even more so, Linux on a set-top box or other appliance, you need to be able to see the code, and generally can, if you know where, but if the thing holds its OS in ROM, what good will it do? How would you modify it? The area of difficulty is in defining from where you get the source code, the GPL would seem to say that, for example, if you get a program from a web site, the code needs to be available from that site, not a link to another site. That would mean that if you buy an appliance from a shop, the code would have to be available, for reasonable media cost, from exactly the same place. That is probably not feasible, and I would think that a link to the place where you can download the code, or an address to apply to for a copy, would be sufficient. IMHO, providing an arrangement to make the code available and informing people of that would seem to satisfy the requirement, the mechanism by which it is delivered would seem to be unimportant from the point of view of the GPL.
The thing which I strongly suspect of being in gross violation is the SCO "Linux Personality Module" which comes with their Unix. I doubt that it has avoided all use of original kernel code, yet it seems to come as a closed binary. If so, it will come out in court in due course.
The problem with BSD is that the licence does not allow you to ensure that your work remains free, for example the other, uglier, less intelligent Billy Gates might not be able to write a TCP/IP stack, so he simply lifts one from BSD, puts a banner in the required places, and profits from someone else's work. Worse, he puts in some proprietary features to break compatability so everyone has to buy his code.
IMHO he should not be able to do that, and could not do with GPL code.
...and maybe end up sharing a prison cell with Darl....
...and maybe Bill and whoever else goes down as a result of a Criminal Conspiracy being uncovered.
Remember that by doing that, you may be in big legal trouble in certain countries, such as Germany, which you may want to visit one day.
Best keep it as far away from lawyers as possible, and no threats or aggression, unless all else fails. You stand to gain a lot without all that. They are in the wrong, and when they are shown that, they will do the right thing, usually. A soft, gentle approach works wonders, unless you come upo against some slimeballs like M$, in which case maybe you should just slap a demand for $1000000000000 on them.
But the second option would also require them to stop distributing the product, or come to an agreement with you about licensing and royalty payments. In many countries, violation of copyright in the course of a business is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine or even jail, but there would also be liquidated damages, or punitive damages, or whatever your local laws say, which is a purely civil matter, and is often set at 3 or 4 times the amount of perceived loss to the copyright holder. Unfortunately, if you were giving the code away, the punitive damages in a civil court would probably be very small.
The thing that would scre them most would be the very real threat of criminal prosecution.
But, as people seem to be suggestion, by being non-aggressive and seeking a mutually satisfactory agreement, you may, if you handle it carefully, get the paid job of code maintainer, which I think is what you should aim for, if you want of course. They can use it, if they pay you to maintain it. Fair? You can negotiate something like that without a lawyer, and I personally would address the head person at the company (President, Chief Executive, Managing Director, or whatever) in the first instance. If their lawyers get involved, they will be firmly on the defensive, but with a decent manager, and preferably face to face negotiation, you will get a lot more. Just get it down in writing, once it has been agreed.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW I hope this also applies to xBSD and any other free OS, and I hope it marks the beginning of a trend towards standards being free and open, but somehow I think not, because the standards bodies have not yet devised an alternative way of funding their work.
Sad, but the cost of acquiring lots of standards, in order to be able to do essential work, really damages small to medium buisnesses, whereas the big boys nuy one copy and distribute it, usually illegally, on their intranet.
BTW I am all for standards compliance, it is best for everyone, but first there has to be a standard, and then it has to be properly documented and published with full disclosure, by a competent standards organisation, or it is worthless, like the slogan "We set the standard" which IIRC originated some years ago from the vile, later to be convicted, Monopolist. Standard? Windoze? I think not, more like a randomly drifting set of obscure, inaccurately documented, and convoluted APIs which may change at any time without prior warning.
It is a bit pointless sending spam which purports to be something to do with a US bank account to a UK email address, and guarantees their immediate deletion.
Since I stopped using Lookout and Inept Exploder, I have had no problems at all with scams like this, or virii and trojans either.
The simple answer to IE bugs is to get rid of IE, it is a pathetic browser anyway.
IANAL, so perhaps someone who is can enlighten me. Surelty it is not right that an industry which exists purely to exploit both the artistes and the buying public can ride roughshod over international trade agreements? If we can purchase almost anything else abroad at the local price, and import it quite legally, paying all proper taxes, why should mere entertainment material be any different?
I think his ending is what one might say to someone not professionally competent but just plain stupid, and was therefore quite OK in that context. McFraud is just a puppet, we all know who is pulling his strings, and I would not give him the credence of the slightest trace of professional competence (except in the field of creating Illegal Monopolies) either.
IMHO they need expert engineers, as well as lawyers, to be reviewing prospective legislation for stupid errors such as this, before the politicians, who are rarely technically astute, decide.
IMHO the fact remains, as you seem to be reinforcing, that when you buy or hire a DVD, you are entitled to play it in any way you want, with any equipment you want, for private or personal use. That is how copyright applies to a book, for example, you can read it under daylight, tungsten or fluorescent light, indoors or out, with a magnifer if you need one.... I have always thought that the same must apply to software and entertainment media, and indeed would apply in all countries which are signatory to the Berne convention, so I am amazed that this piece of nonsense ever became law.
Of course, using the book analogy, it might become illegal to distribute photocopiers, but not to keep one at home for private use.......
In the UK we also have the Small Claims Court, but the case here might be against teh small corner shop who sold you the stuff, and they might defend the case....
No system of legislation is perfect, but it seems to me that fraudulent claims like this should automatically be actioned by the authorities everywhere, with no need for private individuals to have to pay for lawyers.
In any case, if you have been ripped off, first politely request a refund and compensation, and if they refuse, report them to whatever official body deals with such things locally. They will soon get the message.
BTW I have no sympathy whatsoever for any overclocker who has had a meltdown. Overclocking is a very unsound practice, for a number of reasons, which I have aired on /. before and will not bother repeating. It DEFINITELY shortens the life of your equipment, that is provable fact. But, I don't condone fraud, and no silver look-alike is likely to have adequate thermal conductivity.
BTW, copper is almost as good as silver, you would never be able to detect the difference in practice, in fact it might be better because it could be used in higher concentration, and being slightly softer in pure form, the individual particles might deform better to give more contact area. Other metals such as gold or platinum are absolutely useless, despite any spurious claims that may be made. Any testbook on material properties, with tables of thermal conductivity, will show why.
Seriously, this would be of use in lots of circumstances where the response to a topical event results in a server being overloaded, and in many cases the management of the server would probably be quite relieved if someone put up a short-term mirror.
There could well be a way of automating the entire process, the original site would set up a file defining permission to do this and for how long a period, then mirroring sites worldwide would be able to grab the site for the allotted period, and add a modest, predetermined amount of their own such as a banner advert, to cover the cost.
It would be very nice to have this in place before McFraud and hopefully his Convicted Monopolist paymaster go to jail, folowing collapse of the SCO case, an event which surely will trigger a massive server overload!
Gates and Ballmer have been behaving in exactly this way for years, but now they have to keep in line with the judgment, so they have resorted to using a third party to do their dirty work. Sad for them that they picked one as discredited as McFraud, but maybe he was the only one they could easily get a financial hold over.
BTW a few other governments, Chinese for example, are as bad,if not worse, where pollution is concerned. I will give Tony B Liar credit for one, and only one thing, he does try, at least a little bit, to make progress on environmental issues. On other issues he is as devious, corrupt, and dishonest as a politician can be.
AFAIK you have to get special currency with SPECIMEN or something like that superimposed before you can let the face of a note be seen in a picture, even an advert. It seems fair enough to me.
The only silly case I remember was when an artist was prosecuted for painting a huge copy of a note, the difference between a painting and a copy is rather obvious, even without the size. Maybe they were scared that it would look reak when scaled down.
In some countries the currency is so poorly printed that duplication would be easy, and potentially disastrous for the economy. There was a program on TV the other night about how Hitler's cronies tried to bring the UK down during WW2 by printing bogus currency. The output of an inkjet or colour laser could fool some people so I am all for blocking it. The key thing is to ensure that it does not spoil other legitimate uses, by identifying harmless things as currency, which would be a real nuisance.
But, I confidently predict that it will be at most weeks, certainly not years, before a worm or virus brings down IIS running IPv6. IIS has more holes than code....
Best to stick to something where the security model is open to inspection, such as OpenBSD.
In any case, was the particular Win 2000 configuration which was tested not subsequently found to have serious deficiencies, hence the constant service packs, which you can't actually install?
This stupid certification does far more harm than good as it makes users think they are secure when as a matter of proven fact they are not.
SCO's conduct is a recipie for disaster, McFraud has battles running in how many countries now? Is he stupid enough to take on the whole world? Or is it his paymaster/puppetmaster Bill who is pulling the strings?
Either way, they are fools. They only need to get a good thrashing in one court in a major country, remembering that they, like the entire industry, supposedly do business world-wide, and the game is over. The sooner the better!
I wonder where the Australians keep their convicts nowadays? I hope it is not too comfortable.
In any case, as I think lots of people are saying, there is lots of prior art. Who do they think they are kidding? It is simply another of the Convicted Monopolist's blatantly dishonest tactics. IIRC Bill stole computer time from a university to get his dodgy software business started. He started as he meant to continue.....
One day it will all go horribly wrong, like his trashware.
If he gets into enough battles, it may even bring down his paymaster, the Convicted Monopolist.....
I really like the way updates can be set up via a Perl script run from a crom job, so you can get much better control than most of the other products. Also a big plus for me is that it is available for all major BSD dialects as well as Linux, because I play with both at home.
I wonder why F-prot is not more widely known?
Thanks for that info about F-prot. I will give it a look later, as I do all my home email in Linux now.
Now this incident did no damage, but the point is that they lied. as to my certain knowledge others have done, including McAfraud and Panda. I would never, ever trust any one of these companies as the primary means of securing my data.
Stupid things still happen, last night I was putting the Nvidia drivers on my latest Linux box, and yet again, the latest version of SuSE failed totally to configure anything, and trashed my XF86Config. Their configuration program, SAX, has been broken ever since Nvidia released a Linux driver, with no sign of it ever being fixed. I am using the latest SuSE 9.0. This sort of stupidity (the relevant developer could probably fix it in 5 minutes, as he will know his code), where the leading brand of graphics card can't be configured except by an expert, is what is wrong.
Maybe Novell will get this particular one fixed, or if it annoys me much longer, I may have a go myself (but the developer could do it in 0.000001% of the time I will take). (I can of course edit XF86Config by hand to make it work, TwinView included, but the first time SAX is run it blows it all away.)
Another stupid thing is that updating via the net is badly broken on every distro that uses RPM, a very ugly thing anyway. Some of the updates are HUGE and most of the world is on 56k (or less) dialup, with a 2 hour or less timeout. The update procedure invariably has no way of resuming where it left off after a timeout, so you can't, no way, do some of the updates, and some of them are security fixes.
Fix this sort of stupidity, and Linux will rise rapidly on the desktop. Oh, and dump Fedora as a distro, it is junk. And why not move to source patching, most people have a machine which will do the compiles OK and the much smaller amount of data would overcome the bandwidth issues. Strange that BSD can get it right!
Please, distro suppliers, deal with these sort of things....or move away from Linux, to FreeBSD. I don't care which, as long as it is made useable.
At home, my email etc comes through a series of diverse operating systems, each doing at least some checking and filtering, none by M$ of course, before it arrives at the client program. I no longer ever use a M$ product on the internet. At work of course, I must use what is there, sadly a very disfunctional browser (IE) and Lotus Notes. So far, no problems at home, but we had a virus alert again at work today, despite all the (NT) firewalls etc.
First rule of security is to make the program functionality open to scrutiny, which means seeing the source code!
The next phase of the deception will be (and IMHO it started about 2 years ago) to shift the emphasis so that gradually people are persuaded that M$ is the only software that is actually secure.
Of course, anyone who listens to any rubbish any Convicted Monopolist puts out is a fool, but sadly the world is full of them.
The thing which I strongly suspect of being in gross violation is the SCO "Linux Personality Module" which comes with their Unix. I doubt that it has avoided all use of original kernel code, yet it seems to come as a closed binary. If so, it will come out in court in due course.
IMHO he should not be able to do that, and could not do with GPL code.
...and maybe Bill and whoever else goes down as a result of a Criminal Conspiracy being uncovered.
Remember that by doing that, you may be in big legal trouble in certain countries, such as Germany, which you may want to visit one day.
Best keep it as far away from lawyers as possible, and no threats or aggression, unless all else fails. You stand to gain a lot without all that. They are in the wrong, and when they are shown that, they will do the right thing, usually. A soft, gentle approach works wonders, unless you come upo against some slimeballs like M$, in which case maybe you should just slap a demand for $1000000000000 on them.
The thing that would scre them most would be the very real threat of criminal prosecution.
But, as people seem to be suggestion, by being non-aggressive and seeking a mutually satisfactory agreement, you may, if you handle it carefully, get the paid job of code maintainer, which I think is what you should aim for, if you want of course. They can use it, if they pay you to maintain it. Fair? You can negotiate something like that without a lawyer, and I personally would address the head person at the company (President, Chief Executive, Managing Director, or whatever) in the first instance. If their lawyers get involved, they will be firmly on the defensive, but with a decent manager, and preferably face to face negotiation, you will get a lot more. Just get it down in writing, once it has been agreed.